February 11, 2026 special hour-long Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in four parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Author: Robert Zimmerman
Tom Goes Nomad – How Victorians Built This Lighthouse at Sea
An evening pause: Built fast and cheaply, despite real cutting edge engineering challenges, at the turn of the 19th century.
Hat tip Cotour.
February 11, 2026 Quick space links
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.
- Video of Long March 10A first stage landing vertically in the ocean during test launch yesterday
The footage shows the stage landed near the structure of cables that has been designed to catch it. Either it missed, or engineers decided to miss intentionally on this first attempt.
- FCC approves Amazon’s second-generation Leo system, expanding constellation to 7,000+ satellites
This approval suggests the FCC is going to also approve Amazon’s request for a waiver on its original license requirement to get 1,616 satellites launched by July.
- On this day in 2001 ISS’s first laboratory module, Destiny, was installed by the crew of STS-98
The tweet includes a great picture of the entire station taken by that crew as the shuttle was leaving.
SpaceX completes extensive tank tests on next Superheavy booster
Link here. The story details the repeated tank tests just completed on Superheavy booster prototype #19, intended to fly on the 12th Superheavy/Starship test flight now targeting a mid-March launch.
The article also describes the extensive repairs and upgrades to the Massey test stand facility following the explosion during a static fire test in 2025.
It does appear that the issues that caused the two recent blow-outs of Superheavy boosters in the past few months have been fixed, and that flight testing will resume in about a month.
A sculptured Martian landscape
Click for original.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 4, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The science team labels this landscape “olivine-rich plains”, which is a magnesium iron silicate mineral of some industrial value that is quite common on Earth. Its presence here suggests there could be other valuable minerals in this region.
I post the image because the landscape is so weird and beautiful. The orange color suggests these ridges are covered with dust, if not made of dust entirely. The small areas with a greenish tint that appear to mostly appear on north-facing cliffs could be frost, except this is in the southern hemisphere where north-facing cliffs get more sunlight. As it was autumn when this picture was taken frost is an unlikely explanation.
More likely the green indicates exposures of bedrock or coarser boulders.
» Read more
SpaceX launches 24 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX today successfully launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its third flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The 2026 launch race:
16 SpaceX
7 China
2 Rocket Lab
1 Russia
These numbers will definitely change in the next 24 hours, as there are launches planned from China, Russia, Europe, and ULA tomorrow, and a SpaceX Dragon manned launch to ISS the next day.
ULA’s new management predicts it will achieve 18-22 launches in 2026
Before Tory Bruno resigned as CEO of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) to go work for Blue Origin, he had predicted in August last year that ULA was primed to complete two launches per month for the rest of ’25 and throughout ’26.
That prediction did not happen, as the company was only able to do four launches in the last five months of 2025, and no launches so far in 2026.
Yesterday the new management of ULA insisted that Bruno’s prediction was still reasonable, and that the company will complete between 18 to 22 launches before the end of this year.
Speaking during a virtual media roundtable on Feb. 10, Gary Wentz, ULA’s vice president of Atlas and Vulcan Programs, said the company aims to launch two to four Atlas 5 missions and 16 to 18 Vulcan missions. He said the Vulcan rockets will be split between pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and pad 3 at Vandenberg Space Force Base. “It’s a balance. We’re working with our customers to determine specific priorities and order of missions and in the case of Space Force and NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), to determine which missions they wan to get off with higher priority,” Wentz said. “And as we finalize that over the next about six to eight months out of the mission, then we’ll assign whether or not its going to be an Atlas mission or a Vulcan mission.”
John Elbon, the interim CEO following the departure of Tory Bruno in December, said that the company has a “strong commitment” from their commercial and government customers, citing a backlog of more than 80 missions.
That backlog is mostly split between ULA’s big contract to launch Amazon’s Leo satellites and a variety of different agencies in the Pentagon. Both are desperate to get their satellites into space, and it appears ULA is struggling to figure out how to do it. In its early years (from 2007 to 2016) the company was generally able to average about one launch a month, but since then that launch rate as been less than half that. To not only return to those launch rates from a decade ago but to almost double them will be challenging, to say the least.
OHB Italia wins $96 million contract to build Ramses probe to visit the asteroid Apophis
A cartoon (not to scale) showing Apophis’s
path in 2029
The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday announced that it has awarded the aerospace company OHB Italia a $96 million contract to build Ramses probe to rendezvous with the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it makes its next close fly-by of Earth in 2029.
This contract is in addition to the $75 million development contract awarded OHB Italia in 2024. According to the company’s press release here:
The launch is scheduled for April 2028, with a rendezvous with Apophis planned for February 2029, approximately two months before its close approach to Earth. The spacecraft will accompany the asteroid until August 2029, in order to observe in detail how Earth’s tidal forces modify its shape, rotation, orbit and surface characteristics.
The initiative also benefits from strong international cooperation. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), drawing on its well-established expertise in asteroid science, will contribute by providing launch service onboard an H3 rocket, the spacecraft’s solar arrays and a Thermal Infrared Imager, further reinforcing the project’s global dimension.
In addition, two cubesats will be launched with Ramses and deployed once the spacecraft reaches Apophis.
This schedule is very tight, which places great pressure on OHB, especially because European space projects are traditionally built slowly after years of planning. ESA almost never does things fast like this.
