Tag: engineering

Brownsville’s mayor: SpaceX has brought billions of dollars to the region

12:04 pm

According to Brownsville’s mayor, John Cowen, SpaceX has brought billions of dollars to the region as well as created tens of thousands of jobs, and should be unanimously hailed by everyone there.

“The aerospace giant has infused $13 billion into into the economy across Brownsville and South Texas. It has created 24,000 direct and indirect jobs across the region, with approximately 4,000 jobs on site today. It is projected that 4,000 more jobs are coming,” Cowen said.

Cowen made his remarks about SpaceX at his 2026 State of the City Address, held March 25 at Texas Southmost College’s Performing Arts Center.

“SpaceX has generated more than $305 million in tax revenue. It has managed business relationships with more than 350 suppliers, putting $147 million into the regional supply chain,” Cowen said.

None of this is a surprise, except to some local and national news outlets that like to act as PR departments for the fringe activist groups — Save RGV, the South Texas Environmental Justice Network and the fake Indian tribe dubbed the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas — that have opposed SpaceX’s Boca Chica operations from day one, and have repeatedly gone to court to try to shut it down. Those news outlets always give these activists a big bullhorn to tout their position, even though they represent practically no one in the region and likely get their funding from leftist sources outside of Texas.

Hat tip to Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas.

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Voyager-2’s view of clouds on top of clouds on Neptune

11:45 am

Neptune's upper clouds
Click for original image.

Time to continue our cool image tour this week of the Voyager-2 archive of Neptune, taken during the spacecraft’s August 25, 1989 close fly-by of the gas giant, zipping only 2,700 miles above the cloud-tops. This remains the only mission to visit Neptune so far.

The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken two hours before Voyager-2’s closest approach. From the caption:

These clouds were observed at a latitude of 29 degrees north near Neptune’s east terminator. The linear cloud forms are stretched approximately along lines of constant latitude and the sun is toward the lower [right]. The bright sides of the clouds which face the sun are brighter than the surrounding cloud deck because they are more directly exposed to the sun. Shadows can be seen on the side opposite the sun.

These shadows are less distinct at short wavelengths (violet filter) and more distinct at long wavelengths (orange filter). This can be understood if the underlying cloud deck on which the shadow is cast is at a relatively great depth, in which case scattering by molecules in the overlying atmosphere will diffuse light into the shadow. Because molecules scatter blue light much more efficiently than red light, the shadows will be darkest at the longest (reddest) wavelengths, and will appear blue under white light illumination.

The resolution of this image is 6.8 miles per pixel and the range is only 98,000 miles. The width of the cloud streaks range from 30 to 125 miles, and their shadow widths range from 18 to 30 miles. Cloud heights appear to be of the order of 31 miles.

Of all the high resolution images taken of Neptune by Voyager-2, this is the only one that clearly shows some dimensionality. Later photographs taken by Hubble and other ground- and space-based telescopes can only show global views that are far less sharp than the global views produced by Voyager-2.

This picture hints at Neptune’s very complex weather patterns, which has no well-defined surface and is made up mostly of gas and liquid. Though scientists have used Hubble to roughly track those weather patterns, they can only glean the most basic facts. For example, its fast-changing weather appears to be driven by high winds, thought to move as fast as 1,300 miles per hour. This fact however is woefully incomplete and very uncertain, as we have no way to track detailed weather patterns at multiple depths.

Our tour will continue tomorrow.

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A soft barred galaxy with an active nucleus

9:56 am

A barred galaxy with an active galactic nucleus
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of two different surveys aimed at studying galaxies with what scientists call active galactic nuclei.

IC 486 lies right on the edge of the constellation Gemini (the Twins), around 380 million light-years from Earth. Classified as a barred spiral galaxy, it features a bright central bar-shaped structure from which its spiral arms unfurl, wrapping around the core in a smooth, almost ring-like pattern.

…At the galaxy’s center a noticeable white glow outshines the starlight around it. This is light given off by IC 486’s active galactic nucleus (AGN), powered by a supermassive black hole more than 100 million times the mass of the Sun. Every sufficiently large galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its center, but some of these black holes are particularly ravenous, marshaling vast amounts of gas and dust into swirling accretion discs from which they feed. The intense heat generated by the orbiting disc of material generates intense radiation up to and including X-rays, which can outshine the entire rest of the galaxy. In these cases, the galaxy is known as an active galaxy, with an AGN at its center.

For comparison, the relatively inactive supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way has a mass of about four million Suns, considerably smaller than IC 486’s. Why one is active and the other not however is not yet truly understood, though their different masses might provide part of the explanation.

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Two launches from China and SpaceX early today

9:42 am

Early this morning both SpaceX and China successfully launched rockets. First, SpaceX completed its sixteenth Transporter mission placing 119 payloads in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its 12th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. A detailed description of the 119 payloads can be found here.

