Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman

New spaceport proposed in India independent of its space agency ISRO

January 20, 2026 8:02 am Robert Zimmerman

The existing and proposed spaceports in India

According to the chief minister of the Andhra Pradesh province of India, his government is presently in discussions with the private Indian energy company Greenko Group about establishing a partnership to build a commercial spaceport at Hope Island off the coast near the city of Kakinada.

Addressing the gathering of foreign investors in renewable energies and officials of the State government after performing ‘bhumi puja’ [ground-breaking] for the Green Hydrogen and Green Ammonia Production Complex in Kakinada, Mr. Naidu said, “Soon, we (Andhra Pradesh) will launch satellites from the Hope Island. It will come soon, and Kakinada will have a lot of advantages in the field of technology and innovation.”

“The Greenko Group is evincing interest in being a part of the State government’s Space City project that includes developing satellite launching facility. In a recent interaction, Greenko Founder and Group CEO Anil Kumar Chalamalsetty has shown interest in the Space City project on the Hope Island,” said Mr. Naidu.

The location has advantages over the Sriharikota spaceport, run by India’s space agency ISRO, which on polar orbital launches needs to use extra fuel to avoid flying over Sri Lanka to the south. This issue is one of the reasons ISRO is presently building that second spaceport to the south for its SSLV rocket.

If privately run, this new spaceport will have other advantages. It will possibly attract some of India’s new rocket startups, who will avoid some of the bureaucracy that accompanies any dealings with ISRO. ISRO launches always involve a gigantic number of government personnel, a cost these startups can’t afford. This new Hope Island spaceport might avoid these costs with low overhead and efficient operations.

Nothing is firm yet. From the statement above, it appears the negotiation is in a very preliminary stage, and might never bear fruit.

Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Another Zimmerman op-ed today at PJ Media

January 19, 2026 9:17 pm Robert Zimmerman

Our mindless propaganda press

PJ Media tonight posted another op-ed by yours truly:

Artemis II Ready for Dress Rehearsal: Propaganda Press Misses the Real Story of This Dangerous Mission

My readers know I strongly oppose flying this mission manned because of questions about Orion’s heat shield and its untested life support system. In this op-ed however my purpose was not to argue this point again. Instead, I wanted to take our bankrupt media to task for their utter failure to report these facts.

When NASA this past week rolled SLS/Orion to the launchpad, I was appalled by the coverage. In reviewing every article I could find about that rollout, it seemed I was “reading the state-run presses of China and the Soviet Union”, not a free independent press charged with covering the news.

The write-up of every one of these so-called news outlets is cloying and worshipful. The worst examples are those that focus on the ridiculous quote by one astronaut, “We are very likely going to see things that no human eye has ever seen.” This may be true (four humans will see the Moon from a new perspective), but it is hyperbole of the worst sort. Not only have humans circled the Moon before, but unmanned orbiters have also mapped the entire globe at a resolution far better than anything that will be visible to the Artemis-II crew.

Furthermore, these media reports repeat without any questioning NASA’s very false claim that it has done everything possible to make sure this flight is safe.

Only one article out of almost 20 news outlets mentioned Orion’s questionable heat shield, and that article made it seem as if NASA had fixed the problem. None of the articles even mentioned the fact that Orion’s life support system will be flying in space for the very first time, essentially using four human beings as guinea pigs.

Instead, every article was a propaganda piece extolling mindlessly the wonders of NASA and this mission, making believe all was perfect and well planned.

This is bad journalism of the worst sort. If you are going to report on this mission, good journalism requires you to at least note these issues. In fact, good journalism demands it, because it actually makes for a much better story: NASA is sending four astronauts around the Moon in a capsule with questionable engineering!

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Badgerland Birding – Five things you didn’t know about Owls

January 19, 2026 6:01 pm Robert Zimmerman

An evening pause: Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

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January 19, 2026 Quick space links

January 19, 2026 2:55 pm 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.

An image showing the contrail from Ceres-2 rocket that failed at launch on January 17, 2026
The image shows nothing of significance, and could even be from another launch entirely.

