September 3, 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.
- Interlune wins $4.8 million grant from Texas Space Commission to build a facility to study lunar regolith simulants at the Johnson Space Center in Houston
The company has developed a proprietary system it claims can harvest resources from lunar soil, such as helium-3. It will use this facility to further test this system.
- Axiom touts its completion of six custom hatch units to be used on the first two modules of its station
It is not clear from the tweet whether these are engineering test hatches or the actual flight units. Either way, they have been shipped to Thales-Alenia in Italy for testing.
- Engineers propose new rectangular-shaped telescope for use in space
The concept produces a mirror that is smaller than Webb&s but with a greater ability to gather light. The article at the link touts this as a way to find alien life, a completely idiotic supposition and typical of the utter stupidity of our modern press.
- On this day in 1988 contact with the Mars-bound Soviet spacecraft Phobos 1 was lost
The spacecraft shut down due to a faulty command sequence that was sent by mission control. The failure continued the curse that has hounded Russia’s missions to Mars: They all seem to fail before or at arrival.
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.
- Interlune wins $4.8 million grant from Texas Space Commission to build a facility to study lunar regolith simulants at the Johnson Space Center in Houston
The company has developed a proprietary system it claims can harvest resources from lunar soil, such as helium-3. It will use this facility to further test this system.
- Axiom touts its completion of six custom hatch units to be used on the first two modules of its station
It is not clear from the tweet whether these are engineering test hatches or the actual flight units. Either way, they have been shipped to Thales-Alenia in Italy for testing.
- Engineers propose new rectangular-shaped telescope for use in space
The concept produces a mirror that is smaller than Webb&s but with a greater ability to gather light. The article at the link touts this as a way to find alien life, a completely idiotic supposition and typical of the utter stupidity of our modern press.
- On this day in 1988 contact with the Mars-bound Soviet spacecraft Phobos 1 was lost
The spacecraft shut down due to a faulty command sequence that was sent by mission control. The failure continued the curse that has hounded Russia’s missions to Mars: They all seem to fail before or at arrival.
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
$4.84 million in a grant from the Texas Space Commission (TSC) to develop and test highly specialized simulants of Moon dirt, or regolith.
Why simulate lunar soil when the moon is just over there?
Now that the Draco engines have been used to move the space station, perhaps SpaceX can demonstrate a lunar landing/sample return mission of about 500 pounds of real lunar regolith? Use that $4.8 million to purchase 5 pounds of the real thing! The rest of the return mission regolith can be sold as a commodity to collectors and University science investigators which will probably pay for the entire mission. (The proof of concept alone with success will stick it in the eye of Congress and former NASA administrators)
There is a new kind of diamond synthesis
“A team led by University Professor Eiichi Nakamura of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Tokyo explored an alternative low-pressure approach through controlled electron irradiation of a carbon cage molecule called adamantane (C10H16).”
https://phys.org/news/2025-09-diamonds-electron.html
My hope is that this could enable cubic boron nitride deposition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borazon
Ilka Agricola has uncovered massive fraud in mathematics in Germany of all places–as per phys.org.
That really surprises me—I wouldn’t have thought that possible.
False medical studies being tough to root out makes sense to me….folks having different body chemistry such that a low sample of people helped by a medication might be skewed by that same handful all having an increased predilection for the same disease. Those with the disease outside of that immediate group may not be helped at all perhaps.
That is the difference between a (partially) false finding and a fake finding…like saying great mathematicians come from an area not known for mathematics.
That and an equation is either wrong or it isn’t.