June 19, 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.
- On ISS, upcoming tasks include repairs to Canadarm2, which is currently dormant due to arm joint issues
Neither I nor Jay were aware the robot arm was out of commission.
- NASA touts the arrival at the Kennedy Space Center of the first of four core stage engines for the Artemis-3’s SLS rocket
Clearly Isaacman is pushing to accelerate the launch cadence of SLS, though whether he can shorten it to his goal of six months remains extremely doubtful.
- Blue Origin touts the installation of its first “Quartz” ground station in Bermuda
I assume this is for communications with its rockets and orbiting spacecraft.
- NASA touts desert testing of JPL-built Mars rover prototypes
Considering that NASA is transitioning to hiring private companies to build its rovers, I wonder why the agency is still spending money on these government-built prototypes.
- On June 19, 1963 the duel Vostok 5 (carrying Valery Bykovsky) and Vostok 6 (carrying Valentina Tereshkova) missions returned to Earth
Though sold as a rendezvous mission by the Soviets, the two spacecraft merely had complementary orbits that brought them within a few miles of each other. Neither did any orbital maneuvers during their several day-long flights.
- On June 19, 2002 Steve Fossett began his successful flight around the world alone, nonstop, in a balloon
He launched the 10-story high balloon Spirit of Freedom from western Australia, returning to Queensland on 3 July.
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
“”repairs to Canadarm2, which is currently dormant due to arm joint issues””
My arm joints, elbow, and other joints, definitely have issues. Gelatin, ibuprofen assist, along with getting up and moving. That Canadarm2 is much younger than me. I hope that the Canadarm2 can be repaired. Just another reason we are so glad private space is moving forward with space stations.
The replaced parts will be brought back for examination. We need to find a cure for arthritis in space robots.
More on the outrage about a certain trillionaire:
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/business/joseph-vazquez/2026/06/18/top-10-media-freakouts-over-elon-musk-becoming
A very good idea
https://phys.org/news/2026-06-nasa-biocontainment-facility-moon-earth.html
Espresso for geosynchronous, decaf’ for LEO
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-06-coffee-grounds-high-grade-solid.html
Happy Juneteenth! When Republicans forced the last Democrats to free their slaves in 1865.
BryceTech’s 1Q report on global launch statistics is out. It turns out that SpaceX launched a total of 556,057 kg to orbit in the first quarter of 2026, which comes out to 84% of all mass to orbit, globally.
https://brycetech.com/reports/report-documents/bryce-briefing-2026-Q1/
Elon reacts: “Q1 tonnage to orbit by launch provider. Once Starship is flying hourly, SpaceX’s mass to orbit will be about 100 times more than everyone else combined, even if they triple their current launch rate.”
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2067993010743247265
“Hourly” still sounds rather ambitious. I’d be impressed with “daily!”
Regarding hourly or daily, I think delusional might be more accurate than ambitious. .
The Graveyard of Prophets is full of folks who said the same about previous Musk ambitions over the past quarter century. That said, it won’t be long before we know who’s right about this matter either – a few years at most. Let us hope we are both around to see how this all turns out.
I suspect you haven’t bothered to work the numbers for yourself. In any case, not all of Musk’s concepts work, and this one is more risky than most. I believe it is a brilliant execution of a flawed architecture and you don’t. But as you say, we’ll know for sure in a few years.
As for being around, I intend to live forever or die trying. Turn 70 in September and working on new business ventures. Grateful for the health I have so far and will protect it to the best of my ability.
As an aside, if SpaceX had gone with a New Glenn class architecture, I suspect they would have been in revenue service years ago with current flight rate passing the Falcons. The methane based lower stage would likely allow much lower turnaround time and cost. And if the various conjectures are reasonably accurate, a Raptor upper stage would be cheaper than the Falcon upper with double the payload.
I’ll be 75 in September myself. Same goal.
I’ve worked the numbers. That one-per-hour cadence will be cumulative across many pads. One is already active and four more are in various states of construction. That number is likely to at least double over the next few years. SpaceX has already turned F9 pads inside of two days and 2-1/2 to three days is routine. Speeding cadence up by a factor of only five on Starship pads would allow two launches per day from each pad. With a bit over a dozen total pads – nearly inevitable if the Pecan Island deal goes through – a one-per-hour average launch rate could be maintained and even allow rotating pad stand-downs for periodic maintenance.
