July 28, 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.
- The next X-37B mission is now targeting an August 21, 2025 launch
No mention of the length of the mission, or which of the Space Force’s two X-37Bs will fly.
- In reviewing two decades of archive data, astronomers discover a pulsar with repeated abrupt changes in its rotation rate
The changes occur roughly every 550 days. In addition, the overall rate of rotation has slowly sped up and slowed down during these same time periods.
- Chinese pseudo-company Space Epoch has successfully fired the engine recovered from its May test hop
- On this day in 1973 the second crew to occupy Skylab launched on a Saturn-1B rocket
Their mission lasted just under sixty days.
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 next X-37B mission is now targeting an August 21, 2025 launch
No mention of the length of the mission, or which of the Space Force’s two X-37Bs will fly.
- In reviewing two decades of archive data, astronomers discover a pulsar with repeated abrupt changes in its rotation rate
The changes occur roughly every 550 days. In addition, the overall rate of rotation has slowly sped up and slowed down during these same time periods.
- Chinese pseudo-company Space Epoch has successfully fired the engine recovered from its May test hop
- On this day in 1973 the second crew to occupy Skylab launched on a Saturn-1B rocket
Their mission lasted just under sixty days.
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
Godier’s YT channel (the “universe in which we liiiiive” guy) talked a bit about A. Yaginuma’s arxiv paper that suggests a Mars orbiter may indeed be able to reach 3I/ATLAS after all.
…… opening of a new “facility” ….
Tom: Fixed. Thank you.
One amusing story about Skylab 3: Before the crew left the station at the end of their mission, they played a prank on the next crew (Skylab 4) by dressing up some spare flight suits in ad hoc dummies, to give a momentary impression that the station was still inhabited when the Skylaqb 4 guys opened the hatch. As Wiki describes it: “The all-rookie astronaut crew arrived aboard Skylab to find three figures dressed in flight suits. Upon closer inspection, they found these were dummies with Skylab 4 mission emblems and name tags which had been left there by Al Bean, Jack Lousma, and Owen Garriott at the end of Skylab 3.”
Imagine entering what you believe to be an uninhabited space station, only to get the momentary mistaken impression that SOMEONE IS IN HERE AFTER ALL. If Gerald Carr’s crew had EKGs stil wired to them, I’m sure they would have shown a momentary surge in pulse.
This will amuse Bob and most of our regulars: The Atlantic has a big long-form article that went up last night, titled “How NASA engineered its own decline.” Its alt-title tells you what the real moral of the story is: “How Elon Musk ate NASA.” For author Franklin Foer, as undoubtedfly for his editors, this is a horror story, a cautionary tale of what ensues from the commercialization of a federal agency’s second-order activities. For the rest of us regulars at BEHIND THE BLACK, it’s a great success story we want to see more of!
(How NASA’s own program of record rockets and crew vehicles consistently run wildly over budget and behind schedule does not, of course, feature anywhere in Foer’s gazillion-word essay.)
The concluding paragraph lets you skip the rest of the story: “The story of Elon Musk can be told using the genre of fiction that he reveres most. In an act of hubris, NASA gave life to a creature called SpaceX, believing it could help achieve humanity’s loftiest ambitions. But, as in all great parables about technology, the creation eclipsed the creator. What was meant to be a partner became a force of domination. The master lost control. And so begins a new part of the tale: a dystopian chapter written in the language of liberation.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/nasa-spacex-elon-musk-ambitions/683559/
It may be paywalled for some, but web archive can get you the whole thing, for those curious to see how this tale is being spun.
P.S. And there are some real howlers in Foer’s essay. He insists at one point that SpaceX could not possibly succeed, because, and I quote, “There wasn’t a market for rocket launches… For his very expensive product, there was one customer, with a limited budget: the U.S. government.”
For the record, exactly eleven (11) of SpaceX’s 134 Falcon launches in 2024 had U.S. government agencies (NASA, DoD, NRO, and NOAA) as their customer. If you want to count the CLPS missions (a debatable proposition, but you could argue that NASA ultimately paid for most of those missions), the total comes to 13.
