August 12, 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.
- Time-lapse video covering 20 years that shows the multiple stars orbiting the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, Sagittarius A*
The data comes from an instrument on the Very Large Telescope in Chile.
- PLD has shipped the second stage of its Miura-5 rocket to the U.S. for tests of its flight termination system
The startup is still targeting a first orbital launch before the end of the year.
- On August 12, 1962 the Soviet Union launched Vostok 4, carrying Pavel Popovich on a three day mission
He was launched one day after Vostok-3, carrying Andrian Nikolayev on a four day mission. The two spacecraft at one point were within four miles of each other, but had no ability to do any orbital maneuvers and drifted apart thereafter.
- Video of the first free flight and landing of the space shuttle engineering test vehicle Enterprise on August 12, 1977
My memory is that during post flight interviews the commander Fred Haise commented, “It glides like a brick,” but I have never been able to locate that quote since.
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
That the video shows STARS moving around Sagittarius A*shows you how powerful its gravity is.
No way man, gravity is the weakest of the four forces by far. Not saying I’m going anywhere near sagittarious A* though. Is it even a force, maybe it’s just an emergent property of space-time, IDK.
Force or acceleration due to space-time warp or? It’s still impressive and you don’t need to go anywhere near A* just drop down a few hundred feet under water say 300 – that will be 10x surface pressure. The Oceans are about 12000 ft or so half way down the gravity pulling the water puts 5300 psi on you.
None of this will move a star around like we saw in the video – though it does get moved.
One a different note I wonder if the observation can be used to back out the masses of the stars being moved and are they all accounted, or are there other unseen masses.
John,
gravity is the weakest of the forces. It is only responsible for holding the universe together.
In the comments, it was mentioned that those stars are about 1000 AU apart… Literally moving around their own solar system near A*. That makes sense to me, all being neighbors in close proximity allows us to see movement in real time. It also reveals with the masses involved how weak the gravity of a black hole is. In time, because of the density of the center of the galaxy, they’ll be able to map out the influence radius. I’m guessing based upon gravity being very weak, that it will only be a few light years across.
Variations in that movement will reveal the unseen masses mentioned because there may be more than one black hole involved. Remember that we cannot see the actual stars because of the dust clouds obscuring their light between us, but we do track other emissions that find their way through the cloud.
Any Suns with unstable orbits would have been eaten by the black hole billions of years ago… there’s always the chance of an interloper, or a close encounter that moves the orbit of one of the Suns into a fatal course. Time will tell.
Re: Louisiana and possible SpaceX purchase / use.
With the huuuuuge demand for more launches, and if SpaceX does set up in Louisiana, will there be Falcon 9 launch pads, as well as Starship and Falcon Heavy?
Seems quite unlikely given SpaceX’s recent moves toward phasing out the Falcons. At this point it wouldn’t greatly surprise me if SpaceX’s plans for SLC-6 at Vandy morph into another Starship launch complex instead of a fourth Falcon facility. That all probably depends upon what has been promised to the Space Force.
Ceramic coatings for gas turbines that are self-healing
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43246-026-01212-y
Jeff W wrote about “self-healing ceramic coating.”
Can the Borg be far behind?
Now diamonds might help with fusion:
https://phys.org/news/2026-08-diamond-triple-fusion-gain-secrets.html
I see laser fusion with beamed energy from the Moon striking a parabolic dish that focuses the beam to these pellets….the dish like a pusher-plate
Mirror ablatives the key.
Hackaday has a history on robotics for reactors today–useful for Io Starships perhaps. Pluto/SLAM atomic ramjets for Jovian hurricane hunters might need that tech too.
Double catch planned?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=766CN_qg1fE&pp=ugUHEgVlbi1VUw%3D%3D
It would seem so. I suspect on-going analysis of the Flight 13 telemetry has increased confidence that the booster relight gremlins of flights 12 and 13 will succumb to the additional changes already embodied in Booster 21. If that Aug. 28 launch date Felix reported proves accurate, we should be seeing some static fires quite soon.