VLEO?

I couldn't begin to guess how many times we've referred to Low Earth Obit or LEO over the years. I'm sure there's a precise definition somewhere, but I've come to conceptualize LEO as starting at the minimum height that can remain stable for some amount of time, probably more like months than years. This weekend was the first time I've seen the term Very Low Earth Orbit. 

LEO is getting crowded, but there’s plenty of real estate available closer to home if you can make it work. California-based Viridian Space is aiming to do just that.

The company is developing air breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) technology to fly future satellites in VLEO, and the US government is lending a hand to get the tech off the ground.

Viridian Space CEO Slava Spektor announced that the company has signed a five-year cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the US Air Force to co-develop Viridian’s ABEP tech, and to work together on studies leveraging VLEO. The CRADA will be run out of Albuquerque, New Mexico's, Kirtland Air Force Base. The Air Force will assist Viridian with testing and characterizing the power systems they develop, while Viridian will concentrate on the technology and how it can be used to create new operational concepts for the US military. 

Viridian is expecting to launch their first mission within three years. Among its first priorities will be to collect data on the atmospheric conditions in VLEO, offering the DoD a better understanding of atmospheric drag at different altitudes, and how space weather events impact satellite life spans.  

VLEO has the obvious advantage that being miles closer to the ground than higher orbits, it will offer faster up and downlink speeds, and less optical magnification will be required to image targets, but it goes beyond that. Their air breathing electric proposal isn't just replacing the oxidizer in a chemical engine with oxygen taken out of the air, the air itself is the fuel they'll use. No, the short article on Payload offers no details on that. I'll get back to that in a little while.

Viridian’s aim is not just to get around the growing traffic in LEO, but to create a satellite system that is more capable than chemical prop systems flying in higher orbits. An ABEP sat in VLEO has multiple benefits, according to Spektor: [NOTE: read prop as propellant - SiG]

• Viridian’s sats are aiming to stay in orbit for up to 10 years. Because the system is designed to use air as fuel, the sat will be able to maneuver without worrying about burning through onboard fuel reserves.
• Viridian also expects its sats to provide more maneuverability to its customers. The sats are expected to fly at altitudes as low as 150 km, and to dip in and out of the atmosphere to reach multiple orbital altitudes on a single flight.

Viridian's website offers a link to a paper, but there's nothing there. Some searching led me to a more useful site, which links to a pdf version of a paper published in Acta Astronautica in 2022. The top-level introduction says this about the fuel.

The concept is based on the ingestion of rarefied atmospheric particles to be used as propellant for an electric thruster, thereby removing the need for onboard propellant

Viridian offers this diagram of the engine, but no other details. 

Viridian's ABEP engine conceptual diagram. Image credit: Viridian Space

While I'm always suspicious of things that might come across as "something for nothing," the engineers at Viridian have been working on this for years and I think it's worth experimenting to see if it lives up to the experimental results and analysis so far.

About that potential news article

Back on Thursday, I posted an article about the House NASA Reauthorization bill that was going through the process and the impacts coming, including putting up more programs for the private sector to bid on and take the lead in them. 

When that bill passed, lawmakers had added an additional change to it. 

Another add-on to the authorization bill would require NASA to reassess whether to guide the International Space Station (ISS) toward a destructive atmospheric reentry after it is decommissioned in 2030. The space agency’s current plan is to deorbit the space station in 2031 over the Pacific Ocean, where debris that survives the scorching reentry will fall into a remote, unpopulated part of the sea.
...
The amendment tacked onto this year’s bill would not change the timeline for ending operations on the ISS, but it asks NASA to reconsider its decision about what to do with the complex after retirement.

The amendment would direct NASA to “carry out an engineering analysis to evaluate the technical, operational, and logistical viability of transferring the ISS to a safe orbital harbor and storing the ISS in such harbor after the end of the operational low-Earth orbit lifetime of the ISS to preserve the ISS for potential reuse and satisfy the objectives of NASA.”

Rep. George Whitesides (D-Calif.) and cosponsor Rep. Nick Begich (R-Alaska) submitted the amendment, much like the amendment mentioned in Thursday's post had bipartisan sponsors. It probably "looks better" (sells better) than an amendment put up by only one side. Whitesides was a NASA chief of staff and had been an executive in the space industry before his election to the House. 

