Khatia Buniatishvili – Beethoven’s Concerto No. 1 in C Major, Rondo
An evening pause: Performed live 2015, accompanied by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Tag: commercial
The Bahamas suspends further Falcon 9 1st stage landings pending environmental report
The government of the Bahamas has suspended any further Falcon 9 1st stage landings within its territorial waters until SpaceX completes and submits a full environmental report that proves the one previous drone ship landing in February caused no environmental changes at all.
This quote from the article explains everything:
Addressing calls from environmentalists for an EIA, Mr Dontchev [SpaceX’s vice president of launch] said officials heard their feedback. He added that SpaceX hopes to complete the EIA by the end of summer and resume landings thereafter.
The economic impact of space tourism in The Bahamas has also come into focus. [Deputy Prime Minister Chester] Cooper said the February landing could have sparked a greater interest among students inspiring them to pursue STEM studies. SpaceX also announced its $1m donation to the University of The Bahamas in support of STEM education. [emphasis mine]
First, anti-Musk activists, using the environment as a ploy, made enough noise that the Bahamas government felt forced to bow to them. Second, SpaceX is making sure that government will bow more to it by contributing a lot money to its government educational programs.
Expect more landings soon, as SpaceX predicts.
German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg replaces its CEO
Screen capture from video of test failure in August 2024.
Note the flame shooting out sideways.
In a major managerial shake-up as it preps for its first launch attempt later this year, the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg has replaced its CEO, switching from someone with more general business experience to a CEO with a lot of direct experience in the space industry itself.
In an April 11 statement not widely publicized by the company, RFA announced that Stefan Tweraser, who had been chief executive since October 2021, had been replaced by Indulis Kalnins.
The announcement did not give a reason for the change, but it suggested that the company was seeking someone with expertise in the aerospace industry to lead the company. Kalnins is on the aerospace faculty of a German university, Hochschule Bremen, and has been managing director of OHB Cosmos, which focused on launch services.
…Tweraser, by contrast, came from outside the space industry. He joined RFA after past work that included being a consultant at McKinsey & Company, country director for the DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) region at Google and executive at music streaming company Deezer. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted phrase provides I think the explanation for the change. The company had hoped to launch last year, but had a major failure during a static fire engine test on the launchpad, destroying the rocket first stage. The company has probably decided it needed someone in charge who had some hands-on experience with launchpad operations.
Blue Origin completes ground simulation of Orbital Reef space station
Artist rendering of Orbital Reef design, as of
April 2025. Click for original image.
According to a NASA press release today, Blue Origin has successfully completed a ” human-in-the-loop test” in a ground mock-up of the commercial Orbital Reef space station.
The human-in-the-loop test scenarios utilized individual participants or small groups to perform day-in-the-life walkthroughs in life-sized mockups of major station components. Participants provided feedback while simulating microgravity operations, including cargo transfer, trash transfer, stowage, and worksite assessments.
…The milestone is part of a NASA Space Act Agreement originally awarded to Blue Origin in 2021 and focused on the design progress for multiple worksites, floors, and translation paths within the station. This ensures a commercial station can support human life, which is critical to advancing scientific research in a microgravity environment and maintaining a continuous human presence in low Earth orbit.
Though this test might be providing useful information, it leaves me cold. While Blue Origin’s partner in this project, Sierra Space, has been testing real hardware for its LIFE inflatable module (as seen on the left side of the artist’s rendering above), Blue Origin itself appears to have built nothing real. Instead, it is following the old big space paradigm of companies like Boeing that invest none of its own money in development. Instead, the company uses NASA’s development money solely for PR mockups, in the hope the PR will convince NASA to give it the full contract, worth billions. Only then will the real work begin.
Boeing did this with Starliner, and we can all see now how well that turned out.
It also appears that the overall scale of Orbital Reef has been reduced significantly when comparing the current design above with the earlier artist renderings.
Based on this new information, I have dropped Orbital Reef to the bottom in my rankings of the four private space stations presently under development. While Starlab has built as little (following the same play-it-safe paradigm), the company has at least gotten its final design approved. It has also signed a partnership with the European Space Agency, giving it a powerful government backer in addition to NASA.
- 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 a 30 day mission. 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 this spring, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Billy Idol – White Wedding
An evening pause: Performed live 2009.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
Louis Jordan – Saturday Night Fish Fry
An evening pause: It ain’t Saturday, but who cares?
