Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

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 seeks volunteers to passively track the first manned Orion mission around the Moon, presently scheduled for April 2026
  It appears NASA wishes to find out if commercial communications systems can do the same as its government network of antennas.

• French startup The Exploration Company’s Nyx cargo capsule passes initial ISS safety review
  The company is targeting its first cargo flight to ISS in 2028. Its longer range goal is to provide cargo and eventually manned service to the commercial stations that will follow. A successful docking in 2028 will strengthen its competitive position.

• German rocket startup Isar Aerospace secures launch agreements with European Space Agency
  The deal is for two smallsat launches beginning in 2026, and will depend on Isar first achieving a successful launch, having failed in its first attempt in March 2025.

• On this day in 1962, Mariner 2, the first successful mission to another planet, launched to Venus.

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.

• AT&T to Acquire Spectrum Licenses from EchoStar
  Jay: “This is not Spectrum the cable company, these are radio spectrum rights that EchoStar owns, and I would be surprised if old AT&T leases them out.”

• Blue Origin successfully completes static fire of the New Glenn 2nd stage

• Rocket Lab’s Neutron launch pad has been completed
  The company is still targeting the first Neutron launch before the end of this year.

• Firefly Aerospace gets Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) clearance to resume Alpha rocket launches
  This completes the investigation into the April launch failure.

• Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy signs agreement to launch Piesat’s satellites with its Ceres-2 solid-fueled rocket
  This is for Piesat’s Nuwa radar satellite constellation.

• RKK Energia, Russia’s prime contractor in human space flight, publicly admits that the company is in dire financial straits, with debt eating its budget, demotivated staff and obsolete processes
  The Russian invasion of the Ukraine cut Energia off from all its international customers. It no longer has any way to make money.

• On this day in 1999, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released its “First Light” image of Cassiopeia A

The past 24 hours SpaceX did more than complete its stunningly successful tenth launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket. The company also launched its Falcon 9 rocket twice from opposite coasts.

First it launched a commercial Earth observation satellite, built by the European company OHB Italia for Luxembourg, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 27th flight, landing back at Vandenberg..The launch also placed several smallsats in orbit as well.

Then this morning, ten hours after the Starship/Superheavy launch, another Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, placing another 28 Starlink satellites in orbit. The first stage completed its second flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

After including all three SpaceX launches, this is the leader board for the 2025 launch race:

107 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 107 to 84.

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.

• Astronomers discover dozens of new luminous quasars

• The Miura-5 rocket’s second-stage engine for the Spanish rocket startup PLD is now ready for qualification testing
  The company had been targeting the first launch of Miura-5 before the end of 2025. It appears that launch will likely slip to early 2026.

• On this day in 1989, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Neptune
  It passed within 3,000 miles of the planet, and to this day is still the only spacecraft to get a close look.

• On this day in 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope, the fourth in the Great Observatory program
  An infrared telescope, Spitzer was a precursor to the Webb Space Telescope. It was named after Lyman Spitzer, who conceived the Hubble Space Telescope and was central in getting it built.

Diane and I are on the road today, leaving the Grand Canyon, which remains as grand as ever, and heading to Colorado to visit friends we haven’t seen since before the COVID panic.

Thus, I will likely not be able to watch today’s third attempt by SpaceX to complete the tenth launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, as it happens.. (Live stream can be found here.)

Once settled in Colorado I will catch up. Like you all, I have my fingers crossed that the launch will go off as hoped with a largely successful test flight.

One fortunate thing that has occurred during the previous two launch attempts in the past two days is that it appears the protest of boats proposed by a Mexico radical activist group to block the launch has so appeared to be a bust. There has been no indication of any boats entering the launch range in the Gulf of Mexico, and if any have tried, it appears they have been removed quickly.

China today successfully launched another ten satellites for its Guowang internet constellation, its Long March 8A rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

This was the tenth launch for the Guowang constellation, which eventually intends to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink with a constellation of 13,000 satellites. Today’s launch brings the number of satellites presently in orbit to 82.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

104 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 104 to 84.

Both the Webb Space Telescope and the newer SPHEREx space telescopes have now been aimed by scientists at the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas.

According to the paper describing the Webb results, the comet’s coma is dominated by carbon dioxide gas.

The SPHEREx results [pdf] also show a strong signal of carbon dioxice in the coma, as well as a strong signal of water ice in its nucleus.

These results, along with all the observations by multiple other telescopes in space and on the ground, are in line with what is expected from a comet, with the kind of unique differences expected from each object. There is nothing seen so far from the data to suggest anything alien about it, despite the claims of some pubicity-seeking scientists who don’t even specialize in comet research.

