Tag: spaceflight

ESA: Full-sized model of its Space Rider reusable capsule is ready for landing drop tests

10:08 am

Artist rendering of Space Rider in orbit
Artist rendering of Space Rider in orbit. Click for original.

My heart be still! The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday announced that a full-sized model of its Space Rider reusable capsule is now ready for landing drop tests from a helicopter.

The avionics – Space Rider’s ‘brain’ – were installed in the second week of March. This computer hosts the Guidance, Navigation and Control algorithms that will steer the parafoil, adapting to the wind – including any gusts– to guide Space Rider to a soft landing.

Roughly the size of a mini-van, the drop-test model is a full-size stand-in for the 4.6-m long reentry module, Space Rider lands on skis with the landing gear permanently open on this model as the mechanism is not part of the drop test.

To get an idea how unserious ESA is, we need to review this project’s overall schedule. This reusable capsule concept — which appears to be a variation of either Varda’s returnable capsule or Boeing’s X-37B — was first tested by ESA in 2015. By 2017 the agency was promising it would be flying commercially by 2025. A decade later and they have not yet begun testing a full scale spacecraft.

And the development pace now is glacial. Last summer ESA did helicopter drop tests of just the “brain” and parafoil. It is now going to do those drop tests again, a year later, with this full scale model. Expect another year to pass — at a minimum — before it tries another set of helicopter drop tests, this time with the first actual Space Rider capsule.

At this pace, Space Rider might fly by 2030, maybe. In the meantime, expect at least a half dozen private capsules to fly commercially, for profit. Following Varda’s success investment capital has poured into this industry. All will go from a blank sheet of paper to a flight model in less than five years.

And even if ESA finally gets Space Rider operational, it has established some very complex rules about who can use it commercially, rules so complex I predict few will be interested.

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Russia launches the smallest version of its Angara rocket

9:34 am

Russia today successfully launched the smallest version of its Angara rocket, dubbed Angara-1.2, from its Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia, placing a number of classified payloads into orbit.

Russia’s state-run press released almost no information about this launch, partly because of its military nature but also because it has discovered recently that the Plesetsk spaceport is within range of Ukrainian drones, with one attack causing a launch to be scrubbed.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

49 SpaceX
21 China
7 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 49 to 39.

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China picks two Pakistanis to train for a future Tiangong-3 mission

9:22 am

As part of its Soviet-style propaganda effort to promote its space program, China yesterday announced the names of the two Pakistanis who will train for a future short mission to its Tiangong-3 space station.

The agency said in a statement that Muhammad Zeeshan Ali and Khurram Daud will come to China soon as reserve astronauts for training. After completing all training and evaluations, one of them will participate in a space mission as a payload specialist, becoming the first foreign astronaut onboard the Tiangong space station.

This flight is part of Pakistan’s partnership with China in its International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) project to build a lunar base, created by China to counter the U.S.’s Artemis Accords alliance. Pakistan will also fly a small demo rover on China’s Chang’e-8 unmanned lunar mission, scheduled presently for a 2029 launch.

While the American alliance has now signed 63 nations covering most of the world’s major nations, only thirteen nations and about eleven eleven academic or governmental bureaucracies — mostly third world — have joined China.

This Chinese international manned mission mirrors largely what the Soviets would do during the Cold War, flying someone from one of its captured countries to garner international propaganda points. Do not expect these astronauts to do much concrete work. During the Soviet era, the Russians would joke that these foreign astronauts would all get “red hands” disease, caused whenever they tried to touch anything and a Russian astronaut would then slap their hands, saying firmly “Don’t touch that!”

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SpaceX launches 24 more Starlink satellites

10:13 pm

SpaceX this evening followed up Rocket Lab with its own launch of 24 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

49 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 49 to 38.

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Rocket Lab launches satellites for Japan’s space agency JAXA

9:56 pm

Rocket Lab today successfully placed eight smallsats for Japan’s space agency JAXA, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand.

Because all of JAXA’s rockets are presently grounded due to technical failures, Japan’s space agency has had to turn to Rocket Lab. In fact, these eight satellites were originally supposed to launch on JAXA’s Epsilon-S rocket, which remains grounded after an explosion during a static fire test. There have been no updates on the status of Epsilon-S since December 2024.

Rocket Lab was also supposed to do a suborbital hypersonic test flight yesterday out of Wallops Island in Virginia, using the first stage of Election in its HASTE suborbital configuration. As this is a test for the War Department, little information is generally released. This video from a distance confirms the launch apparently took place, but whether it was a success or not remains unknown. That Rocket Lab’s announcers did not tout its success either before or after today’s JAXA launch — as they have routinely done in the past — suggests something might have gone wrong, though this too is pure speculation.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

48 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
6 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 48 to 38.