Chinese pseudo-company touts a strange design to catch a booster horizontally with wires
Jay’s comment: “I could think of a few problems with this design.”

Roscosmos reiterates its promise to launch ~300 satellites by ’27 for its “Russian Starlink” constellation
It also says it will produce 200,000 ground terminals for the system this year. And both Jay and I have strong doubts.

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“A new empire has sprung into existence, and there is a new thing under the sun.”

January 19, 2026 12:52 pm Robert Zimmerman

The words I quote in the headline above were spoken during a sermon by Pastor Manasseh Cutler on August 24, 1788 at the just established settlement of Marietta, Ohio, founded only six months previously by a small group of New England pioneers, with the goal of beginning the settlement of the American west now available following the end of the war of independence against Great Britain.

The Pioneers by David McCullough

It may be emphatically said that a new empire has sprung into existence, and there is a new thing under the sun. By the Constitution now established in the United States, religious as well as civil liberty is secured.

Some serious Christians may possibly tremble for the Ark, and think the Christian religion in danger when divested of the patronage of civil power. They may fear inroads from licentiousness and infidelity, on the one hand, and from sectaries and party divisions on the other.

But we can dismiss our fears, when we consider the truth can never be a real hazard, where there is a sufficiency of light and knowledge, and full liberty to vindicate it.

Cutler’s words come from David McCullough’s 2019 history, The Pioneers, describing the effort of Cutler and a small group of New Englanders to re-create a new New England in the wilderness north of the Ohio river.

Not surprisingly, McCullough’s book is quite readable, as are all his works. What made it a revelation to me is that it revealed an aspect of this early American settlement of the west that I had been ignorant of. It wasn’t just any old Americans moving west to found new communities. At the beginning it was specifically the descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England, actually organizing consciously to repeat the same thing as their ancestors, sending a group of God-fearing religious families west to build a new city on a hill, for the future of America and for their children.

Cutler himself had been crucial in lobbying Congress to establish the laws necessary to allow these first first settlers to buy land and begin settlement. He and a group of former revolutionary soldiers from New England had worked up a plan, and sent Cutler to New York and Philadelphia to convince Congress to pass the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, establishing the legal framework for settling the vast territories now open to American north and west of the Ohio river. Cutler himself wrote much of that bill, making sure it included articles requiring freedom of religion and no slavery.

In the early spring of 1788 the first group of twenty-two settlers arrived, and within a very short time they had established a town and community. By the time Cutler arrived in the late summer, the colony was so well established that families were arriving to build their own farms.
» Read more

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A 10-mile-long avalanche on Mars

January 19, 2026 11:32 am Robert Zimmerman

Overview map

A ten mile long avalanche on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 8, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows only three miles of a ten-mile-long avalanche inside the solar system’s largest canyon, Valles Marineris.

The white dot on the overview map above marks the location. In the inset the white rectangle indicates the area covered by the picture to the right. I have indicated the avalanche’s full extent beyond this.

Overall, the landslide fell about one mile along those ten miles. That there are about a dozen small craters on top of the slide tells us this happened quite a long time ago.

As always, the scale of Valles Marineris boggles the mind. Though this avalanche fell about 5,000 feet (the same depth of the south rim of the Grand Canyon), that drop only covered one fifth of Valles Marineris’s depth. At this point, from the rim to the floor the elevation difference is about 23,000 feet, which would place the rim among the 100 highest mountains on Earth. And of course, this is only one small spot in this gigantic canyon that runs 2,500 miles east-to-west, with its depth about the same that entire length.

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Japanese rocket startup Interstellar raises another $129.7 million in private investment capital

January 19, 2026 9:11 am Robert Zimmerman

The Japanese rocket startup Interstellar announced late last week that it has successfully raised another $129.7 million in private investment capital, bringing its total available cash to $287.7 million.

