March 17, 2026 Quick space links

2:48 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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Voyager-2’s only close-up image of Uranus’s moon Umbriel

12:38 pm

Uranus' five biggest moonsThe historically known moons of Uranus. Click for original NASA press release.

Umbriel as seen by Voyager-2
Click for source.

Today’s cool image continues our tour of the five largest moons of Uranus, as seen by Voyager-2 in 1986 during its close-up visit. The family portrait above, taken from more than three million miles away during Voyager-2’s approach, shows the relative sizes of those five moons as well as their location relative to Uranus, with Miranda in the closest orbit and Oberon the farthest. I have already posted close-ups from Miranda and Ariel. Today’s image moves us outward to Umbriel.

The image to the right is Voyager-2’s best picture. In fact, it is really Voyager-2’s only close-up image, and as you can see, it is not that close or sharp. I have not reduced it at all. This is how NASA released it. From the NASA press release:

The southern hemisphere of Umbriel displays heavy cratering in this Voyager 2 image, taken Jan. 24, 1986, from a distance of 346,000 miles. This frame, taken through the clear-filter of Voyager’s narrow-angle camera, is the most detailed image of Umbriel, with a resolution of about 6 miles.

Umbriel is the darkest of Uranus’ larger moons and the one that appears to have experienced the lowest level of geological activity. It has a diameter of about 750 miles and reflects only 16 percent of the light striking its surface; in the latter respect, Umbriel is similar to lunar highland areas. Umbriel is heavily cratered but lacks the numerous bright-ray craters seen on the other large Uranian satellites; this results in a relatively uniform surface albedo (reflectivity). The prominent crater on the terminator (upper right) is about 70 miles across and has a bright central peak.

The strangest feature in this image (at top) is a curious bright ring, the most reflective area seen on Umbriel. The ring is about 90 miles in diameter and lies near the satellite’s equator. The nature of the ring is not known, although it might be a frost deposit, perhaps associated with an impact crater. Spots against the black background are due to ‘noise’ in the data.

This lone picture of Umbriel by Voyager-2 illustrates even more starkly the very sparse data we have of Uranus and its moons. Voyager-2 is the only spacecraft to ever visit this planet, and it only did a quick fly-by, just long enough to give us this one dim snapshot view. It is forty years later, and no other missions have flown there, nor is any planned in the near future. There are proposals, but none are yet approved.

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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

Modeling says the Small Magellanic Cloud passed through the Large Magellanic Cloud 200 million years ago

11:18 am

Illustration of collision of Magellanic clouds
Click for original graphic.

According to new computer modeling, some astronomers now believe that a collision between the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) 200 million years ago best explains the chaotic movement of the stars in the former.

The SMC contains more mass in gas than in stars. Gas cools, contracts under gravity and settles into a rotating disk, the same process that shaped the spinning plane of our solar system. But when researchers, including those at University of Arizona, previously measured the motion of the SMC’s stars using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Gaia satellite of the European Space Agency, the SMC’s stars were not orbiting around the galaxy’s center the way stars in most galaxies do.

The possible reason, Rathore said, is a collision. A few hundred million years ago, the SMC crashed directly through the LMC’s disk. The LMC’s gravity disrupted the SMC’s internal structure and sent its stars into random, disordered motion. Also, the LMC’s gas applied a tremendous amount of pressure to the SMC’s gas and destroyed its gas rotation.

The graphic to the right illustrates that collision, based on the computer modeling. It appears the Small Magellanic Cloud’s passage through the Large Magellanic Cloud acted to shake the smaller cloud apart, spreading its stars and gas across a wider space.

You can read the paper here [pdf]. There is of course a great deal of uncertainty in these results, but they add weight to the general theory that galaxy formation is strongly impacted by such collisions. As the scientists note in the conclusion of their paper, “The SMC gives a front row view of group processes driving dramatic morphological and kinematic transformations.”

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The first Artemis lunar landings might not go to the Moon’s south pole

10:09 am

It appears from remarks recently by one NASA official, that while the south pole remains the agency’s main lunar base target, it is now looking into other landing options in order to make those first manned landing less risky and easier and quicker to achieve.

