Varda signs deal for more capsule landings in Australia

9:10 am

Proposed Australian spaceports
Australian spaceports: operating (red dot) and proposed (red “X”)
Click for original image.

The recoverable capsule company Varda has now signed a new deal that will allow it to land up to 20 more capsules at the commercial spaceport/range Southern Launch in Australia through 2028.

It has already landed capsules there twice. This new contract suggests that Varda has enough expected customers and products to place in its capsules to pay for about six or seven capsules launched per year. If so, this manufacturing model in space is going to bloom very quickly, and will likely become a major profit center for the commercial space stations now under development.

The deal also illustrates the utter failure of the U.S. government’s red tape, especially during the Biden administration.

The company landed its first mission, W-1, at the Utah Test and Training Range in February 2024. But difficulties securing licenses and other approvals for that mission prompted Varda to look elsewhere. “Through that experience, it became pretty clear that the U.S. was not going to be the location for high-cadence reentry operations in the near term,” Eric Lasker, Varda’s chief revenue officer, said at an IAC event announcing the new agreement.

Hopefully the anti-regulatory policies of Trump will change this, but for the moment our government has driven this American company away from the U.S.

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Belgium company joins Starlab space station consortium

8:25 am

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

The Starlab consortium, proposing to build its single-module large Starlab space station that will be launched on Starship, has now added the Belgium company Space Applications Services (SpaceApps) as both a partner and investor.

SpaceApps contributes deep experience in space systems, mission operations and payload integration with capabilities that include avionics, payload development, the end-to-end International Commercial Experiment Cubes (ICECubes) service, as well as mission integration and operations control software. The company also works closely with the European Space Agency and international partners, broadening Starlab’s access to global markets and research communities.

The Starlab consortium already includes the American companies Voyager Space and Northrop Grumman and the European company Airbus. It also has a partnership agreement with the European Space Agency. This new Belgium partnership further cements its place as Europe’s potential future space station after ISS is retired.

This deal is only one of several news stories in the past week signaling progress by this consortium. It has signed the American company Vivace to build the station’s main structure and its partner Northrop Grumman has successfully tested the rendezvous and docking technology its Cygnus cargo capsule will use to dock with Starlab. All in all this station appears to be assembling the pieces its needs.

Below is my updated rankings of the four commercial stations under development:
» Read more

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Genesis cover

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

Axiom successfully tests two of its lunar spacesuits underwater

8:01 am

Axiom's two spacesuits being tested underwater
Axiom’s two spacesuits being tested underwater.
Click for original.

The space station startup Axiom this week successfully completed underwater testing of two of its lunar spacesuits, making them ready for astronaut training.

Axiom won the contract to build these suits for NASA in 2022. It speaks well of the company that only three years later the suits are now ready for use. It also shows NASA’s own incompetence, because before it awarded this contract to Axiom the agency tried to build its own suits, spending more than a billion dollars and fourteen years to produce nothing.

Furthermore, this success underlines yesterday’s NASA inspector general report that lambasted Collins Aerospace’s incompetence in maintaining the spacesuits on ISS. Collins in 2022 had won a similar spacesuit contract to build new space station suits, but two years later backed out of the deal, unable to get the job done.

For Axiom, this spacesuit success adds an essential component to its own space station plans. Though these suits are intended for the Moon, the company now has the basics down for its own space station suit. It owns this suit design, and will not only sell suits to NASA, it can market the suits to any one else.

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Conscious Choice cover

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.

September 30, 2025 Quick space links

3:01 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.

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Inspector General: The state of NASA’s spacesuits on ISS is becoming critical

1:28 pm

NASA's failed spacesuit
NASA’s failed Moon spacesuits

A new NASA inspector report issued today [pdf] has found that the single contractor NASA uses to maintain the spacesuits on ISS, Collins Aerospace, has increasingly been unable to do the job, and NASA has no alternative contractor to turn to. From the report’s executive summary:

We previously reported on NASA’s spacesuit management in 2017 and 2021, finding that the Agency faced a wide array of risks to sustaining the EMUs [the spacesuits], including design inadequacies, health risks, and low inventories of spacesuit life support systems, ultimately leading to NASA’s efforts to design and develop next-generation suits to replace the existing EMUs. Specifically, the EMU design flaws have increased the chance of and led to unexpected water in helmets, thermal regulation malfunctions, and astronaut injuries. Given that spacesuits are necessary to meet future ISS maintenance needs until its planned decommissioning in 2030, it is critical that NASA effectively manages the contract performance and subsequent safety risks associated with ESOC [the contract with Collins].

…Until the ISS’s planned decommission at the end of the decade, NASA will continue to require spacewalking capabilities to perform upgrades and corrective and preventative maintenance to the Station. However, Collins’ performance on ESOC increases programmatic risks to NASA as it attempts to conduct safe spacewalks outside the ISS and maintain critical EMU life support component inventories. The contractor is experiencing considerable schedule delays, cost overruns, and quality issues that significantly increase the risk to maintaining NASA’s spacewalking capability.

