NASA astronauts ordered to shelter in Dragon while Russians repair air leak

8:53 am

For somewhat unclear reasons that seem at first glance to be an over-reaction, NASA officials today ordered all five non-Russian astronauts on ISS to shelter in the Dragon capsule docked there while the two Russian astronauts did repair work on the new air leak in the Zvezda module on the Russian half of the station.

Following new leaks, Roscosmos has elected to proceed with a more extensive repair operation on Friday, June 5. Out of an abundance of caution, NASA has directed all four of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-12 members and NASA astronaut Chris Williams to assume an elevated safety posture in the Dragon spacecraft while the repair is underway.

As it turned out, the Russians only did “measurements” today, no actual repairs, and so NASA then canceled its “shelter in place” order.

This new air leak, first detected in May, has been estimated to be equivalent to the loss of about one pound of air per day, which is relative low compared to the loss rates seen from 2019 through 2025, as shown in the lower right corner of the graphic below, taken from a 2024 inspector general report. In late 2025 the Russians were able to stop those leaks, only to have this new one return last month.
Figure 3 from September Inspector General report
Figure 3 from September 2024 Inspector General report, showing Zvezda’s location on ISS, as well as the station’s leak rate at that time.

Unless the Russians planned some radical repair plan (unlikely), sheltering in Dragon seems overkill. For several years NASA’s policy has been to simply close the hatch between the American and Russian sections of ISS during dockings to Zvezda. It likely also did this during earlier repair work. For the agency to now escalate its safety precautions suggests either the repair work was more risky, or NASA administrator Jared Isaacman wanted to make a political and engineering point that would be noticed by the mainsteam press.

If the latter, Isaacman got what he wanted, as there have been numerous stories today from many mainstream outlets, with some misreporting the story as if the leak was suddenly new and required an emergency evacution (see here, here, here, and here).

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


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

June 4, 2026 Quick space links

2:52 pm

BtB’s stinger Jay reported no links worth posting. Below is one link that reader Nate P. posted in the comments earlier today. This post remains 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.

38 comments

Sutherland spaceport in the UK liquidated

2:15 pm

Proposed or active spaceports in north Europe
Proposed or active spaceports in north Europe

After years of fighting bureaucratic red tape, environmental restrictions, and the unending opposition from a local billionaire, the assets of the proposed Sutherland spaceport on the north coast of Scotland are now being liquidated, as part of the liquidation of the bankrupt rocket company Orbex that had originally hoped to launch from this site.

The spokesperson also said: “One of the proposed transactions relates to assets associated with Sutherland Spaceport. As the proposed transaction is structured as an asset sale, a decision has been taken to place Sutherland Spaceport Limited, a Scottish subsidiary of Orbex, into liquidation. “A winding-up petition has therefore been lodged with the court and it is anticipated that the transaction will complete following the appointment of liquidators.”

The administrators “remain hopeful that the disposals will maximise returns for creditors”.

The spokesperson added that the administrators “continue to engage constructively with preferred bidders, secured creditors and other stakeholders, including the UK and Scottish Governments, as the process moves forward.”

Because almost £26 million was invested in this spaceport by the government of the United Kingdom, it is still possible the government itself will buy the assets and attempt to resuscitate the spaceport. If it does, do not count on much actually happening. There is practically no interest in the rocket industry to launch from the UK because of its odious red tape, that has already bankrupted two rocket startups.

Note that the spaceport shown on the map in North Uist is merely a proposal. Almost nothing real has happened so far to establish it. The SaxaVord spaceport hopes the German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg will do its first orbital launch this July, but there is no guarantee, as it appears the company is still awaiting launch approval from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority, which in its slow-walking of license approvals was a main cause for the bankruptcy of those two rocket companies.

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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.

Martian glacier flowing around a recent small crater impact

12:37 pm

A Martian glacier flowing arond a recent crater impact
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 3, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this a “crater on debris covered glacier.” The crater, the dark spot in the upper center, is only about 450 feet across. The impact apparently took place onto this glacial slope, and since then the glacier has continued to flow downhill (as indicated by the arrows), flowing around the denser material pounded down by the impact.

The elevation loss within this image is about 300 feet, along a distance of just under two miles. How long it took this glacial material to flow this much however is unknown. Nor is it known when this happened. The orbital data so far of all Martian glaciers suggests they are at this time inactive, neither growing or shrinking.
» Read more

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SpaceX launches 29 more Starlink satellites

11:07 am

SpaceX this morning successfully placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida.

