May 15, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Category: Behind The Black
David Allan Coe – Tennessee Whiskey
An evening pause: How one man found a better way to spend his weekend.
Hat tip Cotour.
SpaceX launches cargo Dragon to ISS
SpaceX today launched an unmanned Dragon freighter to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The first stage completed its 6th flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The capsule is also making its sixth flight to ISS, and will dock with the station at 7 am (Eastern) on May 17, 2026.
57 SpaceX
27 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 57 to 48.
May 15, 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.
- German Pangea Propulsion touts successfull static fire testing of its ARCOS methane-fueled “thrust module”
It will be used on the company’s planned aerospike engine.
- Video of fuel dump by China’s Zhuque-2E upper stage over Minnesota
Its flight path was polar. Future such launches will produce similar sky shows.
- Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile yesterday agreed in principle to form a joint venture
They will work together to “fill long-time [cellphone] coverage gaps, especially in rural areas.” It also appears they did this out of fear of Starlink.
- On May 15, 1960 Korabl-Sputnik 1 was launched (known as Sputnik 4 in the West).
First unmanned test flight of the Soviet’s manned Vostok capsule. It did not de-orbit as planned, with one section remaining in space until 1962, and another until 1965. It also fueled fake rumors a man was trapped on board because the Soviets used taped recordings to test their communications systems.
- On this day in 1973, Skylab launched, the first American space station
It was occupied by three crews over the next six months on missions lasting 28, 59, and 84 days. The first and second crews also did extensive repairs to the station, which had been damaged during launch. See chapter 3 in Leaving Earth.
The barren hills west of Jezero Crater
Click for full panorama.
Click for interactive map.
Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped and reduced to post here, was created on April 5, 2026 using 46 pictures taken by one of the high resolution camera’s on the Mars rover Perseverance. It also attempts to show this terrain in natural color.
The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Perseverance’s present location. The green dot indicates where I think the rover was when the panorama was taken. (Note: I think the press release incorrectly lists the Sol number for these dates, but as I am not sure I can only guess.) The yellow lines indicate approximately the terrain seen in the full panorama.
As the press release notes, “the panorama offers one of the richest geological vistas of the rover’s mission, revealing a windswept landscape of diverse rock textures.” It also appears this is the direction the rover is presently headed.
I ask my readers to once again look at this panorama. It shows an utterly barren terrain. There is no life here, and if there ever was it was gone billions of years ago and never did much to shape the landscape. While some at NASA and in the planetary community like to tout the possibility of life on Mars in order to lobby for funding, the reality we see says there is none, and that life will only appear on Mars when humans finally arrive there to build new human societies.
Intuitive Machines buys British ground station company
The lunar lander startup Intuitive Machines is now in the process of buying the British ground station company that operates antennas used for deep space communications in both Britain and the U.S.
Intuitive Machines announced May 14 that it entered into an agreement to acquire Goonhilly Earth Station Ltd. and its American subsidiary, Comsat. Intuitive Machines will pay 37 million pounds ($49.6 million) for Goonhilly, split equally between cash and stock, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter pending regulatory approvals in the U.S. and U.K.
Goonhilly operates a ground station in Cornwall, England, that includes 30- and 32-meter antennas that have been used for lunar and deep-space communications. Through Comsat, it operates teleports in Southbury, Connecticut, and Santa Paula, California, that have dozens of antennas.
This antenna deal gives the company added flexibility in its future lunar missions. It also gives it a capability it can sell to both the European Space Agency as well as NASA. NASA for example is looking to accelerate in the next few years the number of unmanned lunar landers it will buy from the commercial sector. It also is looking for commercial options to improve its communications capabilities for those missions. Intuitive Machines is now better placed to compete for this work.
Northrop Grumman completes successful test of new nozzle for its solid-fueled boosters
Nozzle failure during February 12, 2026 Vulcan launch
Northrop Grumman on April 15, 2026 successfully completed a test of a new nozzle design of a GEM solid-fueled booster, the strap-on booster whose nozzle failed on two previous ULA Vulcan rocket launches.
