Tag: engineering

Thales Alenia ships the orbit insertion module for the Mars sample return mission

8:59 am

Though the entire project remains in limbo at NASA and might be cancelled, the European aerospace company Thales Alenia this week completed construction of the orbit insertion module for the Mars sample return mission that will place the orbiter — also built by European companies — in Mars orbit and will eventually bring the samples back to Earth.

On 28 July, Thales Alenia Space announced that the module had passed its test campaign with “excellent results.” According to the update, the company had packed and shipped the Orbit Insertion Module from its Turin facilities to Airbus in Stevenage a few days earlier. The delivery marks a key milestone in the development of the Mars Return Orbiter.

The broader Earth Return Orbiter project passed a key milestone in July 2024 with the completion of the Platform Critical Design Review. This review confirmed the performance, quality, and reliability of the mission’s systems. With its successful conclusion, Airbus advanced to full spacecraft development, including the integration and testing of its various components, among them the Orbit Insertion Module.

Under the project’s present very complex design, NASA is supposed to provide the ascent rocket and capsule to bring the samples to Europe’s return orbiter. At the moment it is unclear who will build this, or even if it will ever get built. Thus, Europe might be building a very expensive Mars orbiter with no clear mission.

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Firefly wins new NASA lunar lander contract, worth $176.7 million

8:52 am

NASA announced yesterday that it has awarded Firefly a $176.7 million contract to use the company’s Blue Ghost lunar lander to deliver two rovers and three other science instruments to the Moon’s south pole region.

Under the new CLPS task order, Firefly is tasked with delivering end-to-end payload services to the lunar surface, with a period of performance from Tuesday to March 29, 2030. The company’s lunar lander is targeted to land at the Moon’s South Pole region in 2029.

This is Firefly’s fifth task order award and fourth lunar mission through CLPS. Firefly’s first delivery successfully landed on the Moon’s near side in March 2025 with 10 NASA payloads. The company’s second mission, targeting a launch in 2026, includes a lunar orbit drop-off of a satellite combined with a delivery to the lunar surface on the far side. Firefly’s third lunar mission will target landing in the Gruithuisen Domes on the near side of the Moon in 2028, delivering six experiments to study that enigmatic lunar volcanic terrain.

One of the rovers is being built in partnership with Canada.

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Gilmour’s first launch a failure

4:55 pm

Eris rocket launch and failure
Click for video, cued to just before launch.

The first launch of the Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space’s Eris rocket ended in failure today when the rocket started drifting sideways after rising about 150 feet and then crashing near the launchpad.

The picture to the right is a screen capture from an independent live steam of the launch posted on youtube by Aussienaut, captured about 20 seconds after liftoff. The red dot indicates the location of the launchpad where the rocket took off to make clear the rocket’s sideways motion. Ten seconds after this, the rocket fell to the ground and exploded.

This launch attempt was the first ever by a private commercial Australian rocket company, so the failure itself is not surprising. It was also the first orbital test launch from a privately owned Australian spaceport. Whether the company has the resources to recover remains to be seen, but I suspect it will try again.

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Starlab partners with the interior design company Journey

3:12 pm

Starlab design in 2025
The Starlab design in 2025. Click
for original image.

The consortium designing the commercial Starlab space station has now signed a partnership deal with the interior design company Journey for the latter to design the station’s habitable interior.

Journey brings a deep portfolio of globally recognized projects, including the Sphere in Las Vegas, the Empire State Building observatory in New York City and the Sun Princess Dome for Princess Cruises. The agency will be working closely with Hilton, one of the original strategic partners in the Starlab program, designing the Starlab hospitality and crew experience. Journey’s role adds a vital layer of design and experiential innovation, shaping a space that reflects both function and humanity.

Much of the press release is similar blather. It is good that Starlab is thinking about making the living space in its station “both a cutting-edge research platform and a welcoming, livable habitat,” but this deal doesn’t include any actual design work. Apparently nothing concrete will be done until Starlab wins the big NASA construction project — assuming it does so. Thus, I still rank Starlab low in my rankings of the four commercials stations being built or proposed, but this deal has convinced me to raise its ranking above Orbital Reef. Both have built little, but Starlab is at least making a lot of partnership deals with others, strengthening the quality of its team.

