Author: Robert Zimmerman

German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg replaces its CEO

9:27 am

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

In a major managerial shake-up as it preps for its first launch attempt later this year, the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg has replaced its CEO, switching from someone with more general business experience to a CEO with a lot of direct experience in the space industry itself.

In an April 11 statement not widely publicized by the company, RFA announced that Stefan Tweraser, who had been chief executive since October 2021, had been replaced by Indulis Kalnins.

The announcement did not give a reason for the change, but it suggested that the company was seeking someone with expertise in the aerospace industry to lead the company. Kalnins is on the aerospace faculty of a German university, Hochschule Bremen, and has been managing director of OHB Cosmos, which focused on launch services.

…Tweraser, by contrast, came from outside the space industry. He joined RFA after past work that included being a consultant at McKinsey & Company, country director for the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) region at Google and executive at music streaming company Deezer. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrase provides I think the explanation for the change. The company had hoped to launch last year, but had a major failure during a static fire engine test on the launchpad, destroying the rocket first stage. The company has probably decided it needed someone in charge who had some hands-on experience with launchpad operations.

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Blue Origin completes ground simulation of Orbital Reef space station

9:16 am

Artist rendering of Orbital Reef design, as of April 2025
Artist rendering of Orbital Reef design, as of
April 2025. Click for original image.

According to a NASA press release today, Blue Origin has successfully completed a ” human-in-the-loop test” in a ground mock-up of the commercial Orbital Reef space station.

The human-in-the-loop test scenarios utilized individual participants or small groups to perform day-in-the-life walkthroughs in life-sized mockups of major station components. Participants provided feedback while simulating microgravity operations, including cargo transfer, trash transfer, stowage, and worksite assessments.

…The milestone is part of a NASA Space Act Agreement originally awarded to Blue Origin in 2021 and focused on the design progress for multiple worksites, floors, and translation paths within the station. This ensures a commercial station can support human life, which is critical to advancing scientific research in a microgravity environment and maintaining a continuous human presence in low Earth orbit.

Though this test might be providing useful information, it leaves me cold. While Blue Origin’s partner in this project, Sierra Space, has been testing real hardware for its LIFE inflatable module (as seen on the left side of the artist’s rendering above), Blue Origin itself appears to have built nothing real. Instead, it is following the old big space paradigm of companies like Boeing that invest none of its own money in development. Instead, the company uses NASA’s development money solely for PR mockups, in the hope the PR will convince NASA to give it the full contract, worth billions. Only then will the real work begin.

Boeing did this with Starliner, and we can all see now how well that turned out.

It also appears that the overall scale of Orbital Reef has been reduced significantly when comparing the current design above with the earlier artist renderings.

Based on this new information, I have dropped Orbital Reef to the bottom in my rankings of the four private space stations presently under development. While Starlab has built as little (following the same play-it-safe paradigm), the company has at least gotten its final design approved. It has also signed a partnership with the European Space Agency, giving it a powerful government backer in addition to NASA.

  • Haven-1, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company is moving fast, with Haven-1 to launch and be occupied in 2026 for a 30 day mission. It hopes this actual hardware and manned mission will put it in the lead to win NASA’s phase 2 contract, from which it will build its much larger mult-module Haven-2 station..
  • Axiom, being built by Axiom, has launched three tourist flights to ISS, with a fourth scheduled for this spring, carrying passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. Though there have been rumors it has cash flow issues, development of its first module has been proceeding more or less as planned.
  • Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with an extensive partnership agreement with the European Space Agency. It recently had its station design approved by NASA.
  • Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Overall, Blue Origin has built almost nothing, while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building its module for launch.
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April 15, 2025 Quick space links

2:38 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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Myriad flows on mountainous inner crater wall on Mars

1:03 pm

Myriad flows in a crater rim
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 27, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

That the science team labels this “Monitoring Slopes for Changes on Eastern Terraces of Mojave Crater” is quite understandable. The number of apparent dentritic channels suggests strongly the possibility of change over time, which is why MRO has been used repeatedly to monitor this location, beginning in 2006, when the science team noted this in a caption:

Aptly-named Mojave Crater in the Xanthe Terra region has alluvial fans that look remarkably similar to landforms in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California and portions of Nevada and Arizona.

