Author: Robert Zimmerman

SpaceX launches 25 more Starlink satellites

10:59 am

The beat goes on: SpaceX today successfully launched another 25 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its 19th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

It also appears on this launch SpaceX placed its 11,000th Starlink satellite into orbit. The actual number of satellites in orbit presently is much less than this, as SpaceX retires older Starlink satellites on a regularly basis. Nonetheless, the overall number is impressive, in that it was accomplished in less than seven years.

The 2026 launch race:

12 SpaceX
5 China
1 Rocket Lab

Though it is still early in 2026, note that SpaceX has now launched twice as much as the rest of the world, combined.

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Artemis-2 proves NASA learned nothing from the Challenger and Columbia failures

9:56 am

NASA: an agency still avoiding reality
NASA: an agency that still avoids reality

Our bankrupt new media continues to fail us. NASA is about to send four astronauts on a ten-day mission around the Moon in a capsule with questionable engineering, and that media continues to ignore the problem. Mainstream news outlets continue to describe the mission in glowing terms, consistently ignoring that questionable engineering. In some cases the stories even make believe NASA has fixed the problem, when it has not.

The most ridiculous example is an article yesterday from an Orlando outlet, Spectrum New 13: “How the lessons learned from the Challenger disaster apply to Artemis rockets”. It focuses entirely on the O-ring problem that destroyed Challenger, noting repeatedly that NASA has fixed this issue in its SLS rocket.

Of course it has. That’s the last war, long over. Engineers fixed this issue almost four decades ago. The article however dismisses entirely the new engineering concern of today, Orion’s heat shield, which did not work as expected during its own test flight in space in 2022. It covers this issue with this single two-sentence paragraph:

However, during re-entry, it broke up into chunks instead of burning away. This issue pushed back the Artemis II and III missions, but NASA has stated it has resolved the problem.

NASA however has not resolved the problem. It is using the same heat shield now on this manned mission, and really has no reason to assume it will work any better, even if the agency has changed the re-entry flight path in an effort to mitigate the heat shield’s questionable design.

You see, NASA with Artemis-2 is doing the exact same thing it did prior to both the Challenger and Columbia accidents. » Read more

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The Warning – Dust To Dust/Dull Knives

6:01 pm

An evening pause: In 2017 I posted an evening pause of this band, when Daniela (on guitar) was 14 years old, Paulina (on drums) was 12 years old, and Alejandra (on bass guitar) was 9 yrs old. Today’s evening pause is from their 2025 tour in Mexico (where they are from), celebrating the band’s tenth anniversary. To put it mildly, they are a bit older.

Hat tip Matt Falk, who adds, “They are all adults now who’ve become one of the best live rock bands playing today, while still maintaining complete control of their career (a feat in itself).”

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Saturn’s rings with two of its moons perfectly aligned

2:30 pm

Two of Saturn's moons above its rings
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Rather than posting another Mars orbital image, I decided today to delve into the archive of pictures taken by the Cassini orbiter during the thirteen years it circled Saturn, from 2004 until 2017. The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was released on December 14, 2015, and is just one example of the many breath-taking photographs that the Cassini science team took during that mission. From the caption:

Like a cosmic bull’s-eye, Enceladus and Tethys line up almost perfectly for Cassini’s cameras. Since the two moons are not only aligned, but also at relatively similar distances from Cassini, the apparent sizes in this image are a good approximation of the relative sizes of Enceladus (313 miles across) and Tethys (660 miles across).

This view looks toward the un-illuminated side of the rings from 0.34 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken in red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 24, 2015.

The image was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million miles from Enceladus. Image scale on Enceladus is 7 miles per pixel. Tethys was at a distance of 1.6 million miles with a pixel scale of 10 miles per pixel.

Enceladus is in the foreground, and is the planet that has what scientists have labeled tiger stripe fractures that vent water and other material, including carbon molecules.