Next, China successfully completed the maiden launch of its Kinetica-2 rocket, lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China and placing three demonstration satellites into orbit. The rocket is built by the pseudo-company CAS Space, which is entirely owned by one of China’s government space agencies.

According to the developers, the rocket stands 53 meters tall, with a core stage diameter of 3.35 meters and a fairing 4.2 meters wide. At liftoff, it weighs 625 tons and produces 753 tons of thrust. It can deliver up to 12 tons to a 200 kilometers low Earth orbit or 8 tons to a 500 kilometers sun-synchronous orbit.

On this launch, the liquid-fueled core stage and two side boosters were expendable, and crashed somewhere in China. China will use this rocket to partly replace its older expendable Long March 2 and Long March 3 rockets that use very toxic hypergolic fuels, thus reducing the risk to its citizens somewhat from crashing lower stages. Eventually the plan is to make the core stage and boosters reusable, so that they no longer crash uncontrolled inside China.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

39 SpaceX
16 China
5 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

SpaceX has another Starlink launch scheduled for later today, using a first stage on a record 34th flight.

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Another rocket startup in India hopes to launch from its own spaceport

9:17 am

India's spaceports, active, under construction, or proposed
India’s spaceports, active, under construction, or proposed

A new rocket startup in India, dubbed Bharath Space Vehicle (BSV), is not only building a commercial rocket to launch smallsats, it hopes to establish its own private spaceport near the town of Kodinar in western India.

BSV has proposed a launch complex near Kodinar in Gujarat’s Gir Somnath district. Gujarat’s Science and Technology Minister Arjun Modhwadia told the state assembly that IN-SPACe has identified a suitable location between Diu and Kodinar for a satellite launch facility, comparable to Sriharikota.

The coastal location offers open sea access and favourable launch corridors for specialised satellite trajectories. Isro had earlier evaluated a Gujarat site for its SSLV launch complex before Kulasekarapattinam in Tamil Nadu was selected.

Sriharikota has been operated for decades by India’s space agency ISRO. Kulasekarapattinam is a new ISRO spaceport set to begin operations next year, focused on launching its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV) for commercial missions. Hope Island is a proposed private and commercial spaceport, under study.

BSV’s rocket is called Agasthya-1 and will use liquid-fueled engines. It appears to be similar in design to SpaceX’s first rocket, the Falcon-1.

Though the company’s founders are all ISRO veterans who helped develop its rockets, its website makes no mention of a launch schedule. At present, India has two rocket startups, Skyroot and Agnikul, that appear close to their first orbital launch.

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China’s government strengthens its commitment to space

8:01 am

China's long term launch record
Taken from my 2025 year-end report on the state of
global launch industry.

In the Chinese government’s most recently announced five-year plan, it appears it has increased its commitment to its space program and its government-controlled commercial space sector.

Aviation and aerospace was elevated at the Two Sessions [conference earlier this month] to a ‘pillar industry’—a step up from its previous classification as an emerging sector. For the first time, the 15th 5-year plan (2026–30) explicitly sets the goal of building China into a space power by 2030.

The 5-year plan prioritizes reusable launch vehicles, large-scale satellite constellations, and the commercialization of space applications, with cost reduction cast as central to long-term viability. Satellite internet has been earmarked for rapid development as part of broader ambitions around integrated space-air-ground connectivity. A new ‘Space+’ framing suggests that satellite infrastructure is being treated as part of the broader industrial system, with growing interest in on-orbit computing rather than communications alone.

…But the sector still runs on patient state capital—a funding model that has enabled rapid scaling while deferring any serious test of commercial viability. No domestic launch provider has yet turned a profit, and closing the cost gap with SpaceX on reusable rockets remains the industry’s central challenge.

The report at the link is very detailed. Though it comes from a Chinese-based think tank that almost certainly gets funding and supervision from the Chinese communists, it is definitely worth reading. It notes the areas where China is doing well — its Beidou GPS-type constellation and its manned space program — as well as those areas it has come up short — re-usable rockets and its mega-satellite constellations.

Though the graph to the right illustrates the long-term growth of China as a space power, it has not yet been able to match the U.S. in these two areas, mostly because of SpaceX. Moreover, the inability of China’s pseudo-rocket companies to get its reusable rockets operational is hindering the ability of China’s pseudo-satellite companies to launch their satellites. In both cases this new five-year plan appears to be applying pressure on these pseudo-companies to get moving, or the government will take over.

I must repeat again that the Chinese government’s support for space is deep and widespread, strengthened by that government’s almost two-decade-long policy of using that program as a training ground for its political leaders. Many of its successful space industry managers have been promoted to higher political office, and thus wield great power in deciding policy. Their pro-space roots clearly influence that policy in favor of China’s space effort.