  • Haven-1, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company is moving fast, with Haven-1 to launch and be occupied in 2026 for an estimated 30 days total. It hopes this actual hardware and manned mission will put it in the lead to win NASA’s phase 2 contract, from which it will build its much larger mult-module Haven-2 station..
  • Axiom, being built by Axiom, has launched four tourist flights to ISS, with the fourth carrying government passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. Though there have been rumors it has cash flow issues, development of its first module has been proceeding more or less as planned.
  • Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with an extensive partnership agreements with the European Space Agency and others. It recently had its station design approved by NASA, but it has built nothing. The company however has now raised $383 million in a public stock offering, which in addition to the $217.5 million provided by NASA gives it the capital to begin some construction.
  • Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Overall, Blue Origin has built almost nothing, while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building its module for launch.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Third star destroying part of expanding shells surrounding binary Wolf-Rayet stars

3:00 pm

Apep system.
From figure 3 of the paper.

Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers think they can now disentangle the strange spiral shape of the expanding dust shells caused by the colliding powerful winds flowing from a binary pair of giant aging Wolf-Rayet stars, dubbed the Apep system.

Apparently, a third smaller O-type star sits in the system, and is acting to block the winds and destroy the dust within them, carving out a large cavity in the spiral shells. The image to the right, produced by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, shows the spiral dust shells shaped by the strong solar winds flowing and colliding from the binary Wolf-Rayet stars (the bright dot in the center). The O-type star can be seen just above them. The yellow lines indicate the empty cone. Without the O star computer models had predicted a very bright shell north of the binary, and its non-existence in VLT images caused these further Webb observations.

From the paper’s [pdf] conclusion:

The JWST observations of Apep reveal luminous circumstellar dust that support[s] … our finding that the O supergiant ‘northern companion’ is dynamically associated with the binary WR stars in Apep; this is the first time that dust destruction has been observed by a tertiary star in a colliding wind nebula, and marks Apep as part of a rare class of triple colliding wind binaries.

The dust produced by Wolf-Rayet stars is thought to be a major component in seeding the formation of later stars, such as our own Sun. Finding that a third star in the system can destroy that dust suggests (as always) that this process can be far more complicated that first believed.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Firefly hopes to raise more than $600 million in initial stock offering

9:03 am

The rocket startup and lunar lander company Firefly yesterday posted details about its initial public stock offering, designed to hopefully raise more than $600 million.

Firefly Aerospace, a market leading space and defense technology company, today announced that it has launched the roadshow for its proposed initial public offering of 16,200,000 shares of its common stock. In addition, Firefly intends to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase an additional 2,430,000 shares of its common stock at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions. The initial public offering price is expected to be between $35.00 and $39.00 per share.

The company stated it would use the money “to repay outstanding borrowings under its credit agreement, pay any accrued and unpaid dividends on certain series of its preferred stock, and for general corporate purposes.”

The company has not yet announced the date when this stock offering will become available for purchase.

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Chinese pseudo-company launches classified payload

8:55 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Ispace successfully placed a classified payload into orbit today, its solid-fueled Hyperbola-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

This was the first launch by Ispace since July 2024, following a launch failure. Not only did China’s state-run press say nothing about the payload, no information about where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China was provided.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

93 SpaceX
39 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 93 to 68.

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Galaxies without end

8:55 am

Galaxies without end
Click for original.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and enhanced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a monitoring program studying the two supernovae that have occurred in this galaxy previously.

Hubble has turned its attention toward NGC 1309 several times; previous Hubble images of this galaxy were released in 2006 and 2014. Much of NGC 1309’s scientific interest derives from two supernovae, SN 2002fk in 2002 and SN 2012Z in 2012. SN 2002fk was a perfect example of a Type Ia supernova, which happens when the core of a dead star (a white dwarf) explodes.

SN 2012Z, on the other hand, was a bit of a renegade. It was classified as a Type Iax supernova: while its spectrum resembled that of a Type Ia supernova, the explosion wasn’t as bright as expected. Hubble observations showed that in this case, the supernova did not destroy the white dwarf completely, leaving behind a ‘zombie star’ that shone even brighter than it did before the explosion. Hubble observations of NGC 1309 taken across several years also made this the first time the white dwarf progenitor of a supernova has been identified in images taken before the explosion.

