Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra – O Magnum Mysterium
An evening pause: Peformed live July 2020. They minimize the appearance of the stupid social distancing by good camerawork.
April 6, 2026 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.
- Aer Lingus signs with Starlink to provide Wi-Fi on its planes
The airline expects full deployment on its entire fleet by early 2027.
- Ground-based video showing Orion 200,000 miles from Earth.
See how fast you can spot it.
- NASA stops work on SLS Mobile Launcher 2
No surprise. The whole project was a terrible waste of money, from day one. Kudos to Isaacman for finally killing it.
- On this day in 1972, Pioneer 11 launched on an Atlas Centaur rocket
It was the second spacecraft to fly by Jupiter and the first to fly past Saturn.
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
Cracked bedrock on Mars?
Click for full image.
For today’s cool image we return to Mars. The picture to the right, cropped and brightened to post here, was taken on December 3, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The focus of the picture was a strange crater in the floor of Mawrth Vallis, a channel that drains northward from Mars’ cratered southern highlands to its northern lowland plains. You can see the crater in the full image if you click on the picture. It is intriguing because its rim is strangely abrupt and flat on all sides, something that is not seen with impact craters, which have a raised rim of material plowed out by the impact.
In the picture to the right I have however focused on the two small 50-70-foot-high mesas and cracked ground that surrounds them. What struck me was the dry appearance of this landscape. Located at 23 degrees north latitude, it is in the dry tropics of Mars, where little near surface ice is found. The cracks emphasize this conclusion, as they so well resemble the cracks you see in dried mud on Earth.
» Read more
Orion completes small mid-course-correction engine burn as it prepares to swing around behind the Moon
The Moon as seen by Orion’s astronauts on April 4th, cropped
and reduced to post here. Click for original image.
NASA’s manned Orion capsule last night completed small mid-course-correction engine burn to refine the spacecraft’s trajectory around the Moon and back to Earth.
Mission control teams in Houston and the Artemis II crew completed an outbound correction burn to refine the Orion spacecraft’s trajectory to the Moon. The burn began at 11:03 p.m. EDT and lasted 17.5 seconds. NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, continue on a precise path to flyby the Moon on Monday, April 6.
The lunar fly-by is scheduled for this evening. As the capsule swings around behind the Moon, there will be a communications black-out from 6:44 pm (Eastern) to 7:25 pm (Eastern). NASA is making a concerted PR effort to compare this to the Apollo 8 mission around the Moon, but the differences are gigantic. Apollo 8 went into orbit around the Moon. There was considerable risk it could get stuck there if its engine failed to fire properly when behind the Moon on its last orbit. Thus, that Apollo 8 blackout was quite tension-filled.
Orion’s fly-around is instead completely benign. They aren’t going into orbit, and they are already on their path back to Earth. There will be no extra element of risk as they fly behind the Moon. All they will be doing is coast along, as they have been doing since leaving Earth orbit. They will simply be out of touch for about 40 minutes.
I sadly remain personally bored by this mission. It is is testing relatively little new engineering for future use, and is mostly designed as a PR stunt to convince everyone that “NASA is back!” Hardly. The capabilities of SLS and Orion are extremely limited, and both are ungodly expensive. Neither will make possible any colonization of the solar system. All they do is act as a jobs program for government employees.
And there still remains this mission’s biggest moment of danger, re-entry and splashdown, using Orion’s questionable heat shield that did not behave properly on its only previous unmanned mission in 2022.
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.
Japan’s lunar lander startup Ispace wins contract with Korean rover startup
Artist rendering of Ispace’s Ultra lunar lander
The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace has won a new customer for its next attempt to soft-land on the Moon, with the South Korean startup Unmanned Exploration Laboratory (UEL) signing a contract to put its proposed two-wheeled rover on that mission.
Under the terms of the agreement, the UEL rover will be integrated as a commercial payload on ispace’s ULTRA lunar lander for Mission 3, currently scheduled to launch in 2028. The mission would mark the first Korean rover to explore the Moon’s surface and underscores the growing commercial collaboration between Japan and Korea in the aerospace industry.
Mission 3 will serve as the inaugural flight for ispace’s ULTRA lunar lander.
Ispace so far has a very mixed record. It has successfully gotten two landers to the Moon, but both failed just before landing. It has also recently had to delay its lander mission for NASA because it had to replace the lander’s engine, the previous engine found to be inadequate.
Ultra is Ispace’s new larger lander design, intended to fly on all future missions. It remains untested in flight. The company presently has lander contracts for the following missions:
- 2028: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
- 2029: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Space Strategy Fund (designed at encouraging the private space sector
- 2030: NASA’s mission, being built in partnership with the American company Draper
At the moment, everything about Ispace remains tentative. It needs to finally land something on the Moon to truly establish itself.
Japanese rocket startup Interstellar gets another $47 million grant from Japan
The Japanese rocket startup Interstellar last week announced it has been awarded a new $47 million grant from Japan’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, in addition to the $53 million awarded in earlier grants.
The SBIR is a 3-phased governmental program aimed to promote the implementation of advanced technologies developed by startups in Japan. Interstellar was selected in September 2023 under the space section focused on the “Development and Demonstration of Private Launch Vehicles”, a project spanning for 5 years, from September 2023 to March 2028. After being selected as one of the four participating companies, Interstellar became one of three companies to pass the Phase 1 review in September 2024.
In this latest round, Interstellar is one of only two companies to pass, moving into the 3rd and final phase, which includes flight demonstration. Including the funds of the previous phases the total amount has reached a maximum of 15.4 billion JPY ( 98.97 million USD).
