Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Jared Isaacman
I admit immediately that I have no inside information to back up the speculation that will follow. Instead, it is based entirely on my fifty years of experience observing the political machinations that take place inside the DC swamp.
In the past week there have been a slew of stories all aimed at pressuring Congress to quickly confirm Jared Isaacman (billionaire, jet pilot, businessman, and commercial astronaut), Trump’s pick to be NASA’s next administrator. For example, two days ago NASA’s last Republican-appointed administrator Jim Bridenstine publicly called for Isaacman’s confirmation by the Senate.
“I think Jared Isaacman is going to be an amazing NASA administrator,” he said. “I think he’s got all the tools to be what could be the most consequential NASA administrator given the era in which we live in now.” That era, he said, involves greater reliance on commercial space capabilities. “He’s going to be able to take that and do things that have never been able to be done before.”
This week there was also an article in Space News, touting Isaacman’s desire to increase funding to NASA’s planetary defense program, expressed by him in February when it looked like asteroid 2024 YR4 had a good chance of hitting the Earth in 2032.
Furthermore, a group of seven Republican senators this week also joined the chorus, sending a letter [pdf] to Senators Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Maria Cantwell (D-Washington), the chair and ranking members respectively of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, extolling Isaacman in glowing terms and calling for his quick confirmation.
So with all this enthusiastic support bubbling out everywhere, why do I suspect Isaacman might actually be in trouble?
» Read more
After a delay of several months following the first autonomous robotic docking of its two-satellite Spadex mission, engineers from India’s space agency ISRO have now successfully undocked the chase satellite from its target satellite.
According to ISRO, the in-orbit performance of the docked satellites was extensively analysed, with a viable operational window identified from March 10 to March 25. Isro plans to conduct further experiments with the satellites in the coming days.
…Now that the undocking is complete, more docking attempts are expected to evaluate: How precisely ISRO can execute multiple docking maneuvers, how well the algorithms perform under various conditions, how the integrated inertial systems function and how the propulsion system performs during repeated operations.
These rendezvous and docking capabilities are essential for India to achieve its goal of building a manned space station and resupplying it on a regular basis.
In a letter [pdf] dated March 11, 2025 to both vice president J.D. Vance and Jared Isaacman, presently nominated to become NASA administrator, a group of federal and state lawmakers from Ohio urged the Trump administration to move the agency’s headquarters to their state.
“While we recognize that other states, including Florida, Alabama, and Texas, may pursue similar proposals, Ohio presents a uniquely advantageous case due to its rich aerospace heritage, lower operational costs, and central role in the nation’s technology and defense sectors,” read the letter, signed by Ohio Republican Reps. Max Miller, Troy Balderson, Mike Carey, Warren Davidson, Jim Jordan, Dave Joyce, Bob Latta, Michael Rulli, Dave Taylor and Mike Turner and Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur. Buckeye State Sens. Bernie Moreno and Jon Husted, both Republicans, signed onto the letter as well.
Florida officials have already made their own proposal for capturing NASA headquarters. Based on this growing lobby effort, it really looks like the Trump administration is serious about scaling down NASA’s headquarters and moving it from the District of Columbia.
During a press briefing earlier this week, ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno noted that a manufacturing defect was the reason a nozzle fell off one of the two solid-fueled strap-on boosters during the second launch of the company’s new Vulcan rocket.
In a March 12 media roundtable, Tory Bruno, president and chief executive of ULA, said the anomaly was traced to a “manufacturing defect” in one of the internal parts of the nozzle, an insulator. Specific details, he said, remained proprietary. “We have isolated the root cause and made appropriate corrective actions,” he said, which were confirmed in a static-fire test of a motor at a Northrop test site in Utah in February. “So we are back continuing to fabricate hardware and, at least initially, screening for what that root cause was.”
The company however still awaits approval by the Pentagon to begin Vulcan commercial military launches. That delay has forced it to shift its first launch in 2025 from Vulcan to an Atlas-5 launch of Amazon’s first set of operational Kuiper satellites. Bruno also revealed during the press briefing that the company has scaled down the number of launches it hopes to complete in 2025 from 20 to 12, with the reduction caused almost entirely by fewer Vulcan launches.
NASA today released a fantastic movie of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander as it touched down on the Moon on March 2, 2025, taken by four cameras mounted on the underside of its Blue Ghost lunar lander.
I have embedded the movie below.
