Category: Points of Information

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

Thales Alenia ships the orbit insertion module for the Mars sample return mission

8:59 am

Though the entire project remains in limbo at NASA and might be cancelled, the European aerospace company Thales Alenia this week completed construction of the orbit insertion module for the Mars sample return mission that will place the orbiter — also built by European companies — in Mars orbit and will eventually bring the samples back to Earth.

On 28 July, Thales Alenia Space announced that the module had passed its test campaign with “excellent results.” According to the update, the company had packed and shipped the Orbit Insertion Module from its Turin facilities to Airbus in Stevenage a few days earlier. The delivery marks a key milestone in the development of the Mars Return Orbiter.

The broader Earth Return Orbiter project passed a key milestone in July 2024 with the completion of the Platform Critical Design Review. This review confirmed the performance, quality, and reliability of the mission’s systems. With its successful conclusion, Airbus advanced to full spacecraft development, including the integration and testing of its various components, among them the Orbit Insertion Module.

Under the project’s present very complex design, NASA is supposed to provide the ascent rocket and capsule to bring the samples to Europe’s return orbiter. At the moment it is unclear who will build this, or even if it will ever get built. Thus, Europe might be building a very expensive Mars orbiter with no clear mission.

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Firefly wins new NASA lunar lander contract, worth $176.7 million

8:52 am

NASA announced yesterday that it has awarded Firefly a $176.7 million contract to use the company’s Blue Ghost lunar lander to deliver two rovers and three other science instruments to the Moon’s south pole region.

Under the new CLPS task order, Firefly is tasked with delivering end-to-end payload services to the lunar surface, with a period of performance from Tuesday to March 29, 2030. The company’s lunar lander is targeted to land at the Moon’s South Pole region in 2029.

This is Firefly’s fifth task order award and fourth lunar mission through CLPS. Firefly’s first delivery successfully landed on the Moon’s near side in March 2025 with 10 NASA payloads. The company’s second mission, targeting a launch in 2026, includes a lunar orbit drop-off of a satellite combined with a delivery to the lunar surface on the far side. Firefly’s third lunar mission will target landing in the Gruithuisen Domes on the near side of the Moon in 2028, delivering six experiments to study that enigmatic lunar volcanic terrain.

One of the rovers is being built in partnership with Canada.

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Gilmour’s first launch a failure

4:55 pm

Eris rocket launch and failure
Click for video, cued to just before launch.

The first launch of the Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space’s Eris rocket ended in failure today when the rocket started drifting sideways after rising about 150 feet and then crashing near the launchpad.

The picture to the right is a screen capture from an independent live steam of the launch posted on youtube by Aussienaut, captured about 20 seconds after liftoff. The red dot indicates the location of the launchpad where the rocket took off to make clear the rocket’s sideways motion. Ten seconds after this, the rocket fell to the ground and exploded.

This launch attempt was the first ever by a private commercial Australian rocket company, so the failure itself is not surprising. It was also the first orbital test launch from a privately owned Australian spaceport. Whether the company has the resources to recover remains to be seen, but I suspect it will try again.

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Starlab partners with the interior design company Journey

3:12 pm

Starlab design in 2025
The Starlab design in 2025. Click
for original image.

The consortium designing the commercial Starlab space station has now signed a partnership deal with the interior design company Journey for the latter to design the station’s habitable interior.

Journey brings a deep portfolio of globally recognized projects, including the Sphere in Las Vegas, the Empire State Building observatory in New York City and the Sun Princess Dome for Princess Cruises. The agency will be working closely with Hilton, one of the original strategic partners in the Starlab program, designing the Starlab hospitality and crew experience. Journey’s role adds a vital layer of design and experiential innovation, shaping a space that reflects both function and humanity.

Much of the press release is similar blather. It is good that Starlab is thinking about making the living space in its station “both a cutting-edge research platform and a welcoming, livable habitat,” but this deal doesn’t include any actual design work. Apparently nothing concrete will be done until Starlab wins the big NASA construction project — assuming it does so. Thus, I still rank Starlab low in my rankings of the four commercials stations being built or proposed, but this deal has convinced me to raise its ranking above Orbital Reef. Both have built little, but Starlab is at least making a lot of partnership deals with others, strengthening the quality of its team.