In essence this is the same concept that several people have asked about retiring the ISS here on the blog and, honestly, gets asked everywhere. Instead of splashing the ISS into a deep spot in the Pacific, why not put it into a higher orbit?

“The International Space Station is one of the most complex engineering achievements in human history,” Whitesides said. “It represents more than three decades of international collaboration and investment by US taxpayers estimated at well over $100 billion. Current plans call for the station to be deorbited at the end of its service life in 2030. This amendment does not seek to change that policy. Instead, it asks a straightforward question: Before we permanently dispose of an asset of this magnitude, should we fully understand whether it’s viable to preserve it in orbit for potential use by future generations?”

Of course, this has been analyzed before in the sense of determining just how much orbital velocity has to be changed to get the desired change. That was required to create the contract telling the eventual winning bidder (SpaceX) how much change in orbital velocity is required to start to deorbit the ISS. A good approximation of everything in the Low Earth Orbit range of the station is that its orbital velocity is 17,000 mph. The required change in velocity is 127 mph, which is a tiny percentage of its current velocity: 0.75%. 

Changing its speed by just 127 mph will consume about 10 tons (9 metric tons) of propellant, according to a NASA analysis released in 2024.  

Everyone now is thinking how much mass are we talking about? The station mass is around 450 tons, equivalent to two freight train locomotives, and measures about the size of a football field.

The analysis document shows that NASA considered alternatives to discarding the space station through reentry. One option NASA studied involved moving the station into a higher orbit. At its current altitude, roughly 260 miles (420 kilometers) above the Earth, the ISS would take one to two years to reenter the atmosphere due to aerodynamic drag if reboosts weren’t performed. NASA does not want the space station to make an uncontrolled reentry because of the risk of fatalities, injuries, and property damage from debris reaching the ground.

The amount of fuel required is around twice that 10 tons necessary to de-orbit the ISS. 

At that altitude, without any additional boosts, NASA says the space station would likely remain in orbit for 100 years before succumbing to atmospheric drag and burning up. Going higher still, the space station could be placed in a 1,200-mile-high (2,000-kilometer) orbit, stable for more than 10,000 years, with about 146 tons (133 metric tons) of propellant.

There are two problems with sending the ISS to higher altitudes. One is that it would require the development of new propulsive and tanker vehicles that do not currently exist, according to NASA.

Developing new tankers and a new "Deorbit Dragon" isn't the end to the possible difficulties. Putting the station in a higher orbit, also exposes it to a higher chance of impact from space junk. The engineers who did that 2024 analysis say the peak risk is at an orbital height of 500 miles. “This means that the likelihood of an impact leaving station unable to maneuver or react to future threats, or even a significant impact resulting in complete fragmentation, is unacceptably high.”

An alternative they don't spend much time examining is "leave it where it is." NASA said in 2024 that engineers have “high confidence” that the primary structure of the station could support operations beyond 2030. It's undoubtedly higher risk the longer the station stays there, and maybe some sections could be replaced or just left empty and unused. 

The oldest segments of the station have been in orbit since 1998, undergoing day-night thermal cycles every 45 minutes as they orbit the planet. The structural stability of the Russian section of the outpost is also in question. Russian engineers traced a small but persistent air leak to microscopic structural cracks in one Russian module, but cosmonauts were able to seal the cracks, and air pressure in the area is “holding steady,” a NASA spokesperson said last month.

All that said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with asking, "are we doing the right thing or being stupid?" Paying for another round of analysis, perhaps with some different assumptions, could be good thing.  

Then there's the way NASA has been encouraging the development of private space stations like the Vast Haven-1. Let the private sector develop the stations, make income from them, and let them decide how to handle problems like this. They're not as far along as everyone was talking about, but when has a new technology not had moments like that?  

I'll just conclude with a saying that I like. "When you're doing things no one has ever done before, you learn things no one has ever known before." A decision like this has several of those things no one has done before embedded in it. 

Artist’s illustration of SpaceX’s deorbit vehicle, based on the design of the company’s Dragon spacecraft. The modified spacecraft will have 46 Draco thrusters—30 for the deorbit maneuvers and 16 for attitude control. Credit: SpaceX

The problem with the new US Dietary Guidelines

I've seen quite a few comments in opposition to the new, inverted food pyramid that the USDA released early last month. Most of these comments are from the groups and individuals that wanted the old pyramid the way it was, or who wanted the food pyramid to completely ban not just meat but anything that an animal was involved with in any way. But I've only seen one person who actually mentioned a genuine problem with what the USDA said, and that person is Nina Teicholz who wrote an extremely influential book on diet, called the Big Fat Surprise back in 2014. In this article I'll quote from Nina's substack on the subject; I've been a subscriber to her substack since she started it. When you click on this link, you'll be offered a prompt to read it for free or subscribe. I've never paid a cent.

