October 2, 2026 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay plus the last from reader Gary. 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.
- Space Force awards Northrop Grumman and True Anomaly separate contracts to develop high-orbit maneuverable inspector satellites
True Anomaly will upgrade its Jackal spacecraft, already tested in orbit. Northrop will upgrade its MEV servicing satellite design, used to extend the life of several geosynchronous communication satellites.
- Overview Energy wins War Department contract to build a satellite to transmit power using near-infrared light to ground stations.
The concept is to provide electricity in military operations in remote areas.
- SpaceX and Elon Musk have created 4,400 millionaires
The tweet is in answer to a typically hateful leftist attack on evil billionaires
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
“SpaceX and Elon Musk has created 4,400 millionaires.”
If one of them isn’t you, it’s not someone else’s fault.
It could be someone else’s fault, if they were subject to lawfare…forced to get a COVID shot and die from it, etc.
You’ll have a hard time convincing members of Canada’s far-left New Democratic Party. My own Member of Parliament is an NDPer (Dippers, as some of us have nicknamed them) and she wanted to have Musk arrested for the crime of being a trillionaire. The fact that he reverted to billionaire status due to the price of SpaceX’s stock pulling back didn’t let him off the hook as she doesn’t like billionaires, either….. at least the ones to the right of Chairman Mao as she hasn’t squawked about people like George Soros.
But, then, what does one expect from a party whose national leader is a silver-spoon red diaper baby? (His grandfather had the same job over 50 years ago.)
Dr. Peter McCullough recently testified in Canada on the latest findings of the Covid shot.
https://youtu.be/Y9afVwQzsF8?si=JBprdn7i0H8dYr5R
I haven’t been following the inquiry very closely. I’ve been focusing more on the activities of our prime minister and, being an Albertan, the upcoming referendum.
There’s an interesting piece about the GAO protest of the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter at SpaceNews about the *other* major federal agency that does stuff in space. And in it, Dan Robitzski has a striking quote from Rocket Lab’s CFO:
I’ve gotten used to this kind of talk about SpaceX. But when even Rocket Lab is saying it now, I think it shows just how much the commercial space industry has outgrown NASA in the 2020’s.
And, as our host would say, that’s a good thing.
Yep. The only people that kind of progress should threaten are those of an authoritarian or totalitarian bent.
This comment falls into a longer essay I am planning. A major shift has occurred, that only can be stopped by force and evil.
Elon just posted a magnificent Flight 14 shot of Starship deploying Starlinks:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2106454808676716916
Here’s to more, and even better, views of space deployments!
”There’s an interesting piece about the GAO protest of the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter at SpaceNews about the *other* major federal agency that does stuff in space…I think it shows just how much the commercial space industry has outgrown NASA in the 2020’s.”
I think Rocket Lab’s quote isn’t about how much the commercial space industry has outgrown NASA (though it may have). I think it’s about how much the Space Force has outgrown NASA.
Just in the last five years we’ve had the Transport Layer, the Tracking Layer, the Resilient Missile Warning / Tracking system, Starshield, the Space Data Network, and the Airborne Moving Target Indicator constellations get added to the existing national security space sector. Golden Dome will increase that by a factor of four or five.
NASA may have started the cubesat revolution through its SBIR and STTR programs, but it’s the military and private industry that are benefiting the most from it. I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, that’s really the point of those programs.
That was Stanford and Cal Poly, not NASA. While NASA did develop the first US-launched CubeSat, the idea originated from the university system.
Bob Twiggs, who used to be at Cal Poly, is a co-inventor (along with Jordi Pulg-Suari) of the cubesat..
One of the major users of cubesats is amateur radio. The modular design makes it easier to build one as the layout is standardized. There are a number of kits available on the market now. They come with the basic hardware, such as the internal housekeeping unit, and one simply adds the other bits, such as an amateur transponder.
Being so small, they can now be sent to and deployed from the ISS.
Twiggs was also at Stanford. I attended one of his class’s design reviews on their OPAL satellite, three decades ago. OPAL was an octagonal satellite that, like most student satellites, needed a unique release mechanism.
I’m not sure of BMJ’s point, but Twiggs and Puig-Suari invented the cubesat standard (good for them!) in order to standardize student projects to make piggybacking and release of them much easier and less odious for the generous launch companies that agreed to launch student projects. The standard was quickly seen as useful to many potential operators and (then) current space operators. I do not know who started the actual revolution, but it was clearly through frequent use of the concept.
