July 17, 2025 Quick space linksCourtesy 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.
- Amazon confirms the 24 satellites launched yesterday by SpaceX are all functioning as planned
It also says they were deployed every 20 seconds over 8 minutes.
- Boeing touts its progress in building SLS’s more powerful upper stage, intended to increase SLS’s power to approximately match the Saturn-5
As Jay notes, “This is kind of painful to watch and read.”
- On July 16, 1969 Apollo 11 was launched
The tweet is by Buzz Aldrin, still going strong.
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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
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.
- Amazon confirms the 24 satellites launched yesterday by SpaceX are all functioning as planned
It also says they were deployed every 20 seconds over 8 minutes.
- Boeing touts its progress in building SLS’s more powerful upper stage, intended to increase SLS’s power to approximately match the Saturn-5
As Jay notes, “This is kind of painful to watch and read.”
- On July 16, 1969 Apollo 11 was launched
The tweet is by Buzz Aldrin, still going strong.
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. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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
“100 Ton Test” (May 7, 1945)
https://youtu.be/iCw2hP193Cw
1:34
“To help in preparing the instrumentation for the Trinity shot, 108 tons of TNT/RDX high explosive was stacked on a wooden platform 800 yards from Trinity ground zero and detonated. The pile of high explosive was threaded with tubes containing 1000 curies of reactor fission products. The test allowed the calibration of instruments to measure the blast wave and gave some indication of how fission products might be distributed by a nuclear explosion.”
I am looking forward to the EUS, a second stage that won’t cartwheel. Pyrios needs Buffet to invest in it.
I have visited the Nuclear Testing Museum in Las Vegas, and no, they don’t hand out out dosimeters at the door.
Boeing touts the increased power of the SLS’s upper stage to approximately match the Saturn 5 …
I didn’t see the Saturn 5 directly in the article but I noted that this would be what a former Boeing engineer I worked with used to quip: “Yesterdays technology tomorrow”
I also noted that the SLS will be “advancing exploration to the outermost parts of the universe.” You gotta have goals.
Boeing: “Look. We made an expensive rectangle on legs.”
To Chris
The goal is America having a high-energy upper stage that can be used for missions manned or unmanned.
I am hoping another, friendlier administration will restart DARPA’s NTR research (and not have Goddard uber alles)
The mission I am most excited over is Interstellar Probe. That can be a two-fer, as part of Project Lyra to Oumuamua. A Manhattan Project level program.
The EUS just needs to be a NERVA type nuclear thermal stage –the craft itself nuclear electric with the H9 MUSCLE ion drive.
It really is.
Trans Lunar Injection never sounded so sexy before!
@AndrewR – No kidding. In fact, AFAICT from the Boeing press release linked, it appears what they’re actually showing us are CAD renderings of an expensive rectangle on legs. Frankly, it isn’t clear that the expensive rectangle on legs actually exists IRL. Even the hero banner at the top shows (and is captioned) engineers looking at a CAD illustration, not the real thing. And why? It’s not a classified item. How hard could it have been to get a photograph of them standing around pointing at the actual physical artifact sitting in front of them? _If it existed!_
Desperate. Pathetic.
But by all means, continue – or even increase – the funding for this project. Because, reasons.
“The goal is America having a high-energy upper stage that can be used for missions manned or unmanned.”
Pity about the obscenely expensive heap of junk first stage and the crummy Orion capsule.
Jeff Wright,
The fate of EUS is still very much on the bubble. Based on OIG and CBO reports about its inadequately-trained workforce, close-enough-for-government-work tolerances, iffy welds and a price tag so lofty it can’t be tested before putting humans on it, NASA seems hell bent on exceeding SpaceX in the “success possible, but not inevitable” and “excitement guaranteed” categories. Let us sincerely hope these lunatic plans are rendered redundant by intervening events.
Let’s look at another part of the Boeing story…
Here’s another quote touted in the story:
“Collaborating with different teams including Quality Assurance, Engineering, Materials & Processes and Tooling, the team not only resolved key issues, but has maintained a consistent 90% or better first-time quality pass rate.”
90% sounds good until you need to do that 5, 10 or 20 times.
So I must very much agree with what Bob said long ago in his paper. You want a “high-energy upper stage that can be used for missions manned or unmanned.” or any other goal that is set by policy (This is the real area for debate) then specify it well and put it out for bid and contract a private company to build it.
