August 5, 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.
Sorry this is so late, but I was on my way home this evening and only just got in.
- British rocket startup Skyrora gets license for suborbital launches at Saxavord
Don’t expect much. Skyrora has been around forever promising an orbital rocket, and has only managed a handful of small suborbital launches of rockets not much bigger than model rockets.
- A look at what might be causing the delay in launching Sierra Space’s Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle
Lots of guesses, similar to the guesses I have been making for the past year. All suggest there are fundamental problems preventing launch.
- China touts the launch of the drone ship for landing pseudo-company Ispace’s Hyperbola-3 first stage
- On this day in 2011 Juno was launched
It arrived in Jupiter orbit 2016.
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.
Sorry this is so late, but I was on my way home this evening and only just got in.
- British rocket startup Skyrora gets license for suborbital launches at Saxavord
Don’t expect much. Skyrora has been around forever promising an orbital rocket, and has only managed a handful of small suborbital launches of rockets not much bigger than model rockets.
- A look at what might be causing the delay in launching Sierra Space’s Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle
Lots of guesses, similar to the guesses I have been making for the past year. All suggest there are fundamental problems preventing launch.
- China touts the launch of the drone ship for landing pseudo-company Ispace’s Hyperbola-3 first stage
- On this day in 2011 Juno was launched
It arrived in Jupiter orbit 2016.
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
They should have went with the bloody hypergolics. Trucks are on the road right now towing trailers with molten aluminum. Big whoop.
Jeff Wright,
Who “should have went with the bloody hypergolics?” Can’t be Sierra Space as they did go with the bloody hypergolics for Dream Chaser. So who? The Brits? The Chinese? And “bloody hypergolics” for what? We’re not bloody mind readers. You have a tendency toward gnomic declarations that assume we all understand the context you have in mind. We don’t. A lot of your comments are mini-singularities – no information emerges from their mass.
All,
The linked info about the new ISRO Moon/Mars simulation hab doesn’t say exactly where in Ladakh it is located, but that entire province is a border region surrounded by hostile territory – Pakistan, Pakistan-controlled Kashmir and the PRC. There would seem to be a reasonable probability the simulation hab’s residents might face challenges other than those related to the site’s approximate resemblance to places off-planet.
The Ars site article (if accurate) claims Dream Chaser uses kerosene and high test peroxide…like torpedoes.
Buran used super-refined kerosene (Sintin) and LOX. I have read in secret projects that kerosene and nitric acid might be good for any shuttle replacement.
Most jets use kerosene (propellor planes still use leaded gasoline).
The idea was to keep everything as aircraft like as possible
I thought trouble might be coming from elsewhere–but Ars may very well be correct here.
The United States lost practice with making small spacecraft–and that kind of knowhow only persists if you stay in practice with propulsion–hard to do with economical and ecological zealots claiming pork this, poison that.
Jeff Wright,
I stand corrected on Dream Chaser’s propulsion. It has engines that can use hydrogen peroxide as both a monopropellant and a bipropellant via the afterburner-like injection of RP-1 into the monopropellant exhaust stream.
This article reassures me a little bit. I have been worried that the environmental testing (vibration, thermal, electromagnetic) had found a serious structural problem that required a long-lead mechanical rebuild. Instead, the report is that it is software and thruster certification work. It is unlikely that either of these will require a massive rebuild effort.
From the article:
I’m not sure that this is a fundamental problem. It could be that Sierra Space had not been as prepared for all the different end-to-end software testing. Sierra Space is a fairly new company, so it should not be surprising that they were caught as unprepared as the stalwart Boeing was. NASA may have changed the requirements between the beginning of 2020 and now. It is possible that the software has only minor or no problems but that they have to write more test software than they had intended and now are spending more time than originally scheduled for running these tests. However, if they are finding and fixing software problems, then Starliner has shown us that finding them now is much better than finding them in flight.
______________
Jeff Wright wrote: “The United States lost practice with making small spacecraft–and that kind of knowhow only persists if you stay in practice with propulsion …”
The U.S. builds plenty of small spacecraft. Besides, Dream Chaser is not so small. It fits into the category of Extra Heavy satellite, over 15,000 pounds.
The problem is not being out of practice with propulsion but with straying from hypergolic propulsion systems to thrusters that are less familiar.
From the article:
They had a reason for avoiding the hypergolics. This would allow them to approach the returning vehicle and get it off the runway fairly quickly, freeing up the runway for use by other aircraft. If they had hypergolics, then the runway could be tied up for hours, and that would greatly limit the airports that would welcome Dream Chaser for landings. The point of having Dream Chaser land horizontally is the ability to land at any airport in the world so that the returning payload comes back close to the customer rather than thousands of kilometers away.
The Super-Hustler pod used hypergolics–and Dream Chaser wouldn’t need much.
If Gemini is to be believed:
“Southern California Logistics Airport: Exquadrum has a test site at this airport for liquid rocket engines and solid rocket motors, including hypergolics testing. Tulsa International Airport: Agile Space Industries is developing the Tulsa Space Test Center adjacent to this airport for advanced in-space rocket engine testing, according to Agile Space Industries.”
It wasn’t long ago that the USAF itself thought about bringing back the Martin Astrorocket concept:
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/martin-ar-14b.2928/#post-23541
“Note: sometime around 2002, I was contacted by someone at Lockheed-Denver about the Astrorocket. Seems that someone in the USAF had expressed interest in a modernized Astrorocket, so the LM folk decided to dig up all their references on the AR to make a proper response. As it turns out, even though their facility had done the studies… they had nothing left on it. Someone googled AR, found my website, and negotiated a copy of the original Martin report.”
When I hear things like that–it makes me seven different kinds of angry—fogbank…how much else has been lost to the dumpster?
O/T
I saw this on Hackaday that may be of interest–model rocket sim:
https://hackaday.com/2025/08/04/a-simple-simulator-for-model-rocket-performance/
Jeff Wright asked: “how much else has been lost to the dumpster?”
A whole lot of stuff researched and created during Project Apollo. Congress abandoned far more than just Apollo.
Another reason for the commercialization of space. Commercial companies would be eager for much of what NASA has researched but was then abandoned by its funding agency, Congress.
With AstroRocket, the opposite was true.
Scott Lowther of up-ship.com (as conservative as they come) laments that private business actually has a poor record of preservation.
A few years back, he was on the verge of being homeless—he, a repository of aerospace knowledge.
That is proof that he an others need something like Marshall in that private industry doesn’t think twice about dumping history.
You would think the techbrahs would fund him—but they haven’t.
Yes Musk has gone after social media—but pest though he may be…Soros isn’t afraid to spend bank in terms of bailing out members of rent-a-mobs.
Lowther is a national asset…and should be treated like it.