Tag: Moon

Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, targets March 2, 2025 for landing

9:50 am

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

Blue Ghost on February 13, 2025 successfully completed a long four-minute engine burn to complete its transfer from Earth to lunar orbit, with a target date for the actual landing on March 2, 2025.

Now that the lander is in lunar trajectory, over the next 16 days, additional maneuvers will take the lander from an elliptical orbit to a circular orbit around the Moon. Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeted to land Sunday, March 2, at 3:45 a.m. EST.

NASA has also announced the live stream coverage during landing:

Live coverage of the landing, jointly hosted by NASA and Firefly, will air on NASA+ starting at 2:30 a.m. EST, approximately 75 minutes before touchdown on the Moon’s surface. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media. The broadcast will also stream on Firefly’s YouTube channel. Coverage will include live streaming and blog updates as the descent milestones occur.

I will embed the Firefly live stream when it becomes available.

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A Pakistani rover will fly on China’s Chang’e-8 mission to the Moon

9:18 am

Pakistan and China have finalized plans to place a Pakistani rover on China’s Chang’e-8 lunar lander mission.

This rover partnership was first announced in November 2024. This new release appears to provide a bit more information about the rover itself.

The rover will have a mass of around 35 kilograms and carry science payloads for studying lunar soil composition, radiation levels, plasma properties and testing new technologies for sustainable human presence on the Moon. It will also feature a collaborative scientific payload developed by Chinese and European researchers.

The Chang’e-8 mission is targeting a 2030 launch and will land in the Moon’s south pole region. China also claims it will initiate construction of China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), but that’s a bit of hyperbole. All it shall be is another unmanned lander with two rovers and other instruments, hardly a manned base. What will matter will be what follows, and how quickly.

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Blue Ghost leaves Earth orbit

9:06 am

Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon
Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has successfully completed the mid-course correction engine burn that has taken it out of Earth orbit and into a transfer orbit to the Moon.

After a successful Trans Lunar Injection burn on Saturday, Feb. 8, Firefly’s spacecraft carrying NASA science and tech to the Moon has departed Earth’s orbit and begun its four-day transit to the Moon’s orbit. Blue Ghost will then spend approximately 16 days in lunar orbit before beginning its descent operations. Since launching more than three weeks ago, Blue Ghost has performed dozens of health tests generating 13 gigabytes of data. All 10 NASA payloads onboard are currently healthy and ready for surface operations on the Moon.

I post the artist’s rendering of Blue Ghost to the right to contrast its design with Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander that fell over when it landed last year. Note how much lower to the ground Blue Ghost is. This will certainly reduce the chances it will have the same problem as Odysseus, even if one leg breaks upon landing.

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The payloads on Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander, including a hopper and a rover

9:32 am

The Moon's south pole, with candidate landing sites
Click for NASA’s original image.

Link here. Athena is scheduled for launch on February 26, 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The article is mostly focused on describing the Gracie hopper, which will attempt to hop into the permanent shadows inside a nearby crater.

Though no announcement has ever been made, it appears the landing site for this lander has been changed. Previously it had been targeting a ridge adjacent to Shackleton Crater, at the south pole and shown on the map to the right. That location however required a launch in January. The delay to February seems to have shifted the landing site.

If all goes to plan, Athena will land on a plateau just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole. This region is thought to be rich in water ice, and IM-2 will prospect for the precious resource with the help of some ride-along robots, including a pioneering hopper nicknamed Gracie.

Though I cannot find any specific information on where this location is, I strongly suspect it is the site that Intuitive Machines’ lander, Nova-C (also dubbed Odysseus), attempted to reach last year.

The yellow boxes on the map indicate NASA’s candidate landing zones for its Artemis-3 manned mission.

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Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander gets commercial rover to replace NASA’s VIPER rover

11:51 am

Astrobotic’s commercial Griffin lunar lander has signed a deal with the space rover startup Venturi Astrolab to fly its FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform (FLIP) in place of NASA’s cancelled VIPER rover.

Last year NASA announced that it would be cancelling the VIPER lander that was set to travel aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander, just months after the company’s first attempt at a moonshot failed. Now, the company has secured a contract to transport a rover developed by California-based aerospace firm Venturi Astrolab. That rover, the FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform, or FLIP for short, will be deployed to the Nobile region of the lunar south pole. The mission is scheduled for the end of the year and NASA’s contract with Astrobotic has been modified for the mission to serve as large lander demonstration flight.

This deal has significant ramifications outside of Astrobotic’s effort to make money hauling payloads to the Moon. Astrolab is one of three companies with NASA design contracts to develop a manned lunar rover for its later Artemis manned missions. By flying this smaller version now and successfully operating it on the Moon Astrolab puts itself in a better position to win the larger final rover contract from NASA, beating out Intuitive Machines and Lunar Outpost.

