Author: Robert Zimmerman

NASA today completes SLS wet dress rehearsal with few problems

8:35 pm

NASA today successfully completed its SLS wet dress rehearsal countdown with few problems, fueling the rocket completely and then running the countdown down to T-33 seconds and then recycling back to T-10 minutes and running the countdown down again, this time to T-29 seconds.

During the day-long event there were only two minor issues, neither of significance. Early in the day there was “an issue with ground communications” that required mission control to shift to “backup communication methods” for about a half hour before the issue was resolved.

Then, during the first countdown to T-33 the count was paused and recycled once “due to a booster avionics system voltage anomaly.” This also appeared to be minor issue quickly resolved.

NASA will hold a press conference tomorrow at 11 am (Eastern) to discuss the results of the entire rehearsal.

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman had stated previously that he needed to see a perfect rehearsal before he would approve the launch of Artemis-2, carrying four astronauts on a ten-day mission around the Moon. While today’s rehearsal was not “perfect,” the issues were very minor. I suspect he will give the okay, with a tentative launch date of March 6, 2026 already being considered. The present launch window closes on April 6, 2026.

That mission, should it fly, still carries enormous risk. The Orion capsule will be using a life support system never tested in space before. It will also be using a heat shield that is questionable, having failed to behave as expected in the first Artemis mission in 2022.

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February 19, 2026 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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NASA on Starliner: Too much freedom caused the failure!

2:59 pm

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS in 2024.

NASA today released its final investigation report on the causes behind the Starliner thruster issues during that capsule’s only manned mission in ISS, issues that almost prevented the spacecraft from docking successfully and could have left it manned and out-of-control while still in orbit.

You can read the report here [pdf]. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman made it clear in his own statement that the Starliner incident was far more serious than originally let on.

“To undertake missions that change the world, we must be transparent about both our successes and our shortcomings. We have to own our mistakes and ensure they never happen again. Beyond technical issues, it is clear that NASA permitted overarching programmatic objectives of having two providers capable of transporting astronauts to-and-from orbit, influence engineering and operational decisions, especially during and immediately after the mission. We are correcting those mistakes. Today, we are formally declaring a Type A mishap and ensuring leadership accountability so situations like this never reoccur. We look forward to working with Boeing as both organizations implement corrective actions and return Starliner to flight only when ready.”

A Type A mishap is one in which a spacecraft could become entirely uncontrollable, leading to its loss and the death of all on board. Though Starliner was NOT lost, for a short while as it hung close to ISS that result was definitely possible. Its thrusters were not working. It couldn’t maneuver to dock, nor could it maneuver to do a proper and safe de-orbit. Fortunately, engineers were able to figure out a way to get the thursters operational again so a docking could occur, but until then, it was certainly a Type A situation.

The report outlines in great detail the background behind Starliner’s thruster issues, the management confusion between NASA and Boeing, and the overall confused management at Boeing itself, including its generally lax testing standards.

The report’s recommends that NASA impose greater control over future commercial contracts, noting that under the capitalism model that NASA has been following:
» Read more

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Pluto’s splotched surface

12:30 pm

Pluto's splotched surface
For original images go here and here.

Cool image time! The panorama above was created using two photographs (found here and here) taken by New Horizons during its close fly-by of Pluto on July 14, 2015. It looks at Pluto’s western limb, well lit by the Sun, from a distance of approximately 60,000 miles.

I pulled these images from the New Horizons’ archive specifically because I don’t remember ever seeing them publicly released by the science team. More important, they show a surface far more alien than other more well-known New Horizon pictures. Are those round splotches impact craters or some alien type of volcanic caldera? Note also the vertical cracks that appear to divide this terrain near the center.

It would be a serious mistake to make any conclusions. In the emptiness of the outer solar system, the impact rates are going to be far less than in the inner solar system, so assuming impacts is dangerous. Pluto meanwhile has an alien surface of frozen nitrogen seas often filled with floating mountains of frozen water ice. For it to also produce weird volcanic eruptions of nitrogen, sublimating away like bubbling tomato sauce when it is simmering, is quite possible.

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Chinese pseudo-company Landspace targeting April-June for 2nd Zhuque-3 launch

10:24 am

Zhuque-3 at launch
Screen capture from China’s
state-run press of the first Zhuque-3
launch on December 2, 2025.

The Chinese pseudo-company Landspace now hopes to make its second orbital launch and recovery attempt of its Zhuque-3 rocket sometime in the April-June ’26 time frame.

