Category: Points of Information

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

Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander gets commercial rover to replace NASA’s VIPER rover

11:51 am

Astrobotic’s commercial Griffin lunar lander has signed a deal with the space rover startup Venturi Astrolab to fly its FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) in place of NASA’s cancelled VIPER rover.

Last year NASA announced that it would be cancelling the VIPER lander that was set to travel aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander, just months after the company’s first attempt at a moonshot failed. Now, the company has secured a contract to transport a rover developed by California-based aerospace firm Venturi Astrolab. That rover, the FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform, or FLIP for short, will be deployed to the Nobile region of the lunar south pole. The mission is scheduled for the end of the year and NASA’s contract with Astrobotic has been modified for the mission to serve as large lander demonstration flight.

This deal has significant ramifications outside of Astrobotic’s effort to make money hauling payloads to the Moon. Astrolab is one of three companies with NASA design contracts to develop a manned lunar rover for its later Artemis manned missions. By flying this smaller version now and successfully operating it on the Moon Astrolab puts itself in a better position to win the larger final rover contract from NASA, beating out Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost.

Astrolab was clearly aiming for the VIPER slot when it unveiled FLIP in October 2024. As I predicted then:

FLIP was clearly designed to match the fit of NASA’s now canceled VIPER rover that was to be launched on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. Griffin is still being prepped for its lunar mission to be launched in 2025, but no longer has that prime payload. It is very obvious that Astrolab is vying to make FLIP that prime payload.

Note however how private enterprise moves. NASA can’t get it done but the competition to win contracts and make profits has these private companies scrambling to make things happen, quickly and cheaply.

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German startup Atmos gets FAA approval to launch its orbital research capsule

8:37 am

The German startup Atmos Space Cargo has now gotten its FAA launch license for testing the re-entry capability of its first orbiting research capsule, dubbed Phoenix.

That payload review was the final regulatory step needed for the mission, Sebastian Klaus, chief executive and co-founder of Atmos, said in an interview. The company doesn’t need a separate FAA reentry license because the spacecraft is planned to reenter over international waters, he said, and there are no licensing requirements by Germany, where the company is based.

Phoenix is fully assembled and has completed environmental testing, although the company is continuing to update software for the vehicle. “Physically and from a testing point of view, the spacecraft is ready for launch,” he said.

The capsule will be deployed immediately after the Falcon 9’s upper stage completes its de-orbit burn, so that it can then test that re-entry capability using an “inflatable decelerator”, likely a larger heat shield that can be used to protect a larger capsule.

This mission will be the first in a series of flights to test that inflatable system. If successful, the capsule will then be made available for orbital manufacturing for return to Earth, similar to the American startup Varda and its capsule.

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Putin fires head of Roscosmos

8:28 am

Vladimir Putin today fired Yury Borosov, who has run Russia’s space industry as head of Roscosmos for only two and a half years after he replaced Dmitry Rogozin, whom Putin had fired in 2022.

According to this British news report, Borosov was fired due to a “catastrophic reduction in the number of launches, as well as incidents and accidents with serious consequences”. Since 2022, the number of successful Russian launches has dropped from 21 to 19 to 17 (in 2024), and so far in 2025 it has only launched once, a classified military launch yesterday. Though there is no indication that launch was a failure, the timing of Borosov’s firing today suggests something might have gone askew once the payloads reached orbit.

The new Roscosmos head is 39-year-old Dmitry Bakanov, who was previously deputy minister of transport.

It is not likely Bakanov will have any better luck revitalizing Russia’s space industry than Borosov. First, Putin consolidated that industry in 2015 into this single Roscosmos corporation, so there is no competition allowed. Russia under Putin’s rule has increasingly returned to the top-down communist model, and as a result it is increasingly less capable of accomplishing much.

Second, Putin’s idiotic invasion of the Ukraine has done nothing but harm to the nation. And as that war continues to drag on, the harm has only been metastasizing.

