Author: Robert Zimmerman

A defunct American reconnaissance satellite from the ’80s breaks up

9:44 am

It appears that a defunct American reconnaissance satellite, launched in 1988 and dubbed USA 32, suddenly broke apart in mid-September.

On Sept. 17, Space-Track — the satellite observation arm of the U.S. Space Force — announced that USA 32 suffered a sudden “fragmentation” event four days earlier, on Sept. 13. This essentially means the spacecraft exploded, potentially breaking apart into dozens, hundreds or even thousands of pieces. However, the agency did not specify what had caused this explosion or how many pieces of debris were created. And, as of Sept. 28, no one else has been able to answer either question.

Other organizations have since confirmed the fragmentation event, including the private satellite-tracking company s2a systems, which photographed the largest remaining piece of USA 32 in orbit.

The cause of the break-up is not known. At the moment it appears the location of all the fragments have not yet been mapped. Their orbit, about 480 miles above the Earth, places this space junk in a bad place for about 200 other satellites, though their orbit presently does not appear to threaten either ISS or China’s Tiangong-3 space station.

This incident once again illustrates the real need for commercial satellite space junk removal companies. Multiple satellite companies and governments would certainly pay for a service that could quickly get up there and sweep this debris from orbit.

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The Perseverance science team finally publishes an update!

9:34 am

The Perseverance science team finally published a new update last week describing the rover’s status, the first such update since December 2025, a hiatus of more than ten months.

This new update provided no explanation for the long gap, though it did give this summary of what the team and the rover have been doing during all of 2026:

After a long hiatus, the Perseverance rover updates page is back. A lot has happened on Mars in the meantime, and with regular updates now resuming, there is plenty to catch up on — Perseverance has been busy. The rover has spent 2026 exploring the “Lac de Charmes” area, an area of valleys and ridges west of the Jezero crater rim that represent a “wild west frontier” for the mission. The rocks in this area are among the oldest Perseverance has encountered. They formed when Mars was still a young planet bombarded by asteroid impacts, long before the sedimentary rocks inside Jezero crater formed in rivers and lakes. They therefore could teach us much about the earliest era of Martian history — and, more broadly, how rocky planets evolved during the tumultuous early history of our solar system.

The science team decided to thoroughly explore this ancient and intriguing terrain first, before deciding which rocks to sample.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Earlier this month I had posted my own update on Perseverance, entitled “What is going on with Perseverance?”, noting the long gap in updates and stating the following:

While there have been no reported issues with the Mars rover Perseverance, and while it appears to be functioning normally as it moves around the hilly barren terrain west of Jezero Crater, there appears to be some sort of indecisiveness in how the science team has been operating the rover for more than a year, with an almost complete black-out of updates to explain what they are doing.

The map to the right provides a sense of this dithering. The last time the rover drilled a core sample was June 6, 2025 (sol 1551), more than fifteen months ago. Since then, the rover first traveled south along the outer rim of Jezero Crater to point A, then west to point B, then west again to point C, then south to point D, then south to point E, then north again to point D, then east passing point B to head north to its present position at point F.

I then added that the rover’s wandering back and forth over the same terrain suggested they were doing a wider survey before picking a drill spot. The team’s update last week confirms this guess, and might even have been prompted by my post.

If so, hallelujah! A pause in updates because they had nothing to report is far better than a pause caused by unstated technical problems.

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Blue Origin’s CEO: “We still think we have a path to launch this year.”

9:12 am

Blue Origin logo

At a recent space panel event run by Blue Origin at its Florida facility, the company’s CEO David Limp reiterated his earlier comments that the company is focused on launching New Glenn again before the end of the year, following the May 28, 2026 launchpad explosion.

“We still think we have a path to launch this year,” he said. Blue Origin’s New Glenn explosion during a prelaunch engine test generated a huge fireball and widespread damages at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Investigators blamed an anomaly at the main oxygen valve on one of the rocket’s BE-4 engines.

His comments provided no new information on the status of the rocket, but it continues to appear the company is pushing hard to meet his proposed schedule.

If so, Blue Origin might finally be functioning like a real competitive company. The May 28th explosion not only destroyed a rocket, it destroyed the company’s only New Glenn launchpad. The general opinion then (not held by me) was that this company wouldn’t fly again for more than a year, based on its past track record (before Limp took over) of slow or even non-achievement.