  • Haven-1, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company is moving fast, with Haven-1 to launch and be occupied in 2026 for an estimated 30 days total. It hopes this actual hardware and manned mission will put it in the lead to win NASA’s phase 2 contract, from which it will build its much larger mult-module Haven-2 station..
  • Axiom, being built by Axiom, has launched four tourist flights to ISS, with the fourth carrying government passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. Though there have been rumors it has cash flow issues, development of its first module has been proceeding more or less as planned.
  • Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with an extensive partnership agreements with the European Space Agency and others. It recently had its station design approved by NASA, but it has built nothing. The company however has now raised $383 million in a public stock offering, which in addition to the $217.5 million provided by NASA gives it the capital to begin some construction.
  • Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Overall, Blue Origin has built almost nothing, while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building its module for launch.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Third star destroying part of expanding shells surrounding binary Wolf-Rayet stars

3:00 pm

Apep system.
From figure 3 of the paper.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers think they can now disentangle the strange spiral shape of the expanding dust shells caused by the colliding powerful winds flowing from a binary pair of giant aging Wolf-Rayet stars, dubbed the Apep system.

Apparently, a third smaller O-type star sits in the system, and is acting to block the winds and destroy the dust within them, carving out a large cavity in the spiral shells. The image to the right, produced by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, shows the spiral dust shells shaped by the strong solar winds flowing and colliding from the binary Wolf-Rayet stars (the bright dot in the center). The O-type star can be seen just above them. The yellow lines indicate the empty cone. Without the O star computer models had predicted a very bright shell north of the binary, and its non-existence in VLT images caused these further Webb observations.

From the paper’s [pdf] conclusion:

The JWST observations of Apep reveal luminous circumstellar dust that support[s] … our finding that the O supergiant ‘northern companion’ is dynamically associated with the binary WR stars in Apep; this is the first time that dust destruction has been observed by a tertiary star in a colliding wind nebula, and marks Apep as part of a rare class of triple colliding wind binaries.

The dust produced by Wolf-Rayet stars is thought to be a major component in seeding the formation of later stars, such as our own Sun. Finding that a third star in the system can destroy that dust suggests (as always) that this process can be far more complicated that first believed.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Firefly hopes to raise more than $600 million in initial stock offering

9:03 am

The rocket startup and lunar lander company Firefly yesterday posted details about its initial public stock offering, designed to hopefully raise more than $600 million.

Firefly Aerospace, a market leading space and defense technology company, today announced that it has launched the roadshow for its proposed initial public offering of 16,200,000 shares of its common stock. In addition, Firefly intends to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase an additional 2,430,000 shares of its common stock at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions. The initial public offering price is expected to be between $35.00 and $39.00 per share.

The company stated it would use the money “to repay outstanding borrowings under its credit agreement, pay any accrued and unpaid dividends on certain series of its preferred stock, and for general corporate purposes.”

The company has not yet announced the date when this stock offering will become available for purchase.

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Chinese pseudo-company launches classified payload

8:55 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Ispace successfully placed a classified payload into orbit today, its solid-fueled Hyperbola-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

This was the first launch by Ispace since July 2024, following a launch failure. Not only did China’s state-run press say nothing about the payload, no information about where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China was provided.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

93 SpaceX
39 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 93 to 68.

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July 28, 2025 Quick space links

3:37 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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Galaxies without end

8:55 am

Galaxies without end
Click for original.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and enhanced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a monitoring program studying the two supernovae that have occurred in this galaxy previously.

Hubble has turned its attention toward NGC 1309 several times; previous Hubble images of this galaxy were released in 2006 and 2014. Much of NGC 1309’s scientific interest derives from two supernovae, SN 2002fk in 2002 and SN 2012Z in 2012. SN 2002fk was a perfect example of a Type Ia supernova, which happens when the core of a dead star (a white dwarf) explodes.

