Tag: spaceflight

Inspector General: The state of NASA’s spacesuits on ISS is becoming critical

1:28 pm

NASA's failed spacesuit
NASA’s failed Moon spacesuits

A new NASA inspector report issued today [pdf] has found that the single contractor NASA uses to maintain the spacesuits on ISS, Collins Aerospace, has increasingly been unable to do the job, and NASA has no alternative contractor to turn to. From the report’s executive summary:

We previously reported on NASA’s spacesuit management in 2017 and 2021, finding that the Agency faced a wide array of risks to sustaining the EMUs [the spacesuits], including design inadequacies, health risks, and low inventories of spacesuit life support systems, ultimately leading to NASA’s efforts to design and develop next-generation suits to replace the existing EMUs. Specifically, the EMU design flaws have increased the chance of and led to unexpected water in helmets, thermal regulation malfunctions, and astronaut injuries. Given that spacesuits are necessary to meet future ISS maintenance needs until its planned decommissioning in 2030, it is critical that NASA effectively manages the contract performance and subsequent safety risks associated with ESOC [the contract with Collins].

…Until the ISS’s planned decommission at the end of the decade, NASA will continue to require spacewalking capabilities to perform upgrades and corrective and preventative maintenance to the Station. However, Collins’ performance on ESOC increases programmatic risks to NASA as it attempts to conduct safe spacewalks outside the ISS and maintain critical EMU life support component inventories. The contractor is experiencing considerable schedule delays, cost overruns, and quality issues that significantly increase the risk to maintaining NASA’s spacewalking capability.

Collins was awarded this five-year cost-plus maintenance contract in 2010 for $324 million. Since then NASA has been repeatedly extending it, so that it now runs through 2027 and has funneled $1.4 billion into Collins’ bank account. Yet Collins has repeatedly failed to deliver necessary repair parts, even as there have been more frequent problems on ISS, including several cases where spacewalks had to be aborted because an astronaut’s life was in danger. Here are just a few examples cited in the report:
» Read more

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Firefly loses first stage for next launch when it explodes during static fire test

8:40 am

During a static fire engine test yesterday in preparation for launch, the rocket startup Firefly lost the first stage when an explosion occurred at what appeared to be the base of the rocket. From the company’s update:

During testing at Firefly’s facility in Briggs, Texas, the first stage of Firefly’s Alpha Flight 7 rocket experienced an event that resulted in a loss of the stage. Proper safety protocols were followed, and all personnel are safe. The company is assessing the impact to its stage test stand, and no other facilities were impacted.

Video of the explosion can be seen here.

This incident will obviously delay the next launch, which had only just been scheduled following the completion of the company’s investigation into its launch failure in April. This explosion also suggests there remain serious issues with the Alpha rocket, which has only had two full successes in six launch attempts.

At the same time, with the successful soft landing of its Blue Ghost lander on the Moon earlier this year, Firefly has demonstrated its engineering can be sound and robust. It just appears that a lot more work needs to be done to get Alpha into shape.

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China launches two “test satellites”

7:46 pm

China earlier today successfully launched two test satellites for “experimental verification of Earth observation technologies, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang space port in southwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. The two satellites are part of the Shiyan family of satellites that have done rendezvous and proximity operations as well as surveillance of other satellites in orbit.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

126 SpaceX
58 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 126 to 98.

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Modeling suggests Uranus’s moon Ariel needed underground oceans to shape its known surface

11:22 am

Ariel as seen by Voyager-2 in 1986
Ariel as seen by Voyager-2 in 1986.
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Using computer modeling based on our scant data of the surface features of the Uranus moon Ariel, scientists now posit that underground oceans, some of gigantic depth as much as 100 miles deep, were required to shape those features.

“First, we mapped out the larger structures that we see on the surface, then we used a computer program to model the tidal stresses on the surface, which result from distortion of Ariel from soccer ball-shaped to slight football-shaped and back as it moves closer and farther from Uranus during its orbit,” Patthoff said. “By combining the model with what we see on the surface, we can make inferences about Ariel’s past eccentricity and how thick the ocean might have been.”

The team found that, in the past, Ariel needed to have an eccentricity of about 0.04 [to create those surface structures]. This is about 40 times larger than its current value. While 0.04 may not sound dramatic, eccentricity can strengthen the effects of tidal stresses, and Ariel’s orbit would have been four times more eccentric than that of Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is wracked by the tidal forces that push and pull it to create its cracked and broken surface. Yet, to the eye, the orbit will still resemble a circle.

