A three launch day

It has been a three launch day and we're waiting for number three, just "up the road" at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Just a reminder that a three launch day is nothing at all like a three dog night.

But let me start at the beginning - that's a very good place to start. 

The first launch was a Rocket Lab mission from their seaside launch facility in New Zealand at 2:51 PM here (EST). 

An Electron rocket carrying the QPS-SAR-14 satellite, nicknamed Yachihoko-I, lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site today at 2:51 p.m. EST (1951 GMT; 8:51 a.m. on Nov. 6. local New Zealand time). 

An SAR is a Synthetic Aperture Radar and is an additional satellite for a constellation being implemented by Japanese company iQPS. 

"This satellite will join the rest of the QPS-SAR constellation in providing high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and Earth monitoring services globally," Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description. "iQPS aims to build a constellation of 36 SAR satellites that will provide near-real-time images of Earth every 10 minutes."

The second launch was a SpaceX Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Starlink Group 6-81 at 8:30 PM EST.  Like the Rocket Lab launch before it, the payloads were deployed to the intended orbit on time. Unlike the other two launches, the booster landed on Just Read the Instruction for reuse.

The third launch is an Atlas V, launching a ViaSat-3 F2 built by Boeing to become part of ViaSat's constellation. Launch is currently set for 10:24 PM EST. This payload is headed for a geosynchronous orbit. 

The ViaSat-3 constellation is comprised of three Ka-band satellites, each designed to be capable of rapidly shifting capacity throughout its coverage area to deliver bandwidth where and when it’s needed most. Once in service, ViaSat-3 F2 is expected to more than double the bandwidth capacity of Viasat’s entire existing fleet, adding more than 1 Tbps capacity to Viasat’s network over the Americas, with anticipated service entry in early 2026. 

While typing that previous paragraph, the Atlas V went into a countdown hold. It might not make it tonight.

Small Space News Story Roundup 71

Two updates to stories in the last few days. 

New Glenn and NASA's Mars satellites launch pulled up to Friday 11/7 in the early afternoon Sunday at 2:45PM

This story broke this morning, prompting a revision to the previous story saying the launch date would be Sunday but no launch time was available.  

A minor side note to this story is that the way the mission's name is shown has changed. Until this morning, its NextSpaceflight listing referred to the mission in all caps: ESCAPADE. Slightly unusual but it's easy to hit Caps Lock on the keyboard and just type the one word.  Today's update goes to a weirder spelling: EscaPADE. 

The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE) are a dual-spacecraft mission to study ion and sputtered escape from Mars.

The weather looks darn near ideal, on the Weather Underground 10 day forecast. Winds under 10mph from the East, temperatures in the upper 70s. The only questionable forecast is the cloud cover. While the chances of rain are under 25%, cloud cover is 75%.  not as good as that Friday forecast. The chances of rain are higher at around 50% but the cloud coverage is lower all day. 

   

The BIG Talk on Capitol Hill is the Athena program

In followup to last night's post on how awful the Orion lunar capsule is, I received my daily copy of Payload's newsletter.  I posted to the comments:

In today's newsletter from Payload there's an item reflecting that Jared Isaacman is back in the running for NASA Administrator and so Politico thinks they're attacking him.

"Jared Isaacman’s confidential manifesto has been acquired by Politico, and calls for NASA to quit climate science, buy more space data from industry, and terminate SLS and Gateway."

I'm completely down with all of that.

This afternoon, the story expanded onto Ars Technica emphasizing a copy leaked to their senior Space correspondent, Eric Berger. 

After receiving a copy of this plan from an industry official, I spoke with multiple sources over the weekend to understand what is happening. Based upon this reporting there are clearly multiple layers to the story, which I want to unpack.

In the big picture, this leak appears to be part of a campaign by interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to either hold onto the high-profile job or, at the very least, prejudice the re-nomination of Isaacman to lead the space agency. Additionally, it is also being spread by legacy aerospace contractors who seek to protect their interests from the Trump administration’s goal of controlling spending and leaning into commercial space.

The leaked plan is 62 pages long, and while it isn't presented, probably not easy reading. Berger believes the document is an edited-down version of a more comprehensive “Athena” plan devised by Isaacman and his team earlier this year, after President Trump nominated him to be NASA Administrator. 

The Athena plan lays out a blueprint for Isaacman’s tenure at NASA, seeking to return the space agency to “achieving the near impossible,” focusing on leading the world in human space exploration, igniting the space economy, and becoming a force multiplier for science. 

It's worth noting that a copy of this “Athena”plan was provided by Isaacman to Sean Duffy as well as his chief of staff, Pete Meachum as a courtesy. To my way of thinking, that reflects an intent to help whomever gets the job. 

Tonight, President Trump re-nominated Jared Isaacman to the administrator's position. 

You can already sense what this is really all focused on. Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and the other companies living in luxury on cost-plus contracts like SLS, Orion and all the bad examples we see. 

In recent weeks, Duffy has been building ties with the space industry, trying to paint Isaacman as someone who would come in and force big changes on NASA and its traditional space contractors. There is also an effort to paint Isaacman as a stooge of Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX. However, the Athena plan, read in full, does not seem to support the conclusion that Isaacman has a pro-SpaceX bias. Instead, Isaacman seems equally bullish on Blue Origin.

Ironically, the plan reflects the priorities of the Trump administration for human space exploration.

The Athena plan seeks to transition away from cost-plus contracts for the Space Launch System rocket and Orion, while looking at repurposing elements of the Gateway for a nuclear-powered tug vehicle. These are all in line with the changes sought in the Trump administration’s proposed budget for NASA.

I don't quite know why Eric Berger chose to use the word "Ironically" in the second paragraph there. One would expect the guy the president nominates would do what the president wants to see done. To me the surprise is that Duffy wants to suck up to the companies that have so royally screwed up Artemis and the rest of the post-shuttle space programs. I can only conclude that he wants them to buy his loyalty, too. Which is too bad. I used to have some respect for him.

Interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy provides remarks at a briefing prior to the Crew 11 launch in August. Image Credit: NASA

EDIT NOV. 5 @ 11:00 AM to add: My first visit to Next Spaceflight this morning shows the EscaPADE launch has been pushed back to Sunday, Nov. 9th, the date I've been reporting since early October, this time with a launch time of 2:45PM. 

Chances are Orion is worse than you think

That is, unless you're privy to lots of inside information, Orion is undoubtedly worse than you think.  

Casey Handmer, whom I mentioned a few times on these pages (like here), does a deep dive on the Orion capsule called NASA's Orion Space Capsule is Flaming Garbage.  As you know, Orion is currently being prepared to bring a group of four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, a somewhat inferior version of 1968's Apollo 8 mission, which orbited the moon and famously aired a Christmas Eve broadcast to the world. Apollo 8 orbited the moon 10 times, something Handmer says Orion will never be able to do.