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Astronaut Mike Fincke finally reveals details of his medical emergency on ISS

9:33 am

Astronaut Mike Fincke, who had an undisclosed medical issue on ISS in January 2026 that forced the early return of his crew, has finally provided details of what happened.

Four-time space flier Mike Fincke said he was eating dinner on Jan. 7 after prepping for a spacewalk the next day when it happened. He couldn’t talk and remembers no pain, but his anxious crewmates jumped into action after seeing him in distress and requested help from flight surgeons on the ground. “It was completely out of the blue. It was just amazingly quick,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press from Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Fincke, 59, a retired Air Force colonel, said the episode lasted roughly 20 minutes and he felt fine afterward. He said he still does. He never experienced anything like that before or since. Doctors have ruled out a heart attack and Fincke said he wasn’t choking, but everything else is still on the table and could be related to his 549 days of weightlessness. He was 5 ½ months into his latest space station stay when the problem struck like “a very, very fast lightning bolt.”

Fincke hopes he can fly in space again, but I doubt NASA would agree if the cause of this incident is not identified. His other option then would be to get hired by one of the commercial space station companies to fly to their stations, but even they might be reluctant to hire him.

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Rocket Lab launches GPS-type demo satellite for Europe

9:05 am

Rocket Lab this morning successfully placed a European Space Agency (ESA) smallsat into orbit, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand.

The smallsat, dubbed Celeste, is the first of two such demo satellites that ESA has contracted Rocket Lab to launch. They are designed to test a low Earth orbit constellation for providing global navigation and location information to users on the ground, similar to the U.S.’s GPS constellation. Celeste will work from low orbit with Europe’s medium orbit Galileo constellation, but being smaller will be cheaper and faster to build and launch.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

38 SpaceX
15 China
5 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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Neptune as seen by Voyager-2 in 1989, four days before closest approach

2:46 pm

Neptune as seen by Voyager-2 on approach
Click for original image.

Cool image time! In two earlier posts I highlighted the pictures taken by Voyager-2 of Neptune’s two largest moons, Triton and Proteus, when it made its close fly-by of Neptune in 1989. Other than a very distant low resolution picture of 105-mile-wide Nereid, Voyager-2 took no other good images of Neptune’s other known moons.

So today, let’s begin a tour of some of Voyager-2’s imagery of Neptune itself. The picture to the right, reduced slightly to post here, was taken on August 20, 1989 as the spacecraft was beginning its approach to Neptune. It shows the full daylight hemisphere of the gas giant. From the caption:

The images were taken at a range of 4.4 million miles from the planet, 4 days and 20 hours before closest approach. The picture shows the Great Dark Spot and its companion bright smudge; on the west limb the fast moving bright feature called Scooter and the little dark spot are visible. These clouds were seen to persist for as long as Voyager’s cameras could resolve them. North of these, a bright cloud band similar to the south polar streak may be seen.

Next week I will post some of the other good shots taken of Neptune, as well as one or two close-ups of Triton that need highlighting. Sadly, at that point we will have more or less reviewed most of the best data now available of this distant world. Astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope in subsequent years to attempt to track its weather patterns, but even Hubble really can’t provide enough resolution to really make that research substantive.

But stay tuned. The Voyager-2 images to come are worth viewing.

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China launches “test satellite”

9:23 am

China yesterday afternoon successfully placed what its state-run press merely described as “a test satellite”, its Long March 2C rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

That state-run press also provided no information as to where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

38 SpaceX
15 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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War Department conducts classified suborbital missile test from Cape Canaveral

9:16 am

The War Department yesterday launched an unidentified suborbital missile test from its Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, providing no public information about the rocket, the purpose of the launch, or who built it.

An unidentified missile launched and zoomed across the Atlantic Ocean Thursday, March 26, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, leaving a slim white contrail against the afternoon blue sky. None of the Space Coast’s major rocket-launch providers had missions scheduled on Thursday. The mysterious unannounced launch occurred at roughly 12:30 p.m.

The Pentagon did not respond to media requests for information.

The missile was likely a suborbital hypersonic test, but that is pure speculation. What makes it unusual is the lack of any information about launch provider. In recent years the military has relied entirely on the private sector to build its hypersonic test program. This launch suggests the War Department has moved from testing hypersonic components on private rockets, airplanes, and capsules to building and testing its own final hypersonic missile prototype.

This is also pure speculation. We will have to wait for some clarification from the Pentagon.

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Ispace to replace engine on its lunar lander, delaying its NASA mission to 2030

9:09 am

Ispace's old and new landers

The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace has been forced to institute a major shake-up of its upgraded lunar lander design because a subcontractor’s engine did not meet the required specifications.

