October 22, 2025 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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The Guys Downstairs – How Long Has This Been Going On
<An evening paus: A very nice cover.
Hat tip Cotour, who adds “These old guys have this piece nailed down!”
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
What bad news is NASA hiding about the heat shield it will use on the next Orion/SLS manned mission around the Moon?
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”
Even as our uneducated media goes bonkers over another Musk kerfuffle, this time with interim NASA administration Sean Duffy, it is ignoring what now appears to be a strong effort by NASA to cover up some serious issues with the Orion capsule’s heat shield, issues that might be far more serious than outlined in a May 2024 inspector general (IG) report.
That IG report [pdf] found the following:
Specifically, portions of the char layer wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed (see Figure 3 [shown to the right]). The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions. Moreover, while there was no evidence of impact with the Crew Module, the quantity and size of the debris could have caused enough structural damage to cause one of Orion’s parachutes to fail. Should the same issue occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew.
In our judgment, the unexpected behavior of the heat shield poses a significant risk to the safety of
future crewed missions. [emphasis mine]
NASA spent the next few months reviewing the situation, and decided in December 2024 that it did not have the time or funding to redesign and replace the heat shield before the next flight. Instead, it chose to fly the next manned Orion mission — dubbed Artemis-2 and scheduled for the spring of 2026 carrying four astronauts around the Moon — using this same heat shield design but change the flight path during reentry to reduce stress on the shield.
NASA also admitted then that this heat shield design is defective, and that it will replace it beginning with the next mission, Artemis-3, the one that the agency hopes will land people back on the Moon.
The decision to fly humans in a capsule with such a known untrustworthy heat shield design is bad enough. Any rational person would not do this (as the inspector general above concluded). Yet NASA is going ahead, because it has determined that meeting its schedule, getting Americans back to the lunar surface ahead of China and during Trump’s present term of office, is more important than rational engineering and testing.
What now makes this decision even more worrisome is that it appears NASA is covering up the findings of its own engineers, completed in August 2024 but not made public until now.
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October 22, 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.
- Inversion Space touts its two autonomous drop test vehicles, Jaws and Big Tuna
The company has been using them in helicopter drops to test targeted precise reentry that its proposed Arc orbital capsule will require.
- Airbus, Thales, and Leonardo reportedly agree to merge their satellite divisions
The article speculates, without solid evidence, that the combined company will build a satellite constellation to compete with Starlink. Jay instead speculates (more accurately) that it “will will just lobby for laws that ban Starlink or tax the hell out of it.” After all, that is the European way in the 21st century.
- Chang’e-6 lunar sample is “a type of meteorite known as Ivuna-type carbonaceous chondrite”
What makes this find significant is that these types of primitive meteorites are very fragile, and almost never survive reentry on Earth. Finding this sample on the Moon will help scientists better determine the overall make-up of the solar system’s asteroid population, which will then allow them to better construct its early formation process.
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.
A somewhat typical volcanic vent on Mars
With today’s cool image we begin with the overview map to the right. The white dot marks the location, within the region on Mars dubbed the Tharsis Bulge, where four of its biggest volcanoes are located on a surface that has been pushed significantly above the red planet’s mean “sea level.”
The small rectangle in the inset shows the area covered by the cool image below. The focus is on a two-mile-long and half-mile-wide depression that sits on a relatively flat landscape of few craters.
If you look at the inset closely, you will notice this depression is surrounded by a dark borderline on all four sides, ranging in distance from three to thirteen miles. The grade to that borderline is downhill in all directions, with the drop ranging roughly from 800 to 1,000 feet.
So what are we looking at? » Read more
Duffy’s shiny object worked
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!
As expected, Elon Musk responded yesterday with anger and insults to the announcement by interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy that he will consider other manned lunar landers besides Starship for the first Artemis landing on the Moon.
And as expected, our brainless and generally uneducated propaganda press grabbed the shiny object that Duffy had put out with this announcement to focus entirely on the public spat. Here is just a sampling of the typical reports:
- Axios: Musk rages at Trump’s Transportation head on X: He “is trying to kill NASA!”
- CNBC: Musk blasts Duffy after Artemis contract spat: He ‘is trying to kill NASA!’
