John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers with Gary Moore – So Many Roads
An evening pause: Performed live 2008.
Hat tip Alex Gimarc.
June 25, 2025 Quick space links
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.
- Axiom and India rocket startup Skyroot sign partnership deal
This agreement suggests a willingness of Axiom to use Skyroot’s rocket for supplying its space station, assuming Skyroot ever gets that rocket off the ground.
- Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space is now targeting July 1, 2025 for the first launch of its Eris rocket
Gilmour’s previous launch attempt was aborted when the fairing was released on the launchpad. It now says it has fixed this issue, reinstalled the fairing, and tested everything.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Astronomers look at the Andromeda Galaxy in many wavelengths
Click for full images.
Astronomers using both old and new and ground- and space-based telescopes have created a full set of observations of the Andromeda Galaxy (also known as M31) across five different wavelengths, producing one of the most complete views of the galaxy so far.
This new composite image contains data of M31 taken by some of the world’s most powerful telescopes in different kinds of light. This image includes X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton (represented in red, green, and blue); ultraviolet data from NASA’s retired GALEX (blue); optical data from astrophotographers using ground based telescopes (Jakob Sahner and Tarun Kottary); infrared data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, the Infrared Astronomy Satellite, COBE, Planck, and Herschel (red, orange, and purple); and radio data from the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (red-orange).
Each type of light reveals new information about this close galactic relative to the Milky Way. For example, Chandra’s X-rays reveal the high-energy radiation around the supermassive black hole at the center of M31 as well as many other smaller compact and dense objects strewn across the galaxy.
The contrast in emissions between different wavelengths is certainly striking. The radio, infrared, and ultraviolet data clearly delineate the galaxy’s arms where star formation is occurring. The X-ray highlights the galaxy’s central black hole.
This press release is clearly intended to lobby against the cuts at NASA, especially considering that several of these images (Galax, Spitzer) are not new. At the same time, it does demonstrate the need to look at the heavens across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. It seems to me that the astronomical community should begin to consider other methods of funding for this work, other than just the federal government, and in fact they prove this point themselves by the use of images above from some smaller ground-based telescopes not funded by American tax dollars.
SpaceX launches 27 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX today successfully launched 27 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 20th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
80 SpaceX
35 China
8 Rocket Lab
7 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 80 to 58.
Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!
From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.
“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.
All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.
Curiosity’s future travels uphill
Click for full resolution. For original images go here and here.
Click for interactive map.
Cool image time! The panorama above, assembled from two pictures taken on June 23, 2025 (here and here) by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, looks to the south and uphill into the canyon that the rover will eventually climb.
The overview map to the right provides context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present location, the white line its past travel route, and the red dotted line its future route. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama.
The science team is presently exploring the boxwork formation on the right, and should spend at least the next month or so there before moving on. As the rover moves up into this canyon we should also expect the science team to spend a great deal of time studying that many layered cliff face to the right.
Eventually the rover will enter those white very hilly regions on the horizon. No route through those hills however has yet been chosen.
German rocket startup Isar Aerospace secures $174 million in financing
The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace announced today that it has obtained $174 million in new financing from a Miami-based investment firm.
This news report adds these details:
On 25 July 2025, Isar Aerospace announced that it had signed a €150 million convertible-bond agreement with Eldridge Industries. The instrument provides the company with funding in the short term, and the debt can later be converted into equity in the form of shares, typically at a pre-agreed valuation during a future financing round or an IPO.
That Isar needed to go to an American investment firm suggests there was a lack of interest in Europe to invest in this European rocket startup. The nature of the deal also suggests the possibility that some ownership rights will shift to Eldridge over time.
In March Isar first launch attempt of its Spectrum rocket from Norway’s Andoya spaceport failed 30 seconds after lift-off. It is building two more rockets, and will use this new capital to expand its production and launch facilities.
Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.
Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke
Rocket Lab wins launch contract from the European Space Agency
The American rocket company Rocket Lab announced today that it has been awarded a launch contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to place two European-built GPS-type test satellites into orbit.
Rocket Lab will launch two “Pathfinder A” spacecraft for ESA, provided by European satellite prime contractors Thales Alenia Space and GMV, from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 no earlier than December 2025. The spacecraft will be deployed to a 510km low Earth orbit as part of a mission to test a new approach of providing location, direction, and timing services from satellites in low orbit – otherwise called LEO-PNT (Low Earth Orbit Positioning, Navigation, and Timing). ESA’s LEO-PNT demonstration mission will assess how a low Earth orbit fleet of satellites can work in combination with the Galileo and EGNOS constellations in higher orbits that provide Europe’s own global navigation system.
That ESA gave Rocket Lab this contract illustrates the failure of this government agency’s own commercial rocket division, Arianespace, as well as the slowly emerging new commercial rocket startups in Europe. ESA likely rejected Arianespace’s Ariane-6 and Vega-C rockets as too expensive. These rockets were also likely unable to meet the required launch time table. It also could not pick any independent private European companies, because none have yet to successfully launch.