The engine, called Voidrunner and built by Agile Space Industries, was about to be installed in the lander for a 2027 launch of NASA lunar lander mission when a review found its performance to be unsatisfactory.

After closely monitoring the engine’s status and conducting careful review, Ispace has determined that a change in the development plan to incorporate a new alternative engine is necessary to ensure the successful execution of the lunar landing mission. The new engine, which will replace VoidRunner, has already been developed by the alternative supplier and has a proven track record of operation in past lunar missions.

The company has also decided to standardize its two lunar lander designs, one developed in Japan and the second in parallel by its American division. The new lander, dubbed Ultra, will use this new engine and fly all of Ispace’s subsequent missions. The image above shows the company’s original lander Hakuto-R on the left, compared to its new Ultra lander on the right.

This change will delay its planned NASA mission by three years, to 2030, though the company hopes it will not impact the schedule of two other lunar lander missions for Japan. Its new updated schedule, all using Ultra:

  • 2028: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry
  • 2029: a Japanese mission funded by Japan’s Space Strategy Fund (designed at encouraging the private space sector
  • 2030: NASA’s mission, being built in partnership with the American company Draper

Ispace has also created a new lunar satellite program, to provide communications, location data, and satellite tracking from lunar orbit, with a goal of launching its first lunar orbiter by next year, and five by 2030.

As a lunar lander company Ispace has had a very mixed record. It has successfully flown two landers to lunar orbit and then down to the surface. Each however crashed, failing just prior to landing due to software issues. This new delay of its NASA mission is not going to please NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, who instead wants to speed up the agency’s lunar lander program, flying almost monthly beginning in 2030. It likely means Ispace is going to have problems winning any new NASA lander contracts, until it proves its new Ultra lander design.

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SpaceX launches another 25 Starlink satellites

10:02 pm

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

The first stage completed its 23rd flight 39 days after its previous flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

38 SpaceX
14 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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Proteus, Neptune’s second largest moon, discovered by Voyager-2 in 1989

3:02 pm

Proteus, Neptune's second largest moon
For original images go here and here.

Our tour continues of the only close visit to Neptune on August 25, 1989 by Voyager-2. The two pictures to the right were taken by the spacecraft during that fly-by of Neptune’s second largest moon, dubbed Proteus. Both pictures are shown as Voyager-2 took them.

The top picture was taken from a distance of about 540,000 miles, and has a resolution of about five miles per pixel.

The satellite has an average radius of about 120 miles and is uniformly dark with an albedo of about 6 percent. The irregular shape suggests that 1989N1 has been cold and rigid throughout its history and subject to significant impact cratering.

The bottom picture was taken from a distance of about 91,000 miles, and can resolve objects as small as 1.7 miles in size.

Hints of crater-like forms and groove-like lineations can be discerned. The apparent graininess of the image is caused by the short exposure necessary to avoid significant smear.

Proteus was not known prior to Voyager-2’s fly-by, because it orbits so close to Neptune (about 73,000 miles) that the ground-based telescopes of the time could not see it in the glare of the gas giant. It was discovered in early global pictures of Neptune as Voyager-2 approached.

While planetary scientists have made some educated guesses about the moon’s origin and geology based on these two images, they are simply guesses. These are the only detailed images we have of Proteus, and neither is particularly good.

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Astronomers detect the first comet whose nucleus’ reversed its rotation

11:28 am

Astronomers using data collected by the orbiting Gehrels Swift and Hubble space telescopes now think the nucleus of a small comet reversed its rotation sometime in 2017, caused by the force of the material sublimated off its surface.

From the abstract of their paper [pdf]:

The rotations of cometary nuclei are known to change in response to outgassing torques. The nucleus of the Jupiter-family comet 41P/Tuttle–Giacobini–Kresak exhibited particularly dramatic rotational changes when near perihelion in 2017 April. Here, we use archival Hubble Space Telescope observations from 2017 December to study the postperihelion lightcurve of the nucleus and to assess the nucleus size.

From both Hubble photometry and nongravitational acceleration measurements, we find a diminutive nucleus with effective radius 500 ± 100 meters. Systematic optical variations are consistent with a two-peaked (i.e., rotationally symmetric) lightcurve with period 0.60 ± 0.01 days, substantially different from periods measured earlier in 2017. The spin of the nucleus likely reversed between perihelion in 2017 April and December as a result of the outgassing torque.

In plain English: the thrust of the material being thrown from the surface as the comet made its close approach to the Sun was sufficient to slow and then reverse the nucleus’s rotation. This process was helped by the relatively small size of the nucleus compared to the material being sublimated from it.

