Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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An evening pause: Performed live 2025, and beautifully directed by Gibbons as well.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
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 you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
"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
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.
I feel obliged to apologize for the general low rate of posting the past few days. First I am still fighting this head cold, which though it appears to be fading it still leaves me foggy-brained at times. This situation was made worse today when the profile vanished from my Thunderbird email program. How it vanished remains a mystery, but it took me more than an hour to upload a back-up (from a week ago) and get it to work with the program. Thus I lost about a week’s emails.
Hardly a tragedy but all this has been quite exhausting. Hopefully by tomorrow things will run better.
Regardless, I want to thank my readers for their kind words and support. It is truly appreciated.
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.
“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.
Al-Amal’s 2023 image of Deimos, the first good
picture of the moon ever taken. Click for full movie.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) yesterday announced it is extending the mission of its Al-Amal Mars orbiter (“Hope” in English) to 2028, significantly beyond its initial planned mission of two years.
Launched in July 2020, the Hope Probe successfully entered Mars orbit in February 2021 after a seven-month interplanetary journey, marking a historic achievement as the first Arab nation to reach the Red Planet. Originally designed as a two-year mission to observe and study Mars’ atmosphere, the probe has far exceeded expectations. Since reaching Mars, it has gathered around 10 terabytes of scientific data, shared through more than a dozen datasets with research institutions worldwide.
The probe itself was mostly built by American engineers and organizations, as part of a deal to train UAE students. Once in operation around Mars, the UAE and those students took over almost all operations. It orbits Mars in a very wide orbit, allowing it to study global weather and atmosphere conditions, such as dust storms.
The Civil Aviation Authority of the Bahamas (CAAB) this week announced that it is allowing SpaceX to resume Falcon 9 landings inside Bahamian waters.
In a statement, CAAB said that one landing is scheduled for Wednesday night between 5:00 pm and 9:30 pm (local time). “All requisite regulatory and environmental reviews and clearances have been completed in accordance with established aerospace safety and operations protocols,” CAAB said, reminding the population that, depending on weather and atmospheric conditions, “one or more sound booms may be heard during the landing sequence”.
SpaceX had completed one landing in February 2025, but the CAAB then paused further landings two months later, claiming it wanted to do a full environmental review.
There was also the issue of a SpaceX $1 million donation to the University of the Bahamas. Maybe the CAAB wanted to wait until the check cleared.
As should be expected, a fringe of anti-Musk activists began screaming “environmental disaster” and getting the full support of the propaganda press. The claim is utterly stupid, considering SpaceX has landed hundreds of Falcon 9s in the past decade harmlessly.
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.
"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
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.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and sharpened to post here, was taken by New Horizons on July 14, 2015 when it made its close fly-by of Pluto.
The picture looks at the part of Pluto that was close to sunset. Hence the mountain’s long dramatic shadow. The raw image webpage provides little information, including a scale of 0.0 meters, which means nothing. My guess is that these mountains could be several hundred to several thousand feet high based on data from other New Horizon mountain images, but that is a pure guess.
What we think we know is that these mountains are likely made of ice, which at Pluto’s eternally cold environment is as hard as granite. We also think we know that they float on a layer of frozen nitrogen, but because that nitrogen can sublimate into gas when Pluto’s climate warms as its orbit brings it closer to the Sun, the foundation of these mountains is quite unstable. They can roll and drift about, even if they are the size of the Appalachian mountains in the eastern U.S.
I continue to delve into the New Horizons’ archive, and have discovered a trove of quite amazing pictures that hadn’t been featured by the science team during the fly-by. Pluto really is an alien place. Stay tuned, there is more to come!
According to an announcement yesterday afternoon, NASA is now targeting February 19, 2026 for the second SLS wet dress rehearsal countdown.
During the rehearsal, the team will execute a detailed countdown sequence. Operators will conduct two runs of the last ten minutes of the countdown, known as terminal count. They will pause at T-1 minute and 30 seconds for up to three minutes, then resume until T-33 seconds before launch and pause again. After that, they will recycle the clock back to T-10 minutes and conduct a second terminal countdown to just inside of T-30 seconds before ending the sequence. This process simulates real-world conditions, including scenarios where a launch might be scrubbed due to technical or weather issues.
If this dress rehearsal goes off perfectly, NASA is considering the possibility of an actual launch attempt on March 6, 2026, though it admits that date is very preliminary That launch will carry four astronauts on a ten-day mission slingshot around the Moon and back to Earth, using an Orion capsule with untested life support system and a questionable heat shield.
The present launch window for this mission closes on April 6th, so NASA’s margins will shrink considerably if this second dress rehearsal has any further problems.