The image however carries a far more philosophic component. Except for the star near the top (identified by the four diffraction spikes), every single dot and smudge you see in this picture is a galaxy. NGC 1309 is about 100 million light years away, but behind it along its line of sight and at much greater distances are innumerable other galaxies, so many it is impossible to count them. And each is roughly comparable in size to our own Milky Way galaxy, containing billions of stars.

The scale of the universe is simply impossible to grasp, no matter how hard we might try.

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Bankrupt balloon company Space Perspective bought by European company

10:15 am

The bankrupt high-altitude balloon company Space Perspective has now been purchased by the Spanish balloon startup Eos X Space.

Space Perspective “will operate with full autonomy, under U.S. leadership and corporate structure,” Eos X Space representatives said in an emailed statement on Thursday (July 24). Space Perspective’s efforts will dovetail with those of Madrid-based Eos X Space, an aerospace outfit founded in 2020 that has been working on a balloon-tourism system of its own.

Eos X is one of three Spanish balloon startups, all vying to provide high altitude flights to tourists, with the other two companies being Zero-2 and Halo. All three have been in a long legal fight, with the latter two indicted in 2023 over the theft of Eos X’s balloon concept. In an earlier legal action, Zero-2 claimed its concept was stolen by Eos X.

None, including Space Perspective, has as yet actually flown any tourists.

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Another two launches by SpaceX and China

10:01 am

There were two more launches last night and today. First, SpaceX put another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 19th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

Next, China today successfully launched another five satellites in its planned Guiwang (“king”) internet constellation of 13,000 satellites, its Long March 6 rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northern China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

This launch brought the total number of operational satellites in orbit for this constellation to 39, all launched since December 2024. At this pace it will take many years for China to complete this constellation, though it likely can begin selling the service in China with an incomplete constellation. Its international licence requires it to launch 10% by 2029 and 50% by 2032.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

93 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 93 to 67.

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One of NASA’s two Tracers satellites just launched has an issue

10:17 am

During the commissioning phase shortly after their launch earlier this week, one of NASA’s two Tracers satellites designed to study the solar wind and its interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field has had an as yet unnamed issue.

During the commissioning process, the team made routine adjustments to the power subsystem on both vehicles. While the adjustments achieved the desired results on one satellite, the other satellite requires further investigation by the team. Commissioning operations are temporarily paused while the team analyzes the situation and determines the appropriate response.

Though the press release provides no other information, it appears the satellite is having a problem producing the power expected.

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Europe and SpaceX complete two launches late yesterday

10:01 am

Both Europe and SpaceX successfully completed launches in the early morning hours today.

First Arianespace, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) commercial arm, used Avio’s Vega-C rocket lifting off from French Guiana to put five satellites into orbit, including four high resolution Earth observation satellites and one climate satellite. This was only the third launch for Arianespace in 2025, two of which were of the Vega-C.

Next, SpaceX placed 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its 22nd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

92 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 92 to 66, with another Starlink launch scheduled for tonight.

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Mars and its two moons seen in the infrared by Europa Clipper

10:37 am

Mars and its two moons
Click for original.

Cool image time! The infrared image to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken by Europa Clipper on February 28, 2025 just before it flew past Mars on its way to Jupiter.

Deimos is in the upper left corner, while Phobos is close to Mars.

When the image was taken by the mission’s Europa Thermal Emission Imaging System (E-THEMIS), the spacecraft was about 560,000 miles (900,000 kilometers) from the Red Planet. The image is composed of 200 individual frames, part of a continuous scan of 1,100 frames taken roughly a second apart over a period of 20 minutes. Scientists are using the tiny, point-like images of the moons to check the camera’s focus.

As this is an infrared image (measuring heat), it shows Mars’ northern polar cap as the dark oval at the top of the planet. The bright (and thus warmer) oval to the lower left is the shield volcano Elysium Mons.

This data suggests Europa Clipper’s thermal instrument is working as intended, which is essential for observing the ice content (if any) on Europa once it enters Jupiter orbit in 2030.

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Dassault lobbies ESA to fund its Vortex reusable mini-shuttle

9:51 am

Dassault's proposed Vortex mini-shuttle
Dassault’s proposed Vortex mini-shuttle. Click for original.