Let's start where Casey starts. Orion is absurdly expensive to build and operate. According to Wikipedia, the Orion program has already burned through over $30 Billion. Yes, with a "B". You might remember that the Orion program has been in development since 2006, originally begun under the Presidency of George W Bush. Coincidentally, I was working on cleaning up this computer a bit and ran into pictures from the first flight of an Orion capsule on the Ares 1-X mission, the first (and only) launch of what was called the Constellation program. To borrow from the Wikipedia article:

The Ares 1-X vehicle used in the test flight was similar in shape, mass, and size to the planned configuration of later Ares 1 vehicles, but had largely dissimilar internal hardware consisting of only one powered stage.

Ignoring the dead end vehicle made from Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster sections, Handmer points out that if SpaceX had started at the same time as the Constellation program, "by expense alone, SpaceX would have shipped Crew Dragon by 2008, before Obama was elected. Going by schedule, even Boeing’s irredeemably broken Starliner capsule would have flown by 2018." Then he adds this statement for more detail in referring to duplicating Apollo 8.

But if all we want to do is fly around the Moon and back, a lightly modified Crew Dragon on Falcon Heavy could have done this at any point since 2020. We could do it today, or tomorrow. It wouldn’t mean very much in the context of the ongoing Chinese land rush, but it could be executed for well under $500m if SpaceX was cooperative – roughly equivalent to a single month of burn on the SLS and Orion programs. That is, for the same budget, we could fly a crew around the Moon every month indefinitely. [bold added - SiG]

While it sounds cool, flying a crew Dragon (with four people) around the moon every month forever for the same cost as Orion doesn't do much for anyone's spaceflight goals. Still, Orion is a barely flown, barely developed vehicle. It has flown exactly once (November of '22) and its life support systems weren't even used on that flight test - there was no crew to need them. Yet Orion has taken four times longer and cost six times more to develop than Crew Dragon. Even that's not a fair comparison, because Crew Dragon today is already a seasoned operational vehicle that has flown many crewed missions, with a functional heatshield that has never shown any of the kinds of problems Orion's did.

When you factor in the way Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy has been saying that Artemis and NASA are behind schedule because SpaceX hasn't finished the Human Landing System it's worth pointing out, as Handmer says:

Unlike SLS and Orion, which might one day manage to repeat a mission we first flew almost sixty years ago and which commercial providers could do for 1% of the cost this year, the HLS program is doing the hard part (actually landing on the Moon and then flying back) with less than $3b and has been in active development only since 2021.

At one time or another, Boeing and Lockheed seem to have hired every former senior NASA official who is still alive and who is for sale to try and sell Congress and the public on their version of reality. Telling your story is important, but it helps to have an actual story to point to, not just the ashes of $100b of private money and a system that’s still too dangerous and too slow to ever use.

A name you may have noticed joining in on the effort sell Orion and lobby against SpaceX may be familiar: Jim Bridenstine, former NASA Administrator and now a lobbyist for Boeing. Bridenstine did his job and pushed how Orion and SLS are just so superior to landing in the HLS, getting backed by the New York Times. Casey Handmer put this graphic together to put raw numbers in front of all the faces who need to know.

This isn't wrong so much as it isn't the full picture and Handmer points that out. In the upper right, that $31.6 billion cost doesn't include the SLS. Orion and SLS have burned through nearly $100b - so far.

As I always say, "it's not that bad. It's worse." Despite the $100 billion, the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule can't get to the moon. Orion is too heavy. Payloads are too small. These things have been known for a long time.  Here’s 434 pages of NASA talking around the subject last year without getting anywhere. Remember the talk about the lunar space station called the Lunar Gateway? That was originally done to come up with a way to get a system able to get to the moon without looking like complete and utter morons by throwing away everything they've done so far. They could dress it up with all sorts of fancy names, add new things like The Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit and more.

Casey Handmer's presentation is very readable, and very (Very) long. Using my "Print to PDF" option results in a copy to read from that's 63 pages long. I tried to get some good top level stuff here to pique your interest, but I'm not sure I'm doing it any justice.

SpaceX launches first mission for Vast this morning

Only morning in the fullest definition of the word; for most of us it was "zero dark thirty" or "middle of the freakin' night!" It was 1:09 a.m. EDT (0509 GMT). Yes, I slept through it and watched the NASA Spaceflight replay on YouTube this morning. That video should start at about t-30 seconds, and I paid attention until the booster landed on the Cape at Landing Zone 2, amid speculation that might be the last landing there will be on LZ-2. That was at 7:35 on the onscreen timer (minutes and seconds since liftoff).

The mission was one of their Bandwagon ride share flights, and was carrying the Haven Demo payload for the private space station company Vast. 

"The first step in our iterative approach towards building next-generation space stations, Haven Demo will test critical systems for Haven-1, including propulsion, flight computers and navigation software," Vast wrote in a description of the satellite.

Vast's Haven-1 will launch to low Earth orbit (LEO) atop a Falcon 9, perhaps as soon as the second quarter of 2026. If that schedule holds, Haven-1 — which can support up to four astronauts at a time — will be the first standalone private space station in human history.

The other 17 payloads on this mission are naturally for other customers: South Korea's Agency for Defense Development (ADD), the Berlin-based company Exolaunch, Turkey's Fergani Space, the weather-forecasting outfit Tomorrow Companies and Starcloud, which aims to build data centers in space.

As you'd guess from the mission name, Bandwagon-4 was the fourth mission in SpaceX's Bandwagon series to lift off. The company also operates another rideshare program called Transporter. The Transporter platform provides launches to sun-synchronous orbits, which are polar orbits that go over the same places on Earth at the same time every day so that the angle of sun and lighting is the same every day - but not every customer wants to launch to an SSO. It should be mentioned that the term polar orbit doesn't require the satellite go precisely over the north and south poles; deviations to 20 or 30 degrees are acceptable.  Enter bandwagon, which flies to the second most requested orbit, at inclinations of up to approximately 45 degrees and satellites at altitudes of 550 to 605 kilometers. 

There have been 14 Transporter rideshare missions, so clearly more popular than the Bandwagon series, which had its first flight on April 7, 2024. The Transporter-1 mission was January 24, 2021. It was an ambitious rideshare mission as one of SpaceX's veteran Falcon 9 boosters hoisted 143 small satellites — a new record for a single rocket

The most important question you can ask yourself

At some point, whether you're involved in big discussions in your job, or your life, or just contemplating things like the stuff you hear about big news events, like global warming, comet 3I-Atlas or anything you have to ask the big question.  It's a question that's hardly ever asked, which is a shame because it's important everywhere and for all time.

