April 27, 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.
- New dates for future American ISS manned missions: Crew 13 (September 12, 2026); Crew 14 (March 2027); Crew 15/Starliner-2 (October 2027)
Before that Starliner manned mission an unmanned cargo mission must happen first, and it must go off without a hitch.
- Video of Russian astronauts during spacewalk in 2018, finding the hole drilled in the Soyuz capsule before launch
Though they had sealed the hole on the inside of the capsule, they wanted to look at it on the outside to confirm it was man-made. Though the Russians have said they figured out who drilled the hole, eight years later they still refuse to tell anyone.
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.
- New dates for future American ISS manned missions: Crew 13 (September 12, 2026); Crew 14 (March 2027); Crew 15/Starliner-2 (October 2027)
Before that Starliner manned mission an unmanned cargo mission must happen first, and it must go off without a hitch.
- Video of Russian astronauts during spacewalk in 2018, finding the hole drilled in the Soyuz capsule before launch
Though they had sealed the hole on the inside of the capsule, they wanted to look at it on the outside to confirm it was man-made. Though the Russians have said they figured out who drilled the hole, eight years later they still refuse to tell anyone.
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
Shortcut?
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-interplanetary-shortcut-mars.html
Break out of the box
https://phys.org/news/2026-04-ideas-physics-based.html
Doesn’t look like Bob is going to cover it tonight, but ULA successfully launched 29 more Leo satellites for Amazon on mission LA-06 tonight. That brings the Leo constellation up to 270 satellites.
This launch is remarkable for two other reasons as well. 1) In a demonstration of its increased launch cadence, ULA launched this Atlas V 551 — its most complex configuration with five solid rocket boosters — just 23 days after launching LA-05 from the same pad. I’ve said for quite some time that ULA’s launch cadence is driven by the availability of payloads, and this launch proves it.
ULA’s next launch is scheduled to be LA-07 on 22 May, just 25 days from now.
2) ULA rolled the vehicle to the pad, conducted all necessary launch preps, fueled the rocket, and launched it all within 14 hours. With two VIFs now feeding the same launch pad, this feat demonstrated the possibility of an even faster launch tempo than 23 days — twice as fast potentially. They should be able to get faster still when their Vandenberg pad comes back online.
All in all, a good show by ULA.
Oh, and in other news, the SLS core stage for Artemis III was delivered to KSC today. This will soon enable stacking of the full-up SLS for the next mission. Then we will have to wait for Starship to be ready. That will probably be a multi-year wait.
Atlas V has always been a good rocket. They could fit in AN-124s.
mkent: based on historical performance the SLS for Artemis III won’t be fully stacked and tested for another year and a half or more. As for Isaacman, he claims to be confident both Blue Origin and SpaceX will deliver their landers in good time. It’s too bad that Congress never actually cared if we returned to the Moon, and so didn’t bother to pay for a lander for most of a decade after they created the SLS.
“I’ve said for quite some time that ULA’s launch cadence is driven by the availability of payloads, and this launch proves it.”
Last month the Space Force literally had a GPS III sat ready to go, on site at CCSFS, for a Vulcan launch, and reassigned it to SpaceX on March 20. SpaceX just launched it on April 21, so I think we can say with confidence that was an *available* payload.
P.S. “ULA rolled the vehicle to the pad, conducted all necessary launch preps, fueled the rocket, and launched it all within 14 hours.”
It actually *was* kinda impressive to see. But it would be nice to see them do it with a Vulcan, since that’s their rocket of the future.
Meta is partnering with Overview Energy on space solar power: https://x.com/meta_engineers/status/2048746828708102421?s=46
Overview’s approach is a bit different from typical SBSP proposals-they’re using near-infrared beaming, and instead of building dedicated rectennas, they want to beam energy to existing solar farms on Earth. I wish them much success.
Richard M,
Also, ULA will hit other limits should they manage to ramp up their launch rate: range capacity, ability to manufacture sufficient stages, and then launch pads.
I see Anthropic’s Claude/Mythos as a weapon against Soros, foreign banks, etc.
Elon I like more than the usual tech-brahs who I consider vapid and useless, but even Elon is far too nice.
People get hung up with Left/Right.
The Soviet Chief Designers were Cosmists…not Greens.
