Tag: engineering

Musk: I have merged xAI with SpaceX

3:35 pm

Elon Musk today announced that he has merged the company xAI (which includes X) with SpaceX, because in his mind the needs of the two companies interlace perfectly.

The requirement to launch thousands of satellites to orbit became a forcing function for the Falcon program, driving recursive improvements to reach the unprecedented flight rates necessary to make space-based internet a reality. This year, Starship will begin delivering the much more powerful V3 Starlink satellites to orbit, with each launch adding more than 20 times the capacity to the constellation as the current Falcon launches of the V2 Starlink satellites. Starship will also launch the next generation of direct-to-mobile satellites, which will deliver full cellular coverage everywhere on Earth.

While the need to launch these satellites will act as a similar forcing function to drive Starship improvements and launch rates, the sheer number of satellites that will be needed for space-based data centers will push Starship to even greater heights. With launches every hour carrying 200 tons per flight, Starship will deliver millions of tons to orbit and beyond per year, enabling an exciting future where humanity is out exploring amongst the stars.

The basic math is that launching a million tons per year of satellites generating 100 kW of compute power per ton would add 100 gigawatts of AI compute capacity annually, with no ongoing operational or maintenance needs. Ultimately, there is a path to launching 1 TW/year from Earth.

My estimate is that within 2 to 3 years, the lowest cost way to generate AI compute will be in space. This cost-efficiency alone will enable innovative companies to forge ahead in training their AI models and processing data at unprecedented speeds and scales, accelerating breakthroughs in our understanding of physics and invention of technologies to benefit humanity.

Many sources online are speculating that this new merged company will make the company’s initial public offering (IPO) now rumored for this summer even more sky high. I remain puzzled however why Musk would want to do it, and this merger today illustrates why. He controls both SpaceX and xAI completely, as both are privately owned. He didn’t need to convince government regulators of anything. Once the company is public, with publicly traded stock, that will change. He will no longer have such freedom of action.

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A galaxy’s swirling dust lanes

12:07 pm

A galaxy with swirling dust lanes
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of follow-up observations of a now faded supernovae that occurred there two years earlier.

This was on purpose: the aim of the observations was to witness the aftereffects of the supernova and examine its surroundings, which can only be done once the intense light of the explosion is gone.

The galaxy itself, NGC 7722, is 187 million light years away, and is unusual in itself.

A “lenticular”, meaning “lens-shaped”, galaxy is a type that sits in between the more familiar spiral galaxies and elliptical galaxies. It is also less common than these — partly because when a galaxy has an ambiguous appearance, it can be hard to determine if it is actually a spiral, actually an elliptical galaxy, or something in between. Many of the known lenticular galaxies sport features of both spiral and elliptical galaxies. In this case, NGC 7722 lacks the defined arms of a spiral galaxy, while it has an extended, glowing halo and a bright bulge in the center similar to an elliptical galaxy. Unlike elliptical galaxies, it has a visible disc — concentric rings swirl around its bright nucleus. Its most prominent feature, however, is undoubtedly the long lanes of dark red dust coiling around the outer disc and halo.

The streak in the lower left is a very distant background galaxy, seen on edge.

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Amazon buys ten more launches from SpaceX to place its Leo satellites in orbit

10:59 am

Amazon Leo logo

Hidden in Amazon’s submission last week to the FCC, requesting more time to launch its Leo internet constellation, was this tidbit:

Less than two years after the Commission granted its authorization, Amazon Leo announced the largest commercial launch procurements in history to deploy its initial constellation. It has since added to this launch capacity, and today has contracted for 102 launches across four providers: 18 launches on Arianespace’s Ariane 6, 24 launches on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 38 launches on ULA’s Vulcan Centaur, 9 launches on ULA’s Atlas V, and 13 launches on SpaceX’s Falcon 9. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrases indicate the significant changes. In my initial post last week I was focused solely on whether the FCC would grant Amazon the time extension to get its constellation in orbit. At the moment it has only 180 satellites operating in orbit, and to meet its license requirement it must have 1,616 launched by July.

Thus, I didn’t look closely at these launch contract numbers. While the number of launches for Arianespace (18) and ULA (47) appears to match Amazon’s contract numbers from its original 2022 announcement, Blue Origin’s total has dropped by three launches, 27 to 24.

SpaceX in turn has gained another ten launches, on top of its original already completed 2023 three-launch contract. (In 2023, faced with a stockholder lawsuit for ignoring SpaceX’s Falcon 9, the only operational rocket among all of these at the time and by far the cheapest, Amazon’s management quickly signed SpaceX to that three-launch contract.)

