Tag: NASA

NASA releases images during Osiris-Apex’s fly-by of Earth in late September

9:42 am

Earth as seen by Osiris-Apex
Click for original image.

NASA today released photos taken by the asteroid probe Osiris-Apex (formerly Osiris-Rex) as it swung past the Earth on September 23, 2025 at a distance 2,136 miles, on its way to the asteroid Apophis.

The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was one of about 424 images taken by the spacecraft during the fly-by. From those, scientists compiled a movie, which you can view here. As this picture shows, South America was in view on the right side of the Earth.

Osiris-Apex, which had already completed its prime mission by returning samples from the asteroid Bennu, is scheduled to arrive at Apophis shortly after that asteroid’s close fly-by of the Earth on April 13, 2029. The Trump administration had threatened to shut it down for budget reasons, but Congress restored those funds in ending the government shut down.

At that time Apophis will zip past only 20,000 miles from Earth. There will be no chance of collision. Nor is there much chance Apophis will hit the Earth in the next two centuries. Its orbit however makes it a potentially dangerous asteroid, and that 2029 fly-by could change these calculations.

Leave a comment

NASA trims $768 million from Boeing’s Starliner contract

9:08 pm

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS in 2024.

According to one story late today, the modifications NASA announced today on its Starliner contract with Boeing will trim $768 million from the total contract, assuming the two later optional manned missions never fly.

Originally valued at $4.5 billion, Boeing’s contract under the Commercial Crew Program envisioned six operational astronaut flights. NASA’s latest modification cuts that number to four, including up to three crewed missions and an uncrewed cargo flight set for April 2026. Two additional flights remain optional. With the changes, the contract’s value has dropped by $768 million to $3.732 billion; NASA has already paid $2.2 billion to date.

Boeing can still earn that additional money if if somehow manages to convince NASA to do all six flights. It will have great difficult achieving this, however, since there probably won’t be enough time to get all six flights up before ISS is retired. That fact is partly why NASA has made this change.

This report however suggests that NASA is not paying Boeing extra money for the unmanned cargo mission in April 2026. Instead, it is treating it as if it were the first operational manned Starliner flight, paying Boeing its purchase price as if it had achieved all its milestones during the manned demo flight last year.

It really pays in today’s America to be a big giant corporation that does lots of business with our bloated and very corrupt federal government. That government is then quite willing to bend over backwards to help you, even if you are like Boeing and incompetent (Starliner), corrupt (737-MAX), or routinely go over-budget and fail to deliver on time (Air Force One). That certainly appears to be the case here with Boeing.

Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.

2 comments

NASA downgrades Boeing’s Starliner contract

12:36 pm

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS in 2024.

NASA today announced a major revision to its contract for Boeing’s manned Starliner capsule, changes that will require it to fly one more unmanned cargo mission to ISS before putting people on it again, while also reducing the total number of later purchased manned flights.

As part of the modification, the definitive order has been adjusted to four missions, with the remaining two available as options. The next Starliner flight, known as Starliner-1, will be used by NASA to deliver necessary cargo to the orbital laboratory and allow in-flight validation of the system upgrades implemented following the Crew Flight Test mission last year.

NASA and Boeing are targeting no earlier than April 2026 to fly the uncrewed Starliner-1 pending completion of rigorous test, certification, and mission readiness activities. Following Starliner certification, and a successful Starliner-1 mission, Starliner will fly up to three crew rotations to the International Space Station.

It has been rumored for months that NASA would require Boeing to fly another unmanned mission before certifying Starliner for manned flights. The question that this press release does not answer is whether NASA is paying for this unmanned flight. The original contract was fixed price, and required Boeing to meet certain milestones before further payments. Another cargo flight to ISS was not in that original deal.

I therefore suspect this is NASA’s way to get Starliner certified. Boeing has likely refused to pay for another demo flight, threatening instead in negotiations to cancel the project entirely. NASA however needs to get cargo to ISS. By buying a cargo mission from Boeing (possibly instead of Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus capsule, which is presently hindered because it lacks its Antares launch vehicle), NASA gets that cargo while also saving Starliner.

The bottom line remains fundamental: Will Boeing finally be able to do a successful problem-free Starliner flight in April 2026? We shall have to see. The fact that NASA appears to be reducing the total number of eventual Starliner missions to ISS indicates its own lack of confidence.

17 comments

NASA releases numerous images of interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas

9:50 am

Comet 3I/Atlas as seen by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter

NASA yesterday released a slew of images of interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas, taken by numerous in-space probes at Mars and elsewhere.

The picture to the right, cropped to post here, is probably the one with the most detail, taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) from Mars orbit on October 2, 2025. In addition, images were captured by:

None of these pictures show the comet in any great detail. All however confirm once again that it is a comet, not an interstellar alien spacecraft as some idiots in academia have been proposing wildly. The Maven observations in ultra-violet wavelengths for example identified hydrogen and other isotopes coming off the comet as it is heated by the Sun. MRO’s image to the right once again showed the comet’s coma and tail.

Above all, these observations were great engineering experiments for all the science teams, demonstrating that they could point their instruments in an unplanned direction and capture a very faint object quite far away.

8 comments

Katalyst picks Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus rocket to launch its Swift rescue mission

9:28 am

Katalyst's proposed Swift rescue mission
Katalyst’s proposed Swift rescue mission.
Click for original image.

The orbital repair startup Katalyst yesterday announced it has chosen Northrop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus rocket to launch its mission to rescue NASA Gehrels-Swift space telescope.

Unlike typical launch campaigns that take up to 24 months, Katalyst has under eight months to get its LINK spacecraft on orbit to rescue Swift. Swift’s orbital decay demands an urgent mission, launching before atmospheric drag makes recovery impossible. Pegasus is the only system that can meet the orbit, timeline, and budget simultaneously.

