Category: Points of Information

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

Europe to spend $11 billion to build its own Starlink government constellation

9:26 am

The European Union has now finalized its $11 billion plan to build a government-owned 290 satellite constellation, dubbed IRIS2, to compete with Starlink and the many other private constellations already launching.

On 16 December, ESA, the European Commission, and the SpaceRIDE consortium, led by European satellite operators SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat, signed a €10.55 billion, 12-year concession contract to develop the IRIS2 constellation.

…Under the contract terms, the EU will contribute €6 billion, the consortium €4 billion, and ESA €550 million toward the total value. In addition to the consortium’s three leads, the key partners include Thales Alenia Space, OHB, Airbus Defence and Space, Telespazio, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Hisdesat, and Thales SIX.

As is usual for government projects, and especially for European ones, the time table for construction and launch is as slow as molasses. The first satellite won’t be launched until 2029, with the service not available until 2030. By that time there will be multiple such constellations in orbit, not just Starlink, offering services at rates far less than this system will likely offer.

This project is really nothing more than crony capitalism, creating a project to funnel government money to all these big European corporations. Fortunately, the project does demand they commit some of their own funds, which will at least act to keep them relatively honest.

Europe however would be better off leaving this to the companies entirely. If both SpaceX, OneWeb, and Amazon can build their internet constellations without government funds, why can’t these big European companies?

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New computer simulations suggest Saturn’s rings are not young but formed at the same time as the solar system

9:12 am

A bright spot in Saturn's rings
Click for original source.

The uncertainty of science: Scientists doing computer simulations now posit that Saturn’s rings are not young, between 100 to 400 million years old as has been believed for the last few decades, but formed instead when Saturn formed, 4.6 billion years ago.

You can read their paper here [pdf].

The young age had been based on data from the Cassini orbiter, which showed the ring particles to be very bright and clean. If old those particles would have been darker as they accumulated dust over time on their surface. The new computer simulations suggest a process whereby those particles get “cleaned,” thus making it possible for the rings to be very old, possibly as old as Saturn itself.

Must I point out the uncertainties? The paper itself admits in its abstract “uncertainties in our models that assume no porosity, strength, or ring particle granularity.” Seems these assumptions make the conclusions very uncertain indeed.

Then again, the previous young estimates of the age of the rings had many similar assumptions and uncertainties. Essentially, we don’t have enough information to make any definitive determinations.

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T-Mobile initiates direct-cell-to-satellite texting using Starlink

8:50 am

As expected after the most recent Starlink launch, T-Mobile has now begun offering its customers beta registration for using Starlink satellites for texting in areas where no cell towers exist.

The free beta program is available to all T-Mobile customers with compatible devices and postpaid voice plans, the telco announced Dec. 16, although first responders will receive priority access due to limited initial capacity. The company declined to detail capacity and device restrictions but said the beta program would gradually expand to more devices via software updates. “Spots are limited but the service will be available in most areas and most of the time,” a T-Mobile spokesperson said.

The goal right now is to test the system and get user feedback.

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Thailand signs the Artemis Accords

8:26 am

Thailand yesterday became the 51st nation to sign the Artemis Accords, joining the American alliance in space.

The full list of nations now part of this American space alliance: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

Trump created the accords with the goal to create an alliance with enough clout to overcome the Outer Space Treaty’s restrictions on private property. Biden rewrote the goal to accomplish the exact opposite, as NASA states in all recent press releases about new nations joining:

The Artemis Accords are grounded in the Outer Space Treaty and other agreements including the Registration Convention, the Rescue and Return Agreement, as well as best practices and norms of responsible behavior that NASA and its partners have supported, including the public release of scientific data.

I expect there to be a shift back to the original goals in the second Trump administration.

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China and SpaceX complete launches

11:21 pm

Two launches today. First China launched four Earth observation radar satellites, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northeast China. No word where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed within China.

SpaceX then launched a GPS-type satellite for the Space Force, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. Little was released about the payload and what information was released was not very informative. The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing softly on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

130 SpaceX
62 China
16 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 149 to 94, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 130 to 113.

