Tag: engineering

Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace signs deal to build lander for ESA

10:10 am

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

The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace — about to attempt its second unmanned lunar landing — has now signed a $3 millionj contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to begin design and construction of its proposed Magpie lander.

The agreement comes in the context of the Small Missions for Exploration initiative launched by ESA. This initiative called for innovative and short-term mission ideas for lunar exploration. ispace’s MAGPIE concept was selected and awarded a pre-phase A contract on Dec. 12, 2024. Under the Phase 1 extension agreement, ispace-EUROPE will collaborate with ESA on the implementation of the lunar exploration mission. In aggregate, the value of the contracts for the two phases is €2,695,000 (approximately ¥437 million JPY).

The company already has contracts for future landers with both NASA and Japan’s space agency JAXA. It appears these space agencies consider the company’s engineering to be acceptable, even though its only attempt to land on the Moon, Hakuto-R1, crashed in 2023 when its software shut the engines down prematurely, three kilometers above the surface.

Ispace’s second lander, Resilience, is presently in lunar orbit and is now targeting a landing attempt tomorrow, June 5, 2025, at 3:17 pm (Eastern). The map to the right shows the landing zone, in Mare Frigoris in the high northern latitudes of the near side of the Moon.

This contract by ESA also illustrates Europea’s increasing shift to the capitalism model. Rather than design and build the lander itself, ESA is buying this product from the private sector. It will likely get what wants sooner and for far less money.

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Orbital tug startup Impulse raises $300 million in private investment capital

9:57 am

Following several large contract announcements in recent weeks, the orbital tug startup Impulse has now raised an additional $300 million in private investment capital, in addition to the $150 million it raised last year.

Impulse plans to use the funding for several initiatives. One is to scale up production of its Mira and Helios vehicles to better meet demand for them. The company says it has more than 30 signed contracts for those vehicles, a backlog worth nearly $200 million. Romo said the company is seeing increasing demand for Mira, the smaller of the two vehicles, for defense applications.

The company was founded by Tom Mueller, who was one of the principal engineers during SpaceX’s development of the Falcon 9. Mira is the smaller of the two tugs, and has flown one demo mission. The larger Helios tug has not yet flown, but the company recently won a contract with the satellite company SES to use it.

The company has also said it is developing its own rocket, but I suspect its first launch that will come later.

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Axiom’s fourth commercial passenger flight to ISS delayed another two days

9:45 am

NASA, Axiom, and SpaceX yesterday announced that the launch of Axiom’s fourth commercial passenger flight to ISS, dubbed Ax-4, has been delayed two days to June 10, 2025.

NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 8:22 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, June 10, for launch of the fourth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, Axiom Mission 4. This shift allows teams to account for predicted inclement weather during the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft transport in addition to completing final processing of the spacecraft ahead of launch.

The Dragon capsule for this mission is new, and there had been delays in getting it built. Though weather is likely the biggest reason for this delay, it also sounds as if SpaceX has needed just a little bit of extra time to finalize the capsule’s construction.

The mission will fly one Axiom astronaut plus three passengers, each a government astronaut from India, Poland, and Hungary. It will spend about a week docked at ISS.

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Voyager announces first public stock offering, valued at $1.6 billion

9:39 am

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

The space station startup Voyager Technologies yesterday announced its first public stock offering, with the hope of raising almost $400 million in investment capital.

Underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to 1.65 million additional Class A shares, on top of the 11 million initially offered, which are expected to be priced between $26 and $29 each. If fully subscribed at the top end of the range, the IPO could raise as much as $367 million in gross proceeds.

Voyager plans to build the Starlab space station, launched as a single large module by SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket, but so far has cut no metal, focusing its work entirely on designs. It has also signed deals with several foreign companies in Europe and Japan as well as the European Space Agency, positioning itself as providing the international community a station to replace ISS when it is gone.

At the moment however I rank Starlab fourth among the four commercial space stations under development, mostly because it has built nothing. Hopefully the funds raised by this stock offering will allow it to start some construction work.

