Tag: politics

NASA inspector general: Dragonfly mission is vastly overbudget and behind schedule

9:24 am

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

According to a new NASA inspector general report issued today, NASA’s Dragonfly mission to Titan is now billions overbudget and is likely not be ready to launch in 2028.

You can download the report here [pdf]. From its executive summary:

Dragonfly was selected under a New Frontiers Announcement of Opportunity with a $850 million cost cap on Principal Investigator-Managed Mission Costs, which primarily includes development costs but excludes launch vehicle and post-launch operations costs. However, by April 2024, those costs had grown to $2.6 billion and the launch delayed by more than 2 years, from April 2026 to July 2028. The cost increase and schedule delay were largely the result of NASA directing APL to conduct four replans between June 2019 and July 2023 early in Dragonfly’s development. Justifications for these replans included the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain issues, changes to accommodate a heavy-lift launch vehicle, projected funding challenges, and inflation.

The report now estimates the budget will eventually rise above $3 billion, cost that is eating away at NASA’s entire planetary budget, making other missions impossible. The project itself is far from ready, with multiple unfinished issues that make its present launch target of 2028 very unlikely.
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China launches 11 more satellites for its Geely satellite constellation

8:09 pm

Earlier today China successfully launched 11 more satellites for its Geely satellite constellation, its Smart Dragon-3 rocket lifting off from a launch platform off the eastern coast of China.

Video of the launch can be found here (Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay). This was the fifth launch for this constellation, bringing the number of satellites in orbit for this planned 240 satellite constellation to 52. The constellation is designed to provide positioning and communications for trucking and other ground-based businesses.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

114 SpaceX
52 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 114 to 89.

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Two more launches today

3:35 pm

As expected, SpaceX and China completed launches today.

First SpaceX launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 20th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacitic.

Next, China placed an unspecified “group” of “remote sensing” satellites into orbit, its Long March 6A rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northeast China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

114 SpaceX
51 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 114 to 88.

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China yesterday completed two launches

9:03 am

China yesterday successfully completed two launches using different rockets from two different spaceports in the country’s interior.

First, its Long March 3C rocket launched a classified technology test satellite, the rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China. No real information about the satellite was released, though its name, Shiyan, is part of a series of satellites that tests new designs for communications and remote sensing.

Next, the pseudo-company Galactic Energy placed three satellites into orbit, its solid-fueled Ceres-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaeport in northwest China. Once again, little information was released about the satellites’ purpose.

With each launch, China’s state-run press also provided no information about where the lowers stages of both rockets landed inside China. This is especially of concern for the Long March 3C, which uses very toxic hypergolic fuels that can dissolve the skin.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

113 SpaceX
50 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 113 to 87.

These numbers should change again by the end of today, with both SpaceX and China planning an additional launch each.

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The beginnings of the first political coup in American history

3:54 pm

Obama, the boss behind the scandal, just before his election in 2012
Obama pontificating just before his election in 2012.
The change he brought was to toss the Constitution
in the trash heap.

Doug Ross has created a very readable six-part series, with illustrations, outlining in great detail and in dramatic form the corruption of the FBI and the entire intelligence community in the latter years of the Obama administration, beginning first with an extensive cover-up of Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private server for sending classified emails, followed by the initial stages of the Russian collusion hoax against Trump that was also used to justify spying on his campaign.

The series admits to be being a dramatization, but is also is based entirely on actual facts that are now documented and known. Nothing of substance or importance here has been made up. And by giving the story a slight patina of drama it becomes much more readable and understandable.

Take a short bit of time and read it all. The actions of numerous dishonest and power-hungry individuals in the FBI, the Justice Department, the Obama White House, and other agencies, will leave you appalled. And heading the list is Barack Obama, taking actions that were unquestionable illegal, immoral, and above all treasonous. He conspired with federal workers to not only cover up crimes, but to attempt to overthrow the elected president of the United States.

