March 13, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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Author: Robert Zimmerman
SpaceX launches 25 Starlink satellites; reuses 1st stage for 32nd time
SpaceX earlier today successfully launched another 25 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage (B1071) completed its 32nd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific, moving into fourth place in the rankings of the most reused launch vehicles:
39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
33 Falcon 9 booster B1067
32 Falcon 9 booster B1071
31 Falcon 9 booster B1063
30 Falcon 9 booster B1069
28 Columbia space shuttle
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
31 SpaceX
10 China
3 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.
History of Everything – The Freshwater Paddle Carriers
An evening pause: A bit of history for the weekend.
Hat tip Blair Ivey.
March 13, 2026 Quick space links
As BtB’s stringer Jay is on vacation, here are a few links I spotted that don’t deserve full posts. 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.
- SpaceX to lower the orbits of 1,600 Starlink satellites to improve customer signal quality
The reduction is about 70 kilometers, and the company plans to lower as many 4,400 satellites before it is done.
- The head of Amazon’s Leo constellation suddenly left the company in February
No replacement has as yet been named, but a further management shake-up is expected.
- ISRO completes static fire test of the engine for its LVM rocket at higher thrusts
The Indian space agency has been upgrading and testing this engine for the past several months. The LVM is the rocket it wishes to use for its manned, space station, and planetary missions.
Miranda, the smallest of Uranus’ spherical moons
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The image to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was created from photographs taken on January 24, 1986 by Voyager-2 as it made its fly-by of the gas giant Uranus. From a later 1996 release:
Miranda, roughly 300 miles in diameter, exhibits varied geologic provinces, seen in this mosaic of clear-filter, narrow-angle images from Jan. 24, 1986. The images were obtained from distances of 18,730 to 25,030 miles; resolution ranges from 1,840 to 2,430 feet. These are among the highest-resolution pictures that Voyager has obtained of any of the new “worlds” it has encountered during its mission.
On Miranda, ridges and valleys of one province are cut off against the boundary of the next province. Probable compressional (pushed-together) folded ridges are seen in curvilinear patterns, as are many extensional (pulled-apart) faults. Some of these show very large scarps, or cliffs, ranging from 1,600 feet to 3 miles in height — that is, higher that the walls of the Grand Canyon on Earth.
This is really the only close look we have of this distant world. The other hemisphere remains a mystery, as it was in darkness when Voyager-2 zipped past. And though some of the individual shots that make up this mosiac are more detailed, they don’t provide that much more information.
Nonetheless, to my uneducated eye Miranda looks like a ball of thick molasses that some giant stirred a bit as gravity forced it to settle into its spherical shape. In this case the molasses is likely a mix of ice and other materials, not yet fully identified. The result is a tiny misshapen planet with some of the roughest topography known in the solar system, including one 12-mile high cliff face (the white streak at the image bottom) thought to be the highest in the solar system.
We don’t yet have a true understanding of the geological processes that formed this strange landscape, nor will we have until we have a lot more data, including a global map of the entire surface. And that won’t come until a spacecraft is sent there to look more closely. Right now no such mission is in the works. No NASA missions have been funded, though several have been proposed. And a Chinese mission was apparently canceled last year.
The new town of Starbase is canceling its May elections
Boy, Elon Musk sure is a FASCIST! Because no one filed to run against the mayor and two commissioners, the new town of Starbase is now about to cancel its May elections.
During an upcoming meeting, the Starbase City Commission is scheduled to consider an ordinance canceling the May 2, 2026 General Election, as all candidates for mayor and city commissioner are running unopposed.
Under Texas law, local governments may cancel elections when every race on the ballot is uncontested.
That means Starbase’s current leadership will remain in office without voters needing to cast ballots. The city’s inaugural mayor is Robert “Bobby” Peden, a SpaceX executive who serves as Vice President of Texas Test and Launch for the company. Two commissioners serve alongside him: Jordan Buss, a senior director of environmental health and safety at SpaceX, and Lois Wallace, an interim commissioner and Starbase resident.
Expect to see stupid mainstream stories suggesting no one filed because people were afraid to run against these SpaceX managers and thus threaten their job status. “Musk, that evil fascist, clearly threatened to send out hit men against anyone who filed! Opposition to Musk will not be allowed!”
What I think is really happening is twofold. First, no one at SpaceX is really interested in this boring administrative government work. They’d rather build cutting-edge rockets. Note that the two commissioners are not really rocket engineers, with one being the wife of a SpaceX employee and the other doing “environmental health and safety” work, likely related to making sure SpaceX meets government work regulations. The real engineers at SpaceX have better things to do.
Second, there really isn’t that much for these town officials to do anyway. The town was established mostly to ease SpaceX’s own regulatory red tape with the state, and once established the task is largely done. Why waste time running for a position that will only add to your work load, while accomplishing nothing of real substance?
A day-by-day description of the entire Artemis-2 manned mission
NASA today posted a detailed day-by-day description of the entire ten-day Artemis-2 manned mission around the Moon, outlining the tasks planned for the astronauts on each day.
The launch is now targeting April 1, 2026.
The description of their closest approach to the Moon is both interesting and underwhelming.