Interstellar’s Series F round represents one of the largest fundraising to date by a privately held space startup in Japan2, bringing Interstellar’s cumulative funding to 44.6 billion JPY (287.7 million USD). The round, led by Woven by Toyota, raised 14.8 billion JPY (95.5 million USD) through a third-party allotment of preferred shares in an up-round.

In addition, the company secured 5.3 billion JPY (34.2 million USD) in debt financing from financial institutions, including 1.8 billion JPY (11.6 million USD) in loan facilities with stock acquisition rights provided by the Japan Finance Corporation. Alongside the fundraising, secondary transactions with existing shareholders were also conducted to optimize the company’s capital structure. Nomura Securities provided advisory support in this series, including the introduction of several potential investors, some of which resulted in fundraising.

Interstellar was one of the earliest rocket startups, first attempting a suborbital launch in 2018. After that launch failed it then disappeared for almost five years to suddenly reappear last year with major funding from Toyota and other sources.

It had previously hoped to complete the first launch of its Zero orbital rocket in 2025. At the moment however the company has set no new launch date, though it has announced that it has seven customer payloads for that launch.

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China launches more satellites in its Guowang satellite constellation

January 19, 2026 8:57 am Robert Zimmerman

China today successfully placed the 19th group of Guowang (SatNet) satellites into orbit, its Long March 12 rocket lifting off from its coastal Wencheng spaceport.

The lower stages of the rocket fell in the territorial waters of the Philippines, forcing that government to issue a warning to its citizens.

Previously I had read reports claiming Guowang was an internet-of-things constellation aiming to 13,000 satellites eventually. That was incorrect. This constellation is comparable to Starlink, providing internet access globally. Before today’s launch there were 137 Guowang satellites in orbit. China’s state-run press provided no information about the number of Guowang satellites launched today. All previous launches using the Long March 12 placed nine in orbit, which would bring the total in orbit to 146. According to the article at the link, however, the constellation now has 150 in orbit.

The 2026 launch race:

8 SpaceX
5 China

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Startup focused on mining helium-3 on the Moon teams up with JPL for private rover mission

January 19, 2026 8:45 am Robert Zimmerman

Artist rendering of Black Moon’s Fusion-1 rover

The helium-3 lunar mining startup Black Moon Energy (BMEC) has now signed a partnership deal with JPL to build and send a private rover to the Moon, dubbed Fusion-1, to search for helium-3.

BMEC will lead mission management, resource-assessment strategy, and large-scale operations planning. As global leaders in robotic space exploration, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Caltech, which manages JPL, have been engaged to oversee the mission’s robotic systems, scientific instrumentation, data acquisition, and mission operations.

…BMEC’s initial year-long lunar expedition will provide the first decision-quality dataset for Helium-3 production operations. Information from the mission will support potential applications in fusion power generation, national security systems, quantum computing, radiation detection, medical imaging, and cryogenic technologies. Insights from the mission will guide BMEC’s long-term strategy for establishing a sustainable cost-effective Helium-3 supply chain from the lunar surface.

A review of Black Moon’s website as well as a search on the web reveals no information about the company’s available capital, so this proposed private mission could be real, or it could be pie-in-the-sky.

Its existence at all however proves the impact that lower launch costs is having. Proposing a private mission such as this before SpaceX would have been met with outright laughter. Now it draws serious interest. It is wholly conceivable to build a low-cost small robotic rover and find affordable launch providers and lunar lander companies that can get it to the Moon.

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Japan’s government gives Ispace a $125 million contract to build a high-precision lunar lander

January 19, 2026 8:30 am Robert Zimmerman

Is this the first sign that Japan's space agency JAXA is becoming irrelevant?
Is Japan’s failed space agency JAXA finally
starting to become irrelevant?

The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace last week announced it has won a $125 million contract to build a high-precision lunar lander targeting a 2029 launch in the Moon’s “polar regions”.

Ispace, inc, a global lunar exploration company, announced that the company was selected to implement its proposal for “High Precision Landing Technology in the Lunar Polar Regions” project under the second phase of Japan’s Space Strategy Fund. The technology will be implemented in ispace’s Mission 6, with development now underway.