  • 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 three tourist flights to ISS, with a fourth scheduled for early June, carrying passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. Though there have been rumors it has cash flow issues, development of its first module has been proceeding more or less as planned.
  • 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.
  • Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with an extensive partnership agreement with the European Space Agency. It recently had its station design approved by NASA, but it has built nothing. This might change once it obtains several hundred million dollars from its initial public offering of stock.
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Proposed commercial spaceport in Nova Scotia gets launch customer

9:28 am

The proposed commercial spaceport in Nova Scotia, operated by Maritime Launch Services, announced this week that it has signed a contract with a Netherlands rocket startup, T-Minus, whereby the latter will do two suborbital launches of its new Barracuda sounding rocket.

On 3 June 2023, Maritime Launch Services, a Canadian commercial launch facility operator, announced that it had signed an agreement with T-Minus Engineering for the launch of two Barracuda rockets. According to the press release, the two launches will carry various scientific and educational payloads for several customers, whose names were not disclosed. The launches are expected to take place from Spaceport Nova Scotia in October 2025.

The viability of both the rocket startup and spaceport are open to question. T-Minus was founded in 2011, and has apparently done little in that time period. It claims it is flown this rocket many times, but if so there is little solid information confirming this fact. Most of its business appears to have been flying very small sounding rockets for European defense agencies.

Maritime Launch Services first proposed this spaceport in 2017, but has seen only one student suborbital launch in that time. Its original plan was to offer both the launchpad and rocket to satellite manufacturers. The rocket however was Ukrainian-built, and when Russia invaded the Ukraine that rocket was no longer available. Furthermore, red tape in Canada stalled launch approvals for years.

Recently the spaceport has been marketing itself to multiple rocket companies, announced a number of deals with unnamed startups or named startups that haven’t flown anything yet. It has also signed a partnership deal with the space station company (Voyager), apparently to bring some real technical expertise to the operation.

Nothing real at this spaceport however has actually yet occurred. Whether this new deal is real will have to wait for something to happen.

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Sunspot update: The Sun confounds the predictions again!

11:27 am

It is time for my monthly update of the Sun’s ongoing sunspot activity, using the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspot activity but annotated by me with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

The activity in May was shocking in that it completely contradicted all expectations by everyone in the solar science community, with the Sun’s sunspot count changing in a way that was somewhat unprecedented. The graph below makes this very clear:

» Read more

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New ground-based images of the Sun’s surface

9:37 am

The Sun's surface, as seen by Inouye Solar Telescope
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken using the Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii. It shows the granule surface of the Sun at very high resolution, resolving objects as small as 12 miles across.

The team used the Inouye’s Visible Broadband Imager (VBI) instrument operating in the G-band, a specific range of visible light especially useful for studying the Sun because it highlights areas with strong magnetic activity, making features like sunspots and fine-scale structures like the ones in the study easier to see. The setup allows researchers to observe the solar photosphere at an impressive spatial resolution better than 0.03 arcseconds (i.e., about 20 kilometers on the Sun). This is the sharpest ever achieved in solar astronomy.

The scientists then used computer simulations to confirm that the smallest features, curtains of plasma raising along the walls of the granules, are linked to fluctuations in the Sun’s magnetic field.

As interesting and cutting edge this research is, the language of the press release seems more aimed at touting this telescope then describing new science. Practically every sentence uses words like “unmatched,” “unparalleled,” “unique,” and “unprecedented” (multiple times), and then ended with this quote:

“This is just one of many firsts for the Inouye, demonstrating how it continues to push the of solar research,” says NSO [National Solar Observatory] Associate Director for the NSF [National Science Foundation’s] Inouye Solar Telescope, Dr. David Boboltz. “It also underscores Inouye’s vital role in understanding the small-scale physics that drive space weather events that impact our increasingly technological society here on Earth.”

I have noticed this phenomenon recently in many government press releases. It appears that the releases issued in the past month have become less about real research and are more designed to lobby the public against any possible budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration.

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Two launches today by American companies

11:39 pm

The beat goes on: Two different American rocket companies today completed successful launches.

First, Rocket Lab placed a BlackSky high resolution Earth imaging satellite into orbit, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand. This was the second of four launches that BlackSky has purchased from Rocket Lab.