Astrolab was clearly aiming for the VIPER slot when it unveiled FLIP in October 2024. As I predicted then:

FLIP was clearly designed to match the fit of NASA’s now canceled VIPER rover that was to be launched on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander. Griffin is still being prepped for its lunar mission to be launched in 2025, but no longer has that prime payload. It is very obvious that Astrolab is vying to make FLIP that prime payload.

Note however how private enterprise moves. NASA can’t get it done but the competition to win contracts and make profits has these private companies scrambling to make things happen, quickly and cheaply.

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NASA calls for the private sector to launch VIPER to the Moon

10:55 am

As a follow-up of its August request for suggestions on how to save its cancelled VIPER rover mission to the Moon, NASA has now issued a request for actual proposals from the private sector for flying the mission, due on March 3, 2025.

The Announcement for Partnership Proposal contains proposal instructions and evaluation criteria for a new Lunar Volatiles Science Partnership. Responses are due Monday, March 3. After evaluating submissions, any selections by the agency will require respondents to submit a second, more detailed, proposal. NASA is expected to make a decision on the VIPER mission this summer.

…As part of an agreement, NASA would contribute the existing VIPER rover as-is. Potential partners would need to arrange for the integration and successful landing of the rover on the Moon, conduct a science/exploration campaign, and disseminate VIPER-generated science data. The partner may not disassemble the rover and use its instruments or parts separately from the VIPER mission. NASA’s selection approach will favor proposals that enable data from the mission’s science instruments to be shared openly with anyone who wishes to use it.

Expect a number of companies to tout their proposals in press releases in the coming weeks.

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Ispace posts first picture taken by its Resilience lunar lander

9:30 am

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

The Japanese startup Ispace on January 29, 2025 released the first picture taken by its Resilience lunar lander, a series of images of Earth.

More important, the company reported that the spacecraft is “in excellent health.”

Though launched on the same rocket with Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, Resilience is taking a longer route to the Moon. Blue Ghost plans to land on the Moon in about six weeks. Resilience won’t get there for about four more months. Both are using the same technique, slowly over time raising the spacecraft’s Earth orbit until its high point enters the Moon gravitational sphere of influence, where each will transfer to lunar orbit. This method saves weight and fuel, as it requires a smaller rocket engine to make the trip. That Resilience is taking longer is simply because it uses an even smaller engine that can only raise that orbit in smaller increments.

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Blue Ghost makes second orbital burn, setting up transfer from Earth to lunar orbit

9:14 am

Blue Ghost's first view of the Moon
Blue Ghost’s first view of the Moon.
Click for original image.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has successfully completed its second orbital burn, raising its Earth orbit in preparation for its shift into lunar orbit in the coming weeks.

Routine assessments while Blue Ghost is in transit show that all NASA payloads continue to be healthy. Firefly and NASA’s payload teams will continue to perform payload health checkouts and operations before reaching the Moon, including calibrating NASA’s Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager (LEXI), continued transit operations of the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE), and analysis of radiation data collected from the Radiation Tolerant Computer (RadPC) technology demonstration.

The picture to the right looks across the top of Blue Ghost, with the small bright object beyond its first image of the Moon. The actual landing is at least four weeks away.

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Blue Ghost completes first main mid-course correction engine burn

10:22 am

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has not only successfully completed its first major engine burn, raising its Earth orbit as it slowly moves towards the Moon, but successfully used a joint NASA-Italian instrument to pinpoint its location using Earth-orbiting GPS-type satellites.

Jointly developed by NASA and the Italian Space Agency, the Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment (LuGRE) technology demonstration acquired Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals, and calculated a navigation fix at nearly 52 Earth radii: more than 205,674 miles (331,000 kilometers) from Earth’s surface. This achievement suggests that Earth-based GNSS constellations can be used for navigation at nearly 90% of the distance to the Moon, an Earth-Moon signal distance record. It also demonstrates the power of using multiple GNSS constellations together, such as GPS and Galileo, to perform navigation.

These results suggest that if all lunar orbiters had this instrument on board, they could all pinpoint their positions precisely and thus eliminate the chance of collision. It also suggests that it might not be necessary, at least immediately, to build a separate GPS-type constellation around the Moon. Earth’s systems could do the job.

Blue Ghost will spend 25 days in Earth orbit, when it will transfer to lunar orbit for several more weeks before attempting a landing.

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Blue Ghost operating as expected on its way to the Moon

10:45 am

Blue Ghost selfie
Blue Ghost selfie. Click for original.