SN 2012Z, on the other hand, was a bit of a renegade. It was classified as a Type Iax supernova: while its spectrum resembled that of a Type Ia supernova, the explosion wasn’t as bright as expected. Hubble observations showed that in this case, the supernova did not destroy the white dwarf completely, leaving behind a ‘zombie star’ that shone even brighter than it did before the explosion. Hubble observations of NGC 1309 taken across several years also made this the first time the white dwarf progenitor of a supernova has been identified in images taken before the explosion.

The image however carries a far more philosophic component. Except for the star near the top (identified by the four diffraction spikes), every single dot and smudge you see in this picture is a galaxy. NGC 1309 is about 100 million light years away, but behind it along its line of sight and at much greater distances are innumerable other galaxies, so many it is impossible to count them. And each is roughly comparable in size to our own Milky Way galaxy, containing billions of stars.

The scale of the universe is simply impossible to grasp, no matter how hard we might try.

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South Korea transfers its government-built Nuri rocket to private company

8:35 am

Capitalism in space: South Korea’s space agency KARI has now completed the transfer of its government-built Nuri rocket to the private South Korea company Hanwha Aerospace.

The transfer includes a total of 16,050 technical documents. While some 2 trillion won ($1.45 billion) in public funds was invested in developing the Nuri rocket, the two sides agreed on a technology transfer fee of 24 billion won, based on direct research and development costs. The agreement comes nearly two years and 10 months after Hanwha Aerospace was selected as the preferred negotiator.

Under the contract, Hanwha Aerospace has secured exclusive rights to lead Nuri production until 2032, which coincides with the government’s target for the next-generation Korean launch vehicle. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrase is important, as it shows that this transfer is not completely shifting space development and ownership from the government to the private sector. Hanwha is going to operate the rocket, but it does not appear to own it, nor is it clear it will be allowed to market it to others for profit. Furthermore, it is not Hanwha but KARI that will be developing the next-generation rocket, using government funds.

The dominance of the South Korean government is also reflected in the cost, as the article notes that the Nuri rocket costs “per kilogram … about 10 times that of SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9.” Like all governments, KARI was not focused on profit in developing Nuri, so it built a rocket uncompetitive in the present launch market.

Still, this deal indicates the South Korean government’s recognition that it must foster a robust private sector aerospace industry if it truly wishes to enter the space age. This deal is thus just a first step.

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Bankrupt balloon company Space Perspective bought by European company

10:15 am

The bankrupt high-altitude balloon company Space Perspective has now been purchased by the Spanish balloon startup Eos X Space.

Space Perspective “will operate with full autonomy, under U.S. leadership and corporate structure,” Eos X Space representatives said in an emailed statement on Thursday (July 24). Space Perspective’s efforts will dovetail with those of Madrid-based Eos X Space, an aerospace outfit founded in 2020 that has been working on a balloon-tourism system of its own.

Eos X is one of three Spanish balloon startups, all vying to provide high altitude flights to tourists, with the other two companies being Zero-2 and Halo. All three have been in a long legal fight, with the latter two indicted in 2023 over the theft of Eos X’s balloon concept. In an earlier legal action, Zero-2 claimed its concept was stolen by Eos X.

None, including Space Perspective, has as yet actually flown any tourists.

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Another two launches by SpaceX and China

10:01 am

There were two more launches last night and today. First, SpaceX put another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 19th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

Next, China today successfully launched another five satellites in its planned Guiwang (“king”) internet constellation of 13,000 satellites, its Long March 6 rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northern China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

This launch brought the total number of operational satellites in orbit for this constellation to 39, all launched since December 2024. At this pace it will take many years for China to complete this constellation, though it likely can begin selling the service in China with an incomplete constellation. Its international licence requires it to launch 10% by 2029 and 50% by 2032.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

93 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 93 to 67.

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Texas Space Commission hands $5 million to proposed spaceport in the middle of Texas

12:21 pm

US and Mexico
Click for source.