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Astronomers discover a “surprisingly mature” cluster of galaxies in early universe

11:18 am

Proto galaxy cluster
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science strikes again! Astronomers using both the Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory now think they have discovered a just-forming protocluster of galaxies only one billion years after the Big Bang, when such galaxy clusters should not yet exist.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the Webb infrared data as the background of stars and galaxies, with the galaxies thought to be part of this protocluster circled. The blue cloud is Chandra’s infrared data. From the press release:

The Chandra and Webb data reveal that JADES-ID1 contains the two properties that confirm the presence of a protocluster: a large number of galaxies held together by gravity (Webb sees at least 66 potential members) that are also sitting in a huge cloud of hot gas (detected by Chandra). As a galaxy cluster forms, gas falls inward and is heated by shock waves, reaching temperatures of millions of degrees and glowing in X-rays.

What makes JADES-ID1 exceptional is the remarkably early time when it appears in cosmic history. Most models of the universe predict that there likely would not be enough time and a large enough density of galaxies for a protocluster of this size to form only a billion years after the big bang. The previous record holder for a protocluster with X-ray emission is seen much later, about three billion years after the big bang.

It increasingly appears that there are aspects of the universe we simply do not yet understand, which in turn make our theories of its birth and formation either incomplete or invalid. Those theories might be right in principle, but the data suggests they are wrong in detail.

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New ground-based space antenna startup raises $100 million and wins $50 million Space Force contract

10:24 am

In a clear sign that the space industry in space now requires increased support on the ground, the ground-based space antenna startup, Northwood Space, this week announced it has raised $100 million in private investment capital even as it simultaneously won a $50 million Space Force contract.

The funding round, announced January 27, was led by Washington Harbour Partners and co-led by Andreessen Horowitz. The financing came on the heels of a $49.8 million contract that was signed with the United States Space Force to help improve the “satellite control network,” which “handles a huge variety of consequential space missions for our government,” said Bridgit Mendler, founder and CEO.

Northwood is an end-to-end ground infrastructure provider for space missions. In other words, it manufactures and deploys antennae systems, which are smaller than older models, that allow Earth to communicate with satellites in space.

Northwood was only formed three years ago, so its success is an clear indication that there is a real need for more and better ground-based facilities.

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German government hires German startup Polaris Spaceplanes to build reusable two-stage hypersonic plane

10:06 am

Mira-II prototype following first flight using aerospike engine
Mira-II prototype following first flight using
aerospike engine in October 2024.

The German government yesterday awarded a contract to the German startup Polaris Spaceplanes to build and fly a reusable two-stage hypersonic plane by 2027.

On 27 January, POLARIS Spaceplanes announced that it had been awarded a contract by the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) to build a fully reusable, horizontal take-off, two-stage hypersonic vehicle. The primary application of the Hypersonic Test and Experimentation Vehicle (HYTEV) will be as a hypersonic testbed for scientific and defence-related research. A variant of the vehicle with an expendable upper stage will also be capable of deploying small satellites into low Earth orbit.

According to the company, the HYTEV will be roughly the size and take-off mass of a fighter jet. The main stage will be powered by two turbofans and one of the company’s in-house developed aerospike rocket engines. The turbofans will be used for take-off and landing, and the rocket engine will accelerate the vehicle before upper-stage deployment. The upper stage will be entirely rocket-powered, with imagery accompanying the announcement appearing to show a more conventional rocket engine configuration compared with the aerospike engine equipped to the main stage. After completing its mission, it will likely be recovered under controlled glide conditions or potentially by a parachute or parafoil.

This deal appears to be an upgrade to a February 2025 German government deal with Polaris. It also follows Polaris’s successful use of an aerospike engine on a prototype test flight in 2024. While the company has shown some success, doing more than a dozen test flights with small scale prototypes (as shown in the image to the right), this program and schedule still seems quite ambitious.

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Ariane-6 gets a new government launch contract

9:45 am

The European Space Agency, one agency among many
The European Space Agency, one European
agency among many

The government rocket of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Ariane-6, yesterday won a new launch contract to place a pair of Galileo GPS-type satellites into orbit for the European Union (EU).

Arianespace announced today at the European Space Conference in Brussels the signature of the launch contract with the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), under the delegation of the European Commission, to orbit the second pair of second-generation satellites of the Galileo constellation (Galileo L18) on board an Ariane 6 launcher. With this signature, the European Commission and the EUSPA are formalizing the launch contract of Galileo L18, following the initial mission allocation to Arianespace made in April 2024.