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Italy awards Italian company contract to design constellation of radio telescopes orbiting the Moon
Capitalism in space: The Italian Space Agency has awarded the Italian company Blue Skies Space a contract to design a constellation of radio telescopes orbiting the Moon and designed to map the universe’s earliest radio emissions.
The project, named RadioLuna, aims to uncover whether a fleet of small satellites in a lunar orbit could detect faint radio signals from the universe’s earliest days—signals that are nearly impossible to pick up on Earth due to man-made radio interference. These signals, in the FM radio range, come from a time before the first stars formed, when the universe was mostly hydrogen gas. By listening from the far side of the Moon, free from Earth’s radio noise, scientists could use the satellites to uncover a missing piece of the puzzle in our understanding of the cosmic “dark ages.”
The study will establish the viability of operating simple and cost-effective CubeSats equipped with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components orbiting the Moon and will be led by Blue Skies Space Italia S.r.l., a subsidiary of UK-based Blue Skies Space Ltd. Project partner OHB Italia will be responsible for the definition of a viable platform in a Moon orbit.
The contract is another example of Italy (and Europe) shifting to private enterprise in space. Rather than design this project in-house, its space agency is contracting it out to private companies.
SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites
Continuing its relentless launch pace, SpaceX this evening successfully launched another 27 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 27th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. This is a new record for flights by a Falcon 9 booster, exceeding the space shuttle Endeavour’s record of 25 by two, and trailing the space shuttle Columbia by only one. The record for most reflights by a spacecraft is presently 39 by the space shuttle Discovery, followed by the shuttle Atlantis at 33. Expect several Falcon 9 boosters to exceed these numbers in the next two years.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
43 SpaceX
19 China
5 Rocket Lab
5 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 43 to 33.
SpaceX completes two launches today
SpaceX continued its relentless launch pace today, launching twice from opposite coasts.
First the company placed a National Reconnaissance Office surveillance satellite into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 24th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
Next SpaceX launched another 21 Starlink satellites, including 13 configured for direct-to-cell capabilities, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Kennedy in Florida. The first stage completed its 10th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
42 SpaceX
19 China
5 Rocket Lab
5 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 42 to 33.
Dave Loggins – Please Come to Boston
An evening pause: Performed live on television 1974.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
New Trump executive order requires Pentagon to “prioritize commercial solutions”
A new Trump executive order signed on April 9, 2025 now requires the space divisions in the Defense Department to “prioritize commercial solutions” in all its future space projects.
The executive order, called “Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base,” referenced commercial technology multiple times, including call to utilize existing authorities to “expedite acquisitions throughout the Department of Defense, including a first preference for commercial solutions” and “the restructuring of performance evaluation metrics for acquisition workforce members to include the ability to demonstrate and apply a first consideration of commercial solutions.”
According to Pentagon officials, this order simply underlines what they have been doing. Maybe so, but the reason the Pentagon has been moving in this direction is not because it wanted to, but because of two factors in the past decade that forced action. First, for the past three decades the Pentagon has increasingly failed to get much accomplished in space. Under Air Force leadership (before the creation of the Space Force) the military focused on designing its own big satellites, creating projects that generally went overbudget and behind schedule. That general failure demanded change.
Second, to institute change Trump created the Space Force in his first term with the express desire to shift the military from building its own gold-plated satellites to buying them from the private sector. And despite the four years when Biden was president, the Pentagon maintained that shift, which is why this new Trump executive order will do little to disturb its present space plans.
Indian satellite thruster manufacturer opens American factory
Capitalism in space: The Indian satellite company Bellatrix, which up-to-now has manufactured electrical attitude thrusters for satellites built by India’s space agency, has now opened a factory in Delaware in order to attract business from American satellite companies.
Bellatrix hired Chris MacDonald, a former business development director at rocket developer Astra and satellite provider Terran Orbital, to lead its recently created U.S. subsidiary, headquartered in Delaware. The manufacturing facility would support localized production, testing and delivery of propulsion systems to enable faster turnaround times and closer collaboration with U.S.-based customers, MacDonald said via email.
Founded in 2015, Bellatrix’s electric hall effect thruster has been used in a handful of missions for India’s space agency in recent years.
Bellatrix is not the only foreign space company to open offices in the U.S. for similar reasons. The Japanese startups Astroscale and Ispace have done the same, as well as several other companies listed in the article at the link. It appears the new American launch industry, which has significantly lowered the cost to orbit, is attracting orbital business from across the world.