Tag: politics

Weather scrubs first test of experimental vertical take-off/landing rocket built by Middle Eastern startup

11:09 am

Middle East, showing Oman's proposed spaceport
The Middle East, showing the location of
Oman’s proposed spaceport at Duqm.

The first test flight of Horus-4, an experimental vertical take-off/landing rocket built by the Middle Eastern startup Advanced Rocket Technologies, was scrubbed yesterday supposedly due to weather.

The launch had been part of the first public event at Oman’s proposed Etlaq spaceport near the coastal city of Duqm.

Oman’s Etlaq spaceport opened its doors to the public for the first time on Monday, hosting a three-day fan zone experience designed to spark interest in space exploration among the country’s youth.

The event had originally been scheduled to culminate with the launch of the Horus-4 experimental rocket, developed by London company Advanced Rocket Technologies (ART). But unsuitable weather forced the test flight to be delayed, with a new launch date to be announced soon.

Pupils from across Duqm – a coastal town about 550km from Oman’s capital city of Muscat – took part in a variety of educational activities. The fan zone, called Etlaq FX, included four tents that were placed about 3km from the spaceport’s operations team and launch pad, with the site overlooking the Arabian Sea.

At the moment the Duqm spaceport is mostly a launch site for small suborbital rockets. Oman however is pushing hard to sell it to rocket companies, with launches of such small rockets by a variety of startups and Middle Eastern nations scheduled throughout the rest of this year.

Of those launches the most ambitious is that of Advanced Rocket Technologies Horus-4. If it flies and lands successfully, it will be a major technological achievement for the company, and the Arab part of the Middle East.

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Astronaut Don Pettit, 70, wants to fly more missions in space

10:54 am

Despite his apparent significant discomfit upon landing last week after seven months in orbit, American astronaut Don Pettit is still eager to fly more times in space, despite celebrating his 70th birthday on the day he returned from ISS.

Pettit landed in Kazakhstan with his two Russian Soyuz MS-26 crewmates on April 20, 2025 local time in Kazakhstan, his 70th birthday. Cameras cut away as he was extracted from the capsule, raising concerns about his health. During a post-mission briefing today he explained that “I was right in the middle of emptying the contents of my stomach onto the steppes of Kazakhstan” and the cameraman kindly gave him the privacy he needed. He added that his body reacts to the return to Earth about the same way every time regardless of duration.

He looked fit today, just a week later.

At the briefing Pettit noted how returning to Earth can be very discomfiting, but with a little effort and time recovery occurs. He also noted how weightlessness is wonderful for older humans.

“I love being in space,” he said. “When you’re sleeping, you’re just floating, and your body, all those little aches and pains heal up. You feel like you’re 30 years old again and free of pain, free of everything. So I love being on orbit. It’s a great place to be for me and my physiology.”

Whether Pettit gets another flight is unclear. There are a lot of medical research reasons to fly an older individual like him in space. Whether NASA wants to do it is another question. The agency has generally been very timid about doing such things.

Pettit also claimed at this briefing that ISS could fly well past 2030, and shouldn’t be de-orbited then as planned. He however likely spent almost all his time in orbit on the American half, and likely has limited information about the stress fractures in the Russian Zvezda module.

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Head of the FAA’s commercial space office takes Trump buy-out

10:36 am

Kelvin Coleman, the head of the FAA office that regulates and issues all launch licenses, has now decided to accept the buy-out offered by the Trump administration and retire.

Coleman has led the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST, since 2022, after being named deputy associate administrator in 2017. During that time, the amount of commercial launch activity has grown enormously, from 23 licensed launches in 2017 to 157 in 2024.

That has put a strain on the office, which the FAA has responded to by seeking additional staff and other resources, as well as streamlining the licensing process. The latter included new launch and reentry licensing regulations, called Part 450, that took effect in 2021.

Industry, though, has complained about the implementation of Part 450, leading the FAA to create a space-related Aerospace Rulemaking Committee, or SpARC, to collect industry input on ways to improve Part 450. FAA officials said at the Commercial Space Conference in February that the SpARC was expected to complete its work by July, and that it was working on other improvements, such as a new electronic system for license applications.

It was apparently under Coleman’s leadership that Part 450 was created and implemented. The FAA claimed it would streamline the licensing process. Instead, it did the exact opposite. Under Coleman and Part 450, the red tape from the FAA actually increased significantly, to the point that it apparently caused the several rocket startups to close down.

It is quite possible therefore that Coleman decided to take the buy-out because he suspected his time at the FAA was limited anyway, that the Trump administration wanted him out.

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Since last night four more launches globally

10:26 am

UPDATE: The Firefly launch was a failure. There was a problem during stage separation. See post above.

The worldwide pace of launches continues now relentlessly. Since my last launch post yesterday afternoon, there were four more launches across the global.