The first launch in December ’25 was a success, getting its upper stage into its planned orbit. The attempt to vertically land the first stage however failed. The stage came down almost precisely on its target landing pad, but the engines failed and so it crashed instead of landing softly.

Officials say that they also hope to begin reusing the first stage quickly, if it should land successfully, with the first reuse planned for late this year. The rocket itself has about two-thirds the capacity of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and is being marketed to launch the half-dozen giant satellite constellations China is presently attempting to place in orbit.

Since the beginning of this year there has been a decided pause of news from China’s pseudo-companies. I have speculated this dearth of the normal stream of PR announcements might be related to a power-play by the new government agency created last year to supervise these pseudo-companies. It also could simply be the government has told them to tone it down a bit. Better to sell actual achievement than empty plans.

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The dimmest galaxy yet found

9:57 am

The dimmest galaxy yet found
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Using ground-based and orbiting telescopes, astronomers think they have identified what might be the dimmest galaxy yet discovered, revealed almost entirely not from its stars but from the four globular clusters that reside within or near it.

The image to the right, cropped and sharpened to post here, shows that galaxy, dubbed CDG-2, along with those four globular clusters. From the press release:

To confirm one of the dark galaxy candidates, astronomers employed a trio of observatories: the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, ESA’s Euclid space observatory, and the ground-based NAOJ Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Hubble’s high-resolution imaging revealed a close collection of four globular clusters in the Perseus galaxy cluster, 300 million light-years away. Follow-up studies using Hubble, Euclid, and Subaru data then revealed a faint, diffuse glow surrounding the star clusters – strong evidence of an underlying galaxy.

“This is the first galaxy detected solely through its globular cluster population,” said David. “Under conservative assumptions, the four clusters represent the entire globular cluster population of CDG-2.”

Preliminary analysis suggests CDG-2 has the luminosity of roughly 1 million Sun-like stars, with the globular clusters accounting for 16% of its visible content.

The scientists next claim that 99% of the galaxy’s mass is made up of dark matter, a material no one has yet detected except for the gravitational influence its invisible mass imposes on visible objects. It appears the astronomers don’t believe the mass that has been detected is sufficient to hold this galaxy together, and thus they need dark matter to explain its existence.

I simply wonder if the distances involved simply make the matter hard to see.

No matter. This is a cool discovery, because it tells us there is much out there hidden in the darkness we will always find difficult if not impossible to detect.

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Engine problems for Japan’s lunar lander company Ispace

9:27 am

According to company officials, the Japanese lunar lander company Ispace is having issues with the engine is has been developing for its next (and third) lander mission — a joint project with the American company Draper — problems that have now delayed the mission from ’26 to ’27.

In an earnings call discussing its fiscal third-quarter financial results this month, ispace executives said issues with development of the new VoidRunner engine could delay the company’s next lander mission. VoidRunner is a joint project between ispace’s U.S. subsidiary and Agile Space Industries, a U.S. space propulsion company, announced in May 2025. It replaced an Agile Space engine originally planned for use on the Apex 1.0 lander that ispace U.S. is developing.

Changing the engine required modifications to the lander design, Ispace said at the time, delaying its use on a mission led by Draper for NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services, or CLPS, program from 2026 to 2027. That mission to the lunar farside is designated Mission 3 by Ispace.

Ispace has made two attempts to land on the Moon. In both cases, the mission worked perfectly until the last moments, resulting in a crash rather than a soft landing. In the first case software had the engines shut down when the spacecraft was still about three miles above the ground, while in the second case the spacecraft’s laser range-finder provided incorrect altitude data.

It presently has contracts for three more missions, the one for NASA working with Draper, a second for Japan in ’28, and a third for Europe in ’29. That it has had to replace the engines on the first (and might have to do it on the second) is a very bad sign. Usually it is best practice to build and test the engine first, get it right, and then build the spacecraft or rocket around it. Replacing an engine usually signals larger design problems that are difficult if not impossible to fix.

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February 18, 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.

6 comments

Sorry about the lack of posts…

2:24 pm

I feel obliged to apologize for the general low rate of posting the past few days. First I am still fighting this head cold, which though it appears to be fading it still leaves me foggy-brained at times. This situation was made worse today when the profile vanished from my Thunderbird email program. How it vanished remains a mystery, but it took me more than an hour to upload a back-up (from a week ago) and get it to work with the program. Thus I lost about a week’s emails.

Hardly a tragedy but all this has been quite exhausting. Hopefully by tomorrow things will run better.

Regardless, I want to thank my readers for their kind words and support. It is truly appreciated.