Amit Kshatriya, NASA Associate Administrator was very vague in his statement, but nonetheless this was what it appears he was saying:

We have opened up the, I would say, the performance specification for the early landing missions in as many ways as we can, in terms of different lunar orbits we want to take, or different other constraints … to make it as agile as possible, to recognize performance limitations in some of the machines we have and let our providers tell us, hey, if you took these constraints out of the way, how could we go faster? So we’re going to do that.

The agency’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, is also pushing to quickly begin sending a lot of unmanned landers to the south pole by next year. Thus, under this plan, we might actually find out first whether there really is water in those permanently shadowed craters, before committing our manned lunar base to this location.

This new approach makes a great deal of sense, especially since the data that has looked into those craters has been very inconclusive, some positive and some negative.

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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.

Canada leases Nova Scotia spaceport for $200 million

9:55 am

Proposed Canadian spaceports
Proposed Canadian spaceports

The Canadian government yesterday announced it is committing significant funding to several space-related companies, including issuing a ten year $200 million lease to the Nova Scotia spaceport that has been unable to attract any launch customers for the past ten years.

The investment is a 10‑year, $200‑million agreement to lease a dedicated space‑launch pad that will serve as the central foundation for a multi-user spaceport near Canso, Nova Scotia. Operated by Maritime Launch Services, this spaceport will support the operational needs of the Department of National Defence (DND), the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), and the wider Government of Canada, while also offering ad hoc access to allies and partners.

The history of Maritime and its Spaceport Nova Scotia is far from encouraging. It was first proposed in 2016, offering satellite companies both a launch site and a Ukrainian-built rocket. That plan fell through when Russia invaded the Ukraine and the rocket became unavailable. Since then Maritime has struggled to convince rocket companies to use the spaceport, all to no avail. It signed some deals, but none has gone anywhere. This Canadian government lease appears an attempt to save it, since it is very unlikely that this government will be capable of building its own rocket during those ten years.

In order to avoid accusations of favoritism, the government at the same time also announced further $8.3 million grants to three Canadian companies to help them develop their own rockets, one of which is Nordspace, which has its own proposed spaceport, the Atlantic Spaceport in Newfoundland. According to the government, these grants are part of a $105 million program to encourage a sovereign Canadian rocket industry. The other two companies are Reaction Dynamics, which wants to launch its suborbital rocket from Nova Scotia, and a new startup dubbed the Canada Rocket Company, of which little is known.

Apparently, the leftist Canadian government is following in the footsteps of the leftist government of the United Kingdom. In both cases their private spaceports have floundered for decades, unable to attract customers for a variety of reasons. To save them, both governments are now pouring cash into their pockets to prop them up.

In the case of the UK, the obstacles have almost entirely been the red tape of the government. In the case of Canada and Maritime’s Nova Scotia spaceport, it has been a series of bad management decisions that reflect poorly on the company. Private capital has thus not been interested in investing in it. Nor have any rocket companies been interested in launching from it.

So of course, the leftist Canadian government is going to use other people’s money to fund it. How typical.

Canadian may get its own launch capability from this program, but don’t bet on it. Government programs like this have routinely failed, wasting billions and decades with little to show for the effort. The program’s one saving grace however is that the government isn’t designing, building, and owning the rockets. It is instead hiring these three companies to do the work. Under that framework, there is a chance something might actually happen.

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SpaceX completes two launches since yesterday

8:56 am

Since last night SpaceX successfully completed two Starlink launches.

First, in the evening it placed 25 more Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage completed its 14th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

Then, in the early morning hours it launched another 29 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The first stage completed its 11th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Increasingly it appears SpaceX is improving the turn-around reuse time for its first stages. The two first stages on these flights had turn-arounds of 32 and 27 days respectively, which appears to be the average in recent launches. With a fleet of about two dozen stages, this pace allows the company to easily do multiple launches per week.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

34 SpaceX
12 China
3 Rocket Lab
2 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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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

South Korean rocket startup Innospace pinpoints the cause of its first launch failure

8:01 am

Less than five seconds after launch
Hanbit-Nano less than five seconds after launch,
prior to its failure in December 2025.

