Boeing announces a new round of layoffs related to its SLS NASA contract

9:02 am

Boeing yesterday announced that it will layoff another 71 employees in connection with its SLS NASA contract, based on rumored changes in NASA’s entire Artemis lunar program, including the increasingly real possibility that SLS will be canceled entirely by the new Trump administration.

The defense contractor was already in the midst of reducing its workforce, including in Alabama. But today, the company told AL.com that changes to its contract with NASA to develop the Space Launch System program sparked the need for some of the 71 layoffs. “As Boeing and NASA continue to finalize contract revisions for Boeing’s work on the Space Launch System program, we have successfully mitigated a majority of the previously announced workforce reductions,” a Boeing spokesperson said in an email to AL.com.

The news article at the link actually suggests that the total number of layoffs is now half that predicted by the company a few weeks ago, so it remains very unclear if these layoffs are because NASA is considering cancelling SLS, or because Boeing is simply shifting SLS management from development (which requires more people) to routine operations.

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The uncertainty of science: Astronomers keep changing the odds of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting the Earth in 2032

8:53 am

In the past three days three different reports from both NASA and the European Space Agency have given three different percentages for the chances that asteroid 2024 YR4 will hit the Earth in 2032.

On Tuesday, NASA calculated that the space rock had a 3.1% chance of hitting Earth in 2032, while the European Space Agency’s risk assessment sits at 2.8%.

The narrow difference is due to the two agencies’ use of different tools for determining the asteroid’s orbit and modeling its potential impact. But both percentages rise above the 2.7% chance of collision once associated with an asteroid discovered in 2004 called Apophis, making 2024 YR4 the most significant space rock to be spotted within the past two decades.

However, another update shared by NASA on Wednesday showed that 2024 YR4 has a 1.5% chance of colliding with Earth in December 2032, based on new observations now that the full moon has passed. Astronomers have anticipated that such fluctuations are possible as they gather more observational data.

While the media has generally focused mostly on the higher numbers in their knee-jerk “We’re all gonna die” approach to everything, all these different numbers simply illustrate is the generally limited nature of our data about the asteroid’s orbit and its future path. For example because such asteroids are so small, it isn’t just gravity that influences their flight path through the solar system. The Sun’s light pressure can actually have an impact, but to determine how much you need to know the exact size, shape, and rotation of the object. Right now 2024 YR4’s size is estimated to range from 130 to 320 feet in width, determining this effect is presently impossible. Nor is this the only such variable.

At the same time, the data continues to suggest that the chances of this asteroid hitting the Earth are not trivial. The sooner we can find out everything about it the better. Getting a mission to it quickly would be the best way, but so far I have heard little from NASA or anyone about such an idea.

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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, any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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.


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

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.

February 19, 2025 Quick space links

3:51 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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Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space appears to have finally gotten its launch license

3:29 pm

Australian commercial spaceports
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.

According to two news reports (here and here) as well as an update today on the company’s website, the Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space has gotten its last government approval allowing it to finally do the first orbital test launch of its Eris rocket from its private Bowen launch site on the east coast of Australia.

Though the company has not yet announced a launch date, the news reports and previous announcements suggest it will occur in late March. This document [pdf] provides excellent details about the launch, including the range limitations and flight path. No live stream will be provided on this first launch attempt.

I expect more information to be announced either later today or tomorrow. If this is confirmed, it will have been a long time coming. Gilmour first applied for its launch license in April 2022, with the intention of launching that year. Unfortunately, Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) appears as slow and as difficult to work with as the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority. It took CASA almost three years to issue this license (assuming it has been issued). With that kind of red tape, I don’t know how Gilmour is going to become profitable. It certainly can’t wait three years between each launch.

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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

The broken edge of Mars’ largest volcanic ash field

12:54 pm

The broken edge of Mars' largest volcanic ash field
Click for original image.

Overview map

Cool image time! The picture above, reduced and rotated to place north to the left, was taken on November 5, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labeled it “Stepped Features in Tartarus Skopulus”. The white dot on the overview map to the right marks the location, right at the equator on the northern edge of the Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash field on Mars, about the size of the subcontinent of India. As I wrote in a post in 2024:

It is believed that most of the planet’s dust comes from this ash field. It is also evident that the ash is a leftover from the time period more than a billion years ago when the giant volcanoes that surround this field were erupting regularly. The eruptions laid down vast flood lava plains that coat the surface for thousands of miles.

