October 30, 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.
- Vast touts the completion of pressure and load acceptance testing of the primary structure of its Haven-1 station
The launch date of spring 2026 appears more and more likely.
- Honda releases video of its successful June test flight of its grasshopper rocket prototype
The video indicates a number of the company’s space goals, but nothing very specific.
- Video of the rendezvous and capture of JAXA’s HTV-X1 freighter to ISS
It’s three hours long. Go to 2:53 minutes to see the docking.
- There are rumors of a shake-up in China’s space operations which is going to delay all launches of its pseudo-companies
Supposedly a new department is being formed to run everything, and that some launches will delayed while this is being done. It also suggests that the pseudo-independence of these fake private companies will now become even more obvious.
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.
- Vast touts the completion of pressure and load acceptance testing of the primary structure of its Haven-1 station
The launch date of spring 2026 appears more and more likely.
- Honda releases video of its successful June test flight of its grasshopper rocket prototype
The video indicates a number of the company’s space goals, but nothing very specific.
- Video of the rendezvous and capture of JAXA’s HTV-X1 freighter to ISS
It’s three hours long. Go to 2:53 minutes to see the docking.
- There are rumors of a shake-up in China’s space operations which is going to delay all launches of its pseudo-companies
Supposedly a new department is being formed to run everything, and that some launches will delayed while this is being done. It also suggests that the pseudo-independence of these fake private companies will now become even more obvious.
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
Talk about SPACS making a return
https://spacenews.com/interest-rate-cut-further-fuels-space-investor-optimism-amid-talk-of-returning-spacs/
How does one say “Roscosmos” in Chinese?
Two other good pieces of news today:
1) The Haven Demo has been confirmed to be scheduled for launch this Saturday night on the Bandwagon 4 mission.
2) The second New Glenn is vertical on pad 36 at CCSFS in preparation for its launch of Escapade. Expect a static fire to occur shortly.
To Calvin,
The answer is “Dear occupant”
Interesting find via magnetics
https://phys.org/news/2025-10-strong-magnetic-field-duality-materials.html
The New Glenn static fire was successful.
I posted this earlier today, but the original posting that it was in reply to has apparently been deleted. Presuming that “space” really is still the open topic, I’ll repost:
Since the general topic is space, let’s talk about what we’ve been learning about Venus in particular and stagnant lid worlds in general. Of late, what we thought we knew about planet Venus has changed utterly.
Venus is what happens—not, it turns out, when there’s a climatic “runaway greenhouse effect” as hitherto supposed—but rather when you’re a world lacking in plate tectonics, which therefore is subject to so-called lid tectonics.
In Venus’ case, this transformed what could have been a semi-habitable world into the hellhole we see there today—not by means of any kind of a climatic catastrophe, but wholly geologic.
Venus geologically is a so-called stagnant lid world. (Other local examples: the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Vesta.) Rather than plate tectonics (a.k.a. “mobile tectonics”), as Earth enjoys, Venus experiences lid tectonics, which means that Venus’ crust—rather than being cracked into “plates,” whose motion, subduction, volcanoes, et al., act to release a great deal of internal heat—instead forms a thick cap (a “lid”) atop the venusian interior, insulating it.
For those who like to contemplate physics in operation, imagine what such an insulating layer lying atop its (heat-generating) interior does to a world.
But no need to imagine, we now know (from its complete surficial dearth of old, large craters) that Venus around half a billion years back underwent a tremendous convulsion—due to heat buildup in the “stagnant” mantle below—whereby Venus’ entire crust one fine day basically turned over and melted (obviously a stupendous catastrophe), then refroze into the nearly pristine surface (a scattering of tiny craters have arrived since the cataclysm, allowing rough dating) that we see there now.
The result is that any carbon hitherto resident in Venus’ crust—in calcite, limestone, coal, oil, or the bodies of any venusian inhabitants—would thereupon have been “cooked” and propelled into the atmosphere as CO2 gas. Thus, the situation we see on the planet today.
Indeed, this kind of “resurfacing” event (sounds so sanitary, doesn’t it?) is a previously unimagined danger that stagnant-lid worlds, we now realize, are generally (or at least many of them) subject to: a disaster which can “suddenly,” with almost no warning—over geologic timescales (of perhaps 100 million years or less), that is—transform formerly clement worlds into almost literal hellholes.
One might note that such disasters might occur repetitively to “lid” world(s) like Venus.
#ScienceFiction and #SciFi has contemplated many kinds of planetary catastrophes—but it never imagined this.
Michael: I just realized that your comment was on the quick links that are scheduled for later today that were accidentally scheduled by me too early. I rescheduled them. Your original comment and my response will appear later today.
Sorry about the confusion.
Rumblings about a nine-engine New Glenn follow on….
New Borman?
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54391.msg2729627#msg2729627
“New Borman is obviously the proper name for a 9 engine New Glenn. Beyond just being the first time Humans got further than LEO, Apollo 8 was the first times humans flew on a super heavy lift LV. So it seems an appropriate name for a vehicle that would be flirting with the definition of super heavy lift.”
PBS on the future of Seetee (CT) ships
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eA4X9P98ess
SpaceX has added engines to Super Heavy and may do so again so why shouldn’t Blue do the same to New Glenn? Bring it on, say I. It would seem that pretty much everything Blue says it wants to do in space would benefit from such an upgrade – particularly its lunar logistics architecture. Perhaps the only reason New Glenn wasn’t nine-engined to start with was Bezos’s aversion to doing anything that looked too SpaceX-ish.
This probably spells doom for New Armstrong, assuming it was ever serious. I hope I am wrong.
I am not the only individual with a love of the past—Stoke looks to give new life to Bono’s plug nozzle.
Bono had another concept—perhaps not serious (used to show how a typical rocket design is best).
Still, his idea of a lenticular HLLV should get a fresh look:
http://www.astronautix.com/b/bonosaucer.html
Here is why the design is desirable:
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50748.msg2729497#msg2729497
Having a wide surface should lower wing loading.
“So it seems an appropriate name for a vehicle that would be flirting with the definition of super heavy lift.”
Defining standards down.