The central star-forming cauldron of M82, the most well known star-forming galaxy

12:40 pm

The central star-forming region of M82
Click for original. For original of inset go here.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was released today by the Hubble Science team. It shows the central star-forming core of the galaxy M82, only about 12 million light years away and long known as a “peculiar” galaxy by earlier research from the 20th century. For this reason I used the 1963 optical image taken by the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar in California as the inset, showing the entire galaxy. At the time the data only suggested some major energetic events were occurring in the galaxy’s core, as indicated by what looked like filaments shooting out from that core at right angles to the plane of the galaxy.

Data since then, from Hubble and Webb and other space telescopes, have revealed that this galaxy, which some have nicknamed the “Cigar Galaxy”, is forming stars at a prolific rate.

Forming stars 10 times faster than the Milky Way, the Cigar Galaxy is what astronomers call a starburst galaxy. The intense starburst period that grips this galaxy has given rise to super star clusters in the galaxy’s heart. Each of these super star clusters contains hundreds of thousands of stars and is more luminous than a typical star cluster.

The red indicates the dust that permeates the galaxy. The blue comes from the radiation emitted from the clusters near the center, illuminating and ionizing that dust.

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Bubbling lava frozen in a Martian crater

11:24 am

Bubbling lava frozen in a Martian crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on June 23, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This one-mile-wide unnamed crater was a featured image last week by the science team. As noted in the caption, written by Chris Okubo of the U.S. Geological Survey:

This area was covered by a large flood of lava, which we see as the generally flat areas surrounding the crater. As the lava flowed across, some of it flowed into this crater through a low spot along the crater rim.

Once in the crater, the lava heated ground water or ground ice in the floor, causing the water to boil and turn into steam. This steam then exploded through the overlying lava and created small, ring-shaped formations. These are called ”rootless cones,” and they record the presence of ground water or ground ice in the crater floor at the time of the lava eruptions.

In other words, when this crater was flooded with hot lava, it was filled with ice or water. That fact is significant because of the crater’s location, as shown in the overview map below.
» Read more

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

Russia further centralizes and consolidates its shrinking space sector

9:43 am

Roscosmos: a paper tiger
Roscosmos: a paper tiger

Russia’s state-run TASS press agency today announced that the operations of much of its space sector has now been moved to a newly completed centralized facility on the west side of Moscow.

Over 30 enterprises of Russia’s rocket and space industry, based in Moscow, will move their production sites to the newly created National Space Center, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov said. “We now have a single platform, where 35 enterprises will be concentrated in one area,” Bakanov said in the National Space Center, visited by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday.

The National Space Center opened in Moscow on Saturday. A complex of building with the total area of 276,000 square meters, is located in the West of Moscow. It’s a joint project of the Moscow Government and Roscosmos.

Sounds neat, eh? In fact, this illustrates how Russia’s space sector is declining. First, Putin in the 2000s centralized the entire industry into a single corporation, Roscosmos, run by the government. That Soviet-style top-down structure eliminated competition and acted to block new companies from forming.

Second, when Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2022 Roscosmos lost billions in revenue when its international customer base cancelled all their contracts and boycotted the country.

Consolidating all these “companies”, which are simply divisions of Roscosmos, into this one facility might save money, but it prevents independent action and competition. It also indicates Russia’s lack of cash.

Most importantly, this move presages the eventually shutdown of many of Russia’s space operations when ISS is retired. Russia has said it is building a new station, but its ability to launch anything new has been abysmal in the 21st century. Routinely it announces new projects which never fly. There is no reason to expect its proposed space station to be anything different.

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Progress docks safely with Zvezda module at ISS

9:24 am

ISS as of today
ISS as of today. Click for original.

In what is increasingly a worrisome procedure, Russia’s just launched Progress freighter successfully docked with the aft port of the Zvezda module at ISS this past weekend, bringing with it more than 5,000 pounds of supplies and research equipment.

