February 13, 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.
- The splashed down Long March 10A test stage has been recovered
More pictures here. Considering its journey it looks pretty good to me, though Jay thinks it’s “a little banged up.”
- SpaceX removes the crew access jetway at Kennedy launchpad LC 39A
The pad is being rebuilt for Falcon Heavy and Starship/Superheavy, so no more Falcon 9 manned launches from here.
- Italy’s private high speed train company Italo signs agreement with Starlink
It will charge passengers nothing for this Wi-Fi access.
- On this day in 2001 the NEAR-Shoemaker probe became the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid
It had spent about a year flying in formation with Eros. The landing was improvised, as the spacecraft had not been designed to do that.
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.
- The splashed down Long March 10A test stage has been recovered
More pictures here. Considering its journey it looks pretty good to me, though Jay thinks it’s “a little banged up.”
- SpaceX removes the crew access jetway at Kennedy launchpad LC 39A
The pad is being rebuilt for Falcon Heavy and Starship/Superheavy, so no more Falcon 9 manned launches from here.
- Italy’s private high speed train company Italo signs agreement with Starlink
It will charge passengers nothing for this Wi-Fi access.
- On this day in 2001 the NEAR-Shoemaker probe became the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid
It had spent about a year flying in formation with Eros. The landing was improvised, as the spacecraft had not been designed to do that.
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
https://x.com/sciguyspace/status/2021927029869097468?s=46
More nozzle issues for ULA
Blue Origin’s MK1 lunar lander, has entered Chamber A for approximately 11 days of TVAC testing at JSC. BO CEO Dave Limp posted a video clip, which is nice to see.
https://x.com/i/status/2022400032587289084
A new study in the journal Astrobiology (Feb 4) suggests that non-biological sources cannot fully account for the abundance of organic compounds found in a sample collected by the Curiosity rover at Gale Crater:
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/science-news/2026/02/06/nasa-study-non-biologic-processes-dont-fully-explain-mars-organics/
This is over a week old….I couldn’t find a blog post on this on the site this month, but if I missed it somehow, my apologies, Bob.
Of course, interesting as this is, it’s the sort of thing we can only get any real resolution on with some ground truth via human exploration and far more sophisticated chemical analysis.
Interesting take on Musks most important contribution to society.
https://x.com/r0ck3t23/status/2022503494146461851?s=46
Gary,
Katherine Boyle is right. The valorization of making stuff is something the US was running badly low on before Elon came along. Now, it seems to be safely a lasting part of the US innovational toolkit again. Granted, this is a restoration and not a sui generis creation, but it is one more reason Musk’s only real competition in the pantheon of American tinkerer-inventors is Thomas Edison who, in addition to inventing many sorts of physical objects, also invented the whole idea of organized research and development as an activity class.
In other reading done about the PRC’s LM-10 test I discover that this particular version of the LM-10 is sub-scale – i.e., shorter than the full-size article will be. This stockier profile probably accounts, at least in part, for the stage’s survival of tipping over in the water after landing with minimal damage. It may also be another indicator of the PRC’s apparent production limitations anent 5-meter-diameter spacecraft structure that this test article was built no longer than it had to be to serve its minimum function.
I agree with Jay, the recovered LM-10 booster looks a little banged up. But it also looks repairable. It will be interesting to see if this piece flies again, and, if so, when and on what sort of mission. Given what seem to be the PRC’s production limits anent 5-meter-diameter rocket structure, there is likely to be considerable value in reusing this booster and perhaps even more in recovering it a second time.
Looks in much better shape than most Chinese boosters after return.
Gary wrote: “Interesting take on Musks most important contribution to society.”
In the essay in Gary’s link, I would add “reintroducing rapid development” to the list of training that Musk brought back to the U.S. It is a part of the decaying industrial knowledge.
From Gary’s link:
They learned welding. They learned that “impossible” just means unsolved engineering, not violated physics. They learned failure in the physical domain where mistakes compound instead of reverting.