Scientists have devised a mission profile that could actually get a spacecraft close to Comet 3I/Atlas sometime around 2085.
…the team found that an intercept could be achieved via a Solar Oberth maneuver, but the launch would have to occur in 2035 to achieve optimal alignment between Earth, Jupiter and 3I/ATLAS. The flight duration would be 50 years (though Hibberd notes that this could be reduced marginally). “2035 is optimal because the alignments of the celestial bodies involved (i.e. the Earth, Jupiter, Sun, and 3I/ATLAS) are the most propitious to reach 3I/ATLAS with a minimum Solar Oberth propulsion requirement from the probe, a minimum performance requirement for the launch vehicle, and a minimum flight time to the target,” he said.
The Solar Oberth maneuver has the spacecraft fire its engines at the moment it is zipping past the Sun at its closest and fastest, taking full advantage of that gravitational velocity.
You can read their paper here [pdf] As they note in their conclusion, this entire mission is based on using “a Starship Block 3 upper stage fully-refuelled in Low Earth Orbit.” It assumes that by 2035 Starship will be flying routinely and cheaply, and could be purchased at a reasonable cost for such a mission.
Or maybe donated in the name of science by some billionaire who happens to care about making the human race multi-planetary. Know anyone?
Personally, I wonder it this mission profile could be adapted to reach the first known interstellar object, Oumuamua. 3I/Atlas appears to simply be a comet. Though a visit would be of value it would not Earth-shaking. Oumuamua however was not a comet, but more importantly it was strange in every way. Though astronomers in 2019 declared based on the available data that it was definitely not an alien spaceship, that conclusion remains very uncertain. As I wrote at the time:
…for anyone to assume there is any certainty to this conclusion would be a grave mistake. It is merely the best guess, based on the available but somewhat limited data. The data however does not preclude more exotic explanations. Nothing is certain.
To me this object should get top priority.
Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.
An evening pause: Performed live 2014 by the Beethoven Academy Orchestra with Sara Andon on the flute.
Some movies are made special because of their score, and I think this applies to the 1962 film, To Kill a Mockingbird. It is a superb work of art, but it rises above many comparable films due to the music that Elmer Bernstein wrote for it. His suite only gives a hint of its effectiveness, in the movie.
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.
Today is “President’s Day”, a meaningless holiday created by our stupid lords in Congress in order to denigrate George Washington by devaluing the holiday celebrating his birth, February 22nd, by applying that holiday to all presidents, from great to the trashy. This fake holiday also acted to devalue any remembrance of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday on February 12th, as it forced many states that used to celebrate that holiday separately to fold that celebration into today as well.
I don’t accept Congress’s stupid holiday. Instead, I separately try each year to honor both Washington and Lincoln on their actual birthdays, because without these great men the nation of my birth would never have become the great and free and prosperous place it became.
In honor of Lincoln today, I thought I’d post a short review of Russell McClintock’s fine 2008 history, Lincoln and the Decision for War. McClintock took a decidedly different look at the Civil War by focusing not on larger events, but specifically at the time period between the election of Lincoln on November 6, 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War in April 1861.
What many forget with the passage of time is that the Civil War did not start instantly with Lincoln’s victory. For six months furious negotiations took place between politicians from the North and South, with Northern politicians desperately trying to somehow convince the southern states not to secede from the Union. McClintock details those negotiations, including Lincoln’s own efforts in numerous ways to placate the most radical southern states.
You see, as much as Lincoln opposed slavery — and he truly did — he was far more committed to the American Constitution and the nation it had created. If he had to let the issue of slavery take a back burner to saving the Union, he was quite content to do so. More important, as McClintock shows, if the southern states hadn’t seceded and had stayed part of the Union, their power bloc in Congress would have been strong enough to block any anti-slavery action by Lincoln anyway. He really didn’t have sufficient political power in Congress to change anything.
For the South, none of these actual facts about Lincoln mattered. The South had developed Lincoln Derangement Syndrome, and was not going to allow itself to be ruled by Lincoln no matter what, even if that rule was weak and ineffectual. As noted by the Ohio’s radical anti-slavery senator Ben Wade in a speech on the Senate floor on December 17, 1860:
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Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 21, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It was posted today by the camera team as a captioned image, with the caption as follows:
The sinuous ridge is approximately 10 meters wide and several kilometers long. The floor surrounding this ridge has been eroding laterally, forming pits and circular features suggestive of removal (sublimation) of subsurface ice. However, landforms such as channels or moraines that might suggest the presence of water or ice are lacking, so the ridge itself does not appear to have formed by fluvial or glacial processes.
Perhaps this curious feature is an exhumed dike formed from magma emanating from Alba Mons in subsurface fractures.