In what can only be seen by anyone with any objectivity as a political payoff that has no chance of ever producing anything worthwhile, the Texas Space Commission (TSC) has given the Midland International Air and Space Port a $5 million grant to develop its proposed spaceport for vertical rockets in the middle of west Texas.

The spaceport is one of three facilities — along with ILC Aerospace in Houston and SylLab Systems in Plano — that received grant funding as part of the Space Exploration and Aeronautics Research Fund (SEARF). The SEARF provides funding to eligible companies, including government entities that the TSC is partnered with, to fund such purposes as technology development, research, workforce training, curation of materials and development of infrastructure. In its history, the SEARF fund has provided $126 million worth of grant money to 22 different projects.

…Although requested and managed by the city of Midland, the vertical launch site will be in Balmorhea in Reeves County, around the same site as the International Rocket Engineering Competition earlier this summer. The area can currently support suborbital rocket launches, but the vertical launch site is expected to support orbital flight, which will complement their horizontal launch system and high speed corridor for hypersonic flight.

The map to the right shows the location of Midland and Balmorhea. As you can see, this site makes no sense for vertical rocket launches, unless every rocket launched from the site is completely reusable. Even then, it faces major political hurdles to get permission to fly rockets over all the neighboring communities and states. The FAA would certainly have doubts.

In other words, this $5 million grant is a nice pay-off from one government agency to another, with its only purpose to spread some graft around.

That the Hearst-owned Midland Reporter-Telegram news article at the link recognizes none of this, and simply and naively spouts the propaganda put forth by government officials, once again illustrates the bankruptcy of our so-called “mainstream” press.

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One of NASA’s two Tracers satellites just launched has an issue

10:17 am

During the commissioning phase shortly after their launch earlier this week, one of NASA’s two Tracers satellites designed to study the solar wind and its interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field has had an as yet unnamed issue.

During the commissioning process, the team made routine adjustments to the power subsystem on both vehicles. While the adjustments achieved the desired results on one satellite, the other satellite requires further investigation by the team. Commissioning operations are temporarily paused while the team analyzes the situation and determines the appropriate response.

Though the press release provides no other information, it appears the satellite is having a problem producing the power expected.

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NASA’s work force is shrinking by about 4,000

10:11 am

The number of NASA employees that have accepted the Trump offer to leave has now grown to more than 4,000 people, reducing the entire workforce from 18,000 to 14,000.

Nearly 4,000 employees, or more than 20% of NASA’s workforce, have applied to leave the agency, NASA confirmed to CBS News Friday. About 3,870 employees have applied to depart NASA over two rounds through the Trump administration’s deferred resignation program, NASA disclosed. The deadline for applications to the program is midnight Friday.

With those deferred resignations, NASA’s civil servant workforce would shrink from about 18,000 to 14,000 personnel. This figure also includes about 500 employees who were lost through normal attrition, the agency said.

It is certain that while Trump is office these workers will not be replaced. While most of the press and pro-government activists will claim this is terrible news, it is actually the best thing that can happen. Since NASA is now trying to use the capitalism model across the board, it doesn’t need that many employees. It is hiring the private sector to do most of its work. It doesn’t take that many people to review and issue a contract.

So, even if Congress rejects Trump’s proposed 24% cut to NASA’s 2026 budget and funds it entirely at the same levels as in 2025, the money will be more effectively used.

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Europe and SpaceX complete two launches late yesterday

10:01 am

Both Europe and SpaceX successfully completed launches in the early morning hours today.

First Arianespace, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) commercial arm, used Avio’s Vega-C rocket lifting off from French Guiana to put five satellites into orbit, including four high resolution Earth observation satellites and one climate satellite. This was only the third launch for Arianespace in 2025, two of which were of the Vega-C.

Next, SpaceX placed 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its 22nd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

92 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 92 to 66, with another Starlink launch scheduled for tonight.

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July 25, 2025 Quick space links

2:35 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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Mars and its two moons seen in the infrared by Europa Clipper

10:37 am

Mars and its two moons
Click for original.