The image to the right, annotated additionally by me, shows the present configuration of spacecraft at ISS. The concerns center on the stress fractures that have been found in the Zvezda hull, fractures that have caused the air leak on ISS and are believed attributable to the many dockings to the module since its launch in the late ’90s, as well as the module’s age. It was first built in the late ’80s, making it almost four decades old.

For recent dockings, NASA now closes the hatch between the Russian and American halves of the stations, just in case Zvezda experiences a catastrophic failure. The Russians seem less concerned, but nonetheless they also take extra care during dockings. It is my understanding their astronauts prepare their Soyuz capsule as a lifeboat and immediately escape during these operations.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

Starlink down for about an hour last night

8:53 am

According to several major news sources, Starlink was down for about an hour last night globally, impacting several tens of thousands in the U.S. alone.

More than 37,000 US users were reporting issues with the internet service Monday at 12:30 a.m. ET, according to the website Downdetector.com. By 1:30 a.m., that number had fallen into the hundreds. The internet service owned by Musk’s SpaceX stopped working on “the entire frontline in Ukraine” around 7:30 a.m. Kyiv time (12.30 a.m. ET), said Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems force, on Telegram. As of 8:00 a.m., service was gradually being restored, he said.

I link to CNN, but numerous other outlets thought this story significant enough to give it front page coverage. That this is considered news, however, illustrates perfectly how well Starlink functions normally. A brief outage lasting less than an hour makes the cover of every news outlet in the world, because normally Starlink works without problems for its more than six million subscribers.

SpaceX has not as yet provided any information about the cause of the outage. I suspect we are seeing the result of a hacker attack, possibly by Russia, but that is pure speculation. Even if not, it is in SpaceX’s interest to outline in detail what happened. This has been its policy in the past, but in the previous outage in July the company was not forthcoming. That lack of transparency has not served the company well.

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Space station startup Vast endorses NASA’s new strategy that no longer requires a continuous human presence in space

8:02 am

The American space stations under construction
The American space stations under development

Officials from the space station startup Vast revealed at a conference last week that they endorse NASA’s new strategy that, not only no longer requires the commercial stations to immediately establish a continuous human presence in space, will also award multiple development contracts to the commercial stations.

Speaking Sept. 11 at the Global Aerospace Summit, Max Haot [chief executive of Vast] endorsed NASA’s new strategy, announced more than a month ago, that calls for multiple Space Act Agreements to support development leading to a four-person, 30-day demonstration mission. “We think it’s really the right direction,” he said, noting it accelerates the award timeline. NASA said in a draft solicitation this month it expects to award multiple funded agreements by April 2026, months sooner than under earlier plans.

The original plan had been to choose at most two, but likely only one of the four consortiums/companies that are developing station proposals. The winner would have gotten a big contract that would have also required it push hard for continuous full time occupation, from day one.

The new plan will instead award smaller development contracts to as many as three of the four station projects, aimed at getting them off the ground and operating, even if astronauts only fly in them intermittently. Eventually the hope is that their capabilities will expand quickly to permanent occupation, especially if they start earning revenue from the private sector, outside NASA. In fact, the smaller government contracts will force them to seek investment and profits elsewhere.

The four commercial stations under development, ranked by me based on their present level of progress:
» Read more

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Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

SpaceX launches Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter to ISS

8:13 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter with more than five tons of cargo, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The two fairing halves completed their 3rd and 6th flights respectively. Cygnus is expected to be berthed to ISS using the robot arm on September 24, 2025. This is also the first flight of the stretched version of Cygnus, capable of carrying more cargo.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

118 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 118 to 92. China also had its own launch scheduled for this evening, but no information about it has yet been released.

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Two launches in the past day

12:19 pm

The beat goes on. Since yesterday afternoon there have been two more global rocket launches, by Russia and SpaceX.