Alba Mons is a gigantic shield volcano to the west.
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Screen capture from video of test failure in 2024.
Note the flame shooting out sideways.
The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg appears to finally be getting close to launching its RFA-1 rocket after a static fire test explosion in 2024 seriously delayed its plans.
Speaking to European Spaceflight in early February, Rocket Factory Augsburg CEO Prof. Dr. Indulis Kalnins, who replaced Dr. Stefan Tweraser in April 2025, explained that the rocket’s first stage is in the process of being transported from Augsburg in Germany to the launch site on Unst. The rocket’s upper stage, which has received upgrades to its single Helix engine and the associated control software, is expected to follow in the next few weeks.
On 10 February, the company announced that the new umbilical tower had been raised, standing at 52 metres high. The tower will support and stabilise the rocket and provide propellant, power, and data connections. The company has begun commissioning the repaired and upgraded launch pad. The only element still to be added is the water tanks for the water deluge system. Kalnins, however, stressed that the company is taking its time with all pre-flight testing.
It appears my speculation that the company had not yet received its launch licenses from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) was wrong. Those licenses were issued in January 2025, only five months after the static fire launchpad explosion. For the CAA to respond that quickly is quite surprising. Maybe it decided it shouldn’t kill a third rocket company trying to launch from the UK.
Right now the race to be the first orbital rocket launched from a European spaceport is coming down to Rocket Factory and its German competitor Isar Aerospace. Isar is gearing up to make its second attempt to launch its Spectrum rocket from Norway’s Andoya spaceport in March.
A man fishing off an uninhabited island in the Maldives discovered what appears to be pieces from the fairing used by India’s LVM3 rocket, also dubbed Bahubali, when it launched AST SpaceMobile’s sixth Bluebird satellite in December.
A similar discovery was made on December 28, 2025 in Sri Lanka. In both cases it is theorized that the material came from the fairings of the December Bahubali launch.
I am unable to determine the flight path of the Bluebird launch, but the location of this debris suggests it headed strongly south from India’s east coast spaceport. The fairing pieces then drifted south and west to reach the Maldives after two months.
SpaceX routinely recovers its fairing and resuses them, which due to the fairing’s basic shape has turned out to be relatively straightforward. They have the shape of a boat’s hull, and after parachuting softly down can simply float on the surface until they can be picked up. It is absurd no one else does this.
SpaceX in the early morning hours today successfully launched another 29 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its 10th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The 2026 launch race:
19 SpaceX
8 China
2 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
1 ULA
1 Europe (Arianespace)
As it did in both ’24 and ’25, SpaceX in ’26 so far has more launches than the entire rest of the world combined.
The Chinese pseudo-company rocket startup Ispace announced on February 13, 2026 that it has raised $729 million in new investment capital.
Beijing Interstellar Glory Space Technology Ltd., also known as iSpace, announced the D++ funding worth 5.037 billion yuan Feb. 12, following a D+ round of $98 million (700 million yuan) in September 2025. The round appears to be the largest disclosed funding round so far for a Chinese launch startup, eclipsing the previous rounds secured by Space Pioneer ($350 million) and Galactic Energy ($336 million) in 2025.
A press statement outlines a hybrid syndicate of numerous funding round participants, incgovernment industrial funds, state-linked strategic ecosystem investors, municipal and provincial investment vehicles and private equity. This follows a trend of strong strategic investment in space companies in China over the past couple of years since the central government identified commercial space as a strategic emerging industry and key driver of high-tech development. Co-leads Tongchuang Weiye and existing shareholder Jingming Capital represent market-oriented investors focused on advanced manufacturing and aerospace, and were joined by repeat backing from private equity players such as CDH Baifu and Ganquan Capital. [emphasis mine]
It is hard to determine how independent these Chinese investment firms are from the government. I suspect the communists are closely involved in some manner or another.
The press release made no mention of a timeline for when Ispace will attempt the first launch and recovery of its Hyperbola-3 rocket. It had previously targeted a 2025 launch, but that never happened.
SpaceX today successfully launched 24 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its 22nd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The 2026 launch race:
18 SpaceX
8 China
2 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
1 ULA
1 Europe (Arianespace)
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
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.
UPDATE: NASA posted a late update today describing vaguely the results of this fueling test, and revealed that while the test of the replacement seals appeared to go well, there were other problems:
During the test, teams encountered an issue with ground support equipment that reduced the flow of liquid hydrogen into the rocket. … Engineers will purge the line over the weekend to ensure proper environmental conditions and inspect the ground support equipment before replacing a filter suspected to be the cause of the reduced flow.
In other words, the SLS fueling system is like playing whack-a-mole. You fix one problem, and others show up.