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December 16, 2024 Quick space links

5:01 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 1984 the Soviet Union launched Vega-1
    The spacecraft not only flew past Venus on its way to flying past Halley’s Comet, it also put a lander on Venus and a French balloon in its atmosphere.
    2 comments

    On the Space Show tomorrow

    4:36 pm

    I will be doing a long 90 minute-plus appearance with David Livingston on the Space Show tomorrow evening, beginning at 7 pm (Pacific). I hope my readers will consider calling in with questions or disagreements or comments. The show is always better with listener interaction.

    I definitely plan to talk about my proposal for rethinking NASA’s Artemis program, as outlined in this two-part essay:

    Part 1 of 2: What NASA’s next administrator should do if SLS and Orion are cancelled

    Part 2 of 2: De-emphasize a fast Moon landing and build a real American space industry instead December 11, 2024

    I very much would like to hear other people’s opinions about my suggestions.

    2 comments

    A galactic eye in heaven

    12:30 pm

    A galactic eye in space
    Click for original image.

    Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a project to study the star formation processes over time in this galaxy, located about 76 million light years away.

    A prominent bar of stars stretches across the centre of this galaxy, and spiral arms emerge from each end of the bar. Because NGC 2566 appears tilted from our perspective, its disc takes on an almond shape, giving the galaxy the appearance of a cosmic eye.

    As NGC 2566 gazes at us, astronomers gaze right back, using Hubble to survey the galaxy’s star clusters and star-forming regions. The Hubble data are especially valuable for studying stars that are just a few million years old; these stars are bright at the ultraviolet and visible wavelengths to which Hubble is sensitive. Using these data, researchers will measure the ages of NGC 2566’s stars, helping to piece together the timeline of the galaxy’s star formation and the exchange of gas between star-forming clouds and stars themselves.

    To get the full picture, astronomers have also obtained infrared data from the Webb Space Telescope and millimeter/submillimeter radio wavelength data from the ALMA telescope.

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    The Insight lander on Mars as seen from orbit over six years

    12:07 pm

    Insight as seen by MRO over six years
    Click for movie.

    Using photos taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) from 2018 to 2024, researchers have compiled a short movie showing how the dust around the Mars lander Insight changed over time.

    This video shows images taken by HiRISE between Dec. 11, 2018, just a couple weeks after InSight landed on Mars, and Oct. 23, 2024. In the images, InSight often appears as a bright, blue dot due to its reflection of sunlight. A dark halo was scorched into the ground by the spacecraft’s retrorocket thrusters; this halo fades away over time. Dark stripes that can be seen on the surface are tracks left by passing dust devils. [emphasis mine]

    You can see the movie here. The image to the right was the first picture taken by MRO only three weeks after landing.

    Insight eventually shut down because this dust accumulated on its solar panels, and the lander never was blessed with having a dust devil cross over it to blow that dust away. This video illustrates why. Out of the seven images making up the short movie, only three show dust devil tracks, and in each case only a few tracks are seen. No other tracks are detected.

    In other words, over six years this region simply did not get a lot of dust devils. The odds of one crossing over InSight was thus quite low. Ironically, the image to the right shows that a dust devil crossed very close to the lander about the time it landed in 2018, probably just beforehand since the dark scorch created by the lander’s thrusters cover the track. No dust devil ever got that close again.

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    Another American rocket startup gets a multi-launch contract

    10:25 am

    The American rocket startup Vaya Space announced today that it has been awarded a multi-launch contract to use its proposed Dauntless rocket to place up to 250 small satellites in orbit for the satellite startup Space Telecommunications.

    Vaya has been around since 2017, has won contracts with the Air Force in connection with developing its hybrid-solid-fueled rocket, and in 2022 completed a test suborbital launch. It hopes to launch Dauntless for the first time in 2026.

    This contract is probably like most launch contracts awarded to rocket startups. It allows the company to claim progress, while giving the satellite company the right to go elsewhere at no cost should the rocket not launch on time.

