Tag: NASA

Engineers turn off one more instrument on each Voyager spacecraft

3:57 pm

The Voyager missions
The routes the Voyager spacecraft have
taken since launch. Not to scale.

Due to continuing reductions in the power generated by their nuclear energy sources (after a half century of operation) engineers have now turned off one more science instrument on each Voyager spacecraft in order to extend the spacecrafts’ life as long as possible.

Mission engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California turned off the cosmic ray subsystem experiment aboard Voyager 1 on Feb. 25 and will shut off Voyager 2’s low-energy charged particle instrument on March 24. Three science instruments will continue to operate on each spacecraft. The moves are part of an ongoing effort to manage the gradually diminishing power supply of the twin probes.

Even with this action, the future lifespan of both spacecraft is very limited. It is expected the savings in power will allow both to last about a year longer, well into 2026. In order to keep the Voyagers operating as long as into the 2030s mission engineers are now working up a timeline for shutting down the remaining instruments in a step-by-step manner. In that long run the goal won’t be science gathering but engineering. Can humans keep a spacecraft operating for more than a half century at distances billions of miles away?

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Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter snaps picture of Blue Ghost on the Moon

11:21 am

Blue Ghost on the Moon
Click for full image. For original of inset go here.

Shortly after Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down within Mare Crisium on the Moon, the science team for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) used it to capture a picture of lander on the surface of the Moon.

That image is to the right, reduced to post here. The inset was expanded and sharpened to bring out the details, with the arrow showing Blue Ghost, that tiny dot in the center with a shadow to the right.

The Firefly Blue Ghost lunar lander set down on 2nd March 2025. The landing site (arrow) is about 4000 meters from the center of Mons Latreille, a large volcanic cone [seen to the left].

…LRO was 175 kilometers east (19.294°N, 67.956°E) of the landing site when the NACs acquired this dramatic view of the landing site on 02 March 2025 at 17:49 UTC.

Blue Ghost landed shortly after lunar sunrise, and is designed to operate for one full lunar day (fourteen Earth days). Whether it can survive the 14-day-long lunar night won’t be known until the next sunrise.

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Psyche captures Jupiter and Mars on its way to asteroid Psyche

11:02 am

Jupiter and Mars as seen by Psyche
Click for original image.

As part of routine maintenance and calibration, engineers on January 30, 2025 used the cameras on the Psyche asteroid probe to photograph Jupiter, Mars, and several stars, proving all is well with the spacecraft.

Scientists on the imaging team, led by Arizona State University, also took images of the bright stars Vega and Canopus, which have served as standard calibration sources for astronomers for decades. The team is also using the data to assess the effects of minor wiggles or “jitter” in the spacecraft’s pointing system as it points the cameras to different places in the sky. The observations of Jupiter and Mars also help the team determine how the cameras respond to solar system objects that shine by reflected sunlight, just like the Psyche asteroid.

The starfield pictures shown here are long-exposure (five-second) images captured by each camera. By over-exposing Jupiter to bring out some of the background stars in the Taurus constellation, the imagers were able to capture Jupiter’s fainter Galilean moons as well.

The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, might not be much to look at, but it clearly demonstrates the cameras work and the spacecraft can point accurately, and will work as planned when it arrives at the metal asteroid Psyche in August 2029.

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Watch the landing of Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander on the Moon tomorrow

9:21 am

Athena's landing site 100 miles from the Moon's south pole

NASA has now announced its live stream arrangement for the landing of Intuitive Machines’ Athena lander on the Moon tomorrow at 12:32 pm (Eastern).

The live stream will begin about sixty minutes before landing. The NASA live stream is available here. I have also embedded it below.

The map to the right shows the landing site by the yellow “X”, about 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole on a high relatively flat plateau dubbed Mons Mouton. This will be the closest any lander has come to the pole, and was the original site chosen for NASA’s now-canceled VIPER rover. If the landing is successful Athena will land close to a small crater that is believed to have permanently shadowed areas. The plan had been to have VIPER travel into it. Now the small Grace hopper that Athena carries will attempt this instead.