How do you know what you think you know? I assume if you're reading stuff like this you've heard the old line that "when you assume something you make an ass out of you and me." Considering how few people want to be made an ass of, there sure is a lot assuming going on. 

In even the "hardest hard sciences" there are stacked assumptions that aren't obvious to the vast majority of us. How do we know the speed of light? We can (and do) measure that. That can be done in a well-equipped laboratory. How do we know the distances to nearby stars, those within "a few" light years? That's more complex but let me jump around that to something that's more fundamental. How do we know how far away another galaxy is? The technique is based on the observation that certain stars vary in brightness over time in such a predictable way that the maximum brightness they will show is the same absolute brightness (in astronomy that's called the star's magnitude). That's saying if you had a sample of those stars, they're all the same magnitude when they're at their brightest. Since the decrease in brightness with distance is constant, the period of the star tells you how bright the light was when it left there and the magnitude at our observatories tells you how much brightness made it here, which tells you the distance. 

The assumption buried in there is the laws of nature are the same everywhere, and that's perhaps the biggest assumption there can be. I'm not saying those laws aren't absolutely the same, I'm saying we have no way of knowing that because we can only measure them in this neighborhood. We assume they're the same because it's convenient. There's nothing we could say to answer so many fundamental questions people have. For example, we constantly see things like how far to some galaxy or the size of the universe or all kinds of things. If those laws aren't absolutely the same all of those headlines are meaningless. 

Since I did the well-received post about Comet 3I-Atlas last Monday (Oct. 27), let me drag out a point or two from that. One of the arguments about this one is that it has abnormally large amounts of nickel in it, compared to the iron/nickel (Fe/Ni) ratios we're used to. They're saying because it's a comet, every comet should have the same Fe/Ni ratio or it has been changed by some sort of intelligent process. That's assuming every star system everywhere has the exact same elements in the exact same proportions and I see no reason to expect that. Same elements? They're the only ones we know that exist. Same proportions depends on too many factors. High nickel space rocks exist and are often the source of the biggest deposits of the metal here on Earth. But they bounce around in space, some hitting the planets, some never hitting one. The amount of any mineral should vary.

A topic I've seen talked about since I was about 15 is the red giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion going Supernova "any day now." Since I'm not sure of when I first read nervous stories about this happening, I'll just say it was in 1970 as a "close enough" disclaimer. Close enough to say the star going supernova has been "any day now" for nearly 56 years. 

The main thing I remember from reading about Betelgeuse going supernova back then, is that it would be such an incredible disaster there'd be horrible things happening all over Earth. I don't know anything about this girl's videos (TheSpaceChick on this story) but it's the best thing I've bothered to watch. I've seen people talking about this happening on some very specific date in something like next March. SpaceChick's version is the astronomical community says it could blow somewhere between 100,000 and a million years, which in cosmic terms is like tomorrow, while in human time it's more like never.

Without going too far down the global warming/climate cataclysm road, that stuff is based on so many models with entirely PFA (Pulled From Ass) justifications that it's nearly impossible to summarize. 

If there's any takeaway from this it's to be aware that even the best "hard science" has many assumptions tied to it. The best thing to talk about are things that can be measured accurately in a small lab. If you can do it yourself on equipment you trust, all the better. Want to measure the speed of light? You need a bright light, a long distance and spinning octagonal mirrors. 

Image from: https://image.slideserve.com/257821/speed-of-light14-l.jpg

New Glenn Looks to be ready for second mission

The path to the next and second ever launch of a New Glenn mission got a lot closer to completion last night with the successful static firing of the ships main engines at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station here in Central Florida.  

Standing on a seaside launch pad, the New Glenn rocket ignited its seven BE-4 main engines at 9:59 pm EDT Thursday (01:59 UTC Friday). The engines burned for 38 seconds while the rocket remained firmly on the ground, according to a social media post by Blue Origin.

The hold-down firing of the first stage engines was the final major test of the New Glenn rocket before launch day.

Since early October, we've known the earliest launch window to be Sunday November 9th, with no time given, but the launch window runs until the 11th, so just two days. It will be worthwhile keeping an eye on the mission's NextSpaceflight page to see what launch time gets posted. Meanwhile we know the 9th is only a week away and this booster has been rolled back to its nearby hangar to have the two ESCAPADE satellites mounted and be readied for launch. 

“Love seeing New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines come alive! Congratulations to Team Blue on today’s hotfire,” the company’s CEO, Dave Limp, posted on X.

Blue Origin reported that the engines operated at full power for 22 seconds, generating nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust. CEO Limp went on to say:

We extended the hotfire duration this time to simulate the landing burn sequence by shutting down the non-gimballed engines after ramping down to 50 percent thrust, then shutting down the outboard gimballed engines while ramping the center engine to 80 percent thrust. This helps us understand fluid interactions between active and inactive engine feedlines during landing. 

While it seems like a higher stakes gamble than the typical new rocket launch, Blue expects to recover this booster for reuse and re-fly it "early next year" to launch their first Blue Moon lunar lander to the Moon. If the landing and recovery should not be achieved, as happened on the first New Glenn mission, there isn't a "next New Glenn" available. That means the Blue Moon lander mission will have to wait while a new one is built and tested. 

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket fires up its seven BE-4 engines Thursday night. Credit: Blue Origin

Ars reporter Stephen Clark points out that NASA is getting a good deal and this flight is mutually beneficial for both NASA and Blue.

The space agency is paying Bezos’ company $20 million for the launch, millions less than a dedicated launch on another rocket. But there’s a trade-off. NASA is accepting more risk on this mission because it’s just the second flight of the New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the US Space Force for high-priority government launches.

Officials are fine with that because ESCAPADE is part of a new family of relatively low-cost Solar System missions. The mission’s total cost amounts to less than $80 million, an order of magnitude lower than all of NASA’s recent Mars missions. At this cost, NASA managers can live with a little more risk than they would for an $800 million mission.

The strangest part of this mission, though, is in the details Clark provides. 

 Normally, Mars missions can launch from the Earth for only a few weeks about once every 26 months, when the planets are in the right position for a spacecraft to make a direct trip. ESCAPADE is launching outside of the normal Mars interplanetary window, so the twin probes will loiter relatively close to the Earth until next November, when they will fire their engines to set off for the red planet.

"Relatively close" means in a Sun-Earth L2 orbit, detailed at that link at the end of the previous paragraph. The Mission Design webpage says this will be the first mission ever to harness the Sun-Earth L2 orbit en route to Mars. That L2 point is what the James Webb Space Telescope is orbiting.