The ash either came from the eruptions themselves, or was created as the thin Martian wind eroded those flood lava plains, slowly stripping ash from the top. The ash then gathered within the black-outlined regions on the map.

In that 2024 post the cool image showed another location on the north edge of Medusae. In that case the prevailing wind had carved long parallel ridges as it pulled ash from the field.

Here, the wind appears to play no part, or if it did, it produced a very different terrain. At first glance it appears the stepped terraces formed as the ash field began to slide downhill to the north, spreading to crack along the curved lines. The inset especially suggests this explanation.

A closer look instead suggests these terraces each represent a different layer of ash placed down by a sequence of eruptions. Over time the prevailing winds, which here appear to generally blow to the south, stripped off the top of each layer, creating this stair-step landscape.

I however have no guess as to why the terraces are curved. Regardless, it is all strange, but quite beautiful in its own way.

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Alaskan spaceport sues insurance company over delayed rocket clean-up claims

11:06 am

The Alaskan spaceport in Kodiak has now sued the insurance company of the rocket startup ABL (now out of the orbital rocket business) because it has not responded to the spaceport’s claims for cleaning up the mess caused by a failed static fire engine test.

According to the spaceport, the cost of the damages and cleanup totals about $3.1 million.

The corporation claims ABL Space Systems was required to carry insurance that covered the spaceport, and had a policy for up to $50 million through the U.S. Aircraft Insurance Group (USAIG) to cover the damages.

But after sending three emails to USAIG asking for a copy of its policy and status on a filed claim, which allegedly existed but was never confirmed by the insurance group, Alaska Aerospace’s lawyer Cook with Birch Horton Bittner & Cherot sent a final follow up email last month on Jan. 8.

Having still not gotten a response, the spaceport has now sued. Delays and suits like this are not unusual in the insurance business, because insurance companies often stall when it comes to paying out large claims.

The failure during the static fire test was the final blow in ABL’s effort to enter the orbital launch market. After one failed launch and this static fire test failure it abandoned the market to instead focus on building missiles for the military.

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Musk: Biden delayed the return of Starliner’s astronauts “for political reasons”

10:06 am

During a television interview with President Trump, Elon Musk suggested that the reason the two Starliner astronauts have been forced to remain on ISS for months was because of a political decision by the Biden administration last year.

The billionaire SpaceX CEO said his company was “accelerating the return of the astronauts” as per Trump’s instructions. Musk then appeared to take a shot at the Biden administration, saying the move was “postponed kind of to a ridiculous degree,” before the president chimed in saying “they got left in space.”

When Hannity pointed out the astronauts have been on the ISS for almost 300 days instead of the planned 8 days, Trump simply said “Biden,” before Musk claimed they were “left up there for political reasons, which is not good.”

While the decision to return Starliner unmanned certainly had a political component (a desire to avoid a disaster in the final year of Biden’s term), Musk’s claim is greatly exaggerated. Worse, Musk is papering over his own company’s contribution to the delays. Had SpaceX and NASA chosen in December to use an already existing Dragon capsule instead of a brand new capsule to launch the next crew to ISS, the astronauts would be home already. Instead, they decided to get that new capsule ready, requiring an almost two month delay in their return.

When it became obvious last month that even this extra time was insufficient to get the new capsule ready, only then did SpaceX and NASA choose to switch capsules. That switch allowed them to move up the return date by about a week.

In reporting Musk’s words here, our ignorant press has generally left these details out, allowing both Musk and Trump to make it appear as they are saviors for these poor astronauts. This is simply not true. SpaceX is certainly making it possible to bring them home (something Boeing was unable to do), but it also contributed to the delay in doing so.

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New data from Webb shows the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole flares multiple times per day

9:47 am

The magnetic field lines surrounding Sagittarius A*
The magnetic field lines surrounding Sagittarius A*,
published in March 2024. Click for original image.