The company has also raised a little under $130 million in private investment capital, and has also signed contracts placing seven satellites on the first launch of its proposed Zero rocket. That launch was originally supposed to occur in 2025, but did not. No new launch date has been set, though this new grant suggests the company is getting close, though I also doubt it will occur in 2026.
At the moment Japan has no launch capability, as the two rockets controlled by its space agency JAXA are both grounded due to launch failures. It has several startups trying to build their own rockets, but none has succeeded as yet. The only one to attempt a launch, Space One, has tried three times to reach orbit with its Kairos rocket, all failures.
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
Avio delays next Vega-C launch due to “technical issue”
The Italian rocket company Avio announced yesterday that is has postponed the May 9, 2026 launch of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Smile solar wind spacecraft due to “a technical issue” discovered by a subcontractor in a component used by the Vega-C rocket.
The press release provided little information:
The launch of the Smile satellite has been postponed, due to a technical issue occurred on a subsystem component production line after VV29 launcher integration. Additional investigations are needed to exclude any relation between such issue and the VV29 launcher in order to safeguard flightworthiness. The new launch date will be announced following the completion of these activities, as agreed with the supplier.
This launch will be the first entirely managed by Avio since it regained control of its rockets from ESA’s Arianespace division. The rocket itself was grounded for two years in 2023 and 2024 due to nozzle issues. It has since flown four times successfully.
ULA launches 29 Leo satellites for Amazon
ULA early this morning successfully placed 29 Leo satellites for Amazon’s internet constellation, its Atlas-5 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida.
This was the heaviest Atlas-5 payload so far launched by ULA, and ULA’S fifth launch for Amazon’s Leo constellation, which now has 241 satellites in orbit, out of the 1,616 it needs to launch by July to meet its FCC license requirement. Because it is not expected to meet that requirement, the company has asked for a time extension, which the FCC is presently considering.
ULA is in the process of retiring the Atlas-5 rocket. It now has only nine Atlas-5 rocket left in stock, with three reserved for Leo launches and six for Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule (though there is a good chance some if not all of the Starliner launches will be switched to other payloads).
This was also ULA’s second launch in 2026, which means the leader board for the 2026 launch race remains unchanged:
41 SpaceX
16 China
5 Rocket Lab
5 Russia
SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.
Diana Damrau – Queen of the Night
An evening pause: From Mozart’s The Magic Flute, performed by the Royal Opera. If the closed captions are off, turn them on, as they provide a translation.
As “the fat lady” has now sung, we can go off and enjoy the weekend.
Hat tip Blair Ivey.
April 3, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more
Voyager-2’s most detailed look at Neptune’s moon Triton
Click for original image.
Today we conclude our tour of the Voyager-2 fly-bys of Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989 with what is the most detailed look at the alien surface of Neptune’s moon Triton, taken on August 25, 1989 and shown to the right, cropped, rotated, reduced, and sharpened to post here.
Taken from a distance of only 25,000 miles, the frame is about 140 miles across and shows details as small as [a half mile in width]. Most of the area is covered by a peculiar landscape of roughly circular depressions separated by rugged ridges. This type of terrain, which covers large tracts of Triton’s northern hemisphere, is unlike anything seen elsewhere in the solar system. The depressions are probably not impact craters: They are too similar in size and too regularly spaced. Their origin is still unknown, but may involve local melting and collapse of the icy surface.
A conspicuous set of grooves and ridges cuts across the landscape, indicating fracturing and deformation of Triton’s surface. The rarity of impact craters suggests a young surface by solar system standards, probably less than a few billion years old.
What this photograph as well as the handful of other Voyager-2 images of Triton tell us is that we only have gotten a tiny taste of what’s there, only enough to tell us we don’t understand what we are seeing in the slightest. This is a truly alien world, cold, dark, and composed of materials far different then that found in the inner solar system. Its formation is a mystery, and its subsequent geological history a cypher. Scientists have made some guesses, but to get a real understanding we need to go back, and be there for a long time.
In fact, this is the final conclusion of all of the Voyager-2 images from both Uranus and Neptune. That probe gave humanity its first good close look at these distant worlds, but the look was still a quick and very superficial one. The images and data left us with far more questions than answers.
Unfortunately, there is at present no mission approved and under development to go to either Uranus or Neptune, though several have been proposed. Thus, it will likely be at least two decades before any mission gets there, if that soon.
SpaceX delays next Starship/Superheavy orbital test flight by about a month
According to a tweet by Elon Musk today, the 12th orbital test flight of Starship/Superheavy is not going to happen in mid-April as previously hoped.
Instead, it is now pushed back to early to mid-May.
Next flight of Starship and first flight of V3 ship & booster is 4 to 6 weeks away.
In his tweet, “V3” refers to the third version of both Starship and Superheavy, incorporating many upgrades learned from the first eleven test flights. Version three will also be the first to use SpaceX’s Raptor-3 engine, the most powerful rocket engine ever built but with a much simplified design.
It is not clear what has caused this delay. The last test flight was in October 2025, which means there will be eight month gap between test launches, a much longer gap than desired by the company. Part of the delay was because the company was building a whole new launchpad for the rocket. Also, there were two tank failures during static fire tests of Superheavy that needed investigation and as well as pad repairs.
Still, time is marching on. SpaceX needs to launch this rocket, and begin doing it at a much faster pace. It can no longer complain about red tape, as under Trump that issue has been squashed quite effectively.