EDIT Nov. 4, 2025 @ 10:00 AM to add: This morning's news brings a date and time for the launch: NET Friday, Nov. 7 at 2:51 PM EST.  

SpaceX starting down a new design path for Lunar Landing

Back on Monday, Oct. 20, acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy reset the schedule for the Artemis program and return to the moon. The essence of the message was "everyone's taking too long! Everything's too expensive! I want new bids for a new lunar lander on my desk ASAP!" By the next day, Elon Musk had referred to Duffy as "Sean Dummy" and had said, “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry. Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”

Today, SpaceX let out some information on what they've been looking into. 

On Thursday (Oct. 30), the company posted an update called "To the Moon and Beyond," which summarizes the progress that SpaceX has made with Starship to date and lays out the vehicle's potential to make NASA's lunar ambitions a reality.

"Starship provides unmatched capability to explore the moon, thanks to its large size and ability to refill propellant in space," the blog post reads. "One single Starship has a pressurized habitable volume of more than 600 cubic meters, which is roughly two-thirds the pressurized volume of the entire International Space Station, and is complete with a cabin that can be scaled for large numbers of explorers and dual airlocks for surface exploration."

I knew a Starship was big, but one ship having 2/3 of the volume under pressure of the entire ISS is mind-blowing. And they're going to use that just to put four astronauts on the moon? Yes, and that's not all. But in the update, SpaceX showed a rendering of just how much room is available in Starship:

Artist's rendering of the cabin of SpaceX's Starship vehicle during an Artemis moon mission for NASA. (Image credit: SpaceX)

I don't believe I've ever read about an astronaut saying their capsule was too big and empty inside. I guess I never heard them saying it was too small, either, but nobody ever said it was so big and empty that it was creepy.

In the update, SpaceX announced they were working on two parallel design paths for Starship: the core Starship and a moon-lander upper stage exclusively for Artemis. 

SpaceX is self-funding the core path, and its contract for the Artemis lander is of the fixed-price variety, "ensuring that the company is only paid after the successful completion of progress milestones, and American taxpayers are not on the hook for increased SpaceX costs," the company wrote. 

In the "To the Moon and Beyond" update, SpaceX said they have already completed 49 of the milestones for the Artemis lander, including testing of micrometeoroid and space debris shielding as well as "lunar environmental control and life support and thermal control" systems. The company plans to make even more progress soon, sending a Starship upper stage to Earth orbit and completing an in-space fueling test with the vehicle in 2026, if all goes to plan.

Scott Manley has a YouTube short on this subject which is definitely worth the 80 seconds to watch. In it, Scott mentions that many have been recommending that SpaceX go over to much shorter version of Starship, and I've seen mentions of that as a way to minimize the amount of fuel they'd have to transfer to the lander. That has such a large impact on the difficulty and cost of the mission that I wouldn't be very surprised if the next time the give us something like this update that the Human Landing System of Starship instead of having 2/3 the volume of the ISS had something smaller like maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of the volume of the ISS. Maybe that's the "a moon-lander upper stage exclusively for Artemis" mentioned as their second parallel design path. 

NASA pushing to keep Artemis II on schedule despite shutdown

A noticeable percentage of NASA is shut down now, not updating many (if not all) websites. Staple sites I visit regularly like APOD, the blogs.NASA.gov site, the Voyager project site, and so many more aren't being updated because of the Schumer Shutdown. 

The problem is the preparations for Artemis II, currently set for No Earlier Than Feb. 5, 2026 at 8:09 PM are going into the bad position of depending on people who are going to be going unpaid, which has to add an increased dose of stress.

If you look at any of the thousands of sites that touch on politics more than I do, it's probably not news to you that the upper tier of the Democratic party is doing this strictly to appeal to their voters because they're terrified of any cuts to government. This meme, for an easy to find example, (sixth one down) has direct quotes from some big name demmies. They view anything that blocks the administration from accomplishing anything they want is A Good Thing.

If my 30+ years of close friendships with contractors on the Cape mean anything, the people who are working on this mission, are going to be a mix of union members and non-members. More to the point, some of them are far more dedicated to the missions they're working on than to the job or the union or the company that has its name on their paychecks. That means they're more likely to view going through some time of hardship as part of the job.

The shutdown started after many expenditures for October had already been paid, but as of Midnight Friday night when the clock advances to November that probably comes to a halt. 

Federal civil servants and NASA contractors are not getting paid during the shutdown, even if agency leaders have deemed their tasks essential and directed them to continue working. Jobs classified as essential include employees operating and safeguarding the International Space Station and NASA’s fleet of robotic probes exploring the Solar System and beyond.

Many employees at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida remain at work, too. Their job is to keep the Artemis II mission on schedule for launch as soon as next February. In the four weeks since the start of the government shutdown, crews at Kennedy Space Center have completed several major milestones on the road to Artemis II, including the stacking of the Orion spacecraft atop its Space Launch System rocket inside the cavernous Vehicle Assembly Building. This milestone, completed about one week ago, capped off assembly of the SLS rocket for Artemis II.

“All work on Artemis II is excepted to protect both the property and to protect against risks to the crew introduced by unplanned close out and restart,” a NASA official told Ars. “All of our contracts are funded into early November.

“The Office of Procurement has sent letters to contractors doing excepted work (including all the Artemis II contractors) indicating that work is authorized during the lapse in funding,” the official said. “Most workers have indicated a willingness to continue the work in the event of contract funding running out prior to the government reopening.”

It's safe to say that there are months worth of work to be completed and it's not at all unreasonable to ask if it could be completed on time if the issue with paying workers wasn't a concern. It's important to note that this issue isn't unique to the KSC and Artemis II. Artemis II work is being done at subcontractors in Texas, Alabama, Florida and probably others I haven't thought (or heard) of. Plus other shutdowns due to the Federal budget shutdown can affect the mission's readiness. Simple things, like airline or private airplane flights being delayed by air traffic controllers being off.

NASA, overall, is a mixed bag. ISS ground support, for example, is unaffected.

NASA must keep the space station operating in order to protect the lives of the people living and working onboard. NASA has also exempted its other operating spacecraft, such as satellites and robotic deep space explorers, from past government shutdowns to protect the billions of dollars that taxpayers have committed to those missions.

Artemis II is in a different category. While the current launch date is the priority, it was moved up to this date earlier this year. The mission can launch on a handful of days each month when the positions of the Earth and the Moon are right for the Orion spacecraft to complete its circumlunar voyage as designed. 

EOY Falcon Heavy Launch pushed out six months

The next expected Falcon Heavy launch had been penciled in for the end of this December. Instead, the launch which will be the next lunar lander from Astrobotic, was pushed out to No Earlier Than July 2026. 