Firefly has announced that all is well with its Blue Ghost lunar lander, now in an ever expanding Earth orbit on its way to the Moon. Engineers have acquired signal and completed its on-orbit commissioning.

With a target landing date of March 2, 2025, Firefly’s 60-day mission is now underway, including approximately 45 days on-orbit and 14 days of lunar surface operations with 10 instruments as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.

…Firefly’s Blue Ghost will spend approximately 25 days in Earth orbit, four days in lunar transit, and 16 days in lunar orbit, enabling the team to conduct robust health checks on each subsystem, calibrate the propulsion system in preparation for critical maneuvers, and begin payload science operations.

NASA today released the first picture downloaded from the spacecraft, shown to the right. The view looks across the top deck of the lander, with two NASA science instruments on the horizon.

Once it lands it is designed to operate for about two weeks, during the lunar day. It will attempt to further gather some data during the long two-week long lunar night, but is not expected to survive to the next day.

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SpaceX successfully launches two commercial lunar landers

11:26 pm

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

SpaceX tonight successfully launched two different private commercial lunar landers, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The prime payload was Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, flying ten science payloads to the Moon for NASA. It will take about six weeks to get to lunar orbit. The second payload was Resilience or Hakuto-R2, built by the Japanese startup Ispace on that company’s second attempt to land on the Moon. It is taking a longer route to the Moon, 4 to 5 months. The map to the right shows the landing locations for both landers. It also shows the first landing zone for Ispace’s first lander, Hakuto-R1, inside Atlas Crater. In that case the software misread the spacecraft’s altitude. It was still three kilometers above the ground when that software thought it was just off the surface and shut down its engines. The spacecraft thus crashed.

For context, the map also shows the landing sites of three Apollo missions.

Both spacecraft were correctly deployed into their planned orbits.

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

The 2025 launch race:

8 SpaceX
2 China

Right now SpaceX’s launch pace exceeds once every two days. If it can even come close to maintaining that pace, it will easily match its goal of 180 launches in 2025.

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Live stream of SpaceX launch of two lunar landers

9:27 pm

I have embedded below the live stream of tonight’s launch by SpaceX of its Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy, carrying a dual lunar lander payload, Firefly’s Blue Ghost and Ispace’s Resilience, scheduled for 1:11 am (Eastern).

Blue Ghost will take 45 days to reach the Moon, when it will land in Mare Crisium on the eastern edge of the Moon’s visible hemisphere.

Resilience will take a much longer route, not arriving at the Moon for four to five months. It will then attempt to land in Mare Frigoris in the high northern latitudes of the visible hemisphere. If successful it will also deploy its own mini-rover dubbed Tenacious.
» Read more

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Is China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover dead?

12:58 pm

According to monthly images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover on the far side of the Moon, it has not moved since March 2024, suggesting it is no longer functioning.

“Up to about February 2023 the rover was moving about 7 or 8 metres every drive and typically about 40 m per lunar day. Suddenly the drives dropped to about 3 or 4 m each and only about 8 or 10 m per lunar day,” Stooke said in an email.

“That lasted until about October 2023, and then drives dropped to only 1 or 2 m each. In March 2024 Yutu 2 was resting just southwest of a 10 m diameter crater, and it’s been there ever since, as revealed by LRO images,” Stooke added.

It is possible the rover is not entirely dead, but there is no way to be sure. China is not generally forthcoming when things fail. For example, it has never acknowledged the shut down of its Zhurong Mars rover, which it had hoped would survive its first Martian winter. When that winter ended however no reports from Zhurong were released by China, which suggested it was no longer functioning. China however did not report this. It simply made believe the rover no longer existed.

It could be China is now doing the same with Yutu-2.

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Launches galore!

12:44 pm

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

The next two days will be another example of the resurgent American launch industry, with a wide range of rocket launches running the gamut from the maiden flight of the New Glenn rocket, another dramatic test flight of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy, and a launch by SpaceX of two (not one!) lunar landers.

We begin however now with another successful launch by SpaceX’s of its Transporter commercial program, designed to place in orbit as many smallsats as possible at once. The company’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off today from Vandenberg in California, carrying 131 payloads, from cubesats to microsats to orbital tugs.

The first stage completed its second flight, landing on back at Vandenberg. The fairings completed their 18th and 19th flights respectively. As of posting the payloads have not been deployed.

The 2025 launch race:

7 SpaceX
2 China

SpaceX continues its relentless goal of completing in 2025 one launch almost every other day. For example, the launch above is only the first launch planned by SpaceX today. Tonight it will launch another Falcon 9 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying both Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander as well as Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander. The map to the right shows the landing targets of both.

