September 8, 2026 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.
- Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has hired 47 Amazon Leo satellite engineers to build its TeraWave constellation
Essentially this is Bezo’s right hand taking from his left. The article hints at some sort of conflict of interest, though it admits nothing illegal has been done. I wonder at the quality of the engineers, as Leo has been very slow to reach orbit.
- Video of yesterday’s undocking of Progress MS-33 from ISS
It undocked to make room for the next freighter, but that launch has now been delayed due to rocket issues with no launch date yet set.
- Rocket Lab touts its role as Synspective’s sole launch provider since 2020
It has completed 11 launches successfully out of a 27-launch contract.
- On September 7, 1967 Biosatellite-2 was launched, carrying 13 experiments to study how weightlessness and radiation affected living organisms
It found evidence that microgravity could have a negative impact on some life forms, such as wheat seedlings, while other organisms, such as frog eggs, showed no ill effects.
- Short NASA documentary describing Surveyor-5, the third spacecraft to soft land on the Moon, which launched on September 8, 1967
Its instruments found the lunar soil was made up of 58% oxygen, 18% silicon, 6% aluminum, and 1% iron, with 13% a variety of other elements.
- Video of the crash of the Genesis sample return capsule on September 8 2004 due to parachute failure
It spent two years collecting solar wind material a million miles closer to the Sun at L1, but the crash at landing made it difficult to properly assess what it had gathered.
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
On X this evening (Tuesday), Jared Isaacman responds to criticism of SLS as a pork project (he basically concedes the point), and in response to a follow up question asking about progress on adapting Centaur to SLS, says that a major public update on Artemis hardware is coming within a month:
https://x.com/NASAAdmin/status/2097420863049965861
Jared Isaacman is certainly different than the usual NASA Administrator. From Richard M’s linked X-post:
He probably isn’t complaining about previous administrators, because Congress had not given any of them a mandate to Beat the Chinese™ in a second space race. Talk of a second space race began several months before Isaacman was first nominated for his NASA position. Congress was instrumental in SLS, NASA, and the cost-plus contracting that brought us to this point. Rather than speed things along, Congress was willing to spend money, slowing several commercial projects to the point that Bigelow stopped business before it could begin space station services. We could have already had an alternate to the ISS, but Congress has other priorities.
More surprisingly:
America is putting NASA astronauts, not NASA is putting its own astronauts on the Moon. Phrasing it that way seems significant, to me, because it gives room to include the commercial space industry, which is already talking of putting manufacturing bases on the Moon.
This is to be a system that evolves over time. Few NASA projects have had such long-term objectives and goals that the early hardware would become obsolete by the later hardware that will be needed to complete the goals. Isaacman is thinking about the future as he plans the present. NASA’s Moon rocket is not the rocket of the future. Come to think of it, it isn’t even the rocket of the present.
Finally, he wants NASA to go back to leading the way on one of several paths,* rather than being just another competitor in the space industry. NASA has shown itself to be a terrible competitor, but if it wants to lead, it will have to stay well ahead of the very innovative and inspired industry. Can NASA do that? Will Congress fund NASA to do that? Should NASA do that?
__________
* Reaching farther into the solar system is only one possible path. Other paths include: orbital manufacturing (taking advantage of free fall, often called micro-gravity), space stations, communication, observation, space-based datacenter and data processing, orbital solar power plants beaming power to the Earth, and orbital space colonies (similar to O’Neill’s Lagrange Point colonies).
Bezos is not serious. Never was.
He just wants the status symbol of a rocket company. And in my belief he must be using it as a tax loss for all his other companies.
He’s been passionately interested in space since he was a teenager. You can find recorded interviews of this online, and he was heavily influenced by Gerard O’Neill in college. Long before he had any ‘status.’
Overall I think many criticisms of Bezos are unfair. Let’s be precise: The problems at Blue Origin from 2017 to 2023 were caused by the CEO Bezos picked, Bob Smith. Bezos can properly be blamed for hiring him, but more important, he must be blamed for taking so long to replace him.
