Tag: commercial

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

10:00 am

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

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

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

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

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Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, targets March 2, 2025 for landing

9:50 am

Map of lunar landing sites
Landing sites for both Firefly’s Blue Ghost and
Ispace’s Resilience

Blue Ghost on February 13, 2025 successfully completed a long four-minute engine burn to complete its transfer from Earth to lunar orbit, with a target date for the actual landing on March 2, 2025.

Now that the lander is in lunar trajectory, over the next 16 days, additional maneuvers will take the lander from an elliptical orbit to a circular orbit around the Moon. Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeted to land Sunday, March 2, at 3:45 a.m. EST.

NASA has also announced the live stream coverage during landing:

Live coverage of the landing, jointly hosted by NASA and Firefly, will air on NASA+ starting at 2:30 a.m. EST, approximately 75 minutes before touchdown on the Moon’s surface. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media. The broadcast will also stream on Firefly’s YouTube channel. Coverage will include live streaming and blog updates as the descent milestones occur.

I will embed the Firefly live stream when it becomes available.

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Starlink Falcon 9 launch sets new reuse record for first stage

2:05 pm

Last night SpaceX successfully launched 21 new Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 26th flight, a new record for the Falcon 9 boosters. That number also exceeded the number of flights the space shuttle Endeavour completed in nineteen years from 1992 to 2011. This SpaceX booster however needed less than three and a half years to do it. Next shuttle record to beat is Columbia’s, which flew 28 times.

The 2025 launch race:

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

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Watching a Falcon 9 liftoff from an airplane passenger seat

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I think this launch was in December 2022, from Cape Canaveral. Makes a great start for the weekend.

Hat tip Greg the Geologist.

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Blue Origin’s CEO lays off 10% of Blue Origin’s workforce to reduce “bureaucracy”

8:56 am

Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO since late in 2023, announced yesterday that the company is laying off 10% of its workforce to in order to reduce the company’s overhead and make it more efficiently run.

From his company-wide email:

We grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed. It also became clear that the makeup of our organization must change to ensure our roles are best aligned with executing these priorities. Sadly, this resulted in eliminating some positions in engineering, R&D, and program/project management and thinning out our layers of management.

I think Limp has finally gotten a full handle on the company after a year and a half in charge, and has now begun reshaping it from the five years of bloated and failed inactivity that occurred during the reing of the previous CEO, Bob Smith. Smith tried to turn Blue Origin into another old-fashioned big space company like Boeing or Northrop Grumman, big and slow and inefficient. Thus, nothing happened there from 2017 to 2023. Since Limp took over Blue Origin has begun to function more like SpaceX, and thus has begun to move. These layoff are probably Limp’s first main effort to clean house.

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Rocket Lab delivers its third service module for Varda’s orbiting capsules

9:35 am

Rocket Lab yesterday announced it has completed and delivered its third Pioneer service module used in conjunction with the capsules of the in-space manufacturing company Varda, which flies these capsules in orbit for a variety of customers.

The spacecraft will support Varda’s next orbital processing and hypersonic reentry mission, W-3. Earlier this month, the Company’s second spacecraft for Varda, W-2, successfully launched and is currently operating on orbit. Carrying payloads from the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’S Ames Research Center, W-2 will also conduct research to expand the capability and capacity of Varda’s pharmaceutical processing hardware in orbit before it’s hypersonic re-entry and recovery in South Australia.

Like its predecessors, W-3 is based on Rocket Lab’s Pioneer spacecraft, leveraging vertically integrated spacecraft components and subsystems, including spacecraft propulsion, flight software, avionics, reaction wheels, star trackers, separation system, solar panels, radios, composite structures and tanks, and more. The spacecraft will provide power, communications, propulsion, and attitude control for Varda’s 120kg manufacturing capsule, which uses microgravity conditions to develop products that are difficult or impossible to create on Earth.

That hypersonic test for the military is presently scheduled for March 2025. Meanwhile Rocket Lab is building the fourth service module for Varda, as part of a four-spacecraft deal.

If Varda begins generating revenues from these first four capsules, it will then likely sign another deal with Rocket Lab.

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French rocket startup signs Spanish rocket engine startup to provide attitude thrusters

9:15 am

The French rocket startup MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of Airbus, has awarded the Spanish rocket engine startup Arkadia Space a contract to provide the small attitude thrusters used to maintain the rocket’s course.

MaiaSpace hopes to do its first test orbital launch of its smallsat rocket in 2026, launching from a new commercial launchpad at French Guiana.

Arkadia’s thrusters are somewhat radical.

Arkadia Space, founded in 2020 in Castellón, Spain, develops hydrogen peroxide-based propellant systems for satellites and platforms with a mass of more than 50 kilograms. “The hydrogen peroxide-based propellant offers exceptional performance while significantly reducing cost and environmental impact compared to traditional hydrazine-based Reaction Control Systems,” according to the news release.

