October 10, 2025 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Category: Behind The Black
Business Insider – The Rise And Fall Of The American Diner
An evening pause: This remains the place that Americans go to after church.
Enjoy the weekend. And find a great diner to eat at!
Hat tip Cotour.
October 10, 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.
- Inversion Space shows off video of a helicopter drop test of a prototype engineering test vehicle of its proposed Arc recoverable orbiting capsule
The American company has raised $44 million in private investment capital. It has also won financial grants from the Space Force. The prototype resembled a lifting body design, similar to Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser.
- Space Force picks Blue Origin for satellite processing at Cape Canaveral
Essentially Blue Origin will provide the facilities for integrating satellites prior to launch, whether or not they are launched by Blue Origin.
- Law firm begins investigation in behalf of stockholders against Firefly because its stock dropped after its rocket exploded during a static fire test in September
It appears to both Jay and I that this law firm, Glancy Prongay & Murray, is fishing for a nuisance lawsuit to shake Firefly down for money. No one has grounds to sue just because a stock lost value because something went wrong. It’s called buyer beware.
- Ispace press conference showing off engineering test prototype of its 2nd generation lunar lander
After two landing failures with its first generation design, the upgrade will be bigger and will be used on its fourth mission in ’28, for Japan’s space agency JAXA. This prototype has already undergone thermal, radiation, and vibration testing.
New research confirms the steady decline of Martian ice with each glacial cycle
Using orbital data from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) of glaciers inside mid-latitude craters, scientists have concluded that there was a steady decline in the growth of those glaciers with each new glacial cycle.
They focused on craters with indicative signs of glaciation, such as ridges, moraines (piles of debris left behind by glaciers), and brain terrain (a pitted, maze-like surface formed by ice-rich landforms). By comparing the shapes and orientations of these features with climate models, they found that ice consistently clustered in the colder, shadowed southwestern walls of craters. This trend was consistent across various glacial periods, ranging from approximately 640 million to 98 million years ago.
The results show that Mars didn’t just freeze once—it went through a series of ice ages driven by shifts in its axial tilt, also known as obliquity. Unlike Earth, Mars’ tilt can swing dramatically over millions of years, redistributing sunlight and triggering cycles of ice build-up and melting. These changes shaped where water ice could survive on the planet’s surface. Over time, however, each cycle stored less ice, pointing to a gradual planetary drying. [emphasis mine]
You can read the paper here [pdf]. This result is not new. Based on the orbital data scientists have theorized now for almost a decade that as Mars’ rotational tilt (its obliquity) swings from 11 to 60 degrees, it produces extreme climate cycles on the planet. Those swings are shown on the graph to the right, taken from this 1993 paper [pdf]. When the obliquity is low, the mid-latitudes are warm and the glaciers there shrink, with the snow falling at the poles. When obliquity is high, the poles are warmer and its ice sublimates away to fall as snow in the mid-latitudes, thus causing those glaciers to grow instead.
The orbital data has consistently shown that with each new cycle, the glaciers grew less, suggesting that less global water was available on the planet. This new study further confirms these conclusions.
One last point: Though the amount of water ice on Mars has declined, we mustn’t think the red planet now has none. The orbital data shows that there is a lot of near surface ice on Mars, covering the planet from 30 degrees latitude poleward. As I’ve noted numerous times, Mars is a desert like Antarctica.
Orbital tug company Momentus gets two NASA contracts
The orbital tug startup Momentus yesterday announced that NASA has awarded it two contracts worth $7.6 million total to fly two experimental NASA payloads on its Vigoride tug.
One payload will test “test the ability to make semiconductor crystals in microgravity”, while the second will “test a rotating detonation rocket engine, a propulsion system designed to provide higher efficiency than traditional engines.” In this case the propellants used will be nitrous oxide and ethane.
Both will fly on the same Vigoride tug on a mission to be launched no earlier than October 2026. Momentus also says there is room for additional payloads on that mission.
It appears the increase in the number and launches of rockets has actually hurt the orbital tug business:
Momentus is among several companies that developed orbital transfer vehicles, or OTVs, like Vigoride to ferry spacecraft between orbits. They are designed to provide last-mile delivery to specific orbits for spacecraft launched on rideshare missions such as [SpaceX’s] Transporter [launches]. However, demand for such services has been slower to materialize than expected. “Candidly, that part of the market has not developed as much as people thought, say, five years ago,” [said John Rood, Momentus’ chief executive] during a panel at World Space Business Week in September. “The reason is many small manufacturers are multi-manifesting satellites to deploy a single plane with a single launcher.”
As a result, Momentus has focused on getting technology demonstration contracts such as the two above, with the tug acting more like a service module.
Astronomers take first radio image of the supermassive binary system OJ287
Using archive data from the now retired Russian orbiting radio telescope RadioAstron, scientists have now obtained the first image of the binary supermassive black hole system OJ287 that was previously detected flaring as predicted when the smaller black hole (150 million solar masses) circled near the larger (18 billion solar masses).
That image is to the right, cropped and annotated to post here. The cartoon in the lower right shows the theorized orientation of the system, taken from figure 2 of the published paper [pdf]. According to the paper the elongation of the three objects is an artifact of the data and is “not real.” From the press release:
In this latest study, the astronomers compared the earlier theoretical calculations with a radio image. The two black holes were there in the image, just where they were expected to be. This gave the researchers an answer to a question that has been open for 40 years: whether black-hole pairs exist in the first place. “For the first time, we managed to get an image of two black holes circling each other. In the image, the black holes are identified by the intense particle jets they emit. The black holes themselves are perfectly black, but they can be detected by these particle jets or by the glowing gas surrounding the hole,” Valtonen says.