Alluvial fans are fan-shaped deposits of water-transported material (alluvium). They typically form at the base of hills or mountains where there is a marked break, or flattening of slope. They typically deposit big rocks near their mouths (close to the mountains) and smaller rocks at greater distances. Alluvial fans form as a result of heavy desert downpours, typically thundershowers. Because deserts are poorly vegetated, heavy and short-lived downpours create a great deal of erosion and nearby deposition.

There are fans inside and around the outsides of Mojave crater on Mars that perfectly match the morphology of alluvial fans on Earth, with the exception of a few small impact craters dotting this Martian landscape.

» Read more

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Lucy’s next asteroid fly-by on April 20, 2025

9:28 am

Lucy's future route through the solar system
Lucy’s route to the asteroids, with its first picture
of Donaldjohanson in lower right, taken in February.
Click for original blink animation.

The science team operating the probe Lucy are now preparing for the spacecraft’s second asteroid fly-by, set of April 20, 2025, and passing within 600 miles of the surface of asteroid Donaldjohanson.

Lucy’s closest approach to Donaldjohanson will occur at 1:51pm EDT on April 20, at a distance of 596 miles (960 km). About 30 minutes before closest approach, Lucy will orient itself to track the asteroid, during which its high-gain antenna will turn away from Earth, suspending communication. Guided by its terminal tracking system, Lucy will autonomously rotate to keep Donaldjohanson in view. As it does this, Lucy will carry out a more complicated observing sequence than was used at Dinkinesh [the first asteroid that Lucy saw up close in 2023]. All three science instruments – the high-resolution greyscale imager called L’LORRI, the color imager and infrared spectrometer called L’Ralph, and the far infrared spectrometer called L’TES – will carry out observation sequences very similar to the ones that will occur at the Trojan asteroids.

However, unlike with Dinkinesh, Lucy will stop tracking Donaldjohanson 40 seconds before the closest approach to protect its sensitive instruments from intense sunlight.

“If you were sitting on the asteroid watching the Lucy spacecraft approaching, you would have to shield your eyes staring at the Sun while waiting for Lucy to emerge from the glare. After Lucy passes the asteroid, the positions will be reversed, so we have to shield the instruments in the same way,” said encounter phase lead Michael Vincent of Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado. “These instruments are designed to photograph objects illuminated by sunlight 25 times dimmer than at Earth, so looking toward the Sun could damage our cameras.”

Unlike most of the Trojan asteroids Lucy will study, Donaldjohanson is a main belt asteroid. It is thought to be only 150 million years old, but its history would be expected to be very different than those Trojan asteroids.

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April 14, 2025 Quick space links

3:01 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.

  • Rocket fairing found on road in Anhui in eastern China
    No information about the rocket or launch is provided. To quote: “It may have been accidentally dropped during transportation after recovery. Or maybe it was blown away by the wind from a previous launch months ago?” Since China has said nothing about any attempts to recover fairings, this remains a mystery.
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Maybe it finally is time we actually made these major budget cuts at NASA

12:05 pm

Chicken Little rules!

This past weekend the pro-government propaganda press has been in an outraged uproar concerning unconfirmed rumors and anonymous reports that the Trump administration is considering major cuts to NASA’s many science divisions and projects, cuts so large that several space missions, such as Mars Sample Return and the Roman Space Telescope, would have to be canceled. Here are just a few examples, with the first few the ones that broke the story:

Of this list, the Politico story is the most amusing. Suddenly this leftwing news outlet loves Musk again, since he is expressing opposition to these cuts. Just days before he was the devil incarnate because of his partnership with Trump in cutting government waste. Now that he might oppose these NASA budget cuts will lefties start buying Teslas again? Who knows? The depth of their thinking is often quite shallow and divorced from rationality.

As is typical of the propaganda press, all these stories focused on quoting only those opposed to the cuts, from Democrats in Congress to leftist activist organizations. Very few offered any alternative points of view. These reports were thus typical of the propaganda press and the Washington swamp whenever anyone proposes any cuts to any government program: We are all gonna die! Civilization is going to end! Only evil people would dare propose such ideas!