The South Korean rocket startup Innospace today released the results of its investigation into the launch failure of its Hanbit-Nano rocket on its maiden flight on December 22, 2025, pinpointing the failure 33 seconds after liftoff to a rupture in the first stage combustion chamber assembly

The launch vehicle was confirmed to have flown nominally during the initial phase of flight, with flight data transmitted normally following liftoff. Thirty-three seconds into flight, combustion gas leakage occurred at the forward section of the first-stage hybrid rocket combustion chamber assembly, resulting in a rupture of the combustion chamber and the subsequent separation of the launch vehicle into multiple parts.

The investigation further determined that the leakage was caused by insufficient compression and uneven sealing performance resulting from plastic deformation of sealing components during the reassembly process following the replacement of the forward chamber plug during launch preparation activities in Brazil.

Based on these findings, INNOSPACE plans to strengthen assembly processes and quality management procedures. The company will also implement certain design improvements and upgrades to related components and conduct additional functional verification procedures.

The company hopes to attempt a second launch in the third quarter of 2026, once again lifting off from Brazil’s Alcantera spaceport.

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March 16, 2026 Quick space links

3:02 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, whom we welcome back from his vacation. 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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Continuing our tour of Uranus’ five biggest moons: Ariel

12:17 pm

In preparing my cool image last week focused on the best Voyager-2 image of Uranus’ moon Miranda, I came to a realization that was somewhat startling. Voyager-2 is the only time a human spacecraft has gotten close to Uranus, and it was only close for a few days. Thus, the data and images it obtained of the gas giant and its moons is remarkable more sparse than I had ever realized.

You see, when these images were first released in 1986 they were exciting because they gave us that first look. Suddenly, a light was shined on something that had always been shrouded in darkness. It was a flood of data that needed processing.

It is now forty years later. No spacecraft has been there since, and thus we have gotten no more close-up information about Uranus or its moons. Data from Hubble and Webb has helped increase our knowledge of the planet itself, but of the moons nothing really new has been gleaned from this distance.

Uranus' five biggest moons

And so, to highlight how little we know, for the rest of this week I am going give my readers a tour of the few images Voyager-2 gave us of Uranus’ five biggest moons, the five that early astronomers had discovered prior to the space age and shown in the five pictures above, taken by Voyager-2 as it was approaching Uranus from a distance of about three million miles. They are, in order going from closest to farthest from Uranus, Miranda, Ariel, Umbriel, Titania and Oberon, with the images above designed to show their approximate relative sizes.

I already highlighted the strange, patchwork surface of Miranda last week, the smallest of these moons. Below is a mosaic made from the four highest resolution images of 720-mile-wide Ariel, the next out from Uranus, taken from a distance of about 80,000 miles.
» Read more

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A new startup proposes a giant 88,000 satellite data center constellation

10:17 am

Starcloud-4 being deployed
A satellite of the company’s fourth generation Starcloud
constellation being deployed

A new startup dubbed Starcloud has now filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch its own giant 88,000 satellite data center constellation.

The FCC accepted for filing March 13 an application by Starcloud, a company based in Redmond, Washington, to operate as many as 88,000 satellites in a range of low Earth orbits to serve as orbital data centers for artificial intelligence and other applications.

“Starcloud is designing its satellite system to accommodate the explosive growth of datacenter demands driven by AI, which is already encountering severe roadblocks to efforts to scale on the ground,” the company wrote in its filing. “By avoiding the constraints of terrestrial deployment, space datacenters will be the most cost-effective and scalable way to deliver compute this decade.”

The company, previously known as Lumen Orbit, has so far only launched one demonstration smallsat, testing the operation of a computer processor in orbit. It plans a second larger demo satellite to launch in ’27 testing a cluster of processors. Based on its own website, it plans to launch the full constellation in four stages, eventually using rockets comparable to Starship, launching many satellites at a time.