The submission last week tells us that sometime recently Amazon signed SpaceX to a new contract for ten more launches. The numbers also suggest that the company took three launches away from Blue Origin’s New Glenn. Apparently, Amazon is not happy with Blue Origin’s launch pace, and signed SpaceX to help get more satellites in orbit. Without question, SpaceX will get these ten additional launches off faster than ULA, Arianespace, or Blue Origin combined. In fact, I bet it gets all ten done before the middle of this year, assuming Amazon can deliver it the satellites.

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SpaceX launches 25 more Starlink satellites; uses 1st stage for 31st time

9:28 am

SpaceX this morning successfully placed another 25 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The 1st stage (B1071) completed its 31st flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. Though this number set no records, it moved that booster closer to catching the records for the most reused launch vehicle, presently held by the shuttle Discovery:

39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
32 Falcon 9 booster B1067
31 Falcon 9 booster B1071
29 Falcon 9 booster B1063
28 Falcon 9 booster B1069
28 Columbia space shuttle

Sources here and here.

The 2026 launch race:

14 SpaceX
6 China
2 Rocket Lab

This list is likely inaccurate, as Russia had a Soyuz-2 launch of a classified payload planned just prior to SpaceX’s launch, but as yet there been no confirmation of its success. SpaceX also has another launch schedule for this evening. I will include both when I update then.

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Sunspot update: Maybe solar maximum isn’t over?

9:15 am

The uncertainty of science! It is time for another sunspot update. It is also time to note that once again the Sun appears to be confounding the predictions of NOAA’s solar science panel. Below is NOAA’s monthly graph of the sunspot activity on the Earth-facing hemisphere, updated by NOAA to include the activity in January but annotated with extra information by me to illustrate the larger scientific context.

Since April 2025 that science panel has been predicting that the solar maximum has passed and the Sun was beginning the ramp down to solar minimum, now expected to occur around 2031-32. And in the ten months since, sunspot activity has appeared to more or less track that prediction, as indicated by the purple/magenta curve line on the graph below.

It now appears that this prediction might very well have been premature.
» Read more

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SpaceX submits proposal to FCC for new constellation of one million satellites

3:03 pm

SpaceX yesterday submitted a proposal to Federal Communications Commission to build new satellite constellation made up of one million satellites designed as an orbiting data center.

In one 8-page document, SpaceX describes its proposed Orbital Data Center system. “To deliver the compute capacity required for large scale AI inference and data center applications serving billions of users globally, SpaceX aims to deploy a system of up to one million satellites to operate within narrow orbital shells spanning up to 50 km each (leaving sufficient room to deconflict against other systems with comparable ambitions),” the company says.

The same satellites would harness the sun’s energy, orbiting at “between 500 km and 2,000 km altitude and 30 degrees and sun-synchronous orbit inclinations,” the company adds. The orbiting data centers would also use “optical links,” or lasers, to connect with Starlink, using the existing satellite internet system to route traffic to users below.

“Orbital data centers are the most efficient way to meet the accelerating demand for AI computing power,” the filing adds in bold, pointing to the growing energy costs of AI data centers on Earth. The company is also betting it can launch the space-based data centers at a rapid clip using SpaceX’s more powerful Starship vehicle, which is also crucial to upgrading Starlink with next-generation satellites.

The FCC is likely not going to okay this submission, as written. It is clearly very preliminary, but appears to be consistent with SpaceX’s way of doing business. It sees an opportunity, and jumps in with full force. While others are working up their plans, SpaceX submits its first license proposal outlining the plan in very broad terms, thus getting there first.

And SpaceX is very well positioned to launch this constellation as promised. It has the rockets, and has proven itself capable of running a satellite constellation of vast size.

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Axiom wins slot for next tourist mission to ISS

2:25 pm

NASA yesterday announced that it awarded the space station startup Axiom the next slot for a tourist mission to ISS.

NASA and Axiom Space have signed an order for the fifth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, targeted to launch no earlier than January 2027 from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

…Axiom Mission 5 is expected to spend up to 14 days aboard the space station. A specific launch date will depend on overall spacecraft traffic at the orbital outpost and other planning considerations.