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Curiosity looks at a small crater as it climbs Mount Sharp

11:50 am

Antofagasta crater
Click for full resolution. Click here, here, and here for original images.

Cool image time! The panorama above, created from three pictures taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity (see here, here, and here), takes a look at a small relatively fresh crater on the slopes of Mount Sharp. From an update from the rover’s science team yesterday:

At the beginning of the week, Curiosity arrived right on target on the rim of the 10-meter (33 feet) “Antofagasta” crater. The crater looked fresh and deep as we had hoped with a nice well-defined rim that didn’t look too eroded, but the bottom of it turned out to be filled with dark rippled sandy material that covered up the most interesting rock layers. There were a few rock exposures just above the sand cover that seemed like they might have been deep enough to have been sheltered from space radiation between the time their sediments were deposited and the crater-forming impact, but reaching them from the rim would have put the rover at such an awkward angle that we wouldn’t have been able to deliver the sample to the instruments.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

It’s possible that we might have been able to get into a better position by instead placing the rover on the rippled crater fill, but the chance that the rover could get stuck in all that sand made it much too high a risk. We also looked at the nearby blocks in case they could have been ejecta from the crater, but since all the rocks visible in the crater wall looked very similar to each other, there wasn’t a good way to tell which ejecta blocks might have come from the deeper layers of the crater. Because of this, the team decided against attempting to drill in or around the crater.

The overview map to the right provides the context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s location when the pictures above were taken. The yellow lines roughly indicate the area covered by the panorama. The red dotted line marks the future planned route, the white dotted line the rover’s actual travels.

Note the flat rocks in the foreground of the panorama, all part of the crater’s rim. Each looks like a large flat paving stone that was very precisely shattered into numerous tiny pieces, all about the same size. Very strange. On Earth you’d assume some craftsman had laid these small pieces down like tiles, but of course, that couldn’t have happened on Mars.

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European startup Atmos raises €25.7 million to develop its orbital research capsules

9:18 am

Atmos' Phoenix-2 during re-entry
A graphic showing Atmos’ Phoenix-2 capsule during re-entry,
protected by an inflatable shield. Click for more information.

The European startup Atmos announced today that it has raised an additional €25.7 million [$30 million] as part of its ongoing commercial program to develop its Phoenix orbital research capsules that will fly in space for several months — where products can be produced in weightlessness — and then return those products safely to Earth.

The funding will support an initial three-vehicle PHOENIX 2 fleet, the launch of ATMOS WORKS for governmental and defence customers, and development of PHOENIX 3, the company’s next-generation orbital return vehicle.

The round is co-led by Balnord and Expansion, and joined by Keen Defence and Security. The European Innovation Council (EIC) participates through its Accelerator programme via blended financing, combining grant and equity components. Additional investors include OTB Ventures, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), APEX Ventures, Seraphim, Faber, E2MC, Kirch Ventures, Lennertz & Co., Mätch VC, MBG Baden-Württemberg, and Tech Horizons.

Since the American company Varda successfully demonstrated there was money to be made flying these small recoverable capsules, investment capital has poured into this industry. In the U.S. Varda, Inversion Space, and Sierra Space, have raised money for doing such orbital work. In Europe, The Exploration Company in France, Atmos in Germany, PLD in Spain, Genesis in Croatia, and Space Cargo in Luxembourg have also raised capital.

At this moment, however, only Varda has successfully launched and recovered a capsule.

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Northrop Grumman lost $71 million from its bottom line because of its solid-fueled booster failures

9:00 am

In its most recent financial statement, Northrop Grumman admitted it took a $71 million charge due to nozzle failures on two of its solid-fueled boosters, dubbed GEM 63XL, during two different launches of ULA’s Vulcan rocket.

In a statement about its first-quarter financial results, the company said its Space Systems division recorded a $71 million “unfavorable adjustment” to earnings at completion on its GEM 63XL booster “associated with a launch anomaly that occurred during the first quarter.”

The GEM 63XL solid-fuel booster is used on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket. On a Feb. 12 launch, one of four boosters shed debris about 65 seconds after liftoff. The “observation,” as ULA termed it initially, did not affect the success of the USSF-87 mission, placing its payload into its planned geosynchronous orbit.

ULA later called the incident a “significant performance anomaly” with the booster that it would investigate before returning Vulcan to flight. The vehicle has not launched since then.