At the moment, Osiris-Apex (formerly Osiris-Rex) is the only spacecraft that is on its way to Apophis.
Rocket startup Stoke Space raises an additional $350 million in private investment capital
Stoke’s Nova rocket, designed to be
completely reusable.
The rocket startup Stoke Space yesterday announced that its most recent fund-raising round has raised an additional $350 million in private investment capital above the original target of $510 million.
Stoke Space Technologies, the rocket company developing fully and rapidly reusable medium-lift launch vehicles, announced today an extension of its previous Series D financing, bringing the total amount raised in the round to $860 million. The round was initially announced in October 2025 at $510 million. That funding focused on completing activation of Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla., and expanding production capacity for the Nova launch vehicle. Stoke will use the additional capital to accelerate future elements of its product roadmap.
In total the company has now raises $1.34 billion. Though it has been moving steadily towards the first test launch of its totally reusable Nova rocket, it has so far refused to announce any launch dates. Based on all accounts, it appears that launch could occur before the end of this year, but nothing is confirmed.
Stoke’s ability to raise so much capital contrasts sharply with the failure of the British rocket startup Orbex, as noted in my previous post. Investors know that when Stoke is ready to launch from Florida, it will be able to do so, and so they have confidence in the company. With Orbex no one was willing to invest because the investors recognized that red tape was handicapping the company.
British rocket startup Orbex goes under
The prototype of Orbex’s never-launched Prime rocket,
on the launchpad in 2022
After waiting four years to get the necessary launch licenses from the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), delays that forced it to abandon its preferred spaceport in Sutherland to go to the SaxaVord spaceport in the Shetland Islands, the British rocket startup Orbex today announced its effort to find a buyer or new financing had failed and it is going into receivership with the goal of selling off its assets.
Orbex has filed a notice of intention to appointment Administrators and will continue trading while all options for the future of the company are explored, including potential sale of all or parts of its business or assets. The notice provides short-term protection and allows the business time to secure as positive an outcome as possible for its creditors, employees and wider stakeholders.
The funding required for Orbex to remain a viable business was sought from a variety of public and private investors during its Series D funding round, which has ultimately failed. Several merger and acquisition opportunities have also been explored, with none resulting in a favourable outcome.
To repeat this company’s sad story, Orbex had hoped to do its first launch from the proposed Sutherland spaceport on the north coast of Scotland in 2022, but was blocked for four years because of red tape. First, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority would not issue the spaceport and launch licenses. Second, local opposition delayed approvals as well. Those delays ate into the company’s resources, until it became entirely dependent on grants from the UK government (some through the European Space Agency) to keep it afloat.
By 2024 Orbex realized launching from Sutherland was impossible, and it then switched to the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands. This forced more delays because the company had no facilities there. It had already spent a fortune building everything for Sutherland.
There will be many who will blame this failure on the difficulty of rocket science, but it appears the fault almost entirely lies with the UK government and its odious regulatory regime. Neither Sutherland nor SaxaVord have been able to get anything off the ground, and it appears right now that rocket companies are going everywhere else to find launch sites. New rockets must launch and fail so that they can eventually succeed. The sense I get from the CAA is that it is treating every launch not as a test but as an operational launch that must succeed. Orbex couldn’t meet that standard.
Nor can any other rocket startup. At the moment SaxoVord has only one customer planning to launch, the German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg, but after a static fire explosion in 2024 blocked the launch nothing has happened since. I suspect the company is having problems getting new launch approvals from the CAA.
China completes launch abort test of Mengzhou capsule; also vertically lands Long March 10A 1st stage in ocean
Click for source.
China today completed a major test for its future manned lunar program. In launch for the first time the first stage of its new Long March 10A, it not only succeeded in completing a launch abort of its next generation Mengzhou manned capsule — intended not only for its space station but for its manned lunar program — the first stage successfully completed a vertical soft splashdown in the ocean.
The uncrewed vessel took off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on the southern island of Hainan aboard a Long March-10 prototype test rocket at 11am on Wednesday.
The Mengzhou vessel separated from the rocket shortly after launch, before splashing down in the ocean at its designated landing spot, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).
The first stage of the Long March-10 rocket also safely splashed down in its designated ocean landing spot, CASC said. The state-owned aerospace contractor developed both the rocket and the crewed spacecraft.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, video of the launch can be seen here. Jay also found two additional images, one showing the stage just before splashdown standing vertical (as shown in the picture to the right) and the other of the stage floating in the water just before it was picked up by a recovery vessel. According to comments at these tweets, it is speculated that the interstage unit that connected the capsule to the stage was either ejected at landing or was torn off when the stage hit the water.
This is a major achievement for China. It gets it closer to being able to use Mengzhou for longer missions to places like the Moon.
The modular Mengzhou spacecraft has two variants: a seven-astronaut near-Earth model designed to support the country’s Tiangong space station and a model with a smaller crew capacity for missions to the moon. The latter is expected to work in tandem with the Lanyue lunar surface lander, designed to carry two astronauts to the moon’s surface.
The soft splashdown of the Long March 10A first stage also gets China closer to its first reuse of a rocket.
I must note that this success is part of a larger story about China’s space industry that is not so hopeful.
» Read more
Peter Gabriel – In Your Eyes
An evening pause: Performed live 1993.
Hat tip Ferris Akel.