The compressed, resolution-limited video features a preliminary sequence that NASA researchers stitched together from SCALPSS 1.1’s four short-focal-length cameras, which were capturing photos at 8 frames per second during the descent and landing.
The sequence, using approximate altitude data, begins roughly 91 feet (28 meters) above the surface. The descent images show evidence that the onset of the interaction between Blue Ghost’s reaction control thruster plumes and the surface begins at roughly 49 feet (15 meters). As the descent continues, the interaction becomes increasingly complex, with the plumes vigorously kicking up the lunar dust, soil and rocks — collectively known as regolith. After touchdown, the thrusters shut off and the dust settles. The lander levels a bit and the lunar terrain beneath and immediately around it becomes visible.
Engineers will use this imagery to better anticipate and possibly reduce the amount of dust kicked up during future landings.
Meanwhile, Firefly engineers are preparing the lander to observe tomorrow night’s lunar eclipse, but from a completely different perspective. On Earth we will see the Earth’s shadow slowly over five hours cross the Moon. On the Moon Blue Ghost will see the Earth cross in front of the Sun. Because of our home world’s thick atmosphere, there should be a ring remaining during totality.
Because the Moon will be in shadow during the eclipse, the challenge will be power management, operating the spacecraft solely on its batteries.
» Read more
SpaceX yesterday attempted two launches from its Florida launchpads, but only got one off. First the company placed another 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its 22nd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
In the second launch from the Kennedy Space Center, SpaceX had to scrub the launch because of a problem with the hydraulic system operating a support clamp arm. The flight is now rescheduled for no earlier than tomorrow at 7:03 pm (Eastern).
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
28 SpaceX
11 China
3 Russia
2 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world, including American companies, in total launches, 28 to 20.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 29, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). I have also rotated it so north is up. Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research request but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.
In this case the timing allowed the camera team to capture this breath-taking picture of these graceful arching dunes sitting in what is likely the near-surface ice sheet that covers much of the red planet’s high latitudes. That sheet is not pure ice, but a complex mixture of ice, dirt, dust, and sand, covered during the winter by a thin mantle of dry ice.
The isolated dunes appear to be ridges sticking up from that flat terrain, but this impression is probably incorrect, based on the location.
» Read more
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
The Chinese man, Yinpiao Zhou, who was arrested in November when he flew a spy drone illegally over Vandenberg Space Force Base for almost an hour, has now been convicted of a misdemeanor.
A 39-year-old man from Contra Costa County and Chinese citizen, Yinpiao Zhou, pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles Monday morning for flying a drone over Vandenberg Space Force Base, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Zhou was arrested in December on charges of failing to register an aircraft that was not providing transportation and violation of national defense airspace, based on federal court documents. Following an indictment by a federal grand jury on the two misdemeanor charges, Zhou, under a plea agreement, admitted guilt to one charge—violation of national defense airspace. … The plea agreement stipulates Zhou may face up to one year imprisonment, one year supervised release, and a $100,000 fine.
All the evidence suggests this guy was doing spying for China. For one, he was arrested at the airport as he tried to board a plane back to flee back to China. Second, when confronted by security he lied about his actions, trying to hide the drone. Third, he had an accomplice who security people foolishly allowed to get away, who is still unidentified and still at large (assuming he is even still in the country).
Based on these facts, at a minimum Zhou should be immediately deported after he completes his one year sentence. In the past he would not have gotten off so lightly. He would have been tried as a spy, and hanged.
In a sign that suggests OneWeb is losing the competition to begin satellite internet access to India, SpaceX this week has signed two Starlink deals with India’s two largest telecom operators.
Jio Platforms, the subsidiary of India’s conglomerate Reliance Industries and the country’s largest telecom operator, Wednesday announced a partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to offer Starlink’s satellite broadband internet services to its customers in India. Under the agreement, which is subject to regulatory approvals, Jio and SpaceX will explore using Starlink to extend the telco’s offerings, while Jio will sell Starlink equipment through its retail outlets and online storefronts, the telco said in a press statement.
…Earlier Wednesday, Airtel, India’s second-biggest telco, announced a similar partnership with SpaceX to offer Starlink through its channels. The Airtel partnership is also subject to SpaceX’s regulatory approvals in the country, which are in process with IN-SPACe and the Department of Telecommunications.
SpaceX had previously tried to bring Starlink to India by selling subscriptions directly to customers but was forced to pull back when the government denied it regulatory approval. These two deals suggest that the government wanted SpaceX to partner with Indian companies, keeping some of its profits in-country.