Tomorrow the launch pace will continue. First SpaceX will attempt the seventh orbital test launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, lifting off from Boca Chica, with a launch window beginning at 4 pm (Central).

Blue Origin will later that evening once again attempt the maiden launch of its New Glenn rocket. The three hour launch window opens at 1 am (Eastern).

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Repost: The real meaning of the Apollo 8 Earthrise image

1:56 pm

I wrote this essay in 2018, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 8 mission to the Moon. I have reposted previously, but I think it is worth reposting again and again, especially because stories about Apollo 8 still refuse to show the Earthrise image as Bill Anders took it. Even today, the Air and Space Museum did it wrong again, and it seems to me to be a slap in the face of Anders himself, who died this year while flying.
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Earthrise, as seen by a space-farer
Earthrise, as seen by a space-farer

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the moment when the three astronauts on Apollo 8 witnessed their first Earthrise while in orbit around the Moon, and Bill Anders snapped the picture of that Earthrise that has been been called “the most influential environmental picture ever taken.”

The last few days have seen numerous articles celebrating this iconic image. While all have captured in varying degrees the significance and influence of that picture on human society on Earth, all have failed to depict this image as Bill Anders, the photographer, took it. He did not frame the shot, in his mind, with the horizon on the bottom of the frame, as it has been depicted repeatedly in practically every article about this image, since the day it was published back in 1968.

Instead, Anders saw himself as an spaceman in a capsule orbiting the waist of the Moon. He also saw the Earth as merely another space object, now appearing from behind the waist of that Moon. As a result, he framed the shot with the horizon to the right, with the Earth moving from right to left as it moved out from behind the Moon, as shown on the right.

His perspective was that of a spacefarer, an explorer of the universe that sees the planets around him as objects within that universe in which he floats.

When we here are on Earth frame the image with the horizon on the bottom, we immediately reveal our limited planet-bound perspective. We automatically see ourselves on a planet’s surface, watching another planet rise above the distant horizon line.

This difference in perspective is to me the real meaning of this picture. On one hand we see the perspective of the past. On the other we see the perspective the future, for as long humanity can remain alive.

I prefer the future perspective, which is why I framed this image on the cover of Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 the way Bill Anders took it. I prefer to align myself with that space-faring future.

And it was that space-faring future that spoke when they read from Genesis that evening. They had made the first human leap to another world, and they wished to describe and capture the majesty of that leap to the world. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Yet, they were also still mostly Earth-bound in mind, which is why Frank Borman’s concluding words during that Christmas eve telecast were so heartfelt. He was a spaceman in a delicate vehicle talking to his home of Earth, 240,000 miles away. “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.” They longed deeply to return, a wish that at that moment, in that vehicle, was quite reasonable.

Someday that desire to return to Earth will be gone. People will live and work and grow up in space, and see the Earth as Bill Anders saw it in his photograph fifty years ago.

And it is for that time that I long. It will be a future of majesty we can only imagine.

Merry Christmas to all, all of us still pinned down here on “the good Earth.”

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Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander wins its fourth lunar NASA contract

9:32 am

Peregrine landing site

NASA yesterday awarded the rocket startup Firefly a $179.6 million contract to carry six NASA science instruments to the Moon on its Blue Ghost lunar lander, the third lander contract the company has won and the fourth Moon contract overall.

[The four contracts include] three lunar landers as well as one to provide radio frequency calibration services from orbit to support a radio science payload on the second lander mission.

The first mission, Blue Ghost 1 or “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” is scheduled for launch in mid-January, with a landing in the Mare Crisium region of the near side of the moon about 45 days after launch. Blue Ghost 2 will follow in 2026, landing on the lunar farside. That mission will also deploy ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder communications satellite into orbit. Both the second and third Blue Ghost missions will use Firefly’s Elytra Dark as an orbital transfer vehicle, delivering the landers to lunar orbit. Those vehicles will remain in lunar orbit to provide communications services.

This new contract will have Blue Ghost land in the Gruithuisen Domes region, as shown on the map to the right. This had been the landing target for the Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander when it launched in January 2024, but that mission failed when it developed a fuel leak shortly after launch. Astrobotic was able to operate the spacecraft through most of its trip to and from the Moon, but had to cancel the landing.

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Part 2 of 2: De-emphasize a fast Moon landing and build a real American space industry instead

10:41 am

In part one yesterday of this two-part essay, I described the likelihood that Jared Isaacman, Trump’s appointment to be NASA’s next administrator, will push to cancel NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and its Orion capsule, deeming them too expensive, too unsafe, and too cumbersome to use for any viable effort to colonize the solar system.