All told this will be Ariane-6’s fifth launch of GPS-type satellites for the EU, which appears committed to Ariane-6, even though this expendable rocket costs much more than SpaceX’s Falcon 9, in order to promote European sovereignty. Eventually Europe will develop more cost effective private rockets (in about a decade), but until then its access to space will be limited by cost.

And the extra cost is not simply the expendable nature of Ariane-6. Note also the many layers of bureaucracy listed in the quote above. For the European Union there the European Union Agency for Space Programme, working under the supervision of the EU’s European Commission. It signed a deal with Arianespace, which represents the European Space Agency as its commercial rocket division.

That’s four different bureaucracies, two within the European Union and two more related to Europe’s space effort. Each adds cost to the launch, as well as the need for complex negotiations that delay any deal.

Not

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Webb finds another unexpected galaxy in the very early universe

9:25 am

Unexpected galaxy
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered another galaxy in the very early universe that appears too bright and developed for it to even exist so soon after the Big Bang.

MoM-z14 is one of a growing group of surprisingly bright galaxies in the early universe – 100 times more than theoretical studies predicted before the launch of Webb, according to the research team. “There is a growing chasm between theory and observation related to the early universe, which presents compelling questions to be explored going forward,” said Jacob Shen, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT and a member of the research team.

…With galaxy MoM-z14 existing only 280 million years after the big bang, there was not enough time for generations of stars to produce such high amounts of nitrogen in the way that astronomers would expect. One theory the researchers note is that the dense environment of the early universe resulted in supermassive stars capable of producing more nitrogen than any stars observed in the local universe.

All theories about the Big Bang and the early universe did not predict the existence of this galaxy, or a bunch of others that Webb has now detected.

The false color infrared Webb image is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. The full image covered a much larger area, so this tiny galaxy was not easy to find. Scientists identified it by the very high red shift of its light, due to the expansion of the universe and it being so far away. That expansion away from us causes the wavelengths of its light to stretch into the infrared so that only Webb can see it.

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SpaceX launches GPS satellite

9:06 am

SpaceX last night successfully launched a GPS satellite for the Space Force, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The Space Force had originally hired ULA to launch this satellite, but two weeks ago it switched launch provider to SpaceX. Apparently the military wanted this satellite launched now, and for some reason ULA could not do it, even though the Vulcan rocket was supposedly ready for launch.

The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves each completed their second flight.

The 2026 launch race:

11 SpaceX
5 China
1 Rocket Lab

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Scientists produce new estimate of the thickness of Europa’s icy crust

5:23 pm

Europa in true color
Europa in true color, taken by Juno during that
September 2022 fly-by. Click for full image.

Using data produced by Juno during a 2022 close-fly of Jupiter’s moon Europa, scientists have made a new estimate of the thickness of Europa’s icy crust, approximately 18 miles thick with a 6-mile margin of error.

In other words, their estimate could be as small as 12 miles thick, or as large as 24 miles thick.

You can read their paper here. From their abstract:

For the idealized case of pure water ice, the data are consistent with the existence of a thermally conductive ice shell with a thickness of 29 ± 10 km [18 ± 6 miles] and with the presence of cracks, pores or other scatterers extending to depths of hundreds of metres below the surface with a characteristic size smaller than a few centimetres in radius. An ice-shell salinity of 15 mg kg−1, as indicated by models based on terrestrial marine ice, would reduce our estimate of the thickness of the ice shell by about 5 km, substantially less than our 10 km uncertainty. The low volume fraction, small size and shallow depth of the scatterers indicate that the fracture interfaces observed at Europa’s surface are alone unlikely to be capable of carrying nutrients between the surface and the ocean. [emphasi mine]

The highlighted sentence is the important one. If this new estimate is right, than the unidentified reddish material that appears to leak out of the long ridgelike cracks on Europa’s surface, clearly visible in the picture to the right, are not coming from any underground ocean. The distances are too large.

Other estimates have suggested that ice crust could be as thin as 2 miles, but like this research the uncertainties are very large.