Getting back to the subject, though, the problem with the guidelines is simple: the math doesn't work. 

See, the food guidelines have always had an absurd emphasis on the reduction of fat in the diet, especially "dat ol' debil" saturated fat, largely due to some studies from the post-WWII days that have been discredited - mainly by not having measurable positive effects - and at least one that reeks of fraud. Both HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary have repeatedly pledged to “end to the war on saturated fat” since they took office. To quote from Nina's article on this:

The cap on saturated fats has been a bedrock piece of advice since the launch of this policy in 1980, and it is why so many Americans avoid red meat, drink skim milk, and opt to cook with seed oils over butter.

Yet I learned from two administration officials that saturated fats will not be liberated after all. The longstanding 10% of calories cap on these fats will remain.

At the same time, the guidelines’ language will encourage cooking with “butter” and “tallow,” both of which are high in saturated fat. It will also introduce a colorful new food pyramid with proteins—including red meat—occupying the largest portion. These are powerful messages, never before conveyed by our national food policy, and are likely to influence consumer behavior. 

Let me put the food pyramid here, from her article again.

Her concern is that it isn't clear from this display that the old low fat diet guideline of 10% calories from fat (CFF) still applies. For individuals on their own, at home or free-living anywhere: Fine. As always, if you ignore it, it can't hurt you. 

But there’s another audience: the roughly 30 million children eating school lunches daily, plus military personnel, and the vulnerable populations—elderly and poor Americans—who receive food through federal programs, roughly 1 in 4 Americans each week. These programs are required by law to follow the Dietary Guidelines. For them, the numerical cap will trump any contrary language about butter and tallow. Cafeteria managers and program administrators will continue to adhere to the 10% limit, because that’s what the law requires.

For these captive populations, seed oils will remain the mandated cooking fat. The encouraging words about butter and tallow will essentially be meaningless.

For someone on a 2000 calorie/day diet, 10% calories from fat means 200 calories in a day; with fat at 9 roughly calories per gram, that's 22 grams/day. Nina goes on to show how little that is in a day. 

• 1 cup whole-fat yogurt for breakfast: ~5 grams

• 1 chicken thigh with skin, cooked in 1 tablespoon butter for dinner: ~12 grams

Total: ~17 grams of saturated fat for two small meals.

or

• 2 eggs cooked in 1 tablespoon of butter: ~13 grams

• 4 oz ribeye steak: ~6 grams

• Broccoli with 1 tablespoon butter: ~7 grams

Total: ~26 grams of saturated fat for two small meals

Her next topic is that the limit on fat impacts another good aspect of the recommendations, to increase protein. 

I’ve also learned that the new guidelines will increase the recommended amount of protein from the current RDA minimum of about 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight to 1.2-1.5 grams. This is genuinely good news. Studies show this higher range is far better for weight loss, muscle maintenance, recovery from serious illness, and overall well-being—especially for school-aged children and older adults, two populations whose protein needs have been chronically underserved by current recommendations.

But here’s the paradox: with the cap on saturated fats still in place, this increased protein cannot realistically come from animal sources. A 4-ounce serving of lean beef provides 24 grams of protein but also delivers about 6 grams of saturated fat. Meeting the higher protein targets through beef, pork, or chicken thighs with skin would blow through the saturated fat limit by lunchtime.

So where will this protein come from? The only options that fit within the 10% saturated fat cap are peas, beans, and lentils—plant proteins that are mostly incomplete (lacking at least one of the nine essential amino acids), harder for the body to absorb, and packed with starch. To match the protein in 4 ounces of beef, you’d need over 6 tablespoons of peanut butter—between 500 and 600 calories, compared to 155 for the beef.

This isn't news to pretty much anybody that takes their fitness and health seriously, whether gym bros, marathon runners, distance cyclists, you name it. Vegetarian sources of protein are generally incomplete and require combing sources that complement each other and turn it into a proper mixture of the nine essential amino acids. Most people just reflexively believe that vegetables are good for you; so much that "fruits and vegetables" turn into one word. "Don't forget your fruitsandvegetables!" 

