Author: Robert Zimmerman

Blue Origin’s 1st unmanned lunar lander completes ground testing

8:01 am

Blue Moon MK-1 in testing chamber
Blue Origin’s unmanned Blue Moon MK-1 lunar lander
in test chamber. Click for original image.

Blue Origin’s 1st unmanned lunar lander, dubbed Blue Moon Mark-1 (MK-1) or “Endurance,” has completed ground testing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, prior to its planned launch before the end of this year.

The NASA press release however said nothing about the results of that testing.

Testing in NASA Johnson’s Chamber A, one of the world’s largest thermal vacuum test facilities, enabled engineers to model the vacuum of space and the extreme temperature conditions the spacecraft would experience during flight. By recreating these conditions on the ground, teams evaluated system performance and verified structural and thermal integrity prior to launch. NASA and Blue Origin will incorporate lessons learned from MK1’s design, integration, and testing to support NASA’s future Artemis missions that will return American astronauts to the Moon.

Normally when such testing is completed the press release touts their success. The vagueness in the language above is to my instincts somewhat concerning. Did they find something in that testing that needs modification prior to launch? If so, getting this lander off the ground before the end of the year is going to be questionable, as those fixes will have to be incorporated and then tested again.

Any delay such as this would in turn impact the first test in orbit of Blue Origin’s manned Blue Moon MK-2 lunar lander, scheduled for late 2027 during the Artemis-3 manned mission, where NASA wishes to test rendezvous and docking for both Blue Origin’s lander and SpaceX’s Starship.

Some clarity here would be reassuring.

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May 4, 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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Sunspot update: The number of sunspot continues to decline

9:21 am

For only the second time since I started this website in 2010, I forgot last month to do my monthly sunspot update. No matter. The Sun’s behavior in producing sunspots in the past two months was actually amazingly similar, so doing both months at once works.

According to NOAA’s monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere, the amount of sunspots in both March and April continued to be low, well below the predictions put forth by NOAA’s panel of scientists in their April 2025 prediction.

That graph is below, annotated with extra information by me to illustrate the larger scientific context.
» Read more

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China imposes extensive regulations on its pseudo-commercial space industry

8:01 am

China's communists to its citizens
China’s communists to its citizens “Nice business you got here.
Shame if something happened to it.”

As I predicted when China announced in the fall 2025 that it was creating a special agency to supervise the pseudo-companies in its faux commercial space industry, the Chinese government last week announced the release of what it calls its “Commercial spaceflight standards system,” covering all aspects of the operations its pseudo-private companies.

The standards cover six different areas, but the first best expresses the government’s overall goal:

‘Industry Governance Standards’ focuses on the sector’s characteristics of rapid development, agile response, and short delivery times, alongside space safety concerns such as debris mitigation and protection. With subcategories including market access, safety supervision, space environment governance, certification, energy conservation, and occupational health, it is intended to establish hard regulatory constraints as the compliance foundation for orderly commercial space development. [emphasis mine]

The screen capture from a Monty Python skit to the right says it all. The communists running China apparently did not like the chaotic free nature of this pseudo-industry, with the different companies coming up with many wild and innovative ideas, some of which were bound to fail. The communists also saw that some of these pseudo-companies were also making a lot of money that the communists weren’t getting.

And so, the government formed this agency, and it called the companies together to lay down the law.
» Read more

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Is SpaceX buying a 200-plus square mile patch of Louisiana?

11:20 am

Pecan Island SpaceX facility?

According to a real estate agent in Louisiana, there is credible but unconfirmed evidence that SpaceX is in the process of buying a 136,000 acre plot of land owned by Exxon on the coast of Louisiana west of New Orleans, near the unincorporated town of Pecan Island.

The rumor — repeated in private group chats, in coffee shops in Abbeville, and in hunting camps from Forked Island to Grand Chenier — is that SpaceX has acquired or is in the process of acquiring approximately 136,000 acres of coastal Louisiana marshland straddling Pecan Island and Freshwater City in Vermilion Parish. The footprint reportedly stretches from south of Highway 82 down to the Gulf of America, encompassing some of the most ecologically rich and economically untouched wetlands in North America.

If true, this would be the single largest private land acquisition in the modern history of Vermilion Parish. To put it in perspective: 136,000 acres is roughly 212 square miles — bigger than the entire city of New Orleans. SpaceX’s existing Boca Chica/Starbase facility in South Texas, which has reshaped Brownsville’s economy and real estate market in just five years, is built on a footprint of less than 100 acres. A 136,000-acre Louisiana site would not be a launch pad. It would be an industrial campus on a scale never before seen in American aerospace.