The French aerospace company Dassault is now lobbying the European Space Agency to help finance its proposed Vortex reusable mini-shuttle, comparable in concept to Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spacecraft.

The company had first announced this project in June.

While the June announcement included few details, a 25 June hearing of the French National Assembly’s Committee on National Defence and the Armed Forces revealed that the mission is expected to be launched in 2027 aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. The hearing also disclosed that the demonstration mission has a total budget of €70 million, with Dassault providing more than half of the funding and the remainder coming from the French government.

Dassault is now attempting to get more funding from ESA. In June it had signed an agreement with ESA to partner on building a demonstrator, but it was not clear that agreement included funding. It certainly did not include funding for the full scale operational mini-shuttle.

Overall, the structure of funding and the design of the project is good, and demonstrates again Europe’s sharp shift to the capitalism model in the past two years. Dassault will design, build, and (most importantly) own the shuttle, allowing it to market it to many customers. It is also committing a significant amount of its own funds to the project. The funding from France and possibly ESA appears mostly that of a customer buying the services of this product from the company.

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Starlink went down for almost 3 hours yesterday

9:31 am

In what is a rare event, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation was out of service yesterday for about 2.5 hours “due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”

Starlink experienced an outage Thursday afternoon that went on for 2.5 hours and took down at least tens of thousands of people’s satellite internet service. “Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we’ll share an update once this issue is resolved,” Starlink posted on X at 1:05 p.m. PT/4:05 p.m. ET.

Though Starlink has yet to confirm that services are fully up and running again, Downdetector showed reports of issues had dropped to just 1,600 as of 4:30 p.m PT after they’d spiked to around 60,000 at about 1 p.m. PT

CNBC incorrectly tried to pin this internet outage to the start yesterday of T-Mobile’s new cellphone-to-Starlink text and emergency subscription, but that makes no sense, since the two use different Starlink satellites.

Since the constellation began offering customers its service several years ago the number of such global outages has been very rare. If anything, Starlink has been far more reliable than almost all comparable land line internet services.

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Spain offers $470 million to move Thirty Meter Telescope to Canary Islands

8:52 am

The Spanish government this week announced it is willing to commit $470 million to fund the long delayed and no longer funded Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and move it from Hawaii to the Canary Islands.

Last month, the administration of US president Donald Trump announced plans to abandon further support for the telescope, as part of its proposals to slash by half funding for the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which has until now supported the telescope’s design.

Now the Spanish government has pitched to bring the giant facility to La Palma, in Spain’s Canary Islands — and backed up the effort with a pledge to contribute €400 million (US$470 million). “Spain reinforces its commitment as a refuge for science, betting on excellent research and technological innovation,” wrote the Spanish minister for science and innovation, Diana Morant, on X, as she announced the funding on 23 July. According to a statement from her ministry, Morant has already submitted a formal proposal to host the telescope to the TMT board, which would have to back such a move for it to go ahead.

The quote incorrectly spins the Trump cuts. The NSF never had the funds to build both the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile and TMT. For years it has been lobbying to get that additional money, and failed. Even now, Congress is not interested in funding both even as it restores much of the funding cuts proposed by Trump.

The idea of moving TMT to the Canary Islands was first put forth in 2016, but in 2021 a Spanish judge blocked the tentative deal. The move also caused Japan to cut its funding to the project, leaving it without the cash to continue.

This new financing commitment by Spain might actually revive the telescope.

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Russia launches two weather satellites

8:36 am

Russia today successfully placed two weather satellites into orbit, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Vostochny spaceport in eastern Russia.

Video of the launch here. This was the second launch for this new constellation of satellites. The rocket flew north from Vostochny, crossing Russia with its lower stages and four strap-on boosters falling in designated drop zones inside Russia. No word if anything landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

91 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 91 to 65.

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The glaciers on Mars are almost pure ice with only a thin cover of dust and debris

9:55 am

A map of glaciers on Mars
A map of glaciers on Mars.

According to new research, scientists now think that the glaciers on Mars are almost pure ice, protected from sublimation by a thin cover of dust and debris.

Work over the last 20 years has demonstrated that at least some of these glaciers are mostly pure ice with only a thin cover of rock and dust, but according to a new paper published in Icarus, glaciers all over the planet actually contain more than 80% water ice, a significant finding. Ultimately, this means that Mars’s glacial ice deposits are nearly pure across the globe, providing a clearer understanding of Mars’ climate history and a possible resource for future utilization.

