Tag: spaceflight

Understanding Trump’s proposed NASA cuts, in the larger context of the overall federal budget

1:44 pm

U.S. debt as of June 4, 2025
U.S. debt as of June 4, 2025. Click for original.

For my entire life it has always been the same: Whenever any politician or elected official proposes any cuts to the federal budget, and most especially when those cuts are aimed at a popular government agency like NASA, the news reports in the mainstream press are uniformly hostile.

Trump’s proposal to cut NASA’s budget by 24% in 2026 has been no different. Here are just a few headlines:

This list is only a sampling, but they are typical of almost all the reporting now and that always happens when big cuts are proposed in any government program. The spin is always the same: “These cuts are horrible, their acceptance would be the act of a barbarian, and by doing so will certainly cause the fall of civilization!”

Above all, the focus is always on the cuts themselves, and never on the larger picture.

I am not going to do that. I have reviewed in detail the proposed cuts to NASA, and am now going to take a detailed look, but will do so by considering the larger context of the overall federal budget and the need to get its spending under control.

And out of control that budget is, as indicated by the screen capture above of today’s US Debt Clock. The United States is bankrupt. If we don’t gain some control over federal spending in a very near future some very bad things are going to happen, and soon. And those bad things will likely shut down luxury items like NASA entirely, not just impose some cuts to its overall budget.

All Trump is doing is attempting a first stab at this problem. The real question is whether he has made a rational and reasonable attempt, or whether it should be revised in some manner.

This is the perspective I bring to this issue. I just wish others would do the same.
» Read more

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Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace signs deal to build lander for ESA

10:10 am

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

The Japanese lunar lander startup Ispace — about to attempt its second unmanned lunar landing — has now signed a $3 millionj contract with the European Space Agency (ESA) to begin design and construction of its proposed Magpie lander.

The agreement comes in the context of the Small Missions for Exploration initiative launched by ESA. This initiative called for innovative and short-term mission ideas for lunar exploration. ispace’s MAGPIE concept was selected and awarded a pre-phase A contract on Dec. 12, 2024. Under the Phase 1 extension agreement, ispace-EUROPE will collaborate with ESA on the implementation of the lunar exploration mission. In aggregate, the value of the contracts for the two phases is €2,695,000 (approximately ¥437 million JPY).

The company already has contracts for future landers with both NASA and Japan’s space agency JAXA. It appears these space agencies consider the company’s engineering to be acceptable, even though its only attempt to land on the Moon, Hakuto-R1, crashed in 2023 when its software shut the engines down prematurely, three kilometers above the surface.

Ispace’s second lander, Resilience, is presently in lunar orbit and is now targeting a landing attempt tomorrow, June 5, 2025, at 3:17 pm (Eastern). The map to the right shows the landing zone, in Mare Frigoris in the high northern latitudes of the near side of the Moon.

This contract by ESA also illustrates Europea’s increasing shift to the capitalism model. Rather than design and build the lander itself, ESA is buying this product from the private sector. It will likely get what wants sooner and for far less money.

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Orbital tug startup Impulse raises $300 million in private investment capital

9:57 am

Following several large contract announcements in recent weeks, the orbital tug startup Impulse has now raised an additional $300 million in private investment capital, in addition to the $150 million it raised last year.

Impulse plans to use the funding for several initiatives. One is to scale up production of its Mira and Helios vehicles to better meet demand for them. The company says it has more than 30 signed contracts for those vehicles, a backlog worth nearly $200 million. Romo said the company is seeing increasing demand for Mira, the smaller of the two vehicles, for defense applications.

The company was founded by Tom Mueller, who was one of the principal engineers during SpaceX’s development of the Falcon 9. Mira is the smaller of the two tugs, and has flown one demo mission. The larger Helios tug has not yet flown, but the company recently won a contract with the satellite company SES to use it.

The company has also said it is developing its own rocket, but I suspect its first launch that will come later.

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Axiom’s fourth commercial passenger flight to ISS delayed another two days

9:45 am

NASA, Axiom, and SpaceX yesterday announced that the launch of Axiom’s fourth commercial passenger flight to ISS, dubbed Ax-4, has been delayed two days to June 10, 2025.

NASA, Axiom Space, and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 8:22 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, June 10, for launch of the fourth private astronaut mission to the International Space Station, Axiom Mission 4. This shift allows teams to account for predicted inclement weather during the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft transport in addition to completing final processing of the spacecraft ahead of launch.

The Dragon capsule for this mission is new, and there had been delays in getting it built. Though weather is likely the biggest reason for this delay, it also sounds as if SpaceX has needed just a little bit of extra time to finalize the capsule’s construction.

The mission will fly one Axiom astronaut plus three passengers, each a government astronaut from India, Poland, and Hungary. It will spend about a week docked at ISS.