A truly serious private company would push to get back in flight as fast as possible, and at the time I thought a realistic target date was the end of the year. I also thought Limp would push for such a target date, and he did. On top of this, he has also started construction on a new payload processing facility in Florida, begun work on a second launchpad in Florida as it repairs the first, and accelerated work on the larger 9×4 version of New Glenn. Even if he misses his launch date by a month or so, he will have achieved his real goal, of getting Blue Origin off its duff.

And if he does, he will finally make Blue Origin a true competitor to SpaceX.

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Juice successfully completes its 2nd fly-by of Earth

8:54 am

The grooves of Ganymede
Click for original image.

The European probe Juice yesterday successfully completed its second fly-by of Earth, on its way to Jupiter in July 2031.

The flyby deflected Juice by an angle of 20° compared to its pre-flyby path and increased its velocity by 3.5 km/s. In the four weeks before the flyby, spacecraft operators only had to give Juice one tiny nudge (out of six opportunities set aside) to put it on exactly the right approach trajectory to make the most of Earth’s gravity. They have been tracking the spacecraft extra carefully since 17 August, and will continue to do so until 10 October.

Juice’s closest approach was at 13:45 CEST (11:45 UTC) on 28 September. As Juice flew just 8640 km above the Indian Ocean, it snapped a series of images with its onboard monitoring cameras.

The spacecraft’s name is an acronym for “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer”. Its goal is to study the three large moons of Jupiter (Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede) that are thought to be ice covered and might even have underground oceans. While it took a nice picture of the Moon in this fly-by, I think the picture taken by Juno of Ganymede is more appropriate, as it gives us a foretaste of what to expect. It was taken in May 2023.

Juice has already done one previous fly-by of Earth and one of Venus. It still has to do another Earth fly-by in January 2029 before it finally heads to Jupiter.

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Spinlaunch sold off by satellite division

4:23 pm

Spinlaunch prototype launcher
The Spinlaunch prototype launcher

The launch startup Spinlaunch, which initially made its name by testing a technology for spinning payloads up to escape velocity (as shown in the prototype test facility to the right), had in the last two years refocused its efforts to building its Meridian satellite constellation.

The company has now split.

“SpinLaunch and Meridian Space are separating into two independent companies,” Meridian Space CEO Massimiliano Ladovaz told Payload. “Meridian will carry forward the satcom infrastructure business…SpinLaunch will continue to build on its vision for a lower-cost approach to launch, with further applications in hypersonics to support the Golden Dome program and in the lunar economy.”

Call me maybe: The split comes just weeks before Meridian’s first in-space demo, which is expected to launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare NET Oct. 1.

The Spinlaunch concept I think was never taken very seriously within the space industry, which is why the company began focusing instead on satellites. Meridian raised $30 million in 2025 for its proposed broadband constellation. It now has pushed the spinlaunch part of the company out.

Hat tip reader Nate P.

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September 28, 2026 Quick space links

2:57 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, plus the first link from reader Nate P. 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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NASA approves unmanned Starliner cargo mission for December 2026

1:53 pm

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS in 2024.

In a press conference today, NASA announced it has approved an unmanned cargo mission for Boeing’s Starliner capsule for no earlier than December 2026 and to use that flight as an engineering test to see if the fixes to the capsule’s systems work before authorizing two more manned Starliner missions to ISS.

They have dubbed this cargo mission Starliner-1, apparently to erase the memory of the previous problematic Starliner flights.

You can watch the press conference here. From the press release:

The uncrewed Starliner-1 has the potential to fly in December of this year or January 2027. It will serve as an engineering evaluation mission to verify improved thermal environments, obtain necessary performance data for system qualification, and identify residual risk ahead of crewed missions.

They detailed at great length the work that has been done to pinpoint the cause of the thruster issues, due apparently to corrosion issues on the ground before launch. The thrusters are being replaced with new materials. So have other components. The uncrewed cargo mission is expressly aimed at testing these fixes. As both NASA Jared Isaacman and NASA astronaut Woody Hoburg noted, Boeing’s Starliner program had been hardware and testing poor. To paraphrase their words, you need to test to make sure your hardware will work. Boeing apparently didn’t do this. The cargo flight is to do this kind of flight testing.