Granted that SpaceX certainly could have built a New Glenn-class rocket quite a bit faster than Blue Origin did, there would have been little point in doing so. A moderately bigger and better Falcon would still have been only partially reusable and that simply would not allow either the cadence or per-launch costs SpaceX needs to pursue its outsized ambitions.
Falcon exists in a sweet spot…denser fuel…simpler engines that are not full flow (“gas-gas”).
I am happy walnut shot-peening whatever has dealt with coking issues…if any.
Had SuperHeavy been kerolox, and Raptors only on Starship—maybe things would have looked better.
First stages can be a bit more massive, so an argument can be made that you don’t need gas-gas.
Elon is determined to die on the engine-commonality cross.
From a performance basis, it should be kerolox first stage, methalox second, and for any third stage, hydrolox.
First stages are largest, so use the most dense fuel. Third stage the lightest, but uses high-volume hydrogen.
This means you might have commonality in core diameters.
As usual, you are trying to optimize the wrong things and ignoring costs.
The Merlin is a very good engine, but it will never be able to support the sort of gas-and-go flight ops that Raptor will make possible because it has to be de-coked between flights. So would any other kerolox engine.
From the standpoint of efficiency, the methalox staged-combustion Raptor has 45 sec. more Isp at sea level than the kerolox gas-generator Merlin and the same thrust-to-weight ratio.
Why you have the yips about the full-flow – “gas-gas” as you refer to it – engine cycle I have no idea. With no phase changes occurring in the combustion chamber, there is little prospect of the sorts of combustion instabilities that plagued early F-1s. The cycle also imposes lower peak thermal loads on the turbomachinery than do other staged-combustion cycles.
To achieve the kind of launch cadence SpaceX plans for Starship, truly vast quantities of propellant will be required. Propellant cost, therefore, needs to be minimized.
Methalox is, far and away, the cheapest rocket propellant and the advantage increases along with required quantity. The US produces abundant and cheap natural gas. It is straightforward to clean of impurities as it is liquified for rocket use.
Liquid hydrogen, in contrast, is a niche product and much more expensive. Production capacity is also quite limited. The same is true of RP-1.
Given SpaceX’s intended major use cases, Starship is very well-designed to address those at minimum achievable operating cost.
Jeff Wright,
How disappointing that six hours after I explained, below, the importance of reducing costs, you advocate performance over all else.
Your preferred method of space access dominated the industry for half a century, and we got very little for the great expense. The industry begged for lower costs, because many were priced out of the business, but your method continued to dominate.
Once NASA and government relented and told the industry that they finally could try it their own way, costs plummeted, but at some expense of performance. The result was a huge proliferation of commerce in space.
Performance has a place and is important* — SpaceX is working hard to improve the performance of both its Super Heavy and its Starship — but costs have a higher place and are more important. Costs are so highly important that the industry lives and dies on it, explaining why the innovators and users are willing to die on such cost savers as commonality.
We see these kinds of cost savers in the airline industry, which should be a clue as to how important they are.
_______________
* Getting to orbit from the Earth is difficult, expensive, and dangerous. All three have to be reduced, but the “difficult” part comes from the rocket equation. Increasing the performance reduces the difficulty, but doing so at the detriment of the the other two makes using space for our benefit less attainable.
The rocket equation demonstrates that there are limits to performance. As you pointed outthe other day, Jeff, autophage rockets would be ideal. I heard the concept half a century ago, but I have yet to hear anyone propose a way to do it. Comparing it to a cigarette makes it sound possible, but a cigarette only has to burn to ashes, like a forest fire. Getting controlled work out of fire takes some amount of effort, engineering, and innovation. It always has.
I believe that the hourly expectation comes from the planned number of launch pads and the aspirational goal of eight-hour turnaround times for each Super Heavy/pad.
The number of pads is relatively likely to be accomplished, but the turnaround times may take some doing to reach. Eight pads with an eight-hour turnaround comes to an average of one launch per hour, an average of twenty four launches per day, or an average of 8,766 per year. An expectation of hourly launches results in a tremendous number of annual launches.
Another limiting factor is the payload demand. SpaceX may have plans to launch a vast majority of the payloads, especially launching propellants for voyages beyond low Earth orbit. But does SpaceX have a need to launch hourly, because the rest of the world most certainly does not. At least, not yet. I suppose that during the Mars transit windows, the launch pads would be especially busy, but maybe not so much at other times.
