Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

Italian rocket company Avio commits $469 million to expand operations

8:59 am

The Italian rocket company Avio, which owns the Vega-C rocket, today announced that is has approved a $469 million fund to expand its manufacturing capabilities, including building a production facility in the United States.

Announced on 12 September, the capital raise is part of a new ten-year business plan targeting an average annual growth rate of about 10% in turnover and more than 15% in core profit (EBITDA). This growth will be driven by a higher Vega C launch cadence, the introduction of Vega E, continued participation in the Ariane 6 programme, and the construction of a new defence production facility in the United States, which is expected to be completed by 2028.

The management of Vega-C had previously been controlled by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) commercial arm, Arianespace, which had owned and operated all of Europe’s rockets. ESA however is eliminating that commercial arm, shifting from the government-run model to the capitalism model, whereby it simply acts as a customer buying services from the private sector.

As part of that shift, Avio is in the process of taking back its Vega-C from Arianespace. Beginning next year it will be marketing the rocket directly to customers. This major investment reflects this change. The company is now free to pursue profits wherever it can find them, and it appears it wishes to market itself aggressively to American satellite companies as well as its defense industry.

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SpaceX launches Indonesian commercial communications/broadband satellite

8:54 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched an Indonesian commercial communications/broadband satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 23rd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their 16th and 24th flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

116 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
12 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 116 to 91.

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Dennis James – Mozart’s Adagio for Glass Harmonica

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed live 2017. And yes, that is a real instrument, using “a series of glass bowls or goblets graduated in size to produce musical tones by means of friction.” What is even more interesting is that it was invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761.

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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September 11, 2025 Quick space links

3:04 pm

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.

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Russia launches Progress to ISS

9:24 am

Russia today successfully launched a Progress freighter to ISS, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.

The freighter will dock with the aft port of the Zvezda module in two days. When it does so, expect NASA to require its astronauts to close the hatch between the American and Russia parts of ISS. The agency has real concerns about the stress fractures in Zvezda’s hull that are the cause of the station’s air leaks, and fears it could at some point fail catastrophically during a docking. The odds of this happening are small, but they are larger than they should be.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
12 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 91. The company has another launch scheduled for later today.

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NASA bans Chinese citizens from its facilities or operations

9:09 am

Earlier this week NASA moved to block Chinese citizens with visas from having access to its facilities as well as its entire operations, citing security concerns.

“NASA has taken internal action pertaining to Chinese nationals, including restricting physical and cybersecurity access to our facilities, materials and network to ensure the security of our work,” NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens said on Wednesday. According to Bloomberg, Chinese nationals had previously been allowed to work as contractors or students contributing to research, although not as staff.

But on 5 September several individuals told the outlet they were suddenly locked out of IT systems and barred from in-person meetings. They spoke on condition of anonymity.

Though both the Chinese press and the leftist news outlet above (The Guardian) whine about this move, it makes great sense, and should have been done years ago. Though I am sure most of these Chinese citizens are not spies, China’s policy has been to consistently use such citizens for spying, and letting such people into NASA operations makes no sense.

Moreover, shouldn’t NASA be hiring Americans first and foremost?

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SpaceX launches military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency

4:32 pm

SpaceX early today successfully launched a classified military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

I did not post this in the morning because there was a second SpaceX launch scheduled for the afternoon, and I planned on posting both launches in one post. That launch however was scrubbed and rescheduled for tomorrow.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 90.

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September 10, 2025 Quick space links

3:19 pm

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.

  • On this day in 1975, Viking 2 launched to Mars
    Like its twin Viking 1, it included an orbiter and a lander. Both landers were focused far too much on looking for evidence of Martian life, a search that was unrealistic for the first two human spacecraft to arrive on a planet with the surface area equivalent to the continents on Earth.
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Update on what SpaceX learned about Starship’s tiles during the 10th test flight

11:27 am

Superheavy after its flight safely captured at Boca Chica
Superheavy after the October 2024 flight,
safely captured during the very first attempt

Link here. The update comes from a presentation given this week by Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s executive in charge of build and flight reliability, at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Cleveland.

Lots of new details. First, almost no tiles fell off during this flight. More significant, they found that the use of metal tiles won’t work. They tested three, and found that “The metal tiles… didn’t work so well.”

Gestenmaier also outlined how the flight provided the necessary data for sealing the gaps between the tiles better.

Gerstenmaier pointed to a patch of white near the top of Starship’s heat shield. This, he said, was caused by heat seeping between gaps in the tiles and eroding the underlying material, a thermal barrier derived from the heat shield on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. Technicians also intentionally removed some tiles near Starship’s nose to test the vehicle’s response.