This will also be the second attempt by Intuitive Machines to soft land on the Moon. Its first attempt last year was able to land and communicate back to Earth, but the landing was not completely successful. The lander, named Nova-C as well as Odysseus, was moving too fast sideways when it touched down, thus breaking one leg so that the lander fell on its side.
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Live stream of the lunar landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost

7:27 pm

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

I have embedded below the live stream from Firefly of tonight’s landing attempt on the Moon of its Blue Ghost lander. The stream goes live at 1:30 am (Central), with the landing targeting 2:45 am (Central).

The map to the right shows the location, in Mare Crisium. For context the map also shows the landing sites for several Apollo missions, as well as the location where Ispace’s first lander, Hakuto-R1, crashed, inside Atlas Crater. Also shown is the landing site of Ispace’s second lander, Resilience, in the north in Mare Frigoris.

Overall Blue Ghost’s nominal mission is engineering, to prove the lander can get to the Moon, touch down softly, and operate on the surface. If all goes well it will operate for about a week plus, during the lunar day. Whether it can survive the 14-day-long lunar night won’t be known until the Sun rises there and ground engineers can see if they can re-establish contact.

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NASA’s newly launched Lunar Trailblazer orbiter having power and communications problems

8:37 am

It appears that engineers are having serious problems with NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer orbiter, launched on February 26, 2025 on the same Falcon 9 rocket that sent Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander on the way to the Moon.

Following the successful deployment of NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer … mission operators at Caltech’s IPAC in Pasadena, California, established communications with the small satellite at 5:13 p.m. PST, as expected. The team subsequently received engineering data, or telemetry, indicating intermittent power system issues. They lost communication with the spacecraft Thursday morning at about 4:30 a.m. PST.

Several hours later, the spacecraft turned on its transmitter, and the team now is working with NASA ground stations to reestablish telemetry and commanding to better assess the power system issues and develop potential solutions.

The spacecraft does not appear to be lost, at least at this moment, but based on this short report, things do not look good. The orbiter’s mission was to globally map the Moon’s potential water deposits.

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House committee holds hearing to protect its Artemis pork

9:50 am

The space subcommittee of the House science committee yesterday held a hearing which appears to have been mostly designed to protect the Artemis pork that both parties have been funding for decades, designed not to get us into space but to funnel tax dollars into their districts.

The hearing had only two witnesses, one pro-SLS (Dan Dumbacher) and one only very slightly skeptical of it (Scott Pace). Both these men have been deep members of the Washington swamp for decades, and both made it clear that funding should continue for SLS, at a minimum through the third Artemis launch, presently scheduled for ’27, a launch date so uncertain no one should believe it.

NASA had been invited to send a witness, but it apparently declined to do so.

Pace, the supposedly skeptic of SLS, has actually been a big supporter for years. As executive secretary for Trump’s National Space Council during Trump’s first term, he consistently advocated big space and NASA-built rockets, showing continuous skepticism of commercial space. Even now, his suggestion that SLS be reconsidered after that third launch was very hesitant.

Essentially, this committee hearing was called by these congress critters to advocate the status quo, which is likely why NASA declined to send a witness. Why give them a chance to blast any potential or major change in Artemis and have the propaganda press savage NASA and the Trump administration with negative soundbites?

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All is so far well with Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander

9:27 am

The Moon's South Pole with landers indicated
The Moon’s South Pole with landers indicated.
Click for interactive map.

According to a tweet yesterday from Intuitive Machines, its Athena lunar lander is operating as expected since its launch last night.

The lander is in excellent health, sending selfies, and preparing for a series of planned main engine firings to refine her trajectory ahead of lunar orbit insertion, planned on March 3. Intuitive Machines is targeting a lunar landing opportunity on March 6.

If all goes as planned, Athena will land only 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole, as shown on the map to the right. This location had originally been picked for NASA’s now canceled VIPER rover, because the terrain would have allowed the rover to travel down into some permanently shadowed regions. NASA now hopes to use the Grace hopper on Athena to accomplish the same task.