Meanwhile, the Juno mission is still alive, though essentially winding down operations. The mission was expected to officially end at the end of September 2025, when its budget ran out, but the just passed budget included enough money to keep it going, albeit at a relatively low level. According to the orbiter’s webpage, it will continue to orbit Jupiter, its orbit degrading naturally until it falls into Jupiter to burn up. As it does so data will continue to be collected, though at a much lower rate.

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January 27, 2026 Quick space links

2:50 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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Windswept Martian volcanic ash?

2:35 pm

Volcanic ash on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 30, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this simply as “Features,” the vagueness of which I can understand after digging in to get a better idea of the location and geography.

The location, as shown by the white dot on the overview map below, is inside the Medusa Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash field on Mars that is thought to be the source of much of the red planet’s dust. That ash field is large and very deep, and was put down more than a billion years ago when the giant volcanoes of Mars were active and erupting. Thus it is well layered, and many images of that ash field show that layering exposed by the eons of Martian wind scouring its surface.

In this case, that scouring appears to have produced this feathery surface, though the origin of those ridges might have instead come from volcanic flows that are now hardened. Or we could be looking at ancient channels produced by ice or water, though that would have to have been a very long time ago, as this image is located in the Martian dry tropics, where no near surface ice presently exists.
» Read more

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Astronomers use AI to discover hundreds of weird galaxies in Hubble archive

10:23 am

Weird galaxies in the Hubble archive, found with AI
Click for original image.

In what is a perfect example of the proper use of artificial computer intelligence (AI), astronomers have now used this programming to analyze almost 100 million images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over the decades to find any galaxies hidden there that have “anomalies” or unusual shapes.

The team analyzed nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just a few dozen pixels (7 to 8 arcseconds) on a side. They identified more than 1,300 objects with an odd appearance in just two and a half days — more than 800 of which had never been documented in scientific literature.

The six galaxies to the right are just a small sample. All six were previously unidentified, and include “three lenses with arcs distorted by gravity, one galactic merger, one ring galaxy, and one galaxy that defied classification” (the galaxy at the top left). From the European Space Agency’s (ESA) press release:

The strange, bi-polar galaxy seen here is certainly anomalous, with its compact, swirling core and two open lobes at the sides. Exactly what kind of galaxy it is is unclear, and it was not previously known to astronomers.

As noted in the first link, the volume of data that astronomers are now collecting from ground-based and orbiting telescopes — many of which are survey telescopes that photograph the entire sky repeatedly — has actually become a problem. They have great data, but don’t have the time or human resources to study it sufficiently. Even employing large numbers of ordinary citizens, working at home with their own computers, can’t get the job done.

This is the kind of grunt work that AI is ideally made for. It can quickly review the data and identify objects that don’t fit normal expectations. Humans then can do the real work, finding the most interesting of these strange objects, such as the top left galaxy, and devote human creativity to studying it.

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Musk: Next Starship/Superheavy test launch in mid-March

9:39 am

According to a recent tweet by Elon Musk , the next Starship/Superheavy test launch will occur “in 6 weeks,” placing that launch sometime in mid-March.

Musk provided no other information, but this announcement suggests the company’s engineers now understand and have corrected the issues that caused two Superheavy ruptures during two different tank tests in recent weeks. It also suggests that the launchpad repairs and upgrades will soon be completed, and that a new version 3 Superheavy prototype is ready to go, replacing one that was damaged during those tank tests.

The mission specifics however remain unclear. SpaceX could repeat the flight path of the last few tests, in an orbit low enough so that the atmosphere will bring Starship down over the Indian Ocean. In such a flight the company would test refueling within Starship, restarts of its Raptor engines, and deployment of dummy or even real Starlink satellites.

It is possible however that this next test flight will go into a full orbit, and circle the Earth once or several times. SpaceX has said that in 2026 it intends to do a Starship refueling test using two Starships, launched several weeks apart. To do this more ambitious mission however it first needs to do at least one full orbital flight of Starship. Since the company has already tested on previous orbital test flights the restart of Starship’s Raptor engines — proving its capability to do a controlled re-entry — there really is no reason it can’t go for a full orbit on the next flight. There is even the possibility that Starship will come back to Boca Chica and be caught the company’s tower chopsticks, though this remains unconfirmed.

