January 14, 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.
- War Department will invest in L3Harris’s missile division
This is a strange deal. Instead of buying solid-rockets from L3Harris, the government appears to be buying part of the company, now called Missile Solutions. Not a good plan in the long run.
- Firefly unveils the upgraded Block II version of its Alpha rocket
The final launch of Block 1 is tentatively scheduled “in a few weeks” and “will test some Block II subsystems.” As Block I had a poor launch record, the sooner it is replaced with an upgrade the better.
- Nimbus Power Systems successfully completes simulated launch test of its fuel cell system
This power system will be used on Blue Origin’s lunar landers, both manned and unmanned.
- A review of historical records finds the pulse of a variable star has shortened by three days
The Space.com headline at the link is garbage, pure clickbait that does not reflect the basic research.
- NASA official admits it is “unlikely” the MAVEN Mars orbiter will be recovered
Engineers will resume their effort to restore contact later this week, after the solar conjunction ends that is presently blocking communications with Mars.
- NASA’s IMAP space telescope reaches its planned L1 position
From here it will study the edge of the solar system and the local space weather produced by the Sun
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.
- War Department will invest in L3Harris’s missile division
This is a strange deal. Instead of buying solid-rockets from L3Harris, the government appears to be buying part of the company, now called Missile Solutions. Not a good plan in the long run.
- Firefly unveils the upgraded Block II version of its Alpha rocket
The final launch of Block 1 is tentatively scheduled “in a few weeks” and “will test some Block II subsystems.” As Block I had a poor launch record, the sooner it is replaced with an upgrade the better.
- Nimbus Power Systems successfully completes simulated launch test of its fuel cell system
This power system will be used on Blue Origin’s lunar landers, both manned and unmanned.
- A review of historical records finds the pulse of a variable star has shortened by three days
The Space.com headline at the link is garbage, pure clickbait that does not reflect the basic research.
- NASA official admits it is “unlikely” the MAVEN Mars orbiter will be recovered
Engineers will resume their effort to restore contact later this week, after the solar conjunction ends that is presently blocking communications with Mars.
- NASA’s IMAP space telescope reaches its planned L1 position
From here it will study the edge of the solar system and the local space weather produced by the Sun
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
On the War Dept.
You say it is not a good plan—that’s religion again.
The reason Mike Griffin did what he did is that he was a Hegseth himself in some respects.
He didn’t trust the primes and wanted things in-house…Arsenal Method.
That worked quite well for the ABMA.
The idea is to not take what a salesman offers.
You DON’T let them build what they want to build. Keep suits on the short leash—and folks build what YOU tell them to build—or they will try to foist an albatross around your neck…like EELVs.
My guess is that the War Department just doesn’t trust L3 for…whatever.
I guess we will wait and see.
Further—
Remember….the popular wisdom is that L3 got rid of the best part of itself with only RS-25 (and a few other things)….so War Dept. might fear them like Griffin distrusted the EELV lobby.
If I were half the homer people think I am—I would keep silent and say “you’re right Mr. Z—War Department should buy whatever L3 offers.”
Personally, I think Space Force/War Department SHOULD launch assets atop SLS instead of Starship so they don’t wind up in the Gulf….
Jeff Wright,
What makes that ‘religion’?
Given Griffin’s behavior around the SDA, it’s far more likely that he was being leaned upon by politicians to funnel money to their constituents and campaign backers than because he didn’t trust the private sector.
As for not trusting ‘them’ (whomever ‘them’ is), that behavior is what’s gotten our military into the situation it’s in now, with aircraft, ships, weapons, tanks, etc. that cost too much, are built in small numbers, and can barely be adequately replaced when expended. There is nothing suggesting that government officials have any special wisdom anent procurement, and lots to suggest that they don’t.
Why would the Department of War fear L3Harris? Why would they launch payloads aboard a rocket that is unavailable, instead of aboard F9, and simply wait for SpaceX to work the kinks out of Starship? Why pay $2 billion for a launch that you can get for $90 million or less?
Given that L3Harris is pretty much a Franken-company cobbled together from parts acquired at the corporate equivalent of yard or estate sales, I’m inclined to give this deal a chance despite being, in general, not a fan of state-owned industries. A company that is, in essence, a lot of bargain-basement corporate leftovers flying in loose formation might provide more bang-for-the-buck to the War Dept. as a partial division of same than it would as an arms-length supplier under cost-plus contracts. This might even prove to be a model for arranging graceful sunsets for other legacy defense contractors. That is certainly a project I could get behind.