Next week will also see a second privately built rover land on the Moon, though several days before Athena. Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander is scheduled to land on March 2, 2025 in Mare Crisium on the eastern edge of the Moon’s visible hemisphere. Furthermore, there is presently a third private lander on its way to the Moon, built by Japan’s Ispace. It is taking a longer route there, with its landing occurring in May.

There is also a fourth commercial lander, Astrobotic’s Griffin, that is presently targeting a launch by the end of 2025. It was originally supposed to carry VIPER, but has now replaced that with the commercial test prototype rover being built by the startup Venturi Astrolab, which is competing to get the contract to build the manned rover for NASA’s Artemis program.

Lunar exploration is certainly heating up.

Hat tip to reader Richard M for the Athena tweet update.

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SpaceX launches Intuitive Machines’ Athena lunar lander

5:33 pm

The Moon's South Pole with landers indicated
The Moon’s South Pole with landers indicated.
Click for interactive map.

SpaceX today successfully launched the second lunar lander built by the startup Intuitive Machines, dubbed Athena, for a landing near the lunar south pole in about eight days, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The “X” on the map to the right indicates the landing location, on a mountain called Mons Mouton, about 100 miles from the south pole. This will be the closest landing to the pole by any lander. It is also the site that was originally selected for NASA’s now cancelled VIPER rover mission.

The launch also included NASA Lunar Trailblazer lunar orbiter, designed to map the Moon’s surface for evidence of water, and Astroforge’s first interplanetary probe, dubbed Odin, which will attempt the first close fly-by of an asteroid by a privately built and own space probe. The asteroid, 2022 OB5, is thought to be made up largely of nickel-iron, which makes it a prime mining target.

The first stage completed its ninth mission, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

24 SpaceX (with another launch scheduled for later tonight)
8 China
2 Rocket Lab

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Intuitive Machine’s Athena lunar lander to launch later today

12:41 pm

The second attempt by the startup Intuitive Machines to soft land a spacecraft on the Moon is scheduled to launch today at 7:16 pm (Eastern) time on a Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

I have embedded the Space Affairs live stream feed below, because it starts only 45 minutes before launch. If you want to watch an extra hour of pre-launch blather and propaganda from NASA, the official live steam can be found here. Be warned however. All the live feeds are being produced by NASA, which tends to make believe it made everything happen, when in truth both the rocket and lander are privately owned and built. NASA is contributing most of the science instruments, but without SpaceX and Intuitive Machines, none of those instruments would go anywhere.

A very good description of the mission and the science instruments on board, including a hopper, and a drill, can be found here.

Secondary payloads on the rocket include a low cost NASA lunar orbiter and the first interplanetary probe of a private company.

The first, Lunar Trailblazer, has two instruments for mapping the existence of water on the lunar surface. The second, Astroforge’s Odin spacecraft, will attempt a close fly-by of the asteroid 2022 OB5, thought to be made up mostly of nickel-iron and thus potentially very valuable resource for mining.

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More voices in Florida lobby to move NASA HQ there

10:15 am

Today there were several news stories quoting a variety of Florida politicians and industry groups pushing to have the Trump administration move NASA’s headquarters from Washington to Florida when its current building lease expires in 2028.

The first story mostly reiterated what was said by these politicians in January. All three seemed carefully timed to maximize exposure, which illustrates why one must always be skeptical of modern mainstream journalism. Too often it doesn’t report news, it serves as a propagandist for the interests of the political world.

Even so, moving a significantly reduced NASA headquarters to Florida makes some sense. If anything, it would save taxpayer money, and might also reduce the ability of NASA’s upper management to manipulate Congress to give it more money while accomplishing nothing, something that management has been doing now for decades.

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The Europa Clipper team prepares for Mars fly-by

8:52 am

Europa Clipper's route to Jupiter
Click for original image.

As planned, Europa Clipper is set to do a very close fly-by of Mars on March 1, 2025, zipping past the red planet at a speed of 15.2 miles per second only 550 miles above its surface. The graphic to the right shows the spacecraft’s planned route to Jupiter, including an additional fly-by of Earth in 2026.