The researchers analyzed mid-latitude glaciers at five different locations in both the north and south hemispheres, and found that at every location the data suggested almost pure ice.

The map to the right, from earlier research, shows the prevalence of near-surface ice once you get above 30 degrees latitude. From the poles to the mid-latitudes it appears there is an ice sheet or “ice table” just below the surface. In the mid-latitudes glaciers dominate, as this appears to be the region where that ice is beginning to dissipate. In the equatorial regions little or no near-surface ice has been detected, though there has been some evidence in some places of ice at deeper depths.

This data once again demonstrates that Mars is not a desert like the Sahara, as we once believed. Instead, it more resembles Antarctica, where there is ice everywhere that simply needs to be processed for use.

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T-Mobile makes its Starlink capability available to everyone

9:34 am

T-Mobile officials yesterday announced that it is now offering its Starlink text and location cellphone capabilities available by subscription to all users, whether or not they are a T-Mobile customer.

On Wednesday, T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert announced that the Starlink-powered service is officially out of beta, though it only supports text messaging and location-sharing for now. The new satellite coverage option is called “T-Satellite,” and it’s currently available as a standalone subscription. It’s being offered at $10 per month for a “limited time,” before increasing to $15 per month. It also comes included for customers on the carrier’s $100 per month Experience Beyond or older Go5G plans.

Your device will automatically connect to T-Satellite if you’re in an area with no cellular coverage. As long as there isn’t a heavy amount of cloud coverage or trees blocking your view of the sky, you should be able to send and receive text messages, including to 911, as well as share a link that temporarily tracks your location.

At present, the service is only available in the United States, though it will expand as SpaceX launches more cellphone-to-satellite Starlink satellites. T-Mobile also expects to add voice capability as well.

Nor is this the only option. AT&T is partnering with the satellite company AST SpaceMobile to offer similar services.

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Rocket startup IRocket mergers with investment company

9:10 am

The rocket startup IRocket has now gone public by merging with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) BPGC, with the latter committing $400 million in investment capital in the merged company.

Innovative Rocket Technologies Inc. (iRocket), a next-generation reusable space rocket developer, and BPGC Acquisition Corp. (BPGC), a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by The Hon. Wilbur Ross, the 39th U.S. Secretary of Commerce with more than 55 years of private equity and investment banking experience, and BPGC Management LP, an independent private equity firm dedicated to opportunistic buyouts and special situations transactions in the global industrials, materials and chemicals sectors, jointly announced today that they have entered into a definitive Merger Agreement and Plan of Merger dated July 22, 2025, in connection with the previously-announced letter of intent.

Upon closing, the combined company will operate under the name iRocket Technologies Inc. and the parties will plan to list the combined company on Nasdaq.

The press release at the link makes a lot of very ambitious claims about the company’s proposed rocket, claims that so far appear to be nothing more than nice PowerPoint graphics.

iRocket’s Shockwave launch vehicle is uniquely designed for recovery and reuse of all of its stages. Just as airplanes fly multiple flights, iRocket will Recondition, Reload, and Relaunch™ its rockets in under 24 hours. iRocket’s patented liquid rocket engines will maintain high efficiency through descent as well as ascent. iRocket’s engines will be fueled with sustainable liquid oxygen and methane, which burns cooler, imparts less stress on components, and further supports iRocket’s unique 24-hour turn-around time. Being on a leading edge with its rocket engine expertise, iRocket is also developing solid rocket motors that will transform boosters, missiles, and interceptors.

The company has been around since 2018, yet as far as I can determine has never launched anything. One would hope that something real will begin to finally happen with this infusion of significant new capital.

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JAXA/Mitsubishi test upgraded engines for H3 rocket

8:42 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA, working with Mitsubishi, successfully completed today a static fire test of new more powerful engines to be used on its new H3 rocket, thus eliminating the need for solid-fueled boosters with the goal of reducing the rocket’s cost.

Thursday’s test involved the sixth H3 rocket, which is a Type 30 test vehicle that has three main engines and no boosters. The three main engines were fired for 25 seconds while the rocket remained attached to the launchpad. JAXA will check acceleration, temperature and other data collected during the test.