A third limiting factor is the ability to supply all those hungry rockets with propellants, including the tankers.
SpaceX has many challenges to overcome, and if it ever has enough payload demand to cover that many launches, then there would be a huge amount of business taking place in space.
8,766 per year rate would have the 40,000 units of Starlink3 up in a couple of weeks. The million data sats in about a year. Revenue will have to be found in any ventures beyond that for it to take place. Especially as Mars looks like a negative ROI for the foreseeable future.
The million AI data center satellites in LEO are a warm-up exercise – barely the tip of the tip of the eventual iceberg. The SpaceX Moon Base will exponentially ramp up production and deployment of far larger AI data center sats. If one is looking for an ROI for Mars, much the same could be done there.
John hare,
I don’t know of any studies or ideas with a positive return on investment (ROI) for any activity on Mars, colonial or otherwise. I suspect that the colonists would have to find their own niche, as we earthlings haven’t seen one for them, and this may involve inventions and intellectual property. They will have many problems to overcome, and the solutions to some or many of those problems may be very useful on Earth and in space.
The only times that I can imagine that SpaceX would need or desire an hourly launch cadence would be during the Mars transit windows. The six-month short-route would be preferred for human transport, and the longer-route would be satisfactory for cargo.
Outside of the Mars plan, I just do not see enough business occurring in space to need that many launches of Starship-sized payloads. I may lack imagination, after all there are eight billion people on Earth, each capable of forming ideas on uses for space, but I have a hard time seeing a need for 8,800 launches taking 1.3 million tons, or so, to orbit.
If SpaceX’s lunar-based manufacturing comes true, then I can imagine that much of what we would launch from Earth would be launched from the Moon, instead. This was O’Neill’s thinking for manufacturing solar power stations in Earth orbit.
The way I see it, Starship is largely a research program, looking for ways to beat the rocket equation and to reduce the cost of launch. The only practical application for the very large payload-weight capability is to reduce the number of launches needed to retank Starships leaving low Earth orbit. Reducing that number can save some amount of money, over the long term, but more important: it increases the number of Starships that can make the transit to Mars during each transit window.
For the first Space Age, rocket scientists focused on beating the rocket equation, finding ways to get more mass to orbit, but they forgot about the cost side of the equation. In this second Space Age, businessmen have gotten involved, and now the cost side of the equation is being considered, but this happens at the expense of the rocket equation side. In order to successfully expand into space, we must do business there — have a reason to be there that pays for itself. This means that the cost side has to win a few battles.
Just as reducing the cost of orbital access brought space business to a tipping point, where it suddenly became profitable for many business models to do operations in space, reducing the cost of access to Mars can find a similar tipping point, where it suddenly becomes profitable to do operations on Mars. The ROI turns positive.
One potential ROI for Mars is the same as that for the Moon – AI data center satellites.
Anent uses for massive Starship launch cadence, it is true that, over time, more and more of what is used on the Moon will be made there, but it will take a lot of mass imported from Earth to get even basic industry, such as mining, smelting and metal-forming, to that point. And each tonne of such mass will require the launch of several tonnes of propellant for LEO refills to send it on its way, plus at least quite a bit of methane to support Starship lander ops at the lunar end even after lunar smelting is extensive enough to cover local LOX needs. It will require many megatonnes of specialized hardware delivered to Luna to get even a single-product factory and mass-driver launch infrastructure of major size established. It will be a process of decades before the lunar industrial infrastructure is large and variegated enough to back-propagate local supply of most of what will need to be imported initially.
I foresee no likely slump in demand for Starship launches even simply to support SpaceX’s own projects, never mind those of others who will want to access the lunar basic industrial infrastructure SpaceX will be establishing.
Perhaps the tech will just end up getting made available to these companies?
The example shown in the story is said to be aimed at allowing the climbing of steep slopes.
At one time hill-climbs were a popular form of motorsport. Perhaps they can be again on Mars.
Bob-
Have you covered the SpaceX Starfall Demo mission that popped up?
Did you speak on this topic on your radio appearance last week?
Thanks in advance!
I have not covered it at length, though I have referred to it once, I think in a quick link. I am waiting for more details, as everything so far has been very speculative and uncertain.