During this first fly-by the science team will test two of Europa Clipper’s instruments.

About a day prior to the closest approach, the mission will calibrate the thermal imager, resulting in a multicolored image of Mars in the months following as the data is returned and scientists process the data. And near closest approach, they’ll have the radar instrument perform a test of its operations — the first time all its components will be tested together. The radar antennas are so massive, and the wavelengths they produce so long that it wasn’t possible for engineers to test them on Earth before launch.

The spacecraft launched with transistors not properly hardened for the hostile environment around Jupiter. Engineers claimed these would “heal” themselves once in Jupiter orbit. No word on whether there has been any issue from these components since launch.

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More changes in NASA’s upper management

9:40 am

NASA yesterday announced more changes in its upper management, almost all related to its manned Artemis program.

NASA announced today that Johnson Space Center Director Vanessa Wyche is now Acting Associate Administrator, succeeding Jim Free who retired over the weekend. Cathy Koerner, who has been leading the mission directorate that manages the Artemis program, will retire this Friday. Her Deputy, Lori Glaze, will take over on an acting basis.

These are not major changes. The new appointees, Wyche and Glaze, have been upper managers for a long time within NASA’s manned management structure that has created the present Artemis program.

These changes are also tentative depending on what Jared Isaacman decides to do once he is confirmed by the Senate as the actual administrator, replacing Janet Petro, who was named last week as the acting administrator. If Isaacman and Trump decide on canceling SLS and restructuring the entire Artemis program, both might also decide it needs an entirely new management staff.

I must also note the lack of any men in this list. NASA’s DEI effort for decades as apparently left no guys in that upper management, or if they are there, it continues to push them aside to support DEI racial and sex quotas, even though it now does not use those terms.

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The man who has been running NASA’s manned Artemis program resigns

9:31 am

Late yesterday NASA officially announced that Jim Free, who has been running NASA’s manned Artemis program for the past year, has decided to resign.

Only a month or so ago the people at NASA had assumed that Free would take over as the agency’s acting administrator during the transition from Bill Nelson, appointed by Biden, and Jared Isaacman, appointed by Trump. Instead, Trump’s transition team gave this job to Janet Petro, who had been head of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Free has been seen as a headquarters guy who has for years favored the old big space companies like Boeing and who also has favored SLS and Orion and the old way of doing things, whereby NASA designs, builds, and controls everything instead of simply buying what it needs from the private sector.

There have also been reports that “three key officials” at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama have also submitted their retirement papers. This would suggest that the earlier proposals by Trump’s NASA transition team to shrink or eliminate many of NASA’s numerous centers scattered across the country are being seriously discussed, and possibly being implemented.

Many news sources have concluded that the decision by the Trump administration to delay its major layoffs at NASA was because the Trump administration was reconsidering these major changes. I disagree. I think it is holding off because the new administrator has not yet been confirmed by the Senate, and it decided he should have a say in these reductions and changes. The retirement and resignation of these old school NASA management types further tells us that major changes are coming.

Overall, my guess is that a major reorganization of NASA — including the elimination of many of its centers — could reduce its overhead by $5 to $10 billion per year. Part of those savings could be used to reduce the deficit, but some could also be used to increase the amount of money available for all of NASA’s goals. I made this point fourteen years ago, and nothing has changed since then except that NASA has wasted billions over that time accomplishing nothing with SLS and Orion.

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Boeing announces a new round of layoffs related to its SLS NASA contract

9:02 am

Boeing yesterday announced that it will layoff another 71 employees in connection with its SLS NASA contract, based on rumored changes in NASA’s entire Artemis lunar program, including the increasingly real possibility that SLS will be canceled entirely by the new Trump administration.

