Tag: spaceflight

Recovering Maven appears increasingly dim

8:57 am

According to a NASA update late yesterday, engineers have still not been able to recover the Maven Mars orbiter since all communications ceased suddenly on December 6, and are now facing a month-long period when the Sun will block all communications with Mars entirely.

The MAVEN team also continues to analyze tracking data fragments recovered from a Dec. 6 radio science campaign. This information is being used to create a timeline of possible events and identify likely root cause of the issue. As part of that effort, on Dec. 16 and 20, NASA’s Curiosity team used the rover’s Mastcam instrument in an attempt to image MAVEN’s reference orbit, but MAVEN was not detected. Additional analysis will continue, but planned monitoring will be affected by the upcoming solar conjunction.

Mars solar conjunction – a period when Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the Sun – begins Monday, Dec. 29, and NASA will not have contact with any Mars missions until Friday, Jan. 16. Once the solar conjunction window is over, NASA plans to resume its efforts to reestablish communications with MAVEN.

That December 6th tracking data had suggested the spacecraft was tumbling. Though NASA management has not yet given up hope, the longer the spacecraft remains out of touch and in an uncontrolled state, the less chance there will be for it to survive. Batteries will drain, equipment will freeze, and the spacecraft will die. Right now, that appears to be its fate.

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India launches AST SpaceMobile’s sixth Bluebird satellite

8:39 pm

India’s space agency ISRO today (December 24 in India) successfully launched AST SpaceMobile’s sixth Bluebird satellite into orbit, its Bahubali rocket (LVM3) lifting off from its Sriharikota spaceport on India’s eastern coast.

This Bluebird is an upgrade from the first five satellites, providing ten times the bandwidth. The constellation acts as satellite cell towers for smart phones. These Bluebird satellites have been the largest in size ever launched, and this satellite will break their previous records. It is also the heaviest satellite India’s Bahubali rocket has ever put in orbit, on its sixth launch.

For India, this is its fourth launch in 2025. The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

168 SpaceX
86 China
18 Rocket Lab
15 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 168 to 144.

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Hubble images gigantic protoplanetary disk

10:20 am

Largest known protoplanetary disk
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on February 8, 2025, and shows what scientists believe is the largest protoplanetary disk so far measured.

Located roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth, IRAS 23077+6707, nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito,” spans nearly 400 billion miles — 40 times the diameter of our solar system to the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt of cometary bodies. The disk obscures the young star within it, which scientists believe may be either a hot, massive star, or a pair of stars. And the enormous disk is not only the largest known planet-forming disk; it’s also shaping up to be one of the most unusual.

…The impressive height of these features wasn’t the only thing that captured the attention of scientists. The new images revealed that vertically imposing filament-like features appear on just one side of the disk, while the other side appears to have a sharp edge and no visible filaments. This peculiar, lopsided structure suggests that dynamic processes, like the recent infall of dust and gas, or interactions with its surroundings, are shaping the disk.

You can read the peer-reviewed paper here [pdf]. The structure of this system has left them with more questions than answers. They can’t see the central star due to the dust. They don’t know if any planets exist as yet in the system. They don’t really understand the structural details that they can see.

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Starlink added a million new customers in just the past month

9:58 am

According to a tweet by SpaceX yesterday, Starlink now has nine million active customers in 155 countries worldwide.

These numbers tell us the company is now getting more than a billion dollars per month in revenues, based on what it charges for its various plans. What make the numbers even more startling is how fast they are growing.

In a similar post from November 5, SpaceX said Starlink had 8 million customers, meaning that its customer base has expanded at a rate of more than 20,000 per day since that date.

At more than billion dollars per month, SpaceX essentially has about half the annual revenue of NASA, which it can use far more efficiently. And those numbers will only increase in the coming years, as the company opens up new markets worldwide and begins launching its upgraded Starlink satellites with Starship.

It still seems to me puzzling why, with these numbers, Musk is considering making the company public this coming summer. Though that move would bring in a gigantic amount of new investment capital from the stock sale, it would also subject the company to serious government regulation as a publicly-traded company. The Starlink revenue can only grow. Why add government interference when you can live without it?

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JAXA identifies cause of H3 rocket failure

9:44 am

In releasing today the preliminary results of its investigation into the failure on December 21, 2025 of the upper stage of its H3 rocket, Japan’s space agency pinned the likely cause on the rocket’s fairings.

Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency officials told a science ministry panel on Dec. 23 they suspect an abnormal separation of the rocket’s payload fairing—a protective nose cone shield—caused a critical drop in pressure in the second-stage engine’s hydrogen tank.