Next, SpaceX continued its unrelenting launch pace, placing 23 Starlink satellites into orbit (with 13 having phone-to-satellite capabilities), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its 21st flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

68 SpaceX
32 China
7 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 68 to 52.

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Proposed Australian spaceport changes name

9:54 am

Proposed Australian spaceports
Proposed Australian spaceports.
Click for original image.

A proposed Australian spaceport company that was previously called Equatorial Launch Australia and was forced to shift its location because of red tape has apparently changed its name to Space Centre Australia and named its proposed spaceport the Atakani Space Centre.

It is also possible there was a major shake-up in management, but this is unclear from available sources.

The map to the right shows the location where Atakani is planned, on Cape York in Queensland. Previously this company hoped to build the spaceport to the west in the Northern Territory, but local bureaucracy made that impossible.

Right now the company hopes to open for launches by 2029.

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New calculations suggest Andromeda might not collide with Milky Way

9:00 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using new data from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as Europe’s Gaia space telescope, combined with many computer models, have determined that the 2012 prediction that the Andromeda galaxy would collide with Milky Way in five billion years was much more uncertain. From the abstract of the paper:

[W]e consider the latest and most accurate observations by the Gaia and Hubble space telescopes, along with recent consensus mass estimates, to derive possible future scenarios and identify the main sources of uncertainty in the evolution of the Local Group over the next 10 billion years. We found that the next most massive Local Group member galaxies — namely, M33 and the Large Magellanic Cloud—distinctly and radically affect the Milky Way — Andromeda orbit. Although including M33 increases the merger probability, the orbit of the Large Magellanic Cloud runs perpendicular to the Milky Way–Andromeda orbit and makes their merger less probable.

In the full system, we found that uncertainties in the present positions, motions and masses of all galaxies leave room for drastically different outcomes and a probability of close to 50% that there will be no Milky Way–Andromeda merger during the next 10 billion years. Based on the best available data, the fate of our Galaxy is still completely open.

The press release at the first link above makes it sounds as the previous prediction of a collision had been fully accepted as certain by the entire astronomical community, and that is balder-dash. It was simply the best guess at the time, highly uncertain. This new prediction — that we really don’t know what will happen based on the data available — is simply the newest best guess.

This new analysis however is certainly more robust and honest.

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Trump budget proposes putting a final end to the delayed and blocked Thirty Meter Telescope

12:01 pm

There is a lot more to report, and I will do so in a day or so, but I thought it worthwhile to quickly note the the proposed science cuts in the proposed Trump budget for 2026 includes the elimination of all funds for Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii.

In the budget request, NSF [National Science Foundation]… says it will back only one of the two $3 billion optical telescopes that the astrophysics community wants to build. That honor goes to the Giant Magellan Telescope already under construction in Chile. Its competitor, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), “will not advance to the Final Design Phase and will not receive additional commitment of funds from NSF,” according to the budget request.

The NSF has never had enough money to finance both telescopes. The fact that TMT has been blocked for more than a decade by DEI protesters in Hawaii, with the aid of the state government (controlled entirely by Democrats), makes funding it pointless, and a waste of the taxpayers’ money. It long past time to pull the plug.

As I say, there is a lot more details to report in this budget proposal, including its effort to slash a lot of science government spending, but that will have to wait for later essays. I can promise you one thing, however: I will not do what the rest of the press does, and write a knee-jerk propaganda piece in support of that spending. The science mafia at NASA and the NSF and other agencies has funded a lot of junk in the last few decades. It is time for a reckoning.

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Webb spots a new record-setting galaxy, only 280 million years after the Big Bang

3:11 pm

MoM Z14
The galaxy MoM z14, as seen in the infrared
by Webb. Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have now identified a galaxy that formed only 280 million years after the Big Bang, far earlier than their theories of the origins of the universe had predicted.

“The broader story here is that JWST was not expected to find any galaxies this early in the history of the universe, at least not at this stage of the mission,” van Dokkum said. “There are, very roughly, over 100 more relatively bright galaxies in the very early universe than were expected based on pre-JWST observations.”