---

Nina devotes a few inches of column space to look at the "why" of the updates, especially with the consideration that much of what secretary Kennedy and others had said they wanted to do in the guidelines either never got added or the addition got deleted along the way. It all comes down to silly political decisions. Things like how repeated reviews by teams of scientists around the world have concluded that things like the 10% calories from fat and limiting saturated fat are contradicted over and over again yet they still didn't want to get rid of those. 

"The large, rigorous clinical trials on saturated fats—on 60,000 to 80,000 people worldwide—could never demonstrate that reducing saturated fat lowered a person’s risk of death from heart disease or any other cause." 

Small Space News Story Roundup 77

Because small news is better than no news. Or something like that

SpaceX Pauses Falcon 9 Missions 

This isn't even big news here on the Space Coast but showed up on some of the space news sites earlier in the week. 

On Monday, February 2nd, SpaceX had their first launch of the year from Vandenberg Space Force Base, a rather common Starlink satellite launch, but the upper stage had a malfunction after a nominal deployment of the 25 satellites payload into the right orbit.

After liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:47:11 a.m. PST (10:47:11 a.m. EST / 1547:11 UTC), the rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory to deliver 25 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites into low Earth orbit.
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“During today’s Falcon 9 launch of Starlink satellites, the second stage experienced an off-nominal condition during preparation for the deorbit burn,” SpaceX wrote in a social media post. “The vehicle then performed as designed to successfully passivate the stage. The first two [Merlin vacuum engine] burns were nominal and safely deployed all 25 Starlink satellites to their intended orbit.”

The issue is that the upper stage was supposed to make a guided, destructive reentry into an unoccupied area (probably open ocean) and not having the second stage operating properly put that into question. Instead, the second stage remained in a low-altitude orbit and made an unguided reentry later in the week.

SpaceX took the prudent step of putting coming launches on hold until the conditions are well understood. As SpaceX said in a statement, “Teams are reviewing data to determine root cause and corrective actions before returning to flight.” 

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 team in Florida is now focusing on preparations for launch of the Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station, targeted for no earlier than February 11. The schedule for Crew-12 will hinge on how quickly SpaceX can complete the investigation into Monday’s upper stage malfunction. You can bet that NASA will be rather interested in seeing that data before they'll allow that launch. 

A interesting side note is that this Booster 1071 on its 31st launch. Nearly 8-1/2 minutes after launch B1071 successfully landed on drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” or OCISLY.

Amazon books another ten launches with SpaceX

... so that they can keep their FCC approval to complete their satellite constellation. 

Back in mid-January, in a post about Amazon booking an Ariane 64 launch to put up a batch of their Leo satellites, Commenter jeff d posted a reminder of the way the FCC regulates these efforts:

Amazon LEO (Kuipier) is required by FCC to have 50% of their 3,200 satellites deployed by July 2026. Doable (by SpaceX production and launch) but the Amazon team / pace does not seem up to it. Likey get an extension. Still, would love to see them actually do it (or even just try) and additionally give some competition to SpaceX above what the Viasat Marketing department dreams of. 

That's what this is all about. Amazon is demonstrating to the FCC, "we're trying as hard as we can" to get that 50% into orbit.

The deal, which neither Amazon nor SpaceX previously announced, was disclosed in an Amazon filing with the Federal Communications Commission on January 30, seeking an extension of a July deadline to deploy half of its Amazon Leo constellation. Amazon has launched only 180 satellites of its planned 3,232-satellite constellation, rendering the July deadline unattainable. Amazon asked the FCC to extend the July deadline by two years or waive it entirely, but did not request an extension to the 2029 deadline for full deployment of the constellation.

“Near-term shortage in launch capacity”… In the filing with the FCC, Amazon said it faces a “near-term shortage of launch capacity” and is securing additional launch options “wherever available.” That effort includes working with SpaceX, whose Starlink constellation directly competes with Amazon Leo. Amazon bypassed SpaceX entirely when it made its initial orders for more than 80 Amazon Leo launches with United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But Amazon later reserved three launches with SpaceX that flew last year and has now added 10 more SpaceX launches to its manifest. So far, Amazon has only launched satellites on ULA’s soon-to-retire Atlas V rocket and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Amazon has not started flying on the new Vulcan, Ariane 6, or New Glenn rockets, which comprise the bulk of the constellation’s launch bookings. That could change next week with the first launch of Amazon Leo satellites on Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket.

