Tag: spaceflight

Another “What the heck?” image on Mars, this time a mystery on both small and large scales

12:16 pm

What the heck?
Click for the original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

In this case however the camera team picked this spot probably to satisfy their own curiosity. This same location was photographed by MRO back in July 2022, and they were likely wondering if the streaks coming off these dark spots had changed at all in the subsequent years.

As far as I can tell, there has been no significant change, though the highest resolution versions of these images might show more.

The geology in the picture itself is very puzzling. At first glance the dark streaks appear to have been caused by wind blowing the dust from the dark spots. At second glance this doesn’t work, as large dark areas do not appear to be linked to those dark spots.

What is going on here?
» Read more

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ISRO’s head touts private construction of PSLV rocket

9:35 am

In comments published in the Times of India today, the head of India’s space agency ISRO, V Narayanan, enthusiastically touted the fact that a private consortium is presently manufacturing its first PSLV rocket under a five-rocket contract.

Isro chairman V Narayanan revealed this in an exclusive interview to TOI and said the launch, scheduled for the third quarter of this year, will mark a milestone as the first PSLV manufactured by the private sector under a contract for five rockets. The vehicle is in “advanced stages of realisation” with Isro providing technical guidance to the industrial partners.

Sounds good, eh? Actually, this instead appears to be an attempt by ISRO to thwart the Modi government’s desire to transfer ownership of ISRO’s rockets, starting with the long established PSLV rocket, from ISRO to the private sector. This five-rocket deal, first signed in 2022, doesn’t transfer anything. All it does is have private companies build the rocket, something that ISRO has had private companies do for decades. The one difference is that ISRO is no longer listed as the prime contractor, and appears to be somewhat less involved in management.

Well, it is at least a start. Getting government bureaucracies to give up power can sometimes be a struggle that lasts years, unless you are Donald Trump arriving for a second term disgusted with that same struggle during his first term.

The launch, targeting the third quarter of this year, will place a collection of tecnology test payloads into orbit.

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SpaceX engineers given task to review FAA air traffic operations

9:14 am

On February 16, 2025 the new head of the Department of Transportation revealed that he had invited SpaceX to review its air traffic control operations in Virginia and make recommendations.

Tomorrow, members of @elonmusk’s SpaceX team will be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in VA to get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.

Because I know the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon’s team is getting special access, let me make clear that the @FAANews regularly gives tours of the command center to both media and companies.

Many propaganda news reports immediately did exactly what Duffy predicted, quickly finding people to attack both Musk and Duffy for this action and giving them a bull horn for those attacks:

That prompted criticism from some aviation professionals. “SpaceX put people in danger yesterday and their for-profit corporation should reimburse every other for-profit corporation that had to divert, change course or delay because of their operations in the national airspace system,” wrote Steve Jangelis, aviation safety chair for the Air Line Pilots Association, in a social media post after the incident.

Like many in the propaganda press, this article made a big deal about the debris that fell in the Caribbean during the January Starship/Superheavy test flight when Starship broke up soon after stage separation. It however buried this fact to the very end of the article:

In the case if January’s launch, Diez said SpaceX coordinated “debris response areas” with ATO [the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization] beforehand, as it had done on past flights, but this was the first time the areas were activated. “It was only a matter of minutes from when it was activated to when airspace began to be cleared,” she said, sufficient given the time it would take for debris to fall into the airspace. The airspace was cleared in about 15 minutes, she added.

Those debris response areas are developed in coordination with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, said Katie Cranor, acting deputy director of AST’s office of operational safety, on the same panel. After the mishap, she said “only certain sections of the debris response areas were activated to allow traffic to still move freely.”

To put it more bluntly, SpaceX did the proper due diligence before launch — anticipating the possibility of such a failure — and worked well with the FAA to prepare for it. These facts have been conveniently left out of all the reports on that January launch, and we should at least give kudos to this article for finally mentioning it, albeit reluctantly.