These deals also suggest that OneWeb is failing to provide good service to the Indian market, even though it is half owned by a major Indian investor and got regulatory approval several years ago. The design of OneWeb’s system requires the construction of ground stations to link its satellite constellation with the ground operations, and it appears this added step is causing delays that is forcing the telecom industry to look elsewhere. For example, the same thing has happened in the Falkland Islands, which signed first with OneWeb (which is also half owned by the UK government) but has now approved Starlink because OneWeb wasn’t able to provide its service on time.
Using a ground-based telescope, astronomers have now identified 128 new moons circling Saturn, bringing its moon count to 274, more than the total moons around all the other planets in the solar system combined.
Edward Ashton at Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan, and his colleagues found the new moons with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, revealing dozens that have previously evaded astronomers. They took hours of images of Saturn, adjusted them for the planet’s movement through the sky and stacked them on top of each other to reveal objects that would otherwise be too dim to see.
All the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometres in diameter and are likely to have been formed hundreds of millions or even billions of years ago in collisions between larger moons, says Ashton.
That Saturn has so many moons should surprise no one. Saturn actually has possibly millions, maybe even billions, of moons, if you count every particle in its rings. In fact, the gas giant poses a problem for astronomers in defining what a moon actually is. How small must an object be before you stop calling it a moon?
Two launches to report: First, China yesterday successfully completed its first Long March 8 launch from its new launchpad at its coastal Wenchang spaceport, placing 18 satellites for SpaceSail internet constellation, the fifth group so far launched.
China’s state run press noted that the launchpad is designed to allow the Long March 8 rocket to launch every seven days, a pace needed to place these giant Chinese satellite constellations into orbit.
Next, in the early morning hours today SpaceX successfully launched two different NASA science missions, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The prime payload was SPHEREx, a space telescope designed to make an all-sky survey. The secondary payload was PUNCH, four satellites forming a constellation to study the Sun.
The rocket’s first stage completed its third flight, landing back at Vandenberg.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
27 SpaceX
11 China
3 Russia
2 Rocket Lab
As happened last year, SpaceX handily leads the rest of the world, including American companies, in total launches, 27 to 20. This lead will be extended tonight should the company’s next manned Dragon launch to ISS go off as planned.
Click for original master image.
Using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scientists have now located and photographed Intuitive Machines lunar lander Athena where it sits on its side on the Moon.
The picture to the right, reduced to post here, shows that location with the small arrow. This is definitely on Mons Mouton, the intended landing zone about 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole. However at the best magnification provided by the LRO science team, the rover is not visible. Reader James Fincannon was puzzled by this and downloaded the highest resolution version of this image and sent it to me. I have added it to the picture as the inset. Athena is the little white dot in the center of a small 65-foot-wide crater. Note that its shadow falls in the opposite direction of all the shadows in the craters, as the lander projects upward from the surface while the craters descend downward.
One can’t help questioning the quality of the lander’s landing software, if it ended up picking the center of this small crater to touch down, especially considering there appear to be large relatively clear flat areas all around.
The rocket startup Relativity yesterday uploaded a 42-minute long video on Youtube describing in great detail the status of its Terran-R rocket, providing a great deal of information about its design, construction, and goals, including the significant changes the company has made from its much smaller Terran-1 rocket.
I have embedded that video below.
Several take-aways: First, the video devotes a long segment explaining why the company has abandoned its long expressed goal of making a rocket entirely 3D printed. It found with Terran-1 that 3D printing the rocket’s body and fairing was not cost effective. It took too long and was too expensive. Using aluminum is faster and cheaper, especially as Relativity is no longer doing this in-house. Instead, it appears they are partnering long term with specific outside vendors for the rocket shells, tanks, and domes, as well as the fairings.
Second, the company is aiming to make the rocket’s first stage reusable from the start, making the first landing attempts on the first launch. They also recognize that success will take time and many attempts, similar to SpaceX’s experience a decade ago.
Third, they are pushing to go into major production of the rocket by 2026, so that when they launch the first time they will have more rockets ready to quickly follow up with more launches. This schedule is extremely fast, as they only started rocket development in the spring of 2023.
Finally and most important, the video provides no dates for that first launch. Previous releases from the company had suggested a 2026 first launch, and officials in the video implied that they might be ready by 2026, but no one said so directly. My guess is that 2026 is no longer realistic (not that it ever was), and they are beginning to prepare the public for a later launch date.