The defense contractor was already in the midst of reducing its workforce, including in Alabama. But today, the company told AL.com that changes to its contract with NASA to develop the Space Launch System program sparked the need for some of the 71 layoffs. “As Boeing and NASA continue to finalize contract revisions for Boeing’s work on the Space Launch System program, we have successfully mitigated a majority of the previously announced workforce reductions,” a Boeing spokesperson said in an email to AL.com.

The news article at the link actually suggests that the total number of layoffs is now half that predicted by the company a few weeks ago, so it remains very unclear if these layoffs are because NASA is considering cancelling SLS, or because Boeing is simply shifting SLS management from development (which requires more people) to routine operations.

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Musk: Biden delayed the return of Starliner’s astronauts “for political reasons”

10:06 am

During a television interview with President Trump, Elon Musk suggested that the reason the two Starliner astronauts have been forced to remain on ISS for months was because of a political decision by the Biden administration last year.

The billionaire SpaceX CEO said his company was “accelerating the return of the astronauts” as per Trump’s instructions. Musk then appeared to take a shot at the Biden administration, saying the move was “postponed kind of to a ridiculous degree,” before the president chimed in saying “they got left in space.”

When Hannity pointed out the astronauts have been on the ISS for almost 300 days instead of the planned 8 days, Trump simply said “Biden,” before Musk claimed they were “left up there for political reasons, which is not good.”

While the decision to return Starliner unmanned certainly had a political component (a desire to avoid a disaster in the final year of Biden’s term), Musk’s claim is greatly exaggerated. Worse, Musk is papering over his own company’s contribution to the delays. Had SpaceX and NASA chosen in December to use an already existing Dragon capsule instead of a brand new capsule to launch the next crew to ISS, the astronauts would be home already. Instead, they decided to get that new capsule ready, requiring an almost two month delay in their return.

When it became obvious last month that even this extra time was insufficient to get the new capsule ready, only then did SpaceX and NASA choose to switch capsules. That switch allowed them to move up the return date by about a week.

In reporting Musk’s words here, our ignorant press has generally left these details out, allowing both Musk and Trump to make it appear as they are saviors for these poor astronauts. This is simply not true. SpaceX is certainly making it possible to bring them home (something Boeing was unable to do), but it also contributed to the delay in doing so.

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Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander completes lunar flyby in preparation for entering lunar orbit

10:00 am

The Resilience lunar lander, built by the Japanese startup Ispace and launched in January on the same Falcon 9 rocket as Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, has now completed its closest flyby of the Moon as it prepares to enter lunar orbit sometimes in early May.

The spacecraft is actually still in Earth orbit, but with a apogee that is almost 700,000 miles out, or almost three times the distance of the Moon’s orbit. Once Ispace’s engineers have gotten a precise track of this orbit they will then determine the exact parameters of the engine burn in May that will place Resilience in lunar orbit.

This is Ispace’s second attempt to place a lander on the Moon. The first, Hakuto-R1, came close, but crashed in Atlas Crater (see the map in my previous post) when, at an altitude of several kilometers, its software thought it was only a few feet above the surface and shut the engines off.

Most of the instruments on Resilience are either symbolic or engineering experiments to observe the lander’s operations. It is however carrying a small rover, dubbed Tenacious, which will attempt to travel on the surface.

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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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Another Democrat demonstrates her stupidity and ignorance, demanding NASA’s acting administrator revoke Musk’s access to headquarters

9:57 am

Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-New York)
Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-New York), describing
her terror when ordinary Americans walked through the
Capitol on January 6th, almost all of whom simply took
pictures. Click for video.

Proving she knows nothing about the Constitution and the powers it gives to the President, congresswoman Grace Meng (D-New York) earlier this week sent a letter to NASA’s acting administrator Janet Petro demanding that Petro revoke any access to the agency’s headquarters by Elon Musk as part of his work auditing government operations as part of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Meng’s letter [pdf] is quite entertaining, especially because it repeats the new Democratic Party talking point that somehow because DOGE employees, including Musk, were “unelected” their access is inappropriate. How stupid. Except for the president, everyone who works in the executive branch of government is “unelected.”

