Axiom’s fourth commercial manned mission scrubbed due to leak

8:04 pm

Axiom and SpaceX have scrubbed the launch tomorrow of Axiom’s fourth commercial manned mission to ISS due to an oxygen leak detected during the standard prelaunch static fire test.

NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX are standing down from the launch opportunity on Wednesday, June 11, of Axiom Mission 4 to the International Space Station to allow additional time for SpaceX teams to repair a liquid oxygen leak identified during post-static fire Falcon 9 rocket inspections. A new launch date for the fourth private astronaut mission will be provided once repair work is complete, pending range availability.

There a number of launches already scheduled for Florida in the next few days, so it could be that the launch of Ax-4 could be delayed by more than a few days.

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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

June 10, 2025 Quick space links

2:19 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.

I post this early because I have a hour-long taping with Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas this afternoon, and want to get it up beforehand.

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Mexican officials demand investigation into Starship/Superheavy debris on its beaches

11:23 am

Mexican officials of the border state adjacent to Texas are now demanding an investigation into Starship/Superheavy debris that has been found recent on its coast, claiming SpaceX is “polluting Mexican beaches.”

Karina Lizeth Saldivar, the head of the Tamaulipas Secretariat for Urban Development and Environment, recently announced that they would be requesting that federal authorities in Mexico investigate the damages and potential damages that rocket fragments could cause.

According to Saldivar, the rocket pieces could pose a potential danger to locals and claimed that her agency would request a formal investigation by Mexican federal environmental agencies. It remains unclear if Mexico’s government could do anything about the issue.

Saldivar is a typical government apparachik. Rather than try to develop the beach area in Mexico that is close to Boca Chica and thus provides a great tourist spot for viewing launches, she instead can only whine and demand the government shut things down.

Meanwhile, the article notes that ordinary Mexicans aren’t complaining. Instead, they have been collecting the rocket pieces enthusiastically, with some making money by selling them as collector’s iten on social media.

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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.

Trump eliminates restrictions against supersonic flights over the U.S.

9:50 am

In an executive order released on June 6, 2024, President Trump eliminated the half-century-old regulations that forbid supersonic airplanes to fly over the land mass of the United States.

The Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) shall take the necessary steps, including through rulemaking, to repeal the prohibition on overland supersonic flight in 14 CFR 91.817 within 180 days of the date of this order and establish an interim noise-based certification standard, making any modifications to 14 CFR 91.818 as necessary, as consistent with applicable law. The Administrator of the FAA shall also take immediate steps to repeal 14 CFR 91.819 and 91.821, which will remove additional regulatory barriers that hinder the advancement of supersonic aviation technology in the United States.

This order makes sense for several reasons. First, the restrictions were always absurd. The sonic boom concern was always over-rated. Second, the concern increasingly doesn’t exist due to improvements in technology. In a flight test in January, the commercial supersonic airplane startup Boom Aerospace confirmed that its test plane broke the sound barrier three times and each time with “no audible sonic boom.”

Though Boom isn’t the only supersonic startup, it is far ahead of the others. It already has orders from United and Japan airlines for its Overture 80-passenger supersonic jet. This new Trump order will certainly help it attract investment capital, as well as more airlines willing to buy its planes.

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Blue Origin again delays 2nd launch of New Glenn

9:37 am

According to a statement from David Limp, the CEO of Blue Origin, on June 9, 2025, the company has once again delayed the second launch of its new New Glenn rocket, pushing back from May to August.

New Glenn’s second mission will take place NET August 15th. Following in the footsteps of our first booster, we’ve chosen the name “Never Tell Me The Odds” for Tail 2. One of our key mission objectives will be to land and recover the booster.

The rocket’s first launch had occurred in January, and successfully placed its test payload in orbit as intended, though it was unable to land the first stage on its barge in the Atlantic. Blue Origin later said it was targeting May for the second launch, carrying NASA’s two Escapade smallsat Mars orbiters. With this new delay it is unclear what the payload would be.