One other new development at Relativity not mentioned in the video. The company has named former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as its new CEO, with the company’s founder, Tim Ellis, stepping down as CEO to transition to the company’s board of directors. This change could be related to rumors last year that the company was having problems.
» Read more
Based on data from several ground-based telescopes, astronomers now believe that Barnard’s Star, the nearest single star to our Sun at a distance of about six light years away, has a solar system of at least four sub-Earth-sized planets.
After rigorously calibrating and analyzing data taken during 112 nights over a period of three years, the team found solid evidence for three exoplanets around Barnard’s Star, two of which were previously classified as candidates. The team also combined data from MAROON-X with data from a 2024 study done with the ESPRESSO instrument at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile to confirm the existence of a fourth planet, elevating it as well from candidate to bona fide exoplanet.
You can read the paper here. The scientists estimate the minimum masses of these exoplanets to range from 19% to 34% that of the Earth, with their maximum mass not exceeding 57% of the Earth. All are believed to be rocky planets orbiting just inside the star’s habitable zone.
Astronomers have been trying to detect exoplanets around Barnard’s Star for more a century. Several previous “discoveries” were later retracted. This result however appears somewhat firm though of course there are a lot of uncertainties in the result.
Apparently due to his failures in min-February dealing with debris dropped on Poland from a de-orbiting Falcon 9 upper station, the government has fired the head of its space agency.
The President of the Polish Space Agency, Grzegorz Wrochna, has been dismissed following a botched response to the uncontrolled re-entry of a Falcon 9 second stage that scattered debris across multiple locations in Poland.
It appears Wrochna’s office had sent its reports on the debris to the wrong email address, so that the people higher up in the command chain were not informed properly about what was happening. This failure was then compounded in early March when the space agency’s computer systems were hacked, forcing it to shut down its access to the internet.
You might ask why Poland even has a space agency, and if you do you are asking the right question. The nation does not have “a space program,” which would require an agency. Instead it has a handful of new rocket startups, mostly focused on suborbital flights. All these need is the right legal framework to succeed, not a bureaucracy telling them what to do.
As part of its journey to the binary asteroid Didymos/Dimorphos, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Hera probe will slingshot past Mars tomorrow, obtaining images and data of both the red planet and its moon Deimos.
Three instruments will gather data, a navigational camera, and infrared camera, and a spectral camera, with the goal mostly to calibrate the instruments and make sure they are working as designed. The data won’t be available until the next day, when the ESA will hold a webcast unveiling the images.
NASA this week began complying with Trump’s executive orders by finally shutting down its DEI office as well as two other unneeded departments.
NASA’s Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy; the Office of the Chief Scientist; and the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility branch in the Office of Diversity and Equal Opportunity will be shuttered, in compliance with Trump’s executive order, “Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative.”
A total of 23 employees were laid off. All three offices were established during the Biden administration, and provided no real value to the agency. The first two merely gave advice to top management, advice unneeded if the right people are put in charge. The third agency, DEI, was worse than unneeded, because it shifted the agency’s focus from good engineering and space exploration to favoring some races over others in hiring and promotions.
In fact, the DEI office had already been neutered prior to this week’s layoffs, based on the nature of NASA press releases in the past two months. Prior to Trump taking office, almost every single NASA press release touting the work of one or more of its employees would be entirely focused on the race or ethnicity of that employee, with almost every profile featuring a woman or minority. White men need not apply.
Since January 20, 2025, the range of employees featured in these profiles has changed radically. While minorities and women have been profiled, their race and gender is no longer mentioned. Instead, the releases tout their experience, skills, and talent. More important, the releases have now stopped blacklisting white men (who actually make up a majority of NASA’s workforce), highlighting many new and long term such individuals in just the past three weeks. The change has been quite refreshing.
Meanwhile, most of the propaganda press has been lying about these layoffs, attempting to paint them as a major disaster that will destroy NASA’s ability to accomplish anything in the future, with the worse example this headline from the science journal Nature: “NASA begins mass firings of scientists ahead of Trump team’s deadline”. That headline is a total lie. This was certainly not a “mass firing” and no space scientist was fired. Of those let go from the first two offices, all were managers, one of whom was also a “climate scientist”, not a space researcher.
More layoffs are expected of course under Trump’s campaign to shrink the federal government. If later layoffs follow the pattern of this first one, they will likely improve NASA’s workforce, eliminating the fat so that what remains can be more focused on what needs to be done.
The damaged Falcon 9 booster laying on its side
on its drone ship as it returns to port.