The reasoning behind these orbiting data center constellations is that in space there is no real estate to buy or environmental concerns to overcome. You can simply launch the satellites and beam the information to and from Earth. Though it still remains unknown whether this new orbiting data center business model will be profitable, it is definitely becoming a major customer for the new emerging American rocket industry. Even if it fails in the long run, it appears it will fuel the development of a lot of new rockets, all designed to be re-usable, with large capacities, and capable of launching at a fast cadence.

With such a commercial competitive fleet, the entire solar system will be open to the United States and the world.

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Astronomers discover a super-Earth-sized exoplanet covered by a molten ocean of lava

9:53 am

Using the Webb Space Telescope astronomers think they have identified a super-Earth-sized exoplanet, dubbed L98-59d and orbiting a red dwarf star about 35 light years away, that is covered by a very deep molten ocean of lava.

Their results reveal that the mantle of L98-59d is likely molten silicate (similar to lava on Earth), with a global magma ocean extending thousands of kilometres beneath. This vast molten reservoir allows the planet to store extremely large amounts of sulphur deep inside its interior, over geologic timescales. The magma ocean also helps L98-59d to retain a thick hydrogen-rich atmosphere containing sulphur-bearing gases such as hydrogen sulphide (H2S). Normally, this would be lost to space over time, due to X-ray radiation produced by the host star.

You can read the peer-reviewed paper here [pdf]. This planet is part of a three-planet solar system, all of which transit the face of the star, allowing for excellent observations of their make-up. L98-59d is the outermost of the three.

This is the first molten exoplanet yet detected, though it is likely not the last. As new better telescopes come on-line both on Earth and especially in space, the ability to make more detailed observations of the thousands of exoplanets so far identified is certain to reveal many more strange objects, some of which will be probably far stranger than we can yet imagine.

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New telescope array in Chile is financed entirely by private funds

9:29 am

One of Mothra's 30 mounts
One of Mothra’s 30 mounts. Click for original.

Capitalism in space: A new ground-based telescope array in Chile, dubbed Mothra, is being built using only private financing, and is being designed to map the faint hydrogen hidden between the galaxies and thus produce a more precise map of the universe.

MOTHRA is being built at Obstech / El Sauce Observatory in Chile. The telescope’s construction started in the spring of 2025 and it is expected to become fully operational by the end of 2026. By fusing its many images together digitally, the array of [30 mounts totaling] 1,140 telephoto lenses will be the equivalent of a single 4.7-meter diameter lens. It will be the world’s largest all-lens telescope, with capabilities that are unmatched by any other telescope on Earth or in space.

The funding comes mostly from a donation by British billionaire Alex Gerko, who has apparently donated millions to numerous similar research projects.

This is the right future for science research, and was the way things were done in the U.S. until World War II. Stop depending on the government, which often has political concerns that warp research and always does things inefficiently. Get the private sector, especially rich individuals, to back projects, because they will require the work to be done well, and will care personally about its success.

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Terran Orbital wins contract to build cubesat to go to Apophis with ESA’s Ramses probe

9:08 am

Apophis' path past the Earth in 2029
A cartoon (not to scale) showing Apophis’s
path in 2029.

The satellite company Terran Orbital, owned by Lockheed Martin, has won a contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to build a cubesat to fly with its Ramses probe that will launch in 2028 and rendezvous with the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it makes its very close fly-by of the Earth on April 13, 2029.

The CubeSat is named after Italian scientist Paolo Farinella and is backed by the Italian Space Agency. After successfully completing the Critical Design Review in January 2026, Tyvak International [a subsidiary of Terran Orbital] will begin the implementation phase, with launch currently planned for 2028.

…Operating aboard the RAMSES spacecraft, developed by OHB Italia, the Farinella CubeSat will be one of two spacecraft deployed to explore the asteroid’s subsurface using low-frequency radar. The satellite will also carry Horus, an optical instrument that acts as both a science imager and navigation camera, and Vista, a dust detector previously flown on the Milani CubeSat from ESA’s Hera mission.

Apophis is estimated to be about 1,200 feet across. When it does its fly-by in ’29 it will get within 20,000 miles of the Earth, dipping within the orbits used by geosynchronous satellites. It will then pass within 60,000 miles of the Moon. At its closest it will for a short time be visible to the naked eye.

