Tag: spaceflight

SpaceX gets major tax credit for the jobs its new Starship factory will create.

1:29 pm

Because SpaceX’s new Starship factory, dubbed Gigabay, will create more than 500 new jobs in the Boca Chica region, the Starbase city commission this week awarded the company a sales tax refund valued as much as $3.75 million.

Gigabay will create about 630 new jobs, according to information Barrera showed the City Commission. That number included 315 entry-level jobs, which pay nearly $50,000 a year; 277 staff jobs, which pay nearly $90,000 a year; and 26 manager positions, which pay about $164,000 a year. … At least 25% of the jobs must be filled by veterans, residents of the enterprise zone or people who are considered economically disadvantaged.

SpaceX may receive a sales tax refund of $7,500 per job if the company invests $250 million. The program is capped at 500 jobs, allowing SpaceX to receive a maximum of $3,750,000.

Once again, the opposition to SpaceX does not come from the general public, which overwhelming supports what the company is doing in south Texas because of the wealth it is bringing to the region. The only opposition comes from fringe and very tiny leftist activist groups who oppose anything new, and specifically hate Elon Musk because he backed Donald Trump in last year’s election.

Sadly, those fringe groups are also backed by the propaganda press, which gives them a loud bullhorn they don’t deserve. It is imperative that Texas politicians recognize these facts, and not let that bullhorn bully them into actions detrimental to their constituents.

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Texas brewery tries brewing beer and growing barley on ISS

1:19 pm

A Texas brewery dubbed Starbase Brewing (no connection to SpaceX) has just completed an experiment on ISS where it tried to brew beer in weightlessness as well as grow barley in simulated Martian soil.

Starbase Brewing — unrelated to Elon Musk’s space company or its South Texas city of Starbase — sent its MicroBrew-1 and OASIS experiments to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX mission Aug. 1. They came back aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that splashed down eight days later off the coast of California.

…OASIS, short for “Optimizing Agriculture in Simulated Interplanetary Soils,” is the result of a partnership between the beer maker, Texas A&M AgriLife and Jaguar Space, a Colorado bioastronautics firm. According to Argroves, who launched the company in 2020, the goal was to grow barley in a mixture of Martian soil simulant with a byproduct of beermaking called Brewer’s Spent Grain and microbes.

The MicroBrew-1 experiment attempted to ferment beer, mixing “eight containers loaded with half wort — the sugary liquid extracted from malted grains — and half yeast.”

The company is far from manufacturing space-grown beer, but its founder seems focused on being the first brewery selling beer on Mars.

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New Horizons placed in hibernation, possibly forever

9:05 am

The science team running the New Horizons probe, now more then 5.7 billion miles from Earth, has placed the spacecraft into what will be its longest hibernation period so far, with the possibility that it could even last forever.

New Horizons, which had been in active data-collection mode since April, will now remain in hibernation. Pending a final Fiscal Year 2026 budget, the spacecraft may be awoken in late June 2026. This will be the longest hibernation period of the mission so far, surpassing the previous mark of 273 days from June 2022 to March 2023.

But the spacecraft won’t be completely at rest; New Horizons will continue to take round-the-clock measurements of the charged-particle environment in the Sun’s outer heliosphere and the dust environment of the Kuiper Belt using three different onboard scientific instruments. These data will be transmitted back to Earth when New Horizons wakes up. [emphasis mine]

Though the NASA press release puts up an optimistic front, it is very likely that this hibernation period will last significantly longer than planned, due to those budget negotiations. Trump’s budget proposes eliminating all funding for New Horizons, which will mean this hibernation period will be permanent. There will be no money to hire anyone to reactivate it.

Even if the budget is cut, it is probable that NASA management in the future will provide some cash. At the moment there is little for it to observe on a daily basis. All that needs to be done is to turn it on for short periods to download the heliosphere data. Management could simply decide to turn it on once every five years or so.

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SpaceX launches X-37B for Space Force

9:11 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched the Space Force’s X-37B mini-shuttle, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

This is the eighth mission for the Space Force’s two X-37Bs. It appears this flight is fourth for this particular X-37B, but this is not confirmed. Nor do we know how long this particular will last in orbit.

SpaceX’s first stage completed its sixth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The fairing halves completed their first and second flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

102 SpaceX
47 China
11 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 102 to 82.

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Using Webb astronomers have for the first time identified the source of a fast radio burst

12:02 pm

Fast Radio Burst source

Astronomers using the Webb Space Telescope have now successfully pinpointed a specific object that appears to be the source for a fast radio burst (FRB), extra-galactic short bursts of radio energy whose cause and origin have up-to-now been unexplained.

Blanchard and his team used a discovery of an FRB in a nearby galaxy made with the CHIME Outriggers array, a radio telescope in Canada, which was recently upgraded to enable FRB detections with precise positions. The researchers then turned to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to look for an infrared signal from the same location.

…The infrared data revealed an object, dubbed NIR-1, that is likely a red giant star or possibly a middle-aged massive star. A red giant is a Sun-like star near the end of its life that has expanded and brightened, while the other possibility is a star much more massive than the Sun.

Although these stars are unlikely to directly produce FRBs, the scientists say, they may have an unseen companion, such as a neutron star, pulling material away from the red giant or massive star. This process of transferring mass

The burst itself occurred on March 16, 2025 about 130 million light-years away in the galaxy NGC 4141. You can read the discovery paper here [pdf].