Jeff Wright,
Army arsenals have sometimes produced good results, but that is hardly the invariant case.
An interesting example would be the venerable Browning M-2 .50 cal. heavy machine gun, a weapon ubiquitous during WW2 and still in use by US forces today. At the outbreak of US involvement in WW2, the War Production Board- pretty much a collection of leading manufacturing entrepreneurs of the day – was set up to allocate military production chores to companies equipped to handle them in a rapid switch-over from mainly civilian to mainly military production. Singer Sewing Machine Co. was assigned to make machine guns because its main product was a durable precision mechanical device that rapidly reciprocated in operation.
Up to that time, the “Ma Deuce,” as it was called, had been produced by one of the Army arsenals. In keeping with Browning’s original design, every part of the weapon was machined including parts like the ventilated barrel cooling shroud. Singer engineers took a clean-sheet-of-paper approach to the M-2’s manufacture and substituted sheet metal stampings wherever possible and also re-schemed the machining steps of parts that still had to be machined. They took about 90% of the former unit cost out of the gun and increased its achievable production rate by more than two orders of magnitude.
In addition to lavishly supplying the Army and Marine Corps infantry and armored formations, these changes also made it possible for US aircraft to veritably bristle with Ma Deuces – heavy bombers often had a dozen. There were modified versions of the B-25 that had a dozen or more of them mounted in a cluster in the nose for heavy strafing of naval targets. Every US fighter aircraft built thereafter had four, six and even eight M-2s in its nose or its wings.
None of that would have been possible had M-2 production been left as-was at the Army arsenal.
It would be nice if there was a simple and obvious formula for the best way to do everything, but life is more complex than that.
Which brings us to the modern military procurement process – which, as so often seems to be the case with you, you completely misunderstand. Back in the day, the military was far less inclined to be minutely prescriptive about what it wanted, preferring to issue some general minimum specs and see what arrived on-offer. That’s how we got long-range heavy bombers in the inter-war years, for example. The USAAF put out a request for designs for a “multi-engined bomber” with the implied – but not mandated – number of engines being two. Boeing came back with the prototype of what would become the B-17 with four. A lot of inter-war, WW2 and Cold War US weaponry was acquired in this way.
During Vietnam, the swivel chair hussars took over. Not that they just suddenly appeared out of nowhere – there was the famous case of the badly defective Mark 14 torpedo produced by the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance and its obdurate refusal to acknowledge the flaws. There were other such examples. But “requirements” for weapon systems went from a few sheets of paper to toe-crushing volumes the size of big-city phone books. The legacy primes – once most of them were rid of their troublesome founding entrepreneurial headmen – went along with the gag and just did what they were so minutely and prescriptively told so long as they could do it on a cost-plus basis.
There were a few oddball systems – like the A-10 – that managed to succeed despite these headwinds, but, in general, the paper-pushers took over. That’s how we got “fighter planes” that cost $100 million apiece and can only be built in niche quantities. It’s how we continue to get new piloted aircraft when we should be going for mass mass mass mass mass production of cheap and disposable drones with some bigger and more expensive robot fighters that can maneuver at 12Gs or more and rip the crap out of opposing air forces that still put people in planes.
So, far from continuing to have the REMFs run the show, we should send all of these worthless people packing, burn the FAR manuals and put some actual warfighters in place who can intelligently evaluate both solicited and unsolicited proposals from “salesmen” at NewDef companies.
Mike Griffin did this a grand total of once in his life when he was running SDA. Both before and after, though, he has been the guy who wants to dictate terms and empire-build even if it means wasting billions and ignoring serviceable solutions already available. That includes, most especially, using extant EELVs instead of ginning up more useless and barely producible monster rockets in order to give MSFC something to do.
The military has been offered SLS several times – most recently under the clueless auspices of former Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. The War Department has – wisely – declined every time.
But, please, tell us just what payloads the military might loft on SLS – every other year. Given Starship’s vastly greater production cadence and comparatively miniscule price, the War Department would be better off launching stuff on it than on SLS even if every tenth Starship continued to go into the drink. But, of course, they won’t.
I have experience in this mix of corporate/government engineering.
If the prints, designs and concepts all flow together for a final product, this is intrinsically antithetical to how the govt industrial complex flows down their designs to industry.
