March 21, 2025 Quick space links

5:02 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.

  • European Space Agency (ESA) releases a report outlining its overall strategy through 2040
    Contains lots of typical bureaucratic blather. It actually means little, as the real strategies are presently being established by the individual European nations independent of this central bureaucracy. Rather than depend on ESA, the member nations are one-by-one encouraging private enterprise, not government projects. ESA is likely going to become a backwater in the next decade, and unnecessary after that.
16 comments

The insane left keeps shooting itself in the foot!

1:41 pm

Tesla vandal identified and arrested
Click for video.

The recent string of vandalism of Tesla vehicles as well as swatting attacks on well known conservatives by leftist crazies might be scary, horrifying, and disgusting, but if you take a step back from these emotions for a second to look dispassionately at the situation, you will realize these attacks are only the dying screams of a bankrupt political movement that has no proposals, no ideas, and no goals except the obtaining of power — now through the use of violence because its political support has dropped to such record lows.

First, the attacks are beyond senseless. In the case of the vandalism of Teslas, the attacks are actually doing harm to those who in the past were most likely to have supported the Democratic Party’s leftist political agenda. Conservatives in general have not been buying electric vehicles, because they have no need to virtue signal leftist climate goals. So, by damaging Teslas owned by innocent bystanders, just because the car was built by a company founded by Elon Musk, the vandals are not only not winning converts to their cause, they are making enemies of people who were once on their side.
» Read more

14 comments

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 or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


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

New research finds cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere cause of the ignition of lightning

9:52 am

Two lightning flashes graphed
Click for original image.

New research has now found that the shower of energy produced when a cosmic ray hits the atmosphere could be a major cause for the ignition of lightning in thunderheads.

You can read the paper here. The two graphs to the right are taken from figure 3 of the paper, and show two different lightning events. The colors represent time, going from green (earliest) to blue to yellow and red (latest). The white dot marks the spot where the lightning flash started. From the article above:

We believe that that most lightning flashes in thunderstorms are ignited by cosmic ray showers,” says the study’s lead author Xuan-Min Shao, a senior scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

…One of the important things about cosmic ray showers is that they contain antimatter–positrons as well as ordinary electrons. The Los Alamos 3D lightning maps contained strong evidence for positrons. Electrons and positrons are bent in opposite directions by Earth’s magnetic field, so they leave opposite imprints on the lightning’s polarization, which BIMAP-3D also measured.

…Positrons clinched the case for cosmic rays. “The fact that a cosmic ray shower provides an ionized path in the cloud that otherwise lacks free electrons strongly favor the inference that most lightning flashes are ignited by cosmic rays,” the authors wrote.

It remains unclear if cosmic rays cause all lightning flashes or just some. Either way, it is a remarkable thing to consider: Cosmic rays are created in distant interstellar and even intergalactic events. The rays take millions, maybe billions of years to reach Earth. And when they do, they produce lightning in thunderstorms!

Hat tip reader Steve Golson.

7 comments

Oxygen found in the most distant known galaxy, too soon after the Big Bang

9:22 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers studying the most distant galaxy so far discovered, 13.4 billion light years away and existing only 300 million years after the Big Bang, have now detected the existence of oxygen, an element that simply should not have had the time to develop in such a short time span.

The new oxygen detection with ALMA, a telescope array in Chile’s Atacama Desert, suggests the galaxy is much more chemically mature than expected. “It is like finding an adolescent where you would only expect babies,” says Sander Schouws, a PhD candidate at Leiden Observatory, the Netherlands, and first author of the Dutch-led study, now accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. “The results show the galaxy has formed very rapidly and is also maturing rapidly, adding to a growing body of evidence that the formation of galaxies happens much faster than was expected.”

Galaxies usually start their lives full of young stars, which are made mostly of light elements like hydrogen and helium. As stars evolve, they create heavier elements like oxygen, which get dispersed through their host galaxy after they die. Researchers had thought that, at 300 million years old, the Universe was still too young to have galaxies ripe with heavy elements. However, the two ALMA studies indicate JADES-GS-z14-0 has about 10 times more heavy elements than expected.

The spectroscopy that confirmed the oxygen also allowed the scientists to confirm the galaxy’s distance, which also confirmed the fact that there is something seriously wrong with the present theories of cosmologists about the formation of the universe. Present theory requires at least several generations of star birth followed by star death, with each forming heavier and heavier atoms. Such a process is expected to take far more than 300 million years.