The data also suggests the nucleus was once much larger, and has been whittled down to its present small size as it made its multiple close fly-bys of the Sun during the past 1,500 years. Rather than break-up, as most comets do at some point as their nucleus gets smaller, this comet’s nucleus simply kept shrinking, to the point that the thrust of that material could change its rotation.

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The space station part of Isaacman’s new program is facing push back, from industry and Congress

10:37 am

The American space stations under construction
Four of the American space stations under development.
The fifth, Max Space, is a late comer and not shown.

At a hearing yesterday before the space subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, both the trade organization representing the five commercial space station projects as well as some members of Congress expressed strong reservations about NASA’s new plan to build a core module as a basis for helping these companies develop their space stations.

Dave Cavossa, President of the Commercial Space Federation (CSF) that represents these companies, outlined in his statement [pdf] to the committee the industry’s dissatisfaction, not so much because of the specifics of NASA’s plan but because it follows other sudden changes last year by the previous NASA administrator Sean Duffy, and is still uncertain in its outline.

Given the delays and possible shifts in strategy, industry has been left to continue spending resources to develop private space stations without a full understanding of what NASA will require from a private station, how the agency will structure the rest of the procurement and program, and when industry may see a return on investment. This uncertainty challenges the public-private partnership business model and puts the agency at risk of deorbiting ISS before private stations are operational.

The trade group proposed that NASA stick with its previous plan to fund two or more station projects, dropping Isaacman’s core module proposal. It also wanted Congress give the agency the funds to do so.

Cavossa also strongly disputed NASA’s claim that the market at present doesn’t support these commercial stations.
» Read more

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Webb and Hubble take a look at Saturn

9:37 am

Saturn seen by Webb and Hubble

Astronomers using both the Hubble Space Telescope and the Webb Space Telescope have produced new complementary views of the ringed planet Saturn.

Those photographs are shown above, with Webb’s false-color infrared image to the left and Hubble’s optical image to the right. From the press release:

In the Webb image, a long-lived jet stream known as the “ribbon wave” meanders across the northern mid-latitudes, influenced by otherwise undetectable atmospheric waves. Just below that, a small spot represents a lingering remnant from the “Great Springtime Storm” of 2010 to 2012. Several other storms dotting the southern hemisphere of Saturn are visible in Webb’s image, as well. All these features are shaped by powerful winds and waves beneath the visible cloud deck, making Saturn a natural laboratory for studying fluid dynamics under extreme conditions.

…In Webb’s infrared image, the rings are extremely bright because they are made of highly reflective water ice. In both images, we’re seeing the sunlit face of the rings, a little less so in the Hubble image, hence the shadows visible underneath on the planet.

There are also subtle ring features such as spokes and structure in the B ring (the thick central region of the rings) that appear differently between the two observatories. The F ring, the outermost ring, looks thin and crisp in the Webb image, while it only slightly glows in the Hubble image.

The press release says little about the Hubble image, mostly because it shows little new by itself. It however is part of an on-going decade-long survey using Hubble to track Saturn’s changing weather patterns.

While both images are valuable, they also highlight our present limits in observing Saturn. Views from Earth can only see so much. It is like trying to watch a football game from ten miles away, with binoculars. And sadly, no mission is presently planned to return to Saturn.

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China launches two radar satellites

9:18 am

China today successfully placed two radar satellites into orbit, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in north China.

China’s state-run press provided no information about where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

37 SpaceX
14 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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Isar’s second launch attempt scrubbed due to abort at T-0 seconds

1:35 pm

Proposed or active spaceports in North Europe
Proposed or active spaceports in North Europe

The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace was today forced to scrub its second attempt to launch its Spectrum rocket from Norway’s Andoya spaceport when the rocket aborted the launch at T-0 seconds.

The launch was then scrubbed for the day because the launch window was only 15 minutes long. An earlier hold due to a boat violating the range had used up most of the window, leaving no time to recycle the rocket to try again.

No word yet on when the company will try again. At the moment Isar is in the lead to be the first new European startup to get off the ground, though Rocket Factory Augsburg from Germany and PLD from Spain are not far behind. Isar’s first launch attempt in March 2025 had failed seconds after lift-off due to a loss of attitude control.

Andoya is also in the lead to be the first European spaceport to complete an orbital launch, though SaxaVord on the Shetland Islands hopes to see that Rocket Factory launch in the coming months.

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Triton: Neptune’s largest moon

11:19 am

The southern mid-latitudes of Neptune's moon Trident
Click for original image.

Triton

Today’s cool image begins a new tour I plan on doing over the next week or so of the few close-up photographs we have of Neptune and its moons, sent back by Voyager-2 when it did its close fly-by of this distant planet on August 25, 1989. That fly-by was almost 37 years ago, and it remains our only close look. While at the time it shined a quick flashlight of new knowledge on Neptune, its moons, and its ring system, we remain generally in the dark about what’s there, despite some good imagery produced in subsequent years by Hubble and some ground-based telescopes.