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    Ispace awarded $5.83 million loan from Japanese government

    10:01 am

    Ispace landing map

    The planetary lander startup Ispace today announced that it has been awarded a $5.83 million loan from the Japan Finance Corporation, a government corporation designed to issue loans to encourage Japanese businesses.

    The money will be issued this month, and Ispace will have ten years to pay it back. Depending on whether the company is profitable or not, the interest rate will be either 0.5% or 4.15%.

    Ispace’s one lunar landing attempt so far, Hakuto-R1, was a failure when its software thought it was close to the ground at three miles altitude and shut off its engines. The company however is going to try again, with the launch of its second lander, dubbed Resilience, scheduled for a January 2025 launch. It will also carry the company’s own Tenacious micro-rover, and will hopefully land as shown in the map to the right, in the north of the Moon’s near side.

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    China launches first set of satellites for planned internet megaconstellations

    9:42 am

    China today successfully launched an unknown number of satellites in the first launch of one of its planned internet megaconstellations designed to compete with Starlink, its Long March 5B rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

    Not revealing the number of satellites launched is probably a violation of the Outer Space Treaty, which requires each signatory to inform others of its launches and at a minimum the number of objects placed in orbit. This constellation, dubbed Guowang, is hoping to launch as many as 13,000 satellites, and that will require some coordination to prevent it from interfering with the constellations launched by others. Not revealing the size of this satellite group makes such coordination impossible.

    In a bit of good news, it appears China has solved the problem of its Long March 5B rocket, which in the past had used its core stage to place objects in orbit. After payload deployment that core stage would be in an unstable an orbit that would quickly decay, allowing the stage to crash uncontrolled, thus threatening habitable areas worldwide. The rocket’s new upper stage now takes the payloads into orbit, so the core stage can drop off sooner and fall into the ocean harmlessly.

    The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

    129 SpaceX
    61 China
    16 Russia
    13 Rocket Lab

    American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 148 to 93, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 129 to 112.

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    FAA eliminates a stupid licensing requirement imposed when it “streamlined” its launch licensing regulations

    9:18 am

    We’re from the government and we’re here to help! The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced last week that it will stop demanding rocket companies redo a flight safety analysis that have already been done by the rocket’s spaceports, a new bit of red tape that was apparently added when the agency introduced its Part 450 “streamlined” licensing regulations in 2021.

    The FAA announced Dec. 13 that it will accept flight safety analyses performed by federal launch ranges in California, Florida and Virginia in applications for launch licenses under regulations known as Part 450. That decision means that companies will no longer have to perform similar analyses specifically for the FAA as part of the licensing process. Launch companies had complained of the duplication of work needed to carry out FAA analyses in addition to those required by the ranges they were launching from.

    The FAA’s own bureaucracy had recognized the stupidity of this requirement (as well as many others) in July 2023 report [pdf], but the agency’s management did nothing. Apparently the political appointees who ran the agency during the Biden administration either liked this red tape — slowing American business — or were too dense to take action.

    Trump’s election victory has now obviously forced some action. Not only has the agency suddenly recognized this particular problem, one week after Trump’s victory it announced the formation of an independent committee of industry and academia to review, once again, its Part 450 regulations.

    It seems this committee is largely a Potemkin Village to make the Trump leadership think the agency is doing something. Instead, the FAA should do what it did last week, and adopt the many recommendations of the July 2023 report, now. The committee can then move forward cleaning up Part 450 in other areas instead of simply repeating that past work.

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    Boeing to take more than a decade to refit two 747s for Air Force One

    7:30 pm

    Utter incompetence: According to recent news reports, Boeing will not be able to deliver the two 747s it is refitting to be the president’s Air Force One fleet until 2029, even though it signed a $3.9 billion contract to do so in 2018.

    The delay is startling given that Boeing isn’t building the planes from scratch. During Trump’s first term, Boeing started to overhaul two 747s that were built for a Russian airline that never took the jets.