The data suggests MoM z14 is 50 times smaller than the Milky Way, contains nitrogen and carbon, and appears to be forming stars. The data also found little neutral hydrogen surrounding the galaxy, which also contradicts those same cosmological theories. According to those theories, the early universe should be filled with neutral hydrogen.

The nitrogen and oxygen are also there earlier than expected, and suggest there will be more such galaxies, including some even closer to the Big Bang.

Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.

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SES cleared by the United Kingdom to buy Intelsat

11:01 am

The long-established Luxembour satellite company SES has now gotten regulatory approval from the United Kingdom to buy another long-established satellite company, Intelsat, with the purchase price €2.8 billion.

SES’s €2.8 billion acquisition of Intelsat was cleared by the UK’s competition regulator, in a move that will create a satellite giant to better compete with Elon Musk’s Starlink. The Competition and Markets Authority decided on the basis of “the information currently available to it,” to not subject the deal to an in-depth probe, it said in a statement on Friday.

The deal still needs to be approved by the European Union, which has set June 10th as the deadline for a decision.

This merger is because these older satellite companies are presently losing in competition with the many new low-orbit satellite constellations by new companies, led mostly by Starlink. By merging they hope to compete better.

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SpaceX launches GPS satellite for military

10:51 am

SpaceX this morning successfully placed a military GPS satellite into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. As of posting the satellite has not yet been deployed.

This was the second military GPS launch that the Space Force has taken from ULA and its Vulcan rocket and given to SpaceX instead. Even though Vulcan was certified in late March by the military for these kinds of military launches, delays in getting Vulcan operational forced the Space Force to find another more reliable launch provider. Even now, two months after that certification, ULA has still not announced a launch schedule for this rocket. The company in December 2024 had predicted it would launch 20 times in 2025, with 16 of those launches being by Vulcan. The year is almost half over now and ULA has only launched once, using an Atlas 5 rocket.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

66 SpaceX
32 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 66 to 51.

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SpaceX: We are targeting 170 launches in 2025

10:21 am

According to a statement by a SpaceX official during a telephone press conference on May 28, 2025, the company is now hoping to complete 170 total launches in 2025.

“We’re targeting 170 launches by the end of the year,” Anne Mason, director of national security space launch at SpaceX, said during a call with reporters on Wednesday (May 28).

…”I always find it amazing that this cadence has become somewhat normal,” Mason added during Wednesday’s call, which served to preview SpaceX’s planned Friday (May 30) launch of the GPS III SV08 satellite for the U.S. Space Force. “But if we look back just five years ago, in 2020 when we launched roughly 25 times, which is still a healthy rate at twice a month, and now launching on average every two to three days — I think this demonstrates how Falcon’s reusability and reliability, plus the hard work and dedication of the SpaceX team, has been critical to supporting assured access to space,” she said.

Last year SpaceX set a record of 137 successful orbital launches, a number that also exceeded what the entire world had accomplished yearly for most of the space age since Sputnik in 1957. This new goal however appears to be a reduction from its earlier hopes. Near the start of the year SpaceX officials had predicted it would complete 180 launches.

There is also the possibility that Mason above was only referring to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches, and not counting the test flights of Starship and Superheavy.

Either way, SpaceX continues to prove that freedom and private enterprise can do far more than government, and do it faster and cheaper as well.

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Northrop Grumman invests $50 million in Firefly and new rocket

9:55 am

Northrop Grumman and the rocket startup Firefly announced yesterday that the former has invested $50 million in the latter in order to develop a fully new rocket, dubbed Eclipse, with capabilities allowing it to compete with SpaceX for customers.

“Firefly is incredibly grateful for Northrop Grumman’s investment that further solidifies our first-of-its-kind partnership to build the first stage of Antares 330 and jointly develop Eclipse,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. “…With a 16 metric ton to orbit capability, Eclipse is a sweet spot for programs like NSSL Lane 1 and a natural fit to launch proliferated constellations in LEO, MEO, GEO, and TLI.”

Built upon Northrop Grumman’s Antares and Firefly’s Alpha rocket, Eclipse offers a significant leap in power, performance, production cadence, and payload capacity. The launch vehicle retains the flight-proven avionics from the Antares program with additional upgrades, including a larger 5.4 meter payload fairing. Eclipse also utilizes the same first stage Firefly is developing for Antares 330 and retains scaled-up versions of Alpha’s propulsion systems and carbon composite structures, allowing the team to rapidly build and test Eclipse with significant production efficiencies and economies of scale.