The image above, cropped and enhanced to post here, shows a portion of the southern mid-latitudes of Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, as Voyager-2 made its closest pass at a distance of about 25,000 miles. The photo to the right, cropped and reduced, shows a more global view to provide some context, with the box indicating the approximate area covered by the upper image. It was taken when Voyager-2 was on approach, at a distance of about 330,000 miles. The top picture captures several dozen black plumes that appear to vent material from below. From the caption:

The plumes originate at very dark spots generally a few miles in diameter and some are more than 100 miles long. The spots which clearly mark the source of the dark material may be vents where gas has erupted from beneath the surface and carried dark particles into Triton’s nitrogen atmosphere. Southwesterly winds then transported the erupted particles, which formed gradually thinning deposits to the northeast of most vents.

It is possible that the eruptions have been driven by seasonal heating of very shallow subsurface deposits of volatiles, and the winds transporting particles similarly may be seasonal winds. The polar terrain, upon which the dark streaks have been deposited, is a region of bright materials mottled with irregular, somewhat dark patches. The pattern of irregular patches suggests that they may correspond to lag deposits of moderately dark material that cap the bright ice over the polar terrain.

As we only have a few images of this planet, and those provided views of only about 40% of its surface, any theory that tries to explain the weird geology here is certain to be wrong to some degree.

More to come in the next few days. As much as we think we know, these pictures are going instead highlight how sparse that knowledge really is.

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Intuitive Machines wins $180.4 million new NASA lunar lander contract

8:46 am

Intuitive Machines' Nova-D lunar lander
Click for original.

The lunar lander startup Intuitive Machines announced yesterday that it has won its fifth contract from NASA, a $180.4 million deal to place its larger upgraded Nova-D lander near the Moon’s south pole.

The IM-5 mission will target Mons Malapert, a ridge near the Lunar South Pole that offers continuous Earth visibility, stable illumination conditions, and access to permanently shadowed regions. These characteristics make the site a compelling location for future communications, navigation, and surface infrastructure.

The artist’s rendering to the right shows this Nova-D lander. What stands out immediately is its low-slung appearance. Intuitive Machines’ smaller Nova-C lander was tall (see this image), with a high center of gravity. In its only two landing attempts on the Moon it tipped over both times after touchdown. It appears the company has finally recognized the issue and reworked this new lander to make it more stable after touchdown.

This contract award appears to be part of the accelerated program by NASA administrator Jared Isaacman to land 30 unmanned rovers on the moon in three years, beginning in 2027. Mons Malapert is a plateau that Intuitive Machines second lander tipped over on. It is also the landing site for Astrobotics’ Griffin lander, as well as a candidate landing site for the first Artemis manned missions.

Note the small rover on the right in the graphic. While the mission will carry seven NASA science instrument payloads, it will also carry this commercial rover, built by Honeybee Robotics, a subsidiary of Blue Origin. As the company states above, the lander on this mission also has additional available payload capacity for more commercial customers.

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Lunar Gateway dead as NASA announces major changes to its future space station, lunar, and Mars plans

1:07 pm

Capitalism in space As part of the reshaping of NASA being pushed by NASA administrator Jared Isaacman, the agency today announced major changes to its future programs in low Earth orbit, on the Moon, and in exploring Mars. Video of these changes can be viewed here and here.

The Moon

NASA will now focus all work in its lunar program on getting to the surface of the Moon. Lunar Gateway is “paused,” though the language of NASA’s press release suggests more strongly that it is dead, with the agency already trying to figure out ways to “repurpose” its already built components. NASA will instead ask for proposals from private industry and its international Artemis partners to ramp up as soon as possible a phased program to establish the infrastructure on the Moon needed for the lunar base. This new focus begins with “up to 30 robotic landings in three years, starting in 2027,” and at least two manned landings per year beginning in 2028.

The graph below, presented during today’s announcement, shows the basic plan for the next few Artemis missions, which will act as the manned foundation for this entire surface-focused program. The overall program will build out the lunar base in three phases, first to test some basic infrastructure using these smaller lunar landers, second to begin establishing the base’s foundational components with intermittent manned missions, and third to begin long-term human occupancy.
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Satellite repair startup Katalyst awards Arianespace and its Ariane-6 rocket a launch contract

9:02 am

The satellite repair startup Katalyst has chosen Arianespace’s Ariane-6 rocket to launch its first Nexus servicing satellite to geosynchronous orbit in late 2027, where it will demonstrate its capabilities by servicing a Space Force satellite.

