February 10, 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.
- Industry analysis says that SpaceX generated $8.2 billion in revenue from its Starlink constellation
That includes an estimated $2 billion from the Starshield military subconstellation. This is more than enough to make government funding for developing and flying missions on Starship/Superheavy completely irrelevant.
- MDA wins contract to build Globalstar’s next communications satellite constellation
The contract is listed as worth about $1.1 billion. Apparently, there is plenty of business for more than a few satellite constellations.
- NASA cubesat discovers two new temporary high-energy particle belts circling Earth
The story is more dramatic. The cubesat had apparently failed in April 2024, but then mysteriously came back to life in June 2024, allowing it to make these measurements.
- Boom confirms its first supersonic flight of its XB-1 successfully broke the sound barrier three times, with no audible sonic boom
This achievement makes possible commercial passenger supersonic flights worldwide, even over land. Expect production on Boom’s full size Overture plane to begin very soon.
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.
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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.
- Industry analysis says that SpaceX generated $8.2 billion in revenue from its Starlink constellation
That includes an estimated $2 billion from the Starshield military subconstellation. This is more than enough to make government funding for developing and flying missions on Starship/Superheavy completely irrelevant.
- MDA wins contract to build Globalstar’s next communications satellite constellation
The contract is listed as worth about $1.1 billion. Apparently, there is plenty of business for more than a few satellite constellations.
- NASA cubesat discovers two new temporary high-energy particle belts circling Earth
The story is more dramatic. The cubesat had apparently failed in April 2024, but then mysteriously came back to life in June 2024, allowing it to make these measurements.
- Boom confirms its first supersonic flight of its XB-1 successfully broke the sound barrier three times, with no audible sonic boom
This achievement makes possible commercial passenger supersonic flights worldwide, even over land. Expect production on Boom’s full size Overture plane to begin very soon.
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.
Particle beams – energy source?
No sonic boom – military applications?
“This is more than enough to make government funding for developing and flying missions on Starship/Superheavy completely irrelevant.”
Can you confirm that you mean that the military portion of revenue is small enough that government business Is not a requirement for Starlink to be successful? The wording was not completely clear to me.
Ray Van Dune: I was referring to the entire $8.2 billion, not just the military portion.
This was a quick link, though it really should have been a full post. Jay sent these to me late, and I decided to post them this way rather than wait until the morning. As a result I didn’t make myself clear in this first link. Thanks for asking for the clarification.
Eric Berger appeared again on the Main Engine Cutoff podcast with Anthony Colangelo yesterday, and the talk was entirely about Elon Musk and Artemis.
Many here won’t be happy with Berger’s discussion of what Elon is up to; notwithstanding that Eric is quite libertarian on space policy, he seems to be somewhat liberal on most everything else, and that is apparent despite his best effort to try to assess what Elon is doing objectively. But it’s still worth listening to, because he has solid well-placed sources at NASA, and relates some things he has learned. I will summarize the key examples for those who can’t or won’t spare the 40 minutes to listen to it:
1) The Trump White House decision to put Janet Petro in as Acting Administrator instead of Jim Free (which completely blindsided NASA HQ) was deliberate, a conscious policy to not let the “old guard” (which Free is identified as being) have the reins of the agency even in a one month interregnum. It was also one of several agencies where the same thing was done.
2) Berger thinks that SpaceX has now reached “escape velocity,” wherein they now have the resources to not only sustain their market domination but to pursue Starship to its fullest ambitions even without any funding or cooperation from NASA or DoD. (Which is not to say they won’t welcome that, on the right terms.)
3) Boeing’s “all-hands” briefing to set up a WARN Act notification of impending layoffs on the SLS program completely blindsided NASA HQ as well, to the point that NASA yesterday felt the need to issue a statement insisting that there are no plans to terminate SLS. Berger’s sense from his sources is that Boeing management did this to politically signal its allies in Congress to start taking action to save the program.
(Link to CNN story on NASA statement: https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/10/science/boeing-nasa-space-launch-system-sls/index.html )
4) Eric’s most interesting revelation: There are members of the NASA transition team that want to nuke SLS and Orion *immediately*. Against this is a faction, given voice by Petro, adopting a fallback position to keep SLS and Orion just through Artemis III, i.e., use up the largely completed hardware in the pipeline while Starship finds its legs over the next 2-3 years. The Petro position, on conventional wisdom, is an easier “get,” but Berger notes that there is a real concern even among some sympathetic to the position that adopting this course could resurrect issues that came at the end of the Shuttle program: contractors and even NASA employees working on a program they know is going to be terminated soon might sabotage it in various ways, or at least, no longer have any real incentive to meet deadlines and cost objectives.
If true, this seems like yet another reason to adopt the “tear off the bandaid” solution of just killing these vehicles immediately.
Link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t-294-elon-musk-and-the-trump-administration/id1105457520?i=1000690931501
I agree, and this will only end up being ever more true if Starlink revenue continues to grow as projected. Before long, SpaceX might be raking in more every year than NASA’s entire annual budget!
But this is congruent with Eric Berger’s sense, reported in my previous comment, that SpaceX really has reached “escape velocity.” Elon bet big on Starlink, and that bet has really paid off.
I’d like to contrast my view of last night’s Starlink launch with that recorded on YouTube in several instances. The YouTube videos showed booster and early second stage portions of flight. My view was of late second stage until cutoff.
The former were low enough to interact with the tenuous atmosphere, but high enough to still be illuminated by the setting sun. Thus they left a long trail, whereas my view was of the actual incandescent gases from the second stage, un-illuminated by the sun, so there was no trail, only a shorter fan of orangish gas whose trailing edge vanished once it cooled. Note that traveling south-southwest, the rocket crossed into Earth’s shadow even as it gained in altitude.