Astrobotic's Griffin-1 lunar lander, carrying NASA and commercial payloads that include rovers from Astrobotic and Astrolab, will wait just a little longer before its planned excursion to the moon. The mission had previously targeted a launch at the end of 2025, but will apparently miss that deadline, according to an Astrobotic update posted on Oct. 24. 

You probably remember that Astrobotic launched their Peregrine lunar lander in January of '24 but it developed a propellant leak and was never able to land. This lander, Griffin, is undergoing hardware and software testing at the Pennsylvania company's facility, where propulsion testing and avionics validations are currently underway. 

Like Peregrine, Griffin was developed under NASA's CLPS program (Commercial Lunar Payload Service) which is a part of Artemis. 

NASA originally planned to fly its Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) aboard Griffin, but that mission was canceled in 2024, leading Astrobotic to repurpose its payload spot for commercial rover: Astrolab's FLIP (FLEX Lunar Innovation Platform) rover. (VIPER was recently un-canceled, and added to the manifest of a Blue Origin lunar mission targeted for 2027.) 

Astrobotic Technology’s Griffin lander concept for NASA's Lunar CATALYST project. (Image credit: Astrobotic Technology Inc.)

In addition to FLIP, Griffin will carry Astrobotic's own CubeRover, and several smaller payloads including the Nippon Travel Agency plaque sending messages collected from children in Japan to the moon, the Galactic Library to Preserve Humanity from Nanofiche and the MoonBox capsule that will deliver "items from around the world" to the lunar surface, according to Astrobotic's update.

In the "Big Picture" sense, NASA's CLPS is intended ...

... to stimulate the commercial lunar economy while giving the agency access to low-cost delivery services to the moon. Setbacks and early failures in the program, like Peregrine's mishap or Intuitive Machines' landers both toppling over and ending their mission early, have drawn scrutiny, and Astrobotic's ability to recover with Griffin will be a critical test for both the company as well as the CLPS program.

The two stories of comet 3I-Atlas

By now, I think everyone that follows space-related news has heard about the comet that's sucking up every moment of news that's available.  The 3I in the name means it's the third object that we've positively identified as coming from another star system, - the I is short for Interstellar - although I've never seen a specific star system named that would explain where it came from. 

I paid attention to the passage of the other two comets that were named as coming from other star systems, 1I-Oumuamua, Hawaiian word for "a messenger from afar arriving first", in 2017 and 2I-Borisov in 2019. Oumuamua wasn't a comet; it was a rockier body with few properties that comets have; Borisov was the first comet from outside our solar system. Not one of the three extrasolar visitors have had their home star systems identified.

I consider it not at all surprising that a comet from another star system may have different chemical composition and therefore behave differently than what we regard as normal for comets we've seen down through history. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out (if it was possible to do so) that other Interstellar comets have come through our solar system and we just couldn't tell they "weren't from around here." 

My reference to the "two stories" is that this comet gets talked about completely differently on space-related news sites versus sites more aimed at the general population, most notoriously like YouTube. Sites like Space.com (example article here) lately have been including prominent disclaimers like this one's, "a newly found interstellar comet poses absolutely no threat to Earth..." On YouTube, everyone from people I don't particularly disrespect but rarely ever looked at their channels, such as Michio Kaku, Avi Loeb, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson and over to channels I've never heard of, are railing about how dangerous it is and (apparently) making up news to back up their fear. 

Pardon my skepticism, but with none of the "serious" news sources citing these things, I have to ask why. Unfortunately "click bait" is an adequate answer. YouTube channels are overloaded with statements about the comet having done various shocking things, and while I haven't spent hours looking for them, I have yet to see more than one video on any of these allegations.

A view of comet 3I/ATLAS taken by the Gemini South Telescope (Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the Scientist Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab))

Here on the blog, we've had little discussion about this, but I have a rough draft of something I wrote in a comment within the last month, that I'll add here:

Why do I think it's basically just another rock? Because it's acting like a rock. It's on a purely ballistic trajectory. It's moving fast compared to things we're used to observing - which is, after all, the last few years of human history - but it's not moving fast compared to the speeds required for living beings to cover the distances it has come. Good old Wikipedia says it's moving at 58km/sec or 0.000193c. We don't know where it came from, but even if it came from the closest stars at 4 light years away, that means more than 20,000 years to get here. Who's going to launch a system that slow, and why? What kind of system could work over 20,000 years without failing? If they wanted to take over our solar system or take our planet, if they have lifespans similar to ours, 20,000 years makes coming here to take over pretty much impossible. 

It's finally fall

It's not like the weather has been that oppressive, it's just that we still haven't had a run of days where it stayed under 80 all day long.  A few weeks ago, NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) posted their forecast for winter, giving us a forecast of warmer than normal. This is the graphic they published widely:

Since I just misread this, let me point out my mistake. The key to interpreting the colors is at the bottom right of the graphic and you can see that it's saying there's a 40-50% chance of above normal temperatures, not that the temperatures will be 40-50% above normal. To get into the "likely above normal", requires the third color down, distinctively redder than the color over pretty much all of peninsular Florida. My inner ackshually guy says if there's a 50% chance of above normal temperatures, doesn't that say that there's a 50% chance of temperatures that are normal or below? 

Our coolest month of the year is generally January. While I've woken up to frost visible on the neighbors' roofs as early December 7, I can't recall that once in the 9 winters I've been retired. I think we had frost, typically one day, maybe 3 years of the 9. This is why I've joked in comments elsewhere around the 'net that on my planet, water only occurs as a liquid or a gas.  Solid water can be created with appliances but is not found in nature.  

Starting this Thursday, we're going into the coolest forecast week probably since last March. This is lifted from the Weather Underground 10-day forecast at Melbourne International Airport.

Graph of temperature vs time for the three days. The vertical lines are midnight, but you realized that since they divide the days from each other. 

I know this is a strange world for many of you, and we greatly appreciate the days under 80 degrees, but just a few months ago, that was a common overnight low temperature for August. Those of you watching the beautiful colors of fall, those aren't common at all here. Yeah, there's a handful of trees around the county that change colors, and we have a maple in our front yard that does that. Peak colors tend to be in January and are pretty disappointing for most people who are used to the fall colors in other parts of the country. 

We will have rain overnight tonight and then tomorrow. The clearing skies and nicer weather start Tuesday. Hope it's enjoyable where you are!

Japan joins Space Station Cargo Supply Team

I only found out earlier this evening that Japan's H3 rocket was set to join the cargo "trucks" that keep the International Space Station supplied with all the essentials to stay operational.  This was the seventh launch of an H3, called the (H3 F7) carrying the cargo transfer spacecraft called the HTV-X1. We watched until they declared "nominal orbital insertion."  

