April 17, 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.
- NASA approves providing Europe’s Mars Franklin rover its rocket, landing engines, and radioisotope heater units
The agency has chosen to purchase a Falcon Heavy for the planned 2028 launch. Meanwhile, the rover’s lander remains unfinished, though Airbus and Sener have contracts to create it. Russia was originally supposed to provide it, but was kicked out of the project when it invaded the Ukraine in 2022.
- Video of a 1959 Project Orion test using chemical explosive charges to lift a capsule
This was only a preliminary demonstration. Project Orion’s eventual goal was to prove you could propel a spacecraft through a series of nuclear explosions in order to generate thrust.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
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.
- NASA approves providing Europe’s Mars Franklin rover its rocket, landing engines, and radioisotope heater units
The agency has chosen to purchase a Falcon Heavy for the planned 2028 launch. Meanwhile, the rover’s lander remains unfinished, though Airbus and Sener have contracts to create it. Russia was originally supposed to provide it, but was kicked out of the project when it invaded the Ukraine in 2022.
- Video of a 1959 Project Orion test using chemical explosive charges to lift a capsule
This was only a preliminary demonstration. Project Orion’s eventual goal was to prove you could propel a spacecraft through a series of nuclear explosions in order to generate thrust.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
On data
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-04-ai-scientific-papers-usable-fast.html
A.I….how can an anti-gravity device be built?
It is worth noting that NASA has one other contribution to the Rosalind Franklin rover: the Mars Organic Molecule Analyzer (MOMA), a mass spectrometer designed to search for organic compounds and biosignatures in Martian soil. Goddard built it, with some help from the Max Planck Institute.
But MOMA was contributed at the outset of the project; it’s not part of this post-Ukraine invasion rescue package.
Niven and Pournelle launched a spaceship powered by successive nuclear bomb detonations to save earth (Footfall, 1985). Can’t be too difficult if some sci-fi guys could make it work.
Before they were “sci-fi guys” Niven was a mathematician and Pournelle was an aerospace engineer at Boeing. Not exactly two random schlubs off the street. Exceptional men. In a previous chapter of my life I was acquainted with both of them.
Niven and (especially) Pournelle were quite familiar with Project Orion, of course….
It’s an intriguing concept worth more development, even if it does get Gary Church far too excited.
It would have to be built on the Moon, though it actually doesn’t work best in a vacuum.
NSWRs are more scalable less jarring ride, but harsher thermal issues.
In space, there are so many options. You could have the pulse-Orions release a bomb an hour, or per day. It might be better to have a stream aimed at a pusher plate with no hole, perhaps.
As for the smaller Orion:
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/artemis/artemis-2s-heat-shield-seems-to-have-aced-its-trial-by-fire
Just the thing to replace Rutan’s feeble SS1.
Leave that one outside for the pigeons. That or give it to Texas and call it a shuttle. They won’t know the difference.
NSF’s This Week In Spaceflight reported that Sierra Space has completed the acoustic testing of the Tenacity Dream Chaser spacecraft, which tells me that they intend to continue launching it for service, despite NASA’s “restructured” contract to use it for ISS cargo resupply.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1qTLL94J50#t=776 (1 minute)
RocketLaunch.Live lists two Dream Chaser launches on Vulcan launch vehicles in 2026, but it remains to be seen whether either can happen this year.
Bless them. They and SpaceX should have been the down-selects.
Looks like NG just aced another flight:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bW1sJ6jygxY&pp=ygUcVGhlc3BhY2UgY29tbXVuaXR5IG5ldyBnbGVubg%3D%3D
I don’t normally give a whoop…but when I do…
There it is.
Congratulations to SpaceX for its 600th landing of a booste today. (This was B1097, on its 8th flight).
I’d love to congratulate Blue Origin on the first launch and successful landing of a previously flown New Glenn booster, but it seems awkward with what looks like the customer payload stuck in a doomed orbit.
Well, that stinks: AST confirms that the satellite is deorbiting.
AST SpaceMobile Addresses Today’s Orbital Launch of BlueBird 7 on the New Glenn Launch Vehicle
During the New Glenn 3 mission, BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle. While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited. The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy.
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260419512905/en/AST-SpaceMobile-Addresses-Todays-Orbital-Launch-of-BlueBird-7-on-the-New-Glenn-Launch-Vehicle
Vulcan just dodged a bullet. There, it’s the upper stage that bails them out.
Sad about NG….the payload loss put the kibosh on the party they had planned.
I hear it would really have raised the roof
(runs)
One positive, one negative for Blue today. It’s good to see them reusing a first stage, I hope that they can accelerate their launch rate, but I am curious what happened with the second stage, and how long it will take to resolve.
With one ground failure and one on-orbit failure, I hope this year for Blue with New Glenn isn’t shaping up to be like the one that SpaceX had with Starship last year.
Jeff Wright:
“I don’t normally give a whoop…but when I do…
There it is.”
Looking at the Tag Team lyrics for the 1993 tune, a comment suggests itself:
“W-H-double O-M-P as I flow,
Got a message to those who don’t know
One, Two, Three, on the mic check
If you gonna front me you betta’ respect
Illin’ and skillin’, my words will be thrillin’
Sucka MC’s; best just stick to chillin’
Whoomp there it is, I thought you knew!”
Need to up your game, son.
In terms of fusion and shock waves, the LLNL guys got game:
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-tiny-voids-fusion-stable-powerful.html
This technology is also good for oil and gas extraction and defense purposes:
https://dx.doi.org/10.1103/3wgy-sgkz
Looks like Blue Origin launched a wet workshop and didn’t even know it ;)
Of Note:
China’s human spaceflight agency has selected 2 Pakistani astronaut candidates–Muhammad Zeeshan Ali & Khurram Daud–who will travel to China for training. One of them will be selected as a payload specialist and become the 1st foreign astronaut to visit Tiangong.