Swift’s orbit at 20.6° inclination is difficult to reach from U.S. launch sites, where most small rockets are limited by launch site to inclinations above ~27°. Pegasus, carried aloft by Northrop Grumman’s L-1011 Stargazer aircraft and released midair at 39,000 feet, offers the flexibility to launch from virtually anywhere on Earth, making it one of the few viable systems capable of achieving Swift’s orbit on a highly compressed timeline.

This plan has numerous unusual aspects. First, the decision by NASA in September 2025 to pick Katalyst was a surprise. The company is new, and has never actually flown a repair mission yet. It got the contract basically because it could quickly reshape its first planned demo mission into a Swift repair mission.

Second, Pegasus was originally created in the 1980s as a low-cost rocket by the company Orbital Sciences (now part of Northrop Grumman). Though it initially undercut the prices of the existing rocket companies, in the long run it failed to offer a viable option. It hasn’t launched in almost five years, and has only been used five times in the past sixteen years. Northrop Grumman stopped making it years ago, and presently only has this one last rocket in its warehouse.

Finally, saving Gehrels-Swift is critical. It has been one of NASA’s most successful relatively low-cost space telescopes, designed to quickly target high energetic events like gamma ray bursts in order to capture the optical component of the blast. Its orbit is fast decaying and if not raised it will burn up in the atmosphere by 2029. To save it however requires a unique and improvised solution as it has no grapple attachment. Katalyst’s rescue spacecraft ““will rely on a custom-built robotic capture mechanism that will attach to a feature on the satellite’s main structure–without damaging sensitive instruments.”

To put it mildly, in many ways this might be one of the most daring NASA missions ever flown.

2 comments

Senate demands a second hearing before voting on Isaacman as NASA administrator

9:25 am

Jared Isaacman
Billionaire Jared Isaacman

Despite being days from a confirmation vote in June after undergoing a Senate hearing previously — when Trump nominated Jared Isaacman for NASA administrator the first time — the Senate has now demanded a second hearing before it will schedule a second confirmation vote on Isaacman.

Sen. Ted Cruz has scheduled a Dec. 3 hearing for Jared Isaacman, the billionaire entrepreneur and commercial astronaut renominated to lead NASA, before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. … The new hearing will mean that Isaacman will not be confirmed by the Senate in the next batch of nominees, which will likely see the floor in the first week of December.

Trump first nominated Isaacman in December 2024, only to withdraw that nomination in May 2025. Trump then renominated Isaacman two weeks ago.

This extra hearing means Isaacman will likely not be confirmed as NASA administrator until early in 2026. It also means he will probably not be in a position to review and reconsider NASA’s plans to send astronauts around the Moon in the February-April time frame, using an Orion capsule with a questionable heat shield and an untested environmental system.

In fact, I suspect this decision to hold hearings was pushed by Cruz partly to make sure Isaacman couldn’t review those plans. Cruz has made it his goal to save SLS and Orion, no matter the cost, and appears willing to play whatever games necessary to prevent any actions that would delay or impact NASA’s present plans.

This however is not the only reason this new hearing has been scheduled. It appears a lot of Senators, especially the Democrats, want to question Isaacman about Isaacman’s 62-page policy paper that was leaked to many in DC in the past few months. It is certain that questioning will have no impact on the final vote (Isaacman is expected to be confirmed handily), but it will allow these senators to preen before the camera, for no good purpose.

The bottom line however is that Isaacman will not be in place early enough to review and change that Artemis-2 mission. It means that almost certainly NASA will once again fly a manned mission that places schedule above engineering, putting four human lives at risk using a spacecraft that has not be vetted properly.

3 comments

SpaceX launches NASA ocean radar satellite

10:56 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched Sentinal-6B, a NASA radar satellite designed to measure the global sea level, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

The first stage completed its 3rd flight, landing back at Vandenberg.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

150 SpaceX (a new record)
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 150 to 117.

Note that until SpaceX began to up its launch rate significantly in 2022, the entire global rocket industry — run entirely by governments — never completed more than 135 successful launches in a single year, and usually failed to make 100 launches. SpaceX is now proving that those global numbers over more than a half century were indicative of the failure of those governments. Those governments controlled everything, and so they prevented innovation, competition, and new ideas.

The transition to capitalism and freedom since 2010 has finally begun to open up space for everyone.

14 comments

Goldstone antenna damaged and out of service

8:49 am

The Goldstone antenna in California that is a major component in NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) that it uses to communicate with interplanetary spacecraft was damaged recently and is presently out of service, with no known date for when or even if it will be repaired.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed Nov. 10 that the 70-meter antenna at the Deep Space Network (DSN) site in Goldstone, California, has been offline since Sept. 16, with no timetable for its return to service. “On Sept. 16, NASA’s large 70-meter radio frequency antenna at its Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, over-rotated, causing stress on the cabling and piping in the center of the structure,” JPL said in a statement to SpaceNews. “Hoses from the antenna’s fire suppression system also were damaged, resulting in flooding that was quickly mitigated.” [emphasis mine]

This statement suggests that as workers were changing the antenna’s orientation, it was moved too far in one direction, beyond the normal limits of that piping and cabling. The immediate question that the JPL statement avoids is this: What caused the antenna to “over-rotate”? Did something fail to stop it from going too far? Or was this an example of simple human error, whereby the person rotating the antenna failed to pay attention and allowed the antenna to exceed its limits?

Either way, the loss of this antenna not only poses a serious limitation in getting data back from the various unmanned probes at Mars, Jupiter, and elsewhere, it is also a problem for the upcoming Artemis-2 mission in the spring of ’26, which will rely on the Deep Space Network to communicate with the astronauts on Orion as it goes to and from the Moon. The network’s other two antennas in Spain and Australia can pick up the slack, but the system will have less redundancy, and more important, other missions will likely have to delay communications in order to give Artemis priority.