Though past research had shown that the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole, dubbed Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star) is generally quiet and inactive, new data from the Webb Space Telescope gathered over a year’s time now shows that it flares multiple times per day.

Throughout the year, the team saw how the black hole’s accretion disk emitted 5 to 6 large flares per day, of varying lengths and brightnesses, plus smaller flares in between. “[Sagittarius A*] is always bubbling with activity and never seems to reach a steady state,” Yusef-Zadeh says. “We observed the black hole multiple times throughout 2023 and 2024, and we noticed changes in every observation. We saw something different each time, which is really remarkable. Nothing ever stayed the same.”

In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the team outlines two possible ideas for the processes driving these flares. The faint flickers may be caused by turbulent fluctuations in the accretion disk, which could compress plasma and trigger a burst of radiation. “It’s similar to how the sun’s magnetic field gathers together, compresses and then erupts a solar flare,” Yusef-Zadeh says. “Of course, the processes are more dramatic because the environment around a black hole is much more energetic and much more extreme.”

The larger and brighter flares, on the other hand, may be caused by two fast-moving magnetic fields colliding and releasing accelerated particles. These magnetic reconnection events also have a solar parallel.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. Though this research shows unexpected activity, that activity is still relatively mild compared to other central supermassive black holes in many other galaxies. Why this difference exists remains an unanswered question.

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SaveRGV drops lawsuit against SpaceX’s Boca Chica operations

9:29 am

SaveRGV, one of several fringe activist groups that has been using lawfare to try to shut down SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy operations in Boca Chica, suddenly announced yesterday that it has dropped a lawsuit against the company that claimed the potable water released in the launchpad deluge system during launches polluted the wetlands there.

Save RGV board member Jim Chapman said they dropped the lawsuit because the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality [TCEQ], the state’s environmental agency, granted SpaceX a permit that “moots” their lawsuit. “We think we’re right,” Chapman said in a phone interview. “We just didn’t feel like [the lawsuit] was going to move in a positive direction for us.”

According to the article at the first link above, SaveRGV and its partner fringe groups have filed a different lawsuit against TCEQ, challenging its decision to issue SpaceX that permit.

When TCEQ issued the permit last week, I wondered if the lawfare of these groups would begin to fade away because their funding is now drying up because of the Trump’s DOGE team effort to shut down the laundering of money illegally to such groups by many agencies in the executive branch. SaveRGV’s decision yesterday, only days after TCEQ’s decision, makes me think my theory might have some merit. It could be it no longer has funds to pay its lawyers for multiple lawsuits, and has decided to focus on one for the time being. Only time will tell.

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ULA & Northrop Grumman complete static fire test of Vulcan strap-on booster

9:13 am

As part of its investigation into the loss of a strap-on booster nozzle during the second launch of ULA’s Vulcan rocket in October 2024, ULA and Northrop Grumman on February 13, 2025 successfully completed a static fire test of another strap-on booster.

The test was also apparently done in order to convince the Space Force to certify Vulcan for military launches. The Pentagon originally required Vulcan to complete two launches before certification, something that second launch achieved despite the loss of the nozzle. It has held off that certification however, insisting on more information into the nozzle loss.

The investigation has scrambled ULA’s planned launch schedule. The company had hoped after the second certification launch to fly two Space Force commercial launches before the end of 2024. Both launches were pushed back into 2025, so much so that ULA has been forced to de-stack a Vulcan rocket so it can instead do an Atlas-5 launch first, carrying the first set of Amazon’s Kuiper satellites.

Whether the results of this static fire test will satisfy the military is at present unknown. No details about the test were revealed, other than the companies were studying the results.

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SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites; landing first stage on drone ship in the Bahamas

4:35 pm

SpaceX today successfully placed 23 Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The rocket’s two fairings completed their 14th and 22nd flight respectively. The first stage completed its 16th flight, landing on a drone ship off the coast of the Bahamas, near Exumas. That landing was the first ever to land in territory of another country. SpaceX negotiated rights to do so from the Bahamas to give it more orbital options launching from Florida.

The 2025 launch race:

21 SpaceX
7 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab

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February 18, 2025 Quick space links

3:25 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.