As I see it–there is only forward and back.
Some are Ukraine firsters, America Firsters, Israel Firsters.
I am a Space Firster. Money should only go to space professionals–never away from them
Spiro T. Agnew may have been a crook–but I don’t care. He was pro-space, and that forgives all.
mkent,
For an outfit whose record for turning a pad was a month or more until quite recently, 23 days is a considerable improvement in launch-to-launch cadence. The main reason this proved possible, though, was that the rockets in question were already built and in storage. I’ll save being impressed for when ULA can manage to do 23-day or better turnarounds consistently with Vulcans that have to be manufactured at a comparable pace.
SpaceX, of course, has been routinely turning F9 pads in three days, not three weeks, and doing it consistently for roughly three years now. And the only reason it has been able to do that is that it has also mastered the manufacture of expendable 2nd stages at a rate of one every 50 or so hours. So even in the arena of expendable hardware, SpaceX leads the legacy industry.
Anent Starship for Artemis 3, both SpaceX and Blue Origin now expect to have landers available for that mission by late 3Q or early 4Q 2027. So more than a single year, but not quite “multi-.”
“So even in the arena of expendable hardware, SpaceX leads the legacy industry.”
Legacy industry could only be identified through dental records.
Blair Ivey,
Heh.
Not too far from the time the corporate medical examiner will be repeatedly called in to ply his bloody tools.
With the Exploration Upper Stage already a corpse, SLS due to join it in the boneyard maybe three years hence, then ISS being decommissioned and ULA running out of takers for its throwaway rocket around 2030, plus the market for big GEO comsats trending down toward zero, Boeing is going to be out of the space business soon except for maybe the strictly military X-37Bs.
Northrop Grumman will be out of the SRB business once SLS and Vulcan both go away. The Minotaur rockets are already all but dead and that will leave NorGrum’s solids business entirely military. On the civilian side all that will remain is Antares 330 and Cygnus. Cygnus may still have some sort of post-ISS future, but not on an expendable launcher like Antares. Problem is, any outfit operating a semi-reusable or completely reusable launch vehicle big enough to launch Cygnus would likely find it easier to roll its own mini space freighter than to take on Cygnus so NorGrum could be entirely out of the civilian space biz in four or five years too.
That leaves LockMart among the legacy primes. Once ULA passes, all LockMart will have left, space-wise, is their satellite business and maybe a bit of additional work for JPL. Neither are what one could charitably call secure in a world of hungry start-ups that can happily subsist on rations far leaner than what a cost-plus dinosaur is accustomed to.
Apart from space, of course, all of these outfits also produce manned military aircraft. Those will be going away too, especially fighters. As with space, there are a lot of hungry new start-ups looking to bite big chunks out of the hides of the legacy primes for military business too, notably Anduril.
The passing of these legacy primes will leave a lot of long-time subcontractors in the lurch as well. That includes whatever still remains of the liquid-propellant engine business of the former Aerojet-Rocketdyne within L3Harris as well as countless smaller outfits like Dynetics which have long since caught fatal cases of cost-plus disease. I refer to these outfits as “pilotfish” when I’m being charitable and as “crumb-chasers” when I’m not.
The corporate M.E. might be well advised to order some more autopsy tables, body bags and corpse drawers.
Dick Eagleson,
You wrote: “That leaves LockMart among the legacy primes.”
You forgot Boeing. Oh, right. You didn’t forget. They are already on the corporate medical examiner’s autopsy table. Even NASA no longer takes their bids or proposals.
Edward,
If we could take a time machine to 2006 and tell our past selves how things had changed, I bet many of us would scoff. Boeing soundly beaten by tiny upstart SpaceX? Hundreds of rocket launches per year? Over ten thousand satellites in orbit? Private citizens buying their own flights to space? Preposterous. Even if we wished for such things.
Nate P: Not to brag, I was predicting those things, back in the 1998 in Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8. I fully expected new companies to bypass the old stalwarts who had no interest in innovation or competition.
Robert Z,
It’s more about timing. In so many different segments of the economy we can find incumbents disrupted by newest competitors that weren’t so invested into existing systems, but the timeframe isn’t always easily discerned, at least not by me. But disruption and turnover are inevitable.