4 comments

Isaacman shows up as surprise speaker at Turning Point USA event in Alabama

9:57 am

In what could very well explain why Donald Trump changed his mind about Jared Isaacman’s nomination for NASA administration, Isaacman showed up unexpectedly at a Turning Point USA event at Auburn University in Alabama this past week, where he described how the murder of Charlie Kirk had profoundly changed his outlook on life.

[O]n a very personal note, I didn’t grow up very religious at all — my mother’s family, we celebrate Christmas. My father’s family, we celebrated Hanukkah. But I can tell you, having gone to space twice and looking back on our planet, looking at the stars around us, it is very hard not to be spiritual.

But it was only recently, in the last couple weeks that I was inspired for the first time in a very long time to pick up the Bible, and I’ll tell you why.

It’s because of Charlie, and it’s for Charlie, and there’s millions others just like me. Thank you.”

One of the theories as to why Trump withdrew Isaacman’s nomination in May was because of Isaacman’s past political and financial support for numerous Democratic Party candidates, along with his apparent support for DEI at his companies. It was speculated that once Trump learned of these associations during the confirmation process he decided Isaacman was not trustworthy and dumped him.

I wonder now if Isaacman changed Trump’s mind when they met several times in the past few weeks by talking about Kirk’s assassination and how it had changed Isaacman. I can easily see how that would have influenced Trump.

This is also another case of the Democrats and their most radical and public cohort doing a good job of alienating another former Democrat, simply by advocating and committing violence against those who disagree. They did it to Trump and Elon Musk, both former Democrats, and apparently they have done it to Isaacman as well.

22 comments

Trump renominates Jared Isaacman for NASA administrator

8:51 am

Jared Isaacman
Billionaire Jared Isaacman

President Donald Trump late yesterday announced that he has renominated billionaire Jared Isaacman as his nominee to become the administrator of NASA.

Just as Trump had given no reasons why he had withdrawn Isaacman’s nomination in late May, in his announcement yesterday Trump made no effort to explain why he had changed his mind.

One week ago I would have said that Isaacman’s nomination would proceed very quickly to a vote in the Senate, as he had already been vetted completely in the spring and was fully expected to be confirmed within days when Trump pulled the nomination. Now however I expect the Senate might want to bring Isaacman back for questioning in response to the leak this week of a policy paper he had written in the spring outlining his plans for NASA should he be approved.

That paper, still not released to the public, apparently contained a lot of specifics about Isaacman’s plans to reshape NASA that appeared to raise the hackles of the many swamp creatures in DC that live off the government trough. Isaacman addressed that leak in a very long and very detailed tweet yesterday that outlined in detailed but general terms what his goals were in that paper, and it could be his reasoning in this tweet that convinced Trump to renominate him. As Isaacman concluded:

This plan never favored any one vendor, never recommended closing centers, or directed the cancellation of programs before objectives were achieved. The plan valued human exploration as much as scientific discovery. It was written as a starting place to give NASA, international partners, and the commercial sector the best chance for long-term success. The more I see the imperfections of politics and the lengths people will go, the more I want to serve and be part of the solution… because I love NASA and I love my country

These speculations however are all worthless. As we really don’t know the exact reasons why Trump pulled the nomination in May, it is difficult to guess why Trump changed his mind now.

It will be interesting to see how the Senate responds to this new Trump decision.

24 comments

More Washington shenanigans over who will be NASA’s next administrator

12:17 pm

Two news outlets in the past day (Politico and Ars Technica) have posted stories about a 62-page plan — supposedly written by Jared Isaacman while he was still the nominee to become NASA administrator — that was recently leaked to them as well as others inside and outside NASA.

The plan itself, dubbed “Project Athena”, has not been made available, though the descriptions at both sources suggest it matches closely with the overall Trump effort to cancel SLS and Orion and shift space operations out of NASA and more into the private sector.

The nature of this plan of course threatens NASA’s established work force and the big space contractors who have worked hand-in-glove with NASA for decades, producing little but distributing a lot of money and jobs to these groups. Not surprisingly, both news sources quote extensively from anonymous sources within that NASA work force and those big space contractors, lambasting the plan and blasting Isaacman for proposing it. From the Politic article:

Sean Duffy
Sean Duffy: “Pick me! Pick me!”

Putting all of these plans into writing is a “rookie move,” and “presumptuous,” said an industry insider who has seen the document and thought it would stoke congressional skepticism around his nomination. Many of these ideas would need congressional approval to enact, and Congress could always block them.

The Ars Techica article speculates that interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy was the source of the leak, in his effort to become NASA’s official administrator. If the plan is Isaacman’s, it generates opposition to renewing Isaacman’s nomination as NASA administrator while garnering support for Duffy from NASA’s workforce and those big space contractors.

All of this is pure Washington swamp, however, which really matters little in the long run. First of all, none of this is real. We are talking about an unreleased plan that no one has seen publicly, and the reactions of anonymous sources criticizing that unseen plan. It is all the stuff of ghosts and fantasy. For we know, it is all made up, just like the Russian collusion hoax was manufactured against Trump.

Second, and more important, who runs NASA next is becoming increasingly unimportant. » Read more

16 comments

Update on Vast’s first planned space station, Haven-1

9:51 am

Haven-2
Haven-2 station once completed

Link here. The article essentially puts together a number of X links that Jay has provided Behind the Black previously in his daily Quick Space Links reports to provide an overall picture. Two aspects stand out however.