In terms of iffy welds—Boca has had some issues there too.
I hope they both tighten up.
Two Planet 9 candidates?
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2025/07/two-planet-9-candidates.html
I thought P9 was put to bed. Oh well.
Hey Robert Zimmerman, here is something that you might want to look at, and then create a post.
Is Elon Musk’s Starship Doomed? The future of SpaceX keeps blowing up, and no one knows if he can fix it.
https://archive.ph/v2uZd#selection-1193.0-1197.72
Robert: Why should I link to articles from the propaganda press that merely rehash things that I have discussed and reported on months earlier, and with greater depth and understanding?
Jeff Wright,
Starbase doesn’t launch iffy welds, they go to the scrapyard. NASA – at least to this point – is still planning to roll the dice.
Robert,
Articles like the one you linked seem to come three-a-ha’penny every time SpaceX has any kind of setback. There’s an entire industry devoted to this kind of thing anent Tesla. For SpaceX, it’s more a cottage industry.
Mr. Wise is, if anything, one of its less extreme producers. He at least seems to acknowledge that Starlink is a success. There are people with far worse cases of MDS (Musk Derangement Syndrome) who still allege that Starlink is a failure and that the partial-reuse of Falcon 9s is not cost-efficient. There seems no accounting for tastes when it comes to what sorts of hills some people are willing to die on.
“Robert Zimmerman
July 21, 2025 at 8:37 am
Robert: Why should I link to articles from the propaganda press that merely rehash things that I have discussed and reported on months earlier, and with greater depth and understanding?”
I read the article, and thought it was dumb. I have seen many articles like that. Some of these were about early air flight. In one early spaceflight article, The New York Times said back in 1920, that a rocket could not work in the vacuum of space. It needed something better than a vacuum to push against.
In 1969, they published a correction.
Now other people reading that article, will think all of that is true. That each time a Starship explodes, that it is not hurting Spacex. These are experimental spacecraft. From the late 1940s, to the late 1960s, the military flew lots of experimental aircraft. Starting with the X-1, to the X-15.
NASA, and most of the general public have very little understanding of building, and launching experimental spacecraft.
G. Harry Stine mentioned this in his book Half Way to Anywhere.
So when a lot of people see an experimental spacecraft blowup, or crash, they go “Oh no!” Spacex lost another spacecraft.
Robert: I have ranted repeatedly about the low quality of the propaganda press, especially when it comes to science and space issues. See for example:
Starship/Superheavy did not explode!
Or this:
Once again the leftist propaganda press takes out its knives to stab SpaceX and Musk
The real solution is for my readers to post links to MY work on other sites, rather than putting up links to this junk. That way the public might have a better chance of being intelligently informed. :)
I think Jeff Wise was at Weatherwise, a magazine loved by storm chasers.
Stormtrack as a paper quarterly originally–now a website that lost its host…there is a somewhat more libertarian minded poster there (Smith I think) who has talked about how some twisters have gone unwarned.
I hope some of you take the time to visit Stormtrack.
I have always been taken by vortices… tornadoes can have many of these.
In 1986, there was a MN twister filmed by a helicopter that caught vortex breakdown.
Before, you had one super-intense “suction spot” tearing at the land…then, you had two suction vortices…in a double helix mind you.
A tornadic storm is an updraft…like a smoker’s discharge on the sea floor. Near me, a Coke planet’s steam formed quite an updraft, and I saw a wispy vortlet dancing a few feet from the ground…. perhaps a contender for abiogenesis.
More importantly, it could be that vortex breakdown may be of use in fusion plasmas–something besides magnetics that might at least give us non-fission power.
Hello Dick,
And I share your view that it’s little short of criminal that they’re going to do that.
But then again….that is exactly what NASA did on the very first orbital flight of the Space Shuttle in 1981. They barely got away with that.
(The Shuttle of course was designed to *require* human pilots, so it was more than just the price tag at work. But that was a choice NASA made, too. They didn’t have to.)
P.S.
It is worth remembering that Bob and Doug launched on Demo-1 in May 2020 on the….85th flight of a Falcon 9. Falcon 9 had launched 84 times before SpaceX ever put humans on top of one!
How many Starships will launch before humans go up on one? From everything we’ve seen and heard, it will likely be a good deal more than 84 times. With a whole lot of iteration along the way.