According to this report, anonymous sources claim an August launch is unlikely and will likely slip to September. The company has a large backlog of launch contracts, including 27 for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation as well as a number for the military. The hope had been that it could ramp up its launch cadence in 2025 to meet those contracts.

Instead, Amazon has begun shifting some of its launch work to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Its FCC license requires it to get 1,600 satellites in orbit by July 2026, and at present it only has sixteen in space. It can no longer wait for Blue Origin to dilly-dally along.

Considering the actual success of the first launch, it seems very puzzling for there to be a nine-month delay until the second launch, even with the failure to land the first stage. Was there some technical problems with the rocket that have not been revealed? It seems foolish to delay further launches in order to fix the landing of the first stage, since that has no impact on getting the customer’s payload into orbit. Wouldn’t it be better to fly again, test the landing again during flight, than sit on the ground looking at computer simulations?

It is also possible the company is still having production problems producing enough BE-4 engines for both ULA’s Vulcan rocket and its own New Glenn. Vulcan uses two per launch, and according to ULA Blue Origin has delivered enough to begin launching Vulcan as many as fifteen times before the end of this year. New Glenn uses seven BE-4s on its first stage. Could it be that Blue Origin wasn’t able to produce enough of these engines for this year’s New Glenn launches?

All this is speculation. What we do know for certain is that both of these companies continue to disappoint. The result is that for larger payloads the United States remains reliant entirely on SpaceX, a situation that is not healthy for the commercial and government satellite industry.

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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

Scientists increase the odds asteroid 2024 YR4 will impact the Moon in 2032

9:10 am

Asteroid 2024 YR4 in 2032
Click for original image.

Using additional data obtained by the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have now refined the orbit of potentially dangerous asteroid 2024 YR4 and confirmed that while it will almost certainly not hit the Earth in 2032, the odds of it impacting the Moon have increased.

With the additional data, experts from NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California further refined the asteroid’s orbit. The Webb data improved our knowledge of where the asteroid will be on Dec. 22, 2032, by nearly 20%. As a result, the asteroid’s probability of impacting the Moon has slightly increased from 3.8% to 4.3%. In the small chance that the asteroid were to impact, it would not alter the Moon’s orbit.

The yellow line in the image to the right shows the present range of positions the asteroid could be in as it passes the Moon on that date. It is expected this range will be narrowed further when the asteroid flies past the Earth harmlessly in 2028.

If the asteroid should hit the Moon, the impact will provide scientists a great opportunity to learn more about asteroids and the Moon. If it should miss, it will then be essential to recalculate its orbit to see what will happen on later near approaches, whether the fly-by increased or decreased the chances of a later Earth impact.

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SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites

8:54 am

SpaceX this morning successfully launched another 23 Starlink satellites (including 13 with phone-to-satellite capabilities), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

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

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

72 SpaceX
33 China
7 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 72 to 53.

SpaceX’s launch of Axiom’s AX-4 manned commercial mission to ISS, carrying government astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary, has been delayed one more day to 8 am (Eastern) tomorrow due to weather issues.

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June 9, 2025 Quick space links

3:19 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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The happiest cat I’ve ever known

12:13 pm

Misty sleeping in her own unique way
Misty sleeping in her own unique way.

Last week we had one of those heart-wrenching experiences that no one should ever have. When we woke up on Friday morning we could not find our youngest cat, Misty, anywhere. We searched the house, the yard, checked under and in the shed, walked the grounds around the fenced area endlessly, even walked along a nearby wash.

Misty was nowhere. We immediately passed out notices to all our neighbors as well as listed her as missing on a number of websites that specialize in listing unidentified found pets. All to no avail. As of today there is still no evidence of her anywhere. We have mostly decided that a predator of some kind, a coyote or large bird, somehow got into the yard (protected by a very high fence) and snatched her.

She was only two and a half years old. Her loss is quite painful.

