June 3, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Category: Behind The Black
SRT (Synowiec, Robinson, Towne) – Stayin’ Alive
An evening pause: Hat tip Cotour.
June 3, 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.
- Orbital images showing the deployment of 2 Qianfan satellites launched on June 1 by the Long March 12b
China’s state-run press did not initially reveal the number of satellites in the payload.
- The story of the recovery in the Pacific of two Nimbus SNAP-19 nuclear generators
Both were lost during a launch failure in May 1968, and were recovered five months later, intact and having leaked no radiation.
- Video of the June 3, 1965 launch of Gemini 4, America’s first multi-day mission
Astronaut Ed White performed a 20-minute spacewalk that same day, which had been quickly added to the flight after Soviet’s Alexei Leonov did a spacewalk six weeks earlier. For the full story and political backdrop behind this mission see chapter 6 in Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8.
On Coast to Coast with George Noory tonight
I will be making another long two-hour appearance tonight on Coast to Coast with George Noory tonight. I hope my readers tune in and call in, as George usually reserves the second hour for listener questions.
Gigantic slumping Martian cliffs
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 5, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The science team labels this an “alluvial fan.” What we are looking at is the top 5,700 feet of a 9,400-foot-high cliff which is slumping downward. As it does so, its outer layers have been falling downward into the canyon below almost like liquid, producing the slope’s streaked look.
According to this definition, alluvial fans…
are mounds of coarse grained sediments formed when a confined stream disgorges into an unconfined area. They typically occur along the margins of mountain ranges where bedrock incised channels draining uplands spill out on to broad open valley floors. Alluvial fans occur in areas with significant topographic relief caused by rapid subsidence or uplift (rift basins, foreland basins, fold-and-thrust belts, etc.).
While the definition implies these fans only form from the flow of liquid water, that does not have to be the case. Many fans form from the long term downward motion of material from mountainsides into lower valleys or canyons, though water — either by rain, a freeze-thaw cycle, or streamflow — is usually a factor in causing this erosion.
At this location something has made that cliff slump, and in doing so produced the flow patterns on that slope
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SpaceX launches 24 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX this morning successfully placed another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its 16th flight (37 days after its previous flight), landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
65 SpaceX
32 China
8 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 65 to 57.
Venturi Space expands investment in new French factory for building Astrolab’s rover
Venturi Space, the European half of the partnership with the rover startup Astrolab, is increasing its investment in a new French factory from 100 million to 250 million euros.
On 1 June, Venturi Space announced that it had increased its expected investment in the new facility to €250 million. The announcement indicated that it would no longer begin with the initial smaller facility and would instead move directly to the full 16,000-square-metre planned “technology centre.” This likely accounts for the additional €150 million in funding.
According to the company’s 1 June press release, the facility will be used for the “design and manufacture of critical technologies for lunar and Martian mobility, as well as [for] the assembly of the rovers developed by the company.” …Venturi Space is providing wheels, batteries, and battery management systems to US-based Venturi Astrolab for use aboard its rovers. During a 26 May event, NASA announced that Venturi Astrolab was one of two companies selected to build rovers for the agency’s Artemis programme.
The partnership is an unusual one. Venturi Space and Astrolab are separate companies, working together to build Astrolab’s rovers for NASA. Venturi however is also developing its own rover for the European Space Agency.
NASA officially ends its MAVEN Mars orbiter mission
Mars’ global high altitude wind patterns,
found by MAVEN.
More than six months after engineers lost contact with the Mars orbiter MAVEN, NASA today officially ended the mission, determining the spacecraft is “not recoverable.”
The agency convened an anomaly review board in February to evaluate recovery efforts and assess the spacecraft’s probable current state. The review board has determined that the MAVEN spacecraft is not recoverable, and it is no longer capable of performing its science and data relay mission, which is consistent with the mission team’s findings.