The funding amount is subject to change based on stage gate reviews and other factors, so full receipt is not guaranteed at this time.

The mission will also include a lunar orbiter that will act as a relay communication satellite that will also remain in orbit after the mission to provide communications for future missions, not only for polar missions but for missions to the Moon’s far side.

Ispace plans to use some of the technology it is developing for its 2nd generation lunar lander, scheduled to fly in ’28.

This contract is significant because it appears to leave ownership of the project entirely in Ispace’s hands, with Japan’s space agency JAXA having little design or management control. It also appears to use the funds from country’s ten-year $6.6 billion fund as intended. That fund was established in 2023 to support new space startups under the capitalism model, whereby the companies provide the product and government and JAXA are merely the customer.

Up until now it appeared this fund was accomplishing little. In fact, there have been indications that JAXA was trying to repurpose the fund for its own benefit, using it to hire a lot more staff while maintaining control and ownership of any project, rather than let the private sector own its own work.

Since JAXA has increasingly done a very bad job promoting Japan’s space exploration industry, those indications were a very bad sign for Japan’s future in space.

This deal appears however to use that strategic fund properly, even if JAXA might still be skimming a large percentage of the fund off the top. This is not unlike what NASA has been doing. Bureaucrats must be bureaucrats, and all government agencies must be eternal and immortal, no matter what.

Like NASA, however, the success of Ispace and rest of Japan’s private space sector from projects financed by this fund will eventually allow that private sector to make those bureaucrats and JAXA irrelevant. It is happening now in the U.S. It now appears there is a chance it will happen in Japan as well.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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China’s damaged Shenzhou-20 manned capsule successfully returned unmanned today

January 19, 2026 8:01 am Robert Zimmerman

Click for original image.

China today finally brought its damaged Shenzhou-20 manned capsule back to Earth, having it touch down in China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

All the text sources from China’s state-run press showed images like the one to the right, from a distance. Though one of the descent capsule’s windows is visible, and appears to have attracted a lot of attention from members of the recovery crew, it is impossible to see if this is the window that China says was hit by some space debris and damaged. Nor can we see the cracks China claimed were there that forced it to send up a rescue capsule to bring the crew back and return this capsule unoccupied.

BtB’s stringer Jay found two other tweets that China released on X. One focused entirely on the used spacesuit that was returned within the capsule, ignoring the capsule itself. The other showed just one image, showing a side of the capsule with no windows.

Why China has been so reluctant to release any images of the damaged window forces one to suspect they are hiding something, such as the cracks were not caused by an impact but by some issue with the capsule itself. This speculation could of course be completely wrong, but China’s secrecy is what generates it.

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SpaceX launches 29 more Starlink satellites

January 18, 2026 5:30 pm Robert Zimmerman

SpaceX today successfully launched another 29 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 24th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The 2026 launch race:

8 SpaceX
4 China

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SpaceX yesterday completed one launch while China had two launch failures

January 17, 2026 8:20 am Robert Zimmerman

There were three launches attempts yesterday, though the two by China were both failures.

First, China’s Long March 3B rocket attempted a launch from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China but the rocket failed at some point. All that China’s state-run press said was that “an anomaly occurred during its flight” and “the cause of the failure is under investigation.” We therefore do not know when the failure occurred, or where any of the rocket stages crashed, inside China or elsewhere.

Next, China’s pseudo-company Galactic Energy attempted the first launch of its new Ceres-2 rocket, lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China. Once again, China’s state-run press provided little information, stating merely that “an anomaly occurred during its flight.”

The Ceres-2, like its predecessor the Ceres-1, is a solid-fueled rocket, though its final stage upgrades the rocket with liquid fuel. Both are based on missile technology, which is why this pseudo-company is “pseudo,” as everything it does is closely supervised by the Chinese government.

Finally, SpaceX placed a National Reconnaissance Office classified satellite into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 2nd flight, landing back at Vandenberg. The two fairings in turn completed their 13th and 30th flights respectively.