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February 5, 2025 Quick space links

10:33 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.

These are late because my email server was bouncing Jay’s emails. The issue is being investigated.

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Martian hardened dunes untouched by dust devils

2:58 pm

Hardened dunes and dust devils
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on September 26, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

I picked this image out of the MRO archive because of the many dust devil tracts that cut across the entire image, traveling in all directions with no apparent pattern. I also picked it because those tracks also cut across the many parallel small ridges that appear to be ancient ripple dunes that have since hardened into rock. What makes this landscape puzzling is how those dust devil tracks leave no evidence on those ridges. It is as if the ancient ripple dunes were laid down after the very recent dust devil tracks, even though that is chronologically entirely backwards.

Apparently, the dust devil tracks form because the devil only disturbs the dust that coats the flat low ground between the ridges. The ridges themselves are hard, and thus the devils, produced in Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere, can leave no mark.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: Sunspot activity continued its decline in January

11:58 am

Another month has passed, meaning it is time for another update on the Sun’s sunspot cycle, based on NOAA’s monthly graph tracking that activity but annotated by me with additional information.

In January the decline in sunspot activity on the hemisphere facing Earth since August 2024 continued, with the number of sunspots dropping to a level not seen since May 2023, when the Sun’s was ramping up from solar minimum to solar maximum.
» Read more

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The uncertainty of science: Scientists now say eating eggs reduces your chances of a heart attack

9:52 am

I wish they’d make up their minds: For decades scientists — and the U.S. government — claimed with absolute certainty that eating eggs increased your risk of a heart attack because of the egg’s cholesterol content.

Now they say “Never mind.”

The researchers analyzed data from 8,756 Australian and American adults aged 70-plus who participated in the ASPirin in Reducing Events in the Elderly (ASPREE) study and one of its sub-studies, the ASPREE Longitudinal Study of Older Persons (ALSOP) study. As part of the latter study, participants self-reported their total egg intake, which was categorized as never/infrequently (never or one-to-two times a month), weekly (one-to-six times a week), and daily (daily or several times a day). The association between egg intake and all-cause and cause-specific mortality – in this case, cardiovascular disease and cancer – was assessed after adjusting for sociodemographic, health-related and clinical factors, and overall diet quality. The follow-up period was close to six years.

Participants who fell into the weekly category of egg consumption, that is, they consumed one to six eggs per week, had a 29% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a 17% lower risk of dying from any cause compared to those participants who ate eggs never or infrequently. There was no statistically significant association between egg consumption and deaths due to cancer.

The study found that eating eggs with a high quality diet reduced the risk of heart disease even more. It also found that eating eggs has the same exact benefit even for those who already had high levels of cholesterol.

In other words, our lovely government and the American Heart Association had been handing out guidelines for decades based on nothing more than very uncertain science, and doing it with an air of arrogant certainty that should make everyone want to vomit.

I should note that the results above are uncertain as well. It is based merely on a correlation of eating eggs and lower heart disease, and we must remind ourselves that correlation does not prove causation. The study says nothing about how eating eggs might lower your risk of heart disease, and the correlation might very well be unrelated entirely.

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New Mexico’s Spaceport America loses another customer

9:37 am

New Mexico’s Spaceport America, first established in the early 2000s with the expectation it would soon see hundreds of suborbital Virgin Galactic tourist flights per year — launches that never happened — has now lost another customer

In an announcement made late Friday (Jan. 31, 2025) evening, the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association (ESRA) will be holding its annual Intercollegiate Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) at the Midland International Air & Space Port in Midland, Texas, from June 9-14, 2025.

The announcement marks the first venue change for the IREC since the 2017 competition.

For seven years beginning in 2017 and concluding in 2024, ESRA along with the New Mexico Spaceport Authority (NMSA) partnered and jointly held IREC at Spaceport America. During that time, the IREC rebranded as the Spaceport America Cup (SAC) and grew significantly. The growth period of over a half-decade culminated with the 2024 Spaceport America Cup which featured the largest number of competing teams and launches (122) of any previous competition.