Apophis’ orbit means that it has the potential in the next century or so to impact the Earth. This particular fly-by is significant because the Earth/Moon’s gravity will change the asteroid’s path in an unpredictable manner that could either increase or decrease that impact possibility on future fly-bys. And we won’t know until after the fly-by is complete.

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China completes two launches today

10:54 pm

China today completed two separate launches from two different interior spaceports. First it successfully placed a military “remote sensing” satellite into orbit, its Long March 6A rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in north China.

Next it placed eight satellites into orbit using its Kuaizhou-11 solid-fueled rocket, lifting off from Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

China’s state-run press provided no further details on those eight satellites. It also did not provide any information about where the lower stages of both rockets crashed inside China. As the Long March 6A uses very toxic hypergolic fuels, that can dissolve your skin if you come in contact with it, this lack of information tells us a lot about China and its government.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

32 SpaceX
12 China
3 Rocket Lab
2 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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SpaceX launches 29 more Starlink satellites

8:33 am

SpaceX this morning successfully placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 6th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

32 SpaceX
10 China
3 Rocket Lab
2 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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SpaceX launches 25 Starlink satellites; reuses 1st stage for 32nd time

10:57 pm

SpaceX earlier today successfully launched another 25 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage (B1071) completed its 32nd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific, moving into fourth place in the rankings of the most reused launch vehicles:

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

Sources here and here.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

31 SpaceX
10 China
3 Rocket Lab
2 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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March 13, 2026 Quick space links

2:51 pm

As BtB’s stringer Jay is on vacation, here are a few links I spotted that don’t deserve full posts. 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.

15 comments

Miranda, the smallest of Uranus’ spherical moons

12:52 pm

Miranda as seen by Voyager-2
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The image to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was created from photographs taken on January 24, 1986 by Voyager-2 as it made its fly-by of the gas giant Uranus. From a later 1996 release:

Miranda, roughly 300 miles in diameter, exhibits varied geologic provinces, seen in this mosaic of clear-filter, narrow-angle images from Jan. 24, 1986. The images were obtained from distances of 18,730 to 25,030 miles; resolution ranges from 1,840 to 2,430 feet. These are among the highest-resolution pictures that Voyager has obtained of any of the new “worlds” it has encountered during its mission.

On Miranda, ridges and valleys of one province are cut off against the boundary of the next province. Probable compressional (pushed-together) folded ridges are seen in curvilinear patterns, as are many extensional (pulled-apart) faults. Some of these show very large scarps, or cliffs, ranging from 1,600 feet to 3 miles in height — that is, higher that the walls of the Grand Canyon on Earth.

This is really the only close look we have of this distant world. The other hemisphere remains a mystery, as it was in darkness when Voyager-2 zipped past. And though some of the individual shots that make up this mosiac are more detailed, they don’t provide that much more information.

Nonetheless, to my uneducated eye Miranda looks like a ball of thick molasses that some giant stirred a bit as gravity forced it to settle into its spherical shape. In this case the molasses is likely a mix of ice and other materials, not yet fully identified. The result is a tiny misshapen planet with some of the roughest topography known in the solar system, including one 12-mile high cliff face (the white streak at the image bottom) thought to be the highest in the solar system.

We don’t yet have a true understanding of the geological processes that formed this strange landscape, nor will we have until we have a lot more data, including a global map of the entire surface. And that won’t come until a spacecraft is sent there to look more closely. Right now no such mission is in the works. No NASA missions have been funded, though several have been proposed. And a Chinese mission was apparently canceled last year.

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The new town of Starbase is canceling its May elections

12:15 pm

Boy, Elon Musk sure is a FASCIST! Because no one filed to run against the mayor and two commissioners, the new town of Starbase is now about to cancel its May elections.

During an upcoming meeting, the Starbase City Commission is scheduled to consider an ordinance canceling the May 2, 2026 General Election, as all candidates for mayor and city commissioner are running unopposed.

Under Texas law, local governments may cancel elections when every race on the ballot is uncontested.