Telemetry from MAVEN prior to the spacecraft’s passage behind Mars in December showed all subsystems working normally. After the spacecraft emerged, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) did not observe a signal. A brief fragment of telemetry data from analysis of radio signals recorded by the DSN’s open-loop receivers indicated the spacecraft was in safe mode and rotating at an unusually high rate when it emerged from behind Mars, indicating a disruption in MAVEN’s orbit trajectory. The review board concluded that due to this rotation, the batteries on the spacecraft had drained, causing the communications system to lose power and rendering MAVEN in an unrecoverable state.
The actual cause of the rotation remains uncertain.
MAVEN’s mission was to study the atmosphere and surrounding environment of Mar. It gave scientists their first data on how Mars could have lost both its atmosphere as well as a significant amount of its initial supply of water. It also produced the first map of the red planet’s high altitude winds, finding that even at high altitude the winds shift around the Tharsis Bulge where Mars’s biggest volcanoes are located.
Axiom’s CEO provides update on corrosion and the timetable for its space station
Axiom’s module assembly sequence
Jonathan Cirtain, the CEO of the space station startup Axiom, this week gave an interview where he provided a short update on the status of their station’s construction, including the present launch timetable as well as the corrosion issue known to exist on the two module hulls that Thales-Alenia is presently building for the company.
It [the corrosion] was actually observed during ISS using a similar manufacturing technique. They mitigated it.
Now it’s come back. … We’re going to fix it the same way they fixed it for the International Space Station, the Columbus module, which has been operational now for eighteen, nineteen years. Had that same challenge. So we’re working our way through that. That should get resolved by the end of the month of June.
Because this interview took place just prior to NASA’s announcement yesterday that it has abandoned its core module concept proposed last month, Cirtain describes how the company was considering some design and construction changes to deal with it. That issue however has now vanished.
Cirtain added that the module’s hulls will next be shipped from the Thales-Alenia factory in Europe to the U.S., where Axiom will then begin installing the interior and exterior components of each, with a planned launch of the first, dubbed the PPTM, by 2028, the same target date the company announced in January 2026. That the date has not changed six months later suggests either the corrosion issue did not delay things, or it was the cause of that delay.
As I noted in January, Axiom’s schedule margins for getting its station launched, docked to ISS, loaded with ISS equipment, and then separated before ISS retires in 2030 are extremely tight. It cannot afford any further delays.
In other Axiom news, the company announced yesterday that it has established a a wholly owned subsidiary based in Switzerland, dubbed Axiom Switzerland, thus establishing itself within the Europe to facilitate future contracts with the European Space Agency, the European Union, and the member nations of both.
Below are my updated rankings of the five American space stations presently under development:
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Willie Nelson – Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground
<An evening pause: Performed live 1984.
Hat tip Rex Ridenoure.
June 2, 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.
- Spanish rocket startup PLD provides short update on its launchpad construction at French Guiana
It appears to be getting very close to being ready for the first launch of its Miura-5 rocket.
- A plug for Russia’s own Starlink-style satellite network, dubbed Rassvet
Only 16 satellites have been launched, with the entire constellation not expected to be in orbit until 2035, if then. And it also appears the orbit of one satellite might already be decaying.
- On June 2, 1955 the Soviet Union opened its Baikonur Cosmodrome
It was then part of the Soviet Union. And though it is still Russia’s main spaceport, it is now located in a foreign country, Kazakhstan.
- On June 2, 1966 Surveyor 1 completed the first soft landing on the Moon.
It proved that the lunar surface was not deep in soft dust, and that a manned lunar module could safely land there.
- On June 1, 2011 the space shuttle Endeavour landed at the Kennedy Space Center, completing its last mission
This was the next-to-last shuttle mission.
- Video of the June 2, 2003 launch of Europe’s Mars Express orbiter
It is still working, its images providing a wider view than Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Sunspot update: May sunspot activity jumps
It is the beginning of the month, so it is time for my monthly sunspot update. According to NOAA’s June update of its monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere, the amount of sunspots in May surprised us once again by increasing upward, though the totals continue to be below prediction.
That graph is below, annotated with extra information by me to illustrate the larger scientific context.
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