    This is more than absurd, it is obscene. Boeing is handed two flightworthy 747s and almost $4 billion, and it can’t refit the two planes in less than a decade? It seems one of the first things Trump should do once he returns to office next month is cancel this contract entirely, demand a refund from Boeing, and simply convert his present fleet of “Trump Force One” airplanes that he has been using since 2020 for use as president. Cheaper, faster, and certainly a wiser use of taxpayer money.

    As for Boeing, this story illustrates once again how far this company has fallen. Remember, it was Boeing that conceived, designed, and built the 747. Moreover, its 747 has been used for decades for Air Force One. For its engineers now to be incapable to refitting another two 747s for this purpose seems inconceivable, and suggests those same engineers should not be trusted on any new planes they build.

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    Juno spots changes on Io’s surface in just a two-month span

    10:57 am

    Before and after images by Juno of volcanic ring on Io
    Click for original image.

    New photos taken just two months apart by Juno of a region dubbed Nusk Patera on the Jupiter moon Io showed the appearance of a distinct ring that had hardly been there before.

    The pictures, taken during two recent fly-bys of the moon, are above, and show the change. From the caption:

    A red ring formed around Nusku Patera in the two months between the spacecraft’s 58th flyby on Feb. 3, 2024, and its 60th on April 9, 2024. The ring obscures some nearby features like Creidne Patera. This ring, 683 miles (1,100 kilometers) wide is likely from a Pele-type plume rich in sulfur. Similar transient red rings were observed by NASA’s Galileo mission around Grian Patera and Surt and were associated with intense but short-lived thermal “outburst” eruptions.

    In other words, sulfur from eruption from the central vent/caldera was flung into the sky enough that when it eventually settled back down it landed in a ring about 340 miles away from the center.

    Other data from Juno, also released this week here and here, detected fresh lava flows at another volcanic region of Io dubbed, Zal Patera.

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    SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites

    9:39 pm

    SpaceX today successfully launched 22 Starlink satellites, 13 of which were for its direct-to-cell constellation. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg in California, its first stage completing its ninth flight by landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific.

    According to a tweet by SpaceX at the end of October, only five more launches were necessary to complete the first version of its direct-to-cell Starlink constellation. Today’s launch meets that criteria. Since the FCC has approved the constellation’s license, this means T-Mobile can start offering the service to customers, filling in all dead spots worldwide.

    What makes this launch even more unique is that for the first time in quite awhile there was a four-day-plus gap between SpaceX launches. The company has been launching so often that it has been rare for more than two days to pass this year without a launch.

    The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

    129 SpaceX
    60 China
    16 Russia
    13 Rocket Lab

    American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 148 to 92, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 129 to 111.

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    Perseverance reaches top of Jezero Crater rim

    1:41 pm

    The view west out of Jezero Crater
    Click for high resolution panorama. For original images, go here and here.

    Overview map
    Click for interactive map.

    After spending more than three and a half years exploring the floor of Jezero Crater, the rover Perseverance has finally reached the top of the crater’s western rim, and is about to begin exploring the mountainous and potentially rich mining region to the west.

    The panorama above, created from two pictures taken by Perseverance’s right navigation camera on December 11, 2024 (here and here), has been cropped, reduced, enhanced, and annotated to post here. It looks west into that mountainous region, with the yellow lines on the overview map to the right indicating the approximate view. The blue dot on that map marks Perseverance’s present position, on top of Lookout Hill, the name the rover team has given to that spot on the rim.

    The low resolution of the region beyond the grey strip is unexplained. For some reason the rover team has not yet updated the interactive map showing Perseverance’s travels with the many high resolution pictures that Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has taken of this region, in anticipation of Perseverance’s travels there. I expect however this will change shortly.

    Witch Hazel Hill is the first target beyond the rim, where there is an outcrop 330-feet-high with many layers. The rover will then head downhill and south to check out a spot that the scientists believe might show features existing from before Jezero Crater was formed. The rover will then head back up to the rim further south to look at an outcrop of blocks that might actually be ejecta from another much larger Martian impact.