  • By today NASA’s workforce will shrink by 10%
    The layoffs are as per Trump’s order to lay off all new provisional employees, plus the 750 or so who accepted the buy offer. The article is another example of the media wailing over a staffing reduction that private companies do all the time, usually to the benefit of the company.
  • South Africa rejects Starlink
    Actually, Starlink had already rejected South Africa, partly because of its racist policies confiscating land from whites, and partly because the government there was demanding an exorbitant share of Starlink’s profits.
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Blue Ghost lowers its lunar orbit while shooting a movie of the Moon

3:12 pm

The company Firefly announced that its lunar lander Blue Ghost successfully completed 3:18 minute engine burn that tightened its orbit around the Moon.

This maneuver moved the lander from a high elliptical orbit to a much lower elliptical orbit around the Moon. Shortly after the burn, Blue Ghost captured incredible footage of the Moon’s far side, about 120 km above the surface.

I have embedded the movie below. Quite spectacular indeed. The spacecraft is still on target for a March 2, 2025 landing attempt.
» Read more

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Another “What the heck?” image on Mars, this time a mystery on both small and large scales

12:16 pm

What the heck?
Click for the original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

In this case however the camera team picked this spot probably to satisfy their own curiosity. This same location was photographed by MRO back in July 2022, and they were likely wondering if the streaks coming off these dark spots had changed at all in the subsequent years.

As far as I can tell, there has been no significant change, though the highest resolution versions of these images might show more.

The geology in the picture itself is very puzzling. At first glance the dark streaks appear to have been caused by wind blowing the dust from the dark spots. At second glance this doesn’t work, as large dark areas do not appear to be linked to those dark spots.

What is going on here?
» Read more

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ISRO’s head touts private construction of PSLV rocket

9:35 am

In comments published in the Times of India today, the head of India’s space agency ISRO, V Narayanan, enthusiastically touted the fact that a private consortium is presently manufacturing its first PSLV rocket under a five-rocket contract.

Isro chairman V Narayanan revealed this in an exclusive interview to TOI and said the launch, scheduled for the third quarter of this year, will mark a milestone as the first PSLV manufactured by the private sector under a contract for five rockets. The vehicle is in “advanced stages of realisation” with Isro providing technical guidance to the industrial partners.

Sounds good, eh? Actually, this instead appears to be an attempt by ISRO to thwart the Modi government’s desire to transfer ownership of ISRO’s rockets, starting with the long established PSLV rocket, from ISRO to the private sector. This five-rocket deal, first signed in 2022, doesn’t transfer anything. All it does is have private companies build the rocket, something that ISRO has had private companies do for decades. The one difference is that ISRO is no longer listed as the prime contractor, and appears to be somewhat less involved in management.

Well, it is at least a start. Getting government bureaucracies to give up power can sometimes be a struggle that lasts years, unless you are Donald Trump arriving for a second term disgusted with that same struggle during his first term.

The launch, targeting the third quarter of this year, will place a collection of tecnology test payloads into orbit.

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SpaceX engineers given task to review FAA air traffic operations

9:14 am

On February 16, 2025 the new head of the Department of Transportation revealed that he had invited SpaceX to review its air traffic control operations in Virginia and make recommendations.

Tomorrow, members of @elonmusk’s SpaceX team will be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in VA to get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.

Because I know the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon’s team is getting special access, let me make clear that the @FAANews regularly gives tours of the command center to both media and companies.

Many propaganda news reports immediately did exactly what Duffy predicted, quickly finding people to attack both Musk and Duffy for this action and giving them a bull horn for those attacks:

That prompted criticism from some aviation professionals. “SpaceX put people in danger yesterday and their for-profit corporation should reimburse every other for-profit corporation that had to divert, change course or delay because of their operations in the national airspace system,” wrote Steve Jangelis, aviation safety chair for the Air Line Pilots Association, in a social media post after the incident.

Like many in the propaganda press, this article made a big deal about the debris that fell in the Caribbean during the January Starship/Superheavy test flight when Starship broke up soon after stage separation. It however buried this fact to the very end of the article:

In the case if January’s launch, Diez said SpaceX coordinated “debris response areas” with ATO [the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization] beforehand, as it had done on past flights, but this was the first time the areas were activated. “It was only a matter of minutes from when it was activated to when airspace began to be cleared,” she said, sufficient given the time it would take for debris to fall into the airspace. The airspace was cleared in about 15 minutes, she added.