I predicted this. It remains entirely possible NASA will not be able to complete a perfect full wet-dress rehearsal countdown in time to launch before April 6th, when this present launch window closes.
Original post:
———————-
NASA yesterday did an unannounced test fueling of its SLS rocket to check out the repairs in the fueling system.
NASA is loading liquid hydrogen aboard its Space Launch System moon rocket at the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday for an unpublicized but crucial test of the repairs made to a leaky umbilical that derailed a countdown rehearsal on Feb. 2.
The operation to load liquid hydrogen into the huge fuel tank on the rocket’s core stage was thought to be already underway at launch complex 39B on Thursday morning. The test will determine if new seals installed in the launch pad umbilical are working. “As part of our work to assess the repair we made in the area where we saw elevated hydrogen gas concentrations during the previous wet dress rehearsal, engineers are testing the new seals by running some liquid hydrogen across the interface and partially filling the core stage liquid hydrogen tank. The data will inform the timeline for our next wet dress rehearsal,” a NASA spokesperson said about the previously unannounced test.
If the new seals work on these fueling tests, another full dress rehearsal countdown could take place as early as next week.
Posting is going to very light for the rest of the day. I am fighting a bad head cold and just want to go back to bed.
The FAA today released [pdf] its final environmental assessment reviewing SpaceX’s request to expand operations of Starship/Superheavy at Boca Chica, confirming that it has determined there will be “no significant impact” to environment.
The 2022 PEA and April 2025 Tiered EA examined the potential for significant environmental impacts from Starship-Super Heavy launch operations at the Boca Chica Launch Site and defined the regulatory setting for impacts associated with Starship-Super Heavy. The areas evaluated for environmental impacts in this Tiered EA include noise and noise‐compatible land use; aviation emissions and air quality; hazardous materials, solid waste, and pollution prevention; and socioeconomics. In each of these areas, the FAA has concluded that no significant impacts would occur as a result of the Proposed Action.
The approval will allow SpaceX to do 25 launches per year (three of which are at night). The approval also appears to lay the groundwork for bringing Superheavy back not only to Boca Chica, but to Florida. It also lays the groundwork for bringing Starship back to Boca Chica after completing an orbital flight, to be caught by the tower chopsticks.
SpaceX early this morning successfully launched a new four-person crew to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its second flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The capsule, Freedom, will dock with ISS tomorrow. It is making its fifth flight.
The 2026 launch race:
17 SpaceX
8 China
2 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
1 ULA
1 Europe (Arianespace)
Axiom’s module assembly sequence
The space station Axiom today announced that it has raised another $350 million in private investment capital, in addition to the $100 million commitment obtained in December from the Hungarian communications company 4iG.
Type One Ventures and Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) co-led the round, with participation from 1789 Capital, 4iG, LuminArx Capital Management, and others. Axiom Space Founder and Executive Chairman Kam Ghaffarian also participated in the round, reinforcing his commitment to the company’s mission. J.P. Morgan served as sole placement agent to Axiom Space in connection with the financing.
It appears that even if the 2024 rumors that the company was having cash flow issues were true (they were never confirmed), those issues are now long gone.
Below is my revised rankings of the five American consortiums/companies developing space stations. The rankings haven’t changed, but I have updated the text.
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An evening pause: To celebrate the birthday today one of America’s greatest man, a short biography.
The video below does a really fine job in a very short time. Lincoln’s life was filled with heart-breaking tragedy, far more than most Americans today realize. Yet the man endured, so that he ended up changing his nation so that it finally honored fully its founding documents. As he said so eloquently in 1863:
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Vast’s full Haven-2 station once completed
NASA today announced that it has awarded the space station startup Vast its sixth slot for a manned commercial mission to ISS, scheduled for 2027.
The mission is expected to spend up to 14 days aboard the space station. A specific launch date will depend on overall spacecraft traffic at the orbital outpost and other planning considerations.
…Vast will submit four proposed crew members to NASA and its international partners for review. Once approved and confirmed, they will train with NASA, international partners, and SpaceX for their flight. The company has contracted with SpaceX as launch provider for transportation to and from the space station.
Vast already intends to fly four two-week missions to its single module Haven-1 demo station, scheduled to launch in the first quarter of 2027. This new ISS mission will demonstrate to NASA directly that Vast can handle manned missions. In both cases, the company is hoping its actions will convince NASA to award it a full construction contract to build its Haven-2 full-sized station, as shown in the graphic to the right.
Below are my rankings of the five private commercial space stations being developed. At this point the first three (Haven, Axiom, Starlab) are essentially tied, while the fourth (Thunderbird) is only trailing because it came late to the game. The fifth, Orbital Reef, seems practically out of the game.
» Read more
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.