Nonetheless, the insane hostile reaction to this invitation for help by the Transportation Department illustrates once again the stupidity of the left. In every case they attack blindly and without any thought at all, hoping such attacks will win them support and hurt their opponents. Instead, it simply makes them look petty and stupid, and is likely convincing their moderate supporters to rethink that support.

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Glacial material even in Mars’ Death Valley

12:23 pm

Glacial material even in Mars' Death Valley
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 25, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this a “layered feature,” which is appropriately vague in order to not prematurely push a conclusion that is not yet proven. Extensive orbital imagery and data however strongly suggests the layers inside this crater are glacial in nature, each layer laid down during Mars’ many thousands of climate cycles as the planet’s rotational tilt swung back and forth from 11 degrees to 60 degrees. According to the most popular theory today, when that tilt was high, the mid-latitudes (where this 3,000-foot-wide unnamed crater is located) were actually colder than the planet’s poles. The water ice at the icecaps would then migrate from the poles to the mid-latitudes, causing the glaciers to grow.

When the tilt was low the process would reverse, with the mid-latitudes now warmer than the poles, causing the glaciers to shrink. The wedding cake nature of these layers is likely because, over time, Mars has steadily lost its total budget of water to space, so with each cycle the glacier could not grow as much.

Though many such glacial-filled craters have been found in the mid-latitudes, reinforcing these theories, the location of this crater is even more interesting.
» Read more

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British rocket startup Skyrora targets ’26 for its first orbital test flight

10:06 am

According to an article yesterday in the British media, the British rocket startup Skyrora is now hoping to do the first orbital test flight of its XL smallsat rocket in 2026, launching from the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands.

The company applied for this launch license with the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) more than a year ago, but still waits an approval. Previously the company had completed in Iceland several successful suborbital test launches in 2018 and 2020, with a last test in 2022 ending in failure.

The company has been around a long time, with relatively little progress. Whether its schedule is realistic remains unknown, and is more questionable because it is burdened by the CAA’s red tape.

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ESA astronaut with no right leg cleared by medical board to fly to ISS

9:47 am

An international medical board has now cleared ESA astronaut John McFall to fly on a future long-duration mission to ISS, despite the fact that his right leg had been lost due to a motorcycle accident when he was nineteen and wears a prosthesis.

He is the first person with such a disability to be medically approved to train for missions to the station. “John is today certified as an astronaut who can fly on a long-duration mission on the International Space Station, and I think this is an incredible step ahead in our ambition to broaden the access to society to space,” Daniel Neuenschwander, ESA’s director of human and robotic exploration, said at a briefing to announce the certification.

ESA selected McFall as part of an astronaut class announced in 2022. That selection process included an effort by ESA to pick what it called at the time a “parastronaut” to see if people with some physical disabilities could safely fly to space.

This is actually a great idea. As one Russia astronaut once said to me, “The legs are mostly useless in weightlessness.” Testing to see how McFall does on a six-month mission will tell us whether the weightlessness environment is a good one for people who can’t walk, as has been theorized for decades.

At the moment McFall has not yet been assigned to any scheduled flight. He joins a class of twelve astronauts selected by ESA in 2022. He is also being considered as a possible astronaut on a proposed all-British tourist flight that Axiom is considering flying.

It is unfortunate that the racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies of the past decade poison this decision. I am certain many will assume McFall’s future flight will be done just for those reasons, and thus will discount it.

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Starlab space station wins $15 million grant from Texas

9:26 am

the proposed Starlab space station
the proposed Starlab space station

Among the grants awarded last week by the new Texas Space Commission, the consortium building the Starlab space station received a $15 million grant to build a facility in Texas.

The Systems Integration Lab will include two labs, the main SIL and a Software Verification Facility. The SIL will house flight-like hardware for testing. In this environment, engineers and astronauts can check systems designed for the Starlab space station, catching any potential issues in advance and ensuring efficient and effective operations in space. The SVF will contain a simulated station environment with flight computers and serve as the primary software integration and requirements verification facility.