The 2026 launch race:

7 SpaceX
4 China

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January 16, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

January 16, 2026 9:20 pm Robert Zimmerman

Embedded below the fold.

To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
» Read more

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Gravity – Rocket Size Comparison as of 2024

January 16, 2026 6:01 pm Robert Zimmerman

A evening pause: The list is not quite complete, but it does give a sense of the comparable sizes of the most important rockets flying today, with a few important historic examples thrown in for context.

Hat tip Edward Thelen.

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January 16, 2026 Quick space links

January 16, 2026 2:55 pm 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.

Blue Origin completes direct field acoustic testing on its unmanned Blue Moon MK1 lunar lander
The launch date is presently set vaguely for the first quarter of 2026.

Liechtenstein awards spectrum license to satellite startup Open Cosmos
The company will launch the first two satellites in its constellation in ’26, using Rocket Lab as its launch provider.

On this day in 2005 Stardust’s sample return capsule returned to Earth,
It returned particles released from Comet Wild 2.

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Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s high resolution camera is showing its age

January 16, 2026 10:53 am Robert Zimmerman

In a cool image earlier this week I noted that, in going through the archive of images most recently sent back from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) high resolution camera, it appeared the camera was exhibiting more anomalies, and that we must therefore “be prepared for the loss of this camera and orbiter in the somewhat near future.”

In reviewing the archive again yesterday I noticed even more evidence of deterioration, as illustrated by the picture to the left. Not only are there blank vertical strips of no data, but the color drops out of the color strip halfway down, something I had never seen before. Nor was this the only picture with these issues.

I decided to email Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona. who until recently had been the camera’s principal investigator, to find out what is really going on. His answer:

Yes, HiRISE is getting old, just like us. There are 2 issues:

1. Sometimes RED4 fails, leaving a gap in the RED products and color.

2. Bit flips create bad pixels (zeros) in RED1_1 and RED3_1. This can still be mitigated by raising electronics temperatures, and we were just approved for an increase, so this problem should soon be reduced for a year or two. One problem with these increased temperatures is that our calibration isn’t correct, leading to the stripe-ing and strange colors that you noted, although dusty air can also create such issues. The calibration will eventually get updated, but funding is extremely tight.

The first issue explains the drop-out in the color strip. This appears to be a relatively new problem.

The second issue explains the two additional black strips to the right of the color strip. (Bit flips are cases where the radiation of space causes a binary bit to flip randomly from 0 to 1, or visa versa.) Bit flips are something engineers expect in spacecraft, but it appears on MRO they are occurring with more and more frequency.

A third issue, the failure of the electronics unit for CCD RED4 that occurred in August 2023, causes a loss of data in the color strip (see the b&w version of the image above for an example), which the camera team has compensated for using other color filters in that area.

According to McEwen, while the team seems confident the increased temperatures, combined with re-calibration, will fix or reduce issue #2, it is less confident about its impact on the camera’s lifespan.

We wish we knew. We’ve raised temperatures many times and it still works, so we keep raising temperatures incrementally just in case.

All in all, however, McEwen says he expects the high resolution camera to be able to produce images for at as long as MRO operates (at least a decade more), though with time we might be finding the images become narrower and narrower strips.

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Astronomers detect a bar of iron in the center of the Ring Nebula

January 16, 2026 9:17 am Robert Zimmerman

Composite image showing iron bar inside Ring Nebula.
Click for original.

The uncertainty of science: Using a new instrument on the Herschel Telescope in Chile, astronomers have detected a bar of iron cutting across the hole in the center of the Ring Nebula. You can read their paper here.

The cloud of iron atoms, described for the first time in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is in the shape of a bar or strip: it just fits inside the inner layer of the elliptically shaped nebula, familiar from many images including those obtained by the James Webb Space Telescope at infrared wavelengths. The bar’s length is roughly 500 times that of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun and, according to the team, its mass of iron atoms is comparable to the mass of Mars.