    These blocks may represent ancient bedrock broken up during the Isidis impact, a planet-altering event that likely excavated deep into the Martian crust as it created an impact basin some 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) wide, 3.9 billion years in the past.

    Jezero sits on the northwestern rim of Isidis.

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    Curiosity begins to round the corner out of Gediz Vallis

    11:37 am

    Curiosity looks ahead
    Click for original image.

    According to an update yesterday from the rover team, the Mars rover Curiosity has finally begun to round the corner of the northern nose of the long ridge dubbed Texoli that forms the western wall of Gediz Vallis, the slot canyon that the rover has been exploring since August 2022.

    The picture to the right, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was taken on December 10, 2024 and shows the view looking west. The red dotted line indicates the planned route. As the rocky ground indicates, travel forward in the near term will be interesting. As noted in the update:

    While we want to head southwest, we had to divert a bit to the north (right of the image shown) to avoid some big blocks and high tilt. The path is very constrained in order to avoid driving over some smaller pointy rocks, scraping wheels along the sides of blocks, or steering into the side of blocks that might cause the steering to fail. And we also needed to worry about our end-of-drive heading to be sure the antenna will be clear to talk to Earth for the next plan. We ended up relying on the onboard behavior to help us optimize everything by implementing a really interesting and curvy 24-meter path (about 79 feet).

    » Read more

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    Rocket startup Stoke Space completes static fire test of first stage engine

    10:02 am

    Stoke's Nova rocket
    Stoke’s Nova rocket

    The rocket startup Stoke Space revealed yesterday that it has completed a static fire test of the first stage engine it will use on its Nova rocket, shown in the graphic to the right.

    The test, which was not the first for this engine, proved out several new technologies.

    Stoke Space called the test significant for several reasons. It’s the first hotfire of the company’s Block 2 (flight layout) stage 1 engine, and this engine architecture — called full-flow staged combustion (FFSC) — is considered particularly challenging. Only two entities in the world — Stoke and SpaceX — have successfully developed FFSC engines. … Stoke’s stage 1 engine is a liquified natural gas/liquid oxygen engine capable of producing 100,000 pounds of thrust. The duration of the test was not revealed.

    It was the first time Stoke has tested on its new vertical test stand in Moses Lake. The company’s testing philosophy is that you must “test like you fly,” and it believes vertical testing is key to engine development.

    Nor is the first stage engine the only technological innovation. Nova’s second stage uses a radical design whereby the engine releases its thrust through a ring of small nozzles on the outside perimeter of the stage, rather than a single central nozzle. This design is what the company hopes will allow it to return that upper stage intact for reuse.

    The four year old company has raised $100 million in investment capital, but has also faced environmental red tape from the Space Force for its launch facility at Cape Canaveral. It had previously targeted 2025 for the first test flights of Nova, but that schedule appears unlikely because of this red tape.

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    SpaceX requests special election to make Starbase at Boca Chica a city

    9:41 am

    In a letter [pdf] sent yesterday to a local judge, SpaceX requested that a special election be held in Cameron County on whether its Starbase facilities in Boca Chica should be incorporated as a city.

    To continue growing the workforce necessary to rapidly develop and manufacture Starship, we need the ability to grow Starbase as a community. That is why we are requesting that Cameron County call an election to enable the incorporation of Starbase as the newest city in the Rio Grande Valley.

    Incorporating Starbase will streamline the processes required to build the amenities necessary to make the area a world class place to live—for the hundreds already calling it home, as well as for prospective workers eager to help build humanity’s future in space. As you know, through agreements with the County, SpaceX currently performs several civil functions around Starbase due to its remote location, including management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents. Incorporation would move the management of some of these functions to a more appropriate public body.

    The letter went on to list the many other things SpaceX is already doing to benefit the area, including many of the environmental requirements imposed on it by the FAA and Fish & Wildlife.

    At this moment there has been no response from the judge or Cameron County. I suspect there will be no objection, and this vote will take place in the near future. I also expect it will pass, because SpaceX employees now make up almost the entire population of Boca Chica.