- The Hill: Elon Musk: Sean ‘Dummy’ shouldn’t run NASA
- Politico: ‘Sean Dummy’: Musk and Duffy brawl over the future of NASA
- Washington Examiner: Musk says Trump transportation chief ‘Sean Dummy’ trying to ‘kill’ NASA
- Bloomberg: Musk Lobs Insults as NASA Hopeful Isaacman Praises Leader Duffy
- Ars Technica: Elon Musk just declared war on NASA’s acting administrator, apparently
- NBC: Elon Musk goes on a tirade after NASA says it will seek moon landers from SpaceX rivals
Not one of these articles reported the fact that Duffy’s announcement also included an admission that NASA is now delaying this manned Moon mission until 2028. Not one went into any depth as to why this program is delayed, if they discussed it at all. And any articles that did discuss the program’s overall slow pace, the focus was always entirely on SpaceX, as if its Starship program was the sole cause of all the problems. Essentially, they picked up Duffy’s talking points and ran with them, blindly. In fact, for almost all of these articles, it appeared as if the reporter was writing about NASA’s Artemis program for the first time, and really knew nothing about it.
Only the Ars Technica story attempted some thoughtful analysis, but it focused on the office politics of choosing NASA’s next administrator, missing entirely the fundamentals of this story, that the Artemis program is and has always been a mess, and that Duffy’s decision will do nothing to fix the problem.
Musk of course foolishly played into Duffy’s hands by reacting so violently, with insults, helping Duffy distract from the real issues. At the same time, Musk also spoke truth with this one tweet:
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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
SpaceX launches 28 Starlink satellites
SpaceX this morning successfully placed another 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its 21st flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
136 SpaceX
63 China
13 Russia
13 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 136 to 104.
Debby Boone – You Light Up My Life
An evening pause: Performed live on television in 1977.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
October 21, 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.
- NASA’s administrator touts the installation of Orion to SLS for next year’s Artemis II mission
I wonder if Duffy is even aware of the heat shield issues or the lack of testing of the capsule’s environmental system. That NASA is poo-pooing both makes this manned mission around the Moon essentially a repeat of Challenger and Columbia, placing schedule above engineering.
- On board video from Dawn Aerospace’s Mk-II Aurora record-breaking flight in November 2024
On the flight this small scale unmanned prototype was the first commercial plane to break the sound barrier since the Concorde.
- Video of a Chinese rocket booster crashing into a ranch in Guinan County, Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai province on October 13, 2025
This was the launch that day of a Long March 2D rocket from China’s northwest Jiquan spaceport. The rocket uses very toxic hypergolic fuels (note the red clouds) that can dissolve skin. Bad news for this ranch.
- Video of launchpad static fire test of China’s Zhuque-3 rocket
It is a copy of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, with a tentative launch date of November 3, 2025, according to Jay. It is built by the pseudo-company Landspace, which won’t try recovering the first stage until later launches in 2026.
Small fresh impact on Mars’ youngest major lava flow
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 26, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The camera team labels this “Monitoring New Impact Site.” The fresh impact, indicated by the three dark patches just left and up from center, is actually not that fresh. It was first photographed by MRO on September 27, 2008. This newer picture is to see if anything significant had changed in the subsequent seventeen years.
In comparing the two pictures, the only change that is obvious is that the patches have faded and become less distinct. Nothing else appears different.
The surrounding terrain however is interesting in its own right. The landscape is remarkably flat, though it has that meandering ridge coming out from that lighter patch in the lower right. What are we looking at?
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October 17, 2025 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Fake blather from NASA administrator Sean Duffy to hide more Artemis delays
Sean Duffy: “Look at the shiny object!”
During a press interview yesterday, interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy revealed almost as an aside that NASA’s mid-2027 launch for the first Artemis manned lunar landing is no longer realistic, and that NASA is now targeting a 2028 launch date instead.
Duffy managed to hide this revelation by also announcing that he is re-opening the bidding for the manned lunar lander NASA will use on that third Artemis mission. To quote Duffy:
Now, SpaceX had the contract for Artemis III. By the way, I love SpaceX and it’s an amazing company, but the problem is, they are behind. They pushed their timelines out and we are in a race against China. The president and I want to get to the moon in this president’s term. So, I’m going to open up the contract and I’m going let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin. Whatever one gets us there first to the moon, we are going to take. If SpaceX is behind and Blue Origin can do it before them, good on Blue Origin.
By the way we might have two companies that can get us back to the Moon in 2028.
The propaganda press of course is going wild about this SpaceX announcement, making believe it signifies something of importance. “SpaceX is behind! Elon Musk can’t do it! Duffy is giving Jeff Bezos the job!” And as I think Duffy intended, everyone is ignoring the fact that NASA has now admitted it won’t meet that 2027 launch target.
The irony is that Duffy’s decision to re-open bidding on that manned mission is utterly meaningless. » Read more