First, Russia launched the sixth GPS-type satellite as part of its next generation Glonass constellation, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia. The rocket’s lower stage fell several different drop zones in Russia. No word if they landed near any habitable areas.

Next, SpaceX this morning launched another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 28th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

117 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 117 to 92.

As for the rankings for the most reuse by a rocket, this is the present leader board:

39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
30 Falcon 9 booster B1067
28 Columbia space shuttle
28 Falcon 9 booster B1071
27 Falcon 9 booster B1069
27 Falcon 9 booster B1063

Sources here and here.

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September 12, 2025 Quick space links

3:22 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.

5 comments

The left’s face of evil

12:34 pm

Laughter at learning Charlie Kirk had been shot
Laughter at learning Charlie Kirk had been shot

In the past day social media has been filled with numerous examples of individuals on the left proudly posting videos and commentary on line celebrating gleefully the murder of Charlie Kirk (here, here, here, here, here for just a few examples). There is even now a webpage, Charlie’s Murderers, that is complying these examples, having already obtained more than 20,000 submissions.

One could reasonably argue that these videos and hateful comments do not represent the left and the Democratic Party. They are put out by “influencers” who want to impact opinion. Ordinary Democrats are simply not like that.

Sadly, that is not true. These leftist “influencers” represent without doubt the left’s base culture, and the picture to the right proves it. It comes from a video taken by a student in a class at North Texas University. Apparently the class had just learned that Kirk had been killed, and were joyfully laughing about it. The student recorded this reaction, and then in horror protested.

Why are we cheering for someone getting shot? … He has a family!

Her protests was immediately ridiculed by the others, who as the picture shows were happy to learn Kirk was killed for his political beliefs. Worse, according to the tweet, the teacher “singled her out and asked her to leave.” Watch for yourself:
» Read more

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House committee support for threatened NASA missions is actually quite questionable

9:26 am

According to a House appropriations committee spending bill that it approved this week, it appears on the surface that it is canceling the proposed 24% cut by Trump to NASA’s budget as well as endorsing continued funding for some threatened missions. A close look however suggests this congressional support for NASA is somewhat superficial, and might actually be ephemeral.

The key is the language of the bill. From the link above:

The bill was largely unchanged from what the CJS [commerce, justice and science] subcommittee approved July 14. It includes $24.838 billion for NASA, nearly the same as the $24.875 billion the agency received in fiscal 2024 and 2025, and far above the $18.8 billion the administration proposed for fiscal 2026 in May.

Members adopted a manager’s amendment, a package of noncontroversial changes and corrections, on a voice vote. That amendment also made additions to the report accompanying the bill. The report includes language expressing support for several NASA missions targeted for cancellation, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Juno mission at Jupiter and the New Horizons mission in the Kuiper Belt.

The report does not specify funding levels for those missions, but the “continues support” language signals to NASA that it should fund continue operations within the agency’s science budget. [emphasis mine]

It is the vagueness of this language that suggests the support is ephemeral. The courts recently have consistently ruled that if Congress doesn’t specifically mandate spending on a project, the White House is free to move money around as it sees fit. By not expressly outlining funding for Chandra, Juno, and New Horizons, these congressmen are playing a shell game, whereby to their constituents they can point to this vote and claim they wholeheartedly supported NASA and these missions. At the same time, they also appear to be allowing Trump the freedom to go ahead and shut the missions down, as his budget has already proposed.

None of this is yet real. The bill still must be passed by the full House, as well as the Senate. It then has to be signed by Trump. A lot of changes would happen in that process.

Either way, it appears that within the House at least, there is some movement to at least make some budget cuts possible. The sad thing is that the House is not actually cutting the budget, even as it is allowing Trump a way to cut these relatively inexpensive on-going missions. Considering the debt, it would have been much better had the committee actually trimmed NASA’s budget, even a little, while at the same time allocating specific funds to keep these very cost-effective missions alive.

