April 6, 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.
- Aer Lingus signs with Starlink to provide Wi-Fi on its planes
The airline expects full deployment on its entire fleet by early 2027.
- Ground-based video showing Orion 200,000 miles from Earth.
See how fast you can spot it.
- NASA stops work on SLS Mobile Launcher 2
No surprise. The whole project was a terrible waste of money, from day one. Kudos to Isaacman for finally killing it.
- On this day in 1972, Pioneer 11 launched on an Atlas Centaur rocket
It was the second spacecraft to fly by Jupiter and the first to fly past Saturn.
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.
- Aer Lingus signs with Starlink to provide Wi-Fi on its planes
The airline expects full deployment on its entire fleet by early 2027.
- Ground-based video showing Orion 200,000 miles from Earth.
See how fast you can spot it.
- NASA stops work on SLS Mobile Launcher 2
No surprise. The whole project was a terrible waste of money, from day one. Kudos to Isaacman for finally killing it.
- On this day in 1972, Pioneer 11 launched on an Atlas Centaur rocket
It was the second spacecraft to fly by Jupiter and the first to fly past Saturn.
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
about 20 seconds….
Killing mobile launcher 2 is no less stupid than what you see here:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NE6FcGcnvcA
Zealots of every stripe who want to sabotage space should be called out.
Mobile launcher 2 is way, way over budget and now obsolete to boot. What is wrong with canceling it?
The Exploration Upper Stage–which also should not have been killed–needed that for Block II. The Pluto mission Alan Stern advocates is to use that:
https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/1.A34658?journalCode=jsr
Cutting out obsolete WW2 type force projection will save taxpayers much more money. Any fool with a bass boat and two RPGs can cosplay as brave Horatius or Leonidas I at the Thermopylae pass known the Strait of Hormuz.
Each hour of the current conflict is an SLS program.
It is time the warrior gives way to the explorer.
That too, is Force projection.
I want SLS to launch rods from god that Iran can’t shoot down.
No more trillions for fighter jocks!!
But…..there isn’t any Pluto mission.
Jeff Wright,
Mobile Launcher 2 (ML2) was needed for SLS Block 1B and Block 2. Ditto Exploration Upper Stage (EUS). SLS Block 1B was needed to allow co-manifesting of Gateway modules on Artemis lunar landing missions. SLS Block 2 was needed for… we’ll have to get back to you on that one… maybe as a demonstration that Northrop Grumman has finally reacquired the evidently lost knowledge of how to build a big solid motor whose nozzle doesn’t fall off.
But EUS and ML2 were – typically for projects run out of Marshall – seriously late, seriously over-budget and seriously questionable from a build quality standpoint. So Jared Isaacman swung his sword and clove the Gordian Knot by axing all of this pointless sideshow stuff in one swell foop.
Along with it went the Near-Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) all of this detritus was supposed to service. Getting rid of any reliance on this weird orbit was something both Human Landing System (HLS) contractors said would allow them to get their vehicles to readiness faster. And Jared, as we all know by now, is all about both readiness and faster.
Dr. Stern’s Pluto mission concept has a publication date in mid-2020 and so would have been in the works, including peer-review, for at least a year prior, maybe two. During this time Starship was still in its flying water tank era, New Glenn was barely past the PowerPoint stage and Falcon Heavy had launched only Elon’s Tesla. Small wonder the mission was spec’d for SLS – what else was there? Not that SLS was exactly there yet either, but you get my point.
You might want to check in with Dr. Stern and see what changes he would entertain to his brainchild based on the events of the seven or more years which have elapsed since his Pluto project proposal was undertaken. I’m gonna go way out on a limb here and guess that SLS is no longer top-of-mind as a candidate launch vehicle.
While Rods From God (RFGs) are still a good idea, SLS is the least suitable means for their deployment one could imagine.
The thing about RFGs is that they are a form of ammunition. The US military has, over recent decades, acquired the thoroughly dysfunctional tendency of forgetting that ammo is supposed to be expendable, as cheap as possible and mass-producible at a rate at least equal to wartime expenditure. Hence our current quandary in the Persian Gulf.
The US military these days has increasingly come to treat ammo like capital equipment and to treat capital equipment like crown jewels – with prices of each to match. How different from WW2 when even cargo vessels, small warships and all classes of aircraft were regarded, to a considerable extent, as large forms of quasi-ammo that could be expended at will because, to paraphrase an old Jay Leno Doritos ad, “Blow up all you want, we’ll make more.”
Hence the complete impracticality of deploying any sort of ammo to orbit on a vehicle that can only boost one load a year even if it has no other duties to cover.
And the fact that said vehicle is, itself, pretty much the most expensive piece of ammunition ever designed and built doesn’t help. Like rifle rounds, SLS is expended on every firing and one does not even get a cartridge case back to reload.
Even if the RFGs were free, using SLS to orbit them would make them dysfunctionally expensive bits of ammo too, for which one cannot identify all that many potential enemy targets that might be worth more than what we would be shooting at them.
WW2-type force projection is hardly “obsolete.” Conducting wars on other people’s territory makes all kinds of sense – preferably the enemy’s territory. Look at both the military and civilian casualty numbers by nation for WW2 and the wisdom of fighting at the length of the longest arm you can build becomes obvious.
Which combatant nations emerged from WW2 in the best shape? The US was number one followed closely by Canada, Australia and India. What did those nations have in common? That their national territories were either untouched, or only marginally touched, by enemy action.
Even if I wasn’t sure the PRC will collapse before it obtains any ability to cross even an undefended Pacific to come calling with ordnance, I would not be in favor of paving their way by making Hawaii indefensible and festooning Malibu Beach with obstacles, mines, bunkers and barbed wire.
Thank whatever God you may believe in that all forward force projection is going to cost you in the event of actual hostilities is money.
Jeff Wright,
1. EUS was years away from its debut, extremely expensive, and offers no capabilities we can’t better obtain elsewhere for less money.
2. The conflict in Iran decisively demonstrates that our current force projection is viable and has plenty of life left.
3. The military doesn’t want the SLS, so hoping it will launch kinetic weapons is futile.
2.) Then why the cease fire?
Trump has done more damage to global hydrocarbon infrastructure than an Al Gore presidency.
A pox be upon them both.