October 8, 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.
- Space station startup Axiom signs agreement with Slovakian government
The deal is very similar to Axiom’s deal with Senegal from yesterday. Slovakia is buying access to Axiom’s expertise and its planned space station.
- Hams confirm Juno is still operating
It apparently transmitted a signal back to Earth. This however has no bearing on whether the mission will survive the budget process. Right now I remain very skeptical it will.
- A detailed long article describing China’s government space program
A very nice summary, though as Jay notes, “if a little alarmist.” It is part of the swamp’s tag team effort to convince Americans we need to give NASA and the Pentagon lots of money or else China will destroy us. Meanwhile, all we really need to do is clear the way for private competition and American ingenuity and China will be left in the dust.
- The third set of Kuiper satellites are on the way to one of SpaceX’s Florida launchpad
The launch is targeting Thursday, Oct. 9 on a Falcon 9.
- On this day in 1985, the space shuttle Atlantis completed its first mission
This mission, which deployed two military communications satelliets, completed construction of NASA’s initial fleet of four shuttles.
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.
- Space station startup Axiom signs agreement with Slovakian government
The deal is very similar to Axiom’s deal with Senegal from yesterday. Slovakia is buying access to Axiom’s expertise and its planned space station.
- Hams confirm Juno is still operating
It apparently transmitted a signal back to Earth. This however has no bearing on whether the mission will survive the budget process. Right now I remain very skeptical it will.
- A detailed long article describing China’s government space program
A very nice summary, though as Jay notes, “if a little alarmist.” It is part of the swamp’s tag team effort to convince Americans we need to give NASA and the Pentagon lots of money or else China will destroy us. Meanwhile, all we really need to do is clear the way for private competition and American ingenuity and China will be left in the dust.
- The third set of Kuiper satellites are on the way to one of SpaceX’s Florida launchpad
The launch is targeting Thursday, Oct. 9 on a Falcon 9.
- On this day in 1985, the space shuttle Atlantis completed its first mission
This mission, which deployed two military communications satelliets, completed construction of NASA’s initial fleet of four shuttles.
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
There are 240 million Amazon prime sunscribers, so I think Kuiper will do ok in long run even if it has to buy launch services from SpaceX.
George C,
Maybe. Even if Amazon shifted 100% of its Kuiper launches to SpaceX, though, it would still be paying retail to launch while Starlinks go uphill at cost. And we haven’t seen much indication of what a consumer end-user monthly bill for Kuiper service would be. Kuiper might wind up like O3B and OneWeb, abandoning any pretense of being a consumer-level service in favor of strictly B2B markets. Starlink has an enormous first-mover advantage in the consumer-level market.
All,
It looks as though Axiom is doing a full-court press to sign MOUs with countries whose names start with ‘S.’ Who will be next? Sierra Leone? Solomon Islands? Serbia? Singapore? Slovenia?
The key to our easy life – American ingenuity. Most liberals do not understand that concept of (mostly white) humans using natural resources in unique ways to make our lives better, since the 1750s or so. Unfortunately, we shared those ways with the world, and not much appreciation is returned to us.
Don,
Imitation is one of the sincerest forms of flattery. I’d say there has been a tremendous amount of appreciation. Also, a lot of American ingenuity has been imported from places that provide less opportunity, like that African/American guy that does rockets or something.
America is very much a set of ideals and a state of mind rather than a birthplace. Too many born here do not have that state of mind that drives forward. Even with all the baggage though, there are enough productive people to keep things moving at some levels. SLS/Orion illustrate the type of mindset that should have been left behind. Starship* illustrates the type of mindset that should be embraced.
*I am critical of Starship technically and fortunately my approval is not needed. Succeed or fail, it is their decision rather than some government official protecting his election prospects.
If NASA shuts down the Juno team, a suggestion: farm it out to volunteers. A small cadre of volunteers could learn the system: what Juno is transmitting back and how to decode and interpret. You wouldn’t necessarily give the volunteers access to Juno’s controls (certainly not right away), but let them participate in handling the data feed.
On X, the always thoughtful Peter Hague makes an excellent point, but it’s actually better than he realized: That first NASA Commercial Resupply Services contract to SpaceX was not paid out over a single year, but over 8 years. So it was an even smaller share of federal funding.
https://x.com/peterrhague/status/1976178243607712006
Some of the best money that the federal government has ever spent, easily.
You still have to use the Deep Space Network, though, and that not only has a certain cost, but it also uses up scarce DSN bandwidth…
(I like your point, it’s creative, but just pointing out that it would be a little complicated than you grok.)
Richard M: I have argued for decades that the investment should be entirely aimed at encouraging new private companies, with them owning the results of their labor, not the government. This was what was done with NASA’s crew and cargo contracts.
Instead, Congress and even Trump are still pushing for the Soviet way, a big government “space program” aimed at a lunar stunt. It leverages little, and even acts to hinder private development. It is also an approach that we followed for all of the 20th century without any success, or accomplishments of note, after the Apollo landings.
You would think trying the same failed approach over again would seem stupid, but it really is insane, and that is what we have for our leadership these days, when it comes to space.
Richard M,
Dr. Hague is not wrong but he misses a key point, namely that the US government had no choice but to look beyond its legacy contractors after the Columbia disaster. Shuttle would be kept limping along for awhile and the initial “official” successor for ISS resupply and crew transfer was supposed to be Ares 1 – aka “the corndog.” COTS was, in essence, a “Plan B” when Ares 1 started running into insuperable engineering issues.
There were hardly any alternative contractors to go too given NASA’s previous penchant for actively killing off potential private-sector competition to Shuttle. But for Columbia, SpaceX might have been just one more of these road-kill start-ups. But Musk had enough money from himself and friends to get started without needing to seek funds from conventional investors whom NASA would have discouraged when they would have come there to perform due diligence.
There was more than a bit of luck involved in the genesis and rise of SpaceX – some of said luck of the very bad variety. As I’ve noted many times before in comments here and elsewhere, the lasting legacy of the seven Columbia dead was SpaceX in particular and NewSpace in general.
Robert Zimmerman,
You are mostly right. The Trump administration was actually trying to sunset the worst aspects of the pre-existing “Program of Record” by winding down SLS-Orion after Artemis 3. It has been Congress, as usual, which doesn’t want to play ball.
But we are now far enough along that the US future in manned spaceflight/exploration/settlement is going to be determined in the private sector and not by NASA or even by the DoW. So, while one can certainly legitimately bemoan the continuing idiocies of Congress and NASA, their consequential influence is rapidly coming to an end. And, as you frequently remind us all, even the almost invincibly statist Europeans seem to be smelling the private-sector space coffee these days.
New Alloy
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-10-alloy-extreme-conditions-metals-aircraft.html
This refractory metal-based alloy, in whose discovery Dr. Alexander Kauffmann, now professor at the Ruhr University Bochum, played a major role, features hitherto unparalleled properties. “It is ductile at room temperature, its melting point is as high as about 2,000°C, and—unlike refractory alloys known to date—it oxidizes only slowly, even in the critical temperature range.
“This nurtures the vision of being able to make components suitable for operating temperatures substantially higher than 1,100°C. Thus, the result of our research has the potential to enable a real technological leap,” says Kauffmann.
Other materials:
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/what-new-materials-are-there.18181/page-25#post-838299
The last link contains info about odd transfer of heat–