April 24, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
New data says interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas IS different from comets in our solar system
Using spectroscopic data from the ALMA telescope in Chile, astronomers have determined that interstellar comet 3I/Atlas is enriched in deuterium (sometimes called “heavy water”), with quantities as much as 30 times that found in ordinary solar system comets and 40 times that found in Earth’s oceans.
You can read the peer-reviewed paper here. From its abstract:
3I/ATLAS shows a deuterium enrichment exceeding Earth’s ocean value by more than a factor of about 40 and typical Solar System cometary values by more than a factor of about 30. The elevated deuterium enrichment points to water that formed under colder, less irradiated conditions and from less thermally processed material, consistent with an origin in a planetary system that formed under different physical and chemical conditions than our own.
In other words, the conditions in which Comet 3I/Atlas’ solar system formed were very different from those when our own solar system formed.
This conclusion is wonderful, but it raises more questions than it answers. Since we do not know how old the comet is, nor do we really know where it came from, there is little else we can glean from this result, other than it proves the conditions when solar systems form can vary widely.
Blue Origin opens (secretly) its first foreign office, in Luxembourg
Blue Origin last week opened its first office in another country, in Luxembourg, though the company made no official announcement and the fact only became public when a Luxembourg official mentioned it at a conference in Colorado.
In an unexpected twist, the opening of the European HQ was eventually announced on 15 April 2026, not by the company but by Luxembourg Economy Minister Lex Delles – and not at the Grand Duchy office, but on his visit to the 41st annual Space Symposium, held in Colorado Springs in the US.
Blue Origin’s office on the capital’s Avenue de la Liberté had, in fact, opened right on schedule, Tim Collins, the company’s Vice- President of Global Operations and Supply Chain, told the Luxembourg Times in interview on Wednesday.
…Asked why Blue Origin declined to confirm its opening schedule until April, despite media follow-up requests, Collins said there was no cover-up: the company merely wanted to have something to show off before officially opening. The process has been roughly on schedule throughout, he stressed.
The office will work with Blue Origin’s European customers as well as manage its foreign supply chain, not just in European but globally.
China launches another “set of test satellites promoting internet technology”
China today successfully placed what its state-run press described merely as “a new set of test satellites promoting internet technology”, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China.
No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. The state-run press did add this about the payloads:
These satellites will be mainly used to carry out technology tests and verifications, including direct satellite-to-phone broadband connectivity and space-ground network integration.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
49 SpaceX
22 China
7 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 49 to 40.
ESA: Full-sized model of its Space Rider reusable capsule is ready for landing drop tests
Artist rendering of Space Rider in orbit. Click for original.
My heart be still! The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday announced that a full-sized model of its Space Rider reusable capsule is now ready for landing drop tests from a helicopter.
The avionics – Space Rider’s ‘brain’ – were installed in the second week of March. This computer hosts the Guidance, Navigation and Control algorithms that will steer the parafoil, adapting to the wind – including any gusts– to guide Space Rider to a soft landing.
Roughly the size of a mini-van, the drop-test model is a full-size stand-in for the 4.6-m long reentry module, Space Rider lands on skis with the landing gear permanently open on this model as the mechanism is not part of the drop test.
To get an idea how unserious ESA is, we need to review this project’s overall schedule. This reusable capsule concept — which appears to be a variation of either Varda’s returnable capsule or Boeing’s X-37B — was first tested by ESA in 2015. By 2017 the agency was promising it would be flying commercially by 2025. A decade later and they have not yet begun testing a full scale spacecraft.
And the development pace now is glacial. Last summer ESA did helicopter drop tests of just the “brain” and parafoil. It is now going to do those drop tests again, a year later, with this full scale model. Expect another year to pass — at a minimum — before it tries another set of helicopter drop tests, this time with the first actual Space Rider capsule.
At this pace, Space Rider might fly by 2030, maybe. In the meantime, expect at least a half dozen private capsules to fly commercially, for profit. Following Varda’s success investment capital has poured into this industry. All will go from a blank sheet of paper to a flight model in less than five years.
And even if ESA finally gets Space Rider operational, it has established some very complex rules about who can use it commercially, rules so complex I predict few will be interested.
Russia launches the smallest version of its Angara rocket
Russia today successfully launched the smallest version of its Angara rocket, dubbed Angara-1.2, from its Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia, placing a number of classified payloads into orbit.
Russia’s state-run press released almost no information about this launch, partly because of its military nature but also because it has discovered recently that the Plesetsk spaceport is within range of Ukrainian drones, with one attack causing a launch to be scrubbed.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
49 SpaceX
21 China
7 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 49 to 39.
China picks two Pakistanis to train for a future Tiangong-3 mission
As part of its Soviet-style propaganda effort to promote its space program, China yesterday announced the names of the two Pakistanis who will train for a future short mission to its Tiangong-3 space station.
The agency said in a statement that Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud will come to China soon as reserve astronauts for training. After completing all training and evaluations, one of them will participate in a space mission as a payload specialist, becoming the first foreign astronaut onboard the Tiangong space station.