The HTV-X is the successor to JAXA's H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), also known as Kounotori (Japanese for "White Stork"), which flew nine missions to the International Space Station (ISS) between September 2009 and May 2020.

At 26.2 feet (8 meters) long, the new freighter is about 4 feet (1.2 m) shorter than its predecessor, but it can loft roughly the same payload mass to low Earth orbit (about 13,200 pounds, or 6,000 kilograms). The HTV-X also offers other advantages.

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which builds the HTV-X for JAXA, added in a description of the vehicle: "HTV-X enhances transportation capabilities and adds the capability to provide various users with on-orbit demonstration opportunities for up to 1.5 years after leaving ISS until reentry." 

Assuming this mission certifies the HTV-X, the new ship increases the number of cargo ships available for the ISS by a third, from three to four certified launch vehicles.  Currently, the Russian Progress Ship is still approved, along with the two US made ships: Northrop Grumman's Cygnus and SpaceX's Dragon. SpaceX is still under contract to launch the Cygnus as Northrop waits on Firefly Aerospace to build and deliver the next version of the Antares launch vehicle called the Antares 33. For completeness sake, only the Dragon is reusable. The other three are all designed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere when their missions are over. 

Screen capture of the JAXA YouTube coverage of tonight's launch, three seconds after liftoff, as you can see.

Small Space News Story Roundup 70

New Glenn nearly ready for rollout to the pad

As the November 9 launch window opening for NASA's ESCAPADE ("Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers") satellites to Mars is approaching, it's starting to look like we might get the necessary steps completed to launch the next New Glenn and the mission to Mars.

Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, posted a video this week of the company’s second New Glenn rocket undergoing launch preparations inside a hangar at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket’s first and second stages are now mated together and installed on the transporter erector that will carry them from the hangar to the launch pad. “We will spend the next days on final checkouts and connecting the umbilicals. Stay tuned for rollout and hotfire!” Limp wrote. 

I've seen mentions of this as a launch window that opens on Nov. 9 with no detail on how long the window is open, and I've seen it listed as it opens on Nov. 9 and runs until Nov. 11. On the typical Mars science missions we've watched for decades, the optimum launch window comes around once every two years, but it doesn't last only two days. I'm not sure there's not some reason that it must be two days, but I'd find that surprising. Considering how badly Blue Origin needs to show that New Glenn is worth paying attention to and not just some sort of "billionaire's toy," I'm hoping to see it flying in just over two weeks. 

Honestly, though, if the ship just plain works, there's no worry. It'll launch on Nov. 9 and there's no reason to think of anything else. It's just that they don't have much of a track record of things just plain working.

Chinese Startup LandSpace inches closer to a reusable rocket

Launch startup LandSpace is in the final stages of preparations for the first flight of its Zhuque-3 rocket and a potentially landmark mission for China, Space News reports (that's a nag-o-matic site that insists you pay to read the article, so for justification only).

The Zhuque-3 is the largest commercial rocket developed to date in China, nearly matching the size and performance of SpaceX’s Falcon 9, with nine first stage engines and a single upper stage engine. One key difference is that the Zhuque-3 burns methane fuel, while Falcon 9’s engines consume kerosene. Most notably, LandSpace will attempt to land the rocket’s first stage booster at a location downrange from the launch site, similar to the way SpaceX lands Falcon 9 boosters on drone ships at sea. Zhuque-3’s first stage will aim for a land-based site in an experiment that could pave the way for LandSpace to reuse rockets in the future.

LandSpace has been conducting extensive testing on this prototype, including a propellant loading demonstration and a static fire test of the rocket’s first stage engines. Earlier this week, they integrated the payload fairing on the rocket. The company said it will return the rocket to a nearby facility “for inspection and maintenance in preparation for its upcoming orbital launch and first stage recovery.”

They say launch of the test vehicle could occur as soon as November, but nobody has said if they mean Nov. 1st, 9th (like New Glenn) or just before the end of the month.

A static fire test of the Zhuque-3 at Jiuquan spaceport. Credit: LandSpace

Yes, it does resemble the Falcon 9.

Another “Super-Earth” found, added to the list to check for life

A "Super-Earth" called GJ 251c has recently been identified in the regular searches being carried out for possible signs of life. This one is less than 20 light years away putting it in the list of easily observed planets to look at regularly.  

The planet, known as GJ 251c, orbits a red dwarf star 18.2 light-years away in the constellation of Gemini, the Twins. The planet's mass is four times greater than that of Earth, making it a 'super-Earth' — a rocky planet larger and more massive than our own.
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GJ 251c was discovered thanks to observations spanning over 20 years, during which scientists looked for a slight wobble of the world's parent star incurred by the planet's gravity. As the star wobbles ever so slightly toward and away from us, we see a Doppler shift in its radial velocity that can be measured with a spectrograph.

An interesting side note to this discovery is that there's another known planet in this system, named (brace yourself) GJ 251b. This one is a much smaller planet discovered in 2020 that orbits its star every 14 days at a distance of 7.6 million miles. By comparison, Mercury's orbit takes 88 days and it orbits our sun much farther away than GJ 251b, 36 million miles from the sun.

...Using archive data from telescopes worldwide, a team of astronomers, including Mahadevan, was able to refine the accuracy of the radial velocity measurements for planet GJ 251b

The team then combined this refined data with brand new, high-precision observations from the Habitable-Zone Planet Finder (HPF), which is a near-infrared spectrograph on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas. This revealed a second planetary signal belonging to a four-Earth-mass world orbiting the star every 54 days. That was then confirmed by measurements with the NEID spectrograph on the 3.5-meter WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.

Artist's impression of GJ 251c on the left with GJ 251b, in the middle, closer to its red dwarf star on the right. (Image credit: University of California, Irvine.)

GJ 251c is probably a bit too far away to use the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to search for or analyze its atmosphere. There are plans around for 30-meter-class telescopes that open other possibilities and even bigger, more specialized telescopes after that, out into the 2040s. The unmentioned elephant in the room is that red dwarf star.  

At 36% of the mass of our sun, the star GJ 251 is a red dwarf. Astronomers have now found numerous rocky planets in the habitable zone of red dwarfs, including Proxima Centauri b, TRAPPIST-1e and f, and Teegarden's Star b. However, red dwarfs are notorious for having violent tempers that belie their diminutive stature, releasing regular powerful flares that can over time strip a planet of its atmosphere. For example, the JWST's observations of the inner three planets of TRAPPIST-1 find no evidence for an atmosphere, while its observations of the fourth planet, e, are so far inconclusive. Some astronomers are now growing skeptical that Earth-like worlds can thrive around red dwarfs. 