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Avio gets two new launch contracts for its Vega-C rocket

9:16 am

The Italian rocket company Avio has won two separate launch contracts for its Vega-C rocket, one from Airbus and a second from Brazil.

It also appears that these two contracts are the ones that Avio touted in late December for a total of $117 million, but did not reveal the customers at the time.

First, Brazil’s government will pay Avio $35.6 million to use the Vega-C rocket to launch its Amazonia-1B Earth observation satellite in 2027. This contract was obtained though the launch services company SpaceLaunch and is likely the deal first announced in September without mention of the customer.

Next, Airbus will use the Vega-C in 2028 to launch the first satellite in its Pléiades Neo Next Earth observation satellite constellation. Though the contract price was not announced, it is likely $84.4 million, the difference between the $117 million total for the two contracts and the $35.6 million Brazil is paying.

The price on both launch contracts illustrates how the competition from SpaceX and Rocket Lab is forcing launch costs down. A decade ago launches never cost less than $100 million. Now they always do, and the Brazil price of $35.6 million indicates even lower prices in the future.

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NASA targeting January 31, 2026 for Artemis-2 dress rehearsal countdown

8:25 am

The flight plan for the Artemis-2 mission around the Moon
The flight plan for the Artemis-2 mission around the Moon. Click for original.

NASA engineers are now targeting January 31, 2026 for the manned dress rehearsal countdown of the Artemis-2 SLS rocket and Orion capsule.

The upcoming wet dress rehearsal is a prelaunch test to fuel the rocket. During the rehearsal, teams demonstrate the ability to load more than 700,000 gallons of cryogenic propellants into the rocket, conduct a launch countdown, and practice safely removing propellant from the rocket without astronauts inside the spacecraft.

During several “runs,” the wet dress rehearsal will test the launch team’s ability to hold, resume, and recycle to several different times in the final 10 minutes of the countdown, known as terminal count. The rehearsal will count down to a simulated launch at 9 p.m. EST, but could run to approximately 1 a.m. if needed.

This rehearsal will include the four-person crew inside the Orion capsule, which will once launched take them in a wide ten-day Earth orbit that will swing them past the Moon and then back to Earth. The crew entered quarantine at the end of last week to reduce the chance they will catch any illnesses prior to launch.

This mission carries great risk, as the capsule’s life support system has never been used in space before, while the viability of its heat shield remains questionable.

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NASA makes it official: Oman signs the Artemis Accords

8:01 am

Active and proposed Middle East spaceports
Active and proposed Middle East spaceports

In a press announcement yesterday, NASA officially confirmed that Oman has become the 61st nation to sign the Artemis Accords.

U.S. Ambassador to the Sultanate of Oman Ana Escrogima and NASA’s Deputy Associate Administrator Casey Swails participated in the event held on the opening day of the Middle East Space Conference, an international forum on space and innovation in the region. Said al-Maawali, Oman’s minister of transportation, communication, and information technology signed on behalf of the country.

I had reported early yesterday a story in Oman’s state-run press claiming that its sultan wanted his country to sign the Artemis Accords, a claim put forth by Oman officials during this conference. Apparently that was poor reporting. What actually happened was the event included the official Artemis Accords signing ceremony, which also included a number of other bi-laterial trade agreements.

As I noted yesterday, Oman has been unsuccessful so far in its efforts to bring American rocket and satellite companies to its proposed Duqm spaceport because State Department ITAR regulations, designed to protect American technology from hostile foreign powers, prevent it. This agreement hopefully includes some security guarantees that will ease those regulations and allow such deals.

The full list of all signatories to this American space alliance:
» Read more

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January 26, 2026 Quick space links

2:45 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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The profound life’s work of Richard Rodgers

12:30 pm

Sometimes in art there are times when culture, timing, talent, and teamwork combine to produce a magic that is eternal and beyond measure. For Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, that time occurred from 1943 to 1959, when these two men created a string of musicals so grand that each

would become not just familiar but universally beloved, played over and over again until the words and melodies had become meshed, it seemed, with one’s very existence. To have one’s complete score memorized by a whole population would, it would seem for a composer, to have been all that life has to offer.