Cool image time! The infrared image to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken by Europa Clipper on February 28, 2025 just before it flew past Mars on its way to Jupiter.

Deimos is in the upper left corner, while Phobos is close to Mars.

When the image was taken by the mission’s Europa Thermal Emission Imaging System (E-THEMIS), the spacecraft was about 560,000 miles (900,000 kilometers) from the Red Planet. The image is composed of 200 individual frames, part of a continuous scan of 1,100 frames taken roughly a second apart over a period of 20 minutes. Scientists are using the tiny, point-like images of the moons to check the camera’s focus.

As this is an infrared image (measuring heat), it shows Mars’ northern polar cap as the dark oval at the top of the planet. The bright (and thus warmer) oval to the lower left is the shield volcano Elysium Mons.

This data suggests Europa Clipper’s thermal instrument is working as intended, which is essential for observing the ice content (if any) on Europa once it enters Jupiter orbit in 2030.

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The journal Science retracts 15-year-old paper that proposed arsenic as basic element of life

10:15 am

The death of science: Though numerous later research had rejected the conclusions of a 2010 research paper that had suggested a bacteria found at Mono Lake in Californa was using arsenic instead of phosphorus in its DNA, the journal Science that published that paper has now retracted it.

In a blog post accompanying this week’s retraction notice, Science’s current Editor-in-Chief Holden Thorp and Valda Vinson, executive editor of the Science family of journals, emphasize there is no suggestion of foul play in the GFAJ-1 paper. Instead, pointing to subsequent commentary and research that suggest some of the paper’s findings stem from contamination, not arsenic use by bacteria, they write: “Science believes that the key conclusion of the paper is based on flawed data.”

Speaking with Science’s News team, which operates independently from its research arm, study co-author and Arizona State University geochemist Ariel Anbar says the team disputes that assessment and has already addressed the referenced criticisms. “We stand by the data,” he adds.

Anbar added this in this report at Nature:

By contrast, one of the paper’s authors, Ariel Anbar, a geochemist at Arizona State University in Tempe, says that there are no mistakes in the paper’s data. He says that the data could be interpreted in a number of ways, but “you don’t retract because of a dispute about data interpretation”. If that’s the standard you were to apply, he says, “you’d have to retract half the literature”.

This action underlines the decline in open-mindedness in the academic field. It did not suffice to simply demonstrate in later papers that the paper’s conclusions were questionable. It was necessary to cancel it entirely, to airbrush it from history.

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Dassault lobbies ESA to fund its Vortex reusable mini-shuttle

9:51 am

Dassault's proposed Vortex mini-shuttle
Dassault’s proposed Vortex mini-shuttle. Click for original.

The French aerospace company Dassault is now lobbying the European Space Agency to help finance its proposed Vortex reusable mini-shuttle, comparable in concept to Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spacecraft.

The company had first announced this project in June.

While the June announcement included few details, a 25 June hearing of the French National Assembly’s Committee on National Defence and the Armed Forces revealed that the mission is expected to be launched in 2027 aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. The hearing also disclosed that the demonstration mission has a total budget of €70 million, with Dassault providing more than half of the funding and the remainder coming from the French government.

Dassault is now attempting to get more funding from ESA. In June it had signed an agreement with ESA to partner on building a demonstrator, but it was not clear that agreement included funding. It certainly did not include funding for the full scale operational mini-shuttle.

Overall, the structure of funding and the design of the project is good, and demonstrates again Europe’s sharp shift to the capitalism model in the past two years. Dassault will design, build, and (most importantly) own the shuttle, allowing it to market it to many customers. It is also committing a significant amount of its own funds to the project. The funding from France and possibly ESA appears mostly that of a customer buying the services of this product from the company.

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Starlink went down for almost 3 hours yesterday

9:31 am

In what is a rare event, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation was out of service yesterday for about 2.5 hours “due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”

Starlink experienced an outage Thursday afternoon that went on for 2.5 hours and took down at least tens of thousands of people’s satellite internet service. “Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we’ll share an update once this issue is resolved,” Starlink posted on X at 1:05 p.m. PT/4:05 p.m. ET.