“In order to create those fractures, you have to have either a really thin ice on a really big ocean, or a higher eccentricity and a smaller ocean,” Patthoff said. “But either way, we need an ocean to be able to create the fractures that we are seeing on Ariel’s surface.”

This result does not prove an underground ocean now exists, or even if one existed in the past. The data is based on the few fly-by images taken by Voyager-2 when it passed close to Uranus in 1986. Coverage of the entire surface of Ariel was not complete, nor did the images have much resolution. The data is suggestive of this conclusion, but not conclusive by any means.

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Webb: Accretion disk surrounding exoplanet rich in carbon molecules

10:14 am

Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have detected a host of carbon molecules inside an accretion disk that surrounds an exoplanet circling a baby star 625 light years away.

Infrared observations of CT Cha b were made with Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) using its medium resolution spectrograph. An initial look into Webb’s archival data revealed signs of molecules within the circumplanetary disk, which motivated a deeper dive into the data.

…Ultimately, the team discovered seven carbon-bearing molecules within the planet’s disk, including acetylene (C2H2) and benzene (C6H6). This carbon-rich chemistry is in stark contrast to the chemistry seen in the disk around the host star, where the researchers found water but no carbon. The difference between the two disks offers evidence for their rapid chemical evolution over only than 2 million years.

You can read the original paper here [pdf]. The exoplanet itself is thought to have a mass 14 to 24 times that of Jupiter, making it almost a brown dwarf star. The NASA makes a big deal claiming this disk is forming a moon around the exoplanet, but that is not what the paper finds. This research did not find any evidence of a new moon exoplanet.

Instead, the paper found an accretion disk rich in carbon molecules, a finding that is significant on its own. It also found that that the accretion disk around the central star, while lacking carbon molecules, appears rich in water.

In other words, this baby solar system is packed with the right material for eventually producing life. Moreover, in this system’s relatively short life, two million years, these materials were able to sort themselves out so that the star has one concentration of material while the exoplanet has another. Both facts suggest that organic chemistry is common in the universe, and can evolve fast.

That is the important discovery here.

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Two Japanese startups partner to fly the first private lunar sample return mission

9:53 am

Two Japanese startups, the lunar landing company Ispace and the orbital capsule startup ElevationSpace, have signed an agreement to develop the first private mission to bring samples back to Earth from the Moon.

Based on the agreement, Ispace and ElevationSpace will jointly pursue development to undertake a lunar return mission. Ispace has already demonstrated the technology to deploy a lander into lunar orbit through its two lunar missions operated in 2023 and 2025. The company is currently considering the development of an Orbital Transfer Vehicle (OTV), derived from its existing lunar lander development technology.

The collaboration aims to conduct a technology demonstration to verify the feasibility of missions utilizing an and the sample return re-entry capsule being developed by ElevationSpace, as well as to evaluate the overall system characteristics.

At the moment this project is only a PowerPoint proposal. Though Ispace has made two attempts to soft land an unmanned spacecraft on the Moon, neither was a success. It has three further contracts with NASA, ESA, and Japan’s space agency JAXA, but none has flown yet, and its orbital vehicle is only under development.

As for ElevationSpace, it has flown nothing yet as well. Its first demo satellite, designed to test re-entry and recovery, won’t fly until late next year, assuming its launch rocket, Isar’s new Spectrum, gets to orbit.

Nonetheless, this project illustrates the continuing shift to the private sector in space. The companies are doing this to demonstrate their capabilities in order to win contracts from both commercial and government customers.

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New study finds ice is better at dissolving iron than liquid water

9:34 am

In a result that could have a direct bearing on trying to understand the inexplicable geology of Mars, a new study has found that ice actually does a better job at releasing iron from mineral deposits than liquid water.

It was once believed that when iron-rich mineral deposits were locked in ice, the iron would stay put, but a new study from Sweden’s Umeå University shows that the ice itself is actually working better than permafrost melt to release the iron. The study showed that ice at -10 °C (14 °F) releases more iron from mineral deposits than liquid water at 4 °C (39.2 °F). “It may sound counterintuitive, but ice is not a passive frozen block,” says study co-author Jean-François Boily. “Freezing creates microscopic pockets of liquid water between ice crystals. These act like chemical reactors, where compounds become concentrated and extremely acidic. This means they can react with iron minerals even at temperatures as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius.”

The researchers also found that the seasonal freeze/thaw cycle helped this process, and that brackish fresh water did better in dissolving the iron than seawater.

The significance for Mars geology is that this suggests glacial ice in the alien Mars climate might be the catalyst for creating its meandering canyons that so much resemble features on Earth produced by liquid water. On Mars however no model yet has been convincingly successful in creating past conditions where liquid water could flow on the surface. Mars has either been is too cold or its atmosphere too thin to allow it.