One, the demo Vast launched this weekend on SpaceX’s bandwagon mission is expected to fly for about six months, and has successfully deployed its solar panels. During its flight the company will “test out key capabilities, such as Reaction Control Systems (RCS), power systems, and propulsion, in preparation for Haven-1”, which it hopes to launch in the spring.

Two, Haven-1’s planned mission remains unchanged. The company still intends to fly four crewed missions to it during its three-year mission, though who will make-up the crew and passengers remains unknown. This single module station is aimed at proving Vast’s capabilities at space station design and operation to convince NASA to award it a much larger contract to build its much larger Haven-2 multi-module station.

Max Haot [Vast’s CEO] described Haven-1 as the “minimum viable product”. With its one docking port and reliance on a SpaceX Crew Dragon for key life support systems, the station will enable the company to test out capabilities needed for larger stations in the future. The Dragon spacecraft requires a daily change of its CO2 scrubber; therefore, the station will launch with the necessary amount needed for 30-40 days on station for four astronauts.

All in all, Vast appears to be strongly demonstrating its capabilities, on schedule, making my listing it number one as most likely to win that big NASA contract increasingly correct. That ranking is made even more reasonable with the decision by NASA to now award several of those contracts, at smaller amounts, in a step-by-step process that matches milestones. Below is my updated rankings of the four commercial stations under development:
» Read more

Leave a comment

Two former NASA administrators express wildly different opinions on NASA’s Artemis lunar program

1:07 pm

At a symposium yesterday in Alabama, former NASA administrators Charles Bolden and Jim Bridenstine expressed strong opinions about the state of NASA’s Artemis lunar program and the chances of it getting humans back to Moon before the end of Trump’s term in office and before China.

What was surprising was how different those opinions were, and who said what. Strangely, the two men took positions that appeared to be fundamentally different than the presidents they represented.

Charles Bolden
Charles Bolden

Charles Bolden was administrator during Barack Obama’s presidency. Though that administration supported the transition to capitalism, it also was generally unenthusiastic about space exploration. Obama tasked Bolden with making NASA a Muslim outreach program, and in proposing a new goal for NASA he picked going to an asteroid, something no one in NASA or the space industry thought sensible. Not surprisingly, it never happened.

Bolden’s comments about Artemis however was surprisingly in line with what I have been proposing since December 2024, de-emphasize any effort to get back to the Moon and instead work to build up a thriving and very robust competitive space industry in low Earth orbit:

Duffy’s current messaging is insisting it’ll be accomplished before Trump’s term ends in January 2029, but Bolden isn’t buying it. “We cannot make it if we say we’ve got to do it by the end of the term or we’re going to do it before the Chinese. That doesn’t help industry.”

Instead the focus needs to be on what we’re trying to accomplish. “We may not make it by 2030, but that’s okay with me as long as we get there in 2031 better than they are with what they have. That’s what’s most important. That we live up to what we said we were going to do and we deliver for the rest of the world. Because the Chinese are not going to bring the rest of the world with them to the Moon. They don’t operate that way.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, the federal government should focus on helping that space industry grow, because a vibrant space industry will make colonizing the Moon and Mars far easier. And forget about fake deadlines. They don’t happen, and only act to distort what you are trying to accomplish.

Meanwhile, Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator during Trump’s first term, continued to lambast SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander contract, saying it wasn’t getting the job done on time, and in order to beat the Chinese he demanded instead that the government begin a big government-controlled project to build a lander instead.
» Read more

25 comments

SpaceX: Starship will be going to the Moon, with or without NASA

12:27 pm

Artist's rending of Starships on the Moon
SpaceX’s artist’s rending of Starships on the Moon.
Click for original.

In what appears to be a direct response to the claim by NASA’s interim administrator Sean Duffy that SpaceX is “behind” in developing a manned lunar lander version of Starship, SpaceX today posted a detailed update of the status that project, noting pointedly the following in the update’s conclusion:

NASA selected Starship in 2021 to serve as the lander for the Artemis III mission and return humans to the Moon for the first time since Apollo. That selection was made through fair and open competition which determined that SpaceX’s bid utilizing Starship had the highest technical and management ratings while being the lowest cost by a wide margin. This was followed by a second selection [Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander] to serve as the lander for Artemis IV, moving beyond initial demonstrations to lay the groundwork that will ensure that humanity’s return to the Moon is permanent.

Starship continues to simultaneously be the fastest path to returning humans to the surface of the Moon and a core enabler of the Artemis program’s goal to establish a permanent, sustainable presence on the lunar surface. SpaceX shares the goal of returning to the Moon as expeditiously as possible, approaching the mission with the same alacrity and commitment that returned human spaceflight capability to America under NASA’s Commercial Crew program.

The update then provides a list of the testing and engineering work that SpaceX has been doing on the Starship lunar lander, including full scale drop tests simulating lunar gravity, qualification of the docking ports, and the construction of a full scale mock-up of the Starship cabin to test its systems.

A close list of the work done is actually not that impressive, but at the same time this is not surprising. SpaceX is now mostly focused on getting Starship into orbit, proving it can be refueled there, and proving it can fly for long enough to get to the Moon. This part of the update was most exciting, as it confirms what I have suspected for next year’s flight program:
» Read more

52 comments

Blue Origin officials provide update on their lunar lander program

9:30 am

2023 artist rendering of the manned Blue Moon lander
2023 artist rendering of the manned Blue Moon lander

Link here. According to the article, the company is presently stacking its first unmanned version of its Blue Moon lander, dubbed Blue Moon Mark 1, scheduled for launch now next year.

The 8.1-meter-tall cargo lander will help with ongoing development of their crewed lander, named Blue Moon Mk. 2, which is 15.3 meters tall. Both are powered by Blue Origin’s BE-7 engines, which are being tested on stands in Alabama, Texas and Washington.