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Voyager announces first public stock offering, valued at $1.6 billion

9:39 am

Starlab design in 2025
The Starlab design in 2025. Click
for original image.

The space station startup Voyager Technologies yesterday announced its first public stock offering, with the hope of raising almost $400 million in investment capital.

Underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to 1.65 million additional Class A shares, on top of the 11 million initially offered, which are expected to be priced between $26 and $29 each. If fully subscribed at the top end of the range, the IPO could raise as much as $367 million in gross proceeds.

Voyager plans to build the Starlab space station, launched as a single large module by SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket, but so far has cut no metal, focusing its work entirely on designs. It has also signed deals with several foreign companies in Europe and Japan as well as the European Space Agency, positioning itself as providing the international community a station to replace ISS when it is gone.

At the moment however I rank Starlab fourth among the four commercial space stations under development, mostly because it has built nothing. Hopefully the funds raised by this stock offering will allow it to start some construction work.

  • Haven-1, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company is moving fast, with Haven-1 to launch and be occupied in 2026 for an estimated 30 days total. It hopes this actual hardware and manned mission will put it in the lead to win NASA’s phase 2 contract, from which it will build its much larger mult-module Haven-2 station..
  • Axiom, being built by Axiom, has launched three tourist flights to ISS, with a fourth scheduled for early June, carrying passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. Though there have been rumors it has cash flow issues, development of its first module has been proceeding more or less as planned.
  • Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Overall, Blue Origin has built almost nothing, while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building its module for launch.
  • Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with an extensive partnership agreement with the European Space Agency. It recently had its station design approved by NASA, but it has built nothing. This might change once it obtains several hundred million dollars from its initial public offering of stock.
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Proposed commercial spaceport in Nova Scotia gets launch customer

9:28 am

The proposed commercial spaceport in Nova Scotia, operated by Maritime Launch Services, announced this week that it has signed a contract with a Netherlands rocket startup, T-Minus, whereby the latter will do two suborbital launches of its new Barracuda sounding rocket.

On 3 June 2023, Maritime Launch Services, a Canadian commercial launch facility operator, announced that it had signed an agreement with T-Minus Engineering for the launch of two Barracuda rockets. According to the press release, the two launches will carry various scientific and educational payloads for several customers, whose names were not disclosed. The launches are expected to take place from Spaceport Nova Scotia in October 2025.

The viability of both the rocket startup and spaceport are open to question. T-Minus was founded in 2011, and has apparently done little in that time period. It claims it is flown this rocket many times, but if so there is little solid information confirming this fact. Most of its business appears to have been flying very small sounding rockets for European defense agencies.

Maritime Launch Services first proposed this spaceport in 2017, but has seen only one student suborbital launch in that time. Its original plan was to offer both the launchpad and rocket to satellite manufacturers. The rocket however was Ukrainian-built, and when Russia invaded the Ukraine that rocket was no longer available. Furthermore, red tape in Canada stalled launch approvals for years.

Recently the spaceport has been marketing itself to multiple rocket companies, announced a number of deals with unnamed startups or named startups that haven’t flown anything yet. It has also signed a partnership deal with the space station company (Voyager), apparently to bring some real technical expertise to the operation.

Nothing real at this spaceport however has actually yet occurred. Whether this new deal is real will have to wait for something to happen.

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Sunspot update: The Sun confounds the predictions again!

11:27 am

It is time for my monthly update of the Sun’s ongoing sunspot activity, using the update that NOAA posts each month to its own graph of sunspot activity but annotated by me with extra information to illustrate the larger scientific context.

The activity in May was shocking in that it completely contradicted all expectations by everyone in the solar science community, with the Sun’s sunspot count changing in a way that was somewhat unprecedented. The graph below makes this very clear:

» Read more

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New ground-based images of the Sun’s surface

9:37 am

The Sun's surface, as seen by Inouye Solar Telescope
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken using the Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaii. It shows the granule surface of the Sun at very high resolution, resolving objects as small as 12 miles across.

The team used the Inouye’s Visible Broadband Imager (VBI) instrument operating in the G-band, a specific range of visible light especially useful for studying the Sun because it highlights areas with strong magnetic activity, making features like sunspots and fine-scale structures like the ones in the study easier to see. The setup allows researchers to observe the solar photosphere at an impressive spatial resolution better than 0.03 arcseconds (i.e., about 20 kilometers on the Sun). This is the sharpest ever achieved in solar astronomy.

The scientists then used computer simulations to confirm that the smallest features, curtains of plasma raising along the walls of the granules, are linked to fluctuations in the Sun’s magnetic field.

As interesting and cutting edge this research is, the language of the press release seems more aimed at touting this telescope then describing new science. Practically every sentence uses words like “unmatched,” “unparalleled,” “unique,” and “unprecedented” (multiple times), and then ended with this quote:

“This is just one of many firsts for the Inouye, demonstrating how it continues to push the of solar research,” says NSO [National Solar Observatory] Associate Director for the NSF [National Science Foundation’s] Inouye Solar Telescope, Dr. David Boboltz. “It also underscores Inouye’s vital role in understanding the small-scale physics that drive space weather events that impact our increasingly technological society here on Earth.”