At a press conference yesterday, SpaceX officials outlined the results of its investigation into the loss of Falcon 9 first stage when it fell over on its drone ship shortly after a successful landing.
Speaking at a news conference following a flight readiness review for the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station, Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of Build and Flight Reliability at SpaceX, said about 85 seconds into the launch of the Starlink 12-20 mission, there was a fuel leak in the first stage booster, tail number B1086, and kerosene sprayed onto a hot component of the engine. He said that caused it to vaporize and become flammable.
Because there wasn’t enough oxygen to interact with the leaked fuel, it didn’t catch fire during the ascent, he said. But about 45 seconds after B1086 landed on their droneship, ‘Just Read the Instructions,’ there was enough oxygen available to get into the engine compartment and a fire broke out. “It subsequently blew out the barrel panel on the side of the rocket, just like it was designed to. The fire was all contained in the engine compartment,” Gerstenmaier said. “Even if we would’ve had a problem during ascent, this shows that the fire and the damage would be contained in just a single engine out, which still allows us to accomplish the entire mission.”
The company is still working to determine the cause of the leak itself.
Though the article and video at the link make a big deal about the FAA grounding SpaceX’s Falcon 9 fleet, the agency’s actions here were quite trivial compared to its behavior when Biden was president. It grounded the fleet for only a few days, while SpaceX did its initial investigation, and then immediately accepted the above conclusions from SpaceX and lifted the grounding, even though the company has not yet determined the leak’s cause.
The Space Force’s commercial office, dubbed SpaceWERX, announced March 8, 2025 that it has awarded development contracts to eight startups totaling $440 million.
Each STRATFI agreement is worth up to $60 million, with SpaceWERX and several defense agencies contributing up to $30 million per project. Private investors provide matching funds to scale innovations that have already demonstrated viability through prototype development.
The winners — Albedo, Beast Code, CesiumAstro, Gravitics, LeoLabs, Rise8, Umbra and Xona — were announced March 8 at an event at the Capital Factory in Austin, Texas.
Of these companies, Gravitics is probably the most interesting, as it is attempting to become a major American provider of space station modules. It already has a $125 million contract with Axiom to build a small module for that company’s station. This new contract from the Space Force suggests the Pentagon is considering launching its own space station, or possibly attaching a Gravitics module to one of the four private stations presently being built. Below is my present ranking of these four stations:
Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience
More than a week after landing in Mare Crisium, ground controllers have prepared Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander for surviving the very hot lunar noon while also activating NASA’s LISTER drill, which proceeded to successfully drill down into the lunar surface below the lander.
Mounted below Blue Ghost’s lower deck, NASA’s Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity (LISTER) payload is a pneumatic, gas-powered drill developed by Texas Tech University and Honeybee Robotics that measures the temperature and flow of heat from the Moon’s interior.
I have embedded below the video of this drilling operation. At this moment it appears that nine of the lander’s payloads have completed their tasks successfully, with no indication yet that the tenth playload will have problems. All in all, Firefly has succeeded in establishing itself now as the leading private company capable of launching spacecraft to other worlds.
» Read more
Trump defiant
For those like me who have been around for awhile, the present Trump administration is truly remarkable in that it harks back to an old, very fundamental American military strategy established by Ulysses S. Grant: Never stop your offensive, not for one instant.
When Grant won a battle he didn’t rest on his laurels. He immediately pushed forward because he knew he had his enemy on the run and at its weakest. When he lost a battle (which almost never happened) he didn’t pull back to lick his wounds, but instead re-configured his forces to push forward nonetheless, knowing that his victorious enemy was likely unprepared for a new assault.
Eisenhower demonstrated his understanding of this strategy during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. The Germans had surprised the Allies with their offensive, and thus had successfully pushed a major westward prong splitting Eisenhower’s forces in two. Rather than retreat, however, Eisenhower immediately went on the offensive, moving to pinch off that salient from the north and south and thus trap the German army behind enemy lines. That strategy ended up defeating the Germans, forcing them either to surrender or retreat.
This Trump administration is different from all other Republican presidents, including Trump’s first term, in that he is following this basic winning military strategy, keeping the pressure up continuously, with an enthusiasm that is breath-taking. » Read more
Click for before and after blink animation
The picture to the right, taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) prior to the successful landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, shows its entire landing region. The inset in the lower left is a picture taken by LRO on March 3, 2025, after landing.