The first stage completed its 12th flight (78 days after its previous flight), landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

66 SpaceX
32 China
8 Russia
7 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 66 to 57.

China has two launches scheduled for today, with one supposedly having already taken place. When both are confirmed I will post a new launch update.

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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

SpaceX’s full IPO, aimed at raising $86 billion

10:30 am

SpaceX logo

SpaceX yesterday filed the full prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for its planned initial public offering (IPO) of stock, revealing a plan to sell 555.6K shares at $135 per share, resulting in a total cash acquisition of just over $75 billion. Additionally, the company’s earlier investors will have separate options to buy other shares, raising about $11 billion more, for a total of $86 billion in capital raised.

The stock offering would set SpaceX’s value at about $1.77 trillion, and would make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire. This would also be the largest IPO in history. The full prospectus at the link above has a lot of details, which this CNN article distills nicely:

SpaceX plans to sell 555.6 million shares at an initial price of $135 a share, the company said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The decision to dictate one price target, as opposed to offering a range, is a unique move that reflects the hot IPO market around the AI craze and Musk’s own tendency for mega-scale goals.

Musk, who currently owns half of SpaceX, would still control nearly half of the company’s total shares after the offering. However, some of those are special shares with greater voting power, and Musk will control 82.4% of the voting power after the IPO, according to the filing.

The date of this IPO, when stocks will go on sale, is presently set for June 12, 2026. The stock will be traded on Nasdaq, under the label SPCX.

In addition to this $86 billion, SpaceX already earns about $12 billion per year from its more than 10 million Starlink subscribers, and has previously raised more then $12 billion from those initial private investors. All told, the company will have more than $110 billion in cash on hand after this IPO. That is more than four times NASA’s annual budget.

As I have said repeatedly in the past two years, SpaceX is the real American space program. NASA is begin carried along by it.

One detail of interest revealed in some viewgraphs that SpaceX is showing to potential investors is its intention to begin launching commercial payloads on Starship before the end of this year. In other words, expect much more frequent flights in the coming months, moving quickly to orbital tests, placing operational version 3 Starlink satellites in orbit as well as testing refueling in orbit involving two week missions and two Starships.

11 comments

AST SpaceMobile: Blue Origin’s launch failures delays our commercial operations until 2027

9:58 am

The satellite company AST SpaceMobile revealed yesterday that it no longer expects to begin commercial operations of its cell-to-satellite constellation by the end of this year, that the recent launch failures by Blue Origin will delay the initiation of that commercial service until the first half of 2027.

William Blair said Scott Wisniewski, AST SpaceMobile’s chief strategy officer, made the estimate June 2 during the bank’s annual growth stock conference in Chicago.

Before the loss of a New Glenn rocket in a static-fire test May 28, AST SpaceMobile had aimed to start early services at the end of 2026 with at least 45 satellites in low Earth orbit, helping anchor customers such as AT&T and Verizon in the United States plug terrestrial service gaps. The Texas-based venture had retained that goal even after the loss of its seventh BlueBird satellite on a New Glenn launch April 19.

The April 19th New Glenn launch failure was the first blow. After this the company said it still hoped to get enough of its Bluebird satellites launched to start service in 2026, as it was negotiating with other rocket companies. The May 28th New Glenn launchpad explosion was the final blow. AST now realizes that even with new launch providers, it can’t get enough satellites in orbit this year.

Blue Origin’s failures here are significant to the entire satellite industry. That industry needs more launch capacity from more providers. Right now, there is a dearth, with only SpaceX capable of launching large payloads frequently. Not only is Blue Origin’s New Glenn grounded, ULA’s new Vulcan rocket is grounded as well. And Arianespace’s Ariane-6 rocket is operational, it is not yet able to launch more than once every two months, and its manifest is already completely filled.

New large rockets by Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, and Relativity are expected to launch before the end of the year, but it will be a while before they will be ready to pick up the slack. And though Blue Origin says it will fly again before the end of 2026, there is great doubt in the industry about this claim. At the moment its recovery operations following the launchpad explosion are slowed as the Space Force assesses the damage to the range.

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Axiom’s latest funding round raised $525 million, not $350 million as expected

9:37 am

Axiom's module assembly sequence
Axiom’s module assembly sequence

The space station startup Axiom today announced that its latest funding round raised $525 million, exceeding significantly the $350 million predicted in February and indicating much greater investor enthusiasm for the company.