Before Smith Blue Origin did quite well, and was only slightly behind SpaceX. After Smith it has shown progress and life, but the five-plus years that Smith was in charge has put it that far behind. That it is showing life speaks well for both David Limp, the man Bezos hired to replace Smith, and Bezos himself for finally coming to grips with the problem and taking action.
Right now, I can see no reason why Blue Origin cannot catch up.
Of course they can catch up but they shouldn’t have to.
Right now he needs to dump a few billion into the company and plant his foot into their backside and keep it there.
They need to take the place of Falcon 9 and Space X is handing them the opportunity.
Instead of concentrating on reaching a stable orbit with humans on board they have concentrated on gaining government contracts and cash up front.
If Bezos were serious, he never would have picked Bob Smith at all.
Bezos reminds me of NFL players who have a big “crew” (entourage). You hire the opposite of a “yes man” and tell your crew to talk to him so he looks like the Bad Guy.
Bezos hired Smith to be his “No” man to begin with.
The scuttlebutt is that Bezos would show up, take suggestions from engineers, then have Smith quash everything.
Limp stood up to Bezos, but he looks to be backsliding again.
Elon was NEVER cheap like Smith.
On methane and Mars
https://phys.org/news/2026-09-martian-air-yield-methane-rocket.html
Heat resistant materials
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-09-method-resistant-materials-days-months.html
pzatchok,
“Bezos is not serious. Never was.”
I see this differently. I think that he is serious, which is why he has hired experienced rocket men to run his company. I think it is also why he expanded so widely before his company has generated serious revenue. I think that he wants to hit the ground running in each of these areas, but he didn’t do it right.
Space is not like selling books online, and he didn’t fall for the hypothesis that any Master of Business Administration can run any company, a hypothesis that for the past half century has failed during any contact with reality and thus has not become a theory. He hired experts to make Blue Origin work, but he made the mistake of hiring one that was not enthusiastic for rapid development, and that slowed down everything. He finally has things going fairly rapidly, except he was hit by the explosive nature of new rockets, which has cause another delay. This falls under my category of “the darnedest things happen with spacecraft,” and I don’t think this explosion is anyone’s fault.
Before New Shepard started revenue operations, Bezos was already working on New Glenn and Blue Moon. This also included the BE-4 engine, which he failed to develop with concurrent engineering so that it, too, would hit the ground running, causing a years-long delay in the New Glenn and Vulcan rockets. Blue Ring is another of the expansions attempted before serious revenue was generated.
“He just wants the status symbol of a rocket company. And in my belief he must be using it as a tax loss for all his other companies.”
The IRS does not allow tax deductions for hobbies. He has to convince them that he is serious. It may explain why he has expanded into so many areas.
I think that Bezos truly believes that industries that pollute can be moved to space, leaving the Earth a clean, well-lighted place to live. He got scooped once again with Musk’s move to put huge numbers of datacenter satellites into orbit. Bezos may even be scooped in his desire to put a settlement on the Moon, now that Musk is also talking of making a lunar manufacturing center for those satellites. For several years, we have been talking about mining and manufacturing in space in order to make space-based hardware, saving us huge numbers of launches and saving the pollution that results from those launches.
“Instead of concentrating on reaching a stable orbit with humans on board they have concentrated on gaining government contracts and cash up front.”
Well, that sounds like he is serious. He understands that his company needs revenue, and so far it has not been very successful on that front.
I think that Bezos is serious, it is just that he is better at sales than engineering, and he has gone from a retail sales company to an engineering company.
The difference between a hobby and an investment is the amount of money you put into it. Bezos put in enough money and structure to call it a company.
Is Jay Lenos car collection an investment that could lose him money in the end or is it just a hobby? He has employees and tooling to restore the vehicles.
Pzatchok wrote:
“””Bezos is not serious. Never was.
He just wants the status symbol of a rocket company. And in my belief he must be using it as a tax loss for all his other companies.”””
I often wonder the same thing.
I just did a quick search about Blue Origin opening their European office in Luxembourg. Turns out the Luxembourg office was opened on April 15, 2026. American tax day, April 15?
