April 4, 2025 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.
- Thales Alenia completes primary structure of the HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) module for NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station
The tweet, not from Thales Alenia, specifically notes the debate on whether Gateway “has any meaningful purpose.” That this is even mentioned suggests the political winds are building against it.
- Astra claims to have raised $80 million in private investment funds
The company founder, Chris Kemp, says they will use the funds to get back into the launch game. We shall see.
- Spanish rocket startup PLD signs another launch contract, with the European orbital tug company D-Orbit
All the company now has to do is to launch.
- Perseverance spots dust devils
Some nice visuals, but nothing particularly new.
- On this day in 1983 the space shuttle Challenger launched on its first flight
The mission placed in orbit NASA’s first dedicated satellite for manned orbital communications, Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-1 (TDRS-1)
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
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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.
- Thales Alenia completes primary structure of the HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) module for NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station
The tweet, not from Thales Alenia, specifically notes the debate on whether Gateway “has any meaningful purpose.” That this is even mentioned suggests the political winds are building against it.
- Astra claims to have raised $80 million in private investment funds
The company founder, Chris Kemp, says they will use the funds to get back into the launch game. We shall see.
- Spanish rocket startup PLD signs another launch contract, with the European orbital tug company D-Orbit
All the company now has to do is to launch.
- Perseverance spots dust devils
Some nice visuals, but nothing particularly new.
- On this day in 1983 the space shuttle Challenger launched on its first flight
The mission placed in orbit NASA’s first dedicated satellite for manned orbital communications, Tracking and Data Relay Satellite-1 (TDRS-1)
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
“Every NASA Space Shuttle Launch At The Same Time!”
https://youtu.be/VKHq6vp2oAw
3:54
Lunar Gateway – Emblematic of the waste of good resources in the entire Artemis program.
Artemis is bad architecture eating good money.
But we are stuck, if we keep going around and around we will never get to the moon but we will spend a lot of money.
Sort of symbolic of our entire Federal Government
Doubting Thomas,
You’re not wrong, as the Aussies like to say. But, as Bob Dylan also said, the times they are a-changin.’ Neither the Gateway, nor even SLS-Orion, any longer enjoy patents of immunity.
Gateway’s security, as a program, was always based on the idea that messing with it would upset our international partners. As should, by now, be plainly evident by inspection, the Trump administration ranges somewhere between utter indifference and positive glee to the prospect of pissing off Europeans and Canadians. The Japanese, who’ve always been far more enthusiastic about sharing in lunar surface activities than merely watching same through telescopes from a glorified bus station locker room in space, can be very easily mollified.
Jared Isaacman starts his confirmation process for NASA Administrator next week and should be in office by May. After that, we shall see what we shall see. But I am confident that Artemis is in for a major makeover. The only uncertainty is just how major and how fast.
“””As should, by now, be plainly evident by inspection, the Trump administration ranges somewhere between utter indifference and positive glee to the prospect of pissing off Europeans and Canadians. “”””
That is not a positive aspect of the administration. Mr. Eagleson.
Dick from your lips to the ears of the Great Bird of the Galaxy.
Doubting Thomas,
Let us sincerely hope so.
john hare,
Beg to differ. We’ve been looking after the Europeans and Canadians since the end of WW2 and they have gotten far too matter-of-fact about what they have long since come to regard as their privileges. That needs to stop.
We originally gave them largely unfettered access to American markets as, in Peter Zeihan’s words, “a bribe” to join us in opposing the Soviets. That justification evaporated 1/3 of a century ago but the policies have continued largely through inertia.
So, as Europeans have always been wont to do, they have been drifting into more and more self-destructive behavior, the most self-destructive being the opening of their borders to millions of hostile aliens who now largely mooch off of the native Europeans in the way the Europeans have long done off of us, but even worse.
The trans-national elites now running Europe have begun the inevitable destruction of civil liberties necessary to get increasingly recalcitrant European natives to acquiesce in their own extinction and that of their national cultures. That accounts for the attempts to censor US social media platforms, the jailings of Brits who speak out on-line against Islamic rape gangs or their own elected officials and the various other outrages committed against those resisting the EU party line in recent years such as Dutch farmers. It also accounts for the venom directed at US VP J.D. Vance recently for calling Europe out on all of this.
Even with the Russian bear again hungry and on the prowl, much of Europe seems oblivious, casually assuming the US will, as it has long done, do any really heavy lifting required. Only the Balts, Poles and Nordics seem inclined to chip in to any great extent. Good for them, but the Balts and Nordics are small countries and the Poles don’t have the economic heft of a Germany or France.
We shall see where all of this goes. There is some decent evidence to support the idea that Russia may have so depleted itself over the past three or so years of largely fruitless warfare that it can be taken down strictly with what Europe can scrape together even allowing for more Russian support by the PRC and the DPRK. I’m not especially confident that that will occur.
On the other hand, it may soon prove the case that Trump will reverse his ill-considered attempts to quickly end the Russo-Ukraine War via Russia-favoring diplomacy in the face of Putin’s clearly evident lack of willingness to play along and ramp up American support for Ukraine as the only other way to relatively quickly end the war. We shall see.
In any event, even if this scenario comes to pass, it should be seen as the last favor Mom and Dad (Trump’s US) will do for the sullen and ungrateful dope-smoking Millennial (Europe under the EU) living in the basement before tossing the latter out of the house and forcing him to root, hog or die.
Unfettered access to American markets means that some foreign individuals have something that some American individuals want to buy. Tariffs tax the Americans that want to buy those products. “pissing off” as you put it, People you are interacting with is stupid. Along the lines of POing your coworkers, employees, suppliers, family and others is not a positive attribute. Quit subsidizing is a different thing and doesn’t require nasty behavior.
Blockades are what you do to an enemy in time of war.
Tariffs are what you do to your own people in time of peace.
Similar result as to restrict goods available to the individuals of the affected country.
Other countries subsidizing their export industry is using their tax money so having their citizens subsidize American consumers.
Prices are going up and the risks of a recession or even depression just went up as well.
john hare,
Yeah, that’s the Milton Friedman party line. The problem is that those foreign nations subsidizing what we import are not usually politically neutral players. There are other aspects of international interaction than simply economic ones. The largest subsidizer of its trade with us, for example, is the PRC – which does not, I think it is clear, wish us well.
Our monied elites and their political stooges – who fancy themselves “citizens of the world” rather than Americans – have been content for decades to privatize the rewards of one-sided “free trade” while socializing the costs in employment and various latter-day national vulnerabilities on the general US population whom they generally hold in contempt.
If Trump’s tariffs stick, instead of mostly being negotiated away as bargaining chips as seems to be happening, then there will be some short-term price rises along with a more general inflation owing to the pell-mell rebuilding and expansion of the American industrial base. This latter will happen even if the former does not.
As a fixed-income retiree, that doesn’t delight me. But the transition will be finite and on the other side will be a notably better America for my progeny. I lived through the 1970s. My entire family lived through the California Covid Reich. I can certainly live through what is coming as America gets its long-term act together. You can too.
Even well meaning top down economics doesn’t work in the long run as well as the short run. There’s no way the government is more competent to decide what citizens can and can’t buy than the individuals themselves.. Plus this somewhat random application damaging to friends and foe alike is not good to say the least.
We will see over the next few months and years. That I will get through this is more due to being out of debt and out of the stock market and not due to government benevolence.. I hope you don’t have much of your retirement dependent on stocks.