SpaceX today successfully launched another 28 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its 4th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
159 SpaceX (a new record)
75 China
15 Rocket Lab
15 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 159 to 127.
It turns out that one week after a judge approved a plea deal in early November between Boeing and the Justice Department that would allows the company to avoid a criminal prosecution for its malfeasance and fraud that led to two 737-Max airplane crashes that killed a total of 346 people — thus dismissing the pending criminal charges — the families of the victims filed an appeal, asking a higher court to overturn that deal.
The families had argued before U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) non-prosecution agreement violated the judicial review provisions, which was reached behind closed doors without the families’ statutory right to confer. The writ of mandamus argues that no substantive proceedings before Judge O’Connor were held before he made his decision in favor of Boeing.
…DOJ initially presented Judge O’Connor with a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) that he rejected. Instead of coming back with something more stringent, DOJ presented Boeing with the lesser punishment of an NPA in which Boeing would merely pay a $243.6 million penalty, give $444.5 million to be divided amongst the 346 families, and make additional investments in its safety and compliance. In exchange, the DOJ agreed to dismiss the criminal charge against Boeing. On November 6, Judge O’Connor approved this revised NPA and granted the government’s motion to dismiss.
The families now look forward to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse this decision through its writ of mandamus. In the writ, Paul Cassell, pro bono, attorneys for the families and professor of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, argued on behalf of the families’ that the government’s NPA with Boeing would not provide sufficient oversight of Boeing and failed to account for the fact that Boeing’s criminal behavior was found to have caused the deaths of 346 crash victims. Boeing’s CEO and its lawyers had admitted to the fraud in a guilty plea issued four years ago.
In 2021 Boeing itself pleaded guilty to malfeasance and corruption charges, and was given three years to clean up its act or face criminal prosecution. When after three years Justice found Boeing had instead lied to it while doing little to fix things, it first proceeded with prosecution, only to suddenly back off and make this plea deal.
Thus, the families’ case is strong. Boeing is an admitted criminal and has also done nothing to change its behavior. Whether the families can get the plea deal overturned, however, remains unknown. The legal system no longer can be trusted when it comes to big government contractors like Boeing. The government acts routinely to protect them (as Justice is doing here), and thus there will be heavy political pressure on the courts to turn down this appeal.
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.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 27, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The science team labels this a “twisted surface,” to which I think we all can agree. What we are looking at is a geological feature found only on Mars in only one region that has been labeled “taffy terrain” by scientists. According to a 2014 paper, the scientists posit that this material must be some sort of “a viscous fluid,” naturally flowing downward into “localized depressions.” Because of its weird nature I have posted many cool images of it in the past (see here, here, here, here, here, and here).
In the case of the image to the right, the red dot marks the peak of a small knob, with the green dot on the upper left the low point about 900 feet below. As you can see, the taffy has migrated into the depressions, as some flowing material would.
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Click for original movie.
Using a new instrument on the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii astronomers have not only discovered a massive exoplanet orbiting a star, they have been able to actually photograph the planet itself.
The arrow in the picture to the right shows that planet. That picture is a screen capture from a short movie complied from five observations taken over several months earlier this year, showing the planet as it orbited the star, the light of which is blocked out so as to not blind the camera. From the press release:
The newly discovered planet, HIP 54515 b, orbits a star 271 light-years away in the constellation Leo. With nearly 18 times Jupiter’s mass, it circles its star at about Neptune’s distance from our Sun. But the star and planet appear very close when seen from Earth; roughly the size that a baseball seen 100 km away would appear. The SCExAO system produced extremely sharp images allowing us to see the planet.
The astronomers also used this new instrument to image a brown dwarf star with a mass equivalent to sixty Jupiters about 169 light years away.
Billionaire Jared Isaacman
Nothing that happened at yesterday’s Senate hearing of Jared Isaacman’s nomination to be NASA’s next administrator was a surprise, or very significant, even if most media reports attempted to imply what happened had some importance. Here are just a small sampling:
To be fair, all of these reports focused on simply reporting what happened during the hearing, and the headlines above actually provide a good summary. Isaacman committed to the Artemis program, touted SLS and Orion as the fastest way to get Americans back to the Moon ahead of the Chinese, and dotted all the “i”s and crossed all the “t”s required to convince the senators he will continue the pork projects they so dearly love. He also dodged efforts by several partisan Democrats to imply Isaacman’s past business dealings with Musk and SpaceX posed some sort of conflict of interest.