The companies say that because of its reliance on already proven launch rockets, they hope Eclipse’s first launch will take place in 2026 from Wallops Island.

As I noted yesterday, the demand for launch services — especially for heavier payloads — presently exceeds the supply, as already established rocket companies ULA and Blue Origin have so far failed to deliver as promised. Rocket Lab is developing its medium-lift Neutron expressly to grab this market. It now appears Northrop Grumman wants a share as well, and is partnering with Firefly to get it.

If all goes as planned this partnership will soon have two rockets to offer customers, the Antares 330 and Eclipse.

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Elon Musk’s presentation “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary”

2:51 pm

The Musk game plan for Mars exploration over the next few years
The Musk game plan for Mars exploration over the next few years.

It appears Elon Musk finally gave his public presentation to SpaceX employees today, entitled “The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary”, and had it posted on X.

I have embedded that presentation below.

After reviewing the present development program for Starship/Superheavy (without mentioning anything about this week’s flight), Musk then outlined the game plan for the the next few years, as shown in the graphic above. If all goes as planned (not to be expected), the first Starships will head to Mars in about eighteen months, at the next launch window near the end of 2026. These flights will be unmanned, and will require that by then SpaceX will have also developed orbital refueling capability.

Musk hopes the first manned missions will take place at the next launch window in 2028-29, with the number of ships increased from 5 to 20. Later windows will see 300 and then 500 ships launched. For those flights a lot of work will need to be done to make Starships function as interplanetary spaceships, something it appears SpaceX and Musk have not yet devoted much energy to.

As always, Musk’s target goals are ambitious and not likely to be met. But as always, his targets are not unreasonable, which means SpaceX will likely eventually get all this done but late by only one or several launch windows.

Musk also noted that this entire program is presently being funded by Starlink revenues. The government for SpaceX and Musk’s space exploration plans is largely now irrelevant. This fact is possibly the most historically significant revelation in his presentation.

I strongly recommend you watch his whole speech, if only to enjoy the “Wow!” factor.

The future is going to be exciting for sure.

Hat tip to reader Gary.
» Read more

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Chinese pseudo-company completes successful hop test of rocket

12:04 pm

YXZ-1 completing soft splashdown vertically
YXZ-1 completing soft splashdown vertically.
Click for movie.

The Chinese pseudo-company Space Epoch (also called SEpoch) announced today a successfully hop test yesterday where its prototype YXZ-1 grasshopper-type test prototype completed a vertical launch to an altitude of about 1.5 miles, shut down its engines, then relit them to achieve a soft splashdown over water.

The test article used thin-walled stainless steel and had a diameter of 4.2 meters, a total height of 26.8 meters and a takeoff mass of about 57 tons, according to Space Epoch. The test lasted 125 seconds and reached around 2.5 kilometers in altitude. The test article used Longyun methane-liquid oxygen engines provided by [pseudo]-commercial firm Jiuzhou Yunjian (JZYJ).

Sepoch says the test has laid a solid foundation for the first full flight of the YXZ-1, also known as Hiker-1 in English, later this year.

Without question China’s pseudo-companies as well as its official state space divisions are aggressively pursuing reusable rockets, far more aggressively than any companies (other than SpaceX) in the west. There are at least nine Chinese pseudo-companies or government agencies testing rockets that can land vertically (Space Epoch, Landspace, Deep Blue, Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Space Pioneer, Ispace, Galactic Energy, Linkspace), with eight having attempted hop tests with mixed results.

In the west, only SpaceX is flying reusable rockets. Blue Origin’s New Glenn is supposed to be reusable, but it has only launched once and on that flight its first stage failed to land successfully. The company has only done hop flights with its small suborbital New Shepard spacecraft. Rocket Lab is building its reusable Neutron rocket, but it also has never done any hop tests with that rocket. Stoke Space plans a completely reusable rocket, with the second stage returning as well, and has done one short hop test of a prototype of that stage. Other rocket companies are designing or developing such rockets, but none have done any hop tests.