Link to CMS announcement (in Chinese, you’ll have to auto translate it): https://www.cmse.gov.cn/xwzx/202604/t20260422_57417.html
More powerful directed energy technologies
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-route-plasma-based-particle.html
This might get Starshot or something like it back on the rails.
Let Iron Beam research fund it.
Jared Isaacman was testifying on the Hill, and he had some interesting things to say, actually. And here is one of them, from Eric Berger:
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman just testified before Congress that both the Lunar Gateway habitable modules delivered to NASA (HALO and I-HAB) were corroded.
Here are Isaacman’s remarks on HAL and I-HAB in full:
“I appreciate the contributions, and look forward to working with them on how we could potentially repurpose hardware to surface applications. I’ll tell you, at the Gateway program — outside of the PPE hardware that we’re going use for the nuclear power and propulsion demonstration — the only two habitable volumes that were delivered both were corroded. And that’s unfortunate because it would have delayed, probably beyond 2030, the application of Gateway.”
Video and transcript of the hearing:
https://www.c-span.org/program/house-committee/nasa-administrator-testifies-on-2027-budget-request-following-successful-artemis-ii-mission/677879
Set aside HALO for the moment . . . ESA peeps are pushing back hard on this on X, basically calling Isaacman a liar. Interestingly the claim is made that I-Hab has not even reached critical design review (CDR) yet, which if true is actually even *worse* if you think about it.
Meanwhile, Berger is busy dialing up his sources to figure out the truth of it.
Richard M,
I saw some of that discussion. If Isaacman is lying, it should be fairly easy to produce documentation to that effect, but instead all the questioners got were insults and proclamations that everything was fine. Not a single link to anything, even when they were presented with good sources saying the opposite. But we do live in a post-truth world where if you say something often enough it becomes truth, and people have stopped trying to persuade, instead trying to browbeat others into submission, so ain’t we got fun?
Jeff Wright wrote: “Looks like Blue Origin launched a wet workshop and didn’t even know it”
Except for that reentry in a few days part.
Richard M,
Euro-squawking notwithstanding, I see no reason to disbelieve Isaacman on the corrosion controversy. This was not crucial to his case for killing – oops, “pausing” – Gateway but was more by way of being a bit of icing on the cake.
The Euros would have been smarter to just shut up, take their lumps and hope for better times ahead – like Boeing has been doing. All of this maledicta is not going to curry any favor with Isaacman and, to be blunt, he’s the guy who gets to decide what level of involvement the Euros get to have anent lunar surface operations going forward. When it comes right down to it, we don’t need the Euros at all. JAXA would be delighted to take up their slack.
This contretemps, like the weaseling about NATO and the Iran War, is just one more case of Europe indulging increasingly frayed delusions of grandeur – or mere relevance.
Just put the Gateway in the nose of the Artemis III core in place of the ICPS (only one left–for Arty IV)–only bolted to the SLS proper.
There is your Starship docking practice for Orion in case Starship itself is delayed…again.
Do it outside ISS to put on a show. Elon and Bezos don’t care about debris–so don’t sweat the popcorning either.
Heck–there’s a free ISS floorspace extension—just grab it. Sign it over to Gene Meyers.
In the news:
Plasma coatings
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-plasma-spray-technique-tungstencopper-coatings.html
Engineers have developed a new high-performance tungsten–copper metallic coating in one step using plasma spray, for future high heat flux (HHF) plasma facing components (PFC), specifically in the divertor target plate. The work is published in the journal Surface and Coatings Technology….o overcome this, the Nottingham research team engineered a functionally graded coating in which the composition gradually transitioned from copper-rich at the base to tungsten-rich at the surface. Rather than stacking distinct layers, the material changes smoothly across its thickness, reducing stress and improving bonding.
The team successfully produced a coating graded continuously from 0% to 100% weight percent tungsten, achieving a dense and structurally stable material.
Carbon nanotubes
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-carbon-nanotubes-gap-copper.html
In a paper published in the journal Science, researchers describe a method for adding a chemical to carbon nanotube bundles that brings them closer to copper’s ability to conduct electricity…”These fibers are five times stronger and half the weight of conventional overhead cables while remaining stable in dry conditions,” noted the study authors in their paper. “Specific conductivity values reach 17,345 Siemens-meter squared per kilogram, which is superior to that of metals.”
If Jared really represents America, and not just Elon—then he needs to stand up to Musk too—just like Limp did to Bezos.
Have Gateway/SLS as a Starship docking target for Orion—the god of all Agenas–if Lunar Starship cannot fly by such and such a date.
If SpaceX cant fly it to LEO—rest assured my guys in Huntsville will.
Getting to LEO isn’t an issue. What SpaceX is trying to master is being able to consistently bring back a large upper stage while testing variations on their tiles to determine what works best. A hundred feet per second or so of ΔV is all that was needed, well within the remaining propellant Starship carried. It does not need to be a complete lander, only high enough fidelity that Orion can complete a rendezvous and docking as NASA expects to perform again. To keep an SLS core in orbit long enough to be useful, and then deorbit it successfully, would require extensive modifications (power, guidance, orbital maneuvering, avionics, an active cooling system, the RS-25s being reengineered to be space-startable, etc.) and likely another test launch just to ensure that a core stage can be safely deorbited. As the SLS’s role is clearly being continually descoped, that isn’t going to happen.