Either that theory is very wrong, or the theory of the Big Bang has problems. The facts don’t fit the theories, and when that happens, it is the theories that must be abandoned.

9 comments

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.

China and SpaceX complete launches

9:03 am

Two more launches since yesterday. First, SpaceX successfully launched a National Reconnaissance Office classified surveillance satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off shortly before midnight from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage not only completed its fourth flight, landing back at Vandenberg, it did so setting a new record for the shortest turnaround from its previous flight, only ten days previously. The fairings completed their fourth and seventh flights respectively.

China then followed, with its pseudo-company Galactic Energy placing six weather satellites into orbit, its solid-fueled Ceres-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China. China’s state run press provided no information on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China. This was the second launch for Galactic Energy this week, and the nineteenth overall, making it the most successful Chinese pseudo-company. That its rocket is solid-fueled tells us that it is based on missile technology, which also tells us that the company is not really an independent company as we conceive it in the west, but closely controlled and supervised by China’s military.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

33 SpaceX
14 China
4 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successfully launches, 33 to 25.

Leave a comment

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

March 20, 2025 Quick space links

3:46 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.

7 comments

NASA’s still undecided as to Starliner’s next flight

9:27 am

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS.

Though it now appears that the management at both NASA and Boeing are still committed to getting Boeing’s manned Starliner capsule certified for commercial flights, NASA remains undecided as to the scope and nature of the capsule’s next test flight.

[T]esting will be a big part of the next Starliner flight, whenever it lifts off. “We need to make sure we can eliminate the helium leaks; eliminate the service module thruster issues that we had on docking,” [said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program].

NASA has not yet decided whether the coming Starliner flight will carry astronauts or not, he added. But even if the mission is uncrewed, the agency wants it to be crew-capable — “to have all the systems in place that we could fly a crew with,” Stich said. “As I think about it, it might be there for a contingency situation, as we prepare for whatever events could happen,” he added. “One of the things that I’ve learned in my time at NASA is, always be prepared for the unexpected.”

NASA plans to certify Starliner for operational, long-duration astronaut missions shortly after this next flight, if all goes well.

Stich’s comments took place during a press conference following the return of the Starliner crew on SpaceX’s Freedom capsule.

There had been rumors last year that NASA would pay Boeing to use Starliner on a cargo mission to ISS, thus saving the company the cost of flying another demo mission on its own dime. I suspect those plans have now been squashed by the Trump administration, which is likely to insist that Boeing honor the deal in its fixed price contract. If so, the next flight will once again be a demo mission to prove the capsule’s systems, paid for by Boeing. Whether astronauts fly on it will be a political decision made by Trump, with advice from NASA management. And that decision cannot occur until NASA’s new administrator is confirmed and has had time to review the situation.

18 comments

March 19, 2025 Quick space links

3:33 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.

2 comments

High ridge down the center of a big Martian crack

1:15 pm

High ridge down the middle of a Martian canyon
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 27, 2025 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.

Whenever the camera team needs to do this, they try to find an interesting object to photograph, and often succeed. In this case they focused on the geology to the right. I suspect that at first glance my readers will have trouble deciphering what they are looking at. Let me elucidate: This this a 2.5-mile-wide canyon, about 1,000 feet deep, that is bisected by a ridge about 500 feet high.

On the sunlight walls of this canyon you can see boulders and debris, with material gathered on the canyon floor. The smoothness of the floor suggests also that a lot of Martian dust, likely volcanic ash, has become trapped there over the eons.
» Read more

Leave a comment

Firefly releases movie of lunar sunset

9:59 am

Sunset on the Moon
Click for original image.

Using imagery taken by Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, the company today released a short movie showing sunset on the Moon, from several different angles.

I have embedded that movie below. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is one of the photos from that movie. It shows the Sun on the horizon, with the Earth above it and Venus the small bright dot in between.

One alien aspect of the Moon that that while the Sun (and Venus) slowly crossed the sky during Firefly’s two week mission, going from just after sunrise in the east to sunset in the west, the Earth remained stationary in this location above the horizon. This phenomenon occurs because the length of the Moon’s day and its orbit around the Earth are the same length, so that one hemisphere always faces the Earth. Blue Ghost landed in Mare Crisium on the eastern edge of that hemisphere. At that location the Earth always hangs at this spot in the sky.
» Read more

7 comments

Freedom capsule splashes down successfully

3:26 pm

SpaceX’s Freedom capsule has successfully splashed down off the coast of Florida, and has now been fished out of the water.