Starlab is one of four space stations presently being developed. Starlab had already received a $217.5 million design contract from NASA, as part of the agency’s phase one program to eventually develop two private commercial space stations to replace ISS. NASA also awarded similar development contracts, to Axiom for its Axiom station that will initially be docked to ISS, and to the Orbital Reef station proposal, led by a consortium of companies that includes Blue Origin and Sierra Space.

A fourth company, Vast, did not compete for that phase 1 contract. Instead, it has privately funded its first single modular station, Haven-1, which it is now aiming for a spring 2026 launch. All four station projects are competing to win NASA’s much larger phase 2 contract awards, which will only go to two of these four proposals. At present, this is how I rank their chances:

  • 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 a 30 day mission. 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 also launched three tourist flights to ISS. There are rumors it is experiencing cash flow issues, but it is also going to do a fourth ISS tourist flight this spring, carrying passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland.
  • Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Though Blue Origin has apparently done little, Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building the station’s modules for launch.
  • Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman.

Of all these projects, Starlab appears to have cut the least amount of hardware, which is why I rank it last. At the same time, this grant from Texas is some positive news. In addition, it has partnered aggressively with the European Space Agency (ESA), and appears to have its support for making the station Europe’s ISS replacement. If so, even if it doesn’t win NASA’s phase 2 award it might instead get ESA to fund it. That Europe’s biggest aerospace company Airbus is now one of its major partners clearly helps.

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Ispace’s Resilience lunar lander completes lunar flyby in preparation for entering lunar orbit

10:00 am

The Resilience lunar lander, built by the Japanese startup Ispace and launched in January on the same Falcon 9 rocket as Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, has now completed its closest flyby of the Moon as it prepares to enter lunar orbit sometimes in early May.

The spacecraft is actually still in Earth orbit, but with a apogee that is almost 700,000 miles out, or almost three times the distance of the Moon’s orbit. Once Ispace’s engineers have gotten a precise track of this orbit they will then determine the exact parameters of the engine burn in May that will place Resilience in lunar orbit.

This is Ispace’s second attempt to place a lander on the Moon. The first, Hakuto-R1, came close, but crashed in Atlas Crater (see the map in my previous post) when, at an altitude of several kilometers, its software thought it was only a few feet above the surface and shut the engines off.

Most of the instruments on Resilience are either symbolic or engineering experiments to observe the lander’s operations. It is however carrying a small rover, dubbed Tenacious, which will attempt to travel on the surface.

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Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, targets March 2, 2025 for landing

9:50 am

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

Blue Ghost on February 13, 2025 successfully completed a long four-minute engine burn to complete its transfer from Earth to lunar orbit, with a target date for the actual landing on March 2, 2025.

Now that the lander is in lunar trajectory, over the next 16 days, additional maneuvers will take the lander from an elliptical orbit to a circular orbit around the Moon. Blue Ghost Mission 1 is targeted to land Sunday, March 2, at 3:45 a.m. EST.

NASA has also announced the live stream coverage during landing:

Live coverage of the landing, jointly hosted by NASA and Firefly, will air on NASA+ starting at 2:30 a.m. EST, approximately 75 minutes before touchdown on the Moon’s surface. Learn how to watch NASA content through a variety of platforms, including social media. The broadcast will also stream on Firefly’s YouTube channel. Coverage will include live streaming and blog updates as the descent milestones occur.

I will embed the Firefly live stream when it becomes available.

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Texas commission rejects anti-SpaceX calls to deny company its Starship deluge water permit

2:27 pm

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality this week strongly and finally dismissed the repeated demands by various fringe activist groups to shut down SpaceX’s launch operations at Boca Chica and the use of the deluge system designed to protect the launchpad and the Superheavy booster.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on Thursday denied requests from a dozen area residents and several groups to reconsider the commercial space company’s permit to dump as much as 358,000 gallons of water into wetlands during tests and launches of its Starship rocket from its Starbase east of Brownsville.

