March 21, 2025 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope ejects its dust cover
The telescope will compile a spectroscopic sky survey over its two-year prime mission.
- European Space Agency (ESA) releases a report outlining its overall strategy through 2040
Contains lots of typical bureaucratic blather. It actually means little, as the real strategies are presently being established by the individual European nations independent of this central bureaucracy. Rather than depend on ESA, the member nations are one-by-one encouraging private enterprise, not government projects. ESA is likely going to become a backwater in the next decade, and unnecessary after that.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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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.
- NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope ejects its dust cover
The telescope will compile a spectroscopic sky survey over its two-year prime mission.
- European Space Agency (ESA) releases a report outlining its overall strategy through 2040
Contains lots of typical bureaucratic blather. It actually means little, as the real strategies are presently being established by the individual European nations independent of this central bureaucracy. Rather than depend on ESA, the member nations are one-by-one encouraging private enterprise, not government projects. ESA is likely going to become a backwater in the next decade, and unnecessary after that.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
“NASA’s Plutonium Problem”
Real Engineering (March 22, 2025)
https://youtu.be/geIhl_VE0IA
21:22
Hey Robert Zimmerman, you might want to look at this.
America needs an ‘all of the above’ space strategy
https://www.wnd.com/2025/03/america-needs-an-all-of-the-above-space-strategy/
Hi Wayne,
Just so you know, I am not yelling at you for that link. I did watch it, and I think the guy who made it is misinformed or it is clickbait. Some items are right and some are wrong. We have been producing Pu-238 in greater quantities since 2012. INL (Idaho National Laboratories) is cranking out close to a kilogram of the stuff a year. He talks about Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, but there are other sites as well in production here in the USA. We are making more and there is no shortage for RTGs on spacecraft. This information is not secret, all this data is available through DoE and INL publishes these numbers.
One other item he got wrong, the Dragonfly probe was not developed by JPL, it was APL at John Hopkins University. He talks about Juno, which is an old mission, and this shortage is old news that has been resolved.
@ Jay..
That video is an interesting watch non the less… I know that the US has ramped up production.. the narrator is obviously working with old data, and I didn’t even catch where Dragonfly is being developed, but as far as I could tell the physics, and the production techniques are all correct.
On a tangent, for a couple of decades now I have had an idea about leveraging the vast temperature difference between light and shade in the vacuum of space. Something along the lines of a fluid expanding in the sunlight, a one way valve, fluid contracting in the dark, and a small generator powered by the circulation. I’m pretty sure that as a fork lift driver I’m not the first to have contemplated the idea… Is there a fault in my reasoning? Or has this ever been tried?
Jay–
Great fill-in factoids.
I thought this issue had been dealt with as well.
I’m going to have to re-evaluate my opinion of these people….
Lee–
Sounds like a variation of a perpetual motion machine, but I’m just a psych major, so I just don’t know.
Hoping our engineering readers will weigh in on that!
Lee S — not a new idea, look up “Stirling engine”.
V-Man:
Thank you!
Talking about radio actives, nuclear fuel specifically.
I wish the US was allowed to re-cycle all of our old nuclear power plant fuel instead of just sticking it back underground.
And can someone answer why we could not use a closed system nuclear power plant like we do on submarines and ships on the Moon or Mars?
@V-Man,
I am aware of the Stirling engine, but have never put in the time to actually understand the device… I shall now… Thank you!
Lee-
Million videos on the Stirling engine on Youtube.
One of which informs me that; at the Maricopa Solar Power Plant (Arizona) they were using heat-engines powered by focused sunlight to generate electricity.
https://solarpaces.nrel.gov/project/maricopa-solar-project
(no longer in operation…)
interview with SpaceX engineer ( in this case, materials ). Very impressive guy.
https://youtu.be/H6FuUj1sPQA?si=RjPxDub_i-anacNH
Steve Richter: Very informative video. Thank you. Confirms everything I have assumed about what it is like to work at SpaceX, as well as the kind of people the company hires.
Pzatchok,
I agree. One of the many mistakes during the Carter administration was ending fuel reprocessing. To answer your question, no one has done it, yet.
