Tag: spaceflight

Russia further centralizes and consolidates its shrinking space sector

9:43 am

Roscosmos: a paper tiger
Roscosmos: a paper tiger

Russia’s state-run TASS press agency today announced that the operations of much of its space sector has now been moved to a newly completed centralized facility on the west side of Moscow.

Over 30 enterprises of Russia’s rocket and space industry, based in Moscow, will move their production sites to the newly created National Space Center, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Bakanov said. “We now have a single platform, where 35 enterprises will be concentrated in one area,” Bakanov said in the National Space Center, visited by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday.

The National Space Center opened in Moscow on Saturday. A complex of building with the total area of 276,000 square meters, is located in the West of Moscow. It’s a joint project of the Moscow Government and Roscosmos.

Sounds neat, eh? In fact, this illustrates how Russia’s space sector is declining. First, Putin in the 2000s centralized the entire industry into a single corporation, Roscosmos, run by the government. That Soviet-style top-down structure eliminated competition and acted to block new companies from forming.

Second, when Russia invaded the Ukraine in 2022 Roscosmos lost billions in revenue when its international customer base cancelled all their contracts and boycotted the country.

Consolidating all these “companies”, which are simply divisions of Roscosmos, into this one facility might save money, but it prevents independent action and competition. It also indicates Russia’s lack of cash.

Most importantly, this move presages the eventually shutdown of many of Russia’s space operations when ISS is retired. Russia has said it is building a new station, but its ability to launch anything new has been abysmal in the 21st century. Routinely it announces new projects which never fly. There is no reason to expect its proposed space station to be anything different.

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Progress docks safely with Zvezda module at ISS

9:24 am

ISS as of today
ISS as of today. Click for original.

In what is increasingly a worrisome procedure, Russia’s just launched Progress freighter successfully docked with the aft port of the Zvezda module at ISS this past weekend, bringing with it more than 5,000 pounds of supplies and research equipment.

The image to the right, annotated additionally by me, shows the present configuration of spacecraft at ISS. The concerns center on the stress fractures that have been found in the Zvezda hull, fractures that have caused the air leak on ISS and are believed attributable to the many dockings to the module since its launch in the late ’90s, as well as the module’s age. It was first built in the late ’80s, making it almost four decades old.

For recent dockings, NASA now closes the hatch between the Russian and American halves of the stations, just in case Zvezda experiences a catastrophic failure. The Russians seem less concerned, but nonetheless they also take extra care during dockings. It is my understanding their astronauts prepare their Soyuz capsule as a lifeboat and immediately escape during these operations.

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Starlink down for about an hour last night

8:53 am

According to several major news sources, Starlink was down for about an hour last night globally, impacting several tens of thousands in the U.S. alone.

More than 37,000 US users were reporting issues with the internet service Monday at 12:30 a.m. ET, according to the website Downdetector.com. By 1:30 a.m., that number had fallen into the hundreds. The internet service owned by Musk’s SpaceX stopped working on “the entire frontline in Ukraine” around 7:30 a.m. Kyiv time (12.30 a.m. ET), said Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems force, on Telegram. As of 8:00 a.m., service was gradually being restored, he said.

I link to CNN, but numerous other outlets thought this story significant enough to give it front page coverage. That this is considered news, however, illustrates perfectly how well Starlink functions normally. A brief outage lasting less than an hour makes the cover of every news outlet in the world, because normally Starlink works without problems for its more than six million subscribers.

SpaceX has not as yet provided any information about the cause of the outage. I suspect we are seeing the result of a hacker attack, possibly by Russia, but that is pure speculation. Even if not, it is in SpaceX’s interest to outline in detail what happened. This has been its policy in the past, but in the previous outage in July the company was not forthcoming. That lack of transparency has not served the company well.

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Space station startup Vast endorses NASA’s new strategy that no longer requires a continuous human presence in space

8:02 am

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

Officials from the space station startup Vast revealed at a conference last week that they endorse NASA’s new strategy that, not only no longer requires the commercial stations to immediately establish a continuous human presence in space, will also award multiple development contracts to the commercial stations.

Speaking Sept. 11 at the Global Aerospace Summit, Max Haot [chief executive of Vast] endorsed NASA’s new strategy, announced more than a month ago, that calls for multiple Space Act Agreements to support development leading to a four-person, 30-day demonstration mission. “We think it’s really the right direction,” he said, noting it accelerates the award timeline. NASA said in a draft solicitation this month it expects to award multiple funded agreements by April 2026, months sooner than under earlier plans.

The original plan had been to choose at most two, but likely only one of the four consortiums/companies that are developing station proposals. The winner would have gotten a big contract that would have also required it to push hard for continuous full time occupation, from day one.

The new plan will instead award smaller development contracts to as many as three of the four station projects, aimed at getting them off the ground and operating, even if astronauts only fly in them intermittently. Eventually the hope is that their capabilities will expand quickly to permanent occupation, especially if they start earning revenue from the private sector, outside NASA. In fact, the smaller government contracts will force them to seek investment and profits elsewhere.

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

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SpaceX launches Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter to ISS

8:13 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter with more than five tons of cargo, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The two fairing halves completed their 3rd and 6th flights respectively. Cygnus is expected to be berthed to ISS using the robot arm on September 24, 2025. This is also the first flight of the stretched version of Cygnus, capable of carrying more cargo.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

118 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 118 to 92. China also had its own launch scheduled for this evening, but no information about it has yet been released.

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Two launches in the past day

12:19 pm

The beat goes on. Since yesterday afternoon there have been two more global rocket launches, by Russia and SpaceX.

