June 2, 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.
- Spanish rocket startup PLD provides short update on its launchpad construction at French Guiana
It appears to be getting very close to being ready for the first launch of its Miura-5 rocket.
- A plug for Russia’s own Starlink-style satellite network, dubbed Rassvet
Only 16 satellites have been launched, with the entire constellation not expected to be in orbit until 2035, if then. And it also appears the orbit of one satellite might already be decaying.
- On June 2, 1955 the Soviet Union opened its Baikonur Cosmodrome
It was then part of the Soviet Union. And though it is still Russia’s main spaceport, it is now located in a foreign country, Kazakhstan.
- On June 2, 1966 Surveyor 1 completed the first soft landing on the Moon.
It proved that the lunar surface was not deep in soft dust, and that a manned lunar module could safely land there.
- On June 1, 2011 the space shuttle Endeavour landed at the Kennedy Space Center, completing its last mission
This was the next-to-last shuttle mission.
- Video of the June 2, 2003 launch of Europe’s Mars Express orbiter
It is still working, its images providing a wider view than Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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
Do we know what happened to the NASA Mars orbiter MAVEN?
Couldn’t say.
This worrisome?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IFqI11SIGXo&pp=ygULc3RldmUgbW91bGQ%3D
Still no contact. The last published time that they tried to contact it was in January. No where on the NASA site does it indicate any other attempts to contact it.
Mr. Zimmerman, your headline is misleading. The first soft landing on the Moon was achieved by the Soviet Union on February 3, 1966, with Luna 9. Please correct this.
Questioner: Luna 9 might have been the first unmanned craft to successfully land on the Moon, but it did not do it by a soft landing. It hit the ground at full speed, using airbags to protect the spacecraft.
Mr. Zimmerman,
I believe your statement about Luna 9 is based on an incorrect understanding of what constitutes a soft landing.
Luna 9 did not hit the Moon “at full speed.” The spacecraft used a terminal braking system with retrorockets to reduce its velocity to a survivable level before surface contact. The landing capsule was then protected by airbags, allowing it to remain intact and operational after touchdown.
The key criterion for a soft landing is not whether airbags were used, but whether the spacecraft’s velocity was reduced to a non-destructive value and the vehicle survived and functioned on the surface.
By that definition, Luna 9 was unquestionably a soft landing and is recognized as such throughout the spaceflight literature.
A useful comparison is Mars Pathfinder in 1997. Pathfinder is universally described as having achieved a soft landing on Mars, even though airbags were an essential part of its landing system. If the use of airbags disqualified Luna 9 from being a soft landing, then Mars Pathfinder would also have to be excluded — yet nobody argues that.
Of course, the two missions were not technically identical. Pathfinder benefited from the Martian atmosphere, a heat shield, parachutes, and retrorockets, whereas Luna 9 had to perform its braking almost entirely in vacuum. Nevertheless, the fundamental concept was similar:
substantial deceleration before surface contact,
impact attenuation by airbags,
survival of the spacecraft,
successful operation after landing.
For this reason, Luna 9 is generally and historically recognized as the first successful soft landing on the Moon.
A couple of items down on X from that PLD Space thing about their launch facilities was a translated post by a Spanish-language space cadet with the handle SpaceNosey. He (or she) says that two of ESA’s reserve astronauts, Brit John McFall and Frog Arnaud Prost, have been selected as part of the first manned mission to Vast’s Haven-1 space station, which is to launch next year.
McFall is interesting in being a right-lower-leg amputee. Unless I missed an amputee on one of Blue Origin’s New Shepard flights, McFall should be the first amputee in space. Blue did fly a female paraplegic as I recall, but not, I think, any amputees.
Dick: You must have missed it, but my post about Vast’s deal with the French included an update about McFall’s mission.
Apparently so. I also managed to miss yesterday’s post about NASA’s abandonment of its core module notion for commercial space stations. Whenever opening the tab with your site on it, I always first refresh it by clicking on the title text at the top of the page. In the past, that has always seemed to be equivalent to clicking on the refresh icon of my browser tab, but maybe there is a divergence in refresh functionality since the recent site updates. I’ll switch to using the browser tab refresh only.
Speaking of MAVEN, NASA makes it official today: “He’s dead, Jim.”
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-says-farewell-to-maven-mars-mission-hosts-media-call-today/
Still, count that mission as a success. It lasted 12 years.
Re: Luna 9
I think the characterization of how it landed has to be . . . complicated.
I think Bob is right to have discomfort with the common description of it as a “soft landing.” It’s too easy to assume from that this was a typical retro propulsive landing, right down to contact, with nice sturdy legs supporting the final drop. None of these things is true.
On the other hand, it did use rockets to slow the descent almost all the way down, with a main retro rocket firing down to 250 meters, and some outrigger engines slowing it after that – it needed to be slow enough for the air bags to survive contact with the surface after all. It still struck the surface at 22km/hr, which is not terribly hard, but it’s not as soft as a normal retro propulsive landing, either. Then it bounced several times on its airbags before rolling to a stop. It was a clever solution by Soviet engineers with limited resources whose top given priority was to get an operable machine to the lunar surface before the Americans did, but it also was not as useful or sophisticated as the Surveyors were, either. Surveyor was a lot more useful to NASA in figuring out how to land an Apollo lunar module and understanding what it would be like there when they did, than the Luna’s were to Soviet engineers in preparing their LK landers. Surveyor would be the real model for nearly all extra planetary landings in the future.
It’s a common Space Race outcome: the Soviets get a “first” with some high risk and simple hardware, and NASA follows up shortly afterward to do the same thing with more sophistication and value.
With the follow ons–like Saturn-being killed by cost-cutters
Jeff,
The Apollo program ended because it met the government’s goal and neither Congress nor the president had a real need for it anymore. Cost-cutting is not remotely a bad thing–it’s how SpaceX has become so dominant in both launch and operational satellites–but it needs paired with good leadership and a clear vision. NASA has had precious little of other for most of its lifespan, which is the real source of your troubles. Not a smaller budget. Money ineffectively spent is essentially wasted, which prevents us from doing more and better things.
You waste a dollar and it’ll take friends with it leaving home and won’t even send you a postcard.
You invest a dollar and it often brings friends home to live.
Hello Jeff,
The budgets might have gone down, but the robotic landings would continue! As I noted in one of the other threads, my aunt was at JPL at the time, and she got moved over to the next such attempt: the Viking missions to Mars. They landed flawlessly, and the JPL experience with the Surveyors was critical to that.
Any landing you can walk away from, or continue the mission, is a good landing.