I then described how the Artemis lunar landings could still be done, more or less as planned, by replacing SLS with Starship/Superheavy, and Orion with Starship. Such a change would entail some delay, but it could be done.

This plan however I think is short-sighted. The Artemis lunar landings as proposed are really nothing more than another Apollo-like plant-the-flag-on-the-Moon stunt. As designed they do little to establish a permanent sustainable human presence on the Moon or elsewhere in the solar system.

Isaacman however has another option that can create a permanent sustainable American presence in space, and that option is staring us all in the face.

And now for something entire different

Capitalism in space: I think Isaacman should shift the gears of Artemis entirely, and put a manned Moon landing on the back burner. Let China do its one or two lunar landing stunts, comparable to Apollo but incapable of doing much else.
» Read more

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Part 1 of 2: What NASA’s next administrator should do if SLS and Orion are cancelled

2:29 pm

When George Bush Jr. first proposed in 2004 an American long term effort to return to the Moon that has since become the Artemis program, he made it clear that the goal was not to simply land in 2015 and plant the flag, but to establish an aerospace industry capable of staying on the Moon permanently while going beyond to settle the entire the solar system.

The problem was that Bush proposed doing this with a government-built system that was simply not capable of making it happen. Though this system has gone through many changes in the two decades since Bush’s proposal, in every case it has been centered on rockets and spacecrafts that NASA designed, built, and owned, and were thus not focused on profit and efficiency. The result has been endless budget overruns and delays, so that two decades later and more than $60 billion, NASA is still years away from that first Moon landing, and the SLS rocket and Orion capsule that it designed and built for this task are incapable of establishing a base on the Moon, no less explore the solar system.

The real cost of SLS and Orion
The expected real per launch cost of SLS and Orion

For one thing, SLS at its best can only launch once per year (at a cost of from $1 to $4 billion per launch, depending on who you ask). There is no way you can establish a base on the Moon nor colonize the solar system with that launch rate at that cost. For another, Orion is simply a manned ascent/descent capsule. It is too small to act as an interplanetary spacecraft carrying people for months to years to Mars or beyond.

These basic design problems of both SLS and Orion make them impractical for a program to explore and colonize the solar system. But that’s not all. Orion has other safety concerns. Its heat shield has technical problems that will only be fixed after the next planned Artemis-2 manned mission around the Moon. Its life support system has never flown in space, has issues also, and yet will also be used on the next manned flight.

Thus, it is very likely that when Jared Isaacman, Trump’s appointee for NASA administrator, takes over running the agency, he will call for the cancellation of both SLS and Orion. How can he ask others to fly on such an untested system?

When he does try to cancel both however the politics will require him to offer something instead that will satisfy all the power-brokers in DC who have skin in the game for SLS/Orion, from elected officials to big space companies to the bureaucrats at NASA. Isaacman is going to have to propose a new design for the Artemis program that these people will accept.

Artemis without SLS and Orion

Before I propose what Isaacman should do, let’s review what assets he will have available within the Artemis lunar program after cancelling these two boondoggles.
» Read more

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Why Orion’s heat shield problems give Jared Isaacman the perfect justification to cancel all of SLS/Orion

9:43 am

Orion's damage heat shield
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”

In yesterday’s press conference announcing new delays in NASA’s next two SLS/Orion Artemis missions to the Moon, agency officials were remarkably terse in providing details on why large chunks of Orion’s heat shield material broke off during its return to Earth in 2022 during the first Artemis mission. That damage, shown to the right, is one of the main reasons for the newly announced launch delays.

All they really said was that the damage was caused during re-entry, the atmosphere causing more stress than expected on the heat shield.

Today NASA finally released a more detailed explanation.

Engineers determined as Orion was returning from its uncrewed mission around the Moon, gases generated inside the heat shield’s ablative outer material called Avcoat were not able to vent and dissipate as expected. This allowed pressure to build up and cracking to occur, causing some charred material to break off in several locations.

…During Artemis I, engineers used the skip guidance entry technique to return Orion to Earth. … Using this maneuver, Orion dipped into the upper part of Earth’s atmosphere and used atmospheric drag to slow down. Orion then used the aerodynamic lift of the capsule to skip back out of the atmosphere, then reenter for final descent under parachutes to splashdown.

[Ground testing during the investigation showed] that during the period between dips into the atmosphere, heating rates decreased, and thermal energy accumulated inside the heat shield’s Avcoat material. This led to the accumulation of gases that are part of the expected ablation process. Because the Avcoat did not have “permeability,” internal pressure built up, and led to cracking and uneven shedding of the outer layer.