Though NASA wants to fly at least two more Starliner manned flights, they will not be approved before this test flight, and only afterward if the agency is satisfied with the flight’s results.

It also appears that NASA is picking up the tab for this cargo flight, treating it as one of the six manned flights in Boeing’s original NASA contract, leaving only five manned flights left. When asked about the cost for the fixes and the cargo mission, and who was paying for it, Dana Weigel, (manager of NASA’s ISS program) vaguely said the cost was $359 million, the same as the other manned missions, and she did so in a manner clearly designed to avoid saying who paid for it. Sadly, no one in the press corps followed up for clarity.

However, this $369 million is not an add-on to NASA’s contract with Boeing. Boeing will essentially fly one less manned mission now within the terms of its contract.

In addition, NASA and Boeing will be working to certify ULA’s Vulcan rocket for manned flights, since the six Atlas-5 rockets that Boeing has purchased from ULA for its Starliner missions are getting old and cannot be replaced with new Atlas-5s because the rocket is retired. Boeing needs another rocket to get Starliner into orbit on future flights. This action is also to deal with the possibility that SpaceX will eventually retire crew Dragon and Falcon 9.

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Starship makes orbit!

9:00 am

Starship today 30 seconds after launch
Starship 30 seconds after launch, on September 28, 2026

Starship/Superheavy successfully achieved its first fully orbital flight, and in the process also deployed 26 operational Starlink satellites, making this also the first revenue-producing Starship launch for SpaceX.

The flight was not perfect. Superheavy lost one engine during the latter part of liftoff, then lost a second engine after stage separation when fired its boost-back burn to bring it back to the gulf off the coast of Texas for a soft vertical splashdown simulating a chopstick capture. Despite the loss of two engines, it appears to complete that soft splashdown as planned, though this is not confirmed.

Starship meanwhile continued firing its own engines to reach a preliminary suborbital flight path. Near the end of that burn it lost one of its outer engines. It nonetheless reached the right preliminary orbit, but because of the engine loss engineers spent about fifteen minutes discussing whether that engine issue would preclude going to full orbit and completing all six orbits. In the end they decided to go to orbit, and were successful.

The ship that successfully deployed all 26 Starlinks, all of which appeared to be operating as expected.

Because of the engine issue, however, the decision was then made to de-orbit early, after completing about two orbits, bringing the ship back over the northern Pacific, likely to have it avoid habitable land as much as possible. At landing Starship successfully completed a soft vertical splashdown, but it then exploded. No recovery of this ship will take place, as occurred on the previous flight.

The leader board for the 2026 launch race:

111 SpaceX
60 China
16 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
12 Russia

For the first time in three years SpaceX no longer leads the entire world combined in total launches. This single American company now trails the rest of the world in successful launches in 2026 by 112 to 111.

The Liberty Bell
“Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all
the inhabitants thereof.” Photo credit: William Zhang

Once again, freedom and private enterprise proves it is the best way to get things done. Step-by-step SpaceX has been developing the most powerful rocket ever conceived, that is also completely reusable. Fifteen years ago, before the company proved reusability was possible with Falcon 9, we were consistently told that such things were impractical and in fact impossible. That pessimistic view came from the government-controlled rockets built by the old established rocket companies which no longer cared much for competition or innovation.

Competition and freedom however allowed SpaceX to arrive and prove those nay-sayers 100% wrong. It has not only resulted in this magnificent new rocket, Starship/Superheavy, it has trained a whole new generation of modern innovative and competitive engineers and managers, willing to take risks and build their own companies. Hence, the renaissance in space in the past decade.

And we’ve only just begun!

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Watching the 14th orbital test flight of Starship/Superheavy

8:19 pm

Starship prototype 41 rolling to launchpad
Starship prototype 41 rolling to launchpad. Screen
capture from a NasaSpaceflight live stream. Click for video

The 14th test flight of Starship/Superheavy is presently scheduled to lift off in a 75 minute long launch window starting at 7:15 am (Central) on September 28, 2026.

The live stream can be found here, beginning around 6;45 am (Central)> Details about the flight plan, which will be the first time Starship will complete multiple full orbits of the Earth, can be found here.