Once the revolution was underway, several companies found it lucrative to develop parts small enough to use on cubesats, as mkent notes below. This solidified the revolution, and smallsats were suddenly in vogue again. The low cost of the smallsat and the low cost of its launch allowed them to be short-lived satellites that could be replaced in a few years with more advanced versions — unlike the large geostationary satellites that cost so much to make, launch, and insure that they had to live for a decade or more to be worth their keep.
The increased supply of launch opportunities also advanced the revolution into smallsats, and now we have rideshare launches that are exclusive to launching large batches of smallsats.
Twiggs and Puig-Suari probably thought that they were only teaching students, but it turns out they taught an entire industry. Are they heroes to me? Why, yes. Yes, they are. Aren’t they heroes to everyone?
I thought I’d mention who was credited for having come up with the idea of a cubesat.
The modular form factor has become the design standard for small satellites and, since amateur radio is a popular application for such spacecraft, many of the birds put into orbit in the past few years have been cubesats. The early OSCARs, such as AO-7 (launched on November 15, 1974), were custom-built and tended to be bulky. (Think of a box about the size of a microwave oven.) Many of them were launched because there just happened to be space inside the booster payload bays.
Nowadays, there’s a great demand for launch services and the wait times can be quite long, particularly for larger spacecraft. A cubesat, on the other hand, doesn’t take up as much room (a 2U would be around the size of a roll of paper towel), so it can be easily tucked into, say, a locker that goes to the ISS on a Dragon flight. Deployment basically consists of taking the cubesat and chucking it overboard during an EVA.
Since cubesats are often used as university design projects, many of them that do have amateur radio transponders were built by students. Some, unfortunately, don’t work once they’re deployed. Others have fairly short lifetimes (days or weeks, in some cases).
AO-7 is still working, but only during the day. I have not made a contact with it.
The local university has a cubesat but never got it launched. In the beginning the group, a student club, was quite large with over thirty members working on it. They had many models already built. They approached our amateur radio club about the radio on board. I don’t know if the club is still around.
Sometimes these types of clubs die because of a high turnover with seniors doing their senior design project and graduating. If you have a good core group and an active advisor, these types of clubs succeed.
I do have one of these cubesat simulators. Easy to make and cheap.
BMJ,
Thank you for presenting the opportunity to swoon over two of my heroes.
You are right that the basic form factor became a modular unit, and they now have a standard 3U size (about the size of a bread box, a classic comparison, but only if you still use bread boxes), and go even larger with various shapes. I very much like that they are used for a wide variety of missions, from testing concepts (a low level of technology readiness) to astronomy, communication relay, planetary probes, and cetera (top level of technology readiness).
Hello mkent,
Oh, to be sure, that is also a fair point. The Space Force budget pretty obviously well exceeds NASA’s now, and the gap will only increase in the coming years.
But even allowing for that, Rocket Lab has pretty aggressively diversified its product portfolio.
NB: Blue Origin announced on Oct. 2 that Thomas Zurbuchen, aka “Dr Z,” the longtime NASA associate administrator for the science mission directorate, will start work Oct. 5 as senior vice president of advanced concepts, reporting directly to Chief Executive Dave Limp.
Sounds like his portfolio is all to do with lunar surface stuff.
https://spacenews.com/former-nasa-science-leader-joins-blue-origin/
“That was Stanford and Cal Poly, not NASA. While NASA did develop the first US-launched CubeSat, the idea originated from the university system.”
It wasn’t the cubesat form factor I was referring to. It was the dozens of SBIR and STTR contracts let, mainly by NASA but also by the Air Force, to miniaturize spacecraft components: miniature radios, miniature reaction wheels, miniature guidance computers, etc. These contracts had the effect of creating an entire industry making spacecraft components for cubesats and other smallsats.
Initially I didn’t see this new industry going anywhere. At first it was mostly just universities taking advantage of this new small spacecraft ecosystem. Now, having once been an aerospace engineering college student, I could see the benefit of having college students graduate with actual spacecraft design and manufacturing experience, so I was OK with it. I saw this program as fulfilling the educational part of NASA’s mission, but nothing more.
Then Planet Labs began launching its constellation of SuperDoves, and I could see this new ecosystem leading to a whole new world in space much like the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s led to a whole new world on Earth. It’s been a journey, but I think it’s played out that way.
The microcomputer revolution was sparked by the Air Force seeking to miniaturize ICBM avionics, with some NASA help miniaturizing the Apollo Guidance Computer. The cubesat revolution was sparked by NASA’s SBIR and STTR programs with some help from the Air Force. In each case the industry that the government spawned reached a critical size and started acting on its own initiative reacting to its own market, no longer under control of its midwife. For microcomputers that point was the 1970s. For cubesats that point is the 2020s. I think that’s a good thing.
I see the CLPS program following this same path. Hopefully it bears the same fruit.