That means Starbase’s current leadership will remain in office without voters needing to cast ballots. The city’s inaugural mayor is Robert “Bobby” Peden, a SpaceX executive who serves as Vice President of Texas Test and Launch for the company. Two commissioners serve alongside him: Jordan Buss, a senior director of environmental health and safety at SpaceX, and Lois Wallace, an interim commissioner and Starbase resident.

Expect to see stupid mainstream stories suggesting no one filed because people were afraid to run against these SpaceX managers and thus threaten their job status. “Musk, that evil fascist, clearly threatened to send out hit men against anyone who filed! Opposition to Musk will not be allowed!”

What I think is really happening is twofold. First, no one at SpaceX is really interested in this boring administrative government work. They’d rather build cutting-edge rockets. Note that the two commissioners are not really rocket engineers, with one being the wife of a SpaceX employee and the other doing “environmental health and safety” work, likely related to making sure SpaceX meets government work regulations. The real engineers at SpaceX have better things to do.

Second, there really isn’t that much for these town officials to do anyway. The town was established mostly to ease SpaceX’s own regulatory red tape with the state, and once established the task is largely done. Why waste time running for a position that will only add to your work load, while accomplishing nothing of real substance?

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A day-by-day description of the entire Artemis-2 manned mission

10:04 am

NASA today posted a detailed day-by-day description of the entire ten-day Artemis-2 manned mission around the Moon, outlining the tasks planned for the astronauts on each day.

The launch is now targeting April 1, 2026.

The description of their closest approach to the Moon is both interesting and underwhelming.

The Artemis II crew will come their closest to the Moon on flight day 6, while traveling the farthest from Earth. Artemis II could set a record for the farthest anyone has traveled from Earth depending on launch day, breaking the current record – 248,655 miles away – set in 1970 by the Apollo 13 crew. The distance the Artemis II crew will travel depends on their exact launch day and time.

Over the course of the day, the crew will come within 4,000 to 6,000 miles of the lunar surface as they swing around the far side of the Moon – it should look to them about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length. [emphasis mine]

In other words, Orion is not going to get very close, and in fact, the Moon will only be 2 to 3 times bigger than what we see here on Earth. I suspect the best photographs taken will be those showing both the Earth and Moon, both of which will be relatively small.

Overall, I remain highly concerned about this mission. The life support system has never been tested in space before, and they will spend the first day checking it out in Earth orbit. And the return to Earth will involve using a heat shield that did not perform well on the Artemis-1 mission in 2022, losing chunks during re-entry.

They hope a less stressful flight path will mitigate this issue, but then, they need to hit that flight path perfectly on their way back from the Moon. During yesterday’s briefing it was obvious this was a concern to NASA officials.

24 comments

China to begin construction of its Mars sample return spacecraft

8:13 am

China’s state-run press today announced it is about to begin construction of its Mars sample return spacecraft, Tianwen-3, set for launch in 2028.

Based on the announcement, that date seems very unlikely.

China’s mission to retrieve samples from Mars will advance to the flight model development phase within this year, Liu Jizhong, chief designer of the Tianwen-3 mission, said on Thursday. Building on the preliminary technical research and demonstrations, the mission has achieved breakthroughs in key technologies. The engineering team is now focused on developing prototypes, Liu, also a national legislator, told reporters.

The Mars sample return mission is scheduled for launch around 2028, with the goal of returning no less than 500 grams of Martian samples to Earth by around 2031. [emphasis mine]

They only have two years to get the spacecraft built, and it involves “an orbiter, a returner, a lander, an ascender, and a service module.” While China is basing this mission’s design on its successful Chang’e lunar sample return missions, returning samples from Mars is significantly more challenging. The ascent vehicle will have a much greater gravity to overcome, and doing a robotic rendezvous and docking in orbit around another planet millions of miles from Earth has never even been tried.

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German rocket startup Isar Aerospace wins launch contract from Astroscale

8:03 am

Proposed or active spaceports in North Europe
Proposed or active spaceports in North Europe

The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace has won a launch contract using its Spectrum rocket to launch Astroscale’s ELSA-M space junk removal mission, with a launch now targeting 2028.