In other words, instead of ablating off in small layers, the gas build-up caused the Avcoat to break off in large chunks, with the breakage tending to occur at the seams between sections of the heat shield.
» Read more

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Next two Artemis missions delayed again, with the future of SLS/Orion hanging by a thread

1:22 pm

Orion's damage heat shield
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”

In a press conference today, NASA officials admitted that their present schedule for the next two Artemis missions will not be possible, and have delayed the next mission (sending four astronauts around the Moon) from the end of 2025 to April 2026, and the next mission (landing astronauts on the Moon) to a year later.

It must be noted that when first proposed by George Bush Jr in 2004, he targeted 2015 for this manned landing. Should the present schedule take place as planned, that landing will now occur more a dozen years late, and almost a quarter century after it was proposed. We could have fought World War II six times over during that time.

Several technical details revealed during the conference:

  • It appears a redesign of Orion’s heat shield will take place, but not until the lunar landing mission. For Artemis-2 (the next flight), engineers have determined they can make the shield work safely by changing the re-entry path. They have also determined that the design itself is still insufficient, and will require redesign before Artemis-3.
  • Though Orion’s life support system will still be flown for the first time on Artemis-2, the first to carry humans, they have been doing extensive ground testing and have resolved a number of issues. They are thus confident that it will be safe to fly with people on its first flight.
  • Though SLS’s two solid-fueled strap-on boosters will be stacked for more than one year when Artemis-2 launches in April 2026, they are confident based on data from Artemis-1 that both will still be safe to use.

The political ramifications that lurked behind everything however are more significant.
» Read more

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Japan awards $32.5 million contract for lunar GPS-type satellite constellation to startup

9:52 am

Capitalism in space: As part of the multi-billion dollar fund the Japanese government has allocated to encourage private enterprise by new Japanese startups, its space agency JAXA has now awarded a $32.5 million development contract to the startup ArkEdge Space to design and fly a GPS-type satellite in orbit around the Moon, thus demonstrating the technology.

Under the agreement, ArkEdge Space will plan and design the mass production and operation of micro-satellite constellations to lead the development of a next-generation Lunar Navigation Satellite System (LNSS), a vital component to the International “LunaNet” initiative driven by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA) and JAXA. LunaNet seeks to establish essential infrastructure to support sustainable lunar exploration and foster the growth of the lunar economy.

The real significance of this contract award is that it signals JAXA’s growing shift from designing, building, and owning everything to simply becoming the customer who gets what it needs from the private sector. The Japanese government had established that fund for this express purpose, but JAXA has shown a reluctance to proceed, as it directly threatens its turf. This award indicates that reluctance is finally being pushed aside.

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Analysis of Chang’e-6’s lunar samples suggest the giant impact that caused Aitken Basin occurred 2.83 billion years ago

10:33 am

Chang'e-6's landing site
Click for original image of Chang’e-6 on the Moon

In a paper published in mid-November, Chinese scientists have concluded that — based on their analysis of the lunar samples returned by their Chang’e-6 spacecraft — the giant impact that created the 1,600-mile-wide South Pole-Aitken Basin on the Moon occurred about 2.83 billion years ago.

This conclusion is based both on the dating of the samples as well an analysis of the cratering rate on the Moon. It also suggests the landing site as well as Aitken basin were volcanically active for longer than previous predictions. Overall, scientists believe most volcanic activity on the Moon ceased around three billion years ago.

As noted in the paper, the near and far sides of the Moon are very different.

The Moon has a global dichotomy, with its near and far sides having different geomorphology, topography, chemical composition, crustal thickness, and evidence of volcanism. Volcanic eruptions flooded parts of the surface with lava, producing rocks known as mare basalts, which are more common on the nearside (4), where they cover ~30% of the surface compared to 2% of the farside.

The farside’s crust is also thicker, though under Aitken Basin the difference largely disappears.

This first precise dating for the far side is the first step for understanding why the Moon’s hemispheres are so different. Though many theories exist, none can be considered definitive because we so far have only one data point for the far side.

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NASA: forcing it to fly VIPER would cause it to cancel funding to 1 to 4 other commercial lunar landers

10:31 am

VIPER's planned route on the Moon
VIPER’s now canceled planned route at the Moon’s south pole

According to a response by NASA to a House committee and obtained by Space News, if Congress forces the agency to fly its canceled VIPER moon rover NASA would have to cancel funding to one to four other commercial lunar landers being built by private companies as part of NASA’s CLPS program.