What none of the news reports did — and I am going to do now — is take a deeper look. Did anything Isaacman promise in connection with NASA and its Artemis program mean anything in the long run? Is the race to get back to the Moon ahead of China of any importance?
I say without fear that all of this is blather, and means nothing in the long run. The American space program is no longer being run by NASA, and all of NASA’s present plans with Artemis, using SLS, Orion, and the Lunar Gateway station, are ephemeral, transitory, and will by history be seen as inconsequential by future space historians.
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Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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An evening pause: Performed live c2009.
Hat tip Cotour.
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.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on October 28, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled by the science team as “mottled ridged terrain,” it shows a relatively flat area of scattered broken-up flat-topped ridges and knobs, following no clear pattern of formation.
In trying to research this, I could only find one paper [pdf] discussing this kind of mottled ridges that did a survey of similar features across a large region to the northwest. That paper could not determine what caused such features, but came up with hypothesis. From the abstract:
While it is not possible to determine the precise formation mechanism of these polygonal ridge networks from our new data, their formation can be assessed in terms of three possibly separate processes: (1) polygonal fracture formation, (2) fracture filling and (3) exhumation. We find that polygonal
fracture formation by impact cratering and/or desiccation of sedimentary host deposits is consistent with our results and previous spectral studies. Once the polygonal fractures have formed, fracture filling by clastic dikes and/or mineral precipitation from aqueous circulation is most consistent with our results. Exhumation, probably by aeolian processes that eroded much of these ancient Noachian terrains where the ridges are present caused the filled fractures to lie in relief as ridges today.
To put this in plain terms, the initial polygon-patterned cracks were formed by either an impact or the drying out of the surface (similar to the cracks seen on dried mud here on Earth). Both could have contributed. Then material welled up from below, either lava or mud, that hardened to fill the cracks. Later erosion by wind stripped away the surface, leaving behind these broken ridges.
As always, the location adds some very interesting context.
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It is the start of another month, so it is time again to post my monthly update of the never-ending sunspot cycle on the Sun, using NOAA’s own monthly update of its graph of sunspot activity and annotating it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.
The green dot on the graph below indicates the level of sunspot activity on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere during the month of November. And once again, the Sun surprised us, producing far less sunspots than expected, based on the April 2025 prediction by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists (as indicated by the purple/magenta line).
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The French Guiana spaceport. The Diamant launchsite is labeled “B.”
Click for full resolution image. (Note: The Ariane-5 pad is now the
Ariane-6 pad.)
France’s space agency CNES, which has taken back management from Arianespace of the French Guiana spaceport it owns, has now been found liable for destroying a protected habitat as it began construction to upgrade the old abandoned Diamant rocket launch site into a pad for several of Europe’s new commercial rocket startups.
In March 2022, the regional environmental authority of French Guiana (DGTM) formally informed CNES that it could not begin demolition or earthworks at the Diamant site without first securing the legally required species and water-law authorisations. Despite this, the agency leveled the area in the preceding weeks, with the environmental NGO CERATO discovering the destruction in April 2022.
In August 2022, the DGTM carried out an unannounced inspection of the Diamant site and found further destruction of protected habitats linked to the agency’s PV2 solar farm project. In October 2022, the PV2 project manager informed DGTM that CNES had known about the presence of protected species on the PV2 site since 1 July 2022, yet began earthworks anyway.
In response to repeated flouting of DGTM procedures, the Prefect of French Guiana, the top regional authority, issued a stop-work order requiring CNES to halt all works at both sites.
It appears this stop-work order has contributed to delays in construction. The news now is that the case appears to have been settled.
The agency has been ordered to repair the damage within three years or face a fine of €50,000. It will also be required to finance ecological compensation actions elsewhere on the grounds of the Guiana Space Centre. The conclusion of the lawsuit will allow the agency to fully resume construction at the site, which it had been ordered to stop in late 2022.
In other words, CNES has been told to spend money elsewhere at the spaceport to make the local environmental authorities happy. It remains unclear how these delays have or even will impact the plans of the Spanish rocket startup PLD, which hopes to do the first orbital launch of its Miura-5 rocket from this site in 2026. PLD expects the first flight-worthy Miura-5 to be delivered to French Guiana early next year, so the delays in French Guiana have not yet effected its plans. That might now change if the site won’t be ready as planned.
This whole story however does indicate a fundamental problem within all of Europe’s space regulatory infrastructure that in the future is likely to hinder the development of its new commercial space industry. Europe’s leadership likes its red tape, and has done nothing to reduce it as it has shifted from the government-run model (where it controls and owns everything) to the capitalism model (where it buys what it needs from an independent competing private sector).