Engineers think the fairing might have hit the rocket at separation, damaging the tank.

Japan at present has no way to launch payloads. It has no operating independent commercial rocket companies, and its JAXA-owned H3 and Epsilon-S rockets have had repeated problems. The H3 failed on its first launch in 2023, causing a year-long delay, and Epsilon-S still in limbo because of repeated failures during development.

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No contact with Mars’ rovers for the next month

9:21 am

The Sun is about going to cause a month-long break in communications with Curiosity and Perseverance, the two rovers on Mars.

This communications pause occurs every two years, when the orbits of Earth and Mars align with the Sun in between.

This holiday season coincides with conjunction — every two years, because of their different orbits, Earth and Mars are obstructed from one another by the Sun; this one will last from Dec. 27 to Jan. 20. We do not like to send commands through the Sun in case they get scrambled, so we have been finishing up a few last scientific observations before preparing Curiosity for its quiet conjunction break.

This is not a unique situation. Both rovers have gone through conjunction several times previously. The science teams will place the rovers in secure positions to hold them over during the break.

As for the orbiters circling Mars, it isn’t clear how much their operations will be impacted. The update at the link above makes no mention of them, and my memory says communications with them is less hampered, though reduced somewhat.

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China’s Long March 12A launches but fails to land the first stage

9:21 pm

China’s new Long March 12A reusable rocket completed its first launch today (December 23 in China), lifting off from the Jiuquan space spaceport in northwest China. The attempt to softly land the first stage vertically at a landing pad down range however failed.

According to one report, the rocket’s upper stage reached orbit, but this remains unconfirmed. A Google-translation of this Chinese state-run report confirmed the failure of the first stage:

The rocket lifted off successfully after ignition, and its flight appeared normal during the visual observation phase. However, reports from the recovery site indicated an anomaly during the first stage’s re-entry, resulting in a “mushroom cloud” formation, and the successful recovery of the first stage was not achieved.

Several Chinese outlets showed the same image of that cloud. This is the second unsuccessful attempt by China this month to land a first stage, the first being the December 2nd attempt by the Chinese pseudo-company Landspace’s Zhuque-3 rocket. The Long March 12A is built by the government, so there is no make-believe company involved.

UPDATE: China’s state-run press has confirmed the upper stage reached orbit.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

168 SpaceX
86 China (a new record)
18 Rocket Lab
15 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 168 to 143.

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The first launch by South Korean rocket startup Innospace fails shortly after liftoff

8:47 pm

Less than five seconds after launch

Though details are not yet available, the first launch by South Korean rocket startup Innospace of its Hanbit-Nano rocket failed less than 2 minutes after liftoff from Brazil’s long unused Alcantera spaceport. The failure occurred sometime after the rocket passed through max-q, the moment when the aerodynamic pressure of the atmosphere and the speed of the rocket stresses the rocket the most.

The live stream provided no details, other than to say “we experienced an anomaly during the flight.” No other details have yet been released.

The image to the right is a screen capture of the rocket lifting off the pad, less than a few seconds after T-0. Though the rocket appeared to move upward in a smooth controlled flight, soon thereafter it became impossible to see anything but the bright engine flame at its base. Either the flames were so bright it overexposed the live stream, or the fire was spreading beyond the nozzles. At the moment however we know nothing about what happened.

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Tory Bruno resigns as CEO of United Launch Alliance

3:47 pm

According a brief announcement today from Robert Lightfoot (ULA Lockheed Martin Board Chair) and Kay Sears (ULA Boeing Board Chair), Tory Bruno has resigned as CEO and president of United Launch Alliance, effective immediately.

After nearly 12 years leading United Launch Alliance (ULA), current ULA President and CEO Tory Bruno has resigned to pursue another opportunity.

We are grateful for Tory’s service to ULA and the country, and we thank him for his leadership.

Effective immediately, John Elbon is named as the Interim CEO. We have the greatest confidence in John to continue strengthening ULA’s momentum while the board proceeds with finding the next leader of ULA. Together with Mark Peller, the new COO, John’s career in aerospace and his launch expertise is an asset for ULA and its customers, especially for achieving key upcoming Vulcan milestones.

No further information was provided.

The timing is intriguing, as after a decade of effort, Bruno was about to get ULA’s new Vulcan rocket launching on a regular basis. I could speculate, but at the moment there isn’t enough information to make even a good guess.

Hat tip to reader Gary.

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Florida opposition grows against renewing Blue Origin’s wastewater permit

9:32 am

Chicken Little strikes again!
Chicken Little gains support!