This study suggests ice however could do the work. It also fits with other Martian data that suggests the same, that at the base of the Martian glaciers pockets of liquid water could exist that act to shape the canyons.

All of this is speculation on my part, but it seems that the planetary scientists who are studying Mars should take a close look at this research.

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Avio wins $47 million study contract to build reusable upper stage rocket

9:20 am

Avio's proposed reusable upper stage
Click for original.

The Italian rocket company Avio has won $47 million study contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to begin design work on a reusable upper stage rocket.

The contract runs for two years, with a goal to “assess and prepare the requirements, the design and the technologies for both the ground and flight segments required for an upper stage demonstrator that in the future could return to Earth and be reused on another flight.”

In other words, Avio is not yet building this upper stage, but will use this money to work up a design. The Avio graphic to the right suggests the lower stage will be based on the first stage of Avio’s solid-fueled Vega-C rocket. The upper stage concept appears to resemble Starship, which suggests Avio will be aiming for a vertical landing, using the methane-fueled engines it is developing for its not-yet-launched Vega-E rocket.

This ESA contract once again shows that agency’s shift to the capitalism model. Rather than develop this idea in-house, as it has done so poorly in the past, ESA has asked a private company to do it, and own what it develops.

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SpaceX launches 28 Starlink satellites

7:49 pm

SpaceX this evening successfully placed another 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage, B1063, completed its 28th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. (This booster had been listed as the first stage on a launch two days ago, but it turns out the booster on that flight was B1082, completing its 16th flight.) The present rankings for the most reflights of a rocket:

39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
30 Falcon 9 booster B1067
28 Columbia space shuttle
28 Falcon 9 booster B1071
28 Falcon 9 booster B1063
27 Falcon 9 booster B1069

Sources here and here.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

126 SpaceX
57 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 126 to 97. China has a launch scheduled for this evening, but nothing as yet has been published about its status as of this posting.

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China completes two launches

2:01 pm

Since yesterday China successfully completed two launches from two of its interior spaceports.

First, it successfully launched what its state-run press described as a satellite that will “primarily support monitoring and research activities in weather forecasting, atmospheric chemistry and climate change”, its Long March 4C rocket lifting off yesterday from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

Then today China’s Long March 6A lifted off from its Taiyuan spaceport in north China, placing in orbit the eleventh set of satellites in the Guowang internet constellation, eventually aiming to be 13,000 satellites strong. China’s state-run press did not specify the exact number of satellites. Based on previous launches using the Long March 6A, the number was likely five, bringing the number of this constellation’s satellites now in orbit to 87.

No word on where the the lower stages of both rockets crashed inside China. This is even more critical with the Long March 4C, since it uses very toxic hypergolic fuels that can dissolve your skin if it touches you.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

125 SpaceX
57 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 125 to 97.

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Canadian rocket startup Nordspace postpones first suborbital test launch

9:42 am

Proposed Canadian spaceports
Proposed Canadian spaceports

After trying twice earlier this week to launch its first suborbital test rocket from its Atlantic Spaceport in Newfoundland, the rocket startup Nordspace has decided to postpone that launch for at least several weeks, while it investigates the fuel leaks on the launchpad that caused fires during both launch attempts.

From the company’s website:

After detailed review over the last 15 hours, the root cause has been discovered to be related to our propellant quality slightly differing between vehicle tests at our test facility in Ontario, compared to our first launch test in Newfoundland and Labrador at our spaceport. This led to a fuel-rich scenario. All systems on the rocket and ground performed nominally after careful review. Personnel, rocket and the launch pad are perfectly safe and secure, and our safety systems operated nominally. As our company’s manufacturing and testing facilities are located in Ontario, there’s no expedient way to make the necessary modification with the temporary infrastructure and suppliers we have in place at our launch site.

This company is only about three years old, so this delay is hardly systematic to its operations. In that time they have established their own private spaceport, have built their first demo satellite (set to launch in June 2026), and developed a test suborbital rocket, Taiga, that is on the cusp of its first launch. The company is also developing its own rocket engines, as well as an orbital rocket dubbed Tundra.

Its speed puts to shame Canada’s other proposed spaceport in Nova Scotia, which was first proposed in 2016, and has far accomplished little. Many of its problems stemmed from the Ukraine War, which lost it the rocket it had hoped to market. Even so, it only signed its first launch customer in August of this year.