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Italian rocket company Avio commits $469 million to expand operations

8:59 am

The Italian rocket company Avio, which owns the Vega-C rocket, today announced that is has approved a $469 million fund to expand its manufacturing capabilities, including building a production facility in the United States.

Announced on 12 September, the capital raise is part of a new ten-year business plan targeting an average annual growth rate of about 10% in turnover and more than 15% in core profit (EBITDA). This growth will be driven by a higher Vega C launch cadence, the introduction of Vega E, continued participation in the Ariane 6 programme, and the construction of a new defence production facility in the United States, which is expected to be completed by 2028.

The management of Vega-C had previously been controlled by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) commercial arm, Arianespace, which had owned and operated all of Europe’s rockets. ESA however is eliminating that commercial arm, shifting from the government-run model to the capitalism model, whereby it simply acts as a customer buying services from the private sector.

As part of that shift, Avio is in the process of taking back its Vega-C from Arianespace. Beginning next year it will be marketing the rocket directly to customers. This major investment reflects this change. The company is now free to pursue profits wherever it can find them, and it appears it wishes to market itself aggressively to American satellite companies as well as its defense industry.

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SpaceX launches Indonesian commercial communications/broadband satellite

8:54 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched an Indonesian commercial communications/broadband satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 23rd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their 16th and 24th flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

116 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
12 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 116 to 91.

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September 11, 2025 Quick space links

3:04 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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America’s educational system is failing because it no longer teaches students how to think

1:06 pm


From the movie Idiocracy: “But Brawndo’s
got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes!” Click for video.

Recently the satirical site the Babylon Bee illustrated starkly and with great humor the sad state of American universities.

Genius Trump Enacts Plan To Dumb Down Chinese Population By Inviting Them To Attend American Universities

Trump’s plan was praised by national security experts, who cited it as a brilliant maneuver to reduce China’s influence on global affairs in the long term by shrewdly allowing their students to be made substantially less intelligent at educational institutions in the U.S.

“Pretty soon, Chinese kids will all be dumb, just as dumb as American students,” the president reportedly told his advisors. “We’ll let in hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, have them waste their time at American universities sitting in gender studies classes and college courses about Taylor Swift, and the next thing you know, China will be in the toilet. If it worked here, it can work there. It’ll make things very difficult for the Chinamen, believe me. Very difficult.”

The joke worked because it has now become common knowledge that for much of the American educational system — especially at its so-called “elite” universities — the quality of education has hit rock bottom. Students are not only not learning much of importance, they are being indoctrinated into believing in absurdities, such as a man can become a woman merely by saying so, or that communism will finally work if only the right people were given the power to install it.

Worse, they are being taught that the left is the only correct political choice, and any other ideas are simply evil. The murder of conservatives is therefore absolutely a just act. From an April 7, 2025 tweet by Charlie Kirk:
» Read more

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Russia launches Progress to ISS

9:24 am

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

The freighter will dock with the aft port of the Zvezda module in two days. When it does so, expect NASA to require its astronauts to close the hatch between the American and Russia parts of ISS. The agency has real concerns about the stress fractures in Zvezda’s hull that are the cause of the station’s air leaks, and fears it could at some point fail catastrophically during a docking. The odds of this happening are small, but they are larger than they should be.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
12 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 91. The company has another launch scheduled for later today.

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NASA bans Chinese citizens from its facilities or operations

9:09 am

Earlier this week NASA moved to block Chinese citizens with visas from having access to its facilities as well as its entire operations, citing security concerns.

“NASA has taken internal action pertaining to Chinese nationals, including restricting physical and cybersecurity access to our facilities, materials and network to ensure the security of our work,” NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens said on Wednesday. According to Bloomberg, Chinese nationals had previously been allowed to work as contractors or students contributing to research, although not as staff.

But on 5 September several individuals told the outlet they were suddenly locked out of IT systems and barred from in-person meetings. They spoke on condition of anonymity.