Both Axiom and the space station startup Vast had been bidding for the fifth and sixth tourist slots. That Axiom had already done this four times previously was probably NASA’s reasons for choosing it. The agency has not yet decided on who will get the sixth slot, targeting a mission likely in 2028. My bet is that it will give to Vast, because by then Vast’s own demo station Haven-1 will have launched and been visited, thus giving that company some of the experience Axiom already has.

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Russia in discussions with Malaysian province about potential spaceport

1:49 pm

Proposed spaceports in Malaysia
Proposed spaceports in Malaysia

Officials from Glavcosmos, the commercial division of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, have been holding meetings with officials from the Malaysian province of Sabah about building a spaceport there.

Glavkosmos said technical studies identify Sabah as the most suitable location in Southeast Asia for orbital launches, including low-earth and sun-synchronous orbits, due to its strategic geography and safe rocket stage drop zones. The proposed spaceport could create more than 2,000 high-income jobs and boost local supporting industries.

One year ago, in January 2025, the Sabah government announced it was holding similar discussions with the Ukraine. It seems either those talks fell through, or Russia decided to move in and block the Ukraine from making a deal.

A second Malaysian state, Pahang, is also planning a spaceport, working instead with China.

In all cases, it does appear for some reason Malaysia is not very interested in working with western nations.

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Blue Origin shuts down New Shepard suborbital tourist flights

1:22 pm

Blue Origin yesterday announced it is “pausing” the suborbital tourist flights of its New Shepard spacecraft for no less than two years.

Blue Origin today announced it will pause its New Shepard flights and shift resources to further accelerate development of the company’s human lunar capabilities. The decision reflects Blue Origin’s commitment to the nation’s goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence.

Those “lunar capabilites” not only include its lunar landers, both manned and unmanned, but its New Glenn rocket, which it wants to sell to NASA to use for these missions. Both need more attention. In addition, it could be the company’s CEO, David Limp, wants to allocate more resources to the company’s Orbital Reef space station proposal, which has been sitting dead in the water for the past year-plus. All these projects have been very slow to get out of the starting gate, partly because of the very leisurely culture that Blue Origin’s previous CEO installed, and partly because the company has put out too many projects it is not focusing well on finishing.

There is also likely a third reason: New Shepard was not making a profit. While the company has been flying it quite regularly in recent months, it does not appear it could ever recover its costs. Moreover, I suspect the demand for these short suborbital tourist flights has diminished with advent of orbital tourism and the soon-to-arrive multiple commercial space stations.

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Amazon asks FCC for time extension for launching its Leo constellation

11:22 am

Amazon yesterday submitted a request to the Federal Communications Commission to extend the July deadline on its license for its Leo internet satellite constellation, which presently requires it to have 1,616 satellites in orbit by that date.

At present Amazon has 181 satellites in orbit, all launched in the last ten months. At that pace there is no chance the company can meet its FCC requirement. From its FCC submission:

While Amazon Leo will meet the deadline for full deployment of its constellation established by its license and the Commission’s rules, launch delays will cause it to fall short of the interim milestone requirement to deploy half of its originally authorized constellation by July 30, 2026. The Commission’s rules provide for extension of such milestones where, as here, delay arises from unforeseeable circumstances beyond an operator’s control or overriding public interest considerations favor an extension.

Because it meets both criteria, Amazon Leo respectfully requests a 24-month extension of its 50% milestone to July 30, 2028, or alternatively, a waiver of this interim requirement.

In its submission Amazon claims the delay is entirely the fault of the rocket companies it was relying on to launch the satellites, but that is a bogus claim. It initially choose to depend almost entirely on three new rockets (Blue Origin’s New Glenn, ULA’s Vulcan, and Arianespace’s Ariane-6), all of which had not launched and were still under development. To expect these to launch on time was absurd.

Furthermore, its ULA contract also called for launches using company’s already operational Atlas-5 rocket, which Amazon claims were delayed because of “unexpected anomalies and delays caused by issues with its vehicle fairings and solid rocket boosters.” I don’t buy it, and suspect the real cause was that Amazon was unable to produce the satellites on time.

Faced with these delays and a stockholder lawsuit, Amazon subsequently signed SpaceX to do three launches, which that company did quickly, in less than four months. If Amazon had truly wanted to get its Leo satellites in orbit on time, it would have given SpaceX more launches and gotten it done.

Nonetheless, it is likely the FCC will agree to Amazon’s extension request. The company has now shown it is committed to the process and intends to get its constellation in orbit. It is not sitting on its license doing nothing. I would not be surprised however if the FCC imposes some new requirements in an effort to force Amazon to launch more satellites more quickly.