To those of you who do not know what it is, fuel reprocessing is taking out the old nuclear fuel, extracting the waste out, and taking the still good uranium to make new fuel pellets. The best analogy I heard, I wish I could give credit to the guy who created it, this is how we currently treat nuclear fuel in the U.S.: You fill up your vehicle with 20 gallons of gas (75.7L for Lee), you burn only one gallon driving, you pump out the 19 gallons to be dispose of, refill it with 20 gallons of new gasoline, and repeat. That is our nuclear industry.
Countries that do reprocessing for fuel purposes: France (of course 75% of the their power is nuclear), China, India, Pakistan, and Russia.
@ Steve Richter,
A very interesting and informative interview… As Bob says, it speaks to the kind of people SpaceX have working for them… Young, knowledgeable, enthusiastic and hard working. The kind of guys and gals that will get us to the stars ( or at least Mars! )
Lee S asked: “On a tangent, for a couple of decades now I have had an idea about leveraging the vast temperature difference between light and shade in the vacuum of space. Something along the lines of a fluid expanding in the sunlight, a one way valve, fluid contracting in the dark, and a small generator powered by the circulation. I’m pretty sure that as a fork lift driver I’m not the first to have contemplated the idea… Is there a fault in my reasoning? Or has this ever been tried?”
In the late 1980s, my officemate was working on Sterling cycle cryocoolers for the American space station, which I think was still being called Freedom, at the time. As your research should have shown, the Sterling cycle can work both ways, turning a temperature difference into energy, as you proposed, and using energy to create a temperature difference. Not all machines can be used in reverse like this. My officemate gave a presentation about Sterling cycle engines, and as his finale, he took the audience outside to watch one such engine use solar energy collected by a parabolic mirror run an engine, which ran impressively fast.
There was at least one proposal to use Sterling cycle rather than photovoltaic cells for a space-based solar plant for beaming energy down to Earth. I never did an analysis or research into which was more economical, so I don’t know whether this is likely to be used, should we ever go with beaming energy to Earth.
There is no fault in Lee’s reasoning, and it has been done on Earth. I doubt it has yet been used for energy generation in space.
Robert (not Zimmerman),
Your linked article by Bob Walker America needs an ‘all of the above’ space strategy is correct, in that we no longer need to choose whether to go to the Moon or to Mars. Over the decades I have been in several arguments about where the U.S. should go next. I would argue that we were ready to go straight to Mars, whereas many argued that we should use the Moon to prove out the technology and equipment we need for Mars. However, this argument only applied when we relied upon NASA to take us to the next destination. NASA could only get congressional funding for one or the other, not both (and it couldn’t even get funding for either).
With the recent ability of commercial space to raise funding in order to explore and use space independent of NASA, everything has changed. Three decades ago, Dr. Alan Binder tried to send a privately funded commercial satellite, Lunar Prospector, to orbit the Moon for research. He could raise some money to build most of the satellite, but perceived competition with NASA limited his ability to convince investors to raise the funds to complete it. Eventually, he turned over the project to NASA, which spent three times as much money completing it. Dr. Binder wrote a book in which he expresses his disappointment in NASA’s inefficient ways.
Walker’s article says that we should send men and materiel to both the Moon and Mars. his argument is:
Walker does not mention that NASA’s funds are limited, which they are, and he does not mention that commercial spaces’s funds are now much more available. The success of the commercial cargo spacecraft to the ISS, Dragon and Cygnus. emboldened investors in commercial space; many new companies started up, and several are doing well. These companies are free to do as they please, which is to say they can explore potential profitable ventures, a capability that had been absent for the first half-century of the space age.
‘There is far more capital available outside of NASA [for use by commercial space marketplace] than there is inside of NASA.‘ — paraphrased from an interview with NASA Administrator Bridenstine on the Ben Shapiro radio show on Monday 3 August 2020.
Thus, we are not limited to choosing between sending men and materiel to the Moon or to Mars or to an asteroid for mining, because U.S. commercial space can choose all three and many other places as well. In the past two decades, investors have become much more willing to invest in commercial space, and they have also learned to be discerning about which projects to invest in. The Space Age has finally arrived.