Collins was awarded this five-year cost-plus maintenance contract in 2010 for $324 million. Since then NASA has been repeatedly extending it, so that it now runs through 2027 and has funneled $1.4 billion into Collins’ bank account. Yet Collins has repeatedly failed to deliver necessary repair parts, even as there have been more frequent problems on ISS, including several cases where spacewalks had to be aborted because an astronaut’s life was in danger. Here are just a few examples cited in the report:
» Read more

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Leaving Earth cover

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

Next Starship/Superheavy test set for October 13, 2025

8:59 am

The planned return trajectories for both Superheavy and Starship
The planned return trajectories for both
Superheavy and Starship on future tests

In an update posted yesterday on SpaceX’s website, the company revealed that it is targeting October 13, 2025 for the eleventh orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket.

The update also provided details about the company will test during this flight, including the reuse of a second Superheavy booster.

The booster on this flight test previously flew on Flight 8 and will launch with 24 flight-proven Raptor engines. Its primary test objective will be demonstrating a unique landing burn engine configuration planned to be used on the next generation Super Heavy. It will attempt this while on a trajectory to an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America and will not return to the launch site for catch.

Upon return the booster will start off by firing thirteen engines, the five, and finally three just before landing, to test refinements to its return to Earth.

Starship meanwhile will mostly repeat with variations the test program from flight 10, including the deployment of dummy Starlink satellites, the relight of one of its Raptor engines, and the testing of different thermal protection systems. It will once again fly a low orbital path that will bring it down in the Indian Ocean, either under control or not. This Starship prototype is the last of version two, so there are a limited number of things it can test.

Beginning with the 12th test flight, the company will begin flying version 3, and will likely quickly move to full orbital flights and a chopstick catch of Starship at Boca Chica, as shown by the flight paths in the graphic to the right.

6 comments

Firefly loses first stage for next launch when it explodes during static fire test

8:40 am

During a static fire engine test yesterday in preparation for launch, the rocket startup Firefly lost the first stage when an explosion occurred at what appeared to be the base of the rocket. From the company’s update:

During testing at Firefly’s facility in Briggs, Texas, the first stage of Firefly’s Alpha Flight 7 rocket experienced an event that resulted in a loss of the stage. Proper safety protocols were followed, and all personnel are safe. The company is assessing the impact to its stage test stand, and no other facilities were impacted.

Video of the explosion can be seen here.

This incident will obviously delay the next launch, which had only just been scheduled following the completion of the company’s investigation into its launch failure in April. This explosion also suggests there remain serious issues with the Alpha rocket, which has only had two full successes in six launch attempts.

At the same time, with the successful soft landing of its Blue Ghost lander on the Moon earlier this year, Firefly has demonstrated its engineering can be sound and robust. It just appears that a lot more work needs to be done to get Alpha into shape.

4 comments

China launches two “test satellites”

7:46 pm

China earlier today successfully launched two test satellites for “experimental verification of Earth observation technologies, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang space port in southwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. The two satellites are part of the Shiyan family of satellites that have done rendezvous and proximity operations as well as surveillance of other satellites in orbit.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

126 SpaceX
58 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 126 to 98.

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September 29, 2025 Quick space links

3:05 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.

6 comments

Study suggests low dose radiation reduces severe knee pain

11:35 am

A new study suggests that exposing patients with advanced osteoarthritis (OA) to low doses of radiation reduced their pain significantly.

The trial included 114 people with primary knee OA, diagnosed by moderate damage visible on X-rays, and significant pain with walking. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups: very low-dose radiation (0.3 Gy total, spread over six sessions of 0.05 Gy), low-dose radiation (3 Gy total, spread over six sessions of 0.5 Gy), or a sham treatment that did not deliver radiation.

…Each treatment in this trial was 500 mGy, which works out to be 5,000 times the radiation dose of a chest X-ray and around 70 times the dose of a chest CT scan. However, while this sounds like a lot, the treatment delivered in the study is still considered to be low-dose. For radiotherapy cancer treatment, for example, total doses are usually 50 to 70 Gy – so a total of 3 Gy is roughly one-twentieth or less of that.

…Trial participants couldn’t take regular pain meds during the first four months, other than occasional “rescue” meds if needed. No second round of radiation was allowed. The main treatment outcome was how many participants showed significant improvement after four months, as measured by assessments of pain and function.

The 3 Gy group did significantly better than the sham group. About 70% improved vs 42% in the sham group. Over half (57%) of people in the 3 Gy group had a clinically meaningful improvement in joint pain and function scores vs about 31% in the sham group. The 0.3 Gy group didn’t show a statistically significant improvement; about 58% improved. No meaningful differences were seen in blood markers of inflammation or in the amount of pain medication people used. The treatment was deemed to be safe, with no side effects or toxicity reported.

If this result is confirmed, it suggests strongly that especially for the older population there is now a viable treatment for knee pain that avoids surgery and could be far more reliable.

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