Author: Robert Zimmerman

India tightens its satellite regulations for foreign companies

9:27 am

In what is a likely response to the increased military conflict with Pakistan, India’s government has announced new satellite regulations for foreign companies that will likely impact the operations of both Starlink and OneWeb.

The country’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) announced 29 additional regulations May 5, citing national security interests, which also apply to companies that already hold licenses for providing space-based communication services directly to users.

The rules include a requirement for call logs and other user data to be stored in India, and new obligations for interception and monitoring under national law. Satellite operators must also show how they plan to source at least 20% of their ground infrastructure equipment from India within five years of commercial launch.

The article at the link suggests that these new regulations will have a greater impact on OneWeb than Starlink. Yet, OneWeb already has approval to sell its services in India, while Starlink has not.

The article also included one interesting tidbit from a Starlink official, noting that the company expects to have 6.5 million subscribers by the end of this year. Based on the company’s subscriber fees, that translates into many billions in revenue. Very clearly SpaceX no longer needs NASA to develop Starship.

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Ispace’s Resilience lander successfully enters lunar orbit

9:15 am

Map of lunar landing sites
Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience

Ispace today announced that its lunar lander Resilience, launched in January by SpaceX, has now been successfully inserted into lunar orbit,

Ispace engineers performed the injection maneuver from the Mission Control Center in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan in accordance with the mission operation plan. The orbital maneuver required a main thruster burn lasting approximately 9 minutes, the longest to date during Mission 2. RESILIENCE is now maintaining a stable attitude in its planned orbit above the lunar surface. Mission operations specialists are now preparing for final orbit maneuvers after reaffirming Ispace’s ability to deliver spacecraft and payloads into lunar orbit. A lunar landing is scheduled for no earlier than June 5, 2025 (UTC) (June 6, 2025, JST).

If all goes right, Resilience will touch down in Mare Frigoris in the northern latitudes of the Moon’s near side, as shown on the map to the right.

This is Ispace’s second attempt to soft land on the Moon. Its first attempt, Hakuto-R1, got within three kilometers of the surface in Atlas Crater (also shown on the map), but then its software mistook its altitude, thinking it was only a few feet above the surface and shut down the engines prematurely, causing it to crash.

This second landing is critical for the company’s future. It has contracts for future landers from both NASA and Japan, but a failure now might cause both governments to reconsider those deals.

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NASA cancels VIPER solicitation

9:06 am

NASA today announced that it has canceled its solicitation from the private sector, asking for proposals for launching its overbudget and as yet unfinished lunar rover VIPER to the Moon.

NASA announced Wednesday it is canceling its Lunar Volatiles Science Partnership Announcement for Partnership Proposals solicitation, which sought opportunities to send VIPER to the Moon at no cost to the government.

The announcement, which was very short and lacking in any details, stated also that the agency “will announce a new strategy for VIPER in the future.”

Some background: VIPER was originally budgeted at $250 million. When cancelled in 2024 its budget had ballooned to over $600 million, and that wasn’t enough to complete the rover for launch.

This decision suggests the agency did not get any worthwhile proposals. Apparently, no one was interested in paying the cost to get VIPER finished (about $100 million) and launched. It is also likely that the planned Trump budget cuts had an impact on this decision. NASA management probably recognized that there was no way they could con the administration into forking over any money to finance any private proposal.

It is also possible that this cancellation now is part of the typical game NASA managers always play to get Congress to fund bloated programs like this. Cancel it, get the propaganda press to cry about how the cancellation is so terrible, which in turn gets Congress outraged and willing to approve the extra funds.

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May 6, 2025 Quick space links

2:51 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: Activity rises slightly in April

1:06 pm

It is the start of the month, so it is of course time for my monthly report on sunspot activity, based on the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspots activity. As I have done since the start of Behind the Black in 2010, I take that graph each month and annotate it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

Sunspot activity in April did nothing to tell us anything about the Sun’s future activity. It rose slightly, but not by enough to suggest that the prediction put forth last month by NOAA scientists that the ramp down to solar minimum has begun is wrong.
» Read more

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FAA approves SpaceX request to increase Starship launch rate at Boca Chica

11:40 am

The FAA today by email announced that it has released the final environmental reassessment that approves SpaceX’s request to increase the number of yearly Starship/Superheavy launches at Boca Chica to as many as 25.

The assessment is now available for public comment, and could still be revised. However, the FAA’s conclusions are clear, as indicated by the highlighted phrase:

The FAA is announcing the availability of the Final Tiered Environmental Assessment and Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact/Record of Decision (FONSI/ROD) for the SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy Vehicle Increased Cadence at the SpaceX Boca Chica Launch Site in Cameron County, Texas (Final Tiered EA and Mitigated FONSI/ROD).

Under the Proposed Action addressed in the Final Tiered EA, the FAA would modify SpaceX’s existing vehicle operator license to authorize:  Up to 25 annual Starship/Super Heavy orbital launches, including: Up to 25 annual landings of Starship (Second stage); Up to 25 annual landinqgs of Super Heavy (First stage). The Final Tiered EA also addressed vehicle upgrades.