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Germany’s military commits to spending $41 billion on space through 2030

9:25 am

In another sign that the member nations of the European Space Agency (ESA) are increasingly going their own way, Germany’s defense minister announced yesterday that his agency plans to spend $41 billion on space through 2030.

According to a 25 September Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) release published following the minister’s address, the €35 billion investment will cover five main priorities: hardening against data disruptions and attacks, improved space situational awareness, redundancy through several networked satellite constellations, secure, diverse, and on-demand launch capabilities, and a dedicated military satellite operations centre.

This commitment is going to definitely benefit the three German rocket startups, Isar Aerospace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Hyimpulse. It will also likely benefit the North Sea launch platform — based in Germany — that is being built by a German consortium that has already received almost one million from the government.

While the European partners in ESA have generally kept their military spending separate from that agency, in the past a large bulk of this defense spending would have been committed to ESA joint projects, such as funding the agency’s commercial launch operation, Arianespace, to do the launches. No more.

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NASA cancels Sierra Space’s contract for Dream Chaser cargo missions to ISS

8:01 am

Tenacity grounded in a warehouse
Tenacity grounded in a warehouse, with the
Shooting Star small cargo capsule attached to
its aft port.

NASA today announced it has modified its fixed-price cargo contract with Sierra Space, canceling the planned seven cargo missions as well as a demo docking mission, replacing this with one test flight that will simply go into orbit and then return to Earth.

After a thorough evaluation, NASA and Sierra Space have mutually agreed to modify the contract as the company determined Dream Chaser development is best served by a free flight demonstration, targeted in late 2026. Sierra Space will continue providing insight to NASA into the development of Dream Chaser, including through the flight demonstration. NASA will provide minimal support through the remainder of the development and the flight demonstration. As part of the modification, NASA is no longer obligated for a specific number of resupply missions, however, the agency may order Dream Chaser resupply flights to the space station from Sierra Space following a successful free flight as part of its current contract.

The first launch of Tenacity, the only Dream Chaser so far constructed, has been repeatedly delayed for the past two years, with no explanation from either the company or NASA. Those delays started in 2023 as engineers began the final ground testing before launch, so though we do not know what the issue is it is likely that testing found something fundamentally wrong with the spacecraft that Sierra could not afford to fix.

According to Sierra’s own press release, the company will target a late 2026 launch for that free flyer mission. The company still hopes that mission will make further flights possible, either purchased by NASA or by others wishing to use Tenacity for in-orbit manufacturing, something it first proposed last year.

In the past two years, Sierra has shifted its focus away from commercial manned space and more towards winning military defense contracts. Part of that decision might have come from the problems with Dream Chaser. The decision might have also been fueled by the company’s generally unsatisfactory experience working with Blue Origin on their proposed Orbital Reef space station. While Sierra committed cash to develop and test its LIFE inflatable module, including a full scale prototype, Blue Origin appeared to do nothing at all. As early as September 2023 there were rumors the partnership was falling apart.

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SpaceX launches 24 more Starlink satellites

12:13 am

SpaceX this evening successfully placed 24 additional Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its 28th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific, moving it up into the top rankings for the most reuse by a rocket:

39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
30 Falcon 9 booster B1067
28 Columbia space shuttle
28 Falcon 9 booster B1071
28 Falcon 9 booster B1063
27 Falcon 9 booster B1069

Sources here and here.

As for the 2025 launch race, this is the present leader board:

125 SpaceX
55 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 125 to 95.

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A Martian landscape of volcanic pimples

1:17 pm

A Martian landscape of volcanic pimples
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and downloaded on August 3, 2025. Labeled as a “terrain sample,” such images are usually taken not as part of any specific research request but because the camera team needs to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain its proper temperature. When they do this, they always try to pick interesting targets within the time window, and usually succeed.

In this case, the camera team picked a location in the middle of Isidis Planitia, one of Mars’ four biggest basins thought to have been formed from a major impact several billion years ago, focusing on an area covered with these strange knobs that have craterlike depressions at their peaks.

According research published in 2010 [pdf], it is believed these cones — all of which are only a few feet high — are the result of volcanic activity following the impact that formed Isidis four billion years ago. In a sense, they are leftover pimples from that impact and the subsequent volcanic activity within that melted basin.
» Read more

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European engineers develop a tumbling rover design moved by the Martian wind

10:15 am

Tumbleweed being tested on sandy ground
Tumbleweed being tested on sandy ground. Click for video.

European engineers at Aarhus University in Denmark have now developed and tested a tumbling rover design that is propelled solely by the Martian wind. You can read their most recent paper here.