The close brought new capital onto Axiom Space’s cap table alongside the investors who anchored the round earlier this year. This positions the company to accelerate execution against its core programs: human spaceflight, spacesuits, and Axiom Station – the commercial successor to the International Space Station.

MUFG Bank, Ltd., Japan’s largest bank, joined the round as a new investor, alongside continued participation from existing backers.

With the $100 million previously raised, the company now has $625 million on hand for development, placing it in a strong financial position. It also shows, as does the large investments for the Vast and Starlab stations, that there is enough investor interest and commitment to build all three stations, even if NASA’s funding doesn’t provide all the necessary funds.

Below are my updated rankings of the five American space stations presently under development:
» Read more

3 comments

SETI confirms through extensive radio observations: Comet 3I/Atlas has no alien technology

9:28 am

New Hubble image of 3I/Atlas
Comet 3I/Atlas as seen by Hubble
in November 2025. Click for original.

Hardly a surprise: In order to put an end to the stupid clickbait speculations of some hack scientists, the SETI Institute has just completed seven hours of detailed radio observations of interstellar comet 3I/Atlas, and has confirmed that it has no alien technology and is nothing more than a comet, albeit unusual because it comes from outside our solar system.

The team identified nearly 74 million narrowband signals. After removing human interference and filtering for signals matching 3I/ATLAS’s movement, only about 200 remained for review. All traced back to technology on the surface of the Earth or our own Earth-orbiting satellites.

While no technosignatures were found, the study sets new constraints reinforcing that 3I/ATLAS is a natural object. The observations place upper limits on the power of any radio transmitter on or near 3I/ATLAS, ruling out signals stronger than about 10–110 watts, approximately the power of a household appliance, over the detected frequencies.

In other words, the comet is a comet. This research also demonstrated new astronomical capabilities that can quickly do similar observations when new interstellar objects show up.

5 comments

First parachute drop test for The Exploration Company’s Nyx capsule a success

9:11 am

Nyx drop test

The French capsule startup The Exploration Company on May 19, 2026 successfully completed the first parachute drop test for its Nyx capsule in the Mojave desert in California.

I have embedded the company’s video of the test below. The screen capture to the right shows the capsule descending on its four main parachutes.

This test focused on one of the most critical phases of spacecraft recovery – the transition from drogue parachutes to the main parachutes that bring the vehicle safely to the ground. For this campaign, TEC used a dedicated drop test vehicle, or DTV, built specifically to evaluate parachute deployment, handover timing and vehicle dynamics during this phase of descent. The DTV was not designed to be a full spacecraft. It was designed to answer a precise engineering question: does the recovery system deploy in the right sequence, at the right time, with the expected behavior? This distinction matters. It allows us to focus effort and investment where it has the most impact – on the recovery system itself.

For this campaign, the DTV replicated the relevant mass properties, aerodynamic profile and key structural interfaces of the Nyx capsule, while using a robust internal structure and sacrificial outer panels to support ground impact, hardware recovery and future test campaigns.

The drop occurred when the helicopter carrying the DTV reached about 1.7 miles altitude. As the DTV dropped it appeared the parachute system worked perfectly, with the drogue chutes followed by the four parachutes releases as planned.

The company is targeting 2028 for the first orbital demo flight of Nyx itself. Its relatively fast-paced development in a sense puts to shame the American space industry, which except of SpaceX has not been able to develop such large orbital capsules. Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus capsule might be flying, but much of its development occurred not in the U.S. but in Europe. Meanwhile, Boeing’s Starliner and Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser both remain grounded and unused after more than a decade of development.
» Read more

6 comments

German rocket startup HyImpulse signs deal to consider launching from Oman

8:49 am

Active and proposed Middle East spaceports
Active and proposed Middle East spaceports

The German rocket startup HyImpulse has signed an agreement with Oman to study the possibility of launching its rockets from Oman’s proposed Etlaq spaceport located near the town of Duqm.

Under the proposed collaboration, HyImpulse will evaluate both near-term mission opportunities and the feasibility of establishing a longer-term operational presence at Etlaq Spaceport. Beyond offering an alternative launch base outside northern Europe, the arrangement is expected to capitalize on Oman’s advantageous geographic latitude, enabling access to a broader range of orbital inclinations and enhancing mission flexibility for customers across the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council], Asia and, potentially, emerging African markets.