Starship’s initial orbital mission is expected to fly at an altitude approximately 275 km above Earth and complete approximately six orbits around the planet over the course of a nearly 10-hour flight, with splashdown targeted in the Pacific Ocean to the west of Chile.

During those six orbits the ship (prototype #41) will release 26 version 3 Starlink satellites, making this Starship’s first operational flight. It will also use those orbits to test the ship’s systems, then test its thermal protection system during reentry.

Superheavy (prototype #21) meanwhile will use all 33 of its engines to bring it back to the gulf off the coast of Boca Chica, where it will then use its three center engines to attempt a soft vertical splashdown. It will test modifications designed to prevent the “ice clogging” that prevented some engines from firing as planned on the 13th flight, resulting in a hard somewhat uncontrolled splashdown.

If all goes as planned, the 15th flight is expected to follow on October 19, 2026.

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September 22, 2026 Zimmerman appearance on The Space Show

11:09 pm

My almost two hour visit with David Livingston and the Space Show on September 22, 2026 is now available as a podcast.

The audio is available here. Video is available here or here.

It was as usual a worthwhile conversation. I spent the first twenty minutes summarizing my recent essays on the coming wave of new rockets, noting again that freedom and competition, the fundamentals of capitalism, is going to solve the present shortage of launch providers, considering the high demand for such services at this time. The conversation moved on from there.

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NASA to provide update on Boeing’s Starliner at press conference

9:00 am

NASA late yesterday announced it will hold a press conference at 3 pm (Pacific) on September 28, 2026 to “discuss Starliner’s development and plans for regular crew flights to and from the International Space Station.”

The conference will include NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, Dana Weigel, manager of the agency’s Low Earth Orbit Program, astronaut Woody Hoburg, and John Mulholland, vice president and program manager for Boeing’s Starliner program.

At first glance the presence of an astronaut suggests they will announce the next Starliner mission to ISS will be manned, but this is not likely. More likely it indicates NASA and Boeing have agreed on flying an unmanned cargo mission to ISS to test Boeing’s fixes on Starliner of its valve and engine problems, with Hoburg there to express PR confidence in Boeing. It is also likely they will announce a tentative schedule for at least one Starliner manned mission to follow.

What we won’t know until the conference is whether NASA or Boeing is paying for the cargo mission. NASA doesn’t have to, but it might because Boeing appears uninterested in paying for a fourth demo mission, and will thus abandon Starliner without the extra cash.

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Two launches since yesterday, by Rocket Lab and SpaceX

8:49 am

The launch beat marches on. Since yesterday two American companies successfully completed launches on opposite sides of the globe.

First, Rocket Lab yesterday evening successfully completed its 13th launch (out of a 27-launch contract) for the Japanese radar satellite company Synspective, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand.

Next, SpaceX this morning successfully launched a classified payload for the Space Force, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage (B1100) completed its 10th flight (35 days after its previous mission). The two fairings completed their 22nd and 14th flights respectively.

Though the payload was classified, at least one source speculates it was a batch of Starshield satellites, the military’s version of SpaceX’s commercial Starlink satellite, based on the drop zone for the first stage.

The leader board for the 2026 launch race:

110 SpaceX
60 China
16 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
12 Russia

For the first time in three years SpaceX no longer leads the entire world combined in total launches. This single American company now trails the rest of the world in successful launches in 2026 by 112 to 110.

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Tiny nation of San Marino signs Artemis Accords

8:01 am

European signatories to the Artemis Accords

The string of new signatories to the Artemis Accords continues, likely linked to the UN general assembly meeting going on now where the leaders of many nations are in the United States. Today’s new signatory, the Republic of San Marino, is the world’s fifth smallest nation, shown as the tiny dot inside Italy on the map to the right. It becomes the 76th nation to sign the accords.

I have refined the map to the right. Blue represents those countries that have signed the Artemis Accords, pink those nations (Belarus) that have signed on to China’s International Lunar Research Station partnership (ILRS), blue/pink-stripes those nations (Turkey and Serbia) that have signed on to both partnerships, and grey those nations that have not yet signed anything. At the moment, the only European nations in the last category are Moldova, and three nations that were once part of Yugoslavia.

