November 4, 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.
- We Could Use Neutrino Detectors As Giant Particle Colliders
Sounds cool but the scientists also admit the present neutrino detectors can’t do anything better than the existing colliders, and in fact in most cases can’s do as much.
- Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy touts a successful static fire test of the first stage of its Pallas-1 rocket
This rocket was first unveiled in 2023, and then did not appear reusable. The images now confirm this, showing no landing legs. The company however has implied that it will eventually land vertically for reuse.
- Lawmakers warn UK must act now to get space ambitions back on track
The report, by the House of Lords, is a joke. It says nothing about reducing regulation and red tape, which is the UK’s main problem. Instead, it proposes more funding and more government bureaucracy “to coordinate policy and industry engagement.” We should expect even less (lower than zero?) from the United Kingdom in the coming years.
- The reason Starlink became available in the Falklands was because of the advocacy of Chris Gare of OpenFalklands
Giving credit where credit is due.
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.
- We Could Use Neutrino Detectors As Giant Particle Colliders
Sounds cool but the scientists also admit the present neutrino detectors can’t do anything better than the existing colliders, and in fact in most cases can’s do as much.
- Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy touts a successful static fire test of the first stage of its Pallas-1 rocket
This rocket was first unveiled in 2023, and then did not appear reusable. The images now confirm this, showing no landing legs. The company however has implied that it will eventually land vertically for reuse.
- Lawmakers warn UK must act now to get space ambitions back on track
The report, by the House of Lords, is a joke. It says nothing about reducing regulation and red tape, which is the UK’s main problem. Instead, it proposes more funding and more government bureaucracy “to coordinate policy and industry engagement.” We should expect even less (lower than zero?) from the United Kingdom in the coming years.
- The reason Starlink became available in the Falklands was because of the advocacy of Chris Gare of OpenFalklands
Giving credit where credit is due.
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
Space industry red tape is the least of Britain’s problems at the moment!
Oh boy, getting the “posting too quickly” message again.
Jared Issacman renominated.
YES!
I understand the argument he’d be better off pursuing his Polaris program, but on the whole this is great news.
On materials advancements
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-sculpting-technique-advanced-materials-basic.html
3D…knitting?
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-11-newly-machine-solid-3d.html
Grannybots flooding the world with uglier sweaters soon….wunnerful
Nice for the House of Lords to say the right thing.
We all remember what great friends they were to Black Arrow and the BIS..
…..cough.
If your rockets don’t have legs now, or you’re an established player like Rocket Lab, market share is going to be hard to get.
Patrick Underwood,
Yes, the UK has other priorities these days – like adding to the total of 12,000 political prisoners jailed for saying naughty things about Paki rape gangs on social media.
sippin_bourbon,
Looks as though the Last Stand of the Lifers and the Lazy aimed at getting Duffy the Admin chair has fizzled about as completely as the Coup of the Hardcore Sov-Coms did back in ’91.
Casey Handmer offers some thoughts on the “Orion Space Capsule” part of SLS
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/nasas-orion-space-capsule-is-flaming-garbage/
It’s long.
I saw that bit of invective…he conveniently forgot Dragon used the same parachute maker as Orion, which never did this:
https://makeagif.com/i/x2bdoh
I think of Dan Dumbacher the way most here think of Casey–and vice versa.
He never liked Marshall–I never liked him.
Jeff Wright,
All US manned capsules use the same parachute maker. SpaceX developed better math sims for chute deployment and collaborated with the chute supplier to use stronger materials. It also allowed Boeing and Lock-Mart to use all of this new know-how royalty-free.
The exotic chemistry underlying the Dragon 2 capsule explosion was run to ground and fixed a couple of months after it happened. Dragon ops since have been uneventful. And there have been a lot of them.
Orion came back from Artemis 1 with a heat shield that looked like a stretch of Alameda Blvd. It’s been years now, there’s been a review panel, and NASA says all is well and is planning to fly a crew on Artemis 2. But there seem to have been at least two people on the engineering review panel who don’t think all is necessarily well in Orion-ville even though NASA said the sign-off was unanimous. Let’s hope Orion doesn’t do in-flight with a crew aboard what Dragon 2 once did on the ground while empty.
Handmer’s screed did include just a bit of invective – mainly in the title. But it was mostly an engineering analysis appropriately dripping with scorn.
Who you like or don’t like is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether or not said person is right. As Ben Shapiro likes to say, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
Totally off topic, but here is some very interesting audio…
https://open.spotify.com/episode/19P9k2AfNu6hOvKhet0KXv?si=nje1lVNmSgGJXgedtUQZgg
A tour of Astrobiotic, and including an interesting interview with the CEO, and then an analysis of the content.
Very recommend listening!
( plus more interesting content… A podcast well worth following! )
@Dick Eagleson…
Yes, the UK is struggling right now on many fronts… One of the largest being the immigration issue, but a genuine web search will show that it is still a damage limitation project coping with the system the former ( right wing ) government left behind… No oversight, no control, and most importantly, no “fast track” system for allies who helped us guys in Afghanistan. If they go “home” they will get murdered, but they are not allowed to work or contribute in anyway to the economy of the UK government untill they are prossesd, they are just used as playing pieces in political games, and the situation does a good job of winding the right wing up, even tho the facts of the matter spell out a large majority of UK immigrants are just looking for the safety they had been promised
The bullcrap peddled around just divides us.. left or right, but we can all be nice… It costs nothing, but it also behoves us to check the “facts” that inform our opinions.