I’m working off a decades old print, that requires an act of congress to compel a Rev Roll, and I’m dealing with BASIC GD&T that conflicts with itself, even in the industry standards that existed at that time.
Sometimes you can’t blame the orgs that inherit legacy programs.
It’s a lost art in picking up where someone else left off, especially if the details were lost to tribal knowledge.
Nate P and Dick Eagleson: I have come to the conclusion that Jeff Wright is nothing more than a troll, who is possibly only coming here to put up links to several sites that pay him to do so. In the process he spews out nonsense expressly designed to irritate. He thus reminds me of this guy:
I don’t ban him because he does spark some very intelligent responses that are informative and helpful, such as your two comments above. I do however review every post, and have deleted a few, almost exclusively because he won’t follow my rules relating to posting too-many and off-topic links.
I’ll add that the quality of recent prints from college grads sometimes far exceeds those of the decades old programs.
I think it’s a crapshoot, sometimes you get a print from a moron, sometimes it’s from a future superstar.
I want rods from god up there.
Logistics/basing, carrier groupies and fighter jocks go through the SLS budget every two weeks.
Starship is a Mars Colony Transport—that is what the War Department DOESN’T need.
The reason I advocate a Energiya-Buran type Shuttle 2 is modularity.
With RS-25/SSME/RD-0120 underneath an engine equipped External Tank (SLS, Energia) you don’t have to fly a one-size fits all orbiter.
Buran actually was to have two of the four jets the Analogue had.
The vision is that you could have different types of spaceplanes. No SSMEs weighing down the aft boat-tail
Imagine a side-mount spaceplane with kerosene in place of SSMEs. One with no big payload bay necessarily.
This could come back from space—land…then *take off again* using, say XB-70 jets on top of the wing-root. Heck, with Energiya 2.0 doing the heavy lifting—this concept could be VTOL.
No, it can’t go back to space under its own power—but it can get out of Dodge.
That is of far greater value to the warfighter than a one way trip atop a grain silo… AMEN?
Bob
I spit out my beverage when he said I know I got them when they call me a dumb*ss and then looks at the camera deadpan, “they called me a dumb*ss.”
No one has ever paid me one red cent to post anything BTW.
As much as I have defended SLS, you’d think they’d comp me a launch visit….
Robert Zimmerman: I think troll might be giving him too much credit.
Jeff Wright: Logistics, aircraft, and the Navy are all far more justifiable than the SLS program. Starship will be much more than just a ‘Mars Colony Transport,’ and you know it. The Department of War will have access to a plethora of launch vehicles as the years wear on, so there will be no ‘one-size-fits-all’ flights. Why do we need different types of spaceplanes? Further, why do we need SLS-launched spaceplanes, when the companies who are trying to develop those are using different means for launch? Why would they want to tie themselves down with the SLS’s cost and flight rate?
Starship is advancing far more rapidly than the SLS does, and the SLS is not safe. There are no substitutes for flight experience, and the SLS program has only one test flight under its belt. Simulations don’t replace physical tests.
Dick–
War Factories; Episode 4
General Motors Mass-production of Browning Machine Guns
https://youtu.be/vrclztGCg6M?t=454
“All Out for Victory” (1943)
Firestone Tire & Rubber
https://youtu.be/czHRSVQ6koc
20:32
“Unique short in that it highlights contributions of disabled, blind, and deaf war-production workers at Firestone plants.”
wayne,
Thank you for the links. Very interesting stuff. The way I heard the M-2 story it was Singer that re-engineered it for low-cost volume production, but it was evidently Saginaw Steering Gear. Different company with a name starting with ‘S.’ Tales tend to pick up errors as they are passed along.
Singer, I discover, made cockpit instruments for military aircraft during WW2.
Jeff Wright,
I also favor putting up Rods from God. Space Force could put up a lot more of them a lot faster with Starships than it could with bi-annual SLS launches. Starship is capable of being a lot more than just a Mars Colonial Transport – though it will certainly be that as well. In terms of varied roles, Starship is looking to be the spacefaring equivalent of the DC-3 – just a whole lot bigger.
Spaceplanes, Energia, etc.? Once again your propensity for uncritical worship of antique technology and your heroic – though doomed – efforts to Kerbal it back into relevance are an apparently endless source of innocent amusement to us all.
The Trump Administration has been doing a remarkable amount of this sort of thing. In the last year, it has had the U.S. government acquire significant direct equity stakes in Intel (INTC), MP Materials (MP), Lithium Americas (LAC), Trilogy Metals, ATALCO, and U.S. Steel.