UPDATE: All four astronauts have now exited the capsule.

In watching the live stream, it is important to once again note that no one involved in this recovery operation is a government employee. The entire operation is being run by SpaceX, a private American company doing this work for profit.

It will take a bit more time before the astronauts come out of the capsule, as they must do some leak checks to make sure everything is safe.

25 comments

March 18, 2025 Quick space links

3:03 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.

One comment

SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites, including 13 with phone-to-satellite capabilities

2:54 pm

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

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

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

32 SpaceX
13 China
4 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successfully launches, 32 to 24.

Leave a comment

More surprises from the Wolf-Rayet star numbered 104 and known for its pinwheel structure

2:03 pm

Keck infrared data of WR104

Among astronomers who study such things, Wolf-Rayet 104 is one of the most well known OB massive stars in their catalog, with the infrared picture to the right illustrating why. The star is actually a binary of massive stars, orbiting each other every eight months. Both produce strong winds, and the collision of those winds results in a glorious pinwheel structure that glows in the infrared.

Such stars are also believed to be major candidates to go supernova and in doing so produce a powerful gamma ray burst (GRB) that would shoot out from the star’s poles. As the orientation of this pinwheel suggests we are looking down into the pole of the system, this star system was actually considered a potentially minor threat to Earth. Located about 8,400 light years away, this is far enough away to mitigate the power of the GRB, but not eliminate entirely its ability to damage the Earth’s atmosphere.

New research now suggests however that despite the orientation of the pinwheel, face-on, the plane of the binary star system is actually tilted 30 to 40 degrees to our line of sight. The press release asks the new questions these results raise:

While a relief for those worried about a nearby GRB pointed right at us, this represents a real curveball. How can the dust spiral and the orbit be tilted so much to each other? Are there more physics that needs to be considered when modelling the formation of the dust plume?

You can read the paper here. It is a quite refreshing read, not just because of its relatively plain language lacking jargon, but because of its willingness to list at great length the uncertainties of the data.

One comment

Isar confirms March 20, 2025 for first launch

11:59 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace has now confirmed that it will attempt the first orbital test launch of its Spectrum rocket on March 20, 2025, lifting off from Norway’s Andoya spaceport.

Isar announced March 17 that the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) issued a launch operator license to the company for its Spectrum rocket, launching from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway. The launch, called “Going Full Spectrum” by the company, is a test flight of Spectrum with no customer payloads on board. “Our goal is to test each and every component and system of the launch vehicle,” Alexandre Dalloneau, vice president of mission and launch operations at Isar Aerospace, said in a statement about the upcoming launch.

Isar Aerospace did not announce a specific time for the launch, noting the timing would depend on weather as well as range and vehicle readiness.

This launch is also going to be the first vertical orbital rocket launch from the European continent, and will put Andoya ahead of the three other spaceports being developed in the United Kingdom and Sweden. For the two UK spaceports this launch will be especially embarrassing, as both started years before Andoya but have been endlessly hampered by red tape, government interference, and local lawsuits. Norway meanwhile has moved with alacrity in approving Andoya’s permits and Isar’s launch licenses.

As for Isar, this launch puts it in the lead over the half dozen or so new European rocket startups as the first to attempt a launch. None of the others are close to that first launch attempt, though the German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg came close last year. During its last static fire test of the first stage prior to launch the rocket was destroyed in a fire.

Leave a comment

Curiosity’s newest view from the heights

10:06 am

Mars in its glorious barrenness
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped slightly to post here, was taken today by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It looks north from the rover’s present location on the flank of Mount Sharp, with the rim of Gale Crater in the far distance about 20 to 30 miles away. Curiosity now sits about 3,000 feet above the floor of the crater.

The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks the rover’s position at this time. The yellow lines indicate the approximate view of the panorama. As with all of the images from both Curiosity and Perseverance, the main impression is a barren and lifeless landscape of incredible stark beauty.

It is now very evident that the Curiosity science team has made the decision to abandon their original route to the west. Instead, they have decided to strike south up into this canyon because it provides them the easiest and fastest route to the boxwork geology to the southwest. It also has them climbing into new geological layers rather than descending into layers that the rover has already seen.

3 comments

SpaceX’s manned Freedom capsule has undocked with ISS with its crew of four

12:39 am

SpaceX’s manned Freedom capsule tonight undocked with ISS, carrying with it the two astronauts that launched with it in September as well as the two astronauts that launched on Boeing’s Starliner capsule in June.