On April 15, the company said Northrop Grumman performed a successful static fire test of a Graphite Epoxy Motor (GEM) 63XL Solid Rocket Booster (SRB). A spokesperson told Spaceflight Now on Thursday that the test served to “demonstrate nozzle design enhancements which were already in work and an advanced propellant technology for future solid rocket motors across their portfolio.”
“The information gathered from this test, along with findings from the investigations will provide critical data to validate analytical models and support Vulcan’s return to flight,” the spokesperson said.
At the moment the Pentagon has grounded all Vulcan launches because of this nozzle issue, and has given several planned Vulcan payloads to SpaceX instead. ULA hopes to resume normal Vulcan flights using GEM boosters before the end of the year, but it also hopes to launch Vulcan sooner without the boosters. It is right now preparing a boosterless Vulcan to do a launch for Amazon, placing an as yet undetermined number of Leo satellites into orbit. It is also possible it will do the same with AST SpaceMobile’s Bluebird satellites.
Virgin Galactic releases ’26 first quarter financials; stock at new low under $3
The suborbital tourist company Virgin Galactic, that promised much over two decades and delivered little, this week released its ’26 first quarter financial statement, claiming its situation is “strong” with the completion of its “new SpaceShips”.
Two details however contradict this conclusion. First, revenue in the quarter were only $200K, down from $500K earned in the first quarter of 2025. Second, the company’s stock is now trading at under $3 per share, a far cry from the high of $62, when Richard Branson sold the bulk of his holdings and got out when the getting was good. It is also a quarter of the stock’s initial value when first issued in 2019.
The company hopes to resume flights with these new spacecraft later this year, but whether there is any substantial interest in suborbital tourism remains unknown.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
China launches five classified satellites
China today successfully placed five classified satellites into orbit, its Kinetica-1 rocket (also called Lijian-1) lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
No word from China’s state-run press where the rocket’s lower stages crashed. The rocket itself is built by pseudo-company CAS Space, which is wholly controlled by a government agency.The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
56 SpaceX
27 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 56 to 48.
SpaceX scrubbed a Starlink launch this morning, rescheduling it to tomorrow. It also hopes to launch a cargo Dragon to ISS this afternoon, a launch that has twice in the past week been scrubbed due to weather.
Ilia Laporev & Estevao Gomes – Bach’s Air on a G String
An evening pause: Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
May 14, 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.
- Stoke Space shows pictures of the flight version of its Nova rocket’s first stage, now undergoing final testing
It sounds as if the launch is about three months away, though once again Stoke has not set a date.
- Rocket Lab is secretly shipping a large payload adapter (used to hold satellites on a rocket) from New Zealand to Wallops
The tweet speculates this may be the adapter to be used on the first launch of the new Neutron rocket.
- Firefly touts its scheduled 4th Blue Ghost lunar mission near the Moon’s south pole
It still has to complete two lunar landing missions before this 4th mission can fly.
- NASA provides preliminary mission details for Artemis-3 next year
The key revelation is that SLS will launch with a dummy upper stage. As this mission will stay in low Earth orbit, there is no need for that stage.
- Video of the launch of Venera 10 on May 14, 1975
The lander operated for 65 minutes on the surface of Venus, taking the second picture ever of that surface. It worked in conjunction with Venera-9, which launched a week earlier and took the first picture ever of Venus’s surface.
- Air & Space museum touts two Hubble instruments in its collection, brought back by astronauts in the last repair mission in 2009
The instruments were the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 and COSTAR (which had launched in 1993 and fixed the telescope’s focus problem).
Brain terrain on Mars?
Click for original picture. For full image go here.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and expanded to post here, was taken on April 2, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample”, such images are usually taken not as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule. The camera team needs to take pictures at a regular cadence to maintain its proper temperature.
When they have such a gap, they try to find interesting things to photograph, and usually succeed. In this case we are looking at what I think the scientists dub “brain terrain,” a feature unique to Mars that is thought related to near surface ice and its sublimation, though at present the origins of brain terrain remain murky. The scale is approximately 100 meters across the width of this picture.
However, the location of this brain terrain makes any conclusions about its origin difficult.
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