Elon didn’t build companies. He accidentally rebuilt industrial knowledge that had been decaying for thirty years while America’s best minds chased digital scale.
And now, many of those engineers are out among us, founding their own companies that are also training America’s engineers. It is why America’s commercial space industry is outpacing NASA and the rest of the world’s space faring nations.
Stephen Clark’s new Ars Technica article on the problems with the Artemis II stack hydrogen leaks is instructive. One wishes that Charlie Camarda and Danny Olivas had spent as much time hitting on the SLS fueling procedures as they did the heat shield, because if this doesn’t scream “normalizing deviance,” I don’t know what *does.*
“So, it turns out NASA used the three-year interim between Artemis I and Artemis II to get comfortable with a more significant hydrogen leak, instead of fixing the leaks themselves. Isaacman said that will change before Artemis III, which likewise is probably at least three years away.”
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/02/nasa-chief-vows-to-solve-sls-rocket-fueling-issues-before-artemis-iii/
I’m glad Isaacman is trying to stop this nonsense on that *going forward*, but it’s telling that he doesn’t feel able to put his foot down on Honeycutt’s team doing it with this launch.
Richard M wrote, “I’m glad Isaacman is trying to stop this nonsense on that *going forward*, but it’s telling that he doesn’t feel able to put his foot down on Honeycutt’s team doing it with this launch.”
Let me translate Isaacman’s real position: “I am too much of a coward to push for changes now. What I need to make it happen is a launch failure that kills four astronauts. THEN I will be able to take action.”
Richard M,
Thank you for the link. From that article:
As I recall, part of that same loading operation had them send a couple of brave technicians to solve a hydrogen leak during the fuel loading procedure. Did that turn out to become part of the standard fueling procedure? If they did the same thing this time as last, then that seems to have been part of that last thing.
Sending a team to fix the problem in real time is not a real fix. It is a work around that got the rocket airborne that time, but it may not work out as well the next time. It is a kluge solution.
I would be more impressed if they had spent the past three years solving the problem instead of waiting for the next mission to verify that their solutions were adequate. In addition, they could have spent the past three years performing occasional dry runs on non-flight hardware, which would also help keep everyone up to speed as well as give an opportunity for new people, replacements for natural attrition, to get up to speed. Then we wouldn’t have to be impressed that the team and contractors work diligently through the campaign, because the campaign would be second nature to them, and diligence would be standard operating procedure. Fewer problems would result and more success would ensue.
What has NASA’s team and its contractors been doing these past three years?
Instead of finding the “new problems” this month, they could have found them thirty or so months ago and fixed them all the way back then. NASA has known that this is a problematic process and that the hardware, especially the ground support equipment (GSE), has been the most problematic.
Robert Zimmerman’s comment rings true: “Let me translate Isaacman’s real position: ‘I am too much of a coward to push for changes now. What I need to make it happen is a launch failure that kills four astronauts. THEN I will be able to take action.’”
Isaacman’s problem most likely is that he made promises during his job interview with Congress (his multiple nomination hearings). Now he has to perform with a system that was not designed to do the job and has been kluged together in a way that still does not work right. He inherited a mess and is expected to make it work on schedule, yet the right thing to do is to stand down and correct the problems before one of them kills a crew. This is a chance to avoid the inevitable NTSB-type accident investigation and do it right the first time rather than after the accident. We know it could be done right, but it isn’t done right because Congress is in a hurry. Congress, not NASA, not Isaacman. Some blame for the rush goes to the President, too.
A stand-down and rework may take a few years, but doing it right is important.
Of course, if they have to wait a few years to do it right, then they may end up with a correct but obsolete rocket, spacecraft, and space launch system, as commercial space companies are already working on ways to do it right the first time.
It is a cluster bleep, as defined in the movie Heartbreak Ridge: “Marines shouldn’t be sitting on their sorry asses filling out requisitions for equipment they should already have.”