This new version of the H3 is expected to do its first launch before the end of 2025. If successful, the launch price compared to JAXA’s now retired H2A rocket will be cut in half, to about $35 million, a number that will almost be competitive with the Falcon 9. SpaceX officially charges about $70 million per launch, but it is believed it could reduce that price significantly — some estimate to as low as $20 million — and still make a profit.

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Curiosity amid the boxwork

12:13 pm

Curiosity amid the boxwork, looking uphill
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, cropped to post here, was taken on July 20, 2025 by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity. It looks uphill to the south into the canyon that Curiosity will eventually travel, with the white chaotic upper flanks of Mount Sharp on the horizon. The mountain’s peak itself is out of view, about 25 miles away.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, on the northern edge of the large patch of very distinct boxwork ridges visible from orbit. You can see these ridges in the foreground of the panorama above.

The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line roughly indicates the rover’s future travels. At the moment, however, it is going nowhere, as the science team is focused on studying these boxwork ridges in the hope they can determine their origin. Such features are usually associated with cracking later filled with lava, with the polygon-shaped cracking usually associated with a formerly wet environment drying.

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Rocket Lab’s new Neutron rocket faces red tape delays at Wallops

10:00 am

Proposed dredged channel
Proposed dredged channel. Click for original.

We’re here to help you! Rocket Lab appears to be having regulatory problems getting approvals to transport hardware for its new Neutron rocket to its new launchpad at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island in Virginia, delays that might prevent it from launching as planned later this year.

It appears the company needs to dredge a deeper channel to ship the heavier Neutron hardware into Wallops, but it has not been able to begin work because of approval delays by the federal government.

The dredging project was approved by VMRC [Virginia Marine Resources Commission] in May, but the company has yet to start digging because it’s still awaiting federal sign-off from the Army Corps of Engineers.

Lacking this approval and unable to get the channel ready for this year’s launch, the company is seeking permission to use a stop-gap different approach to transport the hardware through these shallow waters.

Kedging, a little-known nautical method, is used to ensure the barges can safely navigate the existing shallow channel. Workers would use a series of anchors and lines to steer the barge through the shallow waters. The company is seeking permission to use this method through the end of June 2026 or until the dredging work is complete, whichever comes first.

Lacking an okay to do even this alternative approach, Rocket Lab will be forced to transport the hardware using “ramps and cranes,” an approach that is impractical in the long run for achieving a profitable launch pace. It also would likely result in not meeting its targeted launch date before the end of 2025 for the first Neutron launch.

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One of China’s big satellite constellations appears in trouble

9:35 am

According to a report in China’s state-run press today, one of the giant satellite constellations China is building to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is in trouble, and will likely fail to meet its international licensing requirement to place more than six hundred satellites in orbit by the end of 2025.

Only 90 satellites have been launched into low Earth orbit for the Qianfan broadband network – also known as the Thousand Sails Constellation or G60 Starlink – well short of the project’s goal of 648 by the end of this year.

Under international regulations to prevent spectrum hoarding, satellite operators must deploy a certain proportion of their constellation within set times after securing orbits and radio frequencies.

Shanghai Yuanxin Satellite Technology, the company leading the project, plans to deploy more than 15,000 satellites by 2030 to deliver direct-to-phone internet services worldwide.

To meet its license requirement, it require a launch pace for the rest of ’25 of about 30 satellites per month, something that the article says is unlikely due to “a severe shortage of rockets” in China.

This story might also explain why China’s government yesterday ordered all its rocket pseudo-companies to speed up their test schedules, pushing to launch their new rockets for the first time this year instead of in 2026. The Xi government’s order appears to be trying to address this rocket shortage.

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SpaceX launches two SES communications satellites

2:41 pm

Despite a launch abort yesterday at T-11 seconds for unstated reasons, SpaceX followed up by successfully completing the launch today, sending two SES communications satellites into orbit with its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This was SpaceX’s fifth launch for this SES constellation, during which it has placed a total of ten satellites into orbit. The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The fairings completed their ninth and twenty-first flights respectively.

A few hours earlier a different SpaceX rocket had another launch abort at about T-43 seconds, this time because of a local power outage. That launch has been rescheduled for later this evening.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

90 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 90 to 64.