Commission Chair Brooke Paup introduced the item as “quite a big deal,” then quickly moved to deny additional hearings on the subject and issue the permit. She said concerns raised by individuals and groups including Save RGV, the South Texas Environmental Justice Network and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas failed to identify “new factual information or an error that would alter the executive director’s decision.

“The hearing requesters did not show that their ability to practice their religion or engage in recreational activities will be affected in a manner different than the general public,” Paup said.

The commission admitted in its ruling that there had been numerous technical errors by both the commission and SpaceX when it initially approved the permit, but none of those errors were significant.

It appears this particular effort by a very tiny minority of leftist anti-Musk activists has finally been shut down. We can only hope that these groups will now fade away, not because they want to give up but because their funding could be gone. I suspect their money came from somewhere within the fraudulent grant programs at EPA and other federal agencies that DOGE has now identified and shut down.

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Starlink Falcon 9 launch sets new reuse record for first stage

2:05 pm

Last night SpaceX successfully launched 21 new Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 26th flight, a new record for the Falcon 9 boosters. That number also exceeded the number of flights the space shuttle Endeavour completed in nineteen years from 1992 to 2011. This SpaceX booster however needed less than three and a half years to do it. Next shuttle record to beat is Columbia’s, which flew 28 times.

The 2025 launch race:

20 SpaceX
7 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab

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Watching a Falcon 9 liftoff from an airplane passenger seat

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I think this launch was in December 2022, from Cape Canaveral. Makes a great start for the weekend.

Hat tip Greg the Geologist.

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A rose in space

10:02 am

A rose in space
Click for original image.

Cool image time! Using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers have taken a very beautiful picture, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, of a nebula dubbed LH 88 that surrounds a star cluster and is located 160,000 light years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The bright stars seen in the image are widely separated, but their motions through space are similar, indicating that they have a common origin. The layered nebulous structures in LH 88 are the remnants of stars that have already died. The delicate leaves of the rose were formed by both the shockwaves from supernovae and the stellar winds of the O and B stars.

The intense radiation of these super giant O and B stars — that burn fast and explode as supernova after only a few million years of life — not only shapes the nebula, it lights the nebula’s different atoms and molecules in different colors, with red/orange representing hydrogen and blue oxygen. The white areas indicate a mixture of both.

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Blue Origin’s CEO lays off 10% of Blue Origin’s workforce to reduce “bureaucracy”

8:56 am

Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO since late in 2023, announced yesterday that the company is laying off 10% of its workforce to in order to reduce the company’s overhead and make it more efficiently run.

From his company-wide email:

We grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed. It also became clear that the makeup of our organization must change to ensure our roles are best aligned with executing these priorities. Sadly, this resulted in eliminating some positions in engineering, R&D, and program/project management and thinning out our layers of management.

I think Limp has finally gotten a full handle on the company after a year and a half in charge, and has now begun reshaping it from the five years of bloated and failed inactivity that occurred during the reing of the previous CEO, Bob Smith. Smith tried to turn Blue Origin into another old-fashioned big space company like Boeing or Northrop Grumman, big and slow and inefficient. Thus, nothing happened there from 2017 to 2023. Since Limp took over Blue Origin has begun to function more like SpaceX, and thus has begun to move. These layoff are probably Limp’s first main effort to clean house.

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Pits formed from sublimating underground ice on Mars?

12:29 pm

Pits formed from sublimating underground ice
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 31, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this “Impact Ejecta with Marginal Pits,” though even on the full image I am not sure what the impact ejecta is. The pits themselves appear to have formed when near-surface ice sublimated away during the summer months. The location is at 59 degrees north latitude, deep within the Martian northern lowland plains. Since orbital data suggests much of those plains at this latitude has an ice table of some thickness near the surface, it is very reasonable to assume these pits formed when summer sunlight heated that ice, turning it to gas which eventually pushed out to form the pits.