The choice of Ariane-6 is intriguing, as it is much more expensive that a Falcon-9. Either the satellite is too heavy for the Falcon-9 (unlikely), or the Space Force for political reasons pressured Katalyst to use Europe’s rocket. It is also possible Katalyst choose Arianespace to stimulate interest in its robotic repair satellites within Europe, thus increasing its chances of winning contracts from there.

Either way, this is one of the few contracts outside of Amazon’s Leo constellation and European government launches that Ariane-6 has gotten. As I already mentioned, it costs more to use than other rockets, as it is entirely expendable. I think it is only surviving at this point because there are not a lot of options available. This is going to change, however, in the next decade as new rocket companies gear up to meet the demand.

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Russia launches the first 16 satellites in its own internet satellite constellation

8:46 am

In a rare unannounced launch, Russia yesterday placed the first 16 satellites in its proposed 700+ satellite Rassvet internet constellation into orbit, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia in a polar orbit that dumped the rocket’s lower stages in the Arctic ocean.

The satellites are built by the Russian pseudo-company Bureau-1440, which hopes to have the entire constellation in orbit by 2035. Considering that this constellation is designed to compete with Starlink, its pace of launch is ridiculously low. SpaceX can generally launch 700 Starlink satellites in about a month, not ten years. By the time Russia gets this constellation in orbit it will be woefully obsolete.

The launch was originally supposed to occur several days earlier, but for reasons that were never explained never took place. This was not a classified military launch, but one that Russia wants to publicize as it struggles to compete with SpaceX and China in launching new satellite constellations. That Russia provided no details beforehand suggests that the increasingly successful use of drones by the Ukraine on Russian assets forced that secrecy.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

37 SpaceX
13 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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Progress docks with ISS

8:25 am

A Russian astronaut successfully docked a Progress cargo capsule with ISS early today, using the manual TORU joystick system inside the station.

Sergey Kud-Sverchkov manually piloted the spacecraft during docking using the TORU (Telerobotically Operated Rendezvous System) control panel inside the space station’s Zvezda Service Module after one of the spacecraft’s two KURS automated rendezvous antennas failed to deploy after launch.

Normally each Progress docks autonomously, using the Kurs radar antennas to determine distance and location. With one antenna out Kud-Sverchkoy controlled the capsule remotely. This back-up system has been used successfully a number of times previously, but when it was first being tested on Mir in the 1990s one of those earlier tests resulted in a collision that almost destroyed Mir. It did damage one module badly enough that it leaked from then on, requiring that module to be sealed off for the rest of Mir’s life.

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Juno data suggests lightning on Jupiter is a hundred to a million times more powerful than lightning on Earth

11:08 am

The uncertainty of science: Using data from the orbiter Juno as it passed multiple times above a storm on Jupiter, scientists now believe lightning bolts on Jupiter could be a hundred to a million times more powerful than lightning bolts on Earth.

Juno made 12 passes over isolated storms during that period, and was close enough on four of them to measure microwave static from lightning. The flashes averaged three per second during these passes; on one flyover, Juno detected 206 separate pulses of microwave radiation. Of a total of 613 pulses measured, Wong calculated that the power ranged from about that of a lightning bolt on Earth to 100 or more times the power of an Earth bolt. Because he compared Earth lightning emissions at one radio wavelength to Jupiter lightning emissions at a different wavelength, there’s some uncertainty in the comparison, Wong cautioned. Based on one study of lightning radio emissions on Earth, Jupiter’s bolts could have been a million times more powerful than those on Earth.

Lots of uncertainty and assumptions in these conclusions, but they are not only not surprising, they fit earlier data collected before Juno.

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Changes to the Crab Nebula after a quarter century

9:44 am

The Crab Nebula, changes after a quarter century
For original images go here and here.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have obtained a new high resolution image of the Crab Nebula, and by comparing it with earlier Hubble images taken in 1999/2000 have been able to track the continuing expansion and evolution of this supernova remnant over a period now covering almost a quarter century.

The supernova itself became visible on Earth in 1054, though it actually erupted about 6,500 years earlier, as the Crab Nebula is 6,500 light years away. In the 25 years Hubble has been tracking the remnant’s expansion astronomers estimate it is expanding at about 3.4 million miles per hour.

[William Blair of Johns Hopkins University] noted that filaments around the periphery of the nebula appear to have moved more compared to those in the center, and that rather than stretching out over time, they appear to have simply moved outward. This is due to the nature of the Crab as a pulsar wind nebula powered by synchrotron radiation, which is created by the interaction between the pulsar’s magnetic field and the nebula’s material. In other well-known supernova remnants, the expansion is instead driven by shockwaves from the initial explosion, eroding surrounding shells of gas that the dying star previously cast off.

The new, higher-resolution Hubble observations are also providing additional insights into the 3D structure of the Crab Nebula, which can be difficult to determine from a 2D image, Blair said. Shadows of some of the filaments can be seen cast onto the haze of synchrotron radiation in the nebula’s interior. Counterintuitively, some of the brighter filaments in the latest Hubble images show no shadows, indicating they must be located on the far side of the nebula.

