May 14, 2025 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.
- New rocket startup HStar Space proposes its own heavy-lift reusable rocket
It wants to launch from French Guiana, Wallops, and Australia. This is a very new company, so our expectations should at this point be very skeptical.
- Firefly touts its composite dome for the tanks on its
Alpha rocket planned medium launch rocket as well as its first stage for Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket.
Corrected as per my reader Dick Eagleson below. Thank you.
- The New Horizons team notes that the spacecraft continues to detect “high dust impact rates” as it flies outward beyond Pluto in the Kuiper belt
This was first reported in Feburary 2024, but the continuing high impact rate suggests the Kuiper Belt has more in it than predicted.
- On this day in 1973 the last Saturn 5 rocket launched, carrying the first American space station, Skylab, into orbit
Three crews in 1973 occupied the station, for 28, 59, and 84 days respectively. The first mission however had to do major improvised repairs to make the next two missions possible, because during launch a heat shield on the hull ripped off, destroying one solar panel and preventing a second from deploying. Astronauts on that first mission, led by Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad, had to install a new umbrella shield to control the station’s internal temperature, and during a spacewalk released the remaining solar panel. More details in Leaving Earth.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
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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.
- New rocket startup HStar Space proposes its own heavy-lift reusable rocket
It wants to launch from French Guiana, Wallops, and Australia. This is a very new company, so our expectations should at this point be very skeptical.
- Firefly touts its composite dome for the tanks on its
Alpha rocketplanned medium launch rocket as well as its first stage for Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket.
Corrected as per my reader Dick Eagleson below. Thank you.
- The New Horizons team notes that the spacecraft continues to detect “high dust impact rates” as it flies outward beyond Pluto in the Kuiper belt
This was first reported in Feburary 2024, but the continuing high impact rate suggests the Kuiper Belt has more in it than predicted.
- On this day in 1973 the last Saturn 5 rocket launched, carrying the first American space station, Skylab, into orbit
Three crews in 1973 occupied the station, for 28, 59, and 84 days respectively. The first mission however had to do major improvised repairs to make the next two missions possible, because during launch a heat shield on the hull ripped off, destroying one solar panel and preventing a second from deploying. Astronauts on that first mission, led by Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad, had to install a new umbrella shield to control the station’s internal temperature, and during a spacewalk released the remaining solar panel. More details in Leaving Earth.
Readers!
My annual February birthday fund-raising drive for Behind the Black is now over. Thank you to everyone who donated or subscribed. While not a record-setter, the donations were more than sufficient and slightly above average.
As I have said many times before, I can’t express what it means to me to get such support, especially as no one is required to pay anything to read my work. Thank you all again!
For those readers who like my work here at Behind the Black and haven't contributed so far, please consider donating or subscribing. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
First, a correction. The dome Firefly is touting is not for the Alpha but for the much larger first stage it is building for both its own Medium Launch Vehicle (MLV) and the Antares 330, NorGrum’s replacement for the Antares 230, Cygnus’s erstwhile launch vehicle which has been rendered extinct by the Russo-Ukraine war.
Now to Hstar.
Hstar Global is, indeed, a new rocket company with big plans, but may well be able to do what it plans – a completely reusable vehicle with a payload capability in the New Glenn/Falcon Heavy range – though I would not expect to see it do an initial launch until the end of the decade at the earliest.
I am far less skeptical of Hstar’s prospects than I would be of more typical rocket start-ups because the company has both a good team and a billionaire backer. The latter is identified on the company website as “Francois Henry,” but is actually Francois-Henri Pinault, whom Forbes currently ranks as the 117th richest person on Earth with a net worth of $18.2 billion. That makes him only a few billion “poorer” than Eric Schmidt, the ex-Google CEO who recently bought Relativity Space.
And one might also note that, despite his relative “poverty” compared to multi-centi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, Pinault has an even hotter Latina wife as he has been married to the preposterously gorgeous – and spookily ageless – Salma Hayek for more than a decade. So Pinault certainly has all the prerequisites to be a Billionaire Boy’s Club Space Cadet – First Class.
The Hstar team is multinational with a lot of Americans, a fair number of French and a smattering of other national origins. It includes at least two ex-SpaceX-ers, Co-CEO Nick Orenstein and Operations chief Abhi Tripathi. Tripathi was a key member of the development teams for Falcon 9 and both the original and current Dragon capsules during his decade at SpaceX. He is a significant supporting player in Eric Berger’s book about those projects, Re-Entry with multiple entries in that book’s index.
Chief Technical Officer – Vehicles is Adarsh Rajguru whose background includes time at JPL. CTO – Spaceports is a Finn named Juha Nieminen whose background is in rail logistics.
We should also expect a higher-than-usual media presence for Hstar as the company also has a Chief Media Officer with a background in acting and directing. His job attracting attention to the company’s efforts would certainly not suffer if the so-very-fetching Madame Pinault was to put in appearances at them.
Sian Proctor, who was one of Jared Isaacman’s crew on Inspiration4, is also on-board as a Space Ambassador.
Pinault certainly has major influence in France so I wouldn’t anticipate Hstar having any difficulty arranging to launch from French Guiana. I think both the current Macron government and a possible future Le Pen government would be equally delighted to have a French-backed space company jockeying for a key place in the future space businessphere.
Wallops would be an interesting logistical challenge owing to the limited space there. Any launch facility for a vehicle as large as the 8-meter behemoth Hstar plans to fly would be far larger than even that now under construction there for the Rocket Lab Neutron. Wallops might have a problem supporting two large rockets with high launch cadences. We shall see.
Australia’s main limitation from a launch site standpoint is probably bureaucracy. Hstar would be well-advised to get going as early as possible on its Australian paperwork while it does its development test fires and launches elsewhere.
In sum, I think Hstar Global has a very decent shot at becoming a serious space player during the next decade. The more, the merrier.
While those are good points on HStar, and certainly makes it less likely to be a scam that will just drain investors of money, I really have to raise my eyebrows at a new company that is aiming for a payload between New Glenn and Starship/Superheavy, on a fully reusable rocket, as their starting point. Much smarter to start on something that you can get flying earlier, and start bringing in revenue with, before you get that ambitious.
Imagine how different things would be right now, if Blue Origin had decided to start with a medium launcher, and had been capable of putting up payloads, as Atlas 5, Delta IV, Ariane V and Soyuz all fell off, and everything went to Falcon 9/Heavy by default.