What makes it worse is that she was undoubtedly the happiest cat I have ever known. We originally got her as a kitten in 2022 to be a companion for our other cat, Molly, as well as for ourselves. We had adopted Molly and Emma together in 2013, but Emma had died prematurely in 2021 from kidney failure. We found Molly pining for companionship, and thus went out to find her a kitten.

Misty was part of a litter of six that a woman who lived near us was fostering. We struggled to pick one, but it was Diane who made the decision. “Let’s get the tabby.” Diane then named her Misty.
» Read more

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The dusky mountains of Mars

10:10 am

The dusky mountains of Mars
Click for high resolution. For the original images, go here, here, and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, created from three images taken on June 7, 2025 (here, here, and here) by the high resolution camera on top of the Mars rover Curiosity, looks south and uphill into the Gediz Vallis canyon that the rover had been traveling previously.

The overview map to the right provides context. The blue dot Curiosity’s present position, where it is about to begin a drilling campaign into the first boxwork structures the rover has reached. The white dotted line marks its past travels, while the green dotted line its planned future route. The red dotted line marks a planned route that has been abandoned.

The yellow lines indicate approximately the area covered by the panorama. Because this used the rover’s high resolution camera, the view gives us a detailed look at the mountains on the distant horizon. Though we are looking uphill, the peaks in the distance are merely higher ridges and hills on the flanks of Mount Sharp. The mountain’s peak is out of view, about 25 miles away and about 15,000 feet higher up.

Note the dusty and what appears to be a softened nature of the terrain on these higher peaks. Since entering the foothills of Mount Sharp several years ago, the surface has been extremely rocky and rough, every inch covered in boulders of all sizes. This distant view suggests the ground might become easier to traverse at those higher altitudes. It also appears there will be a lot more dust, coating everything.

The lighting I think is close to natural. Because Mars is farther from the Sun, it doesn’t get as much light. Even during mid-day the light to our Earth-borne eyes would more resemble dusk on Earth.

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Axiom charges $70 million per ticket to fly to ISS

9:08 am

Axiom's new module assembly sequence
Axiom’s assembly sequence for its planned station, initially attached to ISS but subsequently detached

According to this article today about Axiom’s tourist flights to ISS, the company now charges $70 million per ticket, which means that for the AX-4 flight scheduled for launch tomorrow, the revenues from India, Poland, and Hungary total about $210 million.

That money of course doesn’t all end up in Axiom’s pockets. It has to pay SpaceX for the launch and use of the Dragon capsule. It also has to pay NASA some recently imposed high fees to use its astronaut training facilities as well as lease time on ISS.

All told, I suspect Axiom’s profits for these flights is relatively small. The company however has other reasons to fly these missions. It is attempting to win NASA’s big space station construction contract, and these flights to ISS demonstrate the company’s ability to manage such operations while working with NASA. Of the other three space station projects competing for that contract, only Vast is planning to do the same.

This effort by these two companies is part of the reason I rank them first and second for winning that contract.

  • 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 an estimated 30 days total. 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 launched three tourist flights to ISS, with a fourth scheduled for tomorrow, carrying passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. Though there have been rumors it has cash flow issues, development of its first module has been proceeding more or less as planned.
  • Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Overall, Blue Origin has built almost nothing, while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building its module for launch.
  • Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with an extensive partnership agreement with the European Space Agency. It recently had its station design approved by NASA, but it has built nothing. This might change once it obtains several hundred million dollars from its initial public offering of stock.
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White House issues new orders to streamline federal broadband regulations

8:52 am

As part of its effort to eliminate the red tape imposed by Biden during his term as president, the White House last week issued new orders to streamline the federal broadband regulations as well as cancel those Biden restrictions.

This Trump executive order cancels a number of Biden executive orders that imposed net neutrality, DEI, climate change, and other requirements that added paperwork and cost money and time. Most important of all for rocket companies, this new order aims to streamline the environmental review process on new projects, a process that was expanded exponentially during Biden but had been growing out-of-control for decades, and appeared during Biden to destroy many rocket startups.