…“A big milestone for you to look out for online is that Mk. 1 is three modules that are being stacked as we speak: aft, forward and mid. And once it is stacked in its finished configuration, we will be barging it over to NASA Johnson Space Center Chamber A to do a full up thermal vac campaign,” said [Jacqueline Cortese, Blue Origin’s Senior Director of Civil Space]. “So when you see that on its boat, you will know that big things are happening.”

Both versions of the lander are powered by a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. A key difference though is that Mk.1 can be launched to the Moon with a single launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket while Mk. 2 requires orbital refueling. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence above is important because it illustrates the absurdity of the comments last week by interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy, claiming SpaceX’s program to make Starship a manned lunar lander is “behind”, forcing him to open up the competition to Blue Origin, who might get it done sooner.

One of the big issues used against SpaceX is that Starship will need to be refueled once in orbit to work as a lunar lander, and that technology needs to be developed and tested. The problem with this criticism is that, as noted above, Blue Origin’s manned lunar lander also needs to be refueled.
» Read more

11 comments

Lockheed Martin completes first flight of X-59 supersonic test plane

8:32 am

My heart be still: Lockheed Martin yesterday completed the first flight for NASA of the X-59 supersonic test plane, designed to produce a much quieter sonic boom.

The X-59 took off from Skunk Works’ facility at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California, before landing near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. The X-59 performed exactly as planned, verifying initial flying qualities and air data performance on the way to a safe landing at its new home.

The plane did NOT yet fly at supersonic speeds. It needs to do more flight tests before it attempts that feat. A somewhat uninteresting video of the flight can be seen here. (Hat tip to Jay.)

This NASA program is another example of government waste. NASA issued the company a $247.5 million the contract for this test plane in 2018, after two years of preliminary design work. Seven years later it finally flies once, but not at supersonic speeds.

Meanwhile, the commercial startup Boom Supersonic started at about the same time, raised far less investment capital, and successfully flew a supersonic flight in January 2025 in which it broke that sound barrier three times, with no audible sonic boom.

Boom has already obtained numerous contracts with the airline companies United and Japan Airlines to provide them planes. It is in the process of manufacturing its Overture commercial passenger jet for sale.

Lockheed Martin’s NASA project has no investors and no airlines interested in the test plane. Lockheed Martin itself is not marketing it and has no plans to use the technology commercially. In fact, NASA likely forbids it from doing so.

I am sure these tests will provide data helpful to Boom and the handful of other commercial supersonic startups. At the same time, the entire project is another example of a poor use of taxpayer funds.

10 comments

Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander delayed again

8:01 am

Moon's south pole, with landers indicated

According to an update on the status of Astrobotic’s Griffin lunar lander posted on October 24, 2025, the company has now delayed the launch from the fall of 2025 to July 2026, apparently because the spacecraft is not yet assembled and its many components are still undergoing testing.

For example, none of Griffin’s four propellant tanks have yet been installed. Nor apparently has its core structure been fully integrated, with “tanks, ramps, attitude control thrusters, and solar panels” only now having completed “fit checks.”

The map to the right indicates the location where Griffin is supposed to land, about 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole. Nova-C, Intuitive Machines first attempt to soft land on the Moon, landed at the green dot, but failed when it fell over at landing. Intuitive Machines second lunar lander, Athena, also fell over when it landed in the same region that is now Griffin’s target landing zone.

Griffin has experienced repeated delays since the contract was issued to Astrobotic in 2020. The mission was originally supposed to launch in November 2023, carrying NASA’s Viper rover. In July 2022 however it was delayed one year to November 2024 because Astrobotic said it needed more time.

Sometime after the failure of Astrobotic’s first lunar lander, Peregrine, in January 2024, NASA once again delayed the Griffin mission, pushing it back another year to November 2025.

In July 2024 NASA canceled Viper, removing it as a payload from Griffin, because Viper was significantly overbudget and would not be ready for that fall 2025 launch. NASA however did not cancel Griffin. It appears however that Astrobotic wasn’t ready either for a launch in November, and thus this further delay.

Whether it will be ready by July remains unknown. Based on Astrobotic’s own update I have serious doubts. For a spacecraft that was supposed to originally launch in 2023, Griffin seems woefully unready now, two years past that date.

2 comments

Two lawsuits filed against NASA at its Marshall Space Flight Center

9:27 am

Two lawsuits against NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center were announced yesterday, one by several employees citing discrimination and the second by the government union representing Marshall employees protesting the Trump executive order that strips it of its collective bargaining rights.

The timing of both announcements strongly suggests the lawsuits are a coordinated effort. The discrimination suit protests the demand of the Trump administration that government employees come back to the office to work. The suit says the agency has not made reasonable accommodation for the suing employees to work at home. It also appears that the lead employee in the suit has made it a habit of doing so, having already won $30K in a settlement of a 2024 lawsuit.

The second suit is of course more significant, as it challenges the president’s power.

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks to invalidate Executive Order 14343, issued by President Trump on Aug. 28. The order excludes NASA and five other agencies from coverage under the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute (FSLMRS), effectively terminating their union representation rights on the grounds of “national security”.

According to the complaint, the Trump Administration justified the exclusion by claiming these agencies have a primary function of national security work and that collective bargaining is inconsistent with those requirements. A White House Fact Sheet accompanying the order stated that collective bargaining “can delay the implementation of time-sensitive national security measures”.

IFPTE vehemently disputes this characterization. The union argues that NASA’s primary mission is “not national security,” but rather scientific exploration for the “benefit of all humanity”. The complaint cites the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which states that “activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all humankind”.

The existence of all these government unions comes originally from an executive order by President John Kennedy. It seems Trump should have the right to cancel that order. The lawsuit also argues no, that Trump is acting beyond his legal authority.