In general China’s rocket industry appears far ahead in this race.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Scientists believe they have detected the actual process in which Mars loses its atmosphere

10:13 am

The uncertainty of science: Scientists using three different instruments on the Mars orbiter MAVEN now believe they have detected evidence of the actual process in which Mars loses its atmosphere, dubbed “sputtering”.

To observe sputtering, the team needed simultaneous measurements in the right place at the right time from three instruments aboard the MAVEN spacecraft: the Solar Wind Ion Analyzer, the Magnetometer, and the Neutral Gas and Ion Mass Spectrometer. Additionally, the team needed measurements across the dayside and the nightside of the planet at low altitudes, which takes years to observe.

The combination of data from these instruments allowed scientists to make a new kind of map of sputtered argon in relation to the solar wind. This map revealed the presence of argon at high altitudes in the exact locations that the energetic particles crashed into the atmosphere and splashed out argon, showing sputtering in real time. The researchers also found that this process is happening at a rate four times higher than previously predicted and that this rate increases during solar storms.

This sputtering is believed to be the process in which Mars lost the thick atmosphere that scientists believe must have existed in the past so that liquid water could exist on the planet’s surface. When MAVEN arrived in Mars orbit ten years ago the scientists actually thought the spacecraft would detect it relatively quickly. That it took ten years to finally find some evidence it is occurring suggests something is not quite right with their theories.

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China launches classified satellite

10:02 am

China today successfully launched a classified Earth observation satellite to do “national land surveys, environmental management and other fields,” its Long March 4B rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, which use very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

65 SpaceX
32 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 65 to 51.

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South Korea rocket startup launches small prototype rocket

9:45 am

Unastella rocket at launch
Unastella rocket at launch

A South Korea rocket startup dubbed Unastella on May 28, 2025 successfully launched a small prototype suborbital rocket from its own launch site near the country’s southern coast.

UNA EXPRESS-I is 9.45 meters long and has a total weight of 2 tons. It is a small launch vehicle that uses kerosene (jet fuel) and liquid oxygen as fuel, with a thrust of 5 tons. The vehicle successfully completed its flight to the target distance of 10 kilometers and fell into the maritime safety zone set by Goheung County, the company stated. Park Jae-hong, the CEO of Unastella, noted, “For the first launch, we lowered the altitude for safety and extended the reach.”

This is South Korea’s second rocket startup that has launched a small test prototype, the first being Innospace which launched its test rocket from Brazil in 2023 and hopes to do an orbital launch before the end of the year.

It appears that South Korea is shifting successfully to the capitalism model. Back in 2023 it was trying to develop its government-built Nuri rocket, but that development seems to have stalled. Since then its newly formed space agency has established policies encouraging private space commercialization, which has apparently resulted in these two new rocket companies.

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New data suggests Europa’s surface is constantly changing

9:26 am

Webb data showing variations on Europa's surface
Click for original graphic.

The uncertainty of science: Using data collected by the Webb Space Telescope combined with modeling and lab experiments, scientists now think they have found evidence that Europa’s surface is constantly changing, with materials from its interior being brought to the surface.

This new study found crystalline ice on the surface as well as at depth in some areas on Europa, especially an area known as Tara Regio. “We think that the surface is fairly porous and warm enough in some areas to allow the ice to recrystallize rapidly,” said Dr. Richard Cartwright, lead author of the paper and a spectroscopist at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “Also, in this same region, generally referred to as a chaos region, we see a lot of other unusual things, including the best evidence for sodium chloride, like table salt, probably originating from its interior ocean. We also see some of the strongest evidence for CO2 and hydrogen peroxide on Europa.”

…“Our data showed strong indications that what we are seeing must be sourced from the interior, perhaps from a subsurface ocean nearly 20 miles (30 kilometers) beneath Europa’s thick icy shell,” said [Dr. Ujjwal Raut of the Southwest Research Institute and co-author of the paper]. “This region of fractured surface materials could point to geologic processes pushing subsurface materials up from below. When we see evidence of CO2 at the surface, we think it must have come from an ocean below the surface.”