Not surprisingly, they call it “Tumbleweed.” The screen capture to the right comes from a video of a wind tunnel test proving the Martian atmosphere could move a prototype on sandy ground. The engineers also did similar tests successfully on rocky and coarse ground.

In July 2025, Team Tumbleweed conducted a week-long experimental campaign, supported by Europlanet, at Aarhus University’s Planetary Environment Facility. Using scaled prototypes with 30-, 40- and 50-centimetre diameters, the team carried out static and dynamic tests in a wind tunnel with a variety of wind speeds and ground surfaces under a low atmospheric pressure of 17 millibars.

Results showed that wind speeds of 9-10 metres per second were sufficient to set the rover in motion over a range of Mars-like terrains including smooth and rough surfaces, sand, pebbles and boulder fields. Onboard instruments successfully recorded data during tumbling and the rover’s behaviour matched fluid-dynamics modelling, validating simulations. The scale-model prototypes were able to climb up a slope of 11.5 degrees in the chamber – equivalent to approximately 30 degrees on Mars – demonstrating that the rover could traverse even unfavourable slopes.

Their concept is to send a swarm of Tumbleweeds to Mars, where they could cheaply document prevailing wind and speeds globally. More sophisticated versions could act as full weather stations, as well as provide in situ data about the landscapes they traverse.

The concept is still in its development stage. The next stage of testing will see if Tumbleweed will work with some science sensors attached.

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Axiom hires Redwire to build the solar panels for its first station module

9:18 am

Axiom's new module assembly sequence
Axiom’s assembly sequence for its planned station, initially attached to ISS but subsequently detached

The space station startup Axiom today announced that it has signed an agreement with the space hardware company Redwire to build the solar panels for its first station module, now under construction.

The companies announced Sept. 25 that Redwire will provide a version of its Roll-Out Solar Array, or ROSA, to Axiom for use on Axiom Station’s Payload Power Thermal Module, known as AxPPTM. AxPPTM is the first module Axiom plans to launch for its commercial station. Under a revised assembly schedule announced last December, AxPPTM will berth with one of two ports on the International Space Station used by Cygnus cargo spacecraft.

It would remain there until Axiom launches a second module, called Hab1. At that point, AxPPTM would unberth from the ISS and dock with Hab1, forming the initial station that can support four-person crews. Axiom would later add more modules.

At present Axiom is targeting a 2026 launch of the AxPPTM module. The hull, built by Thales Alenia, is presently being tested in Europe, and is expected to shipped to Houston for integration later this year.

The four commercial stations under development, ranked by me based on their present level of progress:
» Read more

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Starlab selects Vivace to build the primary structure of its proposed space station

8:25 am

The American space stations under construction
The American space stations under development

The Starlab consortium today announced that it has chosen the Louisiana space hardware company Vivace to build the primary structure of its proposed space station, designed to launch as one very large module inside SpaceX’s Starship.

The aluminum-based structure, one of the largest single spaceflight structures ever developed for launch, will be built at Vivace’s facility in New Orleans, La., with additional development and testing support from [NASA’s] Michoud Assembly Facility (MAF) in Louisiana.

…The program will use Vivace’s New Orleans facility at MAF for fabrication, with support from U.S. government partners for subject matter expertise, structural analysis and potential test infrastructure. MAF will also support specialized large-scale manufacturing and assembly operations.

It appears Starlab chose this subcontractor because of its extensive ties to NASA, likely in the hope this will increase the chances it will win the upcoming station construction contracts NASA is expected to issue in the next year or so.

The four commercial stations under development, ranked by me based on their present level of progress:
» Read more

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NASA awards orbital servicing startup Katalyst contract to save the Gehrels Swift space telescope

8:04 am

Katalyst's proposed Swift rescue mission
Katalyst’s proposed Swift rescue mission. Click for original image.

NASA today announced that it has awarded the orbital servicing startup Katalyst a $30 million contract to use a robotic servicing satellite to rendezvous and attach itself to the Gehrels Swift space telescope and raise its orbit.

Right now the telescope’s orbit is decaying, and it will burn up sometime in 2029 if something isn’t done. As one of the most successful low-cost astronomy space telescopes ever launched — central to the study of gamma ray bursts — spending this small amount to save Gehrels seems a no-brainer. In mid-August NASA had awarded Katalyst and a second company small contracts to study whether they could do this mission. Today’s announcement means NASA liked Katalyst’s proposal.

Whether this startup can do it however remains unknown. It appears from its own press release today describing this contract award that the company decided to add Gehrels to its already planned first demo servicing mission planned for next year.