You can read the executive summary of this announcement here [pdf]. The full reassessment can be read here [pdf]. Its conclusion is quite blunt:

The 2022 PEA [Preliminary Environmental Assessment] examined the potential for significant environmental impacts from Starship/Super Heavy launch operations at the Boca Chica Launch Site and defined the regulatory setting for impacts associated with Starship/Super Heavy. The areas evaluated for environmental impacts in this EA [environmental assesssment] included air quality; climate; noise and noise‐compatible land use; visual resources; cultural resources; Department of Transportation Section 4(f); water resources; biological resources (terrestrial and marine wildlife); land use; hazardous materials; natural resources and energy supply; and socioeconomics, and children’s health. In each of these areas, this EA concludes that no significant impacts would occur as a result of SpaceX’s proposed action. [emphasis mine]

As I’ve noted repeatedly, this has all been self-evident for years, as proved by the environmental circumstances at the American spaceports at Cape Canaveral and Kennedy in Florida and Vandenberg in California. Spaceports help the environment by creating large wildlife refuges where no development can occur. We have known this for decades. That the FAA and the federal bureaucracy has in the past five years suddenly begun demanded these long reassessments time after time that simply restate these obvious facts can only be because that bureaucracy wants to justify its useless existence with make-work.

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Update on launch schedule for India’s manned space program

10:59 am

According to the head of India’s space agency ISRO, V Narayanan, the first unmanned Gaganyaan orbital mission is now targeting a launch in the last quarter of this year, followed by two more unmanned test flights in 2026 and the manned mission of one to three days flying in the first quarter of 2027.

This schedule appears more firm than any previously announced. When first proposed back in 2018, ISRO’s goal was to launch the first manned mission in 2022. And like all government projects, the launch date kept getting pushed back again and again. ISRO officials will blame the COVID panic for these delays, but that’s hogwash. While ISRO shut down for almost two years out of fear of a only slightly more potent illness than the flu, others did not, and ended up stealing almost all of ISRO’s commercial business as a result.

The delays in Gaganyaan also stem from the unrealistic goals first put forth by ISRO. For example, initially the program did not include these unmanned test flights, a lack that was foolish and later corrected.

Based on all reports in the past year, however, it appears that this newest schedule probably reflects reality, and will take place more or less as described.

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Astronomers measure the vibrations of a star 21 light years away

10:22 am

Using an instrument on the ground-based Keck telescope in Hawaii, astronomers have been able to measure the internal vibrations of a star 21 light years away, the equivalent of recording a star’s seismology.

Keck Observatory’s KPF instrument precisely measures the motion of the stellar surface towards and away from the observer. Over four consecutive nights, the team used KPF to collect over 2,000 ultra-precise velocity measurements of the star — enabling them to catch the star’s vibrations in action. This is the first asteroseismic inference of the age and radius for a cool star using KPF.

The astronomers next claim that this data allowed them to date the star’s age as 10.2 billion years old, and that it was about 4% smaller in diameter than measured by other observations. Both these conclusions carry uncertainties, but the former has implications if true for the present theories of stellar evolution, since this star appears to be behaving differently than expected for a star this old.

Astronomers have been doing this kind of stellar seismology for the Sun for several decades. To now have instruments sensitive enough to detect it on stars light years away is truly astonishing.

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Stratolaunch completes first hypersonic test flight for Pentagon

9:58 am

The military this week confirmed that Stratolaunch had successfully completed its first two hypersonic test flights for the Pentagon in December and March.

The hypersonic vehicle named Talon A2 exceeded Mach 5—the threshold for hypersonic speed—in two Pentagon-backed test flights conducted in December 2024 and March 2025, the Defense Department confirmed May 5.

The flights mark the first time since the X-15 program, which ended in 1968, that the U.S. has conducted reusable hypersonic testing.

At the moment the military’s hypersonic test program is really getting its money’s worth from private enterprise. Stratolaunch is doing tests using a reusable vehicle. Rocket Lab is doing suborbital flights using a revised version of its Electron rocket’s first stage. Varda will do hypersonic tests with its capsule when it returns from orbit. And startups Ursa Major and Radian have won contracts to do their own test flights.

For literally decades the military’s hypersonic test program had limped along, barely able to do tests more than once every few years. Then however it was run entirely by the government. Now that the military has stopped trying to be the designer and builder but simply a customer, it is getting what it needs fast and with a great deal of variety.

Ain’t freedom and competition and private enterprise wonderful?

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Australia’s first rocket company continues to be blocked by red tape

9:40 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.

The first rocket launch by Gilmour Space, Australia’s first rocket company, from its Bowen spaceport on the east coast of Australia has apparently been blocked by continuing bureaucratic regulatory red tape.

In February the company had announced a planned launch date in March, based on what appeared to be the issuance (after more than a year’s delay) of its launch licence. That launch however never happened, with no public explanation, until now. From the link above:

In an update on Sunday, the Queensland-based firm said it had received approval from CASA and is now waiting for final clearance from the Australian Space Agency.

…It had planned for an inaugural blast-off in April 2024 but faced a lengthy delay in obtaining its final permit from the Australian Space Agency.

In other words, the launch license had only been promised, but then was not issued, leaving the company stranded for several more months, with that license still buried in the government’s byzantine operations.

The article at the link says the Australian government is now moving to streamline its space regulatory system, but don’t believe it. The elections this week saw a resounding victory for the leftist coalition with the conservative party defeated handily. With the left now in firm control, expect the regulation to increase, not decrease. Leftwing governments almost never reduce regulation. It goes against their power-hungry genetics.

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