“It’s essentially a white material that sits on Dragon and it ablates away, and when it ablates, it creates this white residue,” Gerstenmaier said. “So, what that’s showing us is that we’re having heat essentially get into that region between the tiles, go underneath the tiles, and this ablative structure is then ablating underneath. So, we learned that we need to seal the tiles.”

They hope to do the 11th test flight in October, repeating the same suborbital configuration of previous flights, using the same version 2 of Starship. The plan will then be to follow up with a first suborbital flight of version 3 in 2026, followed quickly by orbital flights. During one of those orbital flights they will also try to do a chopstick catch of Starship. They also hope to do the first refueling tests next year.

All in all, it appears the test program is proceeding as hoped, and is about to accelerate significantly.

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NASA promotes the non-discovery of life on Mars by Perseverance

11:09 am

It's all a game of Kibuki theater
It’s all a game!

In what can only be called a kabuki theater stunt, NASA today held a press conference and issued a press release promoting what is essentially the non-discovery of life on Mars by the science team operating the rover Perseverance.

Agency officials, led by acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy, proudly claimed the discovery justified the oft-stated goal of Perseverance, to find life on Mars.

“This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we have ever come to discovering life on Mars. The identification of a potential biosignature on the Red Planet is a groundbreaking discovery, and one that will advance our understanding of Mars,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy.

This is all garbage. First, Perseverance’s real objective has never been to find life on Mars. It is there to study the planet’s geology. If it should happen to detect a biosignature that would be great, but doing so has always been highly unlikely.

Second, the discovery that Duffy touts is itself quite underwhelming. The key quote from the press release that immediately precedes Duffy’s claim is very telling:

A potential biosignature is a substance or structure that might have a biological origin but requires more data or further study before a conclusion can be reached about the absence or presence of life.

Furthermore, the biosignature that Duffy touts is actually not really a biosignature. They found “a distinct pattern of minerals” that might be sometimes be related to life processes, but not always.

The combination of these minerals, which appear to have formed by electron-transfer reactions between the sediment and organic matter, is a potential fingerprint for microbial life, which would use these reactions to produce energy for growth. The minerals also can be generated abiotically, or without the presence of life. [emphasis mine]

In other words, the data is very uncertain. It certainly doesn’t merit the loud push NASA and Duffy is giving it.

I suspect this push is the result of NASA’s fundamental lie about Perseverance’s so-called search for life, a lie that can never really be fulfilled. It is also related to hiding Perseverance’s limited capabilities. For example, Curiosity has a small lab allowing scientists to analyze samples in great detail. If Curiosity came across a real biosignature, it would be able to identify it.

Perseverance lacks this ability, because in its stead it has equipment for preserving core samples for later pick-up. All it really was designed to do was to gather those core samples. It can’t really do the same kind of ground analysis as Curiosity.

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Scientists detect methane gas on the dwarf planet Makemake orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune

10:05 am

Makemake, as seen by Hubble in 2016
Makemake and the discovery of its small moon,
as seen by Hubble in 2016. Click for original image.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have identified the spectroscopic signal of methane gas on the dwarf planet Makemake that orbits the Sun in the Kuiper belt, suggesting this planet like Pluto might have an intermittent atmosphere.

At about 890 miles (1,430 km) in diameter and two-thirds the size of Pluto, Makemake has long been a source of scientific intrigue. Stellar occultations suggested that it lacked a substantial global atmosphere, though a thin one could not be ruled out. Meanwhile, infrared data of Makemake — including JWST measurements — hinted at puzzling thermal anomalies and unusual characteristics of its methane ice, which raised the possibility of localized hot spots across its surface and potential outgassing.

…“This discovery raises the possibility that Makemake has a very tenuous atmosphere sustained by methane sublimation,” said Dr. Emmanuel Lellouch of the Paris Observatory, another co-author of the study. “Our best models point to a gas temperature around 40 Kelvin (-233 degrees Celsius) and a surface pressure of only about 10 picobars — that is, 100 billion times below Earth’s atmospheric pressure, and a million times more tenuous than Pluto’s. If this scenario is confirmed, Makemake would join the small handful of outer solar system bodies where surface–atmosphere exchanges are still active today.”

It is also possible that the methane gas detected could be coming from volcanic plumes, not unlike the plumes found on the Saturn moon Enceladus.

These results prove once again that even though planets like Pluto and Makemake sit very far from the Sun and thus get little energy from it, they can still have active geological processes. Of all the discoveries produced by New Horizons when it flew past Pluto in 2015, this discovery was the most significant.

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