And ESA did this even as top government officials in Europe have been loudly demanding that Europe only launch its satellites on European rockets. That demand might make a nice sound bite, but reality trumps nice sound bites every time.
SpaceX launches Axiom’s fourth commercial manned mission to ISS
SpaceX last night successfully launched Axiom’s fourth commercial manned mission to ISS, dubbed Ax-4, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first stage completed its second flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The Dragon capsule, the newest and fifth ship in SpaceX’s fleet of manned capsule, was dubbed “Grace,” as announced by Axiom mission commander and former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson. The three paying passengers are government astronauts from India, Hungary, and Poland.
The capsule will dock with ISS tomorrow (Thursday) at 7 am (Eastern), where it and its crew will spend about one to two weeks before returning to Earth.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
79 SpaceX
35 China
8 Rocket Lab
7 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 79 to 58.
The overall lack of excitement about this manned space mission speaks directly to how successful SpaceX has become as a private commercial rocket company. Its rockets and capsules work routinely well, with almost no problems, making these manned space missions seem as boring as an airline trip from New York to Washington.
Schiller – Ein Schoner Tag
An evening pause: Performed live 2001.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
June 24, 2025 Quick space links
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 link below.
- Rocket startup Hyprspace signs deal with French military to launch new suborbital rocket from missile test range inside mainland France
Believe it or not, the company has named this new suborbital rocket Baguette-1. Jay and I both have great doubts about this whole deal.
Slow day. No other quick links.
A graceful spiral galaxy
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a project to study galaxies with very active central supermassive black holes.
What sets UGC 11397 apart from a typical spiral lies at its centre, where a supermassive black hole containing 174 million times the mass of the Sun is growing. As a black hole ensnares gas, dust, and even entire stars from its vicinity, this doomed matter heats up and puts on a fantastic cosmic light show. Material trapped by the black hole emits light from gamma rays to radio waves and can brighten and fade without warning. But in some galaxies, including UGC 11397, thick clouds of dust hide much of this energetic activity from view in optical light. Despite this, UGC 11397’s actively growing black hole was revealed through its bright X-ray emission — high-energy light that can pierce the surrounding dust. This led astronomers to classify it as a Type 2 Seyfert galaxy, a category used for active galaxies whose central regions are hidden from view in visible light by a doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas.
To me what sets this galaxy apart is its natural beauty. It also reminds me of the universe’s vastness. Located about 250 million light years away, those hazy spiral arms represent millions of stars, many of which likely harbor planets and maybe even life.
Another permanently shadowed crater on the Moon shows no obvious ice
Note that the bright areas are not ice but simply overexposed
The science team operating the Shadowcam camera on South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter — designed to take images in places with little light — yesterday released a new image taken of the floor of a permanently shadowed crater on the Moon, Hermes-A, located near the north pole.
That picture is to the right. The rectangle indicates the area discussed by the release, focusing entirely on describing its geological features, such as impact melt and the numerous secondary smaller impacts and ejecta within the crater floor. The inset gives the context, showing the crater’s location near the north pole. The blue areas in the inset are those areas thought to be permanently shadowed, such as the entire floor of Hermes-A.
What the release fails to mention is the most important detail lacking in this picture. Though the floor of Hermes-A crater is considered permanently shadowed, the low light image taken by Shadowcam shows no obvious ice features, at all. If there is a higher content of water here, it is locked within the soil, and would require processing to access. Even so, the picture suggests that any such moisture is of extremely low concentration, likely in the parts per billion, and hardly enough to build a lunar base.
This is the same result found by previous Shadowcam pictures. Increasingly it appears that the hope of finding large quantities of easily accessible water ice in these permanently shadowed craters is proving false.
NASA sets another new date for Axiom’s Ax-4 commercial manned mission to ISS
NASA today announced a new launch date of June 25, 2025 for Axiom’s Ax-4 commercial manned mission to ISS carrying a three passengers from India, Poland, and Hungary respectively and commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson (now working for Axiom).
As with previous announcements, the information provided was sparse:
NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX are targeting 2:31 a.m. EDT, Wednesday, June 25, for launch of the fourth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, Axiom Mission 4.
The mission will lift off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew will travel to the orbiting laboratory on a new SpaceX Dragon spacecraft after launching on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket. The targeted docking time is approximately 7 a.m. Thursday, June 26. NASA will provide more details and its coverage information shortly.
The launch had previously been delayed several times because NASA and Russia wanted to first assess the repair work on the leaks in the Russian Zvezda module before allowing another docking at the station. No information however has been released so far detailing that assessment. Though there have been indications that the loss of air in ISS was stopped by the repair, neither NASA nor Roscosmos have provided any specific data.
2nd test flight of French cargo capsule prototype “partial success”
According to an update today from the French cargo capsule startup The Exploration Company, its Mission Possible capsule prototype launched yesterday on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 had a “partial success (partial failure)” during its return to Earth.