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UAE extends mission of its Al-Amal Mars orbiter

8:57 am

Deimos with Mars in the background
Al-Amal’s 2023 image of Deimos, the first good
picture of the moon ever taken. Click for full movie.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) yesterday announced it is extending the mission of its Al-Amal Mars orbiter (“Hope” in English) to 2028, significantly beyond its initial planned mission of two years.

Launched in July 2020, the Hope Probe successfully entered Mars orbit in February 2021 after a seven-month interplanetary journey, marking a historic achievement as the first Arab nation to reach the Red Planet. Originally designed as a two-year mission to observe and study Mars’ atmosphere, the probe has far exceeded expectations. Since reaching Mars, it has gathered around 10 terabytes of scientific data, shared through more than a dozen datasets with research institutions worldwide.

The probe itself was mostly built by American engineers and organizations, as part of a deal to train UAE students. Once in operation around Mars, the UAE and those students took over almost all operations. It orbits Mars in a very wide orbit, allowing it to study global weather and atmosphere conditions, such as dust storms.

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Bahamas allows SpaceX to resume Falcon 9 landings inside Bahamian waters

8:49 am

The Civil Aviation Authority of the Bahamas (CAAB) this week announced that it is allowing SpaceX to resume Falcon 9 landings inside Bahamian waters.

In a statement, CAAB said that one landing is scheduled for Wednesday night between 5:00 pm and 9:30 pm (local time). “All requisite regulatory and environmental reviews and clearances have been completed in accordance with established aerospace safety and operations protocols,” CAAB said, reminding the population that, depending on weather and atmospheric conditions, “one or more sound booms may be heard during the landing sequence”.

SpaceX had completed one landing in February 2025, but the CAAB then paused further landings two months later, claiming it wanted to do a full environmental review.

There was also the issue of a SpaceX $1 million donation to the University of the Bahamas. Maybe the CAAB wanted to wait until the check cleared.

As should be expected, a fringe of anti-Musk activists began screaming “environmental disaster” and getting the full support of the propaganda press. The claim is utterly stupid, considering SpaceX has landed hundreds of Falcon 9s in the past decade harmlessly.

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February 17, 2026 Quick space links

2:46 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.

10 comments

Pluto’s floating mountains of frozen ice

10:18 am

Pluto's floating mountains
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and sharpened to post here, was taken by New Horizons on July 14, 2015 when it made its close fly-by of Pluto.

The picture looks at the part of Pluto that was close to sunset. Hence the mountain’s long dramatic shadow. The raw image webpage provides little information, including a scale of 0.0 meters, which means nothing. My guess is that these mountains could be several hundred to several thousand feet high based on data from other New Horizon mountain images, but that is a pure guess.

What we think we know is that these mountains are likely made of ice, which at Pluto’s eternally cold environment is as hard as granite. We also think we know that they float on a layer of frozen nitrogen, but because that nitrogen can sublimate into gas when Pluto’s climate warms as its orbit brings it closer to the Sun, the foundation of these mountains is quite unstable. They can roll and drift about, even if they are the size of the Appalachian mountains in the eastern U.S.

I continue to delve into the New Horizons’ archive, and have discovered a trove of quite amazing pictures that hadn’t been featured by the science team during the fly-by. Pluto really is an alien place. Stay tuned, there is more to come!

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NASA now targeting February 19, 2026 for 2nd SLS wet dress rehearsal countdown

8:20 am

According to an announcement yesterday afternoon, NASA is now targeting February 19, 2026 for the second SLS wet dress rehearsal countdown.

During the rehearsal, the team will execute a detailed countdown sequence. Operators will conduct two runs of the last ten minutes of the countdown, known as terminal count. They will pause at T-1 minute and 30 seconds for up to three minutes, then resume until T-33 seconds before launch and pause again. After that, they will recycle the clock back to T-10 minutes and conduct a second terminal countdown to just inside of T-30 seconds before ending the sequence. This process simulates real-world conditions, including scenarios where a launch might be scrubbed due to technical or weather issues.

If this dress rehearsal goes off perfectly, NASA is considering the possibility of an actual launch attempt on March 6, 2026, though it admits that date is very preliminary That launch will carry four astronauts on a ten-day mission slingshot around the Moon and back to Earth, using an Orion capsule with untested life support system and a questionable heat shield.

The present launch window for this mission closes on April 6th, so NASA’s margins will shrink considerably if this second dress rehearsal has any further problems.

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A realistic plan to send a spacecraft to interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas

8:01 am

Scientists have devised a mission profile that could actually get a spacecraft close to Comet 3I/Atlas sometime around 2085.