Looks like they’re not done yet.
Dick–
Singer had an initial ‘test-contract’ for 500 pistols (M1911A1) but could not manufacture them fast enough, the tooling was transferred to Remington Rand and the Ithaca Gun Company who went on to produce almost 2 million. The Singer Models are very rare; they were issued to the Army Air Corp and few survived.
As you note- the military was impressed with their technical proficiency and had them produce other items.
–Frigidaire (a division of GM) did mass-produce 50-cal (aircraft) machine-guns at the Dayton, Ohio Plant. They produced the 250,000th Unit on June 22, 1944, and would eventually produce 363,000 total units and 1 million spare gun barrels by the end of the war.
——————————————-
“These are the People” (1944)
Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Neenah, Wisconsin
https://youtu.be/24voCzUWPa8
15:57
“We make vital paper products, and Maxim machine-gun mounts.”
Hydrogen fuel cells for space? I thought they gave that up during the Bush administration 20 years ago. (Remember the new fake hydrogen economy?)
Some people are still trying to fool others into investing in hydrogen! they take power from the grid to make hydrogen out of water or methane/natural gas! (there are no hydrogen wells) Then burn it with oxygen to make power that is considerably less than the power you started with! (“Air pollution” in the name of “clean air”)
Running hydrogen and oxygen through a catalyst to produce electricity and drinking water works… But they soon found out it was not economical because when you run out of fuel, or “turn it off” in a cold environment, it would freeze and destroy the unit at $1 million per pop.
I’m sure they come up with a fix to prevent that like using battery power to heat the unit up to dry it out… But that still leaves refilling/refueling the unit will be a major setback. (I’m sure leftover fuel in hydrogen/oxygen rocket tanks could be utilized but ultimately it all has to be placed in orbit… and a little problem of 10% of hydrogen leaks out of the container per day because of the small size of the molecule. No container that we know of can contain hydrogen for very long, freezing it consumes too much power that is not economical)
Last I heard most of fuel cells have been converted to use gasoline because it stores well, user friendly with the by product of just carbon dioxide and water. Why isn’t it used widely? Freezing is still a problem, and they get more electricity from an off-the-shelf generator with the same amount of fuel.
A nuclear battery is still the best option, in that it will last many decades before being recycled while keeping the electronics/batteries warm during a -300°F lunar night. (And the “occupants of the rover” as was made famous in the movie “The Martian”)
The announcement that they’re making plans for putting a nuclear reactor on the moon excites me greatly… It tells me they’re serious about future habitation!
Max,
Yes, I remember the second “Hydrogen Economy” push in the late 90’s. Fuel cell research for vehicles was big and that is where the money was. I had a prof who was really big into hydrogen and would talk about it all the time in class.
Yes, the drawbacks, making the hydrogen efficiently, containment with metal-hydride tanks, and boil-off. This was for just transportation purposes. When I was reading about NERVA, they used hydrogen, and I was convinced for a long time that ammonia would be the best propellant. I changed my tune when a guy did a study of the different propellants in a nuclear thermal rocket and showed that methane would be the best choice based on the ISP generated, storability, and making the fuel at low cost.
Wayne,
Not surprising Frigidaire got the job of making the Ma Deuce at scale. It’s a sister division of Saginaw Steering Gear within GM. A lot of the equipment needed to make refrigerators would adapt fairly easily to the revamped Saginaw Steering Gear design for the M-2, especially stamping presses that could make refrigerator frames.
My mother’s oldest brother was a lifelong GM man in Dayton and retired as the President of the Moraine Division during the late 1960s. That was the GM designation of the mile-long Dayton Frigidaire factory as it was actually located in the Dayton suburb of Moraine.
Just digging into the history of the place I find it wasn’t built until 1951 so the M-2s must have been made in whatever Frigidaire facility preceded the Moraine plant. My uncle wasn’t yet running the whole show during WW2 but he probably had something to do with making the M-2, though I don’t recall ever hearing any stories about that. But then, he never talked about refrigerators either.
When he was still the head guy at Frigidaire in the early and mid-60s, he used to get a new fully tricked-out Caddy every year and his wife used to get a new Buick – part of the compensation package. Those were the first cars I ever rode in that had electric windows and air conditioning.
Wow…the most interesting story involving transportation in my family was my Aunt having to ride to the doctor on a mule named “George.”
A mile-long factory…