But what about the impact ejecta? Where is it? And where is the crater from that impact?
» Read more

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Rocket Lab delivers its third service module for Varda’s orbiting capsules

9:35 am

Rocket Lab yesterday announced it has completed and delivered its third Pioneer service module used in conjunction with the capsules of the in-space manufacturing company Varda, which flies these capsules in orbit for a variety of customers.

The spacecraft will support Varda’s next orbital processing and hypersonic reentry mission, W-3. Earlier this month, the Company’s second spacecraft for Varda, W-2, successfully launched and is currently operating on orbit. Carrying payloads from the Air Force Research Laboratory and NASA’S Ames Research Center, W-2 will also conduct research to expand the capability and capacity of Varda’s pharmaceutical processing hardware in orbit before it’s hypersonic re-entry and recovery in South Australia.

Like its predecessors, W-3 is based on Rocket Lab’s Pioneer spacecraft, leveraging vertically integrated spacecraft components and subsystems, including spacecraft propulsion, flight software, avionics, reaction wheels, star trackers, separation system, solar panels, radios, composite structures and tanks, and more. The spacecraft will provide power, communications, propulsion, and attitude control for Varda’s 120kg manufacturing capsule, which uses microgravity conditions to develop products that are difficult or impossible to create on Earth.

That hypersonic test for the military is presently scheduled for March 2025. Meanwhile Rocket Lab is building the fourth service module for Varda, as part of a four-spacecraft deal.

If Varda begins generating revenues from these first four capsules, it will then likely sign another deal with Rocket Lab.

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Chinese pseudo-company GalaxySpace successfully tests its cell-to-satellite system

9:25 am

The Chinese pseudo-company GalaxySpace yesterday successfully proved its its cell-to-satellite technology works, using a smartphone to connect with one of its recently launched satellites.

At 10:28 a.m., a satellite from the constellation passed over the conference venue in the Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area. On-site staff used their mobile phones to connect to the satellite via a terminal device installed on the rooftop. Through a gateway station in Beijing, they established a connection with personnel in Beijing and Thailand.

Calling Thailand was significant because it signaled the signing of a deal with a major Thailand telecommunications operator to provide this service to that country.

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French rocket startup signs Spanish rocket engine startup to provide attitude thrusters

9:15 am

The French rocket startup MaiaSpace, a subsidiary of Airbus, has awarded the Spanish rocket engine startup Arkadia Space a contract to provide the small attitude thrusters used to maintain the rocket’s course.

MaiaSpace hopes to do its first test orbital launch of its smallsat rocket in 2026, launching from a new commercial launchpad at French Guiana.

Arkadia’s thrusters are somewhat radical.

Arkadia Space, founded in 2020 in Castellón, Spain, develops hydrogen peroxide-based propellant systems for satellites and platforms with a mass of more than 50 kilograms. “The hydrogen peroxide-based propellant offers exceptional performance while significantly reducing cost and environmental impact compared to traditional hydrazine-based Reaction Control Systems,” according to the news release.

Hydrazine thrusters, while practical and lightweight, have the problem that the fuel is very toxic, and requires safety precautions to prevent injury to employees or the public. Using hydrogen peroxide instead likely reduces this issue significantly.

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Judge okays vote on whether SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility can incorporate as city

9:03 am

After reviewing the local petition submitted by SpaceX requesting permission, a local judge as signed an order allowing the citizens of Boca Chica to vote on whether they can incorporate as city in Texas.

The incorporation petition, [Cameron County Judge Eddie] Treviño explained, was duly signed by at least ten percent of the qualified voters of Starbase. Additionally, the petition satisfied the statutorily required elements and set forth satisfactory proof that Starbase contains the requisite number of inhabitants as required by law and the area to be incorporated is not part of another incorporated city or town.

