Category: Points of Information

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).

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.

• Video of Japan’s HTV-X1 cargo capsule, still in orbit at an altitude of 376 kilometers
  It launched in October 2025, docked with ISS, and then undocked in March 2026. It will be de-orbited later this month over the Pacific.

• China touts its dedication to climate by describing its carbon monitoring equipment launched recently to its space station
  Pure propaganda. As Jay correctly notes, “China is the worst polluter in the world.”

• On this day in 1982 the first crew to visit the Soviet Union’s new Salyut-7 space station was launched
  They completed a 211 day mission (a record at the time). I describe their mission extensively in my book Leaving Earth. Lots of drama.

• Video of the first carry flight of Russia’s Buran space shuttle copy, which took place on May 13, 1989
  They used an Antonov An-225 Mriya strategic airlift cargo aircraft.

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.

• Second Angara official sentenced to seven years in absentia for fraud
  The first was arrested. This guy is apparently still “a fugitive in Cyprus.”

• Viasat releases amazing photo of its ViaSat-3 F2 satellite with fully deployed large reflector
  Taken 22,236 miles above the Earth, with the Earth in the background.

• On this day in 2009, the space shuttle Atlantis launched on the final Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission
  At the time it was hoped the mission would extend Hubble for five more years. It is now seventeen years later and the telescope is still working, though it is increasingly on the edge of survival.

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. Reader Nate P also sent me the second link. 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.

• SpaceX ends its Starlink reseller program
  Apparently a lot of those resellers were “bad actors.”

• Rocket startup Aetherflux renames itself Cowboy Space
  It wants to build both its own rocket and its own orbiting data centers, and has raised $275 million in private investment capital to do so.

• On this day in 2004, the Saturn orbiter Cassini captured this view of Saturn’s rings casting shadows on the planet’s northern hemisphere

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 off the interior of its Nova rocket’s first stage tank
  The company is “putting the finishing touches on our integration campaign,” which suggests it is getting very close to that first launch. No date has been set however.

• On this date in 1992 the space shuttle Endeavour launched on its first mission.
  The mission captured and repaired the Intelsat-6 F3 communications satellite, in one of the most daring captures of the entire shuttle program. The original plan to catch didn’t work, so the crew ended up sending three astronauts out in the cargo bay to grab and hold it while one got it attached.

• On May 8, 2004 the European Space Agency (ESA) did the first helicopter drop glide test of Phoenix, a prototype of a proposed orbital and reusable launch vehicle
  Dropped from 8,000 ft by a helicopter, it landed precisely and without incident after a GPS-guided 90 second glide. More than two decades later, ESA has done nothing to follow up this test flight.