Of course, because this executive order was issued by Trump, it will likely be blocked by a federal judge, because only Democratic Party presidential executive orders are allowed in America now.

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Starlink approved for India

8:35 am

After several regulatory issues that blocked the company during the past few years, SpaceX has finally gotten approval to sell Starlink to customers in India.

The company hopes to initiate service within the next year. There still remain some required license approvals:

Although the licence from the Ministry of Telecommunications clears a major hurdle, the service’s final launch in India will depend on further regulatory clearances, including the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (TRAI) recommendations on spectrum allocation, which are still pending approval from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).

These should be pro forma at this point, since it was the ministry of telecommunications that issued this most recent license. Why would it issue one permit but then block another?

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SpaceX launches another radio satellite for SiriusXM

9:21 am

SpaceX early today successfully launched another radio satellite for SiriusXM, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its eighth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves completed their 5th and 21st flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

70 SpaceX
33 China
7 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 70 to 53.

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June 6, 2025 Quick space links

3:11 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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Air Force issues impact statement for SpaceX’s proposed Cape Canaveral Starship/Superheavy launch site

2:04 pm

Map of proposed Cape Canaveral Starship/Superheavy launch facilities
Click for higher resolution version.

The Air Force today released its environmental impact statement for SpaceX’s proposed Starship/Superheavy launch site at Cape Canaveral, generally approving a launch rate of 76 launches per year, noting that this would cause “no significant impact” on the environment while providing “beneficial impact” on the local economy.

You can read the impact statement here [pdf]. It lists 69 areas where these new operations could impact something, and found in almost all no significant impact. The beneficial impact was found in the areas where the operations would boost the local economy.

The single area where these additional launches might have an impact is the issue of noise, noting that “community annoyance may increase” due to the launches. Considering the wealth that the local community will gain from jobs, industry, and tourism due to those launches, I suspect the only whining about this noise will come from fake environmental groups opposed to anyone doing anything.

None of this is any surprise. Launches have been occurring at Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center for more than three quarters of a century, and the only significant impact to the ecology has been beneficial, reserving large areas from development where wildlife has prospered. If anything, the obviousness of this proves the utter waste of money we now spend on such reports.

The statement notes that it still will require FAA input on coordinating the closure of air space during launches, but it also appears to consider this part of normal routine actions, not a requirement the FAA can use to block operations or approval.

The number of proposed launches however is quite impressive. SpaceX’s plan would close to match the annual number of global launches by everyone for most of the space era. Nor is it impossible considering the design of the rocket and the plans the company has for getting to Mars. The site plan includes two launch mounts for Starship/Superheavy (as shown in the map above). This is in addition to the two Starship/Superheavy launch facilities the company wants to build at Kennedy.

The statement is now open to public comment through July 28, 2025. The Air Force also plans three public meetings in the Cape Canaveral area on July 8, 9, and 10. It will also make a fourth virtual public meeting available from July 15 to July 28.

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The Senate, led by Ted Cruz, endorses NASA’s failed SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway

9:48 am

Let’s all go bankrupt! A bill introduced today by Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, rejects the Trump budget plan to phase out NASA’s failed SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway programs that have cost so far tens of billions for decades without accomplishing anything, and instead expands funding over the next decade to these and many other projects and agencies at NASA.

The bill would allocate $2.6 billion to Lunar Gateway, $4.1 billion to build two more SLS rockets, $20 million to build one more Orion capsule, $1.25 billion more for ISS to continue its operations as is, and $1 billion to upgrade or expand facilities at five NASA centers in Florida, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana.

This pork-laden bill would also fund a Mars Telecommunications Orbiter for $700 million and add $325 million to the $843 million contract NASA has with SpaceX to build the de-orbit vehicle for bringing ISS down in a controlled manner once it is retired.

What this bill tells us is that these Senators, led by “lying” Ted Cruz (to use the nickname Trump pinned on him during the 2016 presidential election campaign), are still unwilling to face the realities of the national debt, and want to spend money we don’t have in order to make believe they are grand explorers sending Americans into space. Instead, these idiots are simply funneling cash to their states in order to bribe voters to vote for them.