Since the submitted petition met all statutory requirements, Treviño said he is required under Section 8.009 of the Texas Local Government Code to order that an incorporation election be held on a specific date and at a designate place in the community.

The election is set to occur during the general election on Saturday, May 3rd, 2025.

SpaceX itself had organized the petition and submitted it to the county in mid-December, noting that it already “…currently performs several civil functions around Starbase due to its remote location, including management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents. Incorporation would move the management of some of these functions to a more appropriate public body.”

Expect the petition to be approved, making Starbase at Boca Chica one of the most spectacular company towns ever to exist.

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European underwater neutrino telescope detects most powerful neutrino ever

8:53 am

A European underwater neutrino telescope that is still under construction recorded evidence in February 2023 of most powerful neutrino particle ever detected.

KM3NeT’s two neutrino detectors — one off the coast of Sicily, the other near southern France — are still under construction but already collecting data. Both contain cables hundreds of meters tall, which are strung with bundles of light sensors anchored to the seafloor.

When cosmic neutrinos interact with matter in or near a KM3NeT detector, they spawn charged particles such as muons. As those muons careen through water, they give off feeble flashes of bluish light that KM3NeT’s sensors can pick up. Clocking when different sensors spot this light can reveal a particle’s path; the brightness of the blue hue reflects the particle’s energy.

On February 13, 2023, the detector near Sicily was run through by an extremely energetic muon traveling nearly parallel to the horizon. At the time, only 21 of the planned 230 sensor cables were in place. Based on the muon’s energy and trajectory, KM3NeT scientists determined it must have been spawned by a neutrino from space rather than a particle from the atmosphere.

Simulations suggest the neutrino’s energy was around 220 petaelectron volts. The previous record holder boasted around 10 petaelectron volts.

Tracking that trajectory backwards, astronomers say the particle came from a region of space where there are a lot of active galaxies, any one of which could be the source of the neutrino. It is also possible the neutrino came instead from an interaction of high energy cosmic rays and the photons from the faint microwave background left over from the Big Bang.

As noted very correctly by one scientist, “At this point, it’s very difficult to make conclusions about the origins,” says Kohta Murase, a theoretical physicist at Penn State not involved in the research. “It’s dangerous to rely on one event.”

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NASA announces March 12, 2025 as new launch date for next crew to ISS

9:47 am

NASA yesterday announced that it is now targeting March 12, 2025 as new launch date for sending the next crew to ISS, thus moving that date up about one week.

The earlier launch opportunity is available following a decision by mission management to adjust the agency’s original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission that requires additional processing time. The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements. Teams will work to complete Dragon’s refurbishment and ready the spacecraft for flight, which includes trunk stack, propellant load, and transportation to SpaceX’s hangar at 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to be mated with the mission’s Falcon 9 rocket. This will be the fourth mission to the station for this Dragon, which previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights.

Both NASA and SpaceX are touting this as a great decision because it will allow the present ISS crew (which includes the two astronauts initially launched on Starliner last year) to get home quicker.

The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it, and those delays pushed back both the launch of a new crew and the return of the old. So, while everyone is spinning this as SpaceX and NASA brilliantly improvising to get those Starliner astronauts home sooner, the real story is that their return had been significantly delayed by almost two months by SpaceX’s inability to get the capsule ready as promised.

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Firefly wins $8.2 million grant from Texas Space Commission

9:36 am

The new Texas Space Commission, established in 2023 by the state legislature and appropriated $350 million to encourage the development of a Texas aerospace industry, has awarded the rocket and lunar lander company Firefly $8.2 million grant.

Firefly said the funding will result in an additional 5,600 square feet of cleanroom space at its 50,000-square-foot spacecraft facility in Cedar Park, as well as added ground and test equipment, a spacecraft pressure proof test facility at the 200-acre campus in Briggs that has 200,000-square-feet of facilities, and upgraded infrastructure for mission operations and labs. The company’s Cedar Park headquarters is 28,000 square feet. The improvements are expected to be completed by the end of this year.