Though both the Chinese press and the leftist news outlet above (The Guardian) whine about this move, it makes great sense, and should have been done years ago. Though I am sure most of these Chinese citizens are not spies, China’s policy has been to consistently use such citizens for spying, and letting such people into NASA operations makes no sense.

Moreover, shouldn’t NASA be hiring Americans first and foremost?

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SpaceX launches military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency

4:32 pm

SpaceX early today successfully launched a classified military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

I did not post this in the morning because there was a second SpaceX launch scheduled for the afternoon, and I planned on posting both launches in one post. That launch however was scrubbed and rescheduled for tomorrow.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 90.

4 comments

Democrats today showed us their murderous colors

3:52 pm

The left's response to murder is to celebrate it
The left’s response to this murder
is to celebrate it

I had an essay planned for completion this afternoon on how to reform our education system, but that can wait until tomorrow. What matters today is the public assassination of Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a college-focused pro-American conservative organization that has done more in the past ten years to reshape American culture than any pundit or politician anywhere.

Why was Kirk murdered? The murderer is still at large but we can make a reasonable guess. Kirk, only 31, was an outspoken conservative who unequivocally believed in the fundamentals of American society, including freedom, small government, color-blind rules, and the right of every person to pursue happiness. This is not propaganda on my part. I have listened to many of Kirk’s speeches and appearances, and at no time did he do anything to contradict these conclusions. If anything, he made these beliefs crystal clear to anyone who would listen.

Because of those beliefs, he had become a major opponent of the Democratic Party and its now radical Marxist/leftist/queer agenda, which also now hates America and everything it has stood for since its founding almost 250 year ago.

As such, the left — including numerous mainstream elected Democrats and their minions in the propaganda press — have repeatedly slandered him — without any evidence — as a fascist, racist, Nazi, hate-monger, and bigot. Those ugly words — utter lies — made him a target for the crazies on the left, and now one of those crazies has snuffed out his life prematurely.

The left and its propaganda press will work hard to make excuses for this evil act, but as they do so they will simply prove my point above. Already anchors on MSNBC are slandering him again, calling him “divisive” and “awful” who said things that upset people and thus we shouldn’t be surprised he was killed. “It was HIS fault!” On social media leftists are celebrating this evil act, showing us how utterly evil they are.

Charlie Kirk
Charlie Kirk

Kirk’s work will go on. In fact, expect it to expand considerably on campuses nationwide. The American people will no longer tolerate this evil. They are going to shut it down, aggressively, and with joyous fervor. And the left will once again scream “Facists!”, but the only fascists Americans will see are the murderous hate-mongering people on the left.

As for Kirk and his family, today’s events are horrible beyond words. We can only express the deepest sympathy to his wife Erika, who is now left a widow with two small children. She and those kids have been robbed of a husband and father, for no more reason that the words that Charlie Kirk spoke.

America stands for better. Kirk knew this, and spent every day of his short life trying to bring our country back to its original values of freedom and good will. It is our obligation to honor that man and those values and do whatever we can to make his dream a reality.

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September 10, 2025 Quick space links

3:19 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.

  • On this day in 1975, Viking 2 launched to Mars
    Like its twin Viking 1, it included an orbiter and a lander. Both landers were focused far too much on looking for evidence of Martian life, a search that was unrealistic for the first two human spacecraft to arrive on a planet with the surface area equivalent to the continents on Earth.
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Update on what SpaceX learned about Starship’s tiles during the 10th test flight

11:27 am

Superheavy after its flight safely captured at Boca Chica
Superheavy after the October 2024 flight,
safely captured during the very first attempt

Link here. The update comes from a presentation given this week by Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s executive in charge of build and flight reliability, at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Cleveland.

Lots of new details. First, almost no tiles fell off during this flight. More significant, they found that the use of metal tiles won’t work. They tested three, and found that “The metal tiles… didn’t work so well.”