The big picture is even a bit more complex than that because GJ 251 is a bit on the large side for a red dwarf, and that means the usual "Goldilocks zone" (the orbital shell where conditions are most favorable for life) is a little farther from the star and that might help. 

It is possible that GJ 251c is far enough away from its star to have avoided the worst of its temper tantrums, and, if armed with a thick atmosphere and strong planetary magnetic field, it could have resisted the star's stellar wind from stripping its atmosphere away. 

That makes the short version something like, "interesting, but don't sit on the edge of your seat waiting for news." The youngest of us might live long enough to see that news.

Meanwhile back at the range

SpaceX resumed doing what they do - launching while the rest of the world watches. As is often the case, everything they do sets a record of some sort.  

The launch was the 133rd Falcon 9 mission of the year, "just" sending another 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, this time from Vandenberg Space Force Base in southern California. Last year's record was 132. With around 10 weeks left in the year and a pace that has been just over 3/week, that points to the possibility of 162 F9 launches for this year.  It was at 7:16 AM PDT or 10:16 AM of Oct. 22nd here on the east coast.  Although not even distantly related, Ruger Firearms long ago grabbed 10/22 to be called Ruger Day and I feel obligated to pass that on. 

This was called Starlink group 11-5, pictured here:

This morning's launch from Vandenberg Image Credit: SpaceX

The last record-breaking launch for SpaceX was also from Vandenberg SFB, on Sunday 10/19. That launch of 28 Starlink satellites included the 10,000th Starlink satellite, as it's own record. 

The next launch should be tomorrow (Thursday, 10/23) night from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) here on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Launch time is currently set for 9:30PM EDT. What's unusual about this launch is that they will not attempt to land the booster, something that happens very rarely - this one will be only the second one of this year. This is booster B1076-22, with that last two digits telling the number of this mission. That's right, this will be the 22nd flight of B1076. When a booster is thrown away it's because the requirements of the launch (weight and trajectory) are more than a Falcon 9 can handle and return to drone ship to land. 

Tomorrow night's payload is a Communications Satellite (ComSAT) for Spain called SPAINSAT New Generation II

SPAINSAT NG is Hisdesat's largest project since its foundation. Its technological complexity and strategic relevance will position the company as an international benchmark in satellite communications. The new Spainsat NG generation will multiply by 16 times the capacity in X and Ka military band with respect to the current devices and will add a new payload in UHF band. In addition, it will operate with active X-band antennas in receive and transmit. Pioneers in the European aerospace sector, each of them will be assigned 16 different areas of operation to perform their coverage services with electronic configuration.

The SpainSat NG I & II will replace the current SpainSat and XTAR-EUR and will incorporate the latest technological advances in communications to reinforce their capabilities, security levels and resilience. They will have a useful life of about 15 years, which means that they will be fully operational until the 2040 threshold. 

Let me tell you something

Just between you and me. The NASA/SpaceX/Sean Duffy story yesterday is the kind of story I ha-a-a-te with a blinding passion. It's too much of an annoying people story that doesn't tell you the tiniest bit about some new technology, new engine, new telescope or camera or any cool-ass piece of technology.  It's just my least favorite aspect of any space story is petty personnel crap.

Here we are 24 hours later and it has only gotten worse.  But now it's bigger news.  More complicated. More involved. Believe me, if I had more details on some mission or new piece of hardware, I'd rather post that. So I'll try to be brief. 

It turns out that the Sean Duffy news presentation yesterday was upsetting. Eric Berger over at Ars Technica, who presented the base story I linked to, went for the attention-grabbing headline that "Elon Musk just declared war on..." Sean Duffy but the story title was a little wordier, and ended with the weasel word "apparently." 

What has happened now? Why, it was only SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is NASA’s most important contractor, referring to the interim head of the space agency, Sean Duffy, as “Sean Dummy” and suggesting Duffy was trying to kill NASA. Musk later added, “The person responsible for America’s space program can’t have a 2 digit IQ.”

This is all pretty bonkers, so I want to try to contextualize what I believe is going on behind the scenes. This should help us make sense of what is happening in public.

Perhaps Eric is on to something, and I bow in his direction for (1) having many years in this field (he's actually a certified meteorologist) and (2) largely because of that, he has put together a group of experts he can trust for good opinions and good guesses on things like "they said their new rocket is going to fly in X months, but when do you think it actually will?"  

What Eric thinks this is all about is that Duffy wants to be NASA Administrator and it looks like Jared Isaacman is going to get nominated again. 

Since then, a lot has happened, but it boils down to this. Duffy was, nominally, supposed to be running the space agency while searching for a permanent replacement. The biggest move he has made is naming Amit Kshatriya, a long-time employee, as NASA’s associate administrator. Kshatriya now has a lot of power within the agency and comes with the mindset of a former flight director. He is not enamored with using SpaceX’s Starship as a lunar lander.

After Isaacman's nomination was pulled, people close to Trump continued to vouch for the billionaire/former astronaut. Trump listened to his trusted circle and got closer to Isaacman, meeting with him multiple times since, and all were positive experiences.

The problem is that Duffy found he liked running NASA. NASA gets more favorable news coverage than the Department of Transportation gets in the news. To add to that, he brought his chief of staff from the DOT, Pete Meachum, and he also enjoyed having power over NASA.  

Berger points out that what Duffy did yesterday in criticizing one of their most important contractors "just isn't done." Is it true that Starship is late with the Human Landing System?  Of course it is.  It's also amazingly ignorant to blast SpaceX for being late when virtually everything associated with Artemis has been late and over budget, not just Boeing's Space Launch System, but the mobile launch towers, even the new space suits needed for the lunar landing, which also almost certainly will not be ready by the projected 2027 Artemis III launch. If everything is late, why pick on just one? 

There seem to be two clear reasons why Duffy did this. One, he wanted to show President Trump he was committed to reaching the Moon again before China gets there. And secondly, with his public remarks, Duffy sought to demonstrate to the rest of the space community that he was willing to stand up to SpaceX.

Maybe that should read "willing to pick on SpaceX." Eric also reports, almost certainly from well-placed sources in the other companies, that Duffy and Meachum had spent the weekend calling around to SpaceX’s competitors, like Duffy's mention of Blue Origin in Monday's report, asking for their support in his quest to remain at NASA. 

By this morning (Tuesday, Oct. 21) it seemed like Elon had enough. 