This quote comes from Meryle Secrest’s fine 2001 biography of Richard Rodgers, Somewhere for me: a biography of Richard Rodgers. It tells a story of a man who from childhood was obsessed with writing music, who struggled for decades to write musicals where the music and song flowed naturally from the plot and characters, and who changed with time as time changed him. Outside of his music and his commitment to it, he was however a very normal man, with a marriage that at times was stormy but held together despite those storms.

But it is Rodgers’ best music — written for the lovely words of Oscar Hammerstein — for which we most remember him. I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, so I lived at a time when these Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals were being memorized by a whole population. As a child my parents subscribed to a musical record club, which sent them a new album every month. I would spend hours listening to the songs from Oklahoma, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, the King and I, and Carousel. And on television I got to see Julie Andrews in a live production of Cinderella.

In listening to these songs, I quickly realized, even as a child, that there was something deeply profound in those words and music, touching something deeper than mere beauty, a more fundamental but utterly inexplicable aspect of our existence. As I wrote in 2018 when I posted an evening pause of Juanita Hall singing Bali Ha’i from South Pacific,
» Read more

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Oman says it wants to sign the Artemis Accords

9:17 am

Middle East, showing Oman's proposed spaceport
The Middle East, showing the location of
Oman’s proposed spaceport at Duqm.

In a diplomatic meeting between Oman and U.S. state department in Oman, Oman officials announced their Sultan wants his country to sign the Artemis Accords.

The two sides discussed means of maximising the benefits of the Free Trade Agreement between the two countries and augmenting American investments in sectors of priority for the Sultanate of Oman. These sectors include the digital economy, technology and space, in addition to mining, logistics, aviation and infrastructure.

Cooperation in the fields of education and culture was also discussed, particularly educational programmes, academic and professional exchange and investment in research and innovation. The two sides further exchanged views and positions on a number of regional and international issues, emphasising the importance of backing efforts for peace, stability and development.

During the dialogue, the Omani side announced the Sultanate of Oman’s approval to join the ‘Artemis Accords’ for space exploration. A cooperation statement on the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America was also signed. [emphasis mine]

Much of this is diplomatic blather, meaning little. While I would expect the Trump administration welcome Oman as an Artemis Accord partner, in the talks related to the highlighted first paragraph above it likely demanded some concessions first. Free trade in Oman is going to require some protection for American technology.

For example, right now State Department rules make it difficult if not impossible to launch American satellites or rockets from Oman’s proposed spaceport in Duqm, rules imposed because Oman cannot be trusted. I expect the State Department is demanding total security control from U.S. entities on any launch before agreeing to an Oman Artemis Accord agreement.

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“AI isn’t getting smarter. We are getting dumber.”

2:20 pm

Link here. The point the op-ed makes is fundamental: AI cannot add anything to the information it has. It might be able to compile that information well, but its analysis is always going to be limited because it has no true creative spirit. It is merely a software program, albeit a very sophisticated one.

This quote from the essay will give you the sense:

Maybe you just use AI to clarify your thoughts. Turn the mottle of ideas in your head into coherent communicable paragraphs. It’s OK, you say, because you’re reviewing the results, and often editing the output. You’re ending up with exactly what you want to say, just in a form and style that’s better than any way you could have put it yourself.

But is what you end up with really your thoughts? And what if everyone started doing that?

Stripping the novelty and personality out of all communication; turning every one of our interactions into homogeneous robotic engagements? Every birthday greeting becomes akin to a printed hallmark card. Every eulogy turns into a stamp-card sentiment. Every email follows the auto-response template suggested by the browser.

We do this long enough and eventually we begin to lose the ability to communicate our inner thoughts to others. Our minds start to think in terms of LLM prompts. All I need is the gist of what I want to say, and the system fills in the blanks. [emphasis in original]

Comments are of course welcome. But please read the full essay before doing so.

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Dragonfly’s rotors complete testing

12:07 pm

According to a press release yesterday from the Applied Physics Lab (APL) in Maryland that is building the Dragonfly helicopter that is going to Saturn’s moon Titan, the rotors have completed the first round of testing, and are now about to undergo “fatigue and cryogenic trials under simulated Titan conditions.”