The capsule was launched successfully, powered the payloads nominally in-orbit, stabilized itself after separation with the launcher, re-entered and re-established communication after black out. But it encountered an issue afterwards, based on our current best knowledge, and we lost communication a few minutes before splash down. We are still investigating the root causes and will share more information soon.
This was the second prototype test flown by the company, the first launched on the inaugural flight of the Ariane-6 rocket. That test was unable to complete its mission because of a problem with the rocket’s upper stage, which prevented it from completing its de-orbit burn, which would have then permitted the prototype to be released and return to Earth for flight testing. Instead, no test was done.
The company had initially only planned two test flights of these smaller prototypes before moving on to test flights of its full scale Nyx cargo capsule, designed to garner commercial cargo business to and from the space stations presently under development. The update today suggests it might now do another test flight with a smaller prototype.
Ispace: Resilience’s failure was due to a hardware issue in laser range finder
In a press conference today, officials of the Japanese startup Ispace explained that the failure of its second lunar lander, Resilience, to land softly on the Moon on June 5, 2025 was due to a hardware issue in its laser range finder that prevented it from providing correct altitude data.
At the same time, they have not yet been able to pin down precisely what caused the failure. It could have been because of unexpected degradation during flight, or possibly a technical fault with the range finder in gathering data at the speeds and altitudes experienced.
The company is forming a task force in partnership with Japan’s space agency JAXA as well as NASA to try to figure out the issue. It is also going to add lidar instrumentation to future missions to provide a backup to the laser range finder. These actions will add about $11 million in additional costs, an amount Ispace says it can absorb.
Ispace is building two more lunar landers, one for NASA in partnership with the American company Draper, and the second for JAXA. It appears both missions are still moving forward.
Dorothea Taylor – Down With The Sickness
An evening pause: Music by Disturbed.
Hat tip to Wamphyr, who adds, “It’s fun to watch a grandmother rock out like this.”
SpaceX completes another smallsat Transporter launch, launching 70 payloads
SpaceX today successfully placed 70 payloads, including 66 separate deployments, into orbit as part of its Transporter program for smallsats, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its 26th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean. It also completed this flight only 22 days after its last flight. As of posting the deployment of these payloads and satellites was on going.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
78 SpaceX
35 China
8 Rocket Lab
7 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 78 to 58.
June 23, 2025 Quick space links
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.
- Sweden and the U.S. sign deal allowing American companies to launch from Esrange
The deal removes state department restrictions designed to prevent the theft of U.S. technology by hostile foreign powers.
- Chinese pseudo-company AZSpace apparently renamed a spacecraft from DEAR-4 to DEAR-5 because the word “four” in Chinese sounds like the word “death”
That’s the theory at least.
- Arianespace official says it must increase the launch cadence of Ariane-6
He also admits just getting to 10 per year will be difficult.
- On this day in 1960 the first U.S. radar reconnaissance satellite was launched
Its classified name was Grab-1. At the time its public name was Solrad-1, with the government only telling the public about its solar research instruments.
Parker completes its 24th close fly-by of the Sun
The Parker Solar Probe has successfully completed its 24th close fly-by of the Sun, the last of its initial primary mission, matching the distance and speed record set during two previous fly-bys.
Parker Solar Probe checked in with mission operators at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland — where it was also designed and built — on Sunday, June 22, reporting that all systems are healthy and operating normally. The spacecraft was out of contact with Earth and operating autonomously during the close approach.
During this flyby, the spacecraft also equaled its record-setting speed of 430,000 miles per hour (687,000 km per hour) — a mark that, like the distance, was set and subsequently matched during close approaches on Dec. 24, 2024, and March 22, 2025.
The data obtained during this fly-by will be beamed back to Earth in the coming months, as Parker moves to the outer part of its orbit, farther from the Sun.
Though this completes the planned orbits of the mission’s primary mission, the proposed Trump budget continues to fund the spacecraft’s operation for the next five years, allowing it to monitor changes in the Sun as it ramps down from solar maximum to solar minimum.
France’s space agency awards ArianeGroup contract to build methane-fueled engine
France’s space agency CNES this week awarded ArianeGroup, the rocket partnership between Airbus and Safran that builds the Ariane-6 rocket a contract to develop a more powerful methane-fueled rocket engine.
Aiming to reach between 200 and 300 tons of thrust, the new engine will be twice as powerful as the current Vulcain 2.1 main stage engine that propels Ariane 6.
No details about cost or time schedule were released.
The significance of this deal isn’t the engine, but that it was issued directly to ArianeGroup by France’s space agency, instead of through the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Arianespace commercial arm, as has been routine for the past three decades. The deal illustrates how the ESA is essentially beginning to break up. Rather than go through it, its individual nations are now going it alone, each providing support and funding to their own commercial private space startups. Germany began this process, encouraging the development of three new rocket companies (Rocket Factory Augsburg, Isar, and Hyimpulse). Spain and Italy soon followed with their own new rocket companies, (PLD and Avio respectively). France, which until recently lobbied to keep the old government model alive in ESA, has in the past year shifted strongly to the capitalism model.
This contract only underscores this shift.