…the team found that an intercept could be achieved via a Solar Oberth maneuver, but the launch would have to occur in 2035 to achieve optimal alignment between Earth, Jupiter and 3I/ATLAS. The flight duration would be 50 years (though Hibberd notes that this could be reduced marginally). “2035 is optimal because the alignments of the celestial bodies involved (i.e. the Earth, Jupiter, Sun, and 3I/ATLAS) are the most propitious to reach 3I/ATLAS with a minimum Solar Oberth propulsion requirement from the probe, a minimum performance requirement for the launch vehicle, and a minimum flight time to the target,” he said.

The Solar Oberth maneuver has the spacecraft fire its engines at the moment it is zipping past the Sun at its closest and fastest, taking full advantage of that gravitational velocity.

You can read their paper here [pdf] As they note in their conclusion, this entire mission is based on using “a Starship Block 3 upper stage fully-refuelled in Low Earth Orbit.” It assumes that by 2035 Starship will be flying routinely and cheaply, and could be purchased at a reasonable cost for such a mission.

Or maybe donated in the name of science by some billionaire who happens to care about making the human race multi-planetary. Know anyone?

Personally, I wonder it this mission profile could be adapted to reach the first known interstellar object, Oumuamua. 3I/Atlas appears to simply be a comet. Though a visit would be of value it would not Earth-shaking. Oumuamua however was not a comet, but more importantly it was strange in every way. Though astronomers in 2019 declared based on the available data that it was definitely not an alien spaceship, that conclusion remains very uncertain. As I wrote at the time:

…for anyone to assume there is any certainty to this conclusion would be a grave mistake. It is merely the best guess, based on the available but somewhat limited data. The data however does not preclude more exotic explanations. Nothing is certain.

To me this object should get top priority.

Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Elmer Bernstein – To Kill A Mockingbird Suite

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed live 2014 by the Beethoven Academy Orchestra with Sara Andon on the flute.

Some movies are made special because of their score, and I think this applies to the 1962 film, To Kill a Mockingbird. It is a superb work of art, but it rises above many comparable films due to the music that Elmer Bernstein wrote for it. His suite only gives a hint of its effectiveness, in the movie.

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February 16, 2026 Quick space links

2:42 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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Only the power-hungry truly lust for war

1:04 pm

Russell McClintock's Lincoln and the Decision for War

Today is “President’s Day”, a meaningless holiday created by our stupid lords in Congress in order to denigrate George Washington by devaluing the holiday celebrating his birth, February 22nd, by applying that holiday to all presidents, from great to the trashy. This fake holiday also acted to devalue any remembrance of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th, as it forced many states that used to celebrate that holiday separately to fold that celebration into today as well.

I don’t accept Congress’s stupid holiday. Instead, I separately try each year to honor both Washington and Lincoln on their actual birthdays, because without these great men the nation of my birth would never have become the great and free and prosperous place it became.

In honor of Lincoln today, I thought I’d post a short review of Russell McClintock’s fine 2008 history, Lincoln and the Decision for War. McClintock took a decidedly different look at the Civil War by focusing not on larger events, but specifically at the time period between the election of Lincoln on November 6, 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War in April 1861.

What many forget with the passage of time is that the Civil War did not start instantly with Lincoln’s victory. For six months furious negotiations took place between politicians from the North and South, with Northern politicians desperately trying to somehow convince the southern states not to secede from the Union. McClintock details those negotiations, including Lincoln’s own efforts in numerous ways to placate the most radical southern states.

You see, as much as Lincoln opposed slavery — and he truly did — he was far more committed to the American Constitution and the nation it had created. If he had to let the issue of slavery take a back burner to saving the Union, he was quite content to do so. More important, as McClintock shows, if the southern states hadn’t seceded and had stayed part of the Union, their power bloc in Congress would have been strong enough to block any anti-slavery action by Lincoln anyway. He really didn’t have sufficient political power in Congress to change anything.

For the South, none of these actual facts about Lincoln mattered. The South had developed Lincoln Derangement Syndrome, and was not going to allow itself to be ruled by Lincoln no matter what, even if that rule was weak and ineffectual. As noted by the Ohio’s radical anti-slavery senator Ben Wade in a speech on the Senate floor on December 17, 1860:
» Read more

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A sinuous Martian ridge of uncertain origin

10:06 am

A sinuous ridge of uncertain origin
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 21, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It was posted today by the camera team as a captioned image, with the caption as follows:

The sinuous ridge is approximately 10 meters wide and several kilometers long. The floor surrounding this ridge has been eroding laterally, forming pits and circular features suggestive of removal (sublimation) of subsurface ice. However, landforms such as channels or moraines that might suggest the presence of water or ice are lacking, so the ridge itself does not appear to have formed by fluvial or glacial processes.