The researchers also identified a completely new kind of a jet emanating from a black hole. The jet coming out of the smaller black hole is twisted like a jet of a rotating garden hose. This is because the smaller black hole moves fast around the primary black hole of OJ287, and its jet is diverted depending on its current motion. The researches liken it to “a wagging tail” which should be seen twisting in different directions in the coming years when the smaller black hole changes its speed and direction of motion.
This image is cropped from the full dataset. The jet continues upward and then curves to the right as it “wags” away.
This incredible black hole binary system, estimated to be about 3.5 billion light years away, has been posited since 1982, when one astronomer noticed that it repeatedly flared every twelve years. Since then scientists have successfully predicted several flares, based on the system’s theorized orbit. These images further confirm the system’s shape.
Canadian rocket startup Nordspace signs deal for its mission control center
Proposed Canadian spaceports
The Canadian rocket startup Nordspace, which earlier this week signed a deal for another company to establish ground stations for its proposed Atlantic Spaceport, today signed an agreement with the company Kongsberg Geospatial to provide software for running its mission control center.
According to the news release TerraLens “will ingest data from multiple sensors to deliver real-time three-dimensional (3D) visualization of launch operations, range safety, decision support, and vehicle tracking. This will help streamline launch operations and enable deployment of critical space missions to orbit in under 48 hours.” Kongsberg said TerraLens builds on their “experience supporting range safety and mission-critical visualization for the Andøya Space and Defence project in Norway.”
Andøya is Norway’s new commercial spaceport that has been launching suborbital government rockets for decades.
Nordspace continues to move forward quickly, having been established only three years ago. It is putting the pieces together for its spaceport, and is testing both a small suborbital rocket and the engines for its proposed orbital Tundra rocket. Though the race is certainly not over, it does appear Nordspace will get to orbit ahead of the Nova Scotia spaceport that was first proposed in 2016.
Is Trump considering re-nominating Jared Isaacman for NASA administrator?
Billionaire Jared Isaacman
According to a report late today (based on anonymous sources), President Trump has held several face-to-face meetings in the past few weeks with billionaire Jared Isaacman, and those meetings have raised the possibility of Trump re-nominating him for NASA administrator.
According to Bloomberg News, President Trump has reportedly met with Isaacman several times in recent weeks to discuss NASA’s operational plans and future plans. Isaacman is the founder of fintech company Shift4 Payments and a private astronaut at SpaceX who has had a longstanding relationship with Elon Musk.
Isaacman, who has flown two private missions in space (and done one spacewalk), had been nominated by Trump for NASA administrator in December 2024, and was only days away from a Senate confirmation vote when Trump suddenly withdrew the nomination on May 31, 2025. Though it has never been clear why Trump withdrew the nomination, Isaacman’s past support of Democrats and his close links to Musk have been raised as issues, especially because of the Trump-Musk kerfuffle in the spring. Isaacman has also expressed some opinions since then about NASA and what it should do that might not have fit with Trump’s plans.
At the same time, NASA is presently without its own administrator, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy holding down the job as an interim head. It appears Trump might be reconsidering his earlier decision in order to get someone in charge of NASA who isn’t distracted by other responsibilities.
Note however that this report is solely from anonymous sources, and we all know how unreliable those are. The whole story could be fantasy cooked up by someone in DC for any number of devious political purposes.
October 8, 2025 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Asleep At The Wheel – Roly Poly
An evening pause: Performed live c2017.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
October 9, 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.
- Vast touts the construction of the flight hull for its Haven-1 demo space station, set to launch next year
It is the first American-made station flight module built in 20 years.
- Space.com posts a short video showing Blue Origin’s next New Glenn rocket as it is moved to the launch pad
Space.com also calls this “New Shepard” in the video, a gross error.
Dominion Voting Systems purchased by American company run by Republican election reform activist
The issues discovered in an audit of Maricopa County in Arizona
of 2020 election results. Note the problems found related to voting
machines, Dominion’s responsibility. The reason the “Ballots
Impacted” column is marked “N/A” (not available) is because
Dominion refused to cooperate. Click for full graph.
In what could be a major move towards election reform, the electronic voting system company Dominion — that many have suspected or have accused of either doing a bad job tabulating computer ballots or purposely manipulating them — has now been purchased by an American company dubbed Liberty Vote that is owned by Republican election reform activist Scott Leiendecker.
Leiendecker, former GOP election reform advocate, has officially become the sole owner of Dominion after making the deal contingent on dropping several remaining lawsuits against prominent conservatives and One America News Network (OANN).
Leiendecker further disclosed to the Caller that remaining litigation with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell will be dropped by Dominion Voting Systems as part of the acquisition agreement. Dominion also filed a lawsuit against Herring Networks, which owns OANN, in August 2021. The lawsuit remained unresolved, though Leinendecker further confirmed that future litigation will be discontinued following the acquisition.
None of the charges against Dominion have ever been proven, and many have become impossible to investigate because the company’s very successful lawfare campaign, suing anyone who said anything against it, including news organizations such as Fox and Newsmax, both of which settled with Dominion, paying it $787 million and $67 million respectively. Nonetheless, the allegations have been numerous, substantial, and alarming (see also here, here, here, and here). Audits found errors, fraud, and the ability for outsiders to hack Dominion’s machines.
Leiendecker, in announcing the purchase, said that the new company will move all operations to the U.S. and will make third-party audits standard. It will also make paper ballots a fundamental component of its electronic tabulating system, something that Dominion did poorly or not at all.
Even if Dominion had been completely honest in its work, its resistance to investigation or even any criticism helped fuel the growing belief that the 2020 election of Biden was tampered with and might even have been fraudulent. That much of the company’s operations were foreign-based further fueled those suspicions. This purchase should help ease those concerns, though the proof will be in the pudding.