    9 comments

    December 12, 2024 Quick space links

    4:55 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.

    2 comments

    Head of FAA resigns

    1:32 pm

    You could leave now for all I care: Mike Whitaker, who has been director of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) under the Biden administration and who has apparently been the main source of that agency’s increased red tape that has almost destroyed the new rocket industry that had been emerging during the first Trump administration, announced today that he is stepping down next month.

    Mike Whitaker announced his pending resignation in a message to employees of the FAA, which regulates airlines and aircraft manufacturers and manages the nation’s airspace. He became the agency’s administrator in October 2023.

    Since then, the challenges confronting Whitaker have included a surge in close calls between planes, a need for stricter oversight of Boeing. antiquated equipment and a shortage of air traffic controllers at a time of high consumer demand for air travel.

    The article at the link is from PBS, so of course it makes this federal bureaucrat appear a hero. Instead, he was a disaster for America’s space industry, forcing unnecessary delays in SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy program, imposing new regulations that claimed to streamline the launch licensing process but did exactly the opposite, and generally forcing FAA regulators to take a fearful attitude to any new technology, so much so that it became almost impossible for that new technology to launch.

    As for the aviation industry, Whitaker’s term did little to change things. For example, he did nothing to shut down the DEI programs at major airline and airplane companies that were causing the hiring of unqualified people.

    All I can say is good riddance.

    5 comments

    Land of knobs

    12:53 pm

    Land of knobs
    Click for original image.

    Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 17, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature.

    When the camera team does this, they try to pick interesting targets. In this case, they targeted this 400-foot-high pointy-topped hill. The smoothness of its slopes suggest this hill is made up largely of packed dust, possibly a hardened former dune. This hypothesis seems strengthened by the erosion on the eastern slopes, which appears to be areas where that packed sand has worn or blow away.

    Think of sandstone in the American southwest. It is made of sand that has hardened into rock, but wind and water and friction can easily break it back into dust particles, resulting often in the spectacular and weird geological shapes that make the southwest so enticing.

    But is this sand?
    » Read more

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    Io’s volcanoes get their lava from separate magma chambers, not a global underground ocean of magma

    11:11 am

    Io's interior as presently theorized
    Click for original animation.

    Using data collected from Juno’s multiple fly-bys of the Jupiter moon Io, scientists now hypothesize that the moon does not have a global underground ocean of magma, feeding its many volcanoes, but that instead each volcano is fed its lava from a separate magma chamber.

    The graphic to the right illustrates the present conclusion. You can read the paper here [pdf]. From the press release:

    The Juno team compared Doppler data from their two flybys with observations from the agency’s previous missions to the Jovian system and from ground telescopes. They found tidal deformation consistent with Io not having a shallow global magma ocean.

    “Juno’s discovery that tidal forces do not always create global magma oceans does more than prompt us to rethink what we know about Io’s interior,” said lead author Ryan Park, a Juno co-investigator and supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at JPL. “It has implications for our understanding of other moons, such as Enceladus and Europa, and even exoplanets and super-Earths. Our new findings provide an opportunity to rethink what we know about planetary formation and evolution.” [emphasis mine]

    The highlighted words indicate the significance of this data. It possibly suggests that the underground oceans of water that have been theorized for these other moons — where life could possibly exist — might be mistaken. Instead, they might have smaller pockets of water, similar to Io’s many magma chambers.

    Everything here however is uncertain, including these new conclusions about Io. We just don’t have enough data from any of these moons to make any definitive conclusions.

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    ESA continues to dither about building a heavy lift rocket

    10:47 am

    In what almost appears to be a clown show, the European Space Agency (ESA) has three times issued and then retracted and then reissued a request for proposals for studying possible designs to possibly build a heavy lift rocket to both replace Ariane-6 as well as compete with SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy.

    ESA published an initial call for its European 60T LEO Reusable Launch System Pathfinder Study initiative on 20 November. The call was, however, deleted later that day. On 3 December, a second version of the call was published and then removed, once again, on the same day. On 10 December, ESA published a third iteration of the call, with this one being the first to remain published overnight.