No reason for the shift to Texas was mentioned.

The Spaceport America boondoggle has ended up costing New Mexico taxpayers millions, with little to show for it. This change will only increase the losses, and raises more questions about whether that state government should continue pouring money into this black hole. No orbital rocket companies have any interest in launching from there, and Virgin Galactic won’t be launching again for at least a year, and when (or if) it resumes launches it will be doing only a small number of flights. Thus the spaceport’s customer base is very small, and shrinking.

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Rocket Lab wins another multi-launch contract

9:26 am

Rocket Lab today announced it has won a four-launch contract with a Japanese company, the Institute for Q-shu Pioneers of Space, Inc. (iQPS), to launch its Earth-imaging satellites.

The multi-launch contract, signed in July 2024 [but apparently not publicly announced till now], includes three dedicated missions for launch in 2025 from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, with a fourth launch scheduled for 2026. Each mission will carry a single satellite to form part of iQPS’ planned constellation of 36 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites that are capable of collecting images through cloud and at night with a high resolution of less than a meter.

Rocket Lab previously completed one launch for iQPS in 2023, signing the contract and launching within four months.

Though the company has not yet announced officially the number of launches it hopes to fly in 2025, it appears the number will exceed the 14 orbital launches it completed in 2024. Before adding the three 2025 iQPS launches above, Rocket Lab had 18 Electron launches listed for 2025 at the rocketlaunch.live website, as well as the first launch of the company’s new Neutron rocket. Altogether that adds up to a total of 22 launches.

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ISRO considering doing more docking tests with Spadex satellites

9:16 am

India’s space agency ISRO has delayed the undocking of its two Spadex satellites as it considers a plan to do more docking tests.

The original plan was to have the chase satellite complete only one docking with the target vehicle, after which the two satellites would separate and spend the next two years doing different work. That plan is being reconsidered.

[Isro chairman V.] Narayanan said in Sriharikota that they have to think of the money involved in such projects and utilise it to the maximum. “Now we are in the process of reviewing when to do the undocking, the power connections and when to totally separate them again and dock again. All these processes are going on. We do not want to undock and leave it,” the Isro chairman said.

“We have loaded five kg of propellant on both the satellites. The propellant is needed for docking and undocking exercises. Currently we have 60 to 70 per cent of the propellant (as of January 29) remaining in the spacecraft. There are going to be a lot of experiments in the docking, undocking, power connection exercises and it is not a one time exercise,” he said.

Sources at ISRO also suggest there may be issues with the docking that still need analysis.

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UAE hires Thales-Alenia to build its airlock for Lunar Gateway

9:09 am

The European space company Thales-Alenia today announced that it won the contract from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to build its airlock for Lunar Gateway.

It was expected, that after the UAE signed its agreement with NASA in early January to build this airlock in exchange for one astronaut flight to Lunar Gateway, that it would also have to hire someone to build it since that country does not have the capability. Initial reports suggested it was negotiating with Boeing to build the airlock, but not surprisingly the UAE ended up going elsewhere, considering Boeing’s present troubles. Either the UAE decided Boeing was too great a risk and too expensive, or Boeing’s new upper management decided to beg off.

As noted here, Thales Alenia now has contracts to build four major components of Lunar Gateway: the hull of NASA’s habitation module, Europe’s habitation module, the refueling/telecommunications module, and now the airlock. While the graphic below shows that other Gateway components are being built by others, the graphic also shows that NASA has past off many modules to other countries. These deals could make it easier politically for the Trump administration to cancel Lunar Gateway. Thales-Alenia’s dominant position in building the station in Europe would make transferring ownership to Europe simpler, with U.S. participation secondary. The European Space Agency for example could pick up the cost for the modules being built by SpaceX and others.

Lunar Gateway

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