That Meng also thinks NASA’s acting administrator has the power to block access to someone hired specifically by the president to do this work shows us how ignorant she is of the Constitution and basic law. Petro can’t cancel Trump’s orders, even if she wants to. Trump is her boss, and if he tasks Musk and DOGE to audit NASA’s books, she must comply.

There is only one part of Meng’s demand that makes some sense, where she demands Petro “set clear and public ground rules” to keep Musk from getting access to proprietary information of other space companies. Musk certainly has a conflict-of-interest issue at NASA, and such rules make sense. I am also quite sure that Musk is well aware of this issue, and will purposely leave the DOGE audit to others.

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NASA announces March 12, 2025 as new launch date for next crew to ISS

9:47 am

NASA yesterday announced that it is now targeting March 12, 2025 as new launch date for sending the next crew to ISS, thus moving that date up about one week.

The earlier launch opportunity is available following a decision by mission management to adjust the agency’s original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission that requires additional processing time. The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements. Teams will work to complete Dragon’s refurbishment and ready the spacecraft for flight, which includes trunk stack, propellant load, and transportation to SpaceX’s hangar at 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to be mated with the mission’s Falcon 9 rocket. This will be the fourth mission to the station for this Dragon, which previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights.

Both NASA and SpaceX are touting this as a great decision because it will allow the present ISS crew (which includes the two astronauts initially launched on Starliner last year) to get home quicker.

The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it, and those delays pushed back both the launch of a new crew and the return of the old. So, while everyone is spinning this as SpaceX and NASA brilliantly improvising to get those Starliner astronauts home sooner, the real story is that their return had been significantly delayed by almost two months by SpaceX’s inability to get the capsule ready as promised.

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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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Boeing notifies SLS employees of impending layoffs

11:04 am

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

Boeing yesterday sent a notice out to its employees working on NASA’s SLS rocket that up 400 could be laid off due to “revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations.”

Boeing SLS employees were informed Feb. 7 that the company was making preparations to cut up to 400 jobs from the program because of “revisions to the Artemis program and cost expectations.” The specific positions being considered for elimination were not announced but would account for a significant fraction of the overall SLS workforce at the company.

This is probably the most significant update from the entire SLS program since it was first proposed by George Bush Jr in 2004. All other announcements either told us there were going to be more delays, the cost was going up, or there were newly discovered technical problems caused by bad management or sloppy work. This announcement instead actually indicates that NASA management — under pressure from the new Trump administration — is finally addressing these failures after two decades.

In the past few months there have been many indications from the swamp in Washington that it is finally beginning to recognize the absurdity and stupidity of the whole SLS/Orion infrastructure, a realization I outlined in detail fourteen years ago, soon after the project was reshaped from the absurd and stupid Ares project under Bush Jr. to SLS/Orion under Obama.

It took however the arrival of Trump (changed himself from his first administration) to do it. Trump is doing what no president has done in our lifetimes, going through all federal programs and ripping them apart if they are failing to do what they promise. And he is doing it with full and amazingly enthusiastic support of the American people. No one cares that government employees are “crying.” Nor does anyone pay attention any longer to these sob stories, put out by the propaganda press. It have proven itself to be habitual liars whose only interest has been prop up the Washington swamp, and everyone now recognizes it.

Expect a major reshaping of NASA and its entire manned program. We will still be heading to the stars, but finally doing it.

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SpaceX to use older Dragon capsule for next manned launch because of issues with new capsule

9:12 am

Ars Technica today reported that because of continuing battery issues with the new Dragon manned capsule, SpaceX now plans to use the older Endurance Dragon capsule for the next manned launch to ISS and prevent further delays in bringing home the two Starliner astronauts.

NASA now believes the vehicle will not be ready for its debut launch until late April. Therefore, according to sources at the agency, NASA has decided to swap vehicles for Crew-10. The space agency has asked SpaceX to bring forward the C210 vehicle, which returned to Earth last March after completing the Crew-7 mission.

