Tag: policy

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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The first real Republican president in a half century

3:50 pm

Which president is different than all the others?
Which president is different than all the others?

When George Bush Jr. was elected president in 2000, he also won majorities in both the House and the Senate in Congress. At the time I remember quite naively saying that he now was in a position to force through some real change, because any radical leftist proposal needed three different signatures, and the Republicans in all three branches just weren’t going to give it.

Hah! What a fool I was. During Bush Jr’s eight year rein the federal government grew in leaps and bounds, even more than under Bill Clinton, with every leftist desire fulfilled, though generally quietly in order to avoid outraging the American public that wanted change.

Nor was Bush Jr. the exception to the rule. No, every Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower has been nothing more than a Democrat in disguise, and that includes Donald Trump during his first term as president.

Only now do we see a real conservative president in power. You need only look at the official portraits of all these presidents to the right to understand this. Just compare Donald Trump’s official picture in 2017 with this picture in 2025. In 2017 he was a happy leader who innocently thought the administrative state he was in charge of would do as he said.

In 2025 he is innocent no longer. Instead, he is a hardened warrior ready to do battle. And that is exactly what we have seen, a Republican president unlike any since before World War II.

For once, the voters got a choice on election day. For once, the Republican who said he wanted to change things really meant it.
» Read more

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British rocket start-up Orbex wins two-launch contract from Italian orbital tug company D-Orbit

9:10 am

The British rocket start-up Orbex, which hopes to complete its first test orbital launch of its Prime rocket this year, after years of regulatory delays, has gotten a two-launch contract from the Italian orbital tug company D-Orbit.

The contract appears to be part of Europe’s effort to have its European payloads launch on European rockets. Previously D-Orbit tugs have mostly been launched by SpaceX because the only available European rockets, Ariane-6 and Vega-C, have either not been operational or available. Moreover, all these rockets are too big for D-Orbit’s tugs, which thus have to fly as secondary payloads.

Orbex’s Prime rocket is small, and so the tugs can be launched as the primary payload. The rocket however is not yet operational, unlike for example Rocket Lab’s small Electron rocket. The decision to go with Orbex’s untested rocket suggests Europe is forcing D-Orbit to sign with a European rocket company.

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Indian navigation satellite stranded in wrong orbit

8:49 am

Though the GSLV launch rocket worked as planned, putting India’s new navigation satellite in the proper transfer orbit on January 29, 2025, the satellite’s own engines have failed to fire.

Subsequent to the launch, the solar panels on board the satellite were successfully deployed and power generation is nominal. Communication with the ground station has been established. But the orbit raising operations towards positioning the satellite to the designated orbital slot could not be carried out as the valves for admitting the oxidizer to fire the thrusters for orbit raising did not open.

The satellite systems are healthy and the satellite is currently in elliptical orbit. Alternate mission strategies for utilising the satellite for navigation in an elliptical orbit is being worked out. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence suggest India’s space agency ISRO has determined there is no way to raise the orbit to its proper height. With the solar panels deployed and the spacecraft’s orbit having low point that dips into the Earth’s atmosphere, the satellite’s orbit will likely decay relatively quickly. If so, the satellite’s mission will be a failure, not a good way to start what ISRO’s hopes to be its busiest year.

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Japan’s H3 rocket successfully completes its fifth launch

9:40 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA early today successfully launched the sixth satellite in that country’s GPS-type constellation, its new H3 rocket lifting off from the Tanegashema spaceport in south Japan.

This was the rocket’s fifth launch, and the first for Japan this year. The link goes to the JAXA live stream, cued to T-30 seconds. Though it now also provides English translation, JAXA still insists on having an announcer count off every second, several minutes prior to and after launch, something that is incredibly annoying and distracting, and entirely unnecessary.

The 2025 launch race:

14 SpaceX
6 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan

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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) now demands “forced mandatory vaccinations”

3:02 pm

During confirmation hearings this week on Trump’s nominee to take over the Department of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy, Jr., Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island once again demonstrated his fascist and petty dictator nature, demanding that Kennedy support “forced mandatory vaccinations” of Americans or else he will vote against Kennedy’s nomination.

Whitehouse also demanded that Kennedy promise to never again say “that vaccines are not medically safe when they in fact are.”

In other words Kennedy is to put aside his own research and knowledge, that has found some vaccines efficacy and safety are questionable, and join the government swamp to lie to Americans while forcing Americans to take drugs they might not want.

Sounds insane? If you don’t believe me then watch:
» Read more

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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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Malaysia begins spaceport study

9:56 am

Malaysia
Click for original image.