The bar does not cross the nebula’s central star, nor does it exhibit the kind of motion seen by jets flowing outward from such stars. From the paper’s conclusion:

At present, there seem to be no obvious explanations that can account for the presence of the narrow ‘bar’ of [Fe v] and [Fe vi] emission seen in our WEAVE spectra to extend across the central regions of the Ring Nebula. Fresh observations of this newly uncovered feature at much higher spectral resolution seem essential to make progress

The scientists toss out the possibility that the bar is the remains of a rocky planet vaporized at some point in the system’s past, but that is simply a wild guess.

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The recent computer hack of the European Space Agency was bigger than it admitted

January 16, 2026 9:00 am Robert Zimmerman

After the European Space Agency (ESA) claimed in December that a computer hack that stole about 200 gigabytes of data was “limited,” it turns out that the agency had been hacked more than once preveious this past fall, and that the data stolen was far larger and apparently not limited at all.

The European Space Agency on Wednesday confirmed yet another massive security breach, and told The Register that the data thieves responsible will be subject to a criminal investigation. And this could be a biggie.

Earlier in the week, Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters told us that they gained initial access to ESA’s servers back in September by exploiting a public CVE, and stole 500 GB of very sensitive data. This, we’re told, includes operational procedures, spacecraft and mission details, subsystems documentation, and proprietary contractor data from ESA partners including SpaceX, Airbus Group, and Thales Alenia Space, among others.

And, according to the crims, the security hole remains open, giving them continued access to the space agency’s live systems.

“ESA is in the process of informing the judicial authorities having jurisdiction over this cyber incident to initiate a criminal inquiry,” an ESA spokesperson said via email. The agency declined to answer The Register’s specific questions about the intruders’ claims.

The article at the link outlines a slew of other hacks at ESA over the last decade. The agency seems unable to clean up its act.

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China launches four satellites for another Chinese constellation

January 16, 2026 8:41 am Robert Zimmerman

The Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy early today successfully launched another four satellites in the Tianqi satellite constellation, its Ceres-1 solid-fueled rocket lifting off from a sea platform off the northeast coast of China.

This was the sixth launch for the Tianqi constellation, which apparently is an internet-of-things constellation. It has launched 41 satellites so far, though only 29 are presently operational, with 12 having had their orbits decay.

The 2026 launch race:

6 SpaceX
4 China

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French rocket startup MaiaSpace wins ten-launch contract from Eutelsat

January 16, 2026 8:01 am Robert Zimmerman

The French rocket startup MaiaSpace, which has not yet launched anything, has won a ten-launch contract from Eutelsat to place an unspecified number of its next generation OneWeb satellites into orbit.

Eutelsat has ordered around ten launches from MaiaSpace to launch some of the 440 new OneWeb satellites. These launches are scheduled from late 2027 to 2029. MaiaSpace has thus secured 50% of the launches planned for this period.

MaiaSpace is a wholly owned subsidiary of ArianeGroup, the company that builds Arianespace’s Ariane-6 rocket. ArianeGroup created it when it realized the expendable Ariane-6 rocket was not going to do well competing with the new reusable rockets. MaiaSpace’s Maia rocket will launch from French Guiana, and is being designed to eventually be reusable.

What makes this deal puzzling is that MaiaSpace is far behind at least thee other rocket startups in Europe, Germany’s Isar Aerospace and Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Spain’s PLD, all of which are much closer to an orbital launch. I suspect ArianeGroup used its clout to win the contract.

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Chris Rea – The Road To Hell

January 15, 2026 6:01 pm Robert Zimmerman

An evening pause: Performed live 2006.

Hat tip Alec Gimarc, who adds these details: “Chris Rea passed away last week. About our age. Over 30 studio albums. British. Very much an acquired taste. Been listening to him for nearly 40 years. Smooth, smoky voice. He specialized in slide guitar. Road to Hell is probably his greatest hit.”

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January 15, 2026 Quick space links

January 15, 2026 2:43 pm 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.