Known as Endurance, the spacecraft was next due to fly the private Axiom-4 mission to the space station later this spring. Sources said SpaceX is now working toward a no-earlier-than March 12 launch date for Crew-10 on Endurance. If this flight occurs on time—and the date is not certain, as it depends on other missions on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 manifest—the Crew-9 astronauts, including Wilmore and Williams, could fly home on March 19. They would have spent 286 days in space. Although not a record for a NASA human spaceflight, this would be far longer than their original mission, which was expected to last eight to 30 days.

The new capsule will then be used for Axiom’s fourth commercial flight to ISS, AX-4, presently scheduled for later in the spring.

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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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NASA suspends numerous advisory committees to comply with Trump executive orders

10:47 am

In what appears to be an over-reaction by NASA, it has ordered that numerous science advisory committees suspend all meetings and work so that it make sure they are complying with Trump’s executive orders requiring the removal of all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.

More here and here.

The orders listed twenty different working groups as well as the cancellation of the first in-person meeting of the Mercury working group this week.

In reviewing the released list of these groups, only two, the EDIA Working Group (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) and the H2O program (Here to Observe), are expressly focused on promoting these racist policies. EDIA’s job is to make sure DEI is implemented across all working groups and science projects. H2O is an educational program restricted to “under-represented students” only, which really means minorities only. All other kids need not apply.

All the other research groups are focused on research and science, not DEI. While a review of their work to make sure they don’t have racial quotas might make sense, it seems NASA’s memos shutting them down entirely during that review appears to be overkill, and might actually be an example of malicious compliance, a tactic used by the bureaucracy to generate bad press against a politician’s policy orders. By over reacting the bureaucrats try to make the elected official’s new policy look stupid.

For example, the cancellation of the first in-person meeting of the Mercury exploration working group (MExAG) seems absurd. It was scheduled to occur this week in Maryland to discuss for example the Japanese/Italian BepiColombo mission, and the sudden cancellation resulted in quotes like this:

“We are forced, therefore, to cancel MExAG 2025,” the Mercury committee’s chair Carolyn Ernst, a planetary scientist with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, wrote in a memo obtained by Space.com. “This turn of events is shocking and concerning, and is extra painful given the order comes four days before our first in-person meeting.” Some committee members had already begun travel for the meeting, Ernst added.

The nearly three-day hybrid meeting was expected to include at up 200 scientists attending either in person of virtually, one scientist Ed Rivera-Valentin shared on the social media site Bluesky. It was expected to include a number of researchers connected to the BepiColombo Mercury mission run by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the European Space Agency. The probe just made its sixth flyby of Mercury on Jan. 8.

I can see no logical reason for NASA’s management to cancel this meeting other than to create bad press for Trump.

There one other possibility. NASA’s management might simply be running scared, and has decided it must over-react in order to make sure it doesn’t get fired for appearing defiant.

I must add that the suspension of the Earth science working groups is not related to DEI, but to adhere to the Trump executive orders requiring a review of the government’s global warming and climate research. For that order a larger suspension of work makes more sense.

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Boeing writes off another half billion dollars due to Starliner

10:02 am

In filing an annual report to the SEC, Boeing revealed that has written off another half billion dollars due to Starliner delays and technical problems, bringing the total the company has lost on the capsule to more than two billion.

In the company’s 10-K annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Feb. 3, Boeing said it took $523 million in charges on Starliner in 2024. The company blamed the losses on “schedule delays and higher testing and certification costs as well as higher costs for post certification missions.”

Both Boeing and NASA remain utterly silent on the future of Starliner. It remains uncertified for operational manned flights, which means Boeing continues to earn nothing from it. Will it have to fly another manned mission on its own dime to get that certification? Or will NASA instead pay it to fly a cargo mission to ISS, as rumors have suggested, to prove the capsule is ready for manned flights?

No one knows. Nor do we know if Boeing will either sell off its space division or cancel Starliner entirely and thus free itself of the problem.

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NASA’s useless safety panel makes another useless announcement about Starliner

10:15 am

An official of NASA’s ineffectual and largely corrupt safety panel yesterday made another meaningless update on the work Boeing is doing to fix the thruster problems that occurred on the first manned flight of its Starliner manned capsule last summer, and as always told us absolutely nothing.