The other main difference was speed. My view was of the second stage as it attained orbital velocity, not of the booster climbing to altitude and early post-staging. Thus I saw the flight move from my northern horizon to about 45 degrees up in the west in much less than a minute… it was really moving!
And when the “fan” disappeared, it did so with a smallish belch of gas, followed by immediate blackness. The was no illumination of the payload satellites that I could see. All in all this was a much different apparition than I have ever seen on YouTube!
Starlink revenue growth will be limited mainly by how fast more bandwidth can be placed on-orbit. With F9 launching improved V2-minis at a rising cadence and Starship’s imminent V3 deployment debut, total network bandwidth should grow enough, fast enough, to support successive doublings of subscribership both this year and next. Even should growth rate slack off a bit in 2027 and beyond, it will still be quite robust – high double digits annually.
Revenue growth will modestly lag subscriber growth but, given the probable flat or falling NASA annual budgets to come, Starlink revenue will likely exceed NASA’s budget as soon as 2027. By sometime in the early 2030s, Starlink gross profits will probably exceed NASA’s budget.
As part of what seems increasingly certain to be a cancellation announcement for SLS-Orion coming this month or next, I would like to see Elon declare that SpaceX will provide a comprehensive and fully-Starship-based lunar logistics capability to replace SLS-Orion without any new NASA money. That would take down Democrat “profiteering” and “conflict of interest” accusations at a stroke.
So would what I also hope to see fairly shortly anent Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” plans – a fixed-price, sole-source contract for SpaceX to provide the on-orbit constellation of kinetic anti-missile platforms that should constitute the core of such a system ASAP. I think these can be built to the same form factor as Starlink V3 sats though each would likely weigh rather more. But they could still be launched by the same Starships that do Starlink deployments, just fewer of them per launch.
Hello Dick,
None of these things is implausible!
It is at least arguable that the cost of defensive systems have always been higher than that of the offensive systems sufficient to overcome them, at least when it comes to to technological systems (as opposed to masses of men behind fortifications).
So would a truly effective iron dome be affordable, or would it simply trigger a massive arms race? In other words could it replace Mutually Assured Destruction?
In many respects I am the polar opposite of Berger.
I actually would like to see government money on side research…if SLS falls, maybe a MAF build upper stage atop SuperHeavy….or a larger, winged Starship.
China is looking at many different rockets–which I think wise. There was a recent article about reusable solids at Acta Astronautica.
Jeff Foust had an X/Twitter thread just now (late Wednesday morning) that contains a lot of useful tidbits of knowledge he has gathered at the 27th Annual Commercial Space Conference here in Washington, DC. I know people here typically don’t sit on space journalist X accounts, so, here it is:
Link: https://x.com/jeff_foust/status/1889686594472309211
No doubt some of this will make it into a SpaceNews article shortly, but likely not all of it. Curious that the White House has yet to transmit Jared Isaacman’s paperwork to the Senate yet.
So UPI is reporting that NASA’s Pandora mission will be launched from Starbase. Which would mean on a Starship, since nothing else launches there. That seems like quite the announcement, has anyone else heard that? Or are they just doing bad reporting and this will be a Falcon launch from the Cape? https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2025/02/11/spacex-pandora-launch/6571739308341/
David Eastman: UPI is wrong, in a most spectacular way. See this Space.com article.
The reason UPI made the mistake is because the reporter (or its AI software) sloppily misread the original NASA release, which began as follows: “NASA has selected SpaceX of Starbase, Texas, to provide the launch service for the agency’s Pandora mission.” That release also said nothing about launch vehicle.
The reporter (or AI version) obviously did no other research.
From Richard M’s comment:
That would be good news.
It is interesting that Blue Origin is pondering missions to Mars.
We probably won’t get too much more than this, as it may involve proprietary information. A plan to launch again before summer tells us that they have a good idea how to fix the problem. Perhaps a question to ponder: is this an issue only when relighting the engine in flight, or could this be another reason for ULA to delay its next Vulcan launch?
https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/points-of-information/ula-swapping-vulcan-for-atlas-5-for-first-2025-launch/
Speaking of Blue Origin, apparently they laid off about 10% of their workforce today. Eric Berger: “No specific reasons beyond “business strategy” were given during an all-hands meeting led by Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp this morning..”
https://x.com/SciGuySpace/status/1890056205072224555
Joey Roulette story fresh out of the box: https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/bezos-blue-origin-layoff-about-10-across-its-space-launch-business-2025-02-13/
A lot of Blue employees frequent the Blue Origin subreddit, and the feedback over there right now is pretty grim. Some groups got hit with much higher than 10% cuts. From the outside, of course, it’s impossible to judge this kind of thing, and obviously you are more likely to hear from the laid off or people in departments hit hard; I have heard there was still a lot of Bob Smith legacy bloat in place. But it’s hard to make out just why this was done, and whether it was done as well as it could have been.
And, of course, what impact this will have on the timelines Dave Limp just promised yesterday. Stay tuned.
Dropping this in here. I totally missed this at the time. Other good things were happening.
“…to provide confidence in the lethality and effectiveness of the Nation’s nuclear deterrent.”
Minuteman III Test Launch
November 5, 2024
https://youtu.be/EcESTIlsku4
(1:29)
Question–
How do they transport these from North Dakota? Highway or rail?
Jared Isaacman broke his silence this week on X, and while it was mostly a string of retweets and non-substantive comments, he did offer a long tweet reacting to a new photo of Mars yesterday, and I think it is worth sharing.
At this point, British astrophysicist Peter Hague asked Jared a question: “Are you confident humans can go in the 28/29 window?”
Isaacman responded:
https://x.com/rookisaacman/status/1891148876046102896
He interacts with a few other people on the thread, but this was his most interesting interaction.