First, Russia launched the sixth GPS-type satellite as part of its next generation Glonass constellation, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia. The rocket’s lower stage fell several different drop zones in Russia. No word if they landed near any habitable areas.

Next, SpaceX this morning launched another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 28th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

117 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 117 to 92.

As for the rankings for the most reuse by a rocket, this is the present leader board:

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

Sources here and here.

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House committee support for threatened NASA missions is actually quite questionable

9:26 am

According to a House appropriations committee spending bill that it approved this week, it appears on the surface that it is canceling the proposed 24% cut by Trump to NASA’s budget as well as endorsing continued funding for some threatened missions. A close look however suggests this congressional support for NASA is somewhat superficial, and might actually be ephemeral.

The key is the language of the bill. From the link above:

The bill was largely unchanged from what the CJS [commerce, justice and science] subcommittee approved July 14. It includes $24.838 billion for NASA, nearly the same as the $24.875 billion the agency received in fiscal 2024 and 2025, and far above the $18.8 billion the administration proposed for fiscal 2026 in May.

Members adopted a manager’s amendment, a package of noncontroversial changes and corrections, on a voice vote. That amendment also made additions to the report accompanying the bill. The report includes language expressing support for several NASA missions targeted for cancellation, including the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Juno mission at Jupiter and the New Horizons mission in the Kuiper Belt.

The report does not specify funding levels for those missions, but the “continues support” language signals to NASA that it should fund continue operations within the agency’s science budget. [emphasis mine]

It is the vagueness of this language that suggests the support is ephemeral. The courts recently have consistently ruled that if Congress doesn’t specifically mandate spending on a project, the White House is free to move money around as it sees fit. By not expressly outlining funding for Chandra, Juno, and New Horizons, these congressmen are playing a shell game, whereby to their constituents they can point to this vote and claim they wholeheartedly supported NASA and these missions. At the same time, they also appear to be allowing Trump the freedom to go ahead and shut the missions down, as his budget has already proposed.

None of this is yet real. The bill still must be passed by the full House, as well as the Senate. It then has to be signed by Trump. A lot of changes would happen in that process.

Either way, it appears that within the House at least, there is some movement to at least make some budget cuts possible. The sad thing is that the House is not actually cutting the budget, even as it is allowing Trump a way to cut these relatively inexpensive on-going missions. Considering the debt, it would have been much better had the committee actually trimmed NASA’s budget, even a little, while at the same time allocating specific funds to keep these very cost-effective missions alive.

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Italian rocket company Avio commits $469 million to expand operations

8:59 am

The Italian rocket company Avio, which owns the Vega-C rocket, today announced that is has approved a $469 million fund to expand its manufacturing capabilities, including building a production facility in the United States.

Announced on 12 September, the capital raise is part of a new ten-year business plan targeting an average annual growth rate of about 10% in turnover and more than 15% in core profit (EBITDA). This growth will be driven by a higher Vega C launch cadence, the introduction of Vega E, continued participation in the Ariane 6 programme, and the construction of a new defence production facility in the United States, which is expected to be completed by 2028.

The management of Vega-C had previously been controlled by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) commercial arm, Arianespace, which had owned and operated all of Europe’s rockets. ESA however is eliminating that commercial arm, shifting from the government-run model to the capitalism model, whereby it simply acts as a customer buying services from the private sector.

As part of that shift, Avio is in the process of taking back its Vega-C from Arianespace. Beginning next year it will be marketing the rocket directly to customers. This major investment reflects this change. The company is now free to pursue profits wherever it can find them, and it appears it wishes to market itself aggressively to American satellite companies as well as its defense industry.

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SpaceX launches Indonesian commercial communications/broadband satellite

8:54 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched an Indonesian commercial communications/broadband satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 23rd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their 16th and 24th flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

116 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
12 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 116 to 91.

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Russia launches Progress to ISS

9:24 am

Russia today successfully launched a Progress freighter to ISS, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.

The freighter will dock with the aft port of the Zvezda module in two days. When it does so, expect NASA to require its astronauts to close the hatch between the American and Russia parts of ISS. The agency has real concerns about the stress fractures in Zvezda’s hull that are the cause of the station’s air leaks, and fears it could at some point fail catastrophically during a docking. The odds of this happening are small, but they are larger than they should be.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
12 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 91. The company has another launch scheduled for later today.

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NASA bans Chinese citizens from its facilities or operations

9:09 am

Earlier this week NASA moved to block Chinese citizens with visas from having access to its facilities as well as its entire operations, citing security concerns.

“NASA has taken internal action pertaining to Chinese nationals, including restricting physical and cybersecurity access to our facilities, materials and network to ensure the security of our work,” NASA press secretary Bethany Stevens said on Wednesday. According to Bloomberg, Chinese nationals had previously been allowed to work as contractors or students contributing to research, although not as staff.

But on 5 September several individuals told the outlet they were suddenly locked out of IT systems and barred from in-person meetings. They spoke on condition of anonymity.

Though both the Chinese press and the leftist news outlet above (The Guardian) whine about this move, it makes great sense, and should have been done years ago. Though I am sure most of these Chinese citizens are not spies, China’s policy has been to consistently use such citizens for spying, and letting such people into NASA operations makes no sense.

Moreover, shouldn’t NASA be hiring Americans first and foremost?

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SpaceX launches military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency

4:32 pm

SpaceX early today successfully launched a classified military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

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

I did not post this in the morning because there was a second SpaceX launch scheduled for the afternoon, and I planned on posting both launches in one post. That launch however was scrubbed and rescheduled for tomorrow.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 90.

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