The truth is that there are many ample and rational reasons to consider major budget cuts to most of NASA programs. Like the rest of our bloated federal government, NASA is no longer the trim efficient government agency it was in the 1960s.
» Read more

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The structure of a ringed planetary nebula revealed in the infrared

9:18 am

A planetary nebula as seen by Webb
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Using the mid-infrared camera on the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have been able to image in false colors the ringed structure surrounding a dying star about 1,500 light years away.

The nebula’s two rings are unevenly illuminated in Webb’s observations, appearing more diffuse at bottom left and top right. They also look fuzzy, or textured. “We think the rings are primarily made up of very small dust grains,” Ressler said. “When those grains are hit by ultraviolet light from the white dwarf star, they heat up ever so slightly, which we think makes them just warm enough to be detected by Webb in mid-infrared light.”

In addition to dust, the telescope also revealed oxygen in its clumpy pink center, particularly at the edges of the bubbles or holes.

NGC 1514 is also notable for what is absent. Carbon and more complex versions of it, smoke-like material known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are common in planetary nebulae (expanding shells of glowing gas expelled by stars late in their lives). Neither were detected in NGC 1514. More complex molecules might not have had time to form due to the orbit of the two central stars, which mixed up the ejected material.

Though this false-color image of a planetary nebular is hardly ground-breaking (Hubble has been producing such pictures for decades), Webb’s better infrared data, in higher resolution, will help astronomers untangle the nebula’s complex geography. It remains however a question whether the improved capabilities of Webb were worth its $10 billion-plus cost. For that money NASA could have built and launched many different astronomical missions in the past two decades, many of which would have been able to match this data for far less.

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NASA-Roscosmos barter deal to fly each other astronauts to ISS extended

8:55 am

In announcing its future crew assignments in early April NASA also confirmed that its barter deal with Russia to fly each other astronauts to ISS has been extended to 2027.

NASA announced April 3 that astronaut Chris Williams had been assigned to the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft scheduled to launch to the ISS in November, joining Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev. The announcement came ahead of the April 8 launch of fellow astronaut Jonny Kim to the ISS on Soyuz MS-27.

The announcement of the Williams flight assignment was the first public indication by NASA that it has extended an agreement with Roscosmos for “integrated crews” on Soyuz and commercial crew flights to the ISS. Under the no-exchange-of-funds barter agreement, NASA astronauts fly on Soyuz spacecraft and Roscosmos cosmonauts fly on commercial crew vehicles to ensure that there is at least one American and one Russian on the station should either Soyuz or commercial crew vehicles be grounded for an extended period.

Russian sources in January 2025 had indicated the agreement had been extended, but this most recent non-announcement is the first confirmation by NASA.

One interesting change in the schedule revealed by this crew announcement is that Russia will be launching less frequently while extending its Soyuz missions. Previously Russia’s missions were six months long, the same length as NASA’s standard ISS mission. Now Russia will only launch every eight months. No explanation was given for this change, which will likely complicate the station’s already complex docking schedule. I suspect two reasons: First the Russian government probably needs to reduce costs, and flying less often serves that purpose. Second, Roscosmos officials probably want to also fly longer missions for research.

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Italy awards Italian company contract to design constellation of radio telescopes orbiting the Moon

8:45 am

Capitalism in space: The Italian Space Agency has awarded the Italian company Blue Skies Space a contract to design a constellation of radio telescopes orbiting the Moon and designed to map the universe’s earliest radio emissions.

The project, named RadioLuna, aims to uncover whether a fleet of small satellites in a lunar orbit could detect faint radio signals from the universe’s earliest days—signals that are nearly impossible to pick up on Earth due to man-made radio interference. These signals, in the FM radio range, come from a time before the first stars formed, when the universe was mostly hydrogen gas. By listening from the far side of the Moon, free from Earth’s radio noise, scientists could use the satellites to uncover a missing piece of the puzzle in our understanding of the cosmic “dark ages.”

The study will establish the viability of operating simple and cost-effective CubeSats equipped with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components orbiting the Moon and will be led by Blue Skies Space Italia S.r.l., a subsidiary of UK-based Blue Skies Space Ltd. Project partner OHB Italia will be responsible for the definition of a viable platform in a Moon orbit.

The contract is another example of Italy (and Europe) shifting to private enterprise in space. Rather than design this project in-house, its space agency is contracting it out to private companies.

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