Isn’t it interesting how presidents who are Democrats always have the power to issue executive orders n matter how outrageous (such as was done frequently by Obama and Biden), but Republican presidents like Trump do not.

10 comments

Hungary becomes the 57th nation to sign the Artemis Accords

8:01 am

NASA’s acting administrator, Sean Duffy, announced yesterday in a tweet that Hungary has now signed the Artemis Accords.

There was no NASA press release because of the government shutdown.

Hungary is now the 57th nation to sign the accords. The full list of nations now part of this American space alliance: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

The addition of Hungary means that almost the entire European portion of the former Soviet bloc has now joined the alliance. I suspect the desire of these nations to ally with the U.S. and the west is a reflection of their fear of Russia, which has not been kind to its neighbors, both during the Cold War as well as recently.

It still remains to be seen if this alliance will be used by the American government to encourage property rights in space, something that the Outer Space Treaty presently outlaws. That appeared to be its original goal when the accords were created during the first Trump administration. That goal however was abandoned during the Biden administration, making the accords alliance more of a globalist collective in support of the Outer Space Treaty’s restrictions.

So far during Trump’s second administration no action has been taken to reassert those original goals.

One comment

What bad news is NASA hiding about the heat shield it will use on the next Orion/SLS manned mission around the Moon?

3:59 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”

Even as our uneducated media goes bonkers over another Musk kerfuffle, this time with interim NASA administration Sean Duffy, it is ignoring what now appears to be a strong effort by NASA to cover up some serious issues with the Orion capsule’s heat shield, issues that might be far more serious than outlined in a May 2024 inspector general (IG) report.

That IG report [pdf] found the following:

Specifically, portions of the char layer wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed (see Figure 3 [shown to the right]). The unexpected behavior of the Avcoat creates a risk that the heat shield may not sufficiently protect the capsule’s systems and crew from the extreme heat of reentry on future missions. Moreover, while there was no evidence of impact with the Crew Module, the quantity and size of the debris could have caused enough structural damage to cause one of Orion’s parachutes to fail. Should the same issue occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew.

In our judgment, the unexpected behavior of the heat shield poses a significant risk to the safety of
future crewed missions. [emphasis mine]

NASA spent the next few months reviewing the situation, and decided in December 2024 that it did not have the time or funding to redesign and replace the heat shield before the next flight. Instead, it chose to fly the next manned Orion mission — dubbed Artemis-2 and scheduled for the spring of 2026 carrying four astronauts around the Moon — using this same heat shield design but change the flight path during reentry to reduce stress on the shield.

NASA also admitted then that this heat shield design is defective, and that it will replace it beginning with the next mission, Artemis-3, the one that the agency hopes will land people back on the Moon.

The decision to fly humans in a capsule with such a known untrustworthy heat shield design is bad enough. Any rational person would not do this (as the inspector general above concluded). Yet NASA is going ahead, because it has determined that meeting its schedule, getting Americans back to the lunar surface ahead of China and during Trump’s present term of office, is more important than rational engineering and testing.

What now makes this decision even more worrisome is that it appears NASA is covering up the findings of its own engineers, completed in August 2024 but not made public until now.
» Read more

43 comments

Fake blather from NASA administrator Sean Duffy to hide more Artemis delays

9:47 am

Sean Duffy
Sean Duffy: “Look at the shiny object!”

During a press interview yesterday, interim NASA administrator Sean Duffy revealed almost as an aside that NASA’s mid-2027 launch for the first Artemis manned lunar landing is no longer realistic, and that NASA is now targeting a 2028 launch date instead.

Duffy managed to hide this revelation by also announcing that he is re-opening the bidding for the manned lunar lander NASA will use on that third Artemis mission. To quote Duffy:

Now, SpaceX had the contract for Artemis III. By the way, I love SpaceX and it’s an amazing company, but the problem is, they are behind. They pushed their timelines out and we are in a race against China. The president and I want to get to the moon in this president’s term. So, I’m going to open up the contract and I’m going let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin. Whatever one gets us there first to the moon, we are going to take. If SpaceX is behind and Blue Origin can do it before them, good on Blue Origin.

By the way we might have two companies that can get us back to the Moon in 2028.

The propaganda press of course is going wild about this SpaceX announcement, making believe it signifies something of importance. “SpaceX is behind! Elon Musk can’t do it! Duffy is giving Jeff Bezos the job!” And as I think Duffy intended, everyone is ignoring the fact that NASA has now admitted it won’t meet that 2027 launch target.

The irony is that Duffy’s decision to re-open bidding on that manned mission is utterly meaningless. » Read more

34 comments

Scientists find that three normally incompatible substances can interact in the alien conditions on Titan

9:54 am

Artist rendering of Dragonfly soaring over Titan's surface
Artist rendering of Dragonfly soaring
over Titan’s surface

Scientists have discovered that, under the very cold conditions on Titan, three normally incompatible substances — methane, ethane and hydrogen cyanide — can mix together in a way that previously was considered impossible.

The background to the Chalmers study is an unanswered question about Titan: What happens to hydrogen cyanide after it is created in Titan’s atmosphere? Are there metres of it deposited on the surface or has it interacted or reacted with its surroundings in some way? To seek the answer, a group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California began conducting experiments in which they mixed hydrogen cyanide with methane and ethane at temperatures as low as 90 Kelvin (about -180 degrees Celsius). At these temperatures, hydrogen cyanide is a crystal, and methane and ethane are liquids.

When they studied such mixtures using laser spectroscopy, a method for examining materials and molecules at the atomic level, they found that the molecules were intact, but that something had still happened. … In their analysis, they found that hydrocarbons had penetrated the crystal lattice of hydrogen cyanide and formed stable new structures known as co-crystals.