Over five weeks, from August into September, the team evaluated the performance of Dragonfly’s rotor system — which provides the lift for the lander to fly and enables it to maneuver — in Titan-like conditions, looking at aeromechanical performance factors such as stress on the rotor arms, and effects of vibration on the rotor blades and lander body. In late December, the team also wrapped up a set of aerodynamics tests on smaller-scale Dragonfly rotor models in the TDT [Transonic Dynamics Tunnel].

This quote about the manufacture of the rotors however stood out the most:

Pennington and team cut Dragonfly’s first rotors on Nov. 1, 2024. They refined the process as they went: starting with waterjet paring of 1,000-pound aluminum blocks, followed by rough machining, cover fitting, vent-hole drilling, and hole-threading. After an inspection, the parts were cleaned, sent out for welding, and returned for final finishing.

“We didn’t have time or materials to make test parts or extras, so every cut had to be right the first time,” Pennington said, adding that the team also had to find special tools and equipment to accommodate some material changes and design tweaks. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this is another hardware-poor NASA project. What they build is what they have. No time or money for testing of prototypes.

This mission is really pushing the envelope, possibly more than any NASA planetary probe in a half century. I just hope they get it right.

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Russia delays launch of its own “Starlink” constellation

9:33 am

I’m shocked, shocked! According to news reports in Russia yesterday, Roscosmos has now delayed the initial launches for its own copycat “Starlink” constellation because the production of the satellites has fallen behind schedule.

In September 2025, Roscosmos head Dmitry Bakanov promised that by the end of 2025, the first 300 satellites would begin to be deployed in orbit as part of the Rassvet project. They are supposed to become “an analogue of the Starlink system” and provide “access to the internet at any geographical point.”

According to the publication, the postponement of the launch of the first 16 devices until 2026 may be due to the fact that the required number of satellites has not yet been assembled.

The project is being run by a Bureau 1440, supposedly a private Russian commercial company that is providing two thirds of the $5.7 billion budget, with the Russian government picking up the difference. It claims it will begin launching this year and have 318 satellites in orbit by 2028.

Wanna bet? Russia has not been able to complete any space project on time in decades, and even when its projects do finally launch, each routinely has had serious technical and quality control issues.

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ESA awards startup Rocket Factory Augsburg a two-launch contract

9:23 am

Screen capture of test failure
Screen capture from video of the RFA-1
test failure in August 2024. Note the flame
shooting out sideways.

The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday awarded the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg a two-launch contract under its “Flight Ticket Initiative”, designed to encourage the development of a commercial independent European launch market.

With these signatures between ESA and Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA), two more missions will be launched with the RFA One rocket from Saxavord Spaceport in the UK as part of the Flight Ticket Initiative. ESA and the European Commission have thus once again placed their trust in RFA as a future launch service provider.

…The Lurbat mission will fly a collection of demonstrator technologies and is developed by Added Value Solutions based in Spain. … A second mission will see the launch of two CubeSats developed under ESA contract by the Spanish company Indra Space. The CubeSats will hold five experiments selected by the European Commission through the Horizon Europe IOD/IOV call for Expression of Interest

Rocket Factory also has a launch contract with the German government. However it needs to first complete the first launch of its RFA-1 rocket. That launch was originally supposed to occur in 2024 but was canceled when the rocket’s first stage was destroyed during a static fire test on its Saxavord launchpad that year.

Since then the company has released little information about the rocket’s status. According to this news report today, it hopes to finally do that test launch this year. It better do it soon, as there is a slew of other European rocket companies that intend to do the same.

And then of course there is the question of the Saxavord spaceport and the red tape that has crippled all the spaceports in Great Britain. Both Saxavord and Rocket Factory have previously gotten their launch licenses from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), but it is unclear if those licenses remain valid, especially after the static fire explosion. Based on its past behavior, the CAA could have pulled the licenses, and is now reviewing the whole thing.

If so, it might take years for both to get an approval again. In fact, this might very well be the reason Rocket Factory didn’t launch in 2025.

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