The big scientific discovery here is that this interstellar comet is so much like comets that come from our own solar system. The implication is that other solar systems have great similarities to our own. .

The unmanned cargo Dragon that SpaceX launched on August 24, 2025 successfully docked with ISS earlier today.

At 7:05 a.m. EDT, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the forward port of the International Space Station’s Harmony module. The spacecraft carried over 5,000 pounds of scientific investigations and cargo to the orbiting laboratory on SpaceX’s 33rd commercial resupply services mission for NASA.

It will remained docked for the next several months.

The tenth orbial test flight of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket was scrubbed tonight due to bad weather.

The countdown got down to T-40 seconds before scrubbing. Mission control then ran the count down to T-10 to complete instead a full dress rehearsal countdown before fully scrubbing.

Expect them to try again tomorrow, though this has not yet been confirmed.

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.

• Amateur astronomer images the just launched X-37B
  He also captured a smallsat in the imagery.

• Billboard for new Chinese spaceport at Haiyang touts planned 4 land-based launchpads and 4 semi-floating pads off the coast
  This site on China’s northeast coast would give it more launch capacity without having to drop stages on their citizens’ heads.

• NASA reposts the spectacular images of the asteroid Dimorphos after its impact by DART, taken by the Italian LICIACube spacecraft as flew past the asteroid immediately thereafter
  The images found that 35.3 million pounds of rubble spewed from the asteroid.

• On this day in 2006, the IAU passed its idiotic new definition of a planet expressly designed to take that designation from Pluto
  Almost no planetary scientist agrees with that definition. They generally ignore it.

After losing all communications with Europe’s probe Juice on July 16th, on its way to Jupiter, engineers have finally re-established communications and found the spacecraft to be in sound condition.

Six attempts to steer the medium-gain antenna back towards Earth were unsuccessful. Recovery efforts continued overnight, lasting almost 20 hours and focusing on manually powering up Juice’s onboard communication systems.

Eventually, a command succeeded in reaching Juice and triggering a response. The command activated the signal amplifier that boosts the strength of the signal that Juice sends towards Earth. Contact was re-established, and Juice was found to be in excellent condition. No systems had failed, and all telemetry was nominal.

The root cause was traced to a software timing bug. The software function that switches the signal amplifier on and off relies on an internal timer. This timer is constantly counting up and restarts from zero once every 16 months. If the function happens to be using the timer at the exact moment it restarts, the amplifier remains switched off, and Juice’s signal is too weak to detect from Earth.

The spacecraft has a scheduled fly-by of Venus on August 31st, so regaining contact was critical. It has already done one Earth fly-by, with two more scheduled, before it arrives in Jupiter orbiter in July 2031.

India’s space agency this week successfully conducted a parachute drop test of its Gaganyaan manned capsule, planned for its first manned orbital mission in 2027.

ISRO has done smaller drop tests into a pool. This was the first by helicopter over the ocean.

The first unmanned Gaganyaan orbital test flight is targeting a December 2025 launch.

SpaceX last night successfully launched an unmanned Dragon cargo capsule to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its third flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The Dragon, carrying 5,000 pounds of cargo, will dock at ISS on August 25, 2025 in the early morning. During its mission at ISS it will also do a test engine burn to see if it can raise ISS’s orbit, the kind of orbital adjustments that have been routinely done by the Russian Progress freighters.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

104 SpaceX
47 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 104 to 83.

According to a whistle-blower, there has been financial misconduct in international management of the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) being built in remote western Australia.

In response to the disclosure, a copy of which has been seen by the Guardian, Zerbi has initiated an investigation into claims that public funds from member states have been lost through trading accounts – and then covered up by the organisation through the shuffling of funds internally.

At the centre of the misconduct allegations is a claim that at least £12m (A$25.1m) was lost through investment in three money market funds, with one fund allegedly losing 45% of its value. The Guardian has seen balance sheet extracts and statements that appear to confirm the investments by the SKAO, which is headquartered at the Jodrell Bank Observatory near Manchester.

The report also calls for an investigation into claims funds are being shifted within the organisation, and currency fluctuations being fabricated to conceal these losses from the governing council overseeing the project.

The project is significantly overbudget.

SKA management denies the alliegations, though it has at the same time begun its own investigation.

This corruption likely stems from the project’s international setup, which apparantly makes it “immune from normal legal processes and exempt from paying tax.” In addition, “international staff employed on the project in Australia are hired on diplomatic visas.” Under these conditions we should not be surprised if some hanky-panky with large sums of money took place.