First, China launched a “group” of satellites for an “internet constellation,” its Long March 5B rocket lifting off from its coastal Wencheng spaceport. The rocket used a new upper stage which allowed its core stage to shut down sooner and thus not enter orbit to later crash uncontrolled (as earlier Long March 5B cores would do). Instead it fell back into the ocean after launch.

Next, SpaceX sent another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The first stage, flying for the very first time, landed successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Third, Arianespace, the commercial division of the European Space Agency (ESA), used the Italian rocket company Avio’s Vega-C rocket to place an ESA Earth observation radar satellite dubbed Biomass into orbit, lifting off from French Guiana. This was Arianespace’s second launch in 2025. Though Arianespace managed the launch, it is being phased out. By next year all future launches of Vega-C will be sold and managed by Avio instead, cutting out this bureaucratic middle-man.

Fourth, the American rocket startup Firefly attempted to place a Lockheed Martin demo payload into orbit, its Alpha rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The Lockheed Martin payload is part of a deal that could include as many as 25 launches over the next five years. This was Firefly’s first launch in 2025.

A scheduled launch by Russia of its Angara rocket on a classified military mission was apparently scrubbed, though no information at all has been released as to why the launch did not occur.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

50 SpaceX
23 China
5 Rocket Lab
5 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 50 to 40.

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Texas legislators vote down bill giving SpaceX power to close Boca Chica roads

9:57 am

The House State Affairs Committee in the Texas state legislature yesterday voted 7 to 6 to reject a bill that would have given SpaceX the power to close the roads at Boca Chica rather than local county officials.

By a vote of seven “nays” to six “ayes,” members of the Texas House State Affairs Committee narrowly voted down Senate Bill 2188 — the companion to state Rep. Janie Lopez’s, R-San Benito, House Bill 4660. With the vote, the committee has declined to refer the bill to the House floor for a full vote.

The identical bills would shift control of road closures from Cameron County officials to SpaceX and the mayor of the likely new city of Starbase.

It appears there is still a chance the bill could get a vote in the full legislature this year, but that will require parliamentary maneuvers and deal making.

The bill lost because of a heavy campaign by a range of special interest activist groups, some of which have been working to block all of SpaceX’s activities in south Texas because they simply hate Elon Musk. At the same time, there are certainly valid reasons to question putting this power in the hands of a single private company.

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China and SpaceX complete launches

8:39 am

Both China and SpaceX completed launches yesterday. First, China placed what its state-run press called “a data relay” satellite into orbit, its Long March 3B rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China.

No word on where there rocket’s lower stages and four strap-on boosters crashed inside China. All use very toxic hypergolic fuels.

Next SpaceX launched 23 more Starlink satellites, including 13 configured for cell-to-satellite service, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage completed its 20th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

48 SpaceX
22 China
5 Rocket Lab
5 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 48 to 37, with three more launches scheduled for later today. China will use its Long March 5B, its largest rocket, to launch a set of communications satellites, SpaceX will launch another set of Starlink satellites, and ULA will make its second attempt to launch Amazon’s first set of Kuiper internet satellites, the first launch scrubbed due to weather.

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Your smartphone apps are tracking you

10:36 am

The smart phone: A proven tool for spying
The smart phone: A proven tool for spying

Just one more reason I don’t own a smartphone: Researchers have now found that though there is no evidence that big software companies like Facebook and Google are tracking your smartphone conversations, the data instead shows that the many apps you routinely install on your phone are spying on you quite extensively by periodically taking screenshots of things you look at and sending those images to third parties.

“There were no audio leaks at all – not a single app activated the microphone,” said Christo Wilson, a computer scientist working on the project. “Then we started seeing things we didn’t expect. Apps were automatically taking screenshots of themselves and sending them to third parties. In one case, the app took video of the screen activity and sent that information to a third party.”

Out of over 17,000 Android apps examined, more than 9,000 had potential permissions to take screenshots. And a number of apps were found to actively be doing so, taking screenshots and sending them to third-party sources. “That has the potential to be much worse than having the camera taking pictures of the ceiling or the microphone recording pointless conversations,” said David Choffnes, another computer scientists working on the project. “There is no easy way to close this privacy opening.”

Doing this kind of spying is simply unethical, but it is also now routine in our increasingly unethical culture. What makes it worse is that I expect few will react in any way to this information. People will shrug and continue to install apps casually, accepting the fact that they are now merely a tool that someone else can manipulate.

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Trump cuts apparently shutting down NASA’s climate office in New York

9:45 am

Schmidt's data tampering, as documented in 2017
Schmidt’s data tampering, as documented in 2016.