A movie showing the changes between these two images can be seen here. It is worth your while to take a look. These optical images will be further enhanced as the Webb Space Telescope gathers infrared data.

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Growing damage to the wheels of the Curiosity Mars rover

9:19 am

Close-up of the wheel in the worst condition
Images cropped and reduced to post here. For the original images go here and here.

Survey of wheels

Every few months or so the Curiosity science team uses one of the rover’s cameras to do a survey of the rover’s wheels to track their condition. Since early in the mission they had found the wheels were not holding up as well as expected as they rolled over the rough terrain in Gale Crater and on Mount Sharp, and so they take great care in how they move the rover as well as review the wheels regularly.

A year ago it had appeared that the damage to one particular wheel had increased, to a point where its outer section might even break off.

Yesterday the science team did another survey, as shown in the picture to the right.

The two photos above (found here and here) focus on one particular wheel of that survey, which I suspect is the same wheel that was the focus of last year’s post. After taking the first image on the left the team moved Curiosity so that the other side of the wheel could be photographed. As you can see, the damage is extensive, so much so that it is possible the wheel could collapse entirely in the not-to-distant future.

It also looks like another wheel is beginning to see similar damage (see here and here), though not yet as extreme.

The good news is that Curiosity has six wheels, and that it can continue to travel even with the loss of one or maybe two wheels. It also appears that future terrain might not be so rocky.

The bad news is that this wheel damage is likely the one problem that will likely end the mission, possibly sooner than anyone would like. And from these photographs, that end might be sooner rather than later.

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SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla to build large-scale computer chip factory in Texas

8:42 am

At an event this weekend in Austin Elon Musk announced that SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla will a build large-scale computer chip factory in Texas, dubbed Terafab, designed to produce the chips needed by all three companies.

The “TERAFAB” project is a joint effort involving Tesla, SpaceX and xAI. Musk said the chips will be used in vehicles, Tesla’s humanoid AI robots and for projects in space, including solar-powered AI satellites.

…In a Sunday post on X, Musk clarified that the Austin-area facility is one part of the larger project and will focus on chip design. The main TERAFAB facility, he said, would require thousands of acres, and multiple locations are being considered. Musk said the chip production was necessary to fuel his companies’ growth. On Saturday, he shared an ambitious vision for the future powered by TERAFAB, including billions of robots and interplanetary travel. “We want to be a civilization that expands to the galaxy with spaceships, that anyone can go anywhere they want at any time,” he said. “And have a city on the moon, cities on Mars, populate the solar system and send spaceships to other star systems.”

Essentially, Musk has realized that to build his data centers in orbit and on the Moon, he will a lot of computer chips. Early in the history of SpaceX Musk learned that being dependent on outside contractors was crippling. Too often those contractors saw SpaceX has a competitor and acted to sabotage it. He soon decided his companies must be vertically integrated, doing as much work as possible in-house.

He is now applying that policy in chip production as well.

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Three launches today from three continents and three nations

2:59 pm

The global launch pace continues, with three launches today. First, Russia launched a new Progress cargo capsule to ISS, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its repaired launchpad at Baikonur. That launchpad had experienced serious damage to an access platform during the previous launch in November 2025, and since it was the only pad that Roscosmos could launch payloads and crews to ISS, Russia committed heavy resources to get it fixed quickly.

Once Progress reached orbit, however, one of the antennas used by its Kurs automatic docking system failed to deploy. If engineers can’t get it opened by the time of docking, scheduled for March 24, 2026, the Russian astronauts on ISS will use the back-up TORU system, whereby they control the spacecraft manually from inside ISS.

Next, SpaceX placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida. The first stage (B1078) completed its 27th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic, only 20 days after its previous flight. This flight also moved the booster up to just behind the space shuttle Columbia in the rankings of the most reused launch vehicles, tying it with SpaceX booster B1077:

39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
33 Falcon 9 booster B1067
32 Falcon 9 booster B1071
31 Falcon 9 booster B1063
30 Falcon 9 booster B1069
28 Columbia space shuttle
27 Falcon 9 booster B1077
27 Falcon 9 booster B1078

Sources here and here.

At the pace SpaceX is reusing its fleet of Falcon 9 boosters, expect Columbia to drop off this list in about two months.

Finally, China launched 10 smallsats, according to China’s state-run press, for a planned 160-satellite GPS-type constellation, its Smart Dragon-3 rocket (also called Jielong-3) lifting off from an ocean platform off the northeast coast of China. Video here of launch.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

37 SpaceX
13 China
4 Rocket Lab
3 Russia

SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.

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