May 9, 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.
- Astronomers claim to have detected a star being destroyed by a black hole
I found all the actual data in the press releases of this story to be exceedingly confused and uncertain, but Jay thought it worth a quick link, especially because some news outlets are covering it.
- Video showing the moment Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1) undocked from Intelsat satellite
MEV-1 had docked to the satellite’s engine nozzle (useless because it was out of fuel) and acted as a service module to extend the satellite’s life by five years.
- Politico claims without proof that Trump will revive National Space Council
The claim might turn out true, but this “news article” contains no source from anyone in the Trump administration backing up the claim.
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:
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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.
- Astronomers claim to have detected a star being destroyed by a black hole
I found all the actual data in the press releases of this story to be exceedingly confused and uncertain, but Jay thought it worth a quick link, especially because some news outlets are covering it.
- Video showing the moment Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV-1) undocked from Intelsat satellite
MEV-1 had docked to the satellite’s engine nozzle (useless because it was out of fuel) and acted as a service module to extend the satellite’s life by five years.
- Politico claims without proof that Trump will revive National Space Council
The claim might turn out true, but this “news article” contains no source from anyone in the Trump administration backing up the claim.
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.
From the Politico article about the National Space Council
The regulatory reform was requested at the end of the first meeting under Trump, when Pence asked for comments from the commercial space companies. This led to the Part 450 regulations, which Biden’s administration administered in a way that slowed down the operations of many commercial space companies — the exact opposite of the request. Was Part 450 poorly written or maliciously executed?
Artemis was turned into a mere stunt, intended merely to put the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon™. This happened even during the first Trump administration. Now its goal is only to beat the Chinese to the Moon™, which we have already done. What an expensive boondoggle. At one time, the goal was to establish a permanent lunar base, but SLS and Orion’s service module were not designed to perform that mission.
On an upside, perhaps the National Space Council has time to return sanity to the manned space program and convince NASA and Congress to modify Artemis so that its next mission is not so very dangerous, testing Orion’s life support and ergonomics in the safer low Earth orbit, reducing the stress on the miserable heat shield (maybe even safer enough).
Diminished engagement from Harris would explain a lot of what happened to the space community during the Biden administration.
Was Part 450 poorly written or maliciously executed?
Both. Under Trump 2.0, malicious execution is now over and the entire FAA, including regulatory underpinnings such as Part 450, is being given a major rehabbing.
Flying Artemis II in Earth orbit would be pointless. It needs to be flown circumlunar, as intended, but unmanned, in order to test both the never-yet-flown life support system and the allegedly palliative new re-entry profile that, in theory, makes fewer demands on the extant wonky heat shield.
The crew assigned to Artemis II should be reassigned as the crew for the Artemis III landing mission and all three Americans should be detailed for the landing party. I’m sure that prospect would be readily agreed to by the entire crew as more than adequate compensation for having to wait a couple of more years to fly. The Canadian would get appreciably more time in space than he would with Artemis II, the thankfully-departed Biden regime would get its “first woman and first person of color” on the Moon and, with a bit of luck, we would even Beat the Chinese[tm]. Win-win-win-(hopefully)win.
The Politico piece was odd in several ways. First, Trump doesn’t have to “revive” the National Space Council, he did that during his first term. He needed to do that because, contra this article, the NSC had not been just put in some sort of suspended animation by the Clinton administration, it was straight-out killed and buried – thus the need for Trump to do the Lazarus-rising-from-the-grave thing in 2017.
The Biden regime, interestingly, did effectively put the NSC in a state of suspended animation during its tenure, but did not re-kill it. The NSC met, I believe, only three times during Biden-Harris’s entire tenure and did nothing of note. Kamala Harris manifestly had zero interest in space – as she, indeed, had zero interest in anything beyond her personal ambition and the obligatory progressive race-hustling that has always accompanied that. She would show up briefly at these meetings, make a few generic remarks heavily larded with DEI happy-chat, then depart.
From these misrepresentations, I conclude that the article’s author, who is too young to have been part of the Clinton administration, is part of the Obama-Clinton tendency in the Democratic Party and doing his bit, therefore, to throw shade on the now out-of-power Biden clique and Harris clique (not the same).
Trump and Musk, being the boogeymen du jour, the article author is also seeking, in concert with the rest of the legacy left-propaganda media, to try inserting a pry bar between Trump and Musk by floating this “let’s you and him fight” idea that Trump wants to bring the NSC back to wakefulness while Musk is, supposedly, opposed.
If, as seems entirely reasonable, Trump intends to wake the NSC back up, doing so will not be difficult. Musk’s closeness to Trump simply suggest that a re-awakened NSC will not resemble the irrelevant sleep-walker institution of the Biden years.
One should, in any event, keep in mind that the entire rationale for the NSC’s existence in the first place was as a space-oriented coordination mechanism to keep the multifarious organs of government from working at cross-purposes on space-related matters. Under previous administrations, of course, there was certainly more need for such a thing as direct interface between cabinet secretaries has traditionally been both rare and slow as each department would treat such occasions as similar to summit meetings between heads of state – not quickly arranged and attended by all manner of protocols and involvement of subordinates. Trump’s cabinet secretaries, in contrast, communicate directly as often as multiple times per day.
