Category: Behind The Black

August 5, 2025 Quick space links

11:36 pm

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.

Sorry this is so late, but I was on my way home this evening and only just got in.

One comment

Amazon’s Kuiper constellation wins contract from Australian telecom

9:32 am

The Australian telecommunications company NBN has now signed a contract with Amazon to use its Kuiper constellation of satellites, once operational, to provide internet access to its customers.

It appears that Amazon will sell its Kuiper terminals through NBN, instead of directly to customers, unlike Starlink which generally sells direct (unless local law forbids it). In this case it could be the Australian government is requiring these constellations to make such deals. It is also possible that government is playing favorites, favoring Amazon (not operational) over Starlink (now operational for years with millions of customers.

3 comments

Rocket Lab and China complete launches

7:56 am

Two launches since yesterday. First Rocket Lab used its Electron rocket to place a Japanese commercial radar satellite into orbit, lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand.

Next China’s Long March 12 rocket lifted off from its Wencheng coastal spaceport, placing another set of satellites in orbit for one of China’s mega-constellations intended to compete with Starlink..

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

97 SpaceX
42 China
11 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 97 to 73.

Leave a comment

August 4, 2025 Quick space links

5:28 pm

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.

One comment

August 1, 2025 Quick space links

3:07 pm

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.

6 comments

Echostar issues contract to build satellites for direct-to-phone constellation

1:19 pm

Echostar has awarded the satellite company MDA Space a $1.3 billion contract to build the first 100 satellites in its proposed direct-to-phone constellation that will compete directly with the constellations of SpaceX’s Starlink and AST SpaceMobile.

The initial contract, valued at approximately US$1.3 billion (approx. C$1.8 billion), includes the design, manufacturing and testing of over 100 software-defined MDA AURORA™ D2D satellites. With contract options, enabling a full initial configuration of a network of over 200 satellites, the value of the contract would increase to an approximate total value of US$2.5 billion (approx. C$3.5 billion). EchoStar envisions future growth to thousands of satellites, as demand requires, to provide global talk, text and broadband services directly to standard 5G handheld devices.

The constellation will be fully compliant with the newly created NTN and 3GPP standards, allowing EchoStar to provide messaging, voice, broadband data, and video services upon launch to all phones configured to this standard, without modifications. Additionally, the constellation will connect to an array of sensor and mobile vehicles.

All three constellations are designed to provide cell service in areas where there are no cell towers. The satellites themselves become the cell towers, in orbit.

Since most people today access the internet via their smartphones, I can see these direct-to-phone constellations eventually becoming the prime method for accessing the web. Why have a separate provider for your web services when these constellations can give you that as well as phone service. It is for this reason I suspect Echostar is jumping on the bandwagon.

This move also suggests the older Starlink and Kuiper constellations, that only provide web service, are going to eventually get superseded. For Starlink this isn’t really a threat, as it is already beginning the transition to this new technology and can likely shift its millions of customers to it easily when the time comes. For Amazon’s Kuiper constellation, however, it appears it might be arriving too late in the game.

More proof that in capitalism speed is essential. Amazon has simply moved too slowly in launching its constellation.

Hat tip Btb’s stringer Jay.

Leave a comment

Russia desperately lobbies the U.S. to continue and expand its space partnership

10:06 am

Roscosmos: a paper tiger
Roscosmos: a paper tiger

A string of short articles in Russia’s state-run press today, describing the meetings between the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Bakanov, and interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy, suggest strongly that Russia is desperate to link itself with someone in order to continue its generally bankrupt space program.

Bakanov is making his first visit to the U.S. He and Duffy are also conducting the first face-to-face talks by the heads of their respective agencies in eight years. While the U.S. press has been entirely uninterested in these discussions, mostly because it knows little of substance will come of them other than an agreement to maintain the partnership at ISS through its planned retirement in 2030, the reaction by Russia’s press has been remarkably fawning, repeatedly proposing the U.S. and Russia expand their partnership beyond ISS:

Very clearly, Bakanov was trying to convince Duffy to consider a greater partnership, whereby Roscosmos and NASA do other space projects together. He might have even been offering to join NASA’s Artemis program to explore the Moon.

It appears from the other Russian state-run reports, however, that Duffy’s response was diplomatic but unenthused by such a proposal. All he apparently agreed to was to continue the ISS partnership, until the station’s retirement.
» Read more

23 comments

Endeavour launched successfully, carrying four astronauts to ISS

9:03 am

SpaceX’s Endeavour Dragon capsule has been successfully placed in orbit carrying four astronauts to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Kennedy in Florida.

This is Endeavour’s sixth flight. It will dock at ISS in the early hours tomorrow. The first stage completed third flight, landing back in Florida.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

96 SpaceX
41 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 96 to 71.

One comment

Gin Blossoms – Hey Jealousy

6:02 pm

An evening pause: Hat tip Wayne DeVette, who notes, “The band’s name comes from a photo of W.C. Fields in Kenneth Anger’s book Hollywood Babylon, which bore the caption ‘W.C. Fields with gin blossoms’, referring to the actor’s telangiectasia-spotted face and rhinophymic nose by the slang term for the skin condition known as rosacea.”