Mr. Foer attempts to answer the false dilemma he sets up by insisting that SpaceX was only able to find success (which is pretty hard to ignore, even for Atlantic writers) by bootstrapping it by way of Starlink launches. Which, to be sure, there have been a lot of. But also for the record, SpaceX in 2024 launched a total 29 missions on Falcon rockets for customers who were neither the U.S. government nor SpaceX itself (31 if you count those CLPS missions). 29 launches is more than United Launch Alliance has managed in this entire decade. It’s also more than the total number of Shuttle missions NASA managed in the Shuttle’s final decade of operation (2002-2011).
As it turned out, there *was* a market for rocket launches that didn’t involve the U.S. government. And SpaceX helped bring a lot of it into existence.
If I were offered money to do a hit piece on Musk, I would likely focus on his being distracted as hurting Elon’s Starship program.
I would also talk about Hughes’ madness over time…and how a worst case scenario where American spaceflight might suffer if SpaceX kills competition, only to stumble itself due to a disaster, or being politically targeted.
Such a worst-case scenario is why you want a plethora of choices from the public and private worlds.
I think I speak for most when I say that we all love SpaceX so much, that we want there to be more of them!
But there are some promising partially and even fully reusable American commercial rockets in the pipeline. Hopefully, at least a couple of them will turn out to be commercial successes, too.
Richard M: Saw that article, glanced at, laughed at its stupidity, and closed the tab.
It does illustrate the part of the population that is pushing hard to establish the new dark age, based on ignorance, hubris, and close-mindedness. And that population is sadly not small.
Richard M wrote: “As it turned out, there *was* a market for rocket launches that didn’t involve the U.S. government. And SpaceX helped bring a lot of it into existence.”
Those who were paying attention to space in the 1990s knew that the market for rocket launches would be large, as long as the price per pound dropped to around $2,000. The commercial market begged for this price point. SpaceX was able to make that price point, and the market followed quickly, as the industry predicted.
Richard’s quote from his linked article: “The story of Elon Musk can be told using the genre of fiction that he reveres most. In an act of hubris, NASA gave life to a creature called SpaceX, believing it could help achieve humanity’s loftiest ambitions. But, as in all great parables about technology, the creation eclipsed the creator.” [I didn’t go past the paywall to verify this quote.]
This moral of the story is all wrong. Government should never have forbidden commercialization of space in the first place. For two thirds of a century We the People got very little for the government’s expenditures in space. Now that We the People are doing what we want in space, we are finally beginning to get what we had been paying for, all those decades. Paying for it a second time, but this time through capitalist investment and free market purchase rather than taxes.
We the People, through our elected government, gave life to a creature called NASA, and we got very little benefit for the money we spent. We did not have to destroy the creation in order to get back the control of the space industry. The question now is whether NASA can become a symbiont or will it remain a parasite.
When we let government run the space industry, all we got was what government wanted. When We the People run the space industry, we get what We the People want.
Conestoga and Percheron left a bad taste in folks mouth. James Fallows book FREE FLIGHT which was about the VLJ/air-taxi revolution that wasn’t proved that investors by and large avoid aerospace due to up front costs.
When people joke about how the fastest way to become a millionaire in space launch is to start off as a billionaire–don’t be surprised at the VC money men when they don’t laugh.
But if you really want to imagine G-Men dressed in black cackling with glee from interfering with things–especially during the 80’s and 90’s when businessmen were allowed to offshore, outsource, downsize and Just-In-Time America to death–I’ll leave you to your mythology.
In the meantime, the Gilmour girls look to buy more engines from Estes.
They are already working on parts of the storyline for future hit on Neuralink.
“Many of Musks customers visiting the Musée du Louvre for the first time say that the Mona Lisa was not their favorite.”
Darrin Johnson of IONIC EAR spooked the panel on SHARK TANK with his pitch that involved surgical implantation of Bluetooth devices.
Needless to say, he got no offers.
That kind of tech likely spooks venture capitalists even more than aerospace, due to lawsuits that often plague those within the medical community.
Greens would probably hate it, and people of faith see it as a transhumanist attack–even though Rush Limbaugh had a couple of cochlear implants himself. Those were from MiniMed originally (Medtronic now).
Medtronic was targeted by PETA, but they were large enough to shrug them off. Start-ups in the medical world are tough—and large firms have their own researchers.