At 1:05 a.m. EDT Tuesday, NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Suni Williams, and Butch Wilmore, along with Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov undocked from the space-facing port of International Space Station’s Harmony module aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.

Splashdown is scheduled for 5:57 pm (Eastern) March 18, 2025 off the coast of Florida. I have embedded the NASA live stream below.

Normally the transfer of control of the station from the old crew to the new one takes about a week. In this case NASA cut that transfer time to only three days because of the political desire to get the Starliner astronauts home more quickly. The irony is that NASA decided to leave them up there for almost seven months more than planned in order to disturb its normal ISS launch and crew schedule as little as possible. This effort now to shorten their spaceflight by a few measly days seems quite trivial in comparison.
» Read more

6 comments

Rocket Lab launches the last of five missions for French satellite company

12:31 am

Rocket Lab today successfully completed the last of a five missions contract for the French satellite company Kinéis, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launch pads in New Zealand.

This was Rocket Lab’s second launch in only two days.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

31 SpaceX
13 China
4 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successfully launches, 31 to 24.

Leave a comment

March 17, 2025 Quick space links

4:03 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.

8 comments

The next time someone tells you Mars lacks water, show them this picture

1:09 pm

Lots of near surface ice on Mars
Click for original image.

In the past decade orbital images from Mars have shown unequivocally that the Red Planet is not the dry desert imagined by sci-fi writers for many decades prior to the space age. Nor is it the dry desert that planetary scientists had first concluded based on the first few decades of planetary missions there.

No, what the orbiters Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and Mars Express have clearly shown is that, except for the planet’s equatorial regions below 30 degrees latitude, the Martian surface is almost entirely covered by water ice, though it is almost always buried by a thin layer of protective dust and debris. Getting to that ice will be somewhat trivial, however, as it is almost always near the surface.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is a perfect example. It was taken on January 31, 2025 by the high resolution camera on MRO. At the top it shows part of a small glacial-filled crater surrounded by blobby ground clearly impregnated with ice. That crater in turn sits on the rim of a much larger very-eroded ancient 53-mile-wide crater whose floor, also filled with glacial debris, can be seen at the bottom of this picture. The wavy ridge line at the base of the rim appears to be a moraine formed by the ebb and flow of the glacial ice that fills this larger crater.

None of these glacial features is particularly unique on Mars. I have been documenting their presence now at Behind the Black for more than six years. Yet, I find still that most news organizations — including many in the space community — remain utterly unaware of these revelations. Any new NASA or university press release that mentions the near-surface ice that covers about two-thirds of the planet’s surface results in news stories claiming “Water has been found on Mars!”, as if this is a shocking new fact from a place where little water is found.

It is very shameful that so many reporters and news organizations are so far out of touch with the actual state of the research on Mars.
» Read more

11 comments

Webb captures infrared images of five exoplanets orbiting two different stars

10:17 am

Four gas giants in infrared
Click for original image.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have taken two different direct false-color infrared images of exoplanets orbiting the stars HR 8799 (130 light years away) and 51 Eridani (97 light years away.

The image of the four gas giants orbiting HR 8799 is to the right, cropped, reduced, and slightly enhanced to post here. From the caption:

The closest planet to the star, HR 8799 e, orbits 1.5 billion miles from its star, which in our solar system would be located between the orbit of Saturn and Neptune. The furthest, HR 8799 b, orbits around 6.3 billion miles from the star, more than twice Neptune’s orbital distance. Colors are applied to filters from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), revealing their intrinsic differences. A star symbol marks the location of the host star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph. In this image, the color blue is assigned to 4.1 micron light, green to 4.3 micron light, and red to the 4.6 micron light.

The Webb false color infrared picture taken of one of the exoplanets orbiting the star 51 Eridani is also at the link, showing “a cool, young exoplanet that orbits 890 million miles from its star, similar to Saturn’s orbit in our solar system.”

The data from the HR 8799 image suggests these gas giants have a lot of carbon dioxide gas, and thus might be growing by pulling in material from the star’s accretion disk.

Leave a comment

Avio to begin testing its own Grasshopper prototype later this year

10:01 am

According to recent changes to its proposed plans, it appears that the Italian rocket company Avio hopes to begin tests of its own Grasshopper prototype vertical takeoff-and-landing stage later this year, with the hope of incorporating a reusable first stage in its upgraded Vega-Next rocket.