Gestenmaier also outlined how the flight provided the necessary data for sealing the gaps between the tiles better.

Gerstenmaier pointed to a patch of white near the top of Starship’s heat shield. This, he said, was caused by heat seeping between gaps in the tiles and eroding the underlying material, a thermal barrier derived from the heat shield on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. Technicians also intentionally removed some tiles near Starship’s nose to test the vehicle’s response.

“It’s essentially a white material that sits on Dragon and it ablates away, and when it ablates, it creates this white residue,” Gerstenmaier said. “So, what that’s showing us is that we’re having heat essentially get into that region between the tiles, go underneath the tiles, and this ablative structure is then ablating underneath. So, we learned that we need to seal the tiles.”

They hope to do the 11th test flight in October, repeating the same suborbital configuration of previous flights, using the same version 2 of Starship. The plan will then be to follow up with a first suborbital flight of version 3 in 2026, followed quickly by orbital flights. During one of those orbital flights they will also try to do a chopstick catch of Starship. They also hope to do the first refueling tests next year.

All in all, it appears the test program is proceeding as hoped, and is about to accelerate significantly.

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NASA promotes the non-discovery of life on Mars by Perseverance

11:09 am

It's all a game of Kibuki theater
It’s all a game!

In what can only be called a kabuki theater stunt, NASA today held a press conference and issued a press release promoting what is essentially the non-discovery of life on Mars by the science team operating the rover Perseverance.

Agency officials, led by acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy, proudly claimed the discovery justified the oft-stated goal of Perseverance, to find life on Mars.

“This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars. The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy.

This is all garbage. First, Perseverance’s real objective has never been to find life on Mars. It is there to study the planet’s geology. If it should happen to detect a biosignature that would be great, but doing so has always been highly unlikely.

Second, the discovery that Duffy touts is itself quite underwhelming. The key quote from the press release that immediately precedes Duffy’s claim is very telling:

A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before a conclusion can be reached about the absence or presence of life.

Furthermore, the biosignature that Duffy touts is actually not really a biosignature. They found “a distinct pattern of minerals” that might be sometimes be related to life processes, but not always.

The combination of these minerals, which appear to have formed by electron-transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life, which would use these reactions to produce energy for growth. The minerals also can be generated abiotically, or without the presence of life. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the data is very uncertain. It certainly doesn’t merit the loud push NASA and Duffy is giving it.

I suspect this push is the result of NASA’s fundamental lie about Perseverance’s so-called search for life, a lie that can never really be fulfilled. It is also related to hiding Perseverance’s limited capabilities. For example, Curiosity has a small lab allowing scientists to analyze samples in great detail. If Curiosity came across a real biosignature, it would be able to identify it.

Perseverance lacks this ability, because in its stead it has equipment for preserving core samples for later pick-up. All it really was designed to do was to gather those core samples. It can’t really do the same kind of ground analysis as Curiosity.

10 comments

Scientists detect methane gas on the dwarf planet Makemake orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune

10:05 am

Makemake, as seen by Hubble in 2016
Makemake and the discovery of its small moon,
as seen by Hubble in 2016. Click for original image.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have identified the spectroscopic signal of methane gas on the dwarf planet Makemake that orbits the Sun in the Kuiper belt, suggesting this planet like Pluto might have an intermittent atmosphere.

At about 890 miles (1,430 km) in diameter and two-thirds the size of Pluto, Makemake has long been a source of scientific intrigue. Stellar occultations suggested that it lacked a substantial global atmosphere, though a thin one could not be ruled out. Meanwhile, infrared data of Makemake — including JWST measurements — hinted at puzzling thermal anomalies and unusual characteristics of its methane ice, which raised the possibility of localized hot spots across its surface and potential outgassing.