Those debris response areas are developed in coordination with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, said Katie Cranor, acting deputy director of AST’s office of operational safety, on the same panel. After the mishap, she said “only certain sections of the debris response areas were activated to allow traffic to still move freely.”

To put it more bluntly, SpaceX did the proper due diligence before launch — anticipating the possibility of such a failure — and worked well with the FAA to prepare for it. These facts have been conveniently left out of all the reports on that January launch, and we should at least give kudos to this article for finally mentioning it, albeit reluctantly.

Nonetheless, the insane hostile reaction to this invitation for help by the Transportation Department illustrates once again the stupidity of the left. In every case they attack blindly and without any thought at all, hoping such attacks will win them support and hurt their opponents. Instead, it simply makes them look petty and stupid, and is likely convincing their moderate supporters to rethink that support.

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February 17, 2025 Quick space links

5:26 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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With CBS helping him, under no condition should Trump settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the network

4:37 pm

Lying lefist propaganda, through and through
Lying lefist propaganda, through and through

Don’t settle! In the fall Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS News, alleging the network interfered with the election by maliciously editing a 60 Minutes interview with vice president Kamala Harris to hide and improve her incoherent word salad answers, and it did so to aid her just days before the election. In February, when the actual transcripts of the interview were released, proving CBS’s misconduct, Trump expanded the lawsuit to include CBS News’s parent company, Paramount Global, which streamed the program.

Though some might argue the lawsuit rests on weak legal grounds, it seems that Trump’s complaint has some merit, especially since the leftist bias of the older alphabet news outlets (CBS, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, PBS) has become so obvious in the past decade. These networks no longer even try to report the news fairly or with any accuracy. Instead, they twist every story to either promote the Democratic Party or slander the Republican Party.

That bias has caused these networks a lot of trouble in the courts in recent years, when others have sued them for defamation and slander. » Read more

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Glacial material even in Mars’ Death Valley

12:23 pm

Glacial material even in Mars' Death Valley
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 25, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this a “layered feature,” which is appropriately vague in order to not prematurely push a conclusion that is not yet proven. Extensive orbital imagery and data however strongly suggests the layers inside this crater are glacial in nature, each layer laid down during Mars’ many thousands of climate cycles as the planet’s rotational tilt swung back and forth from 11 degrees to 60 degrees. According to the most popular theory today, when that tilt was high, the mid-latitudes (where this 3,000-foot-wide unnamed crater is located) were actually colder than the planet’s poles. The water ice at the icecaps would then migrate from the poles to the mid-latitudes, causing the glaciers to grow.

When the tilt was low the process would reverse, with the mid-latitudes now warmer than the poles, causing the glaciers to shrink. The wedding cake nature of these layers is likely because, over time, Mars has steadily lost its total budget of water to space, so with each cycle the glacier could not grow as much.

Though many such glacial-filled craters have been found in the mid-latitudes, reinforcing these theories, the location of this crater is even more interesting.
» Read more

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British rocket startup Skyrora targets ’26 for its first orbital test flight

10:06 am

According to an article yesterday in the British media, the British rocket startup Skyrora is now hoping to do the first orbital test flight of its XL smallsat rocket in 2026, launching from the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands.

The company applied for this launch license with the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) more than a year ago, but still waits an approval. Previously the company had completed in Iceland several successful suborbital test launches in 2018 and 2020, with a last test in 2022 ending in failure.

The company has been around a long time, with relatively little progress. Whether its schedule is realistic remains unknown, and is more questionable because it is burdened by the CAA’s red tape.

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ESA astronaut with no right leg cleared by medical board to fly to ISS

9:47 am

An international medical board has now cleared ESA astronaut John McFall to fly on a future long-duration mission to ISS, despite the fact that his right leg had been lost due to a motorcycle accident when he was nineteen and wears a prosthesis.

He is the first person with such a disability to be medically approved to train for missions to the station. “John is today certified as an astronaut who can fly on a long-duration mission on the International Space Station, and I think this is an incredible step ahead in our ambition to broaden the access to society to space,” Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of human and robotic exploration, said at a briefing to announce the certification.