We pays our taxes and we takes our chances. This time Congress screwed us with the rocket and now they are screwing us with the mission.
Edward asked, “What has NASA’s team and its contractors been doing these past three years?”
As I noted in a previous comment, there wasn’t much they could do, considering the hardware-poor nature of SLS. Without the rocket itself on the launchpad, they have no capability of doing tank and fueling tests with hydrogen. The only time they can test these kludgy systems is when the rocket is fully stacked, something that takes about six months to do and then must be launched soon thereafter.
To Gary
Remember, Elon went for composites early on…and it bit him. Beal had the largest filament winding machine ever…but I think Musk had Japan build an early test tank. Maybe Neutron will have better luck.
Some think I hate Elon. Fact is, I wanted StarHopper to be the model. It was the most “Salvage One” of all SpaceX builds. Falcon—a good rocket—never inspired me.
Starship increased in sophistication—but I think Elon wanted something more rough and ready.
Beyond a certain size, HLLVs get cranky—I don’t care who builds them.
I hope Japan tries Sea Dragon.
I think it was Husjak that wrote a book where he thought you could get away with ASE skill welders and such…I can’t find his book to check.
Hello Edward,
Yeah. That really happened. Still a little hard to believe, even in retrospect.
I think Bob is (of course) absolutely correct that the extremely hardware-poor state of this program makes *everything* harder to do; harder to improve; harder to fix.
That said, Jared Isaacman has just told us that they think a better redesign of the connector *is* possible even without having done numerous launches to figure this out; and I have to think that Honeycutt’s team knew this right from the start. And yet, they didn’t do it. Why? Because of the cost? Did they ask to do it, and have Nelson or Free turn them down? These would be questions to ask the Artemis team in a press conference, if they have another before the heat death of the universe.
Hello Bob,
Actually, I have considerably more confidence in that Orion abort system saving the crew’s necks in a “core explosion on the pad” scenario than I do in a “SRB booster detonation scenario in flight” scenario. But I admit that this is an exercise in finding silver linings in tornado-spawning thunderhead clouds.
While we’re on the topic of potential rapid unscheduled disassemblies of the SLS stack, I am mortified to see that Polymarket has a live betting outcome on “Artemis II explosion.”
Apparently they caught some heat for that, so now they have . . . renamed it “Artemis II booster rupture.”
No, I’m not going to link it.
Richard M: My translation wasn’t perfect. What he needs to have courage make any changes is a disaster that kills four astronauts, whether at launch, during the flight, or upon return. Before then, Isaacman doesn’t have the balls to face reality.
It is the same NASA mentality that killed people on Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia. In more than half a century, nothing has changed.
Jeff Wright,
Elon is not one to proceed on a course of action just because it was “decided” if experience suggests the decision was in error – unlike the “engineering judgement” of the four former members of the US Senate who “designed” SLS, say.
HLLVs are, indeed, anything but easy to design and build. The N-1 never did get its bugs chased. The Saturn V had some notable teething problems as well. In more recent times, the SLS and Starship have had their own, quite public, issues. The main difference is that, even if all of its fueling issues vanished tomorrow, a “perfected” SLS would still be a dead-end for cost and cadence reasons while a perfected Starship will open the doors to the Solar System.
Never-built HLLVs proposed in the past would face their own issues were any of these projects to emerge from dusty archives into the light of day. No one is going to build Sea Dragon and the timid Japanese would be far less likely to even attempt such a thing than would the South Koreans, the Indians or even some US-based effort. None of those are going to happen because Starship will have pre-empted the field.
An 80 million lbs-force pressure-fed single-chamber booster engine would likely face insuperable combustion instability problems that could not be solved in any hardware-poor development program. A hardware-rich Starship-style development program would be a very tough sell to potential investors even if Truax’s intended reusability could be achieved.