Darrin Johnson would do well to approach Hughes, perhaps –and the richest woman of the Walton family (I threw up in my mouth a little) is at least building a hospital for women.
Implants may be a good way to rescue folks suffering from locked-in syndrome, but there are so few people with that malady that the tech likely can’t sell well on its own–it would have to be part of a range of products of a large medical firm.
Elon has enough dough to to overcome hurdles that stymied Darrin Johnson–but Musk would REALLY have to commit to it –and he has more than enough distractions on his plate as it is.
Jeff Wright,
The people with the bad taste in their mouths anent Percheron and Conestoga all worked at NASA and the legacy primes. Given the full-court press by NASA and its established contractor apparat against all launch startups – including uniformly bad-mouthing the idea to any potential investors who approached NASA as part of their due diligence and locking newbies out of established ranges – the wonder is not that Percheron and Conestoga failed but that they ever even got to a point where a launch could be attempted. Plenty of subsequent attempted launch start-ups never even got that far.
NASA didn’t cease this invidious behavior until the Columbia disaster. At that point, it had suddenly become clear that Shuttle was on life-support and had a very limited future at best. And NASA had a barely-begun ISS to keep going. The lethargic primes had no solutions for either cargo or crew that were either affordable on flat NASA budgets or available sooner than at least a decade hence. So NASA was pretty much forced to try buddying up to the few outfits left it hadn’t succeeded in squashing yet.
So fortunate timing anent its formation was a significant part of SpaceX’s early success. The rest, of course, was Elon Musk’s talent for recruitment of key subordinates and the fact that he didn’t need to cold-call venture capitalists. He had quite a decent piece of change put by from previous serial entrepreneurial efforts including PayPal. And he could get investment from Silicon Valley pals he had made money with/for in the 90s. None of these guys needed to do any due diligence – certainly not at NASA.
So SpaceX succeeded and RpK – where a bunch of ex-NASAns had bought in, then ousted the founding team and radically changed the proposed vehicle design – failed. The rest of the story is well known. As the saying goes, it was in all the papers.
So, no, there were not “G-men” or “Men in Black” stomping on launch start-ups with hobnailed boots. The spookerati and the FeeBIes had no skin in this game. It was “GS-men” on NASA payrolls who mostly stuck the shivs in. If you think this didn’t happen, it isn’t me who is a believer in mythology.
More mythology you seem to believe has to do with venture capitalists, though I suspect these myths are less a matter of believing things you’ve found in external sources and more a matter of you imputing your own risk aversion, distrust of private sector enterprise and deep suspicion of anything actually new onto imaginary VCs.
If VCs stayed mostly away from aerospace in the 80s and 90s it was because they very well understood that the government, in the form of NASA, and to a lesser extent, DoD, had their favorites of long-standing and didn’t fancy seeing any challengers of consequence arise. Senior retirees from both could be reasonably sure of landing cushy sinecures at the legacy primes once retired from government service – jobs I like to refer to as “Executive Vice President in Charge of Playing Golf with Congress.” VCs are smart enough not to play cards against people who print their own decks.
Post-Columbia, and the rise of SpaceX, of course, the rules have radically changed. VCs have put billions into space-related start-ups over the past 20 years – most of it in the last 10. The failure of VLJ wasn’t because of some generic aversion to aerospace by VCs but because the basic economics of that specific idea never made any sense.
The same applies to VCs and healthcare. After AI, in fact, healthcare was the second biggest area of VC investment last year – $23 billion. More than $7 billion of that went to medical device start-ups.
It’s unsurprising the Shark Tank crew passed on a surgically-implanted device. These folks are not tech VCs, they’re consumer product VCs. Hard-core cutting-edge medical device tech simply isn’t in their wheelhouse. If Darrin Johnson was the one who decided to try pitching Shark Tank on his med-tech, I don’t think I’d care to invest with him either – his judgement seems poor. I’m guessing that setting up a Salvation Army bell and kettle in, say, Dearborn wouldn’t yield much either and for pretty much the same reason – wrong audience for the pitch.
Ha!
I just don’t understand why Reagan didn’t push for opening things up then.
Did folks look at Gary Hudson the way the way the sharks looked at Johnson?
It always seemed like he had a reverse Midas touch…a kiss of death.