Airspace closure notice suggests the damaged Shenzhou-20 crew spacecraft will attempt reentry and landing on January 19, 2026
I wonder if the Chinese will finally release an image of its damaged window, should it survive re-entry.

On this date in 2005 the Huygens probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan
The tweet includes the best picture taken from the surface. Huygens sent back data for 72 minutes.

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Martian glacier flowing past small peak

January 15, 2026 12:32 pm Robert Zimmerman

Overview map

Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 24, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

As is proper, the science team labels this vaguely as a “flow obstacle in lobate debris apron.” The obstacle is that small peak. The lobate debris apron is the material flowing past, resembling in almost all details what a glacier looks like on Earth. The scientists use vague terms because they don’t want to trap themselves into a conclusion before it is confirmed.

Nonetheless, based on all the data MRO and other Mars orbiters have been gathering for the past decade, we are almost certainly looking at near-surface ice flowing downhill and past that peak.

The white dot in the overview map above marks the location, on the western end of the 2,000-mile-long mid-latitude strip I label “glacier country,” because practically every image from this region shows features such as this.

The arrow in the inset shows the direction of the downhill grade, dropping from 2,000 to 3,000 feet from the surrounding plateau. The peak itself rises about 130 feet above the flow on the uphill side, but 650 feet above on the downhill side. Apparently the flow piled up somewhat as it hit the peak.

That flow however is likely inactive at this time. Though the researchers have repeatedly monitored the many glacial flows they have found on Mars in the decade since MRO arrived in Mars orbit, so far I have heard of no example showing any movement. And that covers about five Martian years.

These images do prove one thing: Mars is not dry. It has plenty of water near the surface, though locked in ice.

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Lockheed Martin and General Electric complete tests of a rotating-detonation engine

January 15, 2026 10:04 am Robert Zimmerman

Lockheed Martin and General Electric announced this week that they have successfully tested a rotating-detonation engine using complimentary technology developed by each company.

GE Aerospace and Lockheed Martin completed a series of engine tests demonstrating the viability of a liquid-fueled rotating detonation ramjet for use in hypersonic missiles, the first initiative between the companies under a broader joint technology development arrangement.

This fuel-efficient rotating detonation ramjet promises to fly missiles faster—including at hypersonic speeds—and farther while decreasing costs compared to other ramjet options. … The rotating detonation ramjet combusts fuel and air through detonation waves instead of the traditional combustion methods used in ramjet engines today. This propulsion system generates high thrust for super- and hypersonic speeds to engage high-value, time-sensitive targets, with a smaller engine size and weight that boosts range.

In October Lockheed Martin’s venture capital division announced it was investing in a startup, Venus Aerospace, that was developing its own rotating detonation engines. One now wonders, based on today’s story, if that investment might have been a purchase of the technology itself.

Either way, the Pentagon’s program to develop hypersonic missile capability has blossomed in the past two years, since it stopped trying to build the technology itself and has instead been hiring private aerospace companies to do the research for it. Ain’t capitalism wonderful?

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The European Space Agency and China hold the first joint meeting in almost a decade

January 15, 2026 9:50 am Robert Zimmerman

ESA logo

The European Space Agency (ESA) this week hosted the leaders of the China National Space Administration (CNSA) in Paris, the first such joint meeting since 2017.

The meeting was co-chaired by ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher and CNSA Administrator Shan Zhongde. Both ESA and CNSA had unique achievements to share and discuss since the last time the heads of agencies met in person.

Both highlighted joint successes in space science, notably the Tianguan (Einstein Probe) launch with ESA hardware, and progress on the joint Smile mission, set to launch this year. Similarly, the two sides addressed the successful Chang’e-6 mission carrying ESA’s NILS instrument, ESA’s first experiment on the lunar surface. In the field of telemetry and tracking, both looked back on their long-term cooperation in supporting science and exploration missions. In discussing their respective space safety and Earth observation related programmes, the importance of cooperation to protect our planet and climate was recognised on both sides.

It was discussed, that building past progress, both sides in their respective institutional contexts would explore potential opportunities for further collaboration in areas such as Earth and space science.