I must emphasize that this agent is speculating, and that there is no confirmed evidence that SpaceX is the rumored buyer. At the same time, the agent has done his homework. This purchase by SpaceX would make sense on multiple levels. It would give it a very large facility smack dab between Boca Chica and Florida, on the Gulf, so that if Starships are manufactured here they could be easily shipped both east and west to those launch sites. This facility would also give SpaceX to option of shifting more of its operations out of unfriendly California and to a more friendly state, something Elon Musk has been doing since the Covid panic.

It would allow for the construction of larger data centers and satellite manufacturing factories, without much opposition from local communities.

Finally, there is the possibility this location could also serve as a spaceport, though it would only work well for polar orbits.

Stay tuned. If this speculation is true we should find out momentarily.

Hat tip reader Steve Golson.

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SpaceX launches South Korean Earth imaging satellite plus 44 other smallsats

12:06 am

SpaceX at about midnight tonight successfully launched a South Korean Earth imaging satellite as well as 44 other smallsats, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. As of posting the satellites had not yet been deployed.

The first stage (B1071) completed its 33rd flight, landing back at Vandenberg, 50 days after its previous flight. With this flight, the booster moves into a third place tie with the Atlantis shuttle shuttle in the rankings of the most reused launch vehicles:

39 Discovery space shuttle
34 Falcon 9 booster B1067
33 Atlantis space shuttle
33 Falcon 9 booster B1071
32 Falcon 9 booster B1063
31 Falcon 9 booster B1069
28 Columbia space shuttle
27 Falcon 9 booster B1077
27 Falcon 9 booster B1078

Sources here and here.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

54 SpaceX
23 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 54 to 44.

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$2 bill that Gene Cernan carried on three missions sells for more than $90K

3:23 pm

The $2 bill that astronaut Gene Cernan carried on all three of his space missions in 60s and 70s has now sold at auction for $91,519.

Signed and flight-certified by Cernan, the bill is encapsulated and graded by Paper Money Guaranty (PMG) as Choice Fine 15. The holder notes its provenance as having been flown aboard Gemini 9A (1966), Apollo 10 (1969), and Apollo 17 (1972), and traces its origin to Cernan’s personal collection.

A signed letter of provenance from Cernan states that the bill was originally owned by his father and later carried by the astronaut on each of his spaceflights. The letter documents its presence during low Earth orbit on Gemini 9A, lunar orbit on Apollo 10, and on the lunar surface during Apollo 17.

This auction was space-focused and realized a total of $1,764,603. It included items from a number of other Gemini and Apollo missions, including an American flag that astronaut Dave Scott flew on Gemini 8, the mission that achieved the first docking in space but then had to due an emergency splashdown because a thruster began firing uncontrollably. It sold for $47,406.

Hat tip reader Wayne DeVette.

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No Starliner mission to ISS this year

3:07 pm

Though in February 2026 NASA officials suggested there might be a Starliner cargo mission to ISS sometime in April 2026, the new schedule released today for ISS manned and cargo missions for the rest of this year shows no Starliner missions at all.

The press release hinted an extra Starliner mission could be added, but don’t but too much faith in this:

Launch opportunities for NASA’s uncrewed Boeing Starliner-1 cargo mission remain under review as teams continue working through technical issues discovered during the Crew Flight Test in 2024, as well as final actions from the Program Investigation Team report. The agency is assessing operational readiness and space station traffic to determine the earliest feasible launch window.

What I think is happening in NASA is that the agency under Isaacman wants a better assurance from Boeing that the problems with Starliner have been fixed, and Boeing is having trouble satisfying them. If so, it seems he is doing what I suggested in February, demand from Boeing the highest quality work or don’t buy anything from it at all. If so kudos to Isaacman.

It is also possible Isaacman doesn’t want to spend extra money paying Boeing for this extra cargo mission to prove out Starliner’s systems. Boeing’s contract for Starliner is fixed price, and the capsule’s multiple problems has now cost the company more than a billion dollars. It is unlikely it will have make a profit on it, which is why it wants NASA to pay for that cargo flight.

Either way, the first operational manned mission using Starliner continues to recede into the future, to the point where ISS might be gone before the capsule is finally okayed for manned flights.

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May 1, 2026 Quick space links

2:55 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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