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China launches Algerian satellite

10:23 am

China today successfully placed an Algerian “remote sensing” satellite into orbit, its Long March 2C rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. China’s state-run press also said little about the satellite, other than claiming it would be used for “land planning and disaster prevention and mitigation.” This however doesn’t match what “remote sensing” satellites usually do, which is military surveillance.

The 2026 launch race:

13 SpaceX
6 China
2 Rocket Lab

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Russian defunct military satellite breaks up in graveyard orbit

1:42 pm

A Russian defunct military geosynchronous satellite that was launched in 2014 and spent a decade spying on other geosynchronous satellites only to be moved to a graveyard orbit in 2025 when its fuel ran out apparently broke apart earlier today.

The Swiss company S2A systems, which specializes in tracking orbital objects, captured the moment the spacecraft began disintegrating. I have embedded that footage below, though it really is far less exciting than it sounds.

The debris poses a very small risk to other geosynchronous satellites, which orbit at about 22,000 miles elevation where there is too little atmosphere to decay orbits. The graveyard orbit is several hundred miles higher.
» Read more

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Russian official says Soyuz launchpad repair likely delayed

9:48 am

According to the Russian official in charge of ground infrastructure at Roscosmos, the repair of Russia’s only Soyuz launchpad for launching Progress and Soyuz capsules to ISS might not be completed by late March, as Roscosmos has previously promised.

It appears the winter weather at Baikonur is causing issues. In addition:

Barmin explained that the new service platform had to be assembled from components manufactured at different times and sometimes mismatching each other, requiring on-site modifications. For example, the core of the spare platform was manufactured in 1977 in accordance with a different set of blueprints for a planned-but-never-implemented refurbishment of another Soyuz pad, Barmin said. When it was shipped from an arsenal in the city of Tambov to Baikonur, the set of hardware was incomplete, requiring it to be complemented with parts from other sources and with newly manufactured elements.

It also appears the Russian government is going to make scapegoats of the workers who handled the launch platform during the November 2025 launch. It has placed them under criminal investigation. The managers, whom according to one report demanded the launch take place even though these workers could not get the platform properly fastened in place, appear to have been cleared of wrong-doing.

Until this pad is repaired, Russia has no way to launch any manned missions. Nor can it send cargo to ISS.

The decision to scapegoat the workers will further hinder work, as it will certainly damage morale. Such an approach also helps explain why there has been several cases of sabotage of Soyuz and Progress capsules while they are being prepped for launch.

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NASA delays Artemis-2 wet dress rehearsal countdown due to weather

9:30 am

NASA today announced it is delaying until February 2, 2026 the wet dress rehearsal countdown of its Artemis-2 mission due to weather concerns.

NASA is targeting Monday, Feb. 2, as the tanking day for the upcoming Artemis II wet dress rehearsal at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as a result of weather. With this change, the first potential opportunity to launch is no earlier than Sunday, Feb. 8.

Over the past several days, engineers have been closely monitoring conditions as cold weather and winds move through Florida. Managers have assessed hardware capabilities against the projected forecast given the rare arctic outbreak affecting the state and decided to change the timeline. Teams and preparations at the launch pad remain ready for the wet dress rehearsal. However, adjusting the timeline for the test will position NASA for success during the rehearsal, as the expected weather this weekend would violate launch conditions.

I had previously said this dress rehearsal countdown would include the astronauts inside Orion. This was incorrect. The astronauts are in quarantine in preparation for the actual mission. Orion will be unmanned during the rehearsal countdown.

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Two American launches this evening

12:28 am

Two American companies, Rocket Lab and SpaceX, successfully completed launches during the evening of January 29-30.

First, Rocket Lab today (January 30th in New Zealand) placed a South Korean test smallsat, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand. The satellite is the first of a planned mass-produced constellation to provide precise observations of the Korean peninsula.

Next, SpaceX placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in the early morning hours. The first stage completed fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The 2026 launch race:

13 SpaceX
5 China
2 Rocket Lab

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Varda capsule successfully returns to Earth after nine weeks in orbit

9:36 pm

Varda's W-5 capsule after landing today
Varda’s W-5 capsule after landing today

The orbiting capsule startup Varda today successfully returned to Earth its W-5 capsule after nine weeks in orbit, landing in Australia’s Koonibba Test Range, operated by the commercial spaceport startup Southern Launch.