I have noticed this phenomenon recently in many government press releases. It appears that the releases issued in the past month have become less about real research and are more designed to lobby the public against any possible budget cuts proposed by the Trump administration.

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Two launches today by American companies

11:39 pm

The beat goes on: Two different American rocket companies today completed successful launches.

First, Rocket Lab placed a BlackSky high resolution Earth imaging satellite into orbit, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand. This was the second of four launches that BlackSky has purchased from Rocket Lab.

Next, SpaceX continued its unrelenting launch pace, placing 23 Starlink satellites into orbit (with 13 having phone-to-satellite capabilities), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its 21st flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

68 SpaceX
32 China
7 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 68 to 52.

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Texas legislature gives Starbase power to close Boca Chica beaches

1:32 pm

The Texas legislature this week approved language that now gives the new government of Starbase the power to close the road to Boca Chica’s beaches, taking that power from the local county.

House Bill 5246 revises the power and duties of the Texas Space Commission and the Texas Aerospace Research and Space Economy Consortium. A conference committee report of the bill added a section that allows the Space Commission to coordinate with a city to temporarily close a highway or venue for public safety purposes.

In South Texas, that will give the Starbase city commissioners the authority to approve those closures which would affect State Highway 4, a road that runs through Starbase and leads to the beach, as well as the beach itself.

As is usual for the particular news outlet at the link, it magnifies the opposition to SpaceX, amplifying the size of the several tiny leftist activist organizations that have been trying to shut down SpaceX at Boca Chica since the day Elon Musk announced he was now voting Republican. In reality, that opposition is nil. The region is thrilled by the wealth and jobs that SpaceX is bringing to the area, and is willing do help it grow in all ways. This action by the state legislature only reflects that support.

I must also note that the opposition in the legislature came entirely from the Democratic Party, once again taking the 20% side of an 80-20 issue.

Hat tip to radio host Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas.

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Trump’s NASA budget cuts and rejection of Jared Isaacman for NASA administrator signal a very bright future for American space

1:09 pm

To most Americans interested in space exploration, my headline above must seem extremely counter-intuitive. For decades Americans have seen NASA as our space program, with any cuts at NASA seen as hindering that effort. Similarly, Isaacman, a businessman and private astronaut who has personally paid for two flights in space, had initially been nominated by Trump to become NASA administrator expressly because of that commercial space background. For Trump to reject such a person now seems at the surface incredibly damaging to NASA’s recent effort to work with the private sector.

All of that seems true, but it really is not. Both of these actions by Trump are simply what may be the last acts in the major change that has been engulfing the American space industry now for the past decade.

Jared Isaacman

Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk
Jared Isaacman during his spacewalk in September 2024

First, let’s consider Isaacman. Before Trump had nominated him for NASA administrator, he had been a free American doing exactly what he wanted to do. As a very wealthy and successful businessman, he had decided to use that wealth to not only fly in space — fulfilling a personal dream — but to also use those flights to raise money for St. Jude’s Children’s hospital, whose work he considered priceless and wanted supported. He ended up flying two space missions, becoming the first private citizen to do a spacewalk, while also raising more than $200 million for St. Jude’s.

Isaacman’s second flight was also the first in what he hoped would be his own long term manned space program, which he dubbed Polaris. The first mission did this spacewalk from a SpaceX capsule. The second would hopefully do a repair mission to Hubble, or if rejected by NASA some other work in orbit. And the third would fly in SpaceX’s Starship around the Moon.

As this program was funded entirely by Isaacman and used no government funds, it was generally free from criticism. If anything, Americans hailed it as ambitious and courageous. He was following his own American dream, and doing it on his own dime.

This history however made him appear on the surface to be a perfect choice for NASA administrator under Trump, especially in a time where America’s space effort is shifting more and more to the private sector.

Everything changed however once Trump nominated him. He had to suspend his private Polaris program. He had to kow-tow to politicians, telling them what they wanted to hear. And he was no longer his own boss.
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Proposed Australian spaceport changes name

9:54 am

Proposed Australian spaceports
Proposed Australian spaceports.
Click for original image.

A proposed Australian spaceport company that was previously called Equatorial Launch Australia and was forced to shift its location because of red tape has apparently changed its name to Space Centre Australia and named its proposed spaceport the Atakani Space Centre.

It is also possible there was a major shake-up in management, but this is unclear from available sources.

The map to the right shows the location where Atakani is planned, on Cape York in Queensland. Previously this company hoped to build the spaceport to the west in the Northern Territory, but local bureaucracy made that impossible.

Right now the company hopes to open for launches by 2029.

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