The article author also seems to assume that the NSC’s User Advisory Group would act as some sort of check on Elon Musk’s involvement in space-related matters. That assumption rests on the risible idea that the new UAG would be the same sort of largely legacy contractor old-boys club – with the notable exceptions of Gwynne Shotwell and Relativity Space’s then-CEO Tim Ellis – that it was in the first Trump administration. Given subsequent events of the past eight years, that seems a laughably naive hope even for a Beltway-bubbled scribbler at Politico.
Sadly, but typically, for articles in publications of this stripe, this piece is entirely lacking in any actual news and is, instead, merely another window into the fantasy thinking and not-so-secret hopes of a “press” cadre that still fails to appreciate its own irrelevance.
Dick Eagleson: As this was a quick link, I didn’t care to spend any time doing any analysis. I also made it a quick link because I thought it was mostly garbage. Your analysis does the job quite well:
I must add that I sense the manipulations of swamp creature Scott Pace as possibly being behind this propaganda piece. As we both note, the article provided zero news or even the slightest bit of evidence for its claim. I think Pace pushed it with the reporter in the hope he can get back in good graces with the administration.
I think hell will freeze over before that happens.
CSI Starbase has released a video exploring the Starship 7 and 8 failures. Zack Golden posits that pogo could be a major factor, which would be consistent with SpaceX using the word “harmonics” when describing their own thoughts on the failures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkqWhHvfAXY (1½ hours)
He goes into quite a bit of detail so that we understand his point, which is why this is such a long video. Early in my career, my mentor emphasized that when it comes to vibration, everything is a spring. It is one of the many reasons why rocket science is so difficult.
_______________
Dick Eagleson,
You wrote: “Trump doesn’t have to “revive” the National Space Council, he did that during his first term.”
I thought so, too. Trump had definitely brought the National Space Council back from the dead (why does that remind me of a zombie?). I had written in my original comment that “revive” was the wrong word for them to use, but upon reviewing the word in the dictionary, it can apply to bringing someone back from the comatose state that Biden/Harris had put the council in during their reign of senility, so I deleted that part of my comment. Trump may not be bringing it back from the dead this time, but he is reviving it from its “state of suspended animation,” as you phrased it, which definitionally counts as a revival (why does that remind me of Creedence Clearwater Revival?).
I largely agree with the rest of your comment.
Other news organizations seem to be running with this news, using Politico as their sole source, yet Politico claims an anonymous source who cannot be questioned. Did he say what Politico said he said? Does he even exist?
Edward wrote, “Trump may not be bringing it back from the dead this time, but he is reviving it from its “state of suspended animation.”
Edward wrote, “Politico claims an anonymous source who cannot be questioned.”
These statements suggest you were completely taken in by Politico’s fake “news” article. I read the article three times, and no where could I find even one anonymous source quoted that documented the headline claim that Trump was bringing back the space council.
In other words, the headline made the claim, but the article did not document it at all. All the article did was rehash past history.
Let’s please not do the left’s propaganda for them.
I agree. I mean….to be sure, if we both had our way, Dick, the whole thing would be cancelled tomorrow, and it would be onward and upward immediately with commercial replacement architectures. But if we are stuck with flying out the Block 1 hardware… well, for starters, yes, we *should* fly Artemis II uncrewed, to test out the heat shield and its new reentry profile before risking humans on this darned thing. But it might be worth buying down more risk beyond that with the idea NASA was toying with last year of an Apollo 9-style mission for Artemis III in earth orbit, without an ICPS, to put rendezvous, docking, undocking, and general operation of Starship HLS through its paces. And then use the final ICPS for a Block I Artemis IV mission to the lunar surface. Of course, that increases the risk that the landing might not occur on Trump’s watch, which would be undesirable on the part of Mr. Trump. But I think it is an idea that has merit, if the circumstances of SLS/Orion operation and Starship development seem to merit it by the time that decision must be made.
I expect you are likely right about that.
Yes, this seems like wishcasting — not because the author and his editors are even huge fans of the legacy contractors, of course, but because they have terminal cases of Elon Derangement Syndrome — but you’d think they would have figured out that this is yet one more area where the Trump White House is not going to re-run its script from the first Trump term. No matter how much Elon’s star has dimmed at the White House (if indeed it has dimmed at all).
Robert,
From the article:
It is not a quote, but it is a possibly existent source, who may even know something about the topic. Maybe.
Of course, even Biden “staffed” the council, according to the same article, so even if Trump does staff the council, it seems to be no guarantee that the council will meet or even be useful.
“you were completely taken in by Politico’s fake ‘news’ article.”
Once again, I seem to have phrased a comment poorly. Trump could possibly be reviving the council from its “state of suspended animation,” as Dick Eagleson phrased it.
Edward: Politico stealth edited the article, adding that sentence after I had first read it. Makes me even more doubtful about the reality of this propaganda piece.
Robert Zimmerman,
No way to definitively tell if Scott Pace had anything to do with the Politico piece, though his past associations with Republican administrations make him seem a fairly unlikely source for anyone at a left-wing rag to be looking to for gossip.