ESA selected McFall as part of an astronaut class announced in 2022. That selection process included an effort by ESA to pick what it called at the time a “parastronaut” to see if people with some physical disabilities could safely fly to space.

This is actually a great idea. As one Russia astronaut once said to me, “The legs are mostly useless in weightlessness.” Testing to see how McFall does on a six-month mission will tell us whether the weightlessness environment is a good one for people who can’t walk, as has been theorized for decades.

At the moment McFall has not yet been assigned to any scheduled flight. He joins a class of twelve astronauts selected by ESA in 2022. He is also being considered as a possible astronaut on a proposed all-British tourist flight that Axiom is considering flying.

It is unfortunate that the racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies of the past decade poison this decision. I am certain many will assume McFall’s future flight will be done just for those reasons, and thus will discount it.

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Starlab space station wins $15 million grant from Texas

9:26 am

the proposed Starlab space station
the proposed Starlab space station

Among the grants awarded last week by the new Texas Space Commission, the consortium building the Starlab space station received a $15 million grant to build a facility in Texas.

The Systems Integration Lab will include two labs, the main SIL and a Software Verification Facility. The SIL will house flight-like hardware for testing. In this environment, engineers and astronauts can check systems designed for the Starlab space station, catching any potential issues in advance and ensuring efficient and effective operations in space. The SVF will contain a simulated station environment with flight computers and serve as the primary software integration and requirements verification facility.

Starlab is one of four space stations presently being developed. Starlab had already received a $217.5 million design contract from NASA, as part of the agency’s phase one program to eventually develop two private commercial space stations to replace ISS. NASA also awarded similar development contracts, to Axiom for its Axiom station that will initially be docked to ISS, and to the Orbital Reef station proposal, led by a consortium of companies that includes Blue Origin and Sierra Space.

A fourth company, Vast, did not compete for that phase 1 contract. Instead, it has privately funded its first single modular station, Haven-1, which it is now aiming for a spring 2026 launch. All four station projects are competing to win NASA’s much larger phase 2 contract awards, which will only go to two of these four proposals. At present, this is how I rank their chances:

  • Haven-1, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company is moving fast, with Haven-1 to launch and be occupied in 2026 for a 30 day mission. It hopes this actual hardware and manned mission will put it in the lead to win NASA’s phase 2 contract, from which it will build its much larger mult-module Haven-2 station..
  • Axiom, being built by Axiom, has also launched three tourist flights to ISS. There are rumors it is experiencing cash flow issues, but it is also going to do a fourth ISS tourist flight this spring, carrying passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland.
  • Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Though Blue Origin has apparently done little, Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building the station’s modules for launch.
  • Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman.

Of all these projects, Starlab appears to have cut the least amount of hardware, which is why I rank it last. At the same time, this grant from Texas is some positive news. In addition, it has partnered aggressively with the European Space Agency (ESA), and appears to have its support for making the station Europe’s ISS replacement. If so, even if it doesn’t win NASA’s phase 2 award it might instead get ESA to fund it. That Europe’s biggest aerospace company Airbus is now one of its major partners clearly helps.

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Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander completes lunar flyby in preparation for entering lunar orbit

10:00 am

The Resilience lunar lander, built by the Japanese startup Ispace and launched in January on the same Falcon 9 rocket as Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, has now completed its closest flyby of the Moon as it prepares to enter lunar orbit sometimes in early May.

The spacecraft is actually still in Earth orbit, but with a apogee that is almost 700,000 miles out, or almost three times the distance of the Moon’s orbit. Once Ispace’s engineers have gotten a precise track of this orbit they will then determine the exact parameters of the engine burn in May that will place Resilience in lunar orbit.

This is Ispace’s second attempt to place a lander on the Moon. The first, Hakuto-R1, came close, but crashed in Atlas Crater (see the map in my previous post) when, at an altitude of several kilometers, its software thought it was only a few feet above the surface and shut the engines off.

Most of the instruments on Resilience are either symbolic or engineering experiments to observe the lander’s operations. It is however carrying a small rover, dubbed Tenacious, which will attempt to travel on the surface.

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