The Artemis II crew will come their closest to the Moon on flight day 6, while traveling the farthest from Earth. Artemis II could set a record for the farthest anyone has traveled from Earth depending on launch day, breaking the current record – 248,655 miles away – set in 1970 by the Apollo 13 crew. The distance the Artemis II crew will travel depends on their exact launch day and time.
Over the course of the day, the crew will come within 4,000 to 6,000 miles of the lunar surface as they swing around the far side of the Moon – it should look to them about the size of a basketball held at arm’s length. [emphasis mine]
In other words, Orion is not going to get very close, and in fact, the Moon will only be 2 to 3 times bigger than what we see here on Earth. I suspect the best photographs taken will be those showing both the Earth and Moon, both of which will be relatively small.
Overall, I remain highly concerned about this mission. The life support system has never been tested in space before, and they will spend the first day checking it out in Earth orbit. And the return to Earth will involve using a heat shield that did not perform well on the Artemis-1 mission in 2022, losing chunks during re-entry.
They hope a less stressful flight path will mitigate this issue, but then, they need to hit that flight path perfectly on their way back from the Moon. During yesterday’s briefing it was obvious this was a concern to NASA officials.
China to begin construction of its Mars sample return spacecraft
China’s state-run press today announced it is about to begin construction of its Mars sample return spacecraft, Tianwen-3, set for launch in 2028.
Based on the announcement, that date seems very unlikely.
China’s mission to retrieve samples from Mars will advance to the flight model development phase within this year, Liu Jizhong, chief designer of the Tianwen-3 mission, said on Thursday. Building on the preliminary technical research and demonstrations, the mission has achieved breakthroughs in key technologies. The engineering team is now focused on developing prototypes, Liu, also a national legislator, told reporters.
The Mars sample return mission is scheduled for launch around 2028, with the goal of returning no less than 500 grams of Martian samples to Earth by around 2031. [emphasis mine]
They only have two years to get the spacecraft built, and it involves “an orbiter, a returner, a lander, an ascender, and a service module.” While China is basing this mission’s design on its successful Chang’e lunar sample return missions, returning samples from Mars is significantly more challenging. The ascent vehicle will have a much greater gravity to overcome, and doing a robotic rendezvous and docking in orbit around another planet millions of miles from Earth has never even been tried.
German rocket startup Isar Aerospace wins launch contract from Astroscale
Proposed or active spaceports in North Europe
The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace has won a launch contract using its Spectrum rocket to launch Astroscale’s ELSA-M space junk removal mission, with a launch now targeting 2028.
The mission involves a $15 million contract Astroscale won from the space agencies of the UK and Europe to de-orbit a defunct OneWeb satellite. This demo mission however has been delayed repeatedly since it was first announced in 2022. Then it had a launch date of 2024. In 2024 that launch date was shifted to 2026. With this new announcement it is delayed again, to 2028.
Isar meanwhile has not yet achieved a successful launch of its Spectrum rocket. The first attempt, in March 2025, failed mere seconds after launch due to a loss of attitude control. Its second attempt is presently scheduled for March 19 from Norway’s Andoya spaceport.
If successful, this launch would be the first from a European spaceport, and the first from one of Europe’s new rocket startups.
China completes two launches early today
China early today resumed launches after a month-long pause, apparently for the Chinese New Year.
First, it completed the 20th launch for the Guowang (Satnet) internet satellite constellation, its Long March 8A rocket lifting off from its coastal Wencheng spaceport.
Though China’s state-run press provided no information on the number of satellites in the payload, all previous launches using the Long March 8A had carried nine satellites. If so, that would mean the constellation now has 159 satellites in orbit, out of a planned 13,000.
Next, China placed two “test satellites” into orbit, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China. Its state-run press provided no information about where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
30 SpaceX
10 China
3 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25. Though it has up to now almost doubled the launch pace of everyone else, with China resuming launches that pace will likely end.
Max Steiner – Casablanca suite
An evening pause: From the 1942 film Casablanca, still one of the greatest movies ever made.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Cubesat ultraviolet space telescope achieves first light
Click for original images.
A new low-cost cubesat-sized NASA ultraviolet space telescope, dubbed Sparcs, has achieved first light, successfully taking both near- and far-ultraviolet false-color images of a nearby star.
Those images are to the right, with the top the far-ultraviolet image and the bottom in the near ultraviolet. From the press release:
Roughly the size of a large cereal box, SPARCS will monitor flares and sunspot activity on low-mass stars — objects only 30% to 70% the mass of the Sun. These stars are among the most common in the Milky Way and host the majority of the galaxy’s roughly 50 billion habitable-zone terrestrial planets, which are rocky worlds close enough to their stars for temperatures that could allow liquid water and potentially support life.
The question astronomers will try to answer with this telescope is whether the solar activity on these stars is high enough to prevent life from forming in the star’s habitable zone. Because these stars are dim and small, the habitable zone is quite close to the star, which means solar activity has a higher impact on the planet. We don’t yet have sufficient data to determine the normal activity of such stars. Sparcs will provide a good first survey.
It will also demonstrate the viability of such small low-cost cubesats for this kind of research. If successful expect more such telescopes, some of which are likely to be private, like Blue Skies Space’s Mauve optical telescope already in orbit.