The schedule is also unprecedented: while satellite servicing typically takes years to plan, Katalyst must be ready to launch in eight months, with docking operations scheduled for mid-2026, to save Swift before it burns up.

…Katalyst was already on schedule for an in-space demonstration of its rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking technology for June 2026. The demonstration would buy down technical risk ahead of the planned launch of Katalyst’s multi-mission robotic spacecraft, NEXUS, in 2027. When NASA raised the alarm about Swift, Katalyst seized the opportunity to pivot to a live rescue operation which would demonstrate similar capabilities.

The mission is even further risky in that Swift has no grapple or docking port for Katalyst’s satellite to attach to. Instead, it “will rely on a custom-built robotic capture mechanism that will attach to a feature on the satellite’s main structure–without damaging sensitive instruments.”

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Starbase to take control of nearby beaches

12:33 pm

The new government of Starbase has reached an agreement with its local county to take control of the nearby beaches that will allow Starbase to not only maintain them but close them when it chooses.

Cameron County commissioners approved the agreement to hand over a portion of Boca Chica Beach on Tuesday. The deal outlines cleaning and maintenance obligations among other terms. Under the agreement, Starbase will be allowed to set requirements for beachfront construction and special events on the beach.

…The compact includes a plan to address beach erosion, which occurred at a rate of 10 to 20 feet per year from 1950 to 2012, Starbase Commissioner Jordan Buss told the county commissioners, citing a study conducted by the University of Texas at Arlington.

This agreement mirrors one Starbase had previously made with South Padre Island for other beach portions.

The article once again gives lots of column space to the fringe groups that oppose SpaceX and its operations at Boca Chica, even though the evidence suggests they have almost no support from the general public.

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Chinese satellite photographs commercial Maxar satellite

10:41 am

One Jilin-1 image of Maxar satellite
Click for original. More images here.

In what appears to be a tit-for-tat competition, a Chinese reconnaissance satellite, dubbed Jilin-1, has now taken photographs of a commercial Earth imaging satellite owned by Maxar, that the company had previously used to photograph other Chinese satellites.

Chinese commercial remote sensing constellation operator Changguang Satellite Technology (CGST), a spinoff from an arm of the state-owned Chinese Academy of Sciences, published images Sept. 13 of a Maxar Worldview Legion 2 satellite.

The images were taken by CGST’s Jilin-1 remote sensing constellation satellites across a few hours on Sept. 8, from ranges between 40-55 kilometers, showing details of the spacecraft. While part of an expanding Earth observation constellation, Jilin-1 satellites have apparently had their operations adjusted to include Non-Earth Imaging (NEI).

Maxar had earlier published high resolution images of China’s Shijan-26 satellite, being used to test remote sensing and surveillance technologies.

None of this is particular new, though for China the technology is the most advanced it has ever had. Nations have been launching high resolution surveillance satellites since the 1960s. Nor is there anything anyone can do about it. Nations will always do this. If anything, having this ability to observe each other closely will likely reduce tensions and misunderstandings.

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Firefly’s stock sags due to poor revenue numbers in 1st quarter report

10:06 am

Firefly's stock price since IPO

Apparently Wall Street has lost faith in the rocket startup Firefly since that company went public last month. The stock zoomed initially, but has now sagged due to a poor 1st quarter report that showed revenues far below expectations.

The stock’s initial price had been predicted to range from $35 to $39, but quickly rose to $70.

Since then the price has steadily dropped, so that today it sits about about $41.

The news reports seem to think this indicates bad things for the company. I see this as simply a long term correction from the initial over-enthusiasm by buyers. The company had first offered a stock price close to this number. The price is now exactly where Firefly predicted.

If I was interested in buying stock, this might actually be a good time to buy. As a rocket startup, Firefly appears quite solid, being the only startup to successfully soft land on the Moon. Its Alpha rocket has also been cleared for further launches, and though it has had a mixed launch record, with several launches failing due to upper stage issues, it has likely solved these problems.

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NASA now targeting a February-to-April launch window for first manned Artemis mission

9:43 am

Orion's damage heat shield
Damage to Orion’s heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”.
Nor has this issue been fixed.

According to a NASA official at an event yesterday, the agency is now targeting launch window starting on February 5, 2026 and extending into April for the first manned Artemis mission, dubbed Artemis-2, that will slingshot four astronauts around Moon and back to Earth on a 10-day-flight.

If Artemis 2 does lift off on Feb. 5, it will be at night, NASA officials said. The space agency has about five days apiece in February, March and April to launch the flight. The latest possible date is April 26, according to NASA. NASA will aim to hit the earlier part of that launch window, Hawkins said, but she stressed that crew safety will drive the timeline.