The graphic to the right shows the detected variations across the surface of Europa, based on the Webb spectroscopic data. It also illustrates nicely the coarseness of this data, its lack of resolution, and the uncertainties involved. The scientists have found evidence that suggests the surface is changing, but the key word here is “suggests”. They have not yet directly seen any actual changes, such as changes between two images taken at different times.

Nonetheless, the data does point in the right direction. Moreover, it would be far more unlikely if nothing on Europa changed. The fundamental question that remains unanswered is how fast things change there. And we won’t have any chance to answer this question until Europa Clipper enters Jupiter orbit in 2030 and begins multiply fly-bys of Europa.

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China launches its first asteroid sample return mission

12:28 pm

China today successfully launched Tianwen-2, its first mission attempting to return a sample from a near Earth asteroid, its Long March 3B rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China.

Video of the launch can be found here. The probe will take about a year to reach asteroid Kamo’oalewa, where it will fly in formation studying it for another year, during which time it will attempt to grab samples by two methods. One method is a copy of the touch-and-go technique used by OSIRIS-REx on Bennu. The second method, dubbed “anchor and attach,” is untried, and involves using four robot arms, each with their own drill.

Some data suggests Kamo’oalewa is possibly a fragment from the Moon, but that is not confirmed.

After a year studying Kamo-oalewa, Tienwen-2 will then return past the Earth where it will release its sample capsule. The spacecraft will then travel to Comet 311P/PANSTARRS, reaching it in 2034. This comet is puzzling because it has an asteroid-like orbit but exhibits activity similar to a comet.

As for the launch, there is no word where the Long March 3B’s lower stages and four strap-on boosters, all using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. It should be noted that the video I link to above was taken by an ordinary citizen watching from a hill nearby, bringing with him a group of children as well. Considering the nature of the rocket’s fuel (which can dissolve your skin if it touches you), China’s attitude is remarkably sanguine to not only drop these stages on its people, but to allow tourists to get so close to launches.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

65 SpaceX
31 China (with one more launch scheduled later today)
6 Rocket Lab (with one launch scheduled for today SCRUBBED)
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 65 to 50.

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The canyon that Curiosity will eventually climb

11:36 am

The canyon that Curiosity will eventually climb
Click for full resolution. For original images go here and here.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Cool image time! The panorama above, created from two photographs taken on May 23, 2025 by the left navigation camera (here and here) on the Mars rover Curiosity, looks south uphill into the canyon that Curiosity is eventually going to climb.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present position, the white dotted line its past travels, the red dotted line its initial planned route, and the green dotted line its future route. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area seen in the panorama above.

If you look on the horizon to the left, you can see very bright terrain higher up the mountain. This is the pure sulfate-bearing unit that is Curiosity’s next major geological goal. It won’t reach that terrain for quite some time however because first the scientists want to spend some time studying the boxwork geology that Curiosity is now approaching. That boxwork suggests two past geological processes, as yet unconfirmed. First it suggests the ground dried like mud, forming a polygon pattern of cracks that then hardened into rock. Second, lava seeped up from below and filled those cracks. The lava, being more resistant to erosion, ended up becoming the boxwork of ridges as the material around eroded away.

This proposed history however is not proven. They hope to find out when Curiosity gets there.

Meanwhile, despite having traveled almost 22 miles, the rover is more than 25 miles from the peak of Mount Sharp, which remains out of sight. That peak is also about 15,000 feet higher.

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Scientists: Jezero Crater’s theorized lake overflowed intermittently four times in the past

10:42 am

The inlet and outlet valleys of Jezero Crater
Click for original image.

Scientists analyzing the Martian geology of the meandering outflow canyon from Jezero Crater, now think it was formed by four different very short-lived events when the theorized lake inside the crater overflowed the crater rim.

The map to the right, figure 1 of the paper (cropped and annotated to post here), provides the context. Two canyons, Sava Vallis and Neretva Vallis feed into Jezero Crater, and one canyon, Pliva Vallis, flows out. From the abstract:

By examining the shape of the valley, we noticed that Pliva Vallis was not like valleys carved by continuous rivers on Earth and propose instead that the valley was carved by at least four episodes of lake overflow. To give a minimum estimate of the duration of these events, we use a numerical model to simulate the overflow of a lake and the incision of a valley. Modeling suggests that the four (or more) episodes identified each incised part of the valley and that each episode lasted a few weeks at maximum.