The full list of nations in this American space alliance is as follows:

Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Botswana, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Thailand, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

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September 25, 2026 Quick space links

2:41 pm

Normally courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, but work has called him away for the next week or so. I ask my readers to email me links until Jay returns. Nate P. today provided today’s first two links.

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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Blue Origin successfully raises $10 billion in its first outside investment round

12:59 pm

Blue Origin logo

In its first round to raise private investment capital from sources other than Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin has now raised $10 billion, $8 billion from outside investors and $2 billion from Bezos.

Jeff Bezos’s space company, Blue Origin, has raised $10 billion in its first outside financing round, valuing the business at about $140 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ). Bezos is contributing a fresh $2 billion of his own money to the round.

That brings Bezos’s cumulative investment in Blue Origin to roughly $30 billion since he founded the company in 2000, with much of the funding coming from sales of his Amazon stock, said WSJ. Additional commitments could still increase the size of the financing round, the newspaper reported.

When Blue Origin announced this funding round in July 2026, its goal was to raise $10 billion. Two months later it appears the company has succeeded in meeting that goal, despite the May 2026 launchpad explosion that has grounded the company’s New Glenn rocket until at least the end of this year.

The success of this funding round is really an endorsement of Blue Origin’s CEO, David Limp, whom Bezos hired in 2023 to replace Bob Smith, who essentially wasted more than five years from 2017 to 2023 accomplishing nothing while putting the company far behind SpaceX. Limp has been pushing to get Blue Origin revitalized, and it does appear he is succeeding. At least, the investment community thinks so.

Hat tip reader Nate P.

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Webb finds more elements than predicted too soon after the Big Bang

9:30 am

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have now detected a whole range of elements only 500 million years after the Big Bang, elements not expected to have been created by stellar evolution until much much later.

When the universe was still in its infancy – only 500 million years after the Big Bang or about 3% of its current age – some of the universe’s earliest stars and galaxies had already formed. Astronomers have long predicted that much of the gas surrounding these young galaxies must have remained rather pristine, composed of mostly hydrogen and helium, the primordial ingredients available in the newborn cosmos.

According to a study published by astronomers at the University of Arizona in Nature Astronomy, this picture likely is not correct. Instead, galaxies were already seeding the cosmos with heavy elements, such as oxygen and carbon, much earlier than astronomers expected. “We observed that heavy elements escaped from galaxies very, very early in cosmic time,” said Yongda Zhu, first author of the paper and postdoctoral researcher at the U of A Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory. “Not only were the galaxies producing these elements, but they were also dispersing them, possibly seeding other galaxies.”

You can read the paper here [pdf]. Based on the data, these early galaxies are remarkably similar in make-up to galaxies in our own time, something that all cosmological theories had said could not happen. It was expected to take billions of years to produce these heavier elements.

The researchers attempt to account for this contradiction between theory and data by proposing that some of the first stars could evolve and die much faster than expected, thus seeding space with these heavier elements sooner.

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Local aboriginal council in Australia rejects Southern Launch’s spaceport

9:16 am

Australia's spaceports
Australia’s spaceports. Red dot: active. Red X: proposed or defunct

The local aboriginal council that has jurisdiction over the land that the spaceport startup Southern Launch wishes to build its launch facility has rejected a request for an environmental waiver.

The proposed Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex is located 30 kilometres from Port Lincoln on land it leases privately. Southern Launch had sought to have the heritage agreement officially amended so it could build a complex that would offer space mission services.

However, because the proposed site is a recognised conservation area for native vegetation and fauna, the Native Vegetation Council rejected the motion. Rebecca Boulton from Birdlife Australia welcomed the upholding of the heritage agreement in place at the site since 1987, a habitat she said was home to two endangered bird species.

Southern Launch has been very successful with its Koonibba Test Range, where it signed multiple contracts with several recoverable capsule companies, allowing them to land their capsules there, with Varda already doing so about a half dozen times.

Koonibba however is not on the coast. The spaceport has been attempting to build a second facility on land it has leased at Whaler’s Way, as shown on the map. It however has been faced with both local and national opposition from the same kinds of leftist groups that have harassed SpaceX in the U.S., using trumped up environmental issues and lawfare to block development. In Australia those groups have allied themselves with various aboriginal land councils. In the case of the proposed Atakani spaceport in northeast Australia, this activist alliance killed the project..

It now appears to be doing the same to Southern Launch.

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