Hydrazine thrusters, while practical and lightweight, have the problem that the fuel is very toxic, and requires safety precautions to prevent injury to employees or the public. Using hydrogen peroxide instead likely reduces this issue significantly.

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Judge okays vote on whether SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility can incorporate as city

9:03 am

After reviewing the local petition submitted by SpaceX requesting permission, a local judge as signed an order allowing the citizens of Boca Chica to vote on whether they can incorporate as city in Texas.

The incorporation petition, [Cameron County Judge Eddie] Treviño explained, was duly signed by at least ten percent of the qualified voters of Starbase. Additionally, the petition satisfied the statutorily required elements and set forth satisfactory proof that Starbase contains the requisite number of inhabitants as required by law and the area to be incorporated is not part of another incorporated city or town.

Since the submitted petition met all statutory requirements, Treviño said he is required under Section 8.009 of the Texas Local Government Code to order that an incorporation election be held on a specific date and at a designate place in the community.

The election is set to occur during the general election on Saturday, May 3rd, 2025.

SpaceX itself had organized the petition and submitted it to the county in mid-December, noting that it already “…currently performs several civil functions around Starbase due to its remote location, including management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents. Incorporation would move the management of some of these functions to a more appropriate public body.”

Expect the petition to be approved, making Starbase at Boca Chica one of the most spectacular company towns ever to exist.

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NASA announces March 12, 2025 as new launch date for next crew to ISS

9:47 am

NASA yesterday announced that it is now targeting March 12, 2025 as new launch date for sending the next crew to ISS, thus moving that date up about one week.

The earlier launch opportunity is available following a decision by mission management to adjust the agency’s original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission that requires additional processing time. The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements. Teams will work to complete Dragon’s refurbishment and ready the spacecraft for flight, which includes trunk stack, propellant load, and transportation to SpaceX’s hangar at 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to be mated with the mission’s Falcon 9 rocket. This will be the fourth mission to the station for this Dragon, which previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights.

Both NASA and SpaceX are touting this as a great decision because it will allow the present ISS crew (which includes the two astronauts initially launched on Starliner last year) to get home quicker.

The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it, and those delays pushed back both the launch of a new crew and the return of the old. So, while everyone is spinning this as SpaceX and NASA brilliantly improvising to get those Starliner astronauts home sooner, the real story is that their return had been significantly delayed by almost two months by SpaceX’s inability to get the capsule ready as promised.

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Firefly wins $8.2 million grant from Texas Space Commission

9:36 am

The new Texas Space Commission, established in 2023 by the state legislature and appropriated $350 million to encourage the development of a Texas aerospace industry, has awarded the rocket and lunar lander company Firefly $8.2 million grant.

Firefly said the funding will result in an additional 5,600 square feet of cleanroom space at its 50,000-square-foot spacecraft facility in Cedar Park, as well as added ground and test equipment, a spacecraft pressure proof test facility at the 200-acre campus in Briggs that has 200,000-square-feet of facilities, and upgraded infrastructure for mission operations and labs. The company’s Cedar Park headquarters is 28,000 square feet. The improvements are expected to be completed by the end of this year.

The 50 jobs will be added in engineering, quality assurance, manufacturing and spacecraft operations, according to the announcement. The grant also will enable the company to expand STEM outreach and internship programs, including working with the schools in the University of Texas System to provide hands-on experience in spacecraft development.

Though the commission was given $350 million to help industry, in truth the legislature allocated $200 million of that money to build a new “research and training facility” at Texas A&M. While this might help encourage engineering students to come to Texas and thus settle there within the industry, to me it looks like the commission was mostly created to distribute a very large chunk of cash to this one university.

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Orbex scouts Saxaford in advance of first launch

9:25 am

Map of spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea

Though no details have been released, a team from the British rocket startup Orbex has arrived at the Saxaford spaceport in the Shetland Islands to begin preparations for the company’s first launch there, now planned to occur before the end of this year.

Originally Orbex was going to do its launches from the United Kingdom’s other proposed spaceport in Sutherland on the northern coast of Scotland. It had obtained a 50-year-lease to build its own dedicated launch facility, had built its rocket manufacturing facility nearby, and had originally hoped to do the first test orbital launch of its Prime rocket in 2022.

Three years later the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had still not issued Orbex or Sutherland the necessary launch licenses. Faced with bankruptcy if it didn’t launch soon, in December the company announced it was switching its first launch to Saxaford, where the CAA had completed spaceport licensing. It hoped the CAA would thus be able to give it a launch license quickly. We shall see.

Note that the news is slow today. As much as I want to post lots of stuff, I can’t if nothing of significance appears to be happening.

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