…“This discovery raises the possibility that Makemake has a very tenuous atmosphere sustained by methane sublimation,” said Dr. Emmanuel Lellouch of the Paris Observatory, another co-author of the study. “Our best models point to a gas temperature around 40 Kelvin (-233 degrees Celsius) and a surface pressure of only about 10 picobars — that is, 100 billion times below Earth’s atmospheric pressure, and a million times more tenuous than Pluto’s. If this scenario is confirmed, Makemake would join the small handful of outer solar system bodies where surface–atmosphere exchanges are still active today.”

It is also possible that the methane gas detected could be coming from volcanic plumes, not unlike the plumes found on the Saturn moon Enceladus.

These results prove once again that even though planets like Pluto and Makemake sit very far from the Sun and thus get little energy from it, they can still have active geological processes. Of all the discoveries produced by New Horizons when it flew past Pluto in 2015, this discovery was the most significant.

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Croatian startup moves up the launch date for two subscale returnable capsules

9:44 am

The Croatian startup Genesis Space Flight Laboratories (Genesis SFL) has now accelerated the development of its orbital returnable capsule for manufacturing in space, moving up the launch date for its first two subscale demonstrator capsules from 2027 to 2026.

Initially planned for 2027, the missions were moved forward after Genesis SFL announced on 9 September that it had secured earlier slots with an as-yet-undisclosed launch provider.

Speaking to European Spaceflight, Genesis SFL CEO Bence Mátyás explained that the company’s GEN-1 and GEN-2 demonstrators will likely be the smallest reentry capsules ever flown, comparable in size to picosatellites. Despite their diminutive size, the capsules will be capable of remaining in orbit for approximately six months before performing reentry procedures, a capability made possible by the use of a host satellite [essentially the service module] also under development by the company. Once on a reentry trajectory, the capsule will separate from its host satellite and deploy a mini-parachute and antenna to enable recovery following a splashdown.

If these demonstrators succeed, the company plans to scale up later GEN capsules step-by-step, eventually matching and even exceeding those of companies like Varda.

The returnable capsule industry appears at the moment to be bursting with new companies. In the U.S. we have Varda, Inversion Space, Sierra Space, and even SpaceX using Starship. In Europe — in addition to Genesis in Croatia, we have The Exploration Company in France, Atmos in Germany, PLD in Spain, and Space Cargo in Luxembourg. And I am certain there are others that I am missing.

Very clearly the investment community sees big profits in using orbital capsules to manufacture products for later sale on Earth.

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Rather than streamline red tape, a UK government committee proposes it should fund its space industry directly

9:28 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

In a move that will do nothing to solve the red tape that has stymied the spaceports in Scotland as well as the launch industry in the United Kingdom, a Scottish government committee has concluded that the solution is for the UK government to become a direct investor in its space industry, increasing funding to both its spaceports and any launch companies that wish to use them.

The Scottish Affairs Committee heard from a number of experts and figures involved in the space industry. Professor Malcolm Macdonald, of Strathclyde University, said the UK had not always sustained its “first-mover” advantage in the space launch sector.

The report’s conclusion stated: “It is clear that the UK is falling behind its European counterparts in terms of public investment, leaving Scottish spaceports at a competitive disadvantage in a fast-moving global market. Without sustained backing from the Government – particularly in infrastructure – Scotland risks missing a generational opportunity to lead in space launch. To fully realise this potential, the UK Government needs to go further and faster.”

The MPs called for sustained Government investment in infrastructure.

The report also noted that despite a half-decade head start in establishing its spaceports in Scotland, the Andoya spaceport in Norway is now winning the race to become Europe’s prime spaceport.

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. The reason the UK’s spaceports have fallen behind is because its regulatory framework is impossible to navigate, taking years to get any approvals. But rather than fix this, this committee proposes throwing taxpayer money at the problem.

My prediction: It won’t work. Outside rocket companies will continue to move away from the UK, while any that get government investment to stay will find it difficult to get business, because it will still be impossible to get launch licenses when needed.

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