A similar incidence took place during an earlier Vulcan launch, with the rocket’s core stage and the remaining undamaged boosters getting the payload into the proper orbit. The continuing problem however has now grounded Vulcan, though the military is considering using it for some small payload launches, without the GEM strap-on boosters.

As a result, the Pentagon has already shifted several launches from ULA to SpaceX, costing ULA a significant amount of revenue. In addition, Vulcan’s grounding will impact the launch of Amazon’s Leo internet constellation, which had a major contract with ULA to get its Leo satellites into orbit.

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Jordan to sign the Artemis Accords

7:42 pm

According to a press announcement tonight from NASA, Jordan will sign the Artemis Accords on April 23, 2026 at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will host Ambassador Dina Kawar of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and U.S. Department of State Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs Ruth Perry for the ceremony.

Jordan becomes the 63rd nation to sign the accords. It also joins Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates from the Arab Middle East. While it is certainly wise to not trust any nation controlled by Islam, having these nations allied with us in space will help mitigate the worst aspects of their religion. That they are also joining a space alliance that includes Israel is another indication that they are realizing that their future is better aligned with Israel than against it.

The full list of nations in this American space alliance is as follows:

Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.

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Japan to do test launch of its H3 rocket in June

1:28 pm

Japan’s space agency JAXA is now planning a test launch on June 10, 2026 of its H3 rocket, carrying a dummy payload only in order to test the changes it has made in the rocket after a failed launch in December 2025.

The failure of the eighth H3 rocket was likely caused by an adhesion problem in the satellite mounting structure, which led it to break apart during flight, according to an investigation by JAXA. Similar issues were found in other units, prompting the space agency to fix them so the components can maintain their structural integrity.

In the June launch, a dummy satellite will be mounted on the test vehicle to collect data and verify the effectiveness of the measures. For future launches of actual satellites or space probes, JAXA plans to review the mounting structure design to reduce the risk of failure.

In other words, the method for attaching the payload to the rocket at some points failed, so that the satellite separated prematurely. The June launch will be to test a new mounting system.

Posting has been light the last few days as I deal with recovery from knee surgery.

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Two launches by SpaceX

12:02 am

In the past two days SpaceX completed two more launches. The first, yesterday morning, placed 25 more Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage completed its 8th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

Then tonight SpaceX launched a GPS satellite for the Space Force, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The first stage completed its 7th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. That drone ship, “Just read the instructions,” is now being shifted to support Starship operations, and will no longer be used for Falcon 9, after supporting 155 first stage landings. What it will do in connection with Starship has not been made clear. The two fairing halves completed their 2nd and 3rd flights respectively.

The Space Force had originally intended to launch this satellite on a ULA Vulcan rocket, but a month ago it shifted the contract to SpaceX because of the nozzle problem that has plagued two different ULA Vulcan launches. Because of this shift, the time from contract award to launch was the quickest by SpaceX for the Space Force.

The leaders in the 2026 launch race:

48 SpaceX
21 China
6 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 48 to 37.

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NASA’s IG: With only Axiom building NASA’s future spacesuits, the agency’s lunar program faces great scheduling risk

12:23 pm

Axiom's two spacesuits being tested underwater
Axiom’s two spacesuits being tested underwater in October 2025.
Click for original.

According to NASA’s inspector general’s report today [pdf] on the state of NASA’s effort to create new spacesuits for use by its astronauts on future space stations as well as in its Artemis lunar program, the planned schedules for the lunar landing and those stations are threatened because the agency presently has only one contractor, Axiom, building new suits, and has not established any spacesuit standardization rules should it want to issue contracts to others. From the report’s conclusion:

While NASA is taking steps to mitigate schedule risk, it must also contend with the unique risks inherent to a single-provider environment until future competition is introduced. … If Axiom cannot satisfy its contractual requirements in a timely or cost-effective manner, then NASA could be forced to continue using the problematic EMUs throughout the life of the ISS and significantly adjust its lunar plans. [EMUs are the complex suits presently used on ISS, and would not work well for any lunar landing mission.]

While xEVAS [the new suit concept] is flexible enough to allow for additional providers, doing so may not help the Agency meet its more immediate Artemis goals. Critically, NASA must address existing design and safety risks resulting from the lack of standard requirements for spacesuits to be compatible with various lunar spacecraft and assets.

As shown by the photo above, the development of Axiom’s spacesuit has been proceeding, and seems likely to be available for next year’s Artemis-3 Earth orbit test mission. At the same time, it is still behind schedule, a fact that has been mitigated because NASA’s entire Artemis program is equally behind schedule.

The report lists three commercial companies that might be able to provide alternative suits, and thus some redundancy, as shown by the image below.
» Read more

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