As part of the Trump administration’s aggressive effort to trim the federal budget as well as shift the research focus at the federal government’s many science agencies, on April 24, 2025 it revealed that it has canceled the building lease for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York that has existed since 1961 and in 2016 and 2017 was found to be tampering with past climate data with no explanation, lowering past temperature numbers while raising more recent ones in order to make the data fit the as-yet unproven theory that human activity is causing global warming.

Those “adjustments” have never been justified in any way. Nor has Gavin Schmidt, the man who heads GISS, ever done anything to correct them. Moreover, when his office was accused of this tampering in 2016 he not only refused to fix or justify the changes, he responded by claiming “planetary warming does not care about the election.” In the years since it has been his office that annually declares each year “the hottest on record,” using these tampered numbers to do so and demonstrating that he has been acting not as a real researcher but as a political operative of the global warming crowd.

Though the office lease is being canceled, GISS has not been shut down, as of now.

While NASA is terminating the lease on the GISS offices, it is not closing the institute itself. Lystrup said in the email that it will help employees move “to remote work agreements in the short-term as the agency seeks a new, permanent space for the team.”

I suspect this statement is merely designed by Trump officials to dampen the screams of opposition against its actions. It is very likely GISS is going away, and most of its employees will have to find new jobs.

The hope is that new scientists can be hired to review these tampered numbers and get them fixed so that climate research in the future can proceed with reliable data.

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Viasat wins contract to build ESA lunar communications constellation

1:20 pm

As part of a larger European Space Agency (ESA)) project, Viasat has won an ESA contract to build a communications constellation that will orbit the Moon.

Viasat will be responsible for the design and development of the communication network and will lead the definition of the end-to-end communications services: aiming to provide a communications network for lunar landers, rovers, orbiters, and other technology. Viasat will also be responsible for the communication earth ground infrastructure and communication lunar surface user terminals. Telespazio, as Moonlight program lead, has executed a contract with Viasat for the initial design phase of the communication system. This work will be fully funded by the European Space Agency throughout Phase 1.

The UK Space Agency, as one of the major contributors to ESA’s Moonlight program, selected Viasat to lead the UK ecosystem to deliver the communications capability. Moonlight services will be deployed in phases, targeting initial capability at the end of 2028 with full operations aimed by 2030.

It does seem that there are a lot of competing communications/navigation constellations under development, from China, Europe, and the U.S. It also appears that there is far less coordination between them then there should be.

Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.

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China accelerates its schedule for its upcoming Moon/Mars missions while admitting its lunar base will take longer

10:58 am

Phase I of China/Russian Lunar base roadmap
The original phase I plan of Chinese-Russian lunar
base plan, from June 2021.

The new colonial movement: In several different reports today in China’s state-run press — timed to coincide with the launch of three astronauts to Tiangong-3 — Chinese officials confirmed that it has moved up the planned launch dates for both its first lunar rover as well as its Mars sample return mission, and it is also expanding its offers to the international community to partner on those missions.

At the same time it let slip the fact that it will not be establishing its lunar base on the Moon in 2030, as previously claimed. Moreover, note how this so-called accelerated schedule of lunar missions is actually behind the announced timetable outlined by China and Russia in 2021, as shown on the right. None will fly by this year, as promised.

As for the news today, first China announced that its Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission will launch in 2028.
» Read more

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A Malaysian state plans spaceport, working in partnership with China

10:00 am

Proposed spaceports in Malaysia
Proposed spaceports in Malaysia

According to an report out of Malaysia yesterday, the Malaysian state of Pahang has initiated a one year study to build a spaceport off its eastern coast near the town of Nensasi, working in partnership with China.

“On April 15, PKNP [Pahang State Development Corporation] signed a letter of intent with China Great Wall Industry Corporation (CGWIC) and Lestari Angkasa Sdn Bhd to establish a strategic collaboration in the space technology sector. “Next month, PKNP and Lestari Angkasa will visit Wenchang Space City in Hainan, China, to hold further discussions on the Pahang International Spaceport project,” he said during the Pahang state assembly session today.

This is the second Malaysian state to propose its own spaceport. In January the eastern state of Sabah began its own study, working in partnership with the Ukraine.

The partnership with China is worrisome for the U.S., as it is very likely that China will arrange use of that spaceport for its own purposes. It will also use its presence there to access and steal any technology brought by other western companies or nations should they launch there as well.

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China launches three astronauts to Tiangong-3 space station

9:42 am

China today successfully launched a new crew of three astronauts for a six-month mission on its Tiangog-3 space station, its Long March 2F rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

The crew’s Shenzhou capsule will dock autonomously with the station later today. This was China’s fifteenth manned mission and ninth to the station, which it has now occupied continuously for more than three and a half years.

The rocket’s core stage and four strap-on boosters crashed somewhere inside China. No word on where or whether they crashed near any habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

46 SpaceX
21 China
5 Rocket Lab
5 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 46 to 36.

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