The key quote that describes quite succinctly the unconstitutional nature of this scandal comes from part 4, by Rick Ledgett, then deputy director of the National Security Agency.

“This is evidence of systematic violation of Americans’ constitutional rights.”

All six parts can be found at the links below. The series presently ends in May 2016, but Ross fully intends to continue it through the 2016 election and beyond, covering the entire Russian collusion hoax created by the intelligence community, under orders of Barack Obama, that worked to undermine and overthrown Donald Trump’s election as president.

Every American should read it all. It gives a good picture of the initial process that allowed utter evil to take over the entire Democratic Party.

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Sunspot update: In August sunspot activity continued to rise

2:28 pm

Time for this month’s sunspot update. To do this each month I begin by taking NOAA’s own monthly update of its graph of sunspot activity and annotating it with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

This annotated graph showing the August activity is below, and for the third month in a row sunspot activity increased (as indicated by the green dot), so that the August number of sunspots now closely matched the April 2025 prediction by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists that the Sun was finally beginning its ramp down from solar maximum.
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Yesterday’s Senate hearing on Artemis: It’s all a game!

1:08 pm

Ted Cruz, a typical
Ted Cruz, a typical Congressional porkmeister

The Senate hearing that was held yesterday, entitled “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise: Why Congress and NASA Must Thwart China in the Space Race”, was clearly organized by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to promote a continuation of the SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway parts of NASA’s Artemis program. And he was able to do so because senators from both parties felt the same way. They all want to continue this pork, and don’t really care whether those expensive assets can really accomplish what they promise.

Furthermore, the hearing was also structured to allow these politicians to loudly proclaim their desire to beat China back to the Moon, using this pork. They want the U.S. first, but they are almost all want to do this through a government-run program.

As such, the choice of witnesses and the questions put to them were carefully orchestrated to push this narrative. To paraphrase: “We have to beat China to the Moon! And we have make sure a NASA program runs the effort! And above all, we mustn’t let Donald Trump cut any of NASA’s funding, anywhere!”

It was therefore not surprising that the most newsworthy quote from the hearing was the comments by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine about Starship and how its choice as a manned lunar lander was a bad one, and that it was likely going to the prime reason China will put humans back on the Moon ahead of us.
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SpaceX gets FAA approval to double its annual launches from Cape Canaveral

9:02 am

After several years of paperwork, the FAA yesterday approved SpaceX’s request to double its launch rate at the Space Force’s Cape Canaveral spaceport.

In addition to the annual launch increase from 50 launches to up to 120, the Federal Aviation Administration’s environmental review also approved a new on-site landing zone that could accommodate up to 34 booster landings per year. These boosters are the reusable first-stage portions of Falcon 9 rockets that SpaceX lands and refurbishes for future flights.

The review, finalized on Wednesday, found what’s known as a “Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact,” meaning the proposed changes “would not significantly impact the quality of the human environment” under federal law, with impacts reduced by specific protective measures. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words illustrate the absurdity of these environmental reviews. We know without doubt and without any major review that rocket launches do no harm to the environment or wildlife. We have seven decades of data in Florida proving it.

According to the article both the FAA and the Space Force still need to issue further approvals before this request can go forward. Expect the Space Force to agree, without much bother. The FAA needs to amend SpaceX’s launch licenses, and this should also happen relatively quick, especially with Trump as president.

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Cargo Dragon completes test burn to raise ISS’s orbit

8:51 am

The cargo Dragon that docked with ISS in late August successfully completed yesterday an engine burn lasting more than five minutes to see if it could raise ISS’s orbit.

On Wednesday, Sept. 3, SpaceX’s Dragon completed an initial burn to test the spacecraft’s new capability to help maintain the altitude of the International Space Station. Two Draco engines located in the trunk of Dragon, which contains an independent propellant system, were used to adjust the space station’s orbit through a maneuver lasting five minutes, three seconds. The initial test burn increased the station’s altitude by around one mile at perigee, or low point of station’s orbit, leaving the station in an orbit of 260.9 x 256.3 miles. The new boost kit in Dragon will help sustain the orbiting lab’s altitude through a series of longer burns planned periodically throughout the fall of 2025.