Not surprisingly, this result suggests that the alien environment on Titan includes a lot of very unexpected chemistry, some of which we right now cannot predict, or even imagine. While exciting, it also suggests that NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan will face challenges that make that mission far more risky. It could quickly fail once it arrives, because of this alien environment.

Such a failure will of course help engineers design later missions, but Dragonfly is a very expensive mission, already overbudget at $3 billion. It might have made more sense to fly a fleet of small and cheaper missions to Titan to begin with, to lower the risks.

Sadly, that is not NASA’s plan.

4 comments

Orbital tug startup Impulse Space to develop its own unmanned lunar lander

8:25 am

Impulse's tug and proposed lunar lander
Click for original image.

The orbital tug startup Impulse Space, founded by Tom Mueller (one of SpaceX’s first engineers), is now proposing to build its own unmanned lunar lander, with a target for delivering six tons of cargo on two missions, starting in 2028.

Our proposed architecture combines our existing Helios kick stage and a new lunar lander, to be developed by our team in-house. Helios would launch on a standard medium- or heavy-lift rocket. Our lunar lander would ride as a payload on Helios. Once Helios and the lander are deployed in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Helios serves as a cruise stage, transporting the lander to low lunar orbit within one week. The lunar lander then separates from Helios and descends to the surface of the Moon. By taking advantage of Helios’s high delta-v capabilities, this mission architecture doesn’t require in-space refueling.

This solution can bridge the existing cargo delivery gap by offering direct transportation of the necessary mass to kickstart infrastructure, resource utilization, and economic activities on the Moon. We’ve already begun engine development for our lunar lander solution, and we stand ready to execute as dictated by industry demand and interest.

With this Helios and Impulse-made lander combination, we estimate delivering up to 6 tons of payload mass to the Moon (across two missions) per year starting in 2028 at a cost-effective price point. Each Helios + lander combo would take approximately 3 tons of cargo to the Moon.

It appears the company has identified a need (transporting cargo to the Moon cheaply and quickly) that no one (including NASA) is presently considering. SpaceX will be able to do it with Starship. Blue Origin is also proposing to do it with various versions of its Blue Moon manned lander. Impulse has decided however that both of those spacecraft are too large and tied to SLS and Lunar Gateway, with Starship requiring refueling, that makes their cargo missions more costly than a direct mission. Impulse proposes a simpler option.

This decision is also another indication that the demand for low orbital tugs is not developing as expected. It appears satellite companies and the available rocket companies have worked out ways to get most of their satellites to the orbits they require without tugs.

It will be interesting to watch if this proposal gains traction. If it does, than it will likely encourage other orbital tug as well as the other lunar lander companies to propose their own alternatives.

Leave a comment

Another round of layoffs at JPL

3:06 pm

The management at the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in California today announced it will be laying off 550 people this week, about 11% of its work force.

As part of this effort, JPL is undergoing a realignment of its workforce, including a reduction in staff. This reduction — part of a reorganization that began in July and not related to the current government shutdown — will affect approximately 550 of our colleagues across technical, business, and support areas. Employees will be notified of their status on Tuesday, Oct. 14.

As the statement makes clear, this reduction is unrelated to the government shutdown, and is also mostly unrelated directly to the 24% budget cut the Trump administration wishes to impose on NASA. JPL has had major management issues in the last few years, including two previous rounds of layoffs of similar amounts. Much of these budget issues stem from the cancellation by NASA of the Mars sample return mission, which JPL was to play a major part. That money is gone, and even if the mission is resurrected, JPL is almost certainly not going to play a major part.

5 comments

Orbital tug company Momentus gets two NASA contracts

9:54 am

The orbital tug startup Momentus yesterday announced that NASA has awarded it two contracts worth $7.6 million total to fly two experimental NASA payloads on its Vigoride tug.

One payload will test “test the ability to make semiconductor crystals in microgravity”, while the second will “test a rotating detonation rocket engine, a propulsion system designed to provide higher efficiency than traditional engines.” In this case the propellants used will be nitrous oxide and ethane.

Both will fly on the same Vigoride tug on a mission to be launched no earlier than October 2026. Momentus also says there is room for additional payloads on that mission.

It appears the increase in the number and launches of rockets has actually hurt the orbital tug business:

Momentus is among several companies that developed orbital transfer vehicles, or OTVs, like Vigoride to ferry spacecraft between orbits. They are designed to provide last-mile delivery to specific orbits for spacecraft launched on rideshare missions such as [SpaceX’s] Transporter [launches]. However, demand for such services has been slower to materialize than expected. “Candidly, that part of the market has not developed as much as people thought, say, five years ago,” [said John Rood, Momentus’ chief executive] during a panel at World Space Business Week in September. “The reason is many small manufacturers are multi-manifesting satellites to deploy a single plane with a single launcher.”

As a result, Momentus has focused on getting technology demonstration contracts such as the two above, with the tug acting more like a service module.

Leave a comment

Is Trump considering re-nominating Jared Isaacman for NASA administrator?

9:59 pm

Jared Isaacman
Billionaire Jared Isaacman

According to a report late today (based on anonymous sources), President Trump has held several face-to-face meetings in the past few weeks with billionaire Jared Isaacman, and those meetings have raised the possibility of Trump re-nominating him for NASA administrator.

According to Bloomberg News, President Trump has reportedly met with Isaacman several times in recent weeks to discuss NASA’s operational plans and future plans. Isaacman is the founder of fintech company Shift4 Payments and a private astronaut at SpaceX who has had a longstanding relationship with Elon Musk.