The researchers also considered whether Pliva Vallis could have been carved by glacial flows, but rejected that possibility partly because “the general morphology of the valley shows a decrease in depth and width downstream, while subglacial channels [on Earth] tend to remain of similar width or become larger, as the flow regime does not decrease downstream.”

These conclusions of course carry a great deal of uncertainty. For one, they are based solely on orbital data. No ground truth exists as yet. Secondly, they assume the geology on Mars behaves in the same manner as on Earth. It could very well be for example that the reason the valley shrinks in size is because its Martian glacier sublimated away as flowed downhill, something that doesn’t happen on Earth.

Regardless, the data strongly suggests that water shaped Jezero in some manner.

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Astronomers discover a star radiating in X-rays and radio in ways that fit no known explanation

10:14 am

ASKAP J1832 circled. Note the red arc denoting the supernovae remnant
ASKAP J1832 circled. Note the red arc denoting
the supernovae remnant. Click for original image.

Using both the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Square Kilometer Array in Australia, astronomers have discovered a star that pulses in both X-rays and and radio frequencies in a manner previously unseen and that fit no known theory.

ASKAP J1832 belongs to a class of objects called “long period radio transients,” discovered in 2022, that vary in radio wave intensity in a regular way over tens of minutes. This is thousands of times longer than the length of the repeated variations seen in pulsars, which are rapidly spinning neutron stars that have repeated variations multiple times a second. ASKAP J1832 cycles in radio wave intensity every 44 minutes, placing it into this category of long period radio transients.

Using Chandra, the team discovered that ASKAP J1832 is also regularly varying in X-rays every 44 minutes. This is the first time that such an X-ray signal has been found in a long period radio transient.

…However, that is not all ASKAP J1832 does. Using Chandra and the SKA Pathfinder, the team found that ASKAP J1832 also dropped off in X-rays and radio waves dramatically over the course of six months. This combination of the 44-minute cycle in X-rays and radio waves in addition to the months-long changes is unlike anything astronomers have seen in the Milky Way galaxy.

The false-color X-ray/radio image to the right shows the star (circled). Based on the data, it is unlikely that the star is a neutron star or a pulsar. Its properties also do not fit with a magnetar (a pulsar with a very strong magnetic field). Though located within a supernova remnant, the astronomers determined this to be a coincidence, the star unrelated to the remnant.

The best explanation so far is that this is a white dwarf with a companion and the strongest magnetic field ever conceived. The astronomers however do not appear enthused by that explanation either.

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Engineers pinpoint and bypass fuel line problem on Psyche

9:00 am

Psyche's flight path to the asteroid Psyche
Psyche’s flight path to the asteroid Psyche.
Click for original image.

In troubleshooting a significant drop in pressure in the xenon gas fuel lines to the ion engines of the Psyche asteroid probe, engineers have now pinpointed the problem to a failed valve and have switched to a back-up fuel line.

Powered by two large solar arrays, Psyche’s thrusters ionize and expel xenon gas to gently propel the spacecraft, which gradually picks up speed during its journey. The team paused the four electric thrusters in early April to investigate an unexpected drop in pressure. They determined that a mechanical issue in one of the valves, which open and close to manage the flow of propellant, caused the decrease. Through extensive testing and diagnostic work, the team concluded that a part inside one of the valves is no longer functioning as expected and is obstructing the flow of xenon to the thrusters.

Now that the swap to the backup fuel line is completed, engineers will command the spacecraft’s thrusters to resume firing by mid-June.

This issue had to be resolved before that scheduled firing in June or else Psyche would have fallen off its course to reach the metal asteroid Psyche by August 2029.

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SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites

8:51 am

The beat goes on! SpaceX this morning successfully placed another 27 Starlink satellites into orbit (including 13 with cell-to-satellite capabilities), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The first stage completed its nineteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

65 SpaceX
30 China (with two launches scheduled later today)
6 Rocket Lab (with one launch scheduled for today SCRUBBED)
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 65 to 49.

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