Let me translate: We in Europe have found that our cooperative Soviet-style government-run projects with NASA (ISS, Mars Sample Return, and Lunar Gateway) are going away, and we need to find some other authoritarian nation we can partner with.

You see, the bureaucrats in Europe like their Soviet-style government-run space program, and are actually offended that the U.S. is shifting from that approach to the capitalism model, an independent industry run by private enterprise. Moreover, these bureaucrats at ESA are finding their own political support dwindling within the ESA’s member nations, many of whom are adopting the same private industry approach as the U.S.

Thus, rather than embrace freedom, competition, and capitalism — the principles that once made Europe great — they look to China now to help fund their government projects. How so very governmental of them!

It is likely some space projects will come of this, but if the U.S. remains steadfast in support of freedom and private enterprise, it will flow like a tidal wave over anything ESA and China develop.

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China launches classified military satellite in partnership with Algeria

January 15, 2026 9:30 am Robert Zimmerman

China today successfully placed a classified military remote sensing satellite into orbit, its Long March 2C rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

China’s state-run press provided no update on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. The story at the link, from China’s military, did provide this information about the satellite:

Developed by China Academy of Space Technology under China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the satellite will be used for land planning and disaster prevention and mitigation. The launch is part of the Algeria remote sensing satellite system program, a joint project between China Great Wall Industry Corporation, a subsidiary of CASC, and the Algerian Space Agency. Signed in July 2023, the agreement includes two optical remote sensing satellites, ground systems, training, and related support services.

The 2026 launch race:

6 SpaceX
3 China

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Indian startup raises seed money to build robotic satellite servicing “jetpacks”

January 15, 2026 9:22 am Robert Zimmerman

An Indian startup, Aule Space, has now raised $2 million in seed money to begin development of a robot servicing spacecraft it intends to call “jetpacks”, designed to attach to satellites and provide them fuel and power.

The seed funding will allow Aule Space to being work on a demonstration mission planned for launch next year to test its docking capabilities. That will involve two satellites, each weighing about 30 kilograms, but Panchal said one option is to instead use an orbital transfer vehicle as the client for the docking demonstration.

The 11-person company, which plans to grow to 20 people by the end of the quarter, is working on ground tests of its rendezvous and docking technology. It has access to facilities used by the Indian space agency ISRO for testing SPADEX, a docking demonstration mission flown a year ago.

This “jetpack” concept is very similar to Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicles (MEV), several of which have already flown and extended the life of several satellites.

Aule is exactly the type of Indian satellite startup that India’s rocket startups, Agnikul and Skyroot, are being built to serve. The problem is that all of these startups, both satellite and rocket, are literally all startups. None has flown. India’s private space sector won’t really take off until its private rocket companies get off the ground, as its government space agency, ISRO, has done a very poor job launching its PSLV and SSLV rockets (both designed for smallsats). The PSLV has failed on its last two launches, and the SSLV has been in limbo now for years.

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Expedition-11 crew splashdowns safely

January 15, 2026 9:03 am Robert Zimmerman

SpaceX’s Endeavour capsule has safely splashed down and been recovered off the coast of California, returning the four Expedition-11 astronauts several weeks early from ISS due to an as-yet undisclosed medical issue with one astronaut.

Crew-11 returned home about a month earlier than planned because of a medical concern teams are monitoring with one of the crew members, who remains stable. Due to medical privacy, it is not appropriate for NASA to share more details about the crew member. Prior to return, NASA previously coordinated for all four crew members to be transported to a local hospital for additional evaluation, taking advantage of medical resources on Earth to provide the best care possible.

Following the planned overnight hospital stay, the crew members will return to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and undergo standard postflight reconditioning and evaluations.

This hospital visit for all four astronauts is simply a cover to hide which astronaut has the medical issue. At some point this information must be revealed, simply because it impacts how future space travel will be planned.

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January 14, 2026 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast

January 14, 2026 8:22 pm Robert Zimmerman

Embedded below the fold.

To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.