If any Earth-departure launch vehicle significantly more muscular than Starship is ever built it will almost certainly be built by SpaceX because Elon decides Starship is just too small for some future ambition one can hardly imagine at present.
Robert,
My question (“What has NASA’s team and its contractors been doing these past three years?”) was more rhetorical than sincere, but it seems to me that the commercial space companies are using better development practices than NASA. Perhaps Congress is too cheap to fund a proper development program, which does not make much sense if they are just doing this as a jobs program. For a mere jobs program, spending more money would keep more people employed.
My point is that SpaceX is spending a tremendous amount of money on dozens of test units in order to get Starship to work at its best, Stoke Space’s development program uses multiple test units, and Rocket Lab recently had a test unit fail rather spectacularly (similar to some of SpaceX’s test units). NASA, however, did none of that for three years.
NASA didn’t need to build up a whole SLS rocket to conduct tests on its quick disconnect design. All they need is a set of quick disconnect hardware that they can pump liquid hydrogen through the same way that they do when loading SLS. They had three years to figure out whether they need to change the design or whether they only need to change the process, but they didn’t do that kind of learning process. Instead, NASA waited until the last minute (or more accurately: until the last week) before launch to test whether their system works well enough.
Because a separate test setup does not cost much to make and use, they could test beyond ‘good enough’ and improve the system until they get it operating very well, with consistency, and with confidence. SpaceX had ‘good enough’ to launch Starship on their version 1, but they are still improving their system, because ‘even better’ makes their system — well — even better.
NASA keeps saying that safety is their highest priority, but their actions tell a different story.
It isn’t just that SpaceX has replaced NASA as our national space program, SpaceX has been the gold standard for technical excellence for a few years, now. They do it better; they do it faster, and they do it oftener.* It is why so many people keep calling for SpaceX to solve the world’s difficult technical problems. Even the U.S. government, a year ago, asked Musk to find ways to cut government costs.
________________
Jeff Wright,
“Remember, Elon went for composites early on…and it bit him.”
Composites didn’t bite Musk. Testing Composites was only a test, one of many tests for materials and methods. He realized that they were not as rapid to manufacture, and a change in thermal protection for reentry made composites less desirable. The concepts and designs for Starship were fluid from the start, from the original announcement in September 2016.
“Falcon—a good rocket—never inspired me.”
Yeah, I can understand that you are not inspired by reusability, low cost, high quality, rapid cadence, and unbelievable numbers of annual launches. Those are not traditional, but the rest of us are inspired by the exponential increase in the usage of space, especially orbital space, because Falcon made it affordable to do more in space and to do it now rather than sometime in the far distant future.
“Starship increased in sophistication—but I think Elon wanted something more rough and ready.”
Which may explain why Starship is still in development, rather than having its design frozen the moment it did ‘well enough.’ SLS’s design was frozen before it could achieve a state in which it could be launched often or launched affordably. Apollo and the Saturns were cancelled because they were considered too expensive, yet SLS lives even though it launches less frequently and for greater cost per launch, even after accounting for inflation. Where efficiency is concerned, our commercial space companies are finding improvements but our government space program is in retrograde.
“Beyond a certain size, HLLVs get cranky—I don’t care who builds them.”
Is crankiness the reason you prefer SLS over Starship? SLS is so cranky that it can only be launched at great expense and only every three years or so, and even at that, it takes months of rework and tinkering once it reaches the launch pad. NASA went from an operational Space Shuttle to an eternally experimental Space Launch System that defines “cranky.” Talk about retrograde!
The Apollo missions were also considered experimental, but each of those missions was trying something new, trying to improve our capabilities in space. This Artemis mission looks like it is a rerun of Apollo 8, but it does not do as much as that historic mission and yet is more hazardous. Even at its best, the Artemis project does worse than Project Apollo ever did. It is worse in every way that matters. Retrograde is right!
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* I looked it up. “Oftener” is a word.