Isaacman, who has flown two private missions in space (and done one spacewalk), had been nominated by Trump for NASA administrator in December 2024, and was only days away from a Senate confirmation vote when Trump suddenly withdrew the nomination on May 31, 2025. Though it has never been clear why Trump withdrew the nomination, Isaacman’s past support of Democrats and his close links to Musk have been raised as issues, especially because of the Trump-Musk kerfuffle in the spring. Isaacman has also expressed some opinions since then about NASA and what it should do that might not have fit with Trump’s plans.

At the same time, NASA is presently without its own administrator, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy holding down the job as an interim head. It appears Trump might be reconsidering his earlier decision in order to get someone in charge of NASA who isn’t distracted by other responsibilities.

Note however that this report is solely from anonymous sources, and we all know how unreliable those are. The whole story could be fantasy cooked up by someone in DC for any number of devious political purposes.

12 comments

Saturn as seen by Cassini in 2004, four months before orbital insertion

12:18 pm

Saturn as first seen up close by Cassini
Click for original.

Cool image time! As most of the new cool images coming down from space seem mostly limited to Mars and deep space astronomy, I decided today to dig into the archive of the probe Cassini, which orbited Saturn from July 1, 2004 until September 15, 2017, when it was sent plunging into the gas giant’s atmosphere.

The picture to the right heralded the start of that mission, in that it was taken on February 19, 2004, a little over four months before the spacecraft fired its engines and entered orbit. I have rotated the image and cropped it to post here.

When Cassini snapped this picture it was just approaching the gas giant. The image itself is relatively small, with the resolution also relatively poor. You can see one of Saturn’s moons above the planet, but I can’t tell you which one. As noted at the webpage, this is a raw image that has not been “validated or calibrated.”

While not up to the amazing standard exhibited by Cassini’s images during its thirteen year stay at Saturn, it gave us a flavor of the wonders to come. Of all the planets, Saturn might be the most beautiful.

7 comments

Congressional budget action appears to just save two of seventeen on-going NASA missions

9:33 am

Though no final budget has yet been approved, based on the language in the budget the House has approved and sent to the Senate, only two of the seventeen on-going missions presently in space are specifically allocated money, thus allowing the Trump administration to zero out funding for the remaining fifteen.

The two missions saved are Osiris-Apex, on its way to the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis, and the Magnetospheric Multiscale Mission (MMS), four satellites in orbit that observe the Earth’s magnetosphere.

The article at the link is typical of our propaganda press. It clearly opposes any cuts to NASA, and lobbies repeatedly for all funding to be reinstated. This pattern has gotten quite boring and tedious. It would be so refreshing to see a more objective take, at least one in a while.

However, its reporting confirms my own reporting from mid-September, where I noted that the vague language in the House budget bill would allow Trump to cut these missions. Congress wants to preen itself as supporting all funding for NASA, while carefully allowing Trump to go ahead with large cuts.

It is a good thing these two missions have been saved, though it does appear their funding has been trimmed. Of the fifteen missions in limbo, the only two that seem worth keeping is the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and New Horizons, though the second should likely be set up similar to the two Voyager spacecraft, with a very small crew aimed mainly at keeping the spacecraft functioning and able to send back data periodically.

We are in great debt. It is time that the federal government make some real choices. We can no longer afford to buy all the candy in the store.

14 comments

The Juno mission at Jupiter is almost certainly over

8:52 am

An article yesterday at Space.com speculated that the Juno mission to Jupiter is likely over, but added that we cannot yet be sure because the government shutdown has prevented NASA from making any definitive announcement.

NASA’s management had previously extended the orbiter’s mission several times, with the last extension going until the end of the 2025 fiscal year, that ended on September 30, 2025. No new budget has yet been approved, and the proposed Trump budget had included no money for extending the mission farther.

Due to the government shutdown, NASA is currently unable to say whether Juno is still operating or already powered down. At the time of publication, responses from agency officials state that “NASA is currently closed due to a lapse in government funding … Please reach back out after an appropriation or continuing resolution is approved.”

Under shutdown rules, only missions that fall under “excepted activities” — those required to protect life, property, or national security — can continue operations or communications. NASA’s continuity plans also specify that carryover funding may only be applied to “presidential priorities,” which limits what science programs can proceed during a lapse.

Juno does not fall into those protected categories, and was also zeroed-out on the President’s fiscal year 2026 budget request — making the mission, presumably, not a priority. So, until normal government operations resume, the spacecraft’s future is uncertain.

I think Juno’s future at this point is not uncertain in the least. While other active missions that the Trump proposed shutting down might get revived, Juno is unlikely to be one of them. I suspect the science team has put it in hibernation, and is already beginning to move on to other projects and work. They are being coy about this in the faint hope Congress will save Juno, but this should not be a priority. At this point I think NASA would be wiser to spend its resources elsewhere.

2 comments

Axiom successfully tests two of its lunar spacesuits underwater

8:01 am

Axiom's two spacesuits being tested underwater
Axiom’s two spacesuits being tested underwater.
Click for original.

The space station startup Axiom this week successfully completed underwater testing of two of its lunar spacesuits, making them ready for astronaut training.

Axiom won the contract to build these suits for NASA in 2022. It speaks well of the company that only three years later the suits are now ready for use. It also shows NASA’s own incompetence, because before it awarded this contract to Axiom the agency tried to build its own suits, spending more than a billion dollars and fourteen years to produce nothing.

Furthermore, this success underlines yesterday’s NASA inspector general report that lambasted Collins Aerospace’s incompetence in maintaining the spacesuits on ISS. Collins in 2022 had won a similar spacesuit contract to build new space station suits, but two years later backed out of the deal, unable to get the job done.

For Axiom, this spacesuit success adds an essential component to its own space station plans. Though these suits are intended for the Moon, the company now has the basics down for its own space station suit. It owns this suit design, and will not only sell suits to NASA, it can market the suits to any one else.

Leave a comment
1 2 3 … 74