It appears the political opposition by local politicians and activists against renewing Blue Origin’s wastewater permit for its Florida rocket facilities is growing, and could result in major delays for the company.

Four weeks ago, Cocoa Beach Realtor Jill Steinhauser launched an online petition opposing Blue Origin’s draft permit to discharge wastewater into the Indian River Lagoon, writing that “decades of nutrient pollution, algae blooms, seagrass collapse, habitat loss, and record manatee deaths have pushed this fragile ecosystem to the edge.” Since then, Space Coast buzz has significantly grown opposing Blue Origin’s permit-renewal bid to operate a 490,000-gallon-per-day industrial wastewater treatment facility at its massive rocket manufacturing plant just south of the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.

And on Thursday, Dec. 18 — the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s deadline date for public comment — Steinhauser submitted 43,475 verified petition signatures to the state agency.

A five-year permit had first been issued in 2020, and now needs to be renewed. Steinhauser’s campaign has apparently caught the interest of local Democratic Party politicians, who see another great way for them to to block another American success. In early December the Democrats on the Brevard county commission came out against renewing the permit, and followed up with an official vote of opposition shortly thereafter. This was then backed by the Cape Canaveral City Council on December 16th. That same week “eight Democratic state legislators signed a letter opposing Blue Origin’s draft permit.”

It appears that unlike SpaceX’s closed loop system, Blue Origin’s system is open-looped, which carries the possibility that its system can overflow into the Indian River Lagoon. However, officials from Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) note that the system has more than ample capacity to avoid such an overflow.

The facility’s flow averages about 40,000 gallons per day, which is less than 10% of the maximum limit. The industrial wastewater covered by the permit does not come into contact with fuel or other hazardous materials, and it is discharged into a 9¼-acre stormwater retention pond. If the pond reaches its designed holding capacity during heavy rainfall, it overflows through a 3-mile-long drainage ditch along Ransom Road before eventually reaching the lagoon.

Though it is likely that this opposition will fail in the end, it could cause a delay in the permit renewal. If that happens, Blue Origin might find its launch plans for 2026 seriously hampered.

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Third proposed UK spaceport gets conditional airspace approval

9:09 am

Map of spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea

The third proposed spaceport in Scotland, located on the northwest coast of the island of North Uist (as shown on the map to the right) has now received a conditional airspace approval by the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

While the airspace is designated as permanent, it will not be restricted indefinitely. Instead, it will be “activated by Notice to Aviation (NOTAM)” only when launch operations are scheduled to occur. The CAA noted that the approval is “subject to conditions” that the change sponsor must satisfy before the airspace can be fully utilised. Detailed regulatory assessments and the specific list of conditions are expected to be published on the CAA’s Airspace Change Portal shortly.

The spaceport’s airspace is set to become legally effective on Thursday, January 22.

Based on the CAA’s past behavior, this approval means very little. It will still require long lead times to issue any specific launch approvals, making any planned launches at this spaceport as difficult as all the other spaceports that have attempted to lift off from Great Britain. Those red tape delays put Virgin Orbit out of business. It has caused Orbex to abandon the Sutherland spaceport, which increasingly looks like a dead project. And it has caused numerous other small rocket startups to look everywhere else but Great Britain for a launch site.

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A tour of Stoke Space

8:01 am

Nova upper stage static fire test

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut yesterday released a long video in which he got a new tour the Stoke Space facility, led by the company’s CEO and founder, Andy Lapsa.

I have embedded that video below. The image to the right is a screen capture of a static fire test of the company’s Nova rocket’s upper stage engine that was done at the end of the tour. The engine uses a radical design of a ring of small nozzles, with a heat shield in the middle. The design aims to allow that upper stage to return to Earth for reuse, after it has deployed its payload. Nova’s first stage will also be reusable, landing vertically like the Falcon 9.

Though as usual Lapsa said nothing about schedule, it appears that the company is getting very close to its first launch. It appears the company’s launchpad in Florida will be ready for launch early in 2026. It also appears that all the rocket’s components are falling into place.

Lapsa noted that though both stages are designed to land and be reused, the goal for that first launch is simply to demonstrate they can get the rocket into orbit. Neither stage will attempt a landing. Once they’ve got that success under their belt, they will then go for other milestones.

Right now only SpaceX and Stoke Space are working to build a completely reusable rocket. SpaceX is going very big, with Starship. Stoke is aiming for the Falcon 9 market. If successful, it will be able to beat that rocket in price.
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