This flight is part of Pakistan’s partnership with China in its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project to build a lunar base, created by China to counter the U.S.’s Artemis Accords alliance. Pakistan will also fly a small demo rover on China’s Chang’e-8 unmanned lunar mission, scheduled presently for a 2029 launch.
While the American alliance has now signed 63 nations covering most of the world’s major nations, only thirteen nations and about eleven eleven academic or governmental bureaucracies — mostly third world — have joined China.
This Chinese international manned mission mirrors largely what the Soviets would do during the Cold War, flying someone from one of its captured countries to garner international propaganda points. Do not expect these astronauts to do much concrete work. During the Soviet era, the Russians would joke that these foreign astronauts would all get “red hands” disease, caused whenever they tried to touch anything and a Russian astronaut would then slap their hands, saying firmly “Don’t touch that!”
SpaceX launches 24 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX this evening followed up Rocket Lab with its own launch of 24 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
49 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 49 to 38.
Rocket Lab launches satellites for Japan’s space agency JAXA
Rocket Lab today successfully placed eight smallsats for Japan’s space agency JAXA, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand.
Because all of JAXA’s rockets are presently grounded due to technical failures, Japan’s space agency has had to turn to Rocket Lab. In fact, these eight satellites were originally supposed to launch on JAXA’s Epsilon-S rocket, which remains grounded after an explosion during a static fire test. There have been no updates on the status of Epsilon-S since December 2024.
Rocket Lab was also supposed to do a suborbital hypersonic test flight yesterday out of Wallops Island in Virginia, using the first stage of Election in its HASTE suborbital configuration. As this is a test for the War Department, little information is generally released. This video from a distance confirms the launch apparently took place, but whether it was a success or not remains unknown. That Rocket Lab’s announcers did not tout its success either before or after today’s JAXA launch — as they have routinely done in the past — suggests something might have gone wrong, though this too is pure speculation.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
48 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 48 to 38.
April 22, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Curiosity looks at a small crater as it climbs Mount Sharp
Click for full resolution. Click here, here, and here for original images.
Cool image time! The panorama above, created from three pictures taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity (see here, here, and here), takes a look at a small relatively fresh crater on the slopes of Mount Sharp. From an update from the rover’s science team yesterday:
At the beginning of the week, Curiosity arrived right on target on the rim of the 10-meter (33 feet) “Antofagasta” crater. The crater looked fresh and deep as we had hoped with a nice well-defined rim that didn’t look too eroded, but the bottom of it turned out to be filled with dark rippled sandy material that covered up the most interesting rock layers. There were a few rock exposures just above the sand cover that seemed like they might have been deep enough to have been sheltered from space radiation between the time their sediments were deposited and the crater-forming impact, but reaching them from the rim would have put the rover at such an awkward angle that we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the sample to the instruments.
Click for interactive map.It’s possible that we might have been able to get into a better position by instead placing the rover on the rippled crater fill, but the chance that the rover could get stuck in all that sand made it much too high a risk. We also looked at the nearby blocks in case they could have been ejecta from the crater, but since all the rocks visible in the crater wall looked very similar to each other, there wasn’t a good way to tell which ejecta blocks might have come from the deeper layers of the crater. Because of this, the team decided against attempting to drill in or around the crater.
The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s location when the pictures above were taken. The yellow lines roughly indicate the area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line marks the future planned route, the white dotted line the rover’s actual travels.
Note the flat rocks in the foreground of the panorama, all part of the crater’s rim. Each looks like a large flat paving stone that was very precisely shattered into numerous tiny pieces, all about the same size. Very strange. On Earth you’d assume some craftsman had laid these small pieces down like tiles, but of course, that couldn’t have happened on Mars.
European startup Atmos raises €25.7 million to develop its orbital research capsules
A graphic showing Atmos’ Phoenix-2 capsule during re-entry,
protected by an inflatable shield. Click for more information.
The European startup Atmos announced today that it has raised an additional €25.7 million [$30 million] as part of its ongoing commercial program to develop its Phoenix orbital research capsules that will fly in space for several months — where products can be produced in weightlessness — and then return those products safely to Earth.
The funding will support an initial three-vehicle PHOENIX 2 fleet, the launch of ATMOS WORKS for governmental and defence customers, and development of PHOENIX 3, the company’s next-generation orbital return vehicle.
The round is co-led by Balnord and Expansion, and joined by Keen Defence and Security. The European Innovation Council (EIC) participates through its Accelerator programme via blended financing, combining grant and equity components. Additional investors include OTB Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), APEX Ventures, Seraphim, Faber, E2MC, Kirch Ventures, Lennertz & Co., Mätch VC, MBG Baden-Württemberg, and Tech Horizons.
Since the American company Varda successfully demonstrated there was money to be made flying these small recoverable capsules, investment capital has poured into this industry. In the U.S. Varda, Inversion Space, and Sierra Space, have raised money for doing such orbital work. In Europe, The Exploration Company in France, Atmos in Germany, PLD in Spain, Genesis in Croatia, and Space Cargo in Luxembourg have also raised capital.
At this moment, however, only Varda has successfully launched and recovered a capsule.