The mission involves a $15 million contract Astroscale won from the space agencies of the UK and Europe to de-orbit a defunct OneWeb satellite. This demo mission however has been delayed repeatedly since it was first announced in 2022. Then it had a launch date of 2024. In 2024 that launch date was shifted to 2026. With this new announcement it is delayed again, to 2028.

Isar meanwhile has not yet achieved a successful launch of its Spectrum rocket. The first attempt, in March 2025, failed mere seconds after launch due to a loss of attitude control. Its second attempt is presently scheduled for March 19 from Norway’s Andoya spaceport.

If successful, this launch would be the first from a European spaceport, and the first from one of Europe’s new rocket startups.

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China completes two launches early today

7:40 am

China early today resumed launches after a month-long pause, apparently for the Chinese New Year.

First, it completed the 20th launch for the Guowang (Satnet) internet satellite constellation, its Long March 8A rocket lifting off from its coastal Wencheng spaceport.

Though China’s state-run press provided no information on the number of satellites in the payload, all previous launches using the Long March 8A had carried nine satellites. If so, that would mean the constellation now has 159 satellites in orbit, out of a planned 13,000.

Next, China placed two “test satellites” into orbit, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China. Its state-run press provided no information about where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

30 SpaceX
10 China
3 Rocket Lab
2 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25. Though it has up to now almost doubled the launch pace of everyone else, with China resuming launches that pace will likely end.

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Cubesat ultraviolet space telescope achieves first light

5:05 pm

Sparcs first light images
Click for original images.

A new low-cost cubesat-sized NASA ultraviolet space telescope, dubbed Sparcs, has achieved first light, successfully taking both near- and far-ultraviolet false-color images of a nearby star.

Those images are to the right, with the top the far-ultraviolet image and the bottom in the near ultraviolet. From the press release:

Roughly the size of a large cereal box, SPARCS will monitor flares and sunspot activity on low-mass stars — objects only 30% to 70% the mass of the Sun. These stars are among the most common in the Milky Way and host the majority of the galaxy’s roughly 50 billion habitable-zone terrestrial planets, which are rocky worlds close enough to their stars for temperatures that could allow liquid water and potentially support life.

The question astronomers will try to answer with this telescope is whether the solar activity on these stars is high enough to prevent life from forming in the star’s habitable zone. Because these stars are dim and small, the habitable zone is quite close to the star, which means solar activity has a higher impact on the planet. We don’t yet have sufficient data to determine the normal activity of such stars. Sparcs will provide a good first survey.

It will also demonstrate the viability of such small low-cost cubesats for this kind of research. If successful expect more such telescopes, some of which are likely to be private, like Blue Skies Space’s Mauve optical telescope already in orbit.

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NASA now targeting an April 1st launch of Artemis-2

3:54 pm

At a press briefing today, NASA officials said they are now targeting an April 1, 2026 launch date for the Artemis-2 mission, a ten-day manned mission sending four astronauts around the Moon.

NASA completed the agency’s Artemis II Flight Readiness Review on Thursday, March 12, and polled “go” to proceed toward launch. NASA is targeting Thursday, March 19, to roll the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft to launch pad 39B in advance of a launch attempt Wednesday, April 1, pending close out of remaining open work.

The repair work involved replacing a helium seal that was preventing flow to and from the tanks and testing it to confirm the new seal worked. It also involved replacing batteries as well as some oxygen seals.

NASA officials also stated that they do not plan to do another wet dress rehearsal, that they are satisfied by the testing they did in the assembly building. Instead, they are go for full launch countdown, with the hope they can lift-off with no more fueling issues. They have also determined that if there is a scrub, they will also have several launch opportunities through April 6th.

To underline the risks of this mission, the Orion capsule in which they are sending four astronauts around the Moon has an uncertain heat shield and an untested life support system. To mitigate the shield uncertainties, they must hit a specific flight path through the atmosphere upon return.

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March 12, 2026 Quick space links

2:44 pm

As BtB’s stringer Jay is on vacation, here are a few links I spotted that don’t deserve full posts. 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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