I will say, though, that the blanket disinclination of anyone in the Trump 2.0 administration to say anything to a legacy press “reporter” might plausibly have induced even a Politico staffer to be begging scraps from someone whose Trump-adjacent credentials date only to the Trump 1.0 administration while having no role in Trump 2.0. Desperation should never be underestimated as a “strange bedfellows” motivation, especially where “press” weasels and out-of-favor office-seekers are concerned.
Mr. Pace, for what it’s worth, strikes me as someone who is exactly the sort of long-time establishment type of whom there were so disastrously many in the Trump 1.0 administration and who are being categorically stiff-armed this time around. Trump, as in every other department, has a cracker-jack space crew lined up and certainly has no need to throw even crumbs to as superannuated and problematical a DC denizen as Scott Pace.
Certainly if Pace thinks that bit of mild bad-mouthing he gave SLS in Congressional testimony awhile back will serve to get him a red-carpet welcome to the Trump 2.0 administration he’s badly mistaken. I put that in a class with Lori Garver’s craven embrace of anti-human spaceflight rhetoric five years ago as she was obviously angling for the NASA Administrator job in the Biden regime.
Edward,
Point conceded anent “revived.” That said, I don’t think yours was the interpretation of that word intended by the Politico guy.
Haven’t watched Zack’s latest yet though I will try to get to it soon. He always turns out good stuff.
That said, I wonder a bit about the pogo hypothesis. Never say never, to be sure, but the main difference in propellant piping between Starship Block 1 and Block 2 are the three individual downcomers added – one for each RVac engine. These are far skinnier than the former unitary central downcomer and are at angles rather than coming straight down. These would vibrate like bull fiddle strings given the very high-amplitude, low-frequency sonic environment of a large rocket stage. Maximum deflection would be at the mid-point of each pipe and the maximum stress would be at their ends. Breakage or a leak at the engine end of such a pipe could well explain both the leakage detected and the fire/explosion seen in the two Starship Block 2 in-flight failures.
A possible fix would be to change the natural frequency of the pipes by adding one – or even two – braces in the form of horizontal equilateral triangles with the pipes at their apexes to the piping within the LOX tank they are traversing. This would add weight, of course, but the added triple downcomers for the RVacs already add weight and the engineering advantage of having them – whatever that is – must have seemed worth the trade at the time it was made.
Richard M,
An Apollo 9-redux Artemis 3 mission would be nothing beyond a 2-year-or-more and $10 billion or more gift to NASA lifers, MSFC and the entire legacy contractor swamp. It would also guarantee no American return to the Moon during Trump’s presidency and correspondingly relieve pressure on the PRC to back its various brags on the matter of their own lunar program. Worse, it would “prove out” absolutely nothing that can’t be better and far more quickly done via other means.
The most important things that need proving out anent Starship HLS, for example, are on-orbit refilling, trans-lunar injection, entry to NRHO, extended NRHO loiter, actual landing on the lunar surface, mission-length loiter on the lunar surface, and ascent from the lunar surface back to NRHO. The first of these needs doing before any notional Apollo-9-ish Artemis mission would make sense and the rest cannot be verified by such a mission at all.
The only thing that such a mission might “prove out” in space before an actual Artemis landing mission is docking between Orion and HLS Starship. This would be perfectly possible to test out much more quickly and cheaply in the big thermal-vacuum test chamber at the test center formerly known as Plum Brook using an actual Orion fitted with LockMart’s interpretation of the IDSS docking mechanism and a suitable fixture, built by SpaceX, containing their own version – something they have already manufactured at least eight times for the Crew and Cargo Dragon fleet.
To Edward
The concept “everything is a spring” needs be carved in granite.
Though NSF ‘s Jim (Byeman at SPF) is dismissive of brainstorming–throwing things against the wall, etc.–let me throw out a concept.
Could it be that Raptor 3 is so very compact–that the rest of the rocket takes the abuse instead?
Today I saw three articles of interest
“‘Countersnapping structures shrink when pulled.” Vibration dampening is discussed.
“Researchers uncover why cracks in materials break their symmetry while spreading.”
The results surprised people.
“Tapping a new toolbox, engineers buck tradition in high-performing heat exchanger.”
–also helpful to Elon, I would think.
Dick Eagleson,
“Haven’t watched Zack’s latest yet though I will try to get to it soon. He always turns out good stuff.”
When I first found him, I worried that he did a lot of speculation. Then I realized that everyone was speculating a lot, because SpaceX is not as forthcoming as we imagine (their activities are fairly public, because they happen next to a public road, but that is not the same as forthcoming).
Keep in mind that Zack guesses that the problem was pogo, but he does offer some evidence to support his hypothesis.
“A possible fix would be to change the natural frequency of the pipes by adding one – or even two – braces”
The location(s) would need to be carefully thought out to make sure that it (they) breaks up the current resonance but not form a different catastrophic resonance. Assuming that pogo is the problem, then they didn’t see this one coming, so it seems to me that this is not an easy prediction for the Starship design.