As Elon Musk so correctly noted, there is an election coming in 2026. Maybe it is time to throw them all out.

What this bill also tells us is that Trump is going to find it very difficult to get the budget under control. The Senate doesn’t care if the country goes bankrupt. They intend to spend our money like it grows on trees, to hell with the future. Shame on them.

Sadly, these senators know they have the backing of almost the entire press corp, which is why they are doing this. They figure they will get great press for “saving” NASA, even if it bankrupts the country. Worse, it appears the press is all for helping them do so.

R.I.P. America.

40 comments

Long delayed ESA project to build a reusable first stage delayed again

9:28 am

The long delayed European Space Agency (ESA) project dubbed Themis to develop and test a reusable first stage for use in European rockets has been delayed again, with the first test hop now expected to occur next year instead of the fourth quarter of 2025.

Themis was first proposed by ESA in 2019, with the first hops expected in 2022. Three years later little has happened in the project. Instead, it appears the nations in the ESA as well as the new rocket startups on that continent have grown very disinterested in government-run projects like this. The closing paragraph at the article at the link illustrates this starkly:

While another delay to the start of the first Themis launch campaign is frustrating, the downstream consequences are likely to be minimal. The only direct application of the technology developed under the Themis programme is the first stage of the two-stage MaiaSpace rocket. However, the company appears to be continuing the development of its first stage largely independently of Themis, meaning the latest delay is unlikely to affect its progress.

In other words, this whole program is divorced entirely from any commercial application. We should therefore expect that once these test flights finally occur, the entire thing will vanish, like so many other similar government-run test programs by NASA and ESA.

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Ispace confirms that its Resilience lunar lander has failed, apparently crashing on the Moon

8:41 pm

According to an update issued several hours after the planned landing, the Japanese lunar lander startup confirmed that its Resilience lunar lander apparently crashed in its attempt to soft land on the Moon.

Ispace engineers at the HAKUTO-R Mission Control Center in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, transmitted commands to execute the landing sequence at 3:13 a.m. on June 6, 2025. The RESILIENCE lander then began the descent phase. The lander descended from an altitude of approximately 100 km to approximately 20 km, and then successfully fired its main engine as planned to begin deceleration. While the lander’s attitude was confirmed to be nearly vertical, telemetry was lost thereafter, and no data indicating a successful landing was received, even after the scheduled landing time had passed.

Based on the currently available data, the Mission Control Center has been able to confirm the following: The laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values. As a result, the lander was unable to decelerate sufficiently to reach the required speed for the planned lunar landing. Based on these circumstances, it is currently assumed that the lander likely performed a hard landing on the lunar surface.

After communication with the lander was lost, a command was sent to reboot the lander, but communication was unable to be re-established.

This explanation fits with the very high velocity numbers seen as the spacecraft approached the surface, much higher than intended.

Ispace has now attempted to land on the Moon twice, with both landers crashing upon approach. In this sense its record is not quite as good as the American startup Intuitive Machines, which had two landers touch down but immediately tip over, causing both to fail.

Ispace presently has three contracts to build landers with NASA, JAXA (Japan’s space agency), and the European Space Agency. The American lander is being built in partnership with the company Draper. Whether this second failure today will impact any of those contracts is uncertain at this time.

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China launches another set of satellites for one of its giant internet constellations

8:17 pm

China earlier today successfully launched the sixth set of satellites for the Thousand Sails internet constellation, its Long March 6A rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northern China.

Very little information appears available about this specific payload. No word also was released about where the rocket’s lower stages and four strap-on boosters crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

69 SpaceX
33 China
7 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 69 to 53.

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June 5, 2025 Quick space links

4:10 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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Landing of Ispace’s Resilience lander uncertain

12:49 pm

Resilence landing

The landing of Ispace’s Resilience lander on the Moon at present appears uncertain, and could be a failure. Though the announcers of the live stream had warned beforehand that it might take awhile after the planned touchdown time to confirm a successful landing, the circumstances just before landing did not appear to go as expected.