Leave a comment

SpaceX launches 19 more Starlink satellites

3:35 pm

Only a few hours after it scrubbed the launch of its Endeavour capsule carrying four astronauts to ISS because of weather at Kennedy in Florida, SpaceX proceeded to successfully launch 19 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The relatively low number of Starlink satellites on this launch appears related to the higher orbit in which they were placed. The first stage completed its 27th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. SpaceX now has four boosters that have flown more than 25 times, respectively 29, 27, 26, and 26.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

95 SpaceX
41 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 95 to 71. Meanwhile, the manned Endeavour launch has now been rescheduled for tomorrow morning.

4 comments

July 31, 2025 Quick space links

3:18 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, including the exoplanet piece I posted earlier today. 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.

One comment

New data raises doubts about exoplanet having chemicals that on Earth come from life

1:02 pm

The uncertainty of science: Using new data from the Webb Space Telescope, scientists now conclude that the identification on an exoplanet in April 2025 of the molecules dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) — both of which on Earth are only associated with the presence of life — is now uncertain and that these molecules likely aren’t there.

The new work uses [Webb] data to better qualify what is going on. The work confirms the presence of an ocean on this peculiar exoplanet, although it can’t confirm if there is a thick or thin atmosphere. They couldn’t find water vapor in the atmosphere, suggesting that there is an efficient cold trap, keeping evaporation to a minimum on this temperate sub-Neptune world.

Those potential biosignatures were all below the threshold for an undeniable detection, and their model suggests that a possible presence of DMS could be explained by sources unrelated to life. They advise considering more and different molecules to use as biosignatures. Astronomers are studying worlds that are very different from our own, and the chemical signatures that seem obvious here on Earth might not fit well with those exoplanets.

In other words, they simply don’t have enough data to know, one way or the other. No surprise, The science of studying exoplanets is in its infancy, and right now can only tease out the smallest of details based on our limited technology and the distances involved.

You can read the new paper here [pdf]. It notes further that using these molecules as a sign of life is also a mistake, as they can be created in other ways having nothing to do with biology.

Leave a comment

The word that best describes our present NASA lunar program is “delusional.”

12:16 pm

Artemis, a program based on fantasy
Artemis, a program based on fantasy

Increasingly it appears everyone in Congress, the White House, and NASA, as well as our bankrupt mainstream press, has become utterly divorced from reality in talking about NASA’s Artemis lunar program. The claims are always absurd and never deal with the hard facts on the ground. Instead, it is always “Americans are piorneers! We are great at building things! We are going to beat China to the Moon!”

An interview of interim NASA administration (and Transportation secretary) Sean Duffy yesterday on the Sean Hannity Show made all these delusions very clear. First Hannity introduced Duffy by stating with bald-faced ignorance that “NASA has a brand-new program. It is called Artemis that aims to get astronauts back on the Moon in the next couple of years.”

I emphasize “brand-new” because anyone who has done even two seconds of research on the web will know that Artemis has existed now for more than a decade. Hannity illustrates his incompetence right off the bat.

Duffy then proceeds to insist that the next Artemis mission, dubbed Artemis-2, will fly in April 2026 and send four astronauts around the Moon, followed by the Artemis-3 manned landing one year later.

Being an incompetent member of the propaganda press, Hannity of course accepts these claims without question. He fails to question Duffy about the serious issues with the Orion heat shield, which experienced extensive unexpected damage that is still not understood during its return on the first Artemis mission in 2022.

Nor does either Duffy or Hannity mention the fact that for Artemis to land humans on the Moon SpaceX’s Starship not only has to become operational for human passengers, it needs an in-orbit refueling capability that does not yet exist. I have full confidence that SpaceX will eventually succeed in achieving these benchmarks, but I also doubt it will be able to do it by mid-2027, as claimed by Duffy.

Duffy and Hannity however are not alone in living in this dream world. » Read more

30 comments

California Coastal Commission to reconsider SpaceX’s Vandenberg launch proposal

10:12 am

The California Coastal Commission has now scheduled a meeting on August 14, 2025 to reconsider SpaceX’s request to double its launch rate at Vandenberg Space Force Base from 50 to 100 launches per year.

Though it has no real authority over the base, and though the Space Force has indicated it has no objections to SpaceX’s proposal, the commission rejected that increase in a 6-4 vote in October 2024, but did so not because the commissioners thought it would harm California’s beaches, but because they did not like Elon Musk’s endorsement and campaigning for Donald Trump during the election campaign.

SpaceX has subsequently sued, with a judge ruling two weeks ago that the suit can go forward. Based on the statements made by commissioners in October, SpaceX has an excellent case, and will likely win in court.

It appears the commission is now acting to possibly stave off that suit. The article at the link also notes that the make-up of the commission has changed since that October meeting, with at least one of the commissioners who expressed the most hate against Elon Musk, Gretchen Newsom, is no longer a member.

At the same time, the hostility to Musk and SpaceX for environmental reasons appears to still exist within the commission. Either way, in the end SpaceX’s launch rate at Vandenberg is going to increase, since the military is agreeable to the change.