The two sides also plan to assess the possibility of supporting future launch campaigns involving HyImpulse’s SR75 and SL1 launch vehicles from Oman. Etlaq would provide access to launch infrastructure, operational facilities and mission-support capabilities as the European company studies deployment opportunities in the Sultanate.

HyImpulse is now the second European rocket startup to sign such a deal. In 2025 the Spanish company PLD agreed to use Duqm as well.

At the same time, Oman had previously said the spaceport would see a number of suborbital test flights in 2025, none of which happened.

3 comments

June 3, 2026 Quick space links

2:48 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.

3 comments

Gigantic slumping Martian cliffs

11:14 am

Gigantic slumping Martian cliffs
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on May 5, 2026 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this an “alluvial fan.” What we are looking at is the top 5,700 feet of a 9,400-foot-high cliff which is slumping downward. As it does so, its outer layers have been falling downward into the canyon below almost like liquid, producing the slope’s streaked look.

According to this definition, alluvial fans…

are mounds of coarse grained sediments formed when a confined stream disgorges into an unconfined area. They typically occur along the margins of mountain ranges where bedrock incised channels draining uplands spill out on to broad open valley floors. Alluvial fans occur in areas with significant topographic relief caused by rapid subsidence or uplift (rift basins, foreland basins, fold-and-thrust belts, etc.).

While the definition implies these fans only form from the flow of liquid water, that does not have to be the case. Many fans form from the long term downward motion of material from mountainsides into lower valleys or canyons, though water — either by rain, a freeze-thaw cycle, or streamflow — is usually a factor in causing this erosion.

At this location something has made that cliff slump, and in doing so produced the flow patterns on that slope
» Read more

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SpaceX launches 24 more Starlink satellites

9:03 am

SpaceX this morning successfully placed another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its 16th flight (37 days after its previous flight), landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

65 SpaceX
32 China
8 Russia
7 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 65 to 57.

0 comments

Venturi Space expands investment in new French factory for building Astrolab’s rover

8:59 am

Venturi Space, the European half of the partnership with the rover startup Astrolab, is increasing its investment in a new French factory from 100 million to 250 million euros.

On 1 June, Venturi Space announced that it had increased its expected investment in the new facility to €250 million. The announcement indicated that it would no longer begin with the initial smaller facility and would instead move directly to the full 16,000-square-metre planned “technology centre.” This likely accounts for the additional €150 million in funding.

According to the company’s 1 June press release, the facility will be used for the “design and manufacture of critical technologies for lunar and Martian mobility, as well as [for] the assembly of the rovers developed by the company.” …Venturi Space is providing wheels, batteries, and battery management systems to US-based Venturi Astrolab for use aboard its rovers. During a 26 May event, NASA announced that Venturi Astrolab was one of two companies selected to build rovers for the agency’s Artemis programme.

The partnership is an unusual one. Venturi Space and Astrolab are separate companies, working together to build Astrolab’s rovers for NASA. Venturi however is also developing its own rover for the European Space Agency.

3 comments

NASA officially ends its MAVEN Mars orbiter mission

8:42 am

High altitude wind patterns on Mars
Mars’ global high altitude wind patterns,
found by MAVEN.

More than six months after engineers lost contact with the Mars orbiter MAVEN, NASA today officially ended the mission, determining the spacecraft is “not recoverable.”

The agency convened an anomaly review board in February to evaluate recovery efforts and assess the spacecraft’s probable current state. The review board has determined that the MAVEN spacecraft is not recoverable, and it is no longer capable of performing its science and data relay mission, which is consistent with the mission team’s findings.

Telemetry from MAVEN prior to the spacecraft’s passage behind Mars in December showed all subsystems working normally. After the spacecraft emerged, NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) did not observe a signal. A brief fragment of telemetry data from analysis of radio signals recorded by the DSN’s open-loop receivers indicated the spacecraft was in safe mode and rotating at an unusually high rate when it emerged from behind Mars, indicating a disruption in MAVEN’s orbit trajectory. The review board concluded that due to this rotation, the batteries on the spacecraft had drained, causing the communications system to lose power and rendering MAVEN in an unrecoverable state.

The actual cause of the rotation remains uncertain.

MAVEN’s mission was to study the atmosphere and surrounding environment of Mar. It gave scientists their first data on how Mars could have lost both its atmosphere as well as a significant amount of its initial supply of water. It also produced the first map of the red planet’s high altitude winds, finding that even at high altitude the winds shift around the Tharsis Bulge where Mars’s biggest volcanoes are located.

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