Though Starlink has yet to confirm that services are fully up and running again, Downdetector showed reports of issues had dropped to just 1,600 as of 4:30 p.m PT after they’d spiked to around 60,000 at about 1 p.m. PT

CNBC incorrectly tried to pin this internet outage to the start yesterday of T-Mobile’s new cellphone-to-Starlink text and emergency subscription, but that makes no sense, since the two use different Starlink satellites.

Since the constellation began offering customers its service several years ago the number of such global outages has been very rare. If anything, Starlink has been far more reliable than almost all comparable land line internet services.

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Like the Senate the House appropriation committee rejects Trump’s NASA cuts, but differently

9:20 am

The NASA 2026 budget approved this week by the House appropriation committee has rejected the 24% cut proposed by the Trump administration, in a similar manner as the parallel Senate committee.

However, the two congressional committees are not in agreement on any of their spending proposals.

The totals recommended by the two committees are similar — $24.8 billion in the House, $24.9 billion in the Senate — but the specifics are different in many cases.

For example, the House wants to spend $300 million for NASA’s very messed-up Mars Sample Return project, while the Senate eliminated it entirely. The House also increases NASA’s manned exploration budget over Trump’s proposal, while the Senate cuts it. In science spending the House is less generous than the Senate, though both houses reject Trump’s cuts. In education the House agrees with Trump, zeroing out that funding, while the Senate wants to increase the ’25 budget slightly.

Before the 2026 budget is approved the two houses will have to negotiate an agreement to make their numbers match. What has usually happened in past negotiations is that the houses agree to approve the highest spending numbers in any budget item so that nothing gets cut and the budget continues to go up uncontrollably. We should not be surprised if our corrupt Congress does exactly that.

Even so, we should expect Trump to force significant changes at NASA, including budget reductions. Recent Supreme Court rulings have confirmed the president’s right to reorganize and even eliminate bureaucracies, as long as Congress doesn’t specify a particular spending item.

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Spain offers $470 million to move Thirty Meter Telescope to Canary Islands

8:52 am

The Spanish government this week announced it is willing to commit $470 million to fund the long delayed and no longer funded Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and move it from Hawaii to the Canary Islands.

Last month, the administration of US president Donald Trump announced plans to abandon further support for the telescope, as part of its proposals to slash by half funding for the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which has until now supported the telescope’s design.

Now the Spanish government has pitched to bring the giant facility to La Palma, in Spain’s Canary Islands — and backed up the effort with a pledge to contribute €400 million (US$470 million). “Spain reinforces its commitment as a refuge for science, betting on excellent research and technological innovation,” wrote the Spanish minister for science and innovation, Diana Morant, on X, as she announced the funding on 23 July. According to a statement from her ministry, Morant has already submitted a formal proposal to host the telescope to the TMT board, which would have to back such a move for it to go ahead.

The quote incorrectly spins the Trump cuts. The NSF never had the funds to build both the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile and TMT. For years it has been lobbying to get that additional money, and failed. Even now, Congress is not interested in funding both even as it restores much of the funding cuts proposed by Trump.

The idea of moving TMT to the Canary Islands was first put forth in 2016, but in 2021 a Spanish judge blocked the tentative deal. The move also caused Japan to cut its funding to the project, leaving it without the cash to continue.

This new financing commitment by Spain might actually revive the telescope.

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Russia launches two weather satellites

8:36 am

Russia today successfully placed two weather satellites into orbit, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Vostochny spaceport in eastern Russia.

Video of the launch here. This was the second launch for this new constellation of satellites. The rocket flew north from Vostochny, crossing Russia with its lower stages and four strap-on boosters falling in designated drop zones inside Russia. No word if anything landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

91 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 91 to 65.