In one scenario, NASA assumed VIPER would launch on Astrobotic’s Griffin lander as previously planned in September 2025. The agency estimated it would need to spend $104 million to prepare VIPER itself, $20 million of which had already been allocated for activities in fiscal year 2024, along with $20 million in “additional risk mitigation activities” for Griffin. “NASA estimated that these additional funding requirements would lead to cancellation of one CLPS delivery and delay of another delivery by a year,” it stated.

A second scenario anticipated a one-year slip in VIPER’s launch to September 2026. NASA projected an additional $50 million in costs for VIPER and $40 million for Griffin. That would have resulted in two canceled CLPS task orders and a one-year delay to two others.

NASA also revealed it considered “alternative delivery means” for VIPER other than Griffin. NASA did not disclose details about those alternatives, calling them “highly proprietary” but which would have delayed the launch of VIPER beyond 2026 “and would still include significant uncertainty about the reliability of delivery success.” NASA projected total costs of $350 million to $550 million with this scenario, resulting in the cancellation of four CLPS task orders and delaying three to four more by two years.

NASA preferred option is for a private company to take over VIPER. At the moment the agency is reviewing eleven proposals put forth by such companies that has “enough spaceflight experience and technical abilities to conduct the VIPER mission.”

Congress has gotten involved because the science community has lobbied hard to save it. The project itself has been a problem for NASA since its first iteration as Resource Prospector, when NASA would have built both the rover and lander. It has consistently gone over budget and behind schedule, even after NASA gave the lander portion to a private company, Astrobotic. At present the rover is 3X over budget with more overages expected, which is why NASA cancelled it.

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Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander now targeting mid-January launch window

10:08 am

Landing sites on Moon

According to a media update from NASA yesterday, Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander now targeting mid-January launch window for its unmanned mission to the Moon.

A six-day launch window opens no earlier than mid-January 2025 for the first Firefly Aerospace launch to the lunar surface.

The Blue Ghost flight, carrying 10 NASA science and technology instruments, will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Media prelaunch and launch activities will take place at NASA Kennedy.

The first quarter of 2025 will be a busy time for unmanned missions to the Moon. In addition to Firefly’s mission, the American startup Intuitive Machines also hopes to launch its Athena lander to the Moon’s south pole in February. Though it will launch after Blue Ghost, it will get to the Moon first, as it is taking a more direct week-long route compared to Blue Ghost’s 45-day journey. In addition, the Japanese company Ispace is targeting its own January launch for its Resilience lander.

If all three lift off as planned, there will be three landers heading for the Moon in early 2025.

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Starship gets contract to deliver Lunar Outpost’s rover to Moon

11:10 am

Capitalism in space: The lunar lander version of SpaceX’s Starship has won a contract from the startup Lunar Outpost to deliver its manned rover to the Moon.

The Colorado company announced Nov. 21 that it signed an agreement for SpaceX to use Starship to transport the company’s Lunar Outpost Eagle rover to the moon. The companies did not disclose a schedule for the launch or other terms of the deal.

This announcement is less a new deal for SpaceX and more an effort to convince NASA to award Lunar Outpost the full contract to build the rover. In April 2024 Lunar Outpost was one of three companies chosen by NASA to receive initial development grants to design their proposed manned lunar rovers. NASA expects to award the full contract, worth potentially up to $4.6 billion, to one of these three companies later this year, after seeing their preliminary designs. It wants to choose two, but at present says budget limitations make that impossible.

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NASA once again gambling on the lives of its astronauts for political reasons

10:07 am

Orion's damage heat shield
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”

NASA this week began the stacking one of the two strap-on solid-fueled boosters that will help power SLS on the Artemis-3 mission, still officially scheduled for September 2025 and aiming to send four astronauts around the Moon.

A NASA spokesperson told Ars it should take around four months to fully stack the SLS rocket for Artemis II. First, teams will stack the two solid-fueled boosters piece by piece, then place the core stage in between the boosters. Then, technicians will install a cone-shaped adapter on top of the core stage and finally hoist the interim cryogenic propulsion stage, or upper stage, to complete the assembly.

At that point the rocket will be ready for the integration of the manned Orion capsule on top.

The article at the link sees this stacking as a good sign that NASA’s has solved the Orion capsule’s heat shield issue that occurred during the unmanned return from the Moon on the second Artemis mission. The image to the right shows that heat shield afterward, with large chunks missing. Though it landed safely, the damage was much much worse than expected. At the moment NASA officials have said it has found the root cause, but those officials also refuse to say what that root cause is, nor how the agency or Orion’s contractor Lockheed Martin has fixed it.
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China’s plan to land astronauts on the Moon

9:31 am

Mengzhou as of 2023
Click for source.

The new colonial movement: China’s state-run press yesterday revealed the basic flight plan its space program will use to land astronauts on the Moon in 2030.