Thank you sir!
Heads up!
Rocket Lab conducted a launch of its Electron launch vehicle from LC-1 in New Zealand at 10:20Z on 19 Jun 26. Its payload was the Puma spacecraft (built by Rocket Lab on a Photon spacecraft bus) for the US Space Force.
The Puma spacecraft was built for the Space Force’s Victus Haze mission to test unmanned rendezvous and proximity operations on orbit. Its rendezvous target was to be a Jackal vehicle built by True Anomaly and launched on a Firefly Alpha. With Alpha being grounded for an extended period of time, that launch did not occur.
However, True Anomaly launched the Jackal-004 vehicle as a rideshare on SpaceX’s CAS500-2 mission for South Korea. Interestingly, True Anomaly announced on 18 Jun 26 that Jackal-004 had completed on-orbit commissioning and was ready to begin its MX-3 mission. Not coincidentally it turned out, Jackal-004’s orbit had it pass over the LC-1 launch site in New Zealand at 10:30Z on 19 Jun 26, just 10 minutes after the start of the Electron launch.
The fascinating part of all of this is that besides the announcement of the commissioning of Jackal-004, the details of this launch were not announced in advance (and of this writing haven’t been announced at all, though the spacecraft’s orbital elements have been published).
It’s been fun watching this come together.
mkent: Links? Source?
Happy Summer Solstice!
and Happy Father’s Day to all dads out there!
Since it’s the longest day in the northern hemisphere, it’s also International Dachshund Day. I’m observing it as there were several of them in our family for more than 30 years.
NASA’s Office of the Inspector General has just issued its report on NASA infrastructure, which is probably about what you’d expect:
https://oig.nasa.gov/audits/nasas-launch-infrastructure/
Might be worth some discussion, though.
Read the whole thing and looked at all the pictures, charts and graphs.
No comprehensive pavement condition survey since the Shuttle retired – Yikes! NASA claims to have money for such now and to be planning to git ‘er done by Halloween. Strikes me NASA should divert most of those funds to other purposes – like actual physical repairs – and hand the job to SpaceX. Looks like a nice 6-to-8-week project for SpaceX to, in turn, hand to a pair of their bright and eager interns along with a Cybertruck. Program Cybertruck to run the entire KSC/Canaveral road network repeatedly and continuously with only breaks for recharging. Engage Full Self-Driving (FSD) to handle other traffic and such things as checkpoints and access gates. Have accelerometers on board to supplement data gathered by suspension electronics. Good idea to have ground-penetrating radar in the frunk and/or trunk with antennae suspended ahead of and/or behind bumpers. Interns can write any needed control and data post-processing software including of outward-facing camera video.
New baseline for road and bridge upgrades should be ability – in terms of both route width and load-bearing – to handle regular and frequent transport of Starship and New Glenn stages on Self-Propelled Modular Transporters (SPMTs).
The commercial operators apparently have a lot of leeway to do their own things at the pads they lease – way more than NASA does anent shared infrastructure anyway. While waiting for Congress to remove the statutory barriers to commercial operators helping NASA fund infrastructure, NASA should plan to avoid such problems, as well as much projected increased heavy truck traffic, by requiring at least Blue and SpaceX to be non-road autarkic anent nitrogen and cryo prop deliveries by producing same at their launch sites as SpaceX is already in the process of doing at Starbase. Set out routes for natural gas mains to all Blue, SpaceX and other launch sites handling methalox vehicles. Natural gas can run the on-site generators needed to run the on-site LNG refining/liquefaction and air liquefaction/separation plants. As these would not be shared infrastructure but used directly by the lessees, much red tape and hobbling statutory prohibitions look possible to detour around.
Given that the Space Force has a lot more leeway anent infrastructure funding than does NASA, maybe the thing to do about many of the improvements and upgrades needed is simply to allow Space Force to play the national security card to pay for and expedite much of what is needed. The DoW, after all, has a considerable rooting interest in being able to launch what it wants to, when it wants to, without worrying about some jury-rigged infrastructure repair blowing out at an inopportune juncture. Bridge replacements, for example, could be made simulated combat exercises for the Army Corps of Engineers and/or whatever the modern-day Marine equivalent is of the WW2-era Seabees.
That’s my first-pass reaction. Possibly more later.
You posted this in the quick links, but are referring to the IG audit report.