August 13, 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.
- Stoke Space touts manufacturing progress for its Nova rocket, including engines, heat shield, and structural testing
Still no launch date announced.
- Blue Origin pitches a Mars telecommunications orbiter proposal for Mars Sample return
Yawn. This company sure pitches a lot of cool graphics, while launching almost nothing.
- On this day in 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched
More than any other orbiter, images from MRO have proven that Mars is an icy world, not a dry desert.
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.
- Stoke Space touts manufacturing progress for its Nova rocket, including engines, heat shield, and structural testing
Still no launch date announced.
- Blue Origin pitches a Mars telecommunications orbiter proposal for Mars Sample return
Yawn. This company sure pitches a lot of cool graphics, while launching almost nothing.
- On this day in 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter was launched
More than any other orbiter, images from MRO have proven that Mars is an icy world, not a dry desert.
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
Tougher carbon fiber
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-08-carbon-fiber-smart-plastic-shifting.html
Other materials
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/what-new-materials-are-there.18181/page-25#post-821838
Moon ISRU Patent
Phil Metzger: I was just notified the US Patent Office awarded this patent on a lunar construction technology. It is a method to reduce the energy for sintering lunar soil into a concrete-like material. My hypothesis was that magnetic and microwave susceptibilities should be correlated, since magnetic loss tangent is one of the mechanisms of microwave absorption in minerals.
https://x.com/DrPhiltill/status/1955829518171554108
US Patent 12,384,730 B2
12 AUG 2025
Speaking of Blue Origin — and, for that matter, the Patent Office — the youtuber Eager Space, who I have touted in these comment boxes before, has a new video up this week, titled “Why are some spaceflight companies so secretive?” Of course, the company he has in mind in Blue Origin. But most of the video is really about SpaceX, because it is SpaceX’s pioneering of an aggressive openness that has the question even worth asking in the first place. It’s a wonderful tour de force of what those early SpaceX streams were like, and why they so radically transformed public expectations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd0O4JQCMiE
The short answer to his question, by the way, is “It’s a big pain to be open.” And it is! ITAR compliance alone is a nightmare. But I think SpaceX has shown how the pain paid off for them.
One other note about the patents: As Eager Space reminds us, Elon Musk is notoriously disdainful of patents, and yet he discoveres that SpaceX has filed 87 patents, which is more than twice as many as ULA! But as it turns out, 85 of these patents are related to Starlink design. Apparently he has decided that they have value for staellite design and manufacture in way that they simply don’t for rockets.
Adam Savage at the Smithsonian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ywdxvk2jzo
Trying to remember when the last time a SSME blew up…like Raptors