W-5 launched in November 2025, Varda’s fourth launch last year, and spent 9 weeks in orbit. The mission was funded through the Prometheus program, a partnership between the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and commercial space entities.

…The W-5 mission is the first reentry of Varda’s in-house developed satellite bus, designed specifically to meet the rigorous demands of both long-duration orbital pharmaceutical processing and high-velocity reentry. The W-5 flight was also equipped with an in-house manufactured heatshield, made in Varda’s El Segundo headquarters from C-PICA (Conformal Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator).

…The W-5 capsule carried a specialized payload for the U.S. Navy, focusing on data collection during reentry. Varda’s ability to provide fixed-cost, routine reentry offers the Department of War a unique, cost-effective platform for iterative testing of hypersonic flight characteristics. The Varda capsules endure extreme environments when they reenter at speeds exceeding Mach 25.

While previous capsules had used their time in orbit testing the manufacture of products like pharmaceuticals, this mission was used by the Air Force to test hypersonic missile sensors and equipment during the high-speed re-entry.

Varda’s earlier capsules had used a satellite bus (that provides power and control) built by Rocket Lab. With this capsule it is now capable of building its entire capsule. It is also ramping up its launch pace, with plans to launch as many as 20 capsules through ’28.

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Pluto’s mountains of ice surrounded by a sea of frozen nitrogen

2:18 pm

Ice mountains floating in nitrogen sea on Pluto
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Though we only have a limited archive of high resolution pictures of Pluto that were taken when New Horizons did its close fly-by of the planet in July 2015, it is worthwhile sometimes to take a second look at some of those images. The picture to the right, cropped and annotated to post here, was taken during that July 14, 2015 fly-by, and shows a mountainous region dubbed Al-Idrisi Montes on the shore of a white frozen ocean. The red dotted line indicates a large trench that separates the Al-Idrisi mountains from the mountainous region to the west.

Sounds similar to an arctic shoreline here on Earth, doesn’t it? Not in the least. Those mountains, ranging from 600 to 9,000 feet high, are made of frozen ice, which on Pluto are as hard as granite due to the endless cold. And the white frozen ocean is frozen nitrogen, broken into polygon shaped blocks. Even stranger: those ice mountains might even be floating in that nitrogen sea! A paper from 2019 [pdf] looked at the New Horizons data and concluded as follows:

Evidence suggests that the Al-Idrisi mountains may have been uplifted by the formation of
the western trench feature. Solid state convection appears to be our best supposition as to how the Al-Idrisi Montes reached their heights.

In other words, as that large trench/depression formed, convection (the bubbles you see when you simmer tomato sauce) pushed these mountains of ice upward to float above the “sea level” of that nitrogen sea.

At least, that’s one hypothesis. The scientists who wrote this paper admit their “our hypothesis still remains in need of study and this trench-mountain system warrants serious further research.” In other words, we simply don’t know enough to have a definitive understanding of the geology of this extremely alien planet.

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SpaceX launches 25 more Starlink satellites

10:59 am

The beat goes on: SpaceX today successfully launched another 25 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its 19th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

It also appears on this launch SpaceX placed its 11,000th Starlink satellite into orbit. The actual number of satellites in orbit presently is much less than this, as SpaceX retires older Starlink satellites on a regularly basis. Nonetheless, the overall number is impressive, in that it was accomplished in less than seven years.

The 2026 launch race:

12 SpaceX
5 China
1 Rocket Lab

Though it is still early in 2026, note that SpaceX has now launched twice as much as the rest of the world, combined.

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Artemis-2 proves NASA learned nothing from the Challenger and Columbia failures

9:56 am

NASA: an agency still avoiding reality
NASA: an agency that still avoids reality

Our bankrupt new media continues to fail us. NASA is about to send four astronauts on a ten-day mission around the Moon in a capsule with questionable engineering, and that media continues to ignore the problem. Mainstream news outlets continue to describe the mission in glowing terms, consistently ignoring that questionable engineering. In some cases the stories even make believe NASA has fixed the problem, when it has not.

The most ridiculous example is an article yesterday from an Orlando outlet, Spectrum New 13: “How the lessons learned from the Challenger disaster apply to Artemis rockets”. It focuses entirely on the O-ring problem that destroyed Challenger, noting repeatedly that NASA has fixed this issue in its SLS rocket.

Of course it has. That’s the last war, long over. Engineers fixed this issue almost four decades ago. The article however dismisses entirely the new engineering concern of today, Orion’s heat shield, which did not work as expected during its own test flight in space in 2022. It covers this issue with this single two-sentence paragraph:

However, during re-entry, it broke up into chunks instead of burning away. This issue pushed back the Artemis II and III missions, but NASA has stated it has resolved the problem.