That mission will fly with an Orion capsule that has safety concerns, including a questionable heat shield (see picture above) and an untested environmental system.

Meanwhile, as part of NASA’s never-ending PR effort to sell the mission, it announced today that the mission’s four astronauts have now given their Orion capsule a name, Integrity.

The name Integrity embodies the foundation of trust, respect, candor, and humility across the crew and the many engineers, technicians, scientists, planners, and dreamers required for mission success.

Considering NASA’s level of dishonesty during the entire development of SLS and Orion, the ironies of this name and these claims is quite breath-taking.

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Two launches by China and SpaceX

9:10 am

Both China and SpaceX completed launches today. First, China launched another 11 satellites for its Geely internet-of-things constellation, its Smart Dragon-3 rocket lifting off from a ocean platform off the nation’s eastern coast.

This was the sixth launch for this constellation, bringing the number of satellites in orbit to 64, out of a planned 240. The constellation is designed to provide positioning and communications for trucking and other ground-based businesses.

Next, SpaceX successfully placed three government science satellites into orbit (two for NASA and one for NOAA), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The first stage completed its second flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings both completed their first flight.

The two NASA satellites were the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) to study the Sun’s heliosphere at the edge of the solar system and the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory to study the exosphere, the outermost layer of the atmosphere. The NOAA probe, Space Weather Follow On – Lagrange 1 (SWFO-L1), will observe the Sun from one million miles from Earth, providing advance knowledge of strong solar flares and eruptions so that utility companies can shield the electric grid appropriately.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

123 SpaceX
55 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 123 to 94.

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Blobby Martian crater filled with ice

12:55 pm

Overview map

A blobby Martian crater filled with ice
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 4, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this a “concentric fill crater,” a term used by planetary scientists for Martian craters that appear to be filled with glacial material. That certainly appears to be the case, but this 3.5-mile-wide unnamed crater also appears to have been warped by the ice that impregnates the ground all around it.

The overview map above explains why. The white dot marks the location, on the eastern end of the 2,000-mile-long northern mid-latitude strip that I label glacier country, because almost every image in this region shows similar glacial features. Though it is hard to tell from the inset, all the craters here have similar glacial material within them, and the ground surrounding them also appears glacial in nature.

This particular location is at 40 degrees north latitude. While it might be difficult to establish a colony here, on ground that appears so unstable, going 700 to 800 miles to the southeast would put you in what is considered one of Mars’ prime mining regions. Thus, with the right equipment mining operations would have accessible water not that far away.

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NASA’s new class of astronauts illustrates its increasing shift to capitalism

10:19 am

NASA being conquered by Americans
NASA is being conquered by Americans

That two different former SpaceX employees, one of whom had already flown on a private mission in space, applied and were accepted by NASA yesterday — as part of the 24th class of astronauts since its creation three-quarters of a century ago — reveals the major shift that is occurring across the entire space industry, and most especially within NASA.

This new class of ten included four men and six women, the first time women were the majority chosen. More significantly however were the two former SpaceX employees.

Yuri Kubo, 40, is a native of Columbus, Indiana. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University. He spent 12 years working across various teams at SpaceX, including as launch director for Falcon 9 rocket launches, director of avionics for the Starshield program, and director of Ground Segment.

Anna Menon, 39, is from Houston and earned her bachelor’s degree from Texas Christian University with a double major in mathematics and Spanish. She also holds a master’s in biomedical engineering from Duke University. Menon previously worked in the Mission Control Center at NASA Johnson, supporting medical hardware and software aboard the International Space Station. In 2024, Menon flew to space as a mission specialist and medical officer aboard SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn. The mission saw a new female altitude record, the first commercial spacewalk, and the completion of approximately 40 research experiments. At the time of her selection, Menon was a senior engineer at SpaceX.

Menon is also married to another NASA astronaut, Anil Menon, making them the fourth married couple picked by NASA.

At first I wondered why either would want to leave the private sector to work at NASA, especially considering that the opportunity to fly in space through NASA is going to decline significantly in future years. Its Artemis program will at best launch once a year, carrying four, and when ISS retires NASA’s flights to the commercial stations will be fewer and farther apart.

Then I realized the financial and personal benefits of getting picked and trained by NASA as an astronaut. It is a wonderful item to put on one’s resume. These astronauts don’t have to stay at NASA forever. As the private commercial stations and other private manned capsules begin flying, those companies are going to need trained individuals to fly their ships and run their stations. Most will look for candidates from NASA’s astronaut corps.