The 50 jobs will be added in engineering, quality assurance, manufacturing and spacecraft operations, according to the announcement. The grant also will enable the company to expand STEM outreach and internship programs, including working with the schools in the University of Texas System to provide hands-on experience in spacecraft development.

Though the commission was given $350 million to help industry, in truth the legislature allocated $200 million of that money to build a new “research and training facility” at Texas A&M. While this might help encourage engineering students to come to Texas and thus settle there within the industry, to me it looks like the commission was mostly created to distribute a very large chunk of cash to this one university.

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Orbex scouts Saxaford in advance of first launch

9:25 am

Map of spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea

Though no details have been released, a team from the British rocket startup Orbex has arrived at the Saxaford spaceport in the Shetland Islands to begin preparations for the company’s first launch there, now planned to occur before the end of this year.

Originally Orbex was going to do its launches from the United Kingdom’s other proposed spaceport in Sutherland on the northern coast of Scotland. It had obtained a 50-year-lease to build its own dedicated launch facility, had built its rocket manufacturing facility nearby, and had originally hoped to do the first test orbital launch of its Prime rocket in 2022.

Three years later the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had still not issued Orbex or Sutherland the necessary launch licenses. Faced with bankruptcy if it didn’t launch soon, in December the company announced it was switching its first launch to Saxaford, where the CAA had completed spaceport licensing. It hoped the CAA would thus be able to give it a launch license quickly. We shall see.

Note that the news is slow today. As much as I want to post lots of stuff, I can’t if nothing of significance appears to be happening.

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China and SpaceX complete launches

12:02 pm

Both China and SpaceX successfully completed launches today.

First, China completed the first launch of its Long March 8A rocket, an upgraded and more powerful version of its Long March 8 rocket. The rocket lifted off from China’s coastal Wencheng spaceport, and put the second batch (number unrevealed) of one of China’s new mega internet constellations.

Along with the basic Long March-8 model and the booster-free tandem configuration, it forms the Long March 8 series of rockets, providing a payload capacity range of 3 tons, 5 tons, and 7 tons to SSO. This significantly enhances China’s satellite networking capabilities for low and medium Earth orbits.

These rockets and the coastal spaceport will also allow China to steadily reduce its reliance on its older family of rockets that use toxic hypergolic fuels and launch from within China.

Next SpaceX launched another 21 Starliink satellites, including 13 with direct-to-cell capabilities, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 18th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The 2025 launch race:

19 SpaceX
7 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab

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A Pakistani rover will fly on China’s Chang’e-8 mission to the Moon

9:18 am

Pakistan and China have finalized plans to place a Pakistani rover on China’s Chang’e-8 lunar lander mission.

This rover partnership was first announced in November 2024. This new release appears to provide a bit more information about the rover itself.

The rover will have a mass of around 35 kilograms and carry science payloads for studying lunar soil composition, radiation levels, plasma properties and testing new technologies for sustainable human presence on the Moon. It will also feature a collaborative scientific payload developed by Chinese and European researchers.

The Chang’e-8 mission is targeting a 2030 launch and will land in the Moon’s south pole region. China also claims it will initiate construction of China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), but that’s a bit of hyperbole. All it shall be is another unmanned lander with two rovers and other instruments, hardly a manned base. What will matter will be what follows, and how quickly.

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Blue Ghost leaves Earth orbit

9:06 am

Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon
Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has successfully completed the mid-course correction engine burn that has taken it out of Earth orbit and into a transfer orbit to the Moon.

After a successful Trans Lunar Injection burn on Saturday, Feb. 8, Firefly’s spacecraft carrying NASA science and tech to the Moon has departed Earth’s orbit and begun its four-day transit to the Moon’s orbit. Blue Ghost will then spend approximately 16 days in lunar orbit before beginning its descent operations. Since launching more than three weeks ago, Blue Ghost has performed dozens of health tests generating 13 gigabytes of data. All 10 NASA payloads onboard are currently healthy and ready for surface operations on the Moon.