NASA however has not resolved the problem. It is using the same heat shield now on this manned mission, and really has no reason to assume it will work any better, even if the agency has changed the re-entry flight path in an effort to mitigate the heat shield’s questionable design.

You see, NASA with Artemis-2 is doing the exact same thing it did prior to both the Challenger and Columbia accidents. » Read more

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Saturn’s rings with two of its moons perfectly aligned

2:30 pm

Two of Saturn's moons above its rings
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Rather than posting another Mars orbital image, I decided today to delve into the archive of pictures taken by the Cassini orbiter during the thirteen years it circled Saturn, from 2004 until 2017. The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was released on December 14, 2015, and is just one example of the many breath-taking photographs that the Cassini science team took during that mission. From the caption:

Like a cosmic bull’s-eye, Enceladus and Tethys line up almost perfectly for Cassini’s cameras. Since the two moons are not only aligned, but also at relatively similar distances from Cassini, the apparent sizes in this image are a good approximation of the relative sizes of Enceladus (313 miles across) and Tethys (660 miles across).

This view looks toward the un-illuminated side of the rings from 0.34 degrees below the ring plane. The image was taken in red light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 24, 2015.

The image was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.3 million miles from Enceladus. Image scale on Enceladus is 7 miles per pixel. Tethys was at a distance of 1.6 million miles with a pixel scale of 10 miles per pixel.

Enceladus is in the foreground, and is the planet that has what scientists have labeled tiger stripe fractures that vent water and other material, including carbon molecules.

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Astronomers discover a “surprisingly mature” cluster of galaxies in early universe

11:18 am

Proto galaxy cluster
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science strikes again! Astronomers using both the Webb Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory now think they have discovered a just-forming protocluster of galaxies only one billion years after the Big Bang, when such galaxy clusters should not yet exist.

You can read their paper here [pdf]. The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows the Webb infrared data as the background of stars and galaxies, with the galaxies thought to be part of this protocluster circled. The blue cloud is Chandra’s X-ray data. From the press release:

The Chandra and Webb data reveal that JADES-ID1 contains the two properties that confirm the presence of a protocluster: a large number of galaxies held together by gravity (Webb sees at least 66 potential members) that are also sitting in a huge cloud of hot gas (detected by Chandra). As a galaxy cluster forms, gas falls inward and is heated by shock waves, reaching temperatures of millions of degrees and glowing in X-rays.

What makes JADES-ID1 exceptional is the remarkably early time when it appears in cosmic history. Most models of the universe predict that there likely would not be enough time and a large enough density of galaxies for a protocluster of this size to form only a billion years after the big bang. The previous record holder for a protocluster with X-ray emission is seen much later, about three billion years after the big bang.

It increasingly appears that there are aspects of the universe we simply do not yet understand, which in turn make our theories of its birth and formation either incomplete or invalid. Those theories might be right in principle, but the data suggests they are wrong in detail.

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New ground-based space antenna startup raises $100 million and wins $50 million Space Force contract

10:24 am

In a clear sign that the space industry in space now requires increased support on the ground, the ground-based space antenna startup, Northwood Space, this week announced it has raised $100 million in private investment capital even as it simultaneously won a $50 million Space Force contract.

The funding round, announced January 27, was led by Washington Harbour Partners and co-led by Andreessen Horowitz. The financing came on the heels of a $49.8 million contract that was signed with the United States Space Force to help improve the “satellite control network,” which “handles a huge variety of consequential space missions for our government,” said Bridgit Mendler, founder and CEO.

Northwood is an end-to-end ground infrastructure provider for space missions. In other words, it manufactures and deploys antennae systems, which are smaller than older models, that allow Earth to communicate with satellites in space.

Northwood was only formed three years ago, so its success is an clear indication that there is a real need for more and better ground-based facilities.

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German government hires German startup Polaris Spaceplanes to build reusable two-stage hypersonic plane

10:06 am

Mira-II prototype following first flight using aerospike engine
Mira-II prototype following first flight using
aerospike engine in October 2024.

The German government yesterday awarded a contract to the German startup Polaris Spaceplanes to build and fly a reusable two-stage hypersonic plane by 2027.