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Astronomers detect exoplanet shaping the protoplanetary disk surrounding a baby star

9:41 am

Star with disk
Click for original image.

Astronomers using two different instruments on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile have now directly detected what they think is an exoplanet as it shapes the spiral arms of a baby star’s protoplanetary disk.

In the case of HD 135344B’s disc, swirling spiral arms had previously been detected by another team of astronomers using SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch), an instrument on ESO’s VLT. However, none of the previous observations of this system found proof of a planet forming within the disc.

Now, with observations from the new VLT’s Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS) instrument, the researchers say they may have found their prime suspect. The team spotted the planet candidate right at the base of one of the disc’s spiral arms, exactly where theory had predicted they might find the planet responsible for carving such a pattern.

The newly detected object however might be a brown dwarf and not an exoplanet. More observations are required to reduce the uncertainty.

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Have astronomers observed a black hole twice gobble from the same star?

9:23 am

Astronomers have now observed identical flares 700 days apart and coming from the same supermassive black hole, suggesting that a star was partially disrupted both times as it orbited the black hole.

Both flares produced less energy than predicted, based on calculations that assumed the complete destruction of a star. From the paper’s [pdf] abstract:

Here we present the optical-ultraviolet tidal disruption event AT 2022dbl, which showed a nearly identical repetition 700 days after the first flare. Ruling out gravitational lensing and two chance unrelated disruptions, we conclude that at least the first flare represents the partial disruption of a star.

…Since both flares are typical of the optical-ultraviolet class of tidal disruptions in terms of their radiated energy, temperature, luminosity, and spectral features, it follows that either the entire class are partial rather than full stellar disruptions, contrary to the prevalent assumption, or some members of the class are partial disruptions, having nearly the same observational characteristics as full disruptions. Whichever option is true, these findings could require revised models for the emission mechanisms of optical-ultraviolet tidal disruption flares and a reassessment of their expected rates.

Assuming the star wasn’t completely destroyed during the second flare, a third flare should occur about two years from now, as the star swings around and makes its next close approach. If so it will confirm this theory. If not, we will be left with the simple uncertainty of science.

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A galaxy surrounded by galaxies

11:12 am

A galaxy surrounded by galaxies
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 a survey of galaxies where Type 1a supernovae have occurred, in order to better refine the precise brightness of these explosions.

What makes this galaxy most interesting are the hundreds of other galaxies that appear to surround it. And that ain’t an illusion.

NGC 3285B is a member of the Hydra I cluster, one of the largest galaxy clusters in the nearby Universe. Galaxy clusters are collections of hundreds to thousands of galaxies that are bound to one another by gravity. The Hydra I cluster is anchored by two giant elliptical galaxies at its centre. Each of these galaxies is about 150,000 light-years across, making them about 50% larger than our home galaxy, the Milky Way. NGC 3285B sits on the outskirts of its home cluster, far from the massive galaxies at the centre.

As for the survey program, Type 1a supernovae are the measure cosmologists have used to discover the unexpected acceleration of the universe’s expansion rate at the largest scales, something they dub “dark energy” because they really don’t understand what they have discovered. That discovery however hinges entirely on the assumed intrinsic brightness of Type 1a supernovae. Astronomers have assumed these supernovae all have the same approximate brightness, and extrapolate their distance by that brightness.

The problem are the assumptions. We really don’t know if all Type 1a supernovae are approximately the same brightness. And even if they are equally bright, we also do not have a firm grasp of what that brightness should be.

This survey is an attempt to narrow or eliminate these uncertainties.

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Is SpaceX doing ocean salvage operations near Boca Chica?

11:25 pm

Superheavy aft section being salvaged
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SpaceX appears to be recovering the Superheavy booster that soft landed off shore from Boca Chica during the sixth test flight in November.

On Saturday, footage, albeit from a vantage point of someone who should not have been that close to the recovery operations, showed the aft end of a Booster with most of its Raptor engines still attached, being lifted out of the water.

During that November flight mission controllers decided against attempting a chopstick recovery, and sent the booster to do a soft vertical spashdown just off the coast. The booster than fell over and was seen drifting south. It appears SpaceX has now mounted operations to recovery it, possibly in response to the complaints by Mexican officials about its rocket pieces showing up on the beaches. Company engineers likely also wish to take a look at the equipment for their own reasons.

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