Paul Hill, a member of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), said at a Jan. 30 public meeting that the committee was briefed on the status of the investigation into Starliner’s Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission recently. That mission launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, but the spacecraft returned to Earth three months later uncrewed because of agency concerns about the performance of spacecraft thrusters.

“NASA reported that significant progress is being made regarding Starliner CFT’s post-flight activities,” he said. “Integrated NASA-Boeing teams have begun closing out flight observations and in-flight anomalies.” He didn’t elaborate on the specific issues that the teams had closed out but stated that it did not include the thrusters, several of which shut down during the spacecraft’s approach to the station. The propulsion system also suffered several helium leaks. [emphasis mine]

In other words, this announcement was meaningless, because it included no information about the main problem. Hill’s comments were mostly empty blather, which is generally what this panel says in all its announcements. We still do not know when or if Starliner will fly again with astronauts on board.

Over the years the panel has bent over backwards to say positive things about Boeing, so that it missed all of Boeing’s design and construction failures from day one. At the same time it repeatedly slammed SpaceX, even though that company clearly had its act together and ended up fulfilling all of its contract obligations to NASA, even as Boeing has failed to do so.

If I was a member of Trump’s DOGE project, eliminating this safety panel would be very high on my list of things to do to make NASA’s more efficient. All it does is slow things down, often for exactly the wrong reasons.

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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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Congresswoman calls for moving NASA headquarters to Florida

9:29 am

Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna (R-Florida) has now publicly repeated Governor Ron DeSantis’ call to move NASA’s main headquarters from Washington to Florida, doing so by sending Trump a letter noting the reasons why such a move make sense.

“I write to you in support of relocating NASA’s Headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Florida’s Space Coast,” Luna wrote. “While Washington, D.C., has historically been the home of NASA’s headquarters, the rapidly evolving space landscape demands a more integrated and efficient approach to space policy. Florida’s Space Coast, home to key facilities like the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, is uniquely positioned to support this transformation and strengthen America’s leadership in space exploration.”

The lease for NASA’s headquarters building expires in 2028. The agency has already put out a request for proposals for building a new building from scratch, at great cost. I suspect that expensive project is about to die, and the lease expiration will provide the Trump administration and Congress the motive for reducing staffing at headquarters most significantly, as well as moving it elsewhere.

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NASA quickly shutters its DEI offices

9:10 am

NASA has quickly complied with the executive order issued by Donald Trump right after taking office that demanded all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices within the federal government be shut down by January 22, 2025 at the latest.

In a memo to employees Jan. 22 obtained by SpaceNews, NASA Acting Administrator Janet Petro said the agency was working to close offices related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) at the agency and cancel relevant contracts. “These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination,” she wrote in the memo.

The steps, she wrote, are intended to implement an executive order issued by President Trump hours after his Jan. 20 inauguration. The order called on federal agencies to terminate DEIA programs and positions related to them, calling such efforts “discriminatory” and an “immense public waste.”

That was followed the next day by a memo to federal agencies by Charles Ezell, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), directing them to remove “outward facing media” related to DEIA programs by 5 p.m. Eastern Jan. 22 and to place employees of DEIA offices on paid administrative leave. The memo also requires agencies to provide lists of their DEIA offices and employees, as well as related contracts, by Jan. 23, and submit plans for laying off DEIA employees by the end of the month.

As of today it appears the NASA DEI websites have all been removed. It also appears that NASA is complying completely, unlike some government agencies that have tried to save its DEI programs and employees by changing their job titles. We should also expect the racist quota hiring system NASA instituted during the Biden administration to favor some races over others will now be dismantled. Couldn’t happen sooner.

What I have found interesting is the relatively lack of leftist protests — so far — for these actions. It will happen, of course but it also appears the general public won’t buy into it. The leftist propaganda press will highlight those protests, but since very few people trusts or even pays attention to that propaganda press any longer these protests will carry little weight.

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