At T-1:45 minutes, with the spacecraft at an altitude of 32 feet and still moving at a speed of 116 miles per minute, all telemetry disappeared from the broadcast. Mission controllers did then indicate the spacecraft was “pitching up”, which means it was re-orienting itself for landing. At that point however no further updates were provided. Moments later we could see the engineer in mission control in the lower left of the screen capture to the right, obviously disturbed by something.

In ending the live stream a few minutes later, with no further information, the announcers added that a full report will be made during a press conference later today.

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Scientists discover another exoplanet that theories say should not exist

10:20 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using telescopes both in orbit and on the ground have discovered a small red dwarf star with only 20% the mass of our Sun with a gas giant exoplanet with about half the mass of Saturn but a bit larger in size.

The problem is that the theory for the formation of such gas giants predicts that they should not form around small red dwarfs such as this star.

The most widely held theory of planet formation is called the core accretion theory. A planetary core forms first through accretion (gradual accumulation of material) and as the core becomes more massive, it eventually attracts gases that form an atmosphere. It then gets massive enough to enter a runaway gas accretion process to become a gas giant.

In this theory, the formation of gas giants is harder around low-mass stars because the amount of gas and dust in a protoplanetary disc around the star (the raw material of planet formation) is too limited to allow a massive enough core to form, and the runaway process to occur.

Yet the existence of TOI-6894b (a giant planet orbiting an extremely low-mass star) suggests this model cannot be completely accurate and alternative theories are needed.

You can read the paper here. The exoplanet orbits the star every 3.37 days, and each transit across the face of the star has been easily detected by numerous telescopes. Further spectroscopic observations using the Webb Space Telescope will be able to characterize the exoplanet’s atmosphere more fully.

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Scientists release the first year’s data from the Pace orbiter

10:07 am

Pace global data, August 2024
Click for original movie.

Launched in early 2024, the Pace orbiter was designed to track the evolution of the leaves of trees globally throughout the entire year. NASA has now released the data from the first twelve months, showing the seasonal changes of trees as the Earth rotates the Sun and the seasons change globally.

The map to the right is a screen capture from one of many videos showing these changes. The green indicates the global spread of tree cover in the middle of August in the northern hemisphere as well as in the equatorial regions of South America and Africa. Other movies focusing on North America, South America, Europe, India, etc, can be viewed here.

PACE measurements have allowed NASA scientists and visualizers to show a complete year of global vegetation data using three pigments: chlorophyll, anthocyanins, and carotenoids. That multicolor imagery tells a clearer story about the health of land vegetation by detecting the smallest of variations in leaf colors.

…Anthocyanins are the red pigments in leaves, while carotenoids are the yellow pigments – both of which we see when autumn changes the colors of trees. Plants use these pigments to protect themselves from fluctuations in the weather, adapting to the environment through chemical changes in their leaves. For example, leaves can turn more yellow when they have too much sunlight but not enough of the other necessities, like water and nutrients. If they didn’t adjust their color, it would damage the mechanisms they have to perform photosynthesis.

In the visualization, the data is highlighted in bright colors: magenta represents anthocyanins, green represents chlorophyll, and cyan represents carotenoids. The brighter the colors are, the more leaves there are in that area. The movement of these colors across the land areas show the seasonal changes over time.

You can read the full paper describing the first year’s data here.

The Trump budget presently funds Pace for two more years of observations, at about $26 million per year. This is an obvious example of a satellite whose life should be extended for as long as possible. This long term data would likely confirm other data that indicates the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is greening the Earth, helping plant life that provides us oxygen to breath and food to eat.

To do so, however, other cuts in NASA will have to be found to pay for that extension. I once again wonder about the half a billion NASA spends for its “Mission Enabling Services”, which covers NASA’s human resources division, public relations department, and its equal opportunity division, as well as other more useful departments. Surely some money from these bureaucratic divisions could be found to finance this actual useful research.

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