Agreed.
Now the Left tries to slime those who want borders
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-human-rights-breaches-mass-atrocities.html
But borders and picket-lines are the same:
“In 1969, Chávez and members of the UFW marched through the Imperial and Coachella Valleys to the border of Mexico to protest growers’ use of undocumented immigrants as strikebreakers. Joining him on the march were both Reverend Ralph Abernathy and US Senator Walter Mondale.”
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/09/cesar_chavez_on.html
Even the Marxist SPLC had to tell the truth with their January 16, 2007 article:
“Latino Gang Members in Southern California are Terrorizing and Killing Blacks”
Compton a case of ethnic cleansing—the Klan didn’t do that.
Let us not forget Los Angeles City Council President Nury Martinez
Lee, it almost doesn’t matter what the issues are. The Right wanted Elian from Cuba–and the Left wanted to boot him out.
Reagan hated tariffs, because he was a free-traitor. Trump bested him there—but it is a bit late. Democrats sounded like John Birchers, they were so anti-Russia. Really amusing.
There is no intellectual consistency.
Keeping jobs in America with picket-lines, maintaining a border…disciplining a child—al examples of how “unpleasant” isn’t the same as “unnecessary.”
The longer you go without boundaries–the harder it is to re-impose them and the uglier it gets towards the end.
I admire folks who are not liked by their own groups…white Southern liberals in the South, black Conservatives…pro-border hispanics.
That can’t be comfortable. But people like that are brave. The usual politicians just play their crowds.
Independant 4 life
The UK is struggling against the woke and increasingly totalitarian regime of the appalling Keir Starmer. One hopes it will be ultimately successful in ridding itself of this political pestilence – the portents look favorable. There isn’t much practical difference between hapless Tory administrations that did nothing much about the UK’s barbarian invasion problem even after Brexiting the EU and the current gang of Labour thugs whose sympathies pretty obviously lie with the invaders, not their fellow citizens. Fortunately, both Labour and the Tories have dropped into single-digit approval ratings in many places, along with the Greens, while Reform rises toward outright majority support. Recent by-elections clearly show the trend. The main question at issue is whether or not the UK will survive its current fifth-columnist “leadership” until new national elections can no longer be put off and have to be held.
The UK’s many problems are of long standing, including the Muslim rape gang problem which far pre-dates the collapse of Afghanistan. It isn’t a few late-arrival Afghans who are raping schoolgirls all over the UK, it’s well-established Pakis.
As with the Biden-abetted invasion of the US from 2021 to 2025, the vast majority of “migrants” to the UK are military-age males from the too-numerous most wretched places of the Earth. The people who genuinely need protection, women and children, are, as here, barely in evidence.
Culture matters.
On the technical front–scuttlebutt as to a recent crash near Area 51:
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/lockheed-classified-aero-program.47799/page-9#post-849041
Plastic/metal connections and use for transportation:
https://phys.org/news/2025-11-plastics-metals-atomic-scale-molecular.html
Britian’s present is awful. Its future looks even worse.
This weekend, I was watching clips of the “Youth Parliament” last week — they hold this at Westminster every year. It’s students aged 11-18, elected by their peers at schools around Britain.
And, Lord help me, if *this* is the future of Britain, just put the whole country into receivership now. Twelve centuries of glorious and world-changing history, from de Montfort to Pitt to Churchill, left in the hands of pierced pink-haired trans girls and head-scarfed Palestine Action second-generation Pakistanis screaming about Gaza. Britain deserved a better ending than *this*.
Let us hope the “Youth Parliamentarians” of today are no more representative of the ordinary Briton going forward than the effete and privileged cowards of the Oxford Union proved to be nearly a century ago. There is hope for Old Blighty yet.
That said, the Brits, for all of their classical educations during the height of Empire, did even more conquests of unruly tribal barbarians than did the Romans. Rome couldn’t handle its own barbarian “migrant” problem and the UK seems well down the same path.
The US never conquered nearly as many “desolate places” as the Brits and many others did. Our current problems of similar nature are mainly a matter of our fifth-columnist idealogues deliberately opening our borders to invasion by barbarians from places every other former Empire once conquered.
I am an Anglophile (and in no small part of British Isles stock), so I would like to share that hope.
I think the problem is that Britain of 1933 (when the infamous “King and Country” resolution of the OXford Union Society was passed) was still one that had an intact popular and moral culture, and it was merely left to Hitler to shake the Oxbridge lads out of their pacifist torpor.
But that is not the case for the Britain of today. So many migrant populations from those desolate places have been received over just this century that the UK is now on track to be minority white by 2063, and Muslims to be over a fifth of the population. For minors under 21, that status within their peer generation will come a lot sooner. In most British cities, it is *already* the case. You cannot change the demography of a society so radically and so suddenly without profoundly changing the entire culture, and sheer demographic power will make that change essentially irreversible. I think the fear of more than a few Brits is that even if/when Farage and Reform win the next election in 2029 (and they do seem hammerlocks for that right now), it may simply be too late to undo what has been done, not least with a British government “deep state” even more entrenched than ours, and able to bring an entire web of international human rights law and lawyers into play in a way which is not the case in America.
The last time I was there I was stunned. The London I first experienced in the 90’s seemed unrecognizable. Birmingham was even worse.