On 27 January, POLARIS Spaceplanes announced that it had been awarded a contract by the Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) to build a fully reusable, horizontal take-off, two-stage hypersonic vehicle. The primary application of the Hypersonic Test and Experimentation Vehicle (HYTEV) will be as a hypersonic testbed for scientific and defence-related research. A variant of the vehicle with an expendable upper stage will also be capable of deploying small satellites into low Earth orbit.

According to the company, the HYTEV will be roughly the size and take-off mass of a fighter jet. The main stage will be powered by two turbofans and one of the company’s in-house developed aerospike rocket engines. The turbofans will be used for take-off and landing, and the rocket engine will accelerate the vehicle before upper-stage deployment. The upper stage will be entirely rocket-powered, with imagery accompanying the announcement appearing to show a more conventional rocket engine configuration compared with the aerospike engine equipped to the main stage. After completing its mission, it will likely be recovered under controlled glide conditions or potentially by a parachute or parafoil.

This deal appears to be an upgrade to a February 2025 German government deal with Polaris. It also follows Polaris’s successful use of an aerospike engine on a prototype test flight in 2024. While the company has shown some success, doing more than a dozen test flights with small scale prototypes (as shown in the image to the right), this program and schedule still seems quite ambitious.

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Ariane-6 gets a new government launch contract

9:45 am

The European Space Agency, one agency among many
The European Space Agency, one European
agency among many

The government rocket of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Ariane-6, yesterday won a new launch contract to place a pair of Galileo GPS-type satellites into orbit for the European Union (EU).

Arianespace announced today at the European Space Conference in Brussels the signature of the launch contract with the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA), under the delegation of the European Commission, to orbit the second pair of second-generation satellites of the Galileo constellation (Galileo L18) on board an Ariane 6 launcher. With this signature, the European Commission and the EUSPA are formalizing the launch contract of Galileo L18, following the initial mission allocation to Arianespace made in April 2024.

All told this will be Ariane-6’s fifth launch of GPS-type satellites for the EU, which appears committed to Ariane-6, even though this expendable rocket costs much more than SpaceX’s Falcon 9, in order to promote European sovereignty. Eventually Europe will develop more cost effective private rockets (in about a decade), but until then its access to space will be limited by cost.

And the extra cost is not simply the expendable nature of Ariane-6. Note also the many layers of bureaucracy listed in the quote above. For the European Union there the European Union Agency for Space Programme, working under the supervision of the EU’s European Commission. It signed a deal with Arianespace, which represents the European Space Agency as its commercial rocket division.

That’s four different bureaucracies, two within the European Union and two more related to Europe’s space effort. Each adds cost to the launch, as well as the need for complex negotiations that delay any deal.

Not

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SpaceX launches GPS satellite

9:06 am

SpaceX last night successfully launched a GPS satellite for the Space Force, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The Space Force had originally hired ULA to launch this satellite, but two weeks ago it switched launch provider to SpaceX. Apparently the military wanted this satellite launched now, and for some reason ULA could not do it, even though the Vulcan rocket was supposedly ready for launch.

The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves each completed their second flight.

The 2026 launch race:

11 SpaceX
5 China
1 Rocket Lab

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Scientists produce new estimate of the thickness of Europa’s icy crust

5:23 pm

Europa in true color
Europa in true color, taken by Juno during that
September 2022 fly-by. Click for full image.

Using data produced by Juno during a 2022 close-fly of Jupiter’s moon Europa, scientists have made a new estimate of the thickness of Europa’s icy crust, approximately 18 miles thick with a 6-mile margin of error.

In other words, their estimate could be as small as 12 miles thick, or as large as 24 miles thick.

You can read their paper here. From their abstract:

For the idealized case of pure water ice, the data are consistent with the existence of a thermally conductive ice shell with a thickness of 29 ± 10 km [18 ± 6 miles] and with the presence of cracks, pores or other scatterers extending to depths of hundreds of metres below the surface with a characteristic size smaller than a few centimetres in radius. An ice-shell salinity of 15 mg kg−1, as indicated by models based on terrestrial marine ice, would reduce our estimate of the thickness of the ice shell by about 5 km, substantially less than our 10 km uncertainty. The low volume fraction, small size and shallow depth of the scatterers indicate that the fracture interfaces observed at Europa’s surface are alone unlikely to be capable of carrying nutrients between the surface and the ocean. [emphasi mine]

The highlighted sentence is the important one. If this new estimate is right, than the unidentified reddish material that appears to leak out of the long ridgelike cracks on Europa’s surface, clearly visible in the picture to the right, are not coming from any underground ocean. The distances are too large.