The acting administrator had gone on TV and publicly shamed Musk’s company, which has self-invested billions of dollars into Starship. (By contrast, Lockheed has invested little or nothing in the Orion spacecraft, and Boeing also has little skin in the game with the Space Launch System rocket. Similarly, a ‘government option’ lunar lander would likely need to be cost-plus in order to attract Lockheed as a bidder.) Then Duffy praised Blue Origin, which, for all of its promise, has yet to make meaningful achievements in orbit. All the while, it is only thanks to SpaceX and its Dragon spacecraft that NASA does not have to go hat-in-hand to Russia for astronaut transportation.

Will the crass and Trump-like moniker of "Sean Dummy" work? We don't know enough about the important interpersonal dynamics to guess. Like most experiments, we have to watch for the results. 

SpaceX rendering of the Human Landing System, that I first posted here in August of 2021. It appears to be a crop from a larger scale image posted earlier in the year. Credit SpaceX

Another point to factor into the big picture is that the Wall Street Journal reported last night that Duffy has sought to move NASA into the Department of Transportation, as Eric Berger reported earlier in the afternoon yesterday. That would mean that even if Isaacman were appointed to be NASA administrator that he would report to Duffy. I would think it's more likely Duffy would appoint someone other than Isaacman; someone who is a more dependable suck-up.

Don't forget that NASA has been subject not just to the Schumer Shutdown but also to layoffs of 20% of its employees and the budget cuts going around this year. Morale is said to not be high and this situation isn't helping.

Final words to Eric Berger

So this is where we are. A fierce, behind-the-scenes battle rages on among camps supporting Duffy and Isaacman to decide the leadership of NASA. The longer this process drags on, the messier it seems to get. In the meantime, NASA is twisting in the wind, trying to run in molasses while wearing lead shoes as China marches onward and upward.

NASA's acting chief is shaking up the Artemis schedule

The Monday afternoon and evening news is saying that Sean Duffy, acting NASA administrator is shaking up the Artemis program for getting too far behind where they wanted to be.  

Speaking on Fox News, where the secretary of transportation frequently appears in his acting role as NASA chief, Duffy said SpaceX has fallen behind in its efforts to develop the Starship vehicle as a lunar lander. Duffy also indirectly acknowledged that NASA’s projected target of a 2027 crewed lunar landing is no longer achievable. Accordingly, he said he intended to expand the competition to develop a lander capable of carrying humans down to the Moon from lunar orbit and back.

“They’re behind schedule, and so the President wants to make sure we beat the Chinese,” Duffy said of SpaceX. “He wants to get there in his term. So I’m in the process of opening that contract up. I think we’ll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved, and maybe others. We’re going to have a space race in regard to American companies competing to see who can actually lead us back to the Moon first.”

Eric Berger, reporting at Ars Technica sees two big takeaways from this announcement: the first and biggest one is that NASA is acknowledging they're behind schedule and the 2027 date being announced for Artemis III's landing mission is unachievable. The second aspect is that by going public with this on Monday morning as an "out of the blue" announcement seems intended to influence a fierce battle to hold onto the NASA leadership position. Rumors are running that Sean Duffy intends to run for president and part of this maneuvering is to get more pubic attention. 

The shock value of that announcement is pretty small to me. Everyone knows that the way Artemis has been run has led to terrible problems with hardware being late and more expensive than reasonable.  It's more surprising to me that Duffy would say, "I think we’ll see companies like Blue [Origin] get involved..." and my reaction was "they already have a lunar lander contract. What more do you want?"  SpaceX won their contract to turn Starship into the Human Landing System in 2021. Blue Origin won their contract two years later in '23. 

When Duffy says “companies like Blue” may get involved, he is not referring to the existing contract, in which Blue Origin will not deliver a ready-to-go lunar lander until the 2030s. Rather he is almost certainly referring to a plan developed by Blue Origin that uses multiple Mk 1 landers, a smaller vehicle originally designed for cargo only. Ars reported on this new lunar architecture three weeks ago, which company engineers have been quietly developing. This plan would not require in-space refueling, and the Mk 1 vehicle is nearing its debut flight early next year.

Duffy also cites “maybe others” getting involved. This refers to a third option. In recent weeks, officials from traditional space companies have been telling Duffy and the chief of staff at the Department of Transportation, Pete Meachum, that they can build an Apollo Lunar Module-like lander within 30 months. Amit Kshatriya, NASA’s associate administrator, favors this government-led approach, sources said.

This last approach of an Apollo LEM-like lander apparently can be seen as "Big Government should run everything." Practical questions arise, centered on things like the mission Duffy is looking to be accomplished doesn't resemble the Artemis program concept of operations that SpaceX bid on so should that be revised? There was a Lunar Gateway space station that seemed to serve no real purpose and definitely won't have a purpose if they're flying something like the Apollo era Lunar Modules to orbit the moon and land directly. A NASA analysis, from 2017, estimated that a cost-plus contract for a sole-source lunar lander would cost $20 billion to $30 billion, or nearly 10 times what NASA awarded to SpaceX in 2021.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk, responding to Duffy’s comments, seemed to relish the challenge posed by industry competitors.

“SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry,” Musk said on the social media site he owns, X. “Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”

Berger goes on to report on what he thinks is the politics of what's going on.  He thinks this whole story is a show put on to impress President Trump. His argument centers on that Duffy was appointed soon after Jared Isaacman's nomination was pulled in July and Trump expected Duffy would use this time to shore up NASA’s leadership while also looking for a permanent chief of the space agency. There's no obvious evidence he did anything along that line. If anything, he has used his public appearances to help his name recognition and public opinion ratings.  Meanwhile, Jared Isaacman is getting more attention, too. 

Since late summer there has been a groundswell of support for Isaacman in the White House, and among some members of Congress. The billionaire has met with Trump several times, both at the White House and Mar-a-Lago, and sources report that the two have a good rapport. There has been some momentum toward the president re-nominating Isaacman, with Trump potentially making a decision soon.
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A Republican advisor to the White House told Ars that it is good that Duffy has moved beyond his rhetoric about NASA beating China to the Moon and to look for creative tactics to land there. But, this person said, the mandate from the Trump administration is to dominate the emerging commercial space industry, not hand out large cost-plus contracts.

“Duffy hasn’t implemented any of the strategic reforms of Artemis that the president proposed this spring,” the Republican source said. “He has the perfect opportunity during the current shutdown, but there is no sign of any real reform under his leadership. Instead, Duffy is being co-opted by the deep state at NASA.” 

I would add that there's a distinctive aroma of "let's go with someone other than SpaceX, award some big, fat, cost-plus contracts like we always used to work to and run everything just like Apollo." Compare SpaceX's record to Blue Origin's, ULA's, Lock-Mart's, or any other contractor. In terms of launches, it's SpaceX and then everyone else. In terms of innovation, I don't see much difference there.

Interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy provides remarks at a briefing prior to the Crew 11 launch in August. Image Credit: NASA