China’s first manned lunar mission will begin with the launch of the Lanyue lunar lander aboard the country’s new heavy carrier rocket [the Long March 10], and Lanyue will then await the subsequent arrival of the Mengzhou manned spacecraft in space. Mengzhou will be poised for its rendezvous with Lanyue in lunar orbit, at which time the astronauts will transfer into the lander.

The lander will then separate and descend to the moon’s surface. Upon the completion of their lunar exploration, the astronauts will return to lunar orbit in the lander’s ascent stage. This stage will involve re-docking with the spacecraft, and will mark the beginning of the astronauts’ journey back to Earth.

This plan is a variation of the Apollo approach, but rather than sending the ascent/descent capsule and lunar lander on the same rocket, China will launch them separately and have them rendezvous in lunar orbit.

Mengzhou is intended to be a larger and reusable replacement for the Shenzhou capsules China is presently using to transport its astronauts to and from its Tiangong-3 space station. Unlike Shenzhou, which appears to be an upgrade of Russia’s Soyuz capsules, Mengzhou instead appears more conelike, as shown by the mockup image to the right, first revealed in 2023.

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NASA to award SpaceX and Blue Origin contracts to deliver cargo to the Moon

9:14 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday announced that is planning to award both SpaceX and Blue Origin contracts to use their manned lunar landers as cargo freighters to deliver supplies to its planned lunar base.

NASA expects to assign demonstration missions to current human landing system providers, SpaceX and Blue Origin, to mature designs of their large cargo landers following successful design certification reviews. The assignment of these missions builds on the 2023 request by NASA for the two companies to develop cargo versions of their crewed human landing systems, now in development for Artemis III, Artemis IV, and Artemis V.

…NASA plans for at least two delivery missions with large cargo. The agency intends for SpaceX’s Starship cargo lander to deliver a pressurized rover, currently in development by JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), to the lunar surface no earlier than fiscal year 2032 in support of Artemis VII and later missions. The agency expects Blue Origin to deliver a lunar surface habitat no earlier than fiscal year 2033.

The contracts however have not been issued. This is merely an announcement of NASA’s intent to do so, which suggests to me that NASA management has already recognized that the entire Artemis program is facing a major restructuring and wants to indicate it will support such a change. That does not mean these contracts won’t be issued — both rely on the privately owned rockets of both companies — but that NASA now realizes that its manned program — which now relies on SLS/Orion — will likely to be changed significantly, likely by the elimination of SLS/Orion and its replacement by private rockets and private manned spacecraft.

Because of this looming restructuring, NASA management probably intended this press announcement — which really announces little that is new — as a signal of its support for such a change, because the announcement focuses on these private companies rather than NASA’s government-built rocket.

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A new geologic map of one of the Moon’s largest impact basins

10:00 am

Orientale Basin on the Moon
Click for original image.

Using data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), scientists have now produced a high resolution geological map of Orientale Basin, one of the largest impact basins on the Moon — at about 600 miles across — and located just on the edge of the Moon’s visible near side.

That map is to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here. You can read the paper here [pdf]. From the press release:

Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist Kirby Runyon is a lead author on a paper published in the Planetary Science Journal containing a new high-resolution geologic map of Orientale basin that attempts to identify original basin impact melt. The hope is that future researchers use this map to target sample return missions and pin down impact dates for this and other impact basins.

“We chose to map Oriental basin because it’s simultaneously old and young,” Runyon said. “We think it’s about 3.8 billion years old, which is young enough to still have its impact melt freshly exposed at the surface, yet old enough to have accumulated large impact craters on top of it as well, complicating the picture. We chose to map Orientale to test melt-identification strategies for older, more degraded impact basins whose ages we’d like to know.”

The map’s prime purpose is to pin down locations where material from the actual impact exist and can be returned to Earth for precise dating, thus helping to create a more accurate timeline of the Moon’s formation as well as the entire solar system’s accretion rate.

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Pakistan to fly a small rover on China’s Chang’e-8 lunar lander

8:36 am

In an agreement signed yesterday, the Space and Upper Atmo­sphere Research Comm­ission (Suparco) in Pakistan announced it will collaborate with China to build a small rover that will to fly on China’s Chang’e-8 lunar lander.

The lander is present scheduled to land near the Moon’s south pole in 2030, will be China’s second lander to the south pole region, and will also act to officially establish China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) on the lunar surface. It will also include a “hopper” to explore the nearby surface.

Pakistan had already signed on to China’s space alliance to build the ILRS. China’s present list of partners is as follows: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Serbia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela. That partnership also includes about eleven academic or governmental bureaucracies.

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