Other estimates have suggested that ice crust could be as thin as 2 miles, but like this research the uncertainties are very large.

Meanwhile, the Juno mission is still alive, though essentially winding down operations. The mission was expected to officially end at the end of September 2025, when its budget ran out, but the just passed budget included enough money to keep it going, albeit at a relatively low level. According to the orbiter’s webpage, it will continue to orbit Jupiter, its orbit degrading naturally until it falls into Jupiter to burn up. As it does so data will continue to be collected, though at a much lower rate.

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Windswept Martian volcanic ash?

2:35 pm

Volcanic ash on Mars?
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 30, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this simply as “Features,” the vagueness of which I can understand after digging in to get a better idea of the location and geography.

The location, as shown by the white dot on the overview map below, is inside the Medusa Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash field on Mars that is thought to be the source of much of the red planet’s dust. That ash field is large and very deep, and was put down more than a billion years ago when the giant volcanoes of Mars were active and erupting. Thus it is well layered, and many images of that ash field show that layering exposed by the eons of Martian wind scouring its surface.

In this case, that scouring appears to have produced this feathery surface, though the origin of those ridges might have instead come from volcanic flows that are now hardened. Or we could be looking at ancient channels produced by ice or water, though that would have to have been a very long time ago, as this image is located in the Martian dry tropics, where no near surface ice presently exists.
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Astronomers use AI to discover hundreds of weird galaxies in Hubble archive

10:23 am

Weird galaxies in the Hubble archive, found with AI
Click for original image.

In what is a perfect example of the proper use of artificial computer intelligence (AI), astronomers have now used this programming to analyze almost 100 million images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over the decades to find any galaxies hidden there that have “anomalies” or unusual shapes.

The team analyzed nearly 100 million image cutouts from the Hubble Legacy Archive, each measuring just a few dozen pixels (7 to 8 arcseconds) on a side. They identified more than 1,300 objects with an odd appearance in just two and a half days — more than 800 of which had never been documented in scientific literature.

The six galaxies to the right are just a small sample. All six were previously unidentified, and include “three lenses with arcs distorted by gravity, one galactic merger, one ring galaxy, and one galaxy that defied classification” (the galaxy at the top left). From the European Space Agency’s (ESA) press release:

The strange, bi-polar galaxy seen here is certainly anomalous, with its compact, swirling core and two open lobes at the sides. Exactly what kind of galaxy it is is unclear, and it was not previously known to astronomers.

As noted in the first link, the volume of data that astronomers are now collecting from ground-based and orbiting telescopes — many of which are survey telescopes that photograph the entire sky repeatedly — has actually become a problem. They have great data, but don’t have the time or human resources to study it sufficiently. Even employing large numbers of ordinary citizens, working at home with their own computers, can’t get the job done.

This is the kind of grunt work that AI is ideally made for. It can quickly review the data and identify objects that don’t fit normal expectations. Humans then can do the real work, finding the most interesting of these strange objects, such as the top left galaxy, and devote human creativity to studying it.

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Musk: Next Starship/Superheavy test launch in mid-March

9:39 am

According to a recent tweet by Elon Musk , the next Starship/Superheavy test launch will occur “in 6 weeks,” placing that launch sometime in mid-March.

Musk provided no other information, but this announcement suggests the company’s engineers now understand and have corrected the issues that caused two Superheavy ruptures during two different tank tests in recent weeks. It also suggests that the launchpad repairs and upgrades will soon be completed, and that a new version 3 Superheavy prototype is ready to go, replacing one that was damaged during those tank tests.

The mission specifics however remain unclear. SpaceX could repeat the flight path of the last few tests, in an orbit low enough so that the atmosphere will bring Starship down over the Indian Ocean. In such a flight the company would test refueling within Starship, restarts of its Raptor engines, and deployment of dummy or even real Starlink satellites.

It is possible however that this next test flight will go into a full orbit, and circle the Earth once or several times. SpaceX has said that in 2026 it intends to do a Starship refueling test using two Starships, launched several weeks apart. To do this more ambitious mission however it first needs to do at least one full orbital flight of Starship. Since the company has already tested on previous orbital test flights the restart of Starship’s Raptor engines — proving its capability to do a controlled re-entry — there really is no reason it can’t go for a full orbit on the next flight. There is even the possibility that Starship will come back to Boca Chica and be caught the company’s tower chopsticks, though this remains unconfirmed.

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