5 comments

Russians: Air leak on ISS reduced but still on going

9:48 am

According to a report in Russia’s state-run press today, the repairs to the air leak in the Russian Zvezda module on ISS have reduced the rate of air lose significantly, but have failed to eliminate it.

Long-term observations have shown that the leak in the interstitial chamber of the Zvezda module of the International Space Station, which was reported to have been fixed in June, is still ongoing, though its rate has slowed significantly, Roscosmos Executive Director of Manned Space Programs, special presidential envoy for international space cooperation Sergey Krikalyov said.

“The leak is ongoing. We continue our efforts to find and fix it, with the recent repairs having seriously reduced the rate of air leakage. For some time we even thought that we had found the last crack and sealed it, though long-term observations have shown that it (air loss – TASS) continues,” he told a press conference ahead of the launch of the Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft carrying the Crew-11 mission crew.

Even if Russia succeeds eventually in sealing the leak entirely, this does not solve a more fundamental problem, the existence of stress fractures in the hull of Zvezda that have caused the leaks. That module, built in the 1990s and the second oldest module on ISS, remains at serious risk of catastrophic failure due to these fractures. That the leak has not yet been sealed suggests that new cracks are steadily forming even as Russian astronauts patch older cracks.

Though they do not say so, officials at both Roscosmos, NASA, and their partners in Europe and Japan are all praying that the station can last until 2030, when they plan to retire and de-orbit it. They all know however that there is a great risk that Zvezda will not cooperate, and cause an unplanned shut down much earlier.

7 comments

Smithsonian opposes order to transfer space shuttle Discovery to Houston

9:39 am

The recent passed reconciliation bill included a provision ordering the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum to transfer the space shuttle Discovery back to NASA so that it could be shipped to Houston for display, budgeting $85 million for the task.

The Smithsonian however is now opposing that provision, claiming Congress and the President had no authority to do so as it owns Discovery and had not agreed to the transfer.

In a formal response, the Smithsonian Institution says it owns Discovery, which, like the rest of its collection, is held in trust for the American public. The Smithsonian asserts that NASA transferred “all rights, title, interest and ownership” of the shuttle to the Institution in 2012, and that it is “part of the National Air and Space Museum’s mission and core function as a research facility and the repository of the national air and space collection.”

It does appear the Smithsonian might have a case, based on past precedent and the laws that established the institution as an independent entity. At the same time, Congress provides two-thirds of its funding, which surely gives Congress a say in its actions. Moreover, recent court rulings have generally ruled against such independent institutions, ruling that the Constitution does not allow Congress to cede either its authority or the President’s in such cases.

So, even if the Smithsonian should win in court, its funding could be threatened if it defies Congress. It will be entertaining to watch this kerfuffle play out.

13 comments

Ontario cancels Starlink contract in retaliation to Trump’s tariffs

9:28 am

Cutting off your nose to spite your face: The Ontario government yesterday canceled a $100 million Starlink contract it had with SpaceX to provide internet service to remote areas, doing so in retaliation to Trump’s tariffs.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford threatened to cancel the contract in February if U.S. tariffs on Canadian goods were imposed. He killed the deal in March when U.S. President Donald Trump moved ahead with tariffs. “It’s done, it’s gone,” Ford said at the time. “We won’t award contracts to people who enable and encourage economic attacks on our province … and our country.”

…Ford’s cancellation of the deal came as part of a suite of measures in retaliation to Trump’s tariffs. He pulled American booze off the shelves of LCBO stores in March and has said the U.S. booze ban will be kept in place until Trump removes his tariffs on Canada. Ford also banned American companies from bidding on $30 billion worth of procurement contracts the province awards each year. He also banned U.S. companies from bidding on contracts related to his $200-billion infrastructure plan to build highways, tunnels, transit, hospitals, and jails.

It appears the province had to pay SpaceX a penalty for canceling the contract, but the amount has not been revealed. The cancellation also leaves those rural areas stranded, as the government presently has no alternative service to offer.

8 comments

China launches Earth observation satellite for Pakistan

9:21 am

China today successfully launched an Earth observation satellite for Pakistan, its solid-fueled Kuaizhou-1A rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

94 SpaceX
41 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 94 to 71. It also has another Starlink launch scheduled this morning.

Leave a comment

July 30, 2025 Quick space links

3:15 pm

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.

3 comments

India and China complete launches

10:45 am

Two more launches today. First, India’s space agency ISRO successfully placed a joint NASA-ISRO radar satellite into orbit, its GSLV rocket lifting off from its Sriharikota spaceport on the eastern coast of India.

This was India’s first fully successful launch in 2025. On the first launch in January, the GSLV rocket performed as planned, but the satellite’s own engines failed to put it into the right orbit. Then in May the third stage of its PSLV rocket failed during launch.

Next China placed the sixth group of nine satellites for one of its mega-constellations designed to compete with Starlink, its Long March 8A rocket lifting off from its Wenchang coastal spaceport.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

94 SpaceX
40 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 94 to 70.

Leave a comment
1 2 3 … 1,106