Rodney Crowell – Earthbound
An evening pause: Performed live c2006.
Hat tip Alec Gimarc.
Category: Behind The Black
September 22, 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.
- UAE touts its Rashid-2 lunar rover, now undergoing thermal vacuum tests
It will be carried to the Moon in 2026 on a Firefly Blue Ghost lander.
- SpaceX launched 88.5% of all satellites in second quarter of ’25, on track to hit the 90% for the year, as Elon Musk predicted
It also put up 86% of the mass.
- NASA’s corrupt safety panel once lambasts SpaceX for the delays in its Starship program, even though the main culprit was red tape during the Biden administration
I wonder when our propaganda press will stop paying attention to this junk panel, that hasn’t gotten anything right in years. It continues to ignore or poo-poo the real safety issues with Orion and Starliner, while consistently attacking SpaceX wrongly.
- On this day in 1974 Mariner 10 had its second encounter with Mercury
The science team did this by using the gravity of Venus to slingshot the spacecraft back to Mercury. This was the first time such a technique had been tried.
The left’s hatred and violence is finally driving people away
Erika Kirk, at the moment she publicly forgave
her husband’s murderer. Click for video.
As numerous pundits on the web have already noted, the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week has clarified most starkly the political divide in both the United States as well as across the world.
On the right, we have Kirk’s widow yesterday speaking at a memorial service for her husband, and with tears standing before the world to forgive his killer.
I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do. The answer to hate is not hate. The answer, we know from the Gospel, is love. And always love. Love for our enemies, and love for those who persecute us.
Her speech matched the general tone of most of the speakers at that memorial service. The service itself, as well as the numerous peaceful candlelight vigils nationwide in memory of Kirk, illustrate clearly the response of the right to this heinous act. No riots, no violence, no calls for bloodshed. Only prayer and a cold fury to make sure such violence never happens again.
That tone was set by Kirk himself, before he died. All he ever did was want to debate his very mainstream conservative ideas with leftists, with good will and rationality. He proved it in a text he sent to leftist pundit Van Jones just before his murder:
I’d love to have you on my show to have a respectful conversation about crime and race. I would be a gentleman as I know you would be as well. We can disagree about the issues agreeably.
The left’s response to Kirk however has been not love or good will but hate. Hundreds and hundreds of partisan leftists went on social media to gleefully celebrate his assassination. Leftist politicians and entertainers defamed both him and what he stood for, with lies and slanders. And when the television show of one entertainer, Jimmy Kimmel, got canceled by ABC because Kimmel had falsely claimed on the air that a Trump supporter had killed Kirk, one leftist and former teacher’s union employee decided it was okay to protest Kimmel’s cancellation by firing multiple bullets into the offices of an ABC affiliate in Sacramento. The man, Al Hernandez Santana, also has an extensive X feed where he had expressed hate for Donald Trump, often wishing him dead.
He is clearly not sane, but he is also not an outlier on the left. The response of the left to Kirk’s murder has revealed that for too many Democratic Party supporters, Santana is mainstream.
» Read more
SpaceX launches classified reconnaissance payload
SpaceX this morning successfully launched a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its 18th flight, landing back at Vandenberg. The two fairing halves completed their 27th and 28th flights respectively. As of posting the payload had not yet been deployed.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
122 SpaceX
54 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 122 to 93.
A galaxy sunnyside up
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is the Hubble picture of the week. It shows a strange galaxy that defies categorization. From the caption:
The galaxy in question is NGC 2775, which lies 67 million light-years away in the constellation Cancer (The Crab). NGC 2775 sports a smooth, featureless centre that is devoid of gas, resembling an elliptical galaxy. It also has a dusty ring with patchy star clusters, like a spiral galaxy. Which is it, then: spiral or elliptical — or neither?
Because we can only view NGC [2775 from one angle, it’s difficult to say for sure. Some researchers have classified NGC 2775 as a spiral galaxy because of its feathery ring of stars and dust, while others have classified it as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies have features common to both spiral and elliptical galaxies. It’s not yet known exactly how lenticular galaxies come to be, and they might form in a variety of ways.
To me, the galaxy most resembles a fried egg, sunnyside up, though I very strongly doubt that was the process that formed it. The bright center however suggests that something there has in the past emitted a lot of energy and radiation, thus clearing out the gas and dust from that center.
The swamp comes up with a swamp solution for promoting space
Like pigs at the trough
A group of senators last week announced the re-introduction of a bill they had proposed previously in 2023 that they claim would encourage new spaceport development across the United States. From their press release:
Today, U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper, John Cornyn, Ben Ray Luján, and Roger Wicker introduced the bipartisan Spaceport Project Opportunities for Resilient Transportation (SPACEPORT) Act, which would encourage the development of commercial spaceports through the modernization of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Space Transportation Infrastructure Matching (STIM) grant program.
Spaceports, including the Colorado Air and Space Port in Adams County, are ground-based launch and reentry sites that can be used to support public and private ventures into space. “Spaceports are Colorado’s gateway to the commercial space boom, and we need to prioritize that infrastructure if we want to stay at the top of the space industry,” said Hickenlooper. “American space exploration has come a long way, but we can and should go even further,” said Cornyn. “By investing in our spaceport infrastructure, this legislation helps ensure the U.S. space industry remains competitive and is prepared to handle future national security threats.”
Though two of these four senators are Republicans (Cornyn and Wicker), the political leanings of this group is decidedly uni-party and establishment based. Polls for example show that Cornyn is not liked by conservatives in Texas, and will lose a primary challenge from the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton. Wicker doesn’t have the same polling issues, but he has also taken positions that suggests he is a willing member of the Republican establishment that has resisted change for decades.
