July 28, 2025 Quick space linksCourtesy 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.
- The next X-37B mission is now targeting an August 21, 2025 launch
No mention of the length of the mission, or which of the Space Force’s two X-37Bs will fly.
- In reviewing two decades of archive data, astronomers discover a pulsar with repeated abrupt changes in its rotation rate
The changes occur roughly every 550 days. In addition, the overall rate of rotation has slowly sped up and slowed down during these same time periods.
- Chinese pseudo-company Space Epoch has successfully fired the engine recovered from its May test hop
- On this day in 1973 the second crew to occupy Skylab launched on a Saturn-1B rocket
Their mission lasted just under sixty days.
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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from 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
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.
- The next X-37B mission is now targeting an August 21, 2025 launch
No mention of the length of the mission, or which of the Space Force’s two X-37Bs will fly.
- In reviewing two decades of archive data, astronomers discover a pulsar with repeated abrupt changes in its rotation rate
The changes occur roughly every 550 days. In addition, the overall rate of rotation has slowly sped up and slowed down during these same time periods.
- Chinese pseudo-company Space Epoch has successfully fired the engine recovered from its May test hop
- On this day in 1973 the second crew to occupy Skylab launched on a Saturn-1B rocket
Their mission lasted just under sixty days.
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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from 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
Godier’s YT channel (the “universe in which we liiiiive” guy) talked a bit about A. Yaginuma’s arxiv paper that suggests a Mars orbiter may indeed be able to reach 3I/ATLAS after all.
…… opening of a new “facility” ….
Tom: Fixed. Thank you.
One amusing story about Skylab 3: Before the crew left the station at the end of their mission, they played a prank on the next crew (Skylab 4) by dressing up some spare flight suits in ad hoc dummies, to give a momentary impression that the station was still inhabited when the Skylaqb 4 guys opened the hatch. As Wiki describes it: “The all-rookie astronaut crew arrived aboard Skylab to find three figures dressed in flight suits. Upon closer inspection, they found these were dummies with Skylab 4 mission emblems and name tags which had been left there by Al Bean, Jack Lousma, and Owen Garriott at the end of Skylab 3.”
Imagine entering what you believe to be an uninhabited space station, only to get the momentary mistaken impression that SOMEONE IS IN HERE AFTER ALL. If Gerald Carr’s crew had EKGs stil wired to them, I’m sure they would have shown a momentary surge in pulse.
This will amuse Bob and most of our regulars: The Atlantic has a big long-form article that went up last night, titled “How NASA engineered its own decline.” Its alt-title tells you what the real moral of the story is: “How Elon Musk ate NASA.” For author Franklin Foer, as undoubtedfly for his editors, this is a horror story, a cautionary tale of what ensues from the commercialization of a federal agency’s second-order activities. For the rest of us regulars at BEHIND THE BLACK, it’s a great success story we want to see more of!
(How NASA’s own program of record rockets and crew vehicles consistently run wildly over budget and behind schedule does not, of course, feature anywhere in Foer’s gazillion-word essay.)
The concluding paragraph lets you skip the rest of the story: “The story of Elon Musk can be told using the genre of fiction that he reveres most. In an act of hubris, NASA gave life to a creature called SpaceX, believing it could help achieve humanity’s loftiest ambitions. But, as in all great parables about technology, the creation eclipsed the creator. What was meant to be a partner became a force of domination. The master lost control. And so begins a new part of the tale: a dystopian chapter written in the language of liberation.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/nasa-spacex-elon-musk-ambitions/683559/
It may be paywalled for some, but web archive can get you the whole thing, for those curious to see how this tale is being spun.
P.S. And there are some real howlers in Foer’s essay. He insists at one point that SpaceX could not possibly succeed, because, and I quote, “There wasn’t a market for rocket launches… For his very expensive product, there was one customer, with a limited budget: the U.S. government.”
For the record, exactly eleven (11) of SpaceX’s 134 Falcon launches in 2024 had U.S. government agencies (NASA, DoD, NRO, and NOAA) as their customer. If you want to count the CLPS missions (a debatable proposition, but you could argue that NASA ultimately paid for most of those missions), the total comes to 13.
Mr. Foer attempts to answer the false dilemma he sets up by insisting that SpaceX was only able to find success (which is pretty hard to ignore, even for Atlantic writers) by bootstrapping it by way of Starlink launches. Which, to be sure, there have been a lot of. But also for the record, SpaceX in 2024 launched a total 29 missions on Falcon rockets for customers who were neither the U.S. government nor SpaceX itself (31 if you count those CLPS missions). 29 launches is more than United Launch Alliance has managed in this entire decade. It’s also more than the total number of Shuttle missions NASA managed in the Shuttle’s final decade of operation (2002-2011).
As it turned out, there *was* a market for rocket launches that didn’t involve the U.S. government. And SpaceX helped bring a lot of it into existence.
If I were offered money to do a hit piece on Musk, I would likely focus on his being distracted as hurting Elon’s Starship program.
I would also talk about Hughes’ madness over time…and how a worst case scenario where American spaceflight might suffer if SpaceX kills competition, only to stumble itself due to a disaster, or being politically targeted.
Such a worst-case scenario is why you want a plethora of choices from the public and private worlds.
I think I speak for most when I say that we all love SpaceX so much, that we want there to be more of them!
But there are some promising partially and even fully reusable American commercial rockets in the pipeline. Hopefully, at least a couple of them will turn out to be commercial successes, too.
Richard M: Saw that article, glanced at, laughed at its stupidity, and closed the tab.
It does illustrate the part of the population that is pushing hard to establish the new dark age, based on ignorance, hubris, and close-mindedness. And that population is sadly not small.
Richard M wrote: “As it turned out, there *was* a market for rocket launches that didn’t involve the U.S. government. And SpaceX helped bring a lot of it into existence.”
Those who were paying attention to space in the 1990s knew that the market for rocket launches would be large, as long as the price per pound dropped to around $2,000. The commercial market begged for this price point. SpaceX was able to make that price point, and the market followed quickly, as the industry predicted.
Richard’s quote from his linked article: “The story of Elon Musk can be told using the genre of fiction that he reveres most. In an act of hubris, NASA gave life to a creature called SpaceX, believing it could help achieve humanity’s loftiest ambitions. But, as in all great parables about technology, the creation eclipsed the creator.” [I didn’t go past the paywall to verify this quote.]
This moral of the story is all wrong. Government should never have forbidden commercialization of space in the first place. For two thirds of a century We the People got very little for the government’s expenditures in space. Now that We the People are doing what we want in space, we are finally beginning to get what we had been paying for, all those decades. Paying for it a second time, but this time through capitalist investment and free market purchase rather than taxes.
We the People, through our elected government, gave life to a creature called NASA, and we got very little benefit for the money we spent. We did not have to destroy the creation in order to get back the control of the space industry. The question now is whether NASA can become a symbiont or will it remain a parasite.
When we let government run the space industry, all we got was what government wanted. When We the People run the space industry, we get what We the People want.