I post the artist’s rendering of Blue Ghost to the right to contrast its design with Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander that fell over when it landed last year. Note how much lower to the ground Blue Ghost is. This will certainly reduce the chances it will have the same problem as Odysseus, even if one leg breaks upon landing.

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SpaceX launches another batch of Starlink satellites

8:28 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched 22 or 23 Starlink satellites (the reports vary), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its 23rd flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific. At present one other SpaceX booster has flown more, 25 times.

The 2025 launch race:

18 SpaceX
6 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab

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The payloads on Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander, including a hopper and a rover

9:32 am

The Moon's south pole, with candidate landing sites
Click for NASA’s original image.

Link here. Athena is scheduled for launch on February 26, 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The article is mostly focused on describing the Gracie hopper, which will attempt to hop into the permanent shadows inside a nearby crater.

Though no announcement has ever been made, it appears the landing site for this lander has been changed. Previously it had been targeting a ridge adjacent to Shackleton Crater, at the south pole and shown on the map to the right. That location however required a launch in January. The delay to February seems to have shifted the landing site.

If all goes to plan, Athena will land on a plateau just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole. This region is thought to be rich in water ice, and IM-2 will prospect for the precious resource with the help of some ride-along robots, including a pioneering hopper nicknamed Gracie.

Though I cannot find any specific information on where this location is, I strongly suspect it is the site that Intuitive Machines’ lander, Nova-C (also dubbed Odysseus), attempted to reach last year.

The yellow boxes on the map indicate NASA’s candidate landing zones for its Artemis-3 manned mission.

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Germany commits almost a million dollars to build off-shore launch platform

9:08 am

The Germany government has now allocated $897,000 to a private consortium of four companies to help finance its promised but delayed an off-shore launch platform.

The North Sea launch platform is being developed by the German Offshore Spaceport Alliance (GOSA), a joint venture formed in December 2020 by Tractebel DOC Offshore, MediaMobil, OHB, and Harren Shipping Services. The platform will be constructed on the 170-metre-long Combi Dock I vessel and will accommodate launchers with a mass of between 36 and 52 tonnes. A 2020 feasibility study stated that the development and operation of the North Sea launch platform would cost between €22 and €30 million over six years.

The consortium had first announced the project in 2023, with the first launch of several suborbital test rockets in 2024. Since then little has been heard of this project, with those launches never occurring.

If built as promised, this platform would accommodate rockets as large as the Falcon Heavy. Its goal, besides offering the platform to all rocket companies, is apparently to give German rocket startups the option of a German spaceport so they don’t have to depend on other countries.

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Falklands public wants the freedom to choose between OneWeb and Starlink

8:53 am

Even as the Falklands government is demanding its money back from OneWeb for not activating its service on time, it appears the public on those islands has buying and using Starlink terminals, even though it is presently illegal to use it there.

The high level of Starlink usage sparked a successful petition backed by 70% of the island’s population. This petition demanded both a reduction of the £5,400 FIG VSAT licence fee and formal approval for Starlink’s operation in the Falkland Islands.

In response, a Starlink Select Committee – comprising all of the island’s MLAs – convened from July to October 2024. The committee formally endorsed the petition’s demands, and the proposal was subsequently forwarded to the Falkland Islands Government (FIG) for implementation. However, the effective date for this approval has now been delayed until April.

Because Sure International holds an exclusive monopoly telecommunications licence, Starlink’s use in the islands is currently illegal. Nonetheless, this restriction has not prevented the widespread installation of hundreds of Starlink terminals, which remain unlicensed.

Sure International apparently provides internet service though traditional land lines. The cost difference compared to Starlink is considerable, with Starlink being far cheaper and providing much faster speeds. Meanwhile, OneWeb has failed to deliver and is losing this business. By April expect Starlink to be approved.

Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.

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