One comment

July 24, 2025 Quick space links

3:25 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 1950 the first rocket launch took place at Cape Canaveral
    As the tweet notes, in the subsequent 75 years thousands of rockets have lifted off from there. And as I have noted repeatedly, these launches have done no measurable harm to environment, thus illustrating the utter absurdity of the heavy environmental red tape that the FAA and the federal government have imposed on new launch companies seeking to build launchpads.
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The glaciers on Mars are almost pure ice with only a thin cover of dust and debris

9:55 am

A map of glaciers on Mars
A map of glaciers on Mars.

According to new research, scientists now think that the glaciers on Mars are almost pure ice, protected from sublimation by a thin cover of dust and debris.

Work over the last 20 years has demonstrated that at least some of these glaciers are mostly pure ice with only a thin cover of rock and dust, but according to a new paper published in Icarus, glaciers all over the planet actually contain more than 80% water ice, a significant finding. Ultimately, this means that Mars’s glacial ice deposits are nearly pure across the globe, providing a clearer understanding of Mars’ climate history and a possible resource for future utilization.

The researchers analyzed mid-latitude glaciers at five different locations in both the north and south hemispheres, and found that at every location the data suggested almost pure ice.

The map to the right, from earlier research, shows the prevalence of near-surface ice once you get above 30 degrees latitude. From the poles to the mid-latitudes it appears there is an ice sheet or “ice table” just below the surface. In the mid-latitudes glaciers dominate, as this appears to be the region where that ice is beginning to dissipate. In the equatorial regions little or no near-surface ice has been detected, though there has been some evidence in some places of ice at deeper depths.

This data once again demonstrates that Mars is not a desert like the Sahara, as we once believed. Instead, it more resembles Antarctica, where there is ice everywhere that simply needs to be processed for use.

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T-Mobile makes its Starlink capability available to everyone

9:34 am

T-Mobile officials yesterday announced that it is now offering its Starlink text and location cellphone capabilities available by subscription to all users, whether or not they are a T-Mobile customer.

On Wednesday, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert announced that the Starlink-powered service is officially out of beta, though it only supports text messaging and location-sharing for now. The new satellite coverage option is called “T-Satellite,” and it’s currently available as a standalone subscription. It’s being offered at $10 per month for a “limited time,” before increasing to $15 per month. It also comes included for customers on the carrier’s $100 per month Experience Beyond or older Go5G plans.

Your device will automatically connect to T-Satellite if you’re in an area with no cellular coverage. As long as there isn’t a heavy amount of cloud coverage or trees blocking your view of the sky, you should be able to send and receive text messages, including to 911, as well as share a link that temporarily tracks your location.

At present, the service is only available in the United States, though it will expand as SpaceX launches more cellphone-to-satellite Starlink satellites. T-Mobile also expects to add voice capability as well.

Nor is this the only option. AT&T is partnering with the satellite company AST SpaceMobile to offer similar services.

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Mexico’s president says it will investigate SpaceX for doing salvage operations off its coast

9:26 am

Mexico to SpaceX:
Mexico to SpaceX: “Nice business you got here. Shame
if something happened to it.”

You can’t win with these people: First Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum complained loudly about the debris that landed or washed up on its beaches after several of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy test launches, demanding an investigation followed by sanctions against the company.

Now Sheinbaum is complaining and demanding a new investigation about SpaceX’s effort the last two weeks to salvage and remove that debris from the ocean off its coast.

During a passage of her daily press conference, Sheinbaum said the agencies are analyzing whether the company has to be sanctioned after its unit tasked with clearing debris from the Starship launch, located in the Gulf of Mexico, worked without proper authorization. “We are investigating but the Environment, Navy, Digital Transformation, Government and Foreign Relations secretariats are conducting their research. The study is practically done,” Sheinbaum said.

Navy Secretary Raymundo Pedro Morales Angeles said the company hired by SpaceX to retrieve debris from its Starship rocket was allowed to enter the country but didn’t fulfill the requirements to work and ended up leaving the country.

If this behavior doesn’t prove Sheinbaum’s lust for power and control, nothing will. She doesn’t really care about Mexico’s beaches or environment. If she did, she would celebrate SpaceX’s salvage operations. What she really doesn’t like is that someone is doing something without her permission. She is the boss, and SpaceX better remember that!

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