The presence of those two SpaceX employees in this class also shows us the shift from the government to private enterprise. In the past almost all of NASA’s astronaut picks would have come from the military and academia (In fact, the other eight astronauts picked this time all have such backgrounds). Rarely would NASA have chosen anyone from the private sector.

The choice of two such private sector individuals by NASA yesterday is simply another indication of the agency’s shift from the top-down government model to the capitalism model. It is finally recognizing the private sector is (and has always been) the heart of America’s space effort, and it is beginning to reward it appropriately.

Even as that private sector begins to take over NASA itself.

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Australian satellite startup to fly an instrument on private mission to Apophis

8:59 am

In March 2024 the orbital tug startup Exlab’s announced that it will use its orbital tug to deliver three cubesats to the asteroid Apophis when that object makes its next close fly-by of the Earth on April 13, 2029.

The California-based Exlab has now signed its first customer for that mission. An Australian satellite startup, Fleet Space Technologies, has agreed to fly an instrument on this private commercial mission.

Under the ApophisExL mission, Fleet will provide geophysical sensing technologies for ExLabs’ mothership to collect targeted data and characterize the asteroid. The datasets should enable new avenues for data sharing and commercial use, set criteria for prioritizing asteroids for prospecting and feed critical intelligence into planetary‑defence planning.

Fleet already has a contract to fly another instrument, a seismometer, on Firefly’s second Blue Ghost lander mission to the Moon. It has also developed and flown satellite instruments used to detect minerals on Earth.

Both companies are clearly aiming to enhance their brand name with this mission, set to launch in 2028.

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Universities in Taiwan and the United Kingdom sign partnership deal

8:42 am

The University of Surrey in the United Kingdom, a decades-long pioneer in cubesat technology, has now signed a partnership deal with the National Central University in Taiwan to work together.

Both universities began their work with cubesats to simply as a low-cost way to teach students about satellite design, but quickly found there was money to be made selling this technology commercially. This deal attempts to make two plus two equal six.

The collaborative plans follow multiple successful engagements between the Universities, from NCU professor Loren Chang joining a Taiwanese delegation to Guildford in March to partnership working between students from each university earlier this summer when Surrey and NCU worked with launch provider Stellar Kinetics at Etlaq Spaceport in Oman. The students worked together to integrate the Jovian-O and SIGHT space payloads that they had developed onto the KEA-1 rocket.

The universities also share research interests. The Surrey Space Centre has built space-based radiation detectors and, as part of the UK’s SWIMMR programme to improve resilience to space weather, developed miniature detectors to measure radiation at different altitudes and created a model for the UK Met Office to predict radiation levels experienced by aircraft.

NCU has developed multiple scientific payloads and small satellite science missions, including the Deep Space Radiation Probe (DSRP), which flew aboard the commercial lunar payload service provider, ispace, Inc.’s Resilience lunar lander, launched in January 2025. DSRP was operational for more than 97% of the five-month mission, providing measurements of the radiation belts, several solar radiation storms and radiation in lunar orbit. It was the first Taiwanese payload to fly and operate beyond Low Earth Orbit.

This deal now enhances both universities and the products both sell (educating students and developing new satellite technologies).

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SpaceX launches classified reconnaissance payload

10:46 am

SpaceX this morning successfully launched a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its 18th flight, landing back at Vandenberg. The two fairing halves completed their 27th and 28th flights respectively. As of posting the payload had not yet been deployed.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

122 SpaceX
54 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 122 to 93.

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A galaxy sunnyside up

9:23 am

A galaxy sunnyside up
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is the Hubble picture of the week. It shows a strange galaxy that defies categorization. From the caption:

The galaxy in question is NGC 2775, which lies 67 million light-years away in the constellation Cancer (The Crab). NGC 2775 sports a smooth, featureless centre that is devoid of gas, resembling an elliptical galaxy. It also has a dusty ring with patchy star clusters, like a spiral galaxy. Which is it, then: spiral or elliptical — or neither?

Because we can only view NGC [2775 from one angle, it’s difficult to say for sure. Some researchers have classified NGC 2775 as a spiral galaxy because of its feathery ring of stars and dust, while others have classified it as a lenticular galaxy. Lenticular galaxies have features common to both spiral and elliptical galaxies. It’s not yet known exactly how lenticular galaxies come to be, and they might form in a variety of ways.

To me, the galaxy most resembles a fried egg, sunnyside up, though I very strongly doubt that was the process that formed it. The bright center however suggests that something there has in the past emitted a lot of energy and radiation, thus clearing out the gas and dust from that center.

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