The Malaysian state of Sabah this week announced it has partnered with a Ukrainian government agency to study the possibilities of developing its space industry, including establishing a spaceport on that state’s coast.

Initially floated in 2023, the state government signed a memorandum of understanding with Ukraine’s Yuzhnoye State Design Office – which specialises in space-rocket technology – and local defence and aerospace firm Sovereign Sengalang, to explore Sabah’s potential as a regional space launch site.

Sabah has an extensive shoreline stretching about 1,500km on its mainland, and sits close to the equator, ideal conditions for rocket launches and recovery.

Based on the map to the right, it seems the best location for a Sabah spaceport would be on the state’s eastern coast, to the south. Any other location means rockets would have to cross land or islands of other nations.

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Update on upcoming Starship/Superheavy test flights

9:23 am

Link here. As usual, this NASASpaceflight.com article provides an excellent overview of what SpaceX is likely to do on the next few test flights, including details about the possibility of reusing the Superheavy that was successfully recovered on the seventh flight.

And as usual, NASASpaceflight.com ignores the importance of politics and Trump’s election in changing the regulatory culture at the FAA. Just as it has made believe the Biden administration wasn’t forcing the FAA to slow-walk its license approvals to SpaceX, it is now making believe the Trump administration won’t do anything to force the FAA to speed its approvals.

We know however that it will. I fully expect that when SpaceX completes its investigation of the failures from flight 7 and describes its fixes, the FAA approval will following very quickly thereafter, within days. Under Biden that approval would still take months.

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Ariane-6 gets more launch contracts

9:14 am

Despite high launch cost of the Ariane-6 rocket, the European Space Agency (ESA) this week arranged three more launch contracts with Arianespace, which manages the rocket.

During the 17th European Space Conference, held in Brussels on 28 and 29 January, Arianespace was awarded contracts to launch PLATO [an ESA science mission to study exoplanets], Sentinel-1D [an ESA Earth observation satellite], and a pair of second-generation Galileo satellites. [part of ESA’s GPS-type satellite constellation]. Arianespace currently has a backlog of 30 Ariane 6 launches, 18 of which are for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation.

These new launch deals are expressly because ESA wants to force feed contracts to Ariane-6 to keep it whole, as part of its policy to launch its European payloads on European rockets. The result is that ESA is also forced to pay too much for its launches. Note too that these payloads are expressly ESA science or research projects, which also applies to most of Ariane-6’s backlog of launches outside of its Kuiper launches. Profit is not the main goal of these payloads. I doubt this rocket will get much additional business from commercial satellite companies that must make a profit to survive. It costs too much.

This is also the reason ESA member nations Germany, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom are pushing hard to get new European private rocket startups operational. They don’t like being forced to pay too much for launches, and want commercial options outside of Ariane-6.

For the moment however ESA is propping up Ariane-6 and Arianespace. It means Ariane-6 will be around for awhile, even as it limits what ESA can do in space.

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United Kingdom awards rocket startup Orbex $25 million

9:29 am

The government of the United Kingdom has made a sudden and unexpected $25 million grant to the British rocket startup Orbex, which recently announced it was abandoning its launchpad at the Sutherland spaceport and switching to the Saxavord spaceport on the Shetland Islands.

While the UK Government has supported Orbex through grants awarded via the European Space Agency’s Boost! programme, the £20 million investment appears to represent the state acquiring a stake in the company and its future. This signals a significant show of support from the government as the company gears up to compete in the European Launcher Challenge.

Channeling former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, Technology Secretary Peter Kyle declared that the government’s backing of Orbex would enable the launch of “British rockets carrying British satellites from British soil.”

It seems to me that this cash award is less an investment in the company and more a kind of guilt payment by the United Kingdom government because the red tape of its bureaucracy, the Civil Aviation Authority, prevented Orbex from launching at Sutherland for almost three years, delays that eventually forced the switch to Saxavord, which after its own long red tape delays finally has its license approvals not yet issued to Sutherland.

Orbex has probably indicated to the government that these delays have caused it significant cash flow problems, similar to what happened to Virgin Orbit where red tape delays eventually drove it to bankruptcy. The company also probably told the government it needed extra cash to prepare the launchpad at Saxavord for its rocket, money it had already spent at Sutherland and no longer had.

Thus, this $25 million government grant. The UK government realized that if a second rocket company went belly-up due to its red tape, it would likely end forever any chance of getting any rocket company from considering launching from the United Kingdom.

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