The full picture was taken near sunset, with sunlight coming from the left. The inset was taken at sunrise, with sunlight coming from the right. This explains the difference in shadows between the two. Blue Ghost is the white dot in the inset with its long shadow, the black streak, cutting through the nearby crater. The first picture taken from the lander after landing looked down that shadow, looking across the crater.
The new picture tells us that Blue Ghost landed almost dead center in its target zone, indicating that the engineering worked as planned. The lander also used its computer brain to pick a good landing spot and avoid the nearby craters.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a study of the star populations in these two interacting galaxies. From the caption:
Arp 105 is a dazzling ongoing merger between an elliptical galaxy and a spiral galaxy drawn together by gravity, characterized by a long, drawn out tidal tail of stars and gas more than 362,000 light-years long. The immense tail, which extends beyond this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, was pulled from the two galaxies by their gravitational interactions and is embedded with star clusters and dwarf galaxies.
The three blue objects on the outskirts of both galaxies are thought to be active star-forming regions. Whether all three are part of this collision is unclear, as the object on the lower right might simply be a foreground object based on the available data.
What makes this galactic pair so intriguing is that the two galaxies are so different with very different theorized histories. Elliptical galaxies (“the ball”) are thought to be very old, the result of the long term evolution of spirals. You would therefore not think an elliptical would normally interact with a spiral, as their ages are likely so dissimilar.
Starship just before loss of signal on March 6, 2025
According to information at this tweet from anonymous sources, parts of Starship will likely require a major redesign due to the spacecraft’s break-up shortly after stage separation on its last two test flights.
These are the key take-aways, most of which focus on the redesign of the first version of Starship (V1) to create the V2 that flew unsuccessfully on those flights:
- Hot separation also aggravates the situation in the compartment.
- Not related to the flames from the Super Heavy during the booster turn.
- This is a fundamental miscalculation in the design of the Starship V2 and the engine section.
- The fuel lines, wiring for the engines and the power unit will be urgently redone.
- The fate of S35 and S36 is still unclear. Either revision or scrap.
- For the next ships, some processes may be paused in production until a decision on the design is made.
- The team was rushed with fixes for S34, hence the nervous start. There was no need to rush.
- The fixes will take much longer than 4-6 weeks.
- Comprehensive ground testing with long-term fire tests is needed. [emphasis mine]
It must be emphasized that this information comes from leaks from anonymous sources, and could be significantly incorrect. It does however fit the circumstances, and suggests that the next test flight will not occur in April but will be delayed for an unknown period beyond.
I think the tweet however is much too pessimistic. If the problems are all within the fuel lines, engine wiring, and the power unit, they are well localized. Moreover, the design of these components on version 1 of Starship apparently worked reasonably well, which gives them a good basis for that redesign. Nonetheless, if these facts are correct, my guess is the next test flight won’t occur before June.
The one saving grace is that FAA red tape is clearly no longer an additional obstacle. It is very clear now that with the change from Biden to Trump it is letting SpaceX lead all investigations, and immediately accepting its conclusions and fixes, rather than sitting on those conclusions as it retyped them for weeks or months in its own report.
Hat tip to reader Richard M.
Callisto’s basic design
My heart be still! First proposed in 2015 as Europe’s answer to SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the European Space Agency, in partnership with Japan, has finally begun acoustical testing of just one part of its Callisto grasshopper-type reusable test prototype, as shown on the right.
Callisto consists of five main sections: the Aft Bay, which includes the engine and landing legs, the LH2 Tank, the LOx Tank, the VEB, and the Fairing. The VEB houses much of the demonstrator’s electronics, including its onboard computer, avionics, and a reaction control system that uses H2O2 propellant. Its distinctive features include a pair of control fins.
In addition to confirming that the VEB had been transported to the CNES facilities in Toulouse, the 4 March Institute of Space Systems update also revealed that the acoustic test campaign for the key Callisto module had commenced last week. The acoustic test campaign simulates the intense sound vibrations the demonstrator will experience during flight to ensure structural integrity and component reliability.
The whole project has a budget of $100 million. The first test hop won’t occur until 2026, eleven years after the project began, and six years behind its original launch date. In that same time, SpaceX has completed several hundred commercial landings of its Falcon 9 first stage, reusing those stages up to two dozen times.
Nor is Callisto part of any program to develop a similar reusable rocket. It is a typical dead-end government project, with ESA having no clear goal to apply it commercially. The best Europe can hope for is that the engineering lessons from its tests will be given freely to the new European commercial rocket startups, so that they can use it someday.