    The second version put more emphasis on “time and cost efficiency.” The third version added details noting the limitations of Ariane-6 (its cost, limited payload capacity, and non-re-usability).

    When ESA issued the second version, I noted its lack of urgency. “This is ‘call’ for a ‘study’ to ‘explore’ the ‘options’ for development. Hell will freeze over before ESA starts construction.” The new version doesn’t change this in the slightest. It only recognizes more fully the bad decisions that ESA made in 2015 when it approved the expendable design of Ariane-6, making it too expense then to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

    7 comments

    Chinese citizen arrested for flying drone illegally over Vandenberg

    10:29 am

    Yinpiao Zhou, a Chinese citizen in America on a legal immigrant visa, has been arrested for flying a drone illegally over Vandenberg Air Force Base.

    Nearly a mile above Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County, a hacked drone soared through restricted airspace for roughly an hour. The lightweight drone photographed sensitive areas of the military facility on Nov. 30, including a complex used by SpaceX, according to federal investigators. The drone then descended back to the ground, where the pilot and another man waited at a nearby park.

    Before either could leave however, four security officers from Vandenberg showed up. Initially Zhou lied about what he was doing, hiding the drone under his jacket. At one point however the officers spotted the drone, forcing Zhou to admit the truth as well as delete the footage on the drone.

    Neither Zhou or the second man, who remains unidentified, were arrested at that time. Zhou was arrested on December 9, 2024 at San Francisco International Airport, just before he was to board a flight back to China. He is charged with flying a drone illegally out of his line of sight and in a no-fly zone, and remains in custody.

    It appears this was an intended spying operation by China or one of its pseudo-companies, attempting to steal more information about SpaceX’s technology in order to copy it. Why Zhou and that other man were not arrested immediately is unclear.

    17 comments

    Ispace signs agreement with lunar mining startup

    10:15 am

    Landing sites on Moon

    The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace has now signed an agreement with a lunar mining startup dubbed Magna Petra to transport the latter company’s helium-3 mining equipment to the Moon.

    In a memo of understanding, ispace and Magna Petra have agreed to collaborate to utilize the moon’s resources for economic benefits to life on Earth, the companies announced Tuesday, Dec. 10. Through “non-destructive, sustainable harvesting,” according to a joint statement, Magna Petra plans to one day extract “commercial quantities” of helium-3 isotopes from regolith on the lunar surface for delivery and distribution back on Earth, where the resource is facing an extreme supply shortage.

    Ispace meanwhile still has to prove it can put a lander on the Moon. Its first attempt, Hakuto-R1, almost succeeded, but crashed in April 2023 when its software thought it was just above the ground and shut down its engines when it was still three miles high. The company’s second attempt, dubbed Resilience and carrying a rover dubbed Tenacious, is scheduled for launch in January 2025. The landing site is shown on the map to the right, within Mare Frigoris in the northern part of the Moon’s nearside hemisphere.

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    A satellite startup in Oman signs on to China’s lunar base partnership

    10:03 am

    Middle East, showing Oman's proposed spaceport

    Oman Lens, a satellite startup in Oman, has signed an agreement with China to participate in its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) lunar base project.

    This follows Oman’s first suborbital launch, which according to Oman’s state-run press lifted off from its Duqm proposed spaceport facility and reached space. None of this however has been confirmed, though government officials said they hope to do three more suborbital test flights in the next year.

    The Duqm spaceport hopes to be fully operational for orbital flights by 2026. Besides China, Oman has also been in negotiations with various American rocket startup companies, though no deals have been announced, mostly because of the State Department’s ITAR restrictions protecting American technology from hostile foreign theft. Oman is not necessarily considered a friendly country.

    It appears Oman decided to make a deal with China when it couldn’t make one with the U.S.

    As for China’s ILRS project — it formed in competition with the U.S. Artemis Accords — it has now signed thirteen countries and about a dozen academic institutions and international companies. It claims it hopes to get fifty countries on board, but that number likely includes such institutions, not nations.

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