You would have thought DC-X might have opened things up.
I think the consensus is to let someone else take the hit on initial investment–let them fail–then pick up the remains.
Computer start-ups just don’t need as much up-front investments like vehicle production.
It never seemed like the more noble concepts got much in the way of investments. Either it was some widget, or an entrepreneur with a touching story and/or great presence.
Being anti-social myself, I couldn’t sell a heater to an Eskimo.
There is a new store near me in Trussville whose owner is so bubby as to be nauseating.
I don’t trust people who smile too much.
I agree with all of what Mr Eagleson says (as is commonly the case).
That said, you’re kinda darning with faint praise when you observe: “So NASA was pretty much forced to try buddying up to the few outfits left it hadn’t succeeded in squashing yet.” SpaceX had not even been in business a full year yet when Columbia disintegrated over Texas in February 2003, so it’s not like NASA had had much opportunity to squash SpaceX yet!
Fortunately, Mike Griffin was desperate enough, or open minded enough (or both) to green light the COTS program not long after he took over NASA in 2004. And Lori Garver had the determination to make it stick, and expand it to Commercial Crew, when *she* effectively took over. All that was left was for Elon Musk and his workaholic geniuses to work their magic.
Commercialization of space could have happened much sooner (certainly, the 1980’s) had it not been for the Powers That Be, as we all (ruefully) agree. But while I’m tolerably sure that outfits more capable than Percheron and Conestoga would have shown up, I also tend to doubt anybody as capable as SpaceX would have. So we can be thankful that Elon Musk made some amazing lemonade out of the regulatory lemons Congress and NASA spent over four decades cultivating.
Richard M: Actually, the COTS program did not issue its contracts to SpaceX and Kistler until December 2008, days before George Bush left office. Mike Griffin was decidedly unenthusiastic about commercial space. It was under him that the big government Ares rocket and Constellation program was pushed, hard.
Mike Griffin had heard folks like Tumlinson and Hudson before. He didn’t trust Boeing–then depots meant hydrogen–so he saw shuttle derived heavy lifting as a way around the EELV lobby that was also Elon’s enemy as well.
This was all long before Starship flew.
The Saturns were killed because of the promise of re-usability of one tile coated monstrosity–and here we are about to make the same mistake again.
Dick Eagleson wrote: “And he could get investment from Silicon Valley pals he had made money with/for in the 90s. None of these guys needed to do any due diligence – certainly not at NASA.”
Well, that certainly explains why SpaceX was able to raise funding for the first milestone in the COTS competition when Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) could not. That particular challenge seemed difficult, given that it was hardly certain that the government was serious about letting We the People do much in space. Up until then, We were only able to put communications constellations (Iridium and Globalstar) and some observation satellites (e.g. Ikonos) into space. Others were trying to follow in the footsteps of Orbital Sciences (now part of Northrup Grumman), but like Kistler, they were having a very hard time of it, mostly for the reasons Dick explained.
Jeff Wright wrote: “You would have thought DC-X might have opened things up.”
Venturestar and DC-X had similar problems as Dick talked about. Breaking into the Space Shuttle market was difficult, because NASA was even more against commercial space in the 1990s than it was in the 2000s. That is why, when NASA chose to fund both, it only did so halfheartedly. Added to that was the even greater difficulty getting single stage to orbit than getting two stage to orbit. The payload capacity was still too small for even those reusable rockets to successfully compete, but maybe if they could be used only as manned launchers, then they might have managed. It just was not certain enough for those two companies to sink much of their own money into.
“I think the consensus is to let someone else take the hit on initial investment–let them fail–then pick up the remains.”
I haven’t seen that happen yet in launch vehicles, or happen much for space operators, other than Iridium and Globalstar in the 1990s.
“The Saturns were killed because of the promise of re-usability of one tile coated monstrosity–and here we are about to make the same mistake again.”
The Saturns were killed due to the high cost. Nixon wanted a manned space program, but he didn’t want to pay the price of the Apollo-Saturn (not even the SI-B), and he didn’t even want to pay to develop a manned space shuttle. He wanted a space program, but he was unwilling to pay for it.