Perhaps this curious feature is an exhumed dike formed from magma emanating from Alba Mons in subsurface fractures.

Alba Mons is a gigantic shield volcano to the west.
» Read more

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Rocket Factory Augsburg getting close to launch

9:16 am

Screen capture of test failure
Screen capture from video of test failure in 2024.
Note the flame shooting out sideways.

The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg appears to finally be getting close to launching its RFA-1 rocket after a static fire test explosion in 2024 seriously delayed its plans.

Speaking to European Spaceflight in early February, Rocket Factory Augsburg CEO Prof. Dr. Indulis Kalnins, who replaced Dr. Stefan Tweraser in April 2025, explained that the rocket’s first stage is in the process of being transported from Augsburg in Germany to the launch site on Unst. The rocket’s upper stage, which has received upgrades to its single Helix engine and the associated control software, is expected to follow in the next few weeks.

On 10 February, the company announced that the new umbilical tower had been raised, standing at 52 metres high. The tower will support and stabilise the rocket and provide propellant, power, and data connections. The company has begun commissioning the repaired and upgraded launch pad. The only element still to be added is the water tanks for the water deluge system. Kalnins, however, stressed that the company is taking its time with all pre-flight testing.

It appears my speculation that the company had not yet received its launch licenses from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) was wrong. Those licenses were issued in January 2025, only five months after the static fire launchpad explosion. For the CAA to respond that quickly is quite surprising. Maybe it decided it shouldn’t kill a third rocket company trying to launch from the UK.

Right now the race to be the first orbital rocket launched from a European spaceport is coming down to Rocket Factory and its German competitor Isar Aerospace. Isar is gearing up to make its second attempt to launch its Spectrum rocket from Norway’s Andoya spaceport in March.

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Fairing from India’s Bahubali rocket launched in December found in Maldives

9:00 am

A man fishing off an uninhabited island in the Maldives discovered what appears to be pieces from the fairing used by India’s LVM3 rocket, also dubbed Bahubali, when it launched AST SpaceMobile’s sixth Bluebird satellite in December.

A similar discovery was made on December 28, 2025 in Sri Lanka. In both cases it is theorized that the material came from the fairings of the December Bahubali launch.

I am unable to determine the flight path of the Bluebird launch, but the location of this debris suggests it headed strongly south from India’s east coast spaceport. The fairing pieces then drifted south and west to reach the Maldives after two months.

SpaceX routinely recovers its fairing and resuses them, which due to the fairing’s basic shape has turned out to be relatively straightforward. They have the shape of a boat’s hull, and after parachuting softly down can simply float on the surface until they can be picked up. It is absurd no one else does this.

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SpaceX launches 29 Starlink satellites

8:42 am

SpaceX in the early morning hours today successfully launched another 29 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its 10th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The 2026 launch race:

19 SpaceX
8 China
2 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
1 ULA
1 Europe (Arianespace)

As it did in both ’24 and ’25, SpaceX in ’26 so far has more launches than the entire rest of the world combined.

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Chinese pseudo-company raises $729 million

10:35 pm

The Chinese pseudo-company rocket startup Ispace announced on February 13, 2026 that it has raised $729 million in new investment capital.

Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology Ltd., also known as iSpace, announced the D++ funding worth 5.037 billion yuan Feb. 12, following a D+ round of $98 million (700 million yuan) in September 2025. The round appears to be the largest disclosed funding round so far for a Chinese launch startup, eclipsing the previous rounds secured by Space Pioneer ($350 million) and Galactic Energy ($336 million) in 2025.

A press statement outlines a hybrid syndicate of numerous funding round participants, incgovernment industrial funds, state-linked strategic ecosystem investors, municipal and provincial investment vehicles and private equity. This follows a trend of strong strategic investment in space companies in China over the past couple of years since the central government identified commercial space as a strategic emerging industry and key driver of high-tech development. Co-leads Tongchuang Weiye and existing shareholder Jingming Capital represent market-oriented investors focused on advanced manufacturing and aerospace, and were joined by repeat backing from private equity players such as CDH Baifu and Ganquan Capital. [emphasis mine]

It is hard to determine how independent these Chinese investment firms are from the government. I suspect the communists are closely involved in some manner or another.

The press release made no mention of a timeline for when Ispace will attempt the first launch and recovery of its Hyperbola-3 rocket. It had previously targeted a 2025 launch, but that never happened.

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