And the actual bill [pdf] itself proves that all four senators are pure swamp. It doesn’t do anything to directly support spaceport development, as Hickenlooper and Cornyn claim. Instead, it would create a $10 million grant fund that the transportation secretary could hand out willy-nilly each year to political friends and buddies. It would also require the heads of Transportation, Defense, Commerce, and NASA to issue a report every four years that simply reviews the state of America’s space industry and describes it.
The bill does nothing to reduce regulation, the main obstacle blocking the U.S. rocket and space industry. If anything, it allows that red tape to flourish by creating this slush fund that politicians can later use to bribe private companies. The report itself will require more bureaucrats and paperwork, and will act to prevent that bureaucracy from doing its regulatory responsibilities, thus slowing license approvals further.
Introducing a bill like this does not guarantee passage of course. It failed previously in 2023. I suspect it is even more likely to fail now, because the trend appears to be moving away from this kind of funding and legal gabblygook.
Failed launch by Iran
Though information is at present scarce and contradictory, Iran in the past few days appears to have made one or two launch attempts, either of a missile system near Tehran or of its orbital Zoljanah rocket from its Semnan spaceport to the east.
According to this Newsweek report, the launch was of a “suspected missile system … near its capital, Tehran.”
According to this tweet from astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who monitors such activity, it was a “possible failed orbital launch attempt … of an IRGC Zoljanah launch vehicle from Semnan, Iran.”
There is also this tweet from Iran media, which calls it a “missile” and a “test” that failed.
I think these conflicting reports are describing the same launch. If its the latter, then the question is whether it was a Zoljanah rocket, and if so was it attempting its first orbital launch after two suborbital tests in ’21 and ’22?
South Korean rocket startup Innospace wins launch and marketing contract with German broadcast company
The South Korean rocket startup Innospace announced last week that it has signed a $5.8 million launch with the German broadcast company Media Broadcast Satellites (MBS) to not only launch two MBS satellites in 2026 and 2028 using its Hanbit rocket, but to have MBS market the rocket in Germany.
Under the agreement, INNOSPACE will carry out two HANBIT launch missions to deploy MBS satellites into Low Earth orbit (LEO), with one launch in 2026 and the other planned by 2028. In both launch missions, MBS satellites will serve as the primary payloads, with priority in launch scheduling and orbit determination.
INNOSPACE also signed a separate contract on the same day, officially appointing MBS as its exclusive agent for launch service sales and marketing within Germany, marking the company’s entry into the European space launch market. Following the contract, MBS will exclusively distribute launch services based on the HANBIT series to satellite customers in Germany.
Innospace has not yet launched Hanbit. It had hoped to attempt the first launch in July, but in May it delayed it to the end of 2025 due to issues found in a first stage pump. The launch itself will take place at Brazil’s long abandoned Alcântara spaceport on that nation’s northeast coast.
Avio wins U.S. launch contract for its Vega-C rocket
Capitalism in space: In what I think is a first, the Italian rocket company Avio has won a Vega-C launch contract without any participation from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) commercial division Arianespace.
The contract is also with an American company, SpaceLaunch, to put an “institutional Earth observation satellite” in orbit in 2027.
The significance of the deal is that Avio is now successfully marketing and selling its Vega-C rocket, without the middleman Arianespace taking a cut. As part of the shift of ESA and Europe to the capitalism model, whereby it no longer runs things but acts merely as a customer, it also freed Avio from the clutches of Arianespace. Previously, Avio built the rocket for that government agency, which then marketed and sold it to satellite companies. Avio had no control over profit or price. In fact, it didn’t really own its own rocket.
This absurd situation is now ending. There are still a handful of Vega-C launches that were contracted for under Arianespace, but after these Avio will be completely in charge. This deal, announced yesterday, is the beginning of that process.
SpaceX launches 28 Starlink satellites
The beat goes on. SpaceX early this morning successfully placed another 28 Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
121 SpaceX
54 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 121 to 93.
Blue Origin wins contract to bring NASA’s Viper rover to the Moon
NASA yesterday awarded Blue Origin a contract to use its Blue Moon lunar lander to transport the agency’s troubled Viper rover to the Moon’s south pole region.
The CLPS task order has a total potential value of $190 million. This is the second CLPS lunar delivery awarded to Blue Origin. Their first delivery – using their Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) robotic lander – is targeted for launch later this year to deliver NASA’s Stereo Cameras for Lunar-Plume Surface Studies and Laser Retroreflective Array payloads to the Moon’s South Pole region.
With this new award, Blue Origin will deliver VIPER to the lunar surface in late 2027, using a second Blue Moon MK1 lander, which is in production. NASA previously canceled the VIPER project and has since explored alternative approaches to achieve the agency’s goals of mapping potential off-planet resources, like water.
The contract does not guarantee this mission. NASA has several options along the way to shut things down, depending on the milestones Blue Origin achieves. The first of course is the success of that first lunar lander.
The announcement does not make clear how NASA is going to pay for the work needed to finish Viper. VIPER was originally budgeted at $250 million. When cancelled in 2024 its budget had ballooned to over $600 million, and that wasn’t enough to complete the rover for launch. Moreover, after getting eleven proposals from the private sector companies to finish and launch Viper, in May 2025 NASA canceled that solicitation.
It is very likely Blue Origin is picking up the tab, but if so the press release does not say so.
SpaceX launches another 24 Starlink satellites
SpaceX this morning successfully launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
120 SpaceX
54 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 120 to 93.