NASA thought reusability would be inexpensive enough and would allow frequent enough flights to satisfy the then-stingy government. What they ended up with was the monstrosity that was difficult and expensive to refurbish. The lesson to learn was to be careful with the requirements and the specifications, then design a robust system. NASA did not learn that lesson from the Shuttle, but SpaceX learned this lesson and is applying it to Starship.
Richard M wrote: “… I also tend to doubt anybody as capable as SpaceX would have [started commercialization of space in the 1980s]. So we can be thankful that Elon Musk made some amazing lemonade out of the regulatory lemons Congress and NASA spent over four decades cultivating.”
There was Robert Truax, but I am not sure he would have been eager to try reusing the booster, as SpaceX did. There had been concepts of a reusable booster for the Space Shuttle, so it is not out of the question. Of course, he couldn’t get funding, because the government declared itself the monopoly on space.
Hi Bob!
Give his *disastrous* record as NASA administrator, and his insistence on continuing to promote the initiatives that made his record so terrible, I hate to be caught in what even looks like a naked act of defending him in any way.
The record on COTS/CRS is, however, a little more complicated….
The first point to bear in mind is that Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) and Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) were really separate programs, though obviously there was a relationship between them, the latter building on what was achieved with the former. COTS emerged out of the work of the VSE in 2003, and was sole-sourced to Kistler (RpK) in February 2004; Elon immediately sued (and rightly so), and the whole thing was withdrawn by NASA and then competitively bid, with the first round of awards to RpK and SpaceX announced on 18 August 2006. RpK of course went belly up in 2007, and its contract had to be rebid out, ultimately to Orbital Sciences. Anyway, the COTS award ($390M, I believe) was critical to SpaceX, coming right in the middle of its Falcon 1 testing program, and was more than Elon’s entire investment in SpaceX up to that point. This, it should be noted, was hardly halfway through Griffin’s tenure.
Commercial Resupply Services came after, it being the program to actually award test and operational missions of the hardware that the COTS contractors had been developing. SpaceX and Orbital Sciences were awarded CRS contracts in December 2008, right, as you say, in the dying days of the Bush Administration. This is the one people think of when it is said that NASA saved SpaceX from bankruptcy, since at that point they were weeks from not being able to make payroll. CRS also made it easier for Elon to secure loans and venture capital. It came late, but Mike Griffin had to sign off on that, too.
Griffin seems to have been generally supportive of COTS and even CRS, though he does not seem to have been the prime mover. (His continued visceral opposition to Commercial Crew, right up to the present day, is another story.) He was certainly in a position to keep it alive and funded, or kill it, and I grudgingly have to concede that to this extent, he must receive some level of credit for these programs actually coming into being.
Griffin’s overall attitude in that era is a little strange. A brilliant engineer, he had spent his share of time in space startups, including in the initial conceptual stages of SpaceX — he was actually on that infamous trip Elon made to Moscow. Once he was in place at NASA, however, his pro-commercial mojo did not extend beyond COTS. Our friend VSECOTSPE, who as his nom de plume suggest *was* a prime mover in COTS, had to work with Griffin in those days, and not long ago he speculated on why Griffin shifted into a hyper-pork mode as NASA Admin:
All of which makes sense, I suppose. But unless these quid pro quos (if indeed they were such) continued on to the present day, it is less clear why Griffin has continued to publicly back the humunculous of the SLS/Orion program of record (even insisting on resurrecting the Altair lander!) unless he’s also a true believer, too.
Hello Edward,
No, I doubt that, too!
Fascinating guy, though.
Truax wanted maraging steel…like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ed6iUutrXnM
From NSF
If you read the Sea Dragon Concept vol. 1 it shows the baseline material would have been 2014 T6 aluminium. Only first stage RP-1 tank was considered optionally to be built from 18%Ni maraging steel because welding 8″ (yes, eight inches) thick aluminum seams exceeded SoA.
Look at I I I-C-1 for STAGE RECOVERY AND REUSE on Page 57
https://web.archive.org/web/20051226092121/http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19880069339_1988069339.pdf
The First Stage *was* to be re-used.
Legend has it that NASA called it “technically uninteresting,” but I have a different take:
Sea Dragon–Navy
Saturn——–Army
Shuttle——-Air Force
That tells you everything.
Before Stoke-there was this:
https://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2025/06/rombus-reusable-orbital-module-booster.html?m=1