To quote the duo from Wayne’s World, Bezos is a poser
I recall that the root cause of the Genesis failure was not the parachute, but the accelerometer designed to fire a mortar that deployed the parachute after a certain delta-V, indicating a desired altitude had been reached in the reentry process.
It was installed backwards, so the mortar never fired.
I also recall radio conversation with the helicopter that was intended to scoop the capsule out of the air as it hung under its parachute.
Chopper One: “Copy bearing whatever, range whatever… say again altitude.”
Control: “Altitude zero, repeat, zero.”
That radio conversation is in the video at the quick link.
“It was installed backwards, so the mortar never fired.”
It was installed properly. It was *designed* backwards.
Lockheed Martin had a number of comical* screwups in that timeframe such as the Genesis accelerometer, the Mars Polar Lander landing accelerometer, the Mars Climate Orbiter software, the NOAA-19 hold-down fasteners, the F-16 flight software when crossing the equator, and the F-22 flight software when crossing the international dateline. How they kept their reputation intact through all of that I’ll never know.
*I say “comical” because of the nature of the errors and the fact that no one was hurt. But one of those incidents was a close call. Fortunately there was a tanker nearby.
That Tiros flopdown was the most embarrassing.
How much DEI at Lockheed?
Mike Borgelt,
“How much DEI at Lockheed?”
At that time, not that much DEI.
I went to a talk about the Polar Lander, and the problem was not an accelerometer but the engine-disable switch. When the lander set down, the intention was for the weight of the spacecraft to spread the legs and trigger a switch to initiate engine shut down. The problem occurred in testing. I was a test engineer, and we were presented with that talk to learn traps and errors that can occur during test planning. The lander’s leg deployment was tested separately from the chassis, and that is where the problem was not caught. The legs were to snap open before landing, and the test went swimmingly. Unfortunately, the switch was mounted on the chassis and was not part of the test. The investigation determined the most likely cause of the loss of mission was that the legs overextended during that snap opening, and during the mission that overextension was sufficient to trigger the engine-off routine, so the engine quit while the lander was too far above the surface to survive the hard landing.
The NOAA hold-down fasteners were part of the ground support equipment (GSE), and they had been in place two days earlier when the engineer team checked out the equipment. Someone had cannibalized the bolts for another project on Friday (and then didn’t have to use them after all), so that they were not in place on Saturday, the day they lifted the satellite onto the GSE and turned it over for access to the upper parts of the satellite. The bolts were on the underside of the adapter and were supposed to hold the adapter to the turnover cart. Being on the underside meant that they were not easily visible, which was another part of the problem. Installing the satellite to the adapter went well, but as they began to tip over the satellite for that access, the adapter slipped off the turnover cart and the satellite hit the ground.
The picture in the link, above, shows the result. The bolts went through the large white disk seen on the cart (please note the slight angle, it does not take much to topple a satellite with a high center of mass), and they went into the anodized disk seen attached to the base of the satellite.
This would be hilarious, except for the tax money wasted and that the same thing happened for virtually the exact same reason the previous year at another company’s satellite factory five miles down the road from this accident (in that case, the bolts had not been installed in the first place, but they were also on the underside and that team didn’t think to check). Design tips: make everything as easily inspectable as possible (e.g. bolts go from top to bottom so that the heads are visible), and add torque stripes to indicate that bolts have been properly torqued and have not backed off in the meantime. Configuration control and record keeping for GSE is almost as important as for flight hardware.
The point is that it was not DIE that was the problem; it was the corporate culture — at both companies. The difference is that one of them got serious about error prevention as well as test integrity throughout the corporation and the other company did not. The system used for error reduction is similar to the methods developed by U.S. airlines, an industry which had greatly reduced the fatal airline accidents. Until DIE came along, and accidents are coming back to the airline industry with a vengeance. Oh, how one stupid DIE policy can obliterate the hard work of a vitally important safety policy.
The change in corporate culture may be how Lockheed Martin kept their reputation intact.