Tag: spaceflight

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 Exlabs 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 Exlabs 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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The swamp comes up with a swamp solution for promoting space

9:01 am

Like pigs at the trough
Like pigs at the trough

A group of senators last week announced the re-introduction of a bill they had proposed previously in 2023 that they claim would encourage new spaceport development across the United States. From their press release:

Today, U.S. Senators John Hickenlooper, John Cornyn, Ben Ray Luján, and Roger Wicker introduced the bipartisan Spaceport Project Opportunities for Resilient Transportation (SPACEPORT) Act, which would encourage the development of commercial spaceports through the modernization of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Space Transportation Infrastructure Matching (STIM) grant program.

Spaceports, including the Colorado Air and Space Port in Adams County, are ground-based launch and reentry sites that can be used to support public and private ventures into space. “Spaceports are Colorado’s gateway to the commercial space boom, and we need to prioritize that infrastructure if we want to stay at the top of the space industry,” said Hickenlooper. “American space exploration has come a long way, but we can and should go even further,” said Cornyn. “By investing in our spaceport infrastructure, this legislation helps ensure the U.S. space industry remains competitive and is prepared to handle future national security threats.”

Though two of these four senators are Republicans (Cornyn and Wicker), the political leanings of this group is decidedly uni-party and establishment based. Polls for example show that Cornyn is not liked by conservatives in Texas, and will lose a primary challenge from the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton. Wicker doesn’t have the same polling issues, but he has also taken positions that suggests he is a willing member of the Republican establishment that has resisted change for decades.

And the actual bill [pdf] itself proves that all four senators are pure swamp. It doesn’t do anything to directly support spaceport development, as Hickenlooper and Cornyn claim. Instead, it would create a $10 million grant fund that the transportation secretary could hand out willy-nilly each year to political friends and buddies. It would also require the heads of Transportation, Defense, Commerce, and NASA to issue a report every four years that simply reviews the state of America’s space industry and describes it.

The bill does nothing to reduce regulation, the main obstacle blocking the U.S. rocket and space industry. If anything, it allows that red tape to flourish by creating this slush fund that politicians can later use to bribe private companies. The report itself will require more bureaucrats and paperwork, and will act to prevent that bureaucracy from doing its regulatory responsibilities, thus slowing license approvals further.

Introducing a bill like this does not guarantee passage of course. It failed previously in 2023. I suspect it is even more likely to fail now, because the trend appears to be moving away from this kind of funding and legal gabblygook.

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Failed launch by Iran

11:49 pm

Though information is at present scarce and contradictory, Iran in the past few days appears to have made one or two launch attempts, either of a missile system near Tehran or of its orbital Zoljanah rocket from its Semnan spaceport to the east.

According to this Newsweek report, the launch was of a “suspected missile system … near its capital, Tehran.”

According to this tweet from astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who monitors such activity, it was a “possible failed orbital launch attempt … of an IRGC Zoljanah launch vehicle from Semnan, Iran.”

There is also this tweet from Iran media, which calls it a “missile” and a “test” that failed.

I think these conflicting reports are describing the same launch. If its the latter, then the question is whether it was a Zoljanah rocket, and if so was it attempting its first orbital launch after two suborbital tests in ’21 and ’22?

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South Korean rocket startup Innospace wins launch and marketing contract with German broadcast company

9:31 am

The South Korean rocket startup Innospace announced last week that it has signed a $5.8 million launch with the German broadcast company Media Broadcast Satellites (MBS) to not only launch two MBS satellites in 2026 and 2028 using its Hanbit rocket, but to have MBS market the rocket in Germany.

Under the agreement, INNOSPACE will carry out two HANBIT launch missions to deploy MBS satellites into Low Earth orbit (LEO), with one launch in 2026 and the other planned by 2028. In both launch missions, MBS satellites will serve as the primary payloads, with priority in launch scheduling and orbit determination.

INNOSPACE also signed a separate contract on the same day, officially appointing MBS as its exclusive agent for launch service sales and marketing within Germany, marking the company’s entry into the European space launch market. Following the contract, MBS will exclusively distribute launch services based on the HANBIT series to satellite customers in Germany.

Innospace has not yet launched Hanbit. It had hoped to attempt the first launch in July, but in May it delayed it to the end of 2025 due to issues found in a first stage pump. The launch itself will take place at Brazil’s long abandoned Alcântara spaceport on that nation’s northeast coast.

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Avio wins U.S. launch contract for its Vega-C rocket

9:19 am

Capitalism in space: In what I think is a first, the Italian rocket company Avio has won a Vega-C launch contract without any participation from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) commercial division Arianespace.

The contract is also with an American company, SpaceLaunch, to put an “institutional Earth observation satellite” in orbit in 2027.

The significance of the deal is that Avio is now successfully marketing and selling its Vega-C rocket, without the middleman Arianespace taking a cut. As part of the shift of ESA and Europe to the capitalism model, whereby it no longer runs things but acts merely as a customer, it also freed Avio from the clutches of Arianespace. Previously, Avio built the rocket for that government agency, which then marketed and sold it to satellite companies. Avio had no control over profit or price. In fact, it didn’t really own its own rocket.

This absurd situation is now ending. There are still a handful of Vega-C launches that were contracted for under Arianespace, but after these Avio will be completely in charge. This deal, announced yesterday, is the beginning of that process.

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