There remain of course great uncertainties. For one, NIR-1 is itself not likely the cause of the FRB, but related to its source in some manner. The scientists posit a number of explanations, from either an unseen magnetar (a pulsar with a powerful magnetic field), or a flare from this massive star reflecting off that unseen magnetar.

Regardless, this discovery helps narrow the theories considerably.

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Slumping landslide in Mars’ glacier country

11:40 am

Overview map

Slumping landslide in Mars' glacier country
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was downloaded on July 1, 2025 from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Labeled by the science team as a “flow,” it shows what appears to be a major collapse of the canyon’s south wall. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, near the center of the 2,000-mile-long strip in the northern mid-latitudes of Mars that I label “glacier country” because almost every single high resolution image of this region shows glacial features.

This picture is no exception. First, the canyon appears filled with a glacial material, though its flow direction is unclear. Orbital elevation data suggests that this collapse is actually at the canyon’s high point, with the drainage going downhill to the east and west.

Second, the collapse itself doesn’t look like an avalanche of rocks and bedrock, but resembles more a mudslide. Since liquid water cannot exist in Mars’ thin atmosphere and cold climate, the soft nature of the slide suggests it is dirt and dust impregnated with ice. At some point, either because of the impacts that created the craters on its southern edge or because the sun warmed the ice causing it sublimate away thus weakening the ground structurally, the entire cliff wall slumped downward to the north.

The canyon itself is about 800 feet deep. It likely formed initially along a fault line, with ice acting over time to widen and extend it.

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Avio gets 10-year lease from France to launch its Vega-C from French Guiana

9:44 am

The Italian rocket company Avio has now signed a 10-year lease with France to continue to launch its Vega-C from that nation’s French Guiana spaceport.

In a press release published on 19 August, the French Ministry of the Economy, Finance, and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty confirmed that, in line with the Seville agreement, Avio had been granted a ten-year licence.

…Avio will make use of the ELV launch complex at the Guiana Space Centre for the launch of its Vega C rockets. The pad was previously used for the original Vega rocket, which was officially retired in September 2024.

This deal is part of Europe’s move away from its centralized government-run Arianespace operations to the capitalism model. It has already shifted control of French Guiana from Arianespace back to France’s space agency CNES, which has begun to sign multiple similar deals with other European rocket startups. It is now in the process of shifting control of the Vega-C from Arianespace back to its builder, Avio, a shift that should be completed by the end of this year.

At that time, Avio will market the rocket commercially worldwide. Arianespace will no longer be a government middleman. This launchpad deal solidifies its access to a launch site, which it also plans to use for its next Vega upgrade, the Vega-E.

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India now targeting December for first unmanned test flight of Gaganyaan

9:27 am

Artist rendering of India's Gaganyaan capsule
Artist rendering of India’s Gaganyaan capsule

According to the head of India’s space agency ISRO, it is now targeting December 2025 for first unmanned test flight of its Gaganyaan manned capsule.

That flight will put the capsule into orbit for several days carrying a humanoid robot dubbed Vyomitra, designed to simulate what a human would experience in the capsule in space. It will be the first of three similar unmanned orbital test flights, leading up to a planned manned orbital mission in 2027.

Though this program has experienced numerous delays and program changes since it was first proposed in 2006, all the pieces have begun to fall into place in the past four years. It now appears that the above schedule is very solid. As long as there are no major test failures, India could launch its first astronauts by 2027.

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Firefly studying feasibility of launching from northern Japanese spaceport

9:07 am

Japan's spaceports
Japan’s spaceports indicated by red dots.

Firefly and the commercial Japanese Hokkaido spaceport in the north of Japan have begun a feasibility study for launching Firefly’s Alpha rocket there.

Establishing an memorandum of understanding with the Hokkaido Spaceport means that the two entities can flesh out a more concrete launch complex design and figure out all of the logistics to bring Alpha launch capabilities to Japan.

In the past Hokkaido has been the location for a number of suborbital launches, but no orbital launches as yet. For example, the Japanese startup Interstellar used this site for its suborbital test flights in 2018, and hopes to use it for future orbital flights.

Firefly meanwhile has launched its Alpha rocket multiple times from Vandenberg in California. The company is also building a launchpad at Wallops Island in Virginia, and has signed a deal with the Esrange spaceport in Sweden. The Swedish launch site however is questionable because any orbital launch from there would have to cross over land of other countries, and so far it appears permission for such a thing has not been arranged. Firefly might therefore be looking at Hookaiddo for precisely this reason.

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Russia launches classified military payload

8:40 am

Russia today successfully launched a classified military payload comprising “multiple military spacecraft”, its Angara-1 rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia.

This was Russia’s second launch in two days, something it rarely does any longer. It was also the fifth launch of this version of Russia’s new family of Angara rockets, using a modular design that can be configured for different size payloads. Launched into a polar orbit, the lower stages crashed in the ocean in the Arctic and Pacific.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

101 SpaceX
47 China
11 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 101 to 82.

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Russia launches returnable capsule for month-long biology research mission

10:44 am

Russia today successfully launched the first Bion-M returnable capsule in more than a dozen years, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from the Baikonur spaceport in Kazakhstan.

The capsule will remain in orbit for about a month doing weightlessness and radiation experiments with a variety of biological samples, 1,500 fruit flies, and 75 mice. Though similar to the commercial capsules recently launched by Varda, Bion-M is different in that it appears the research has no marketability. As a government-run project by Russian Academy of Science, no effort was made to use weightlessness to produce a product for sale on Earth.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

101 SpaceX
47 China
11 Rocket Lab
10 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 101 to 81.

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