In the latest rendering shared in Avio’s 2024 full-year financial results presentation, control surfaces resembling those on a Falcon 9 booster are visible, seemingly confirming that the stage will be used to explore reusability.

In addition to the new rendering, Avio’s 2024 full-year financial results presentation included an update on the progress of the IFD1 mission. According to the company, integration of the demonstrator is ongoing, with an initial “firing test” expected in the third quarter of 2025. This test will likely be the final major milestone before the demonstrator is launched.

The company is targeting a 2032 first orbital launch of Vega-Next. Right now Avio owns the Vega-C rocket, and is the only private rocket company in Europe launching its own rocket. The only other operational European rocket, the larger Ariane-6, is operated by the European Space Agency. Another half-dozen-plus new private rockets are under development by other European rocket startups, but non have so far launched.

Leave a comment

Norway awards the German rocket startup Isar Aerospace a two-satellite contract

9:48 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

In what appears to be a concerted effort by Norway to cement the establishment of its Andoya spaceport on its northwest coast, last week it awarded a two-satellite launch contract to the German rocket startup Isar Aerospace, launching from that spaceport.

The launch is scheduled until 2028 and will take place from Andøya Spaceport, Europe’s first operational spaceport on the mainland. The agreement between the Norwegian Space Agency and Isar Aerospace involves launching two Norwegian satellites as part of the AOS program, a national maritime surveillance system.

Isar is now gearing up for the very first orbital test launch of its Spectrum rocket, which will also be the very first from Andoya, and the very first from the four proposed spaceports in Europe. Regulatory filings from Norway suggest it will occur during a ten-day launch window beginning on March 20, 2025, but Isar has not yet confirmed this.

Unlike the two UK spaceports, which have been delayed years due to government red tape, Norway’s government has apparently worked hard to cut red tape and help Isar get off the ground quickly. It also appears that Norway’s government is acting to stymie Sweden’s Esrange spaceport, releasing a report last week that suggested it will not give permission for launches over its territory from Esrange.

Leave a comment

Varda’s third capsule begins orbital operations

9:37 am

Varda's space capsule, on the ground in Utah
Varda’s first capsule on the ground in Utah.

The in-space commercial company Varda on March 15, 2025 confirmed that its third capsule has successfully begun orbital operations after its launch on a Falcon 9 rocket, carrying an Air Force payload that will test measuring the capsule’s re-entry speeds in connection with military hypersonic research.

W-3’s payload is an advanced navigation system called an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) developed by the US Air Force and Innovative Scientific Solutions Incorporated (ISSI). This payload will be tested at reentry speeds it was designed to withstand but has never encountered before.

This payload is part of a $48 million Air Force contract awarded to Varda in December. The company also notes in the press release that it is aiming for a monthly launch rate for its capsules, which provide customers an opportunity to do all kinds of in-space testing and manufacturing. Since this launch took place only fifteen days after the landing of its second capsule, it appears Varda is moving swiftly in that direction, thus providing more business for American rocket startups.

The capsule includes a service module built by Rocket Lab, and will stay in orbit several weeks before it returns to Earth, landing at the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia, operated by the Australian commercial spaceport startup Southern Launch.

3 comments

Firefly’s Blue Ghost ends its mission, having achieved all its mission goals

9:23 am

Blue Ghost's shadow on the Moon, with the Earth in the background
Blue Ghost’s shadow on the Moon shortly
after landing, with the Earth in the background.

Five hours after lunar sunset Firefly yesterday shut down its Blue Ghost lander, ending its mission after successfully completing all its assigned tasks in carrying ten NASA research payloads to the Moon and softly placing them on the lunar surface.

Firefly also captured imagery of the lunar sunset on March 16, providing NASA with data on whether lunar dust levitates due to solar influences and creates a lunar horizon glow that was hypothesized and observed by Eugene Cernan on Apollo 17. Following the sunset, Blue Ghost operated for 5 hours into the lunar night and continued to capture imagery that measures how dust behavior changes after sunset.

“Whether lunar dust levitates” is one of the biggest scientific mysteries about the Moon. Only one person, astronaut Harrison Schmidt, has observed the phenomenon during the last Apollo mission to the Moon, and numerous attempts since to confirm and better understand it have all failed for one reason or the other. The preliminary results of Blue Ghost observations will be announced at a press conference tomorrow.

Firefly is now gearing up for annual Blue Ghost lunar missions. The next is targeting a launch next year, and will also deliver payloads for NASA, the European Space Agency, and Australia.

One comment
1 … 33 34 35 36 37 … 1,119