The Dragon will remain docked with ISS until December. It is expected it will do additional test burns during that time.

NASA wishes to get this capability from its own spacecraft so as to no longer have to rely entirely on the Russians, who have traditionally done these orbital adjustments using its Progress cargo freighters. SpaceX likely also wants to do these tests as an adjunct to its contract to build the de-orbit vehicle that will bring ISS down, after it is retired.

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Juno detects the aurora of the moon Callisto in Jupiter’s atmosphere

10:19 am

Though previous observations had detected auroras on Jupiter produced by three of its four Galilean moons — Io, Europa, and Ganymede — scientists had until now been unable to detect a similar aurora produced by the fourth, Callisto.

The Jupiter orbiter Juno finally accomplished this observation for the first time.

[T]o image Callisto’s footprint, the main auroral oval needs to move aside while the polar region is being imaged. And to bring to bear Juno’s arsenal of instruments studying fields and particles, the spacecraft’s trajectory must carry it across the magnetic field line linking Callisto and Jupiter.

These two events serendipitously occurred during Juno’s 22nd orbit of the giant planet, in September 2019, revealing Callisto’s auroral footprint and providing a sample of the particle population, electromagnetic waves, and magnetic fields associated with the interaction.

The research paper describing this detection has just been published.

These secondary auroras are caused by Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field.

The Juno mission itself is about to end. NASA did not approve a mission extension, and next month the science team will send the spacecraft into Jupiter’s atmosphere, where it will burn up. We will then have to wait five years for Europa Clipper to arrive in Jupiter orbit, followed a year later by Europe’s Juice orbiter.

While the propaganda press is condemning this decision, there is some logic to it. Juno has mostly completed its work. While new knowledge can certainly be gained if it remained operations for three more years, the amount of knowledge will be relatively small. And NASA does face a budget crunch. Better to spend its money on other things that can produce more bang to the buck.

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France startup wins contract to build Starlink competitor

9:58 am

France’s space agency CNES has awarded a €31 million contract to France startup Univity to build a demo satellite to demonstrate internet and phone-to-satellite capabilities, as part a longer term plan to build a constellation that can compete with both SpaceX’s Starlink and AST SpaceMobile constellation, both already launched and in operation.

Founded in 2022 under the name Constellation Technologies & Operations, UNIVITY aims to develop a very low Earth orbit constellation to provide global high-speed, low-latency internet services. A prototype of the company’s regenerative 5G mmWave payload was part of a 23 June SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, hosted aboard the D-Orbit SpaceBound ION mission. The company expects to launch a pair of prototype satellites in 2027, followed by the deployment of its full constellation between 2028 and 2030.

This deal likely puts the final nail in the coffin of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) own government IRIS satellite constellation, which has been delayed, is expected to be very expensive and take a long time to get launched, and has already faced disinterest from many partners in ESA. That France is now going it alone likely ends any chance that IRIS will be funded.

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Two more launches in past 24 hours, by Israel and SpaceX

9:04 am

Both Israel and SpaceX completed new launches during the evening hours yesterday. First, Israel placed an Ofek radar surveillance satellite into orbit, its small solid-fueld Shavit-2 rocket lifting off from an undisclosed location within the country, likely its Palmachim Airbase on the Mediterranean coast south of Tel Aviv. The launch occurred about the same time as SpaceX’s Starlink launch from Vandenberg, already reported last night.

This was Israel’s first launch in 2025, and the first since 2023. Since 2008 the country has launched seven military surveillance satellites, one about every two to four years or so.

Several hours later, in the wee hours of the morning, SpaceX completed another launch, placing 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage completed its fourteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

112 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 112 to 85.

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