At the risk of sounding too much like a SpaceX Fanboi, whenever I hear about Starlink competitors doing things like this I kind of shake my head and say, "who you gonna call?" As I pointed out in the early January post, "The 10 biggest rocket companies," SpaceX not only has more launches than any other American launch provider, they had more launches than every company in every country combined. You need to get some satellites up ASAP for some emergency need. Who you gonna call? There's a lot of companies I like and that I think are good, who are pushing at getting even better, but, seriously, who has the best track record? Who you gonna call? 

Obligatory pretty picture of a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, SLC-4E. Same launch pad, different mission, different time of day. Image credit: SpaceX

EDIT 0920 EST Feb. 7 to add: And... the SpaceX stand down from launches is over. Since the mission that caused it was on Monday, it's a bit of an exaggeration to say they stood down for a minute as NASA Spaceflight did, but it's sure not the typical shutdown. Falcon 9 launches are set to resume this morning (Saturday, Feb. 7) from Vandenberg at 9:21 a.m. PST (12:21 p.m. EST / 1721 UTC). Another Space 2.0 vs "old space" story.

A bit of potential news

Since I really can't find anything interesting going on, let me mention something that doesn't mean much right now, but has the potential to have major, great impacts. 

A US House committee with oversight of NASA unanimously passed a “reauthorization” act for the space agency on Wednesday. The legislation must still be approved by the full House before being sent to the Senate, which may take up consideration later this month. 

Just to underline and emphasize, this isn't a law yet, and will probably change before it becomes law, if it ever even does become law. Congress passes reauthorization bills like this every couple of years, not just for NASA but for all agencies with complex fields they regulate, to give a sense of what the administration wants to see them accomplish. These aren't bills that actually regulate appropriations (spending) but can have effects for years. 

One of the more important parts of the bill is considered the first step toward creating a “commercial” deep space program.  

Most notably among these was the Amendment No. 01, offered by the chair of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), as well as its ranking member, Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and three other legislators. 

The amendment concerns acquisition powers bestowed upon NASA by Congress, stating in part: “The Administrator may, subject to appropriations, procure from United States commercial providers operational services to carry cargo and crew safely, reliably, and affordably to and from deep space destinations, including the Moon and Mars.”

Now that sounds pretty generic, as it should, but it may show a way around the need for more SLS launches; as in nothing past Artemis V or possibly not even beyond III. 

NASA’s initial missions to the Moon, through Artemis V, have a clearly defined architecture: They must use the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin to complete lunar landings.

But after that? With this amendment, Congress appears to be opening the aperture to commercial companies. That is to say, if SpaceX wanted to bid an end-to-end Starship lunar mission, it could; or if Blue Origin wanted to launch Orion on New Glenn, that is also an option. The language is generalized enough, not specifying “launch” but rather “transportation,” that in-space companies such as Impulse Space could also get creative. Essentially, Congress is telling the US industry that if it is ready to step up, NASA should allow it to bid on lunar cargo and crew missions.

Yes, that first paragraph says "missions to the moon, through Artemis V" but it doesn't seem to say, NASA must perform Artemis V as envisioned now and must buy SLS systems. If SpaceX or Blue Origin or some startup we've never heard of comes out of the blue and sells NASA upper management on a totally different approach, that doesn't sound impossible to me. Need I add, "I'm not a lawyer" or some sort of disclaimer to that?

It's important to remember that NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is not a fan of SLS, he just thinks it's the best chance we have to get to the moon before 2030. He has enough experience with private space to - perhaps - be more willing to take what others consider big chances.

While it probably goes without saying that both Representatives Brian Babin and Zoe Lofgren said nice things about the bill, it goes farther than that. 

Advocates of commercial spaceflight, who have long argued that the private sector is ready to step up and play a more comprehensive role in deep space transportation for NASA, hailed the new amendment.

“This is quite a step in the right direction for the future of commercial space transportation options for deep space,” Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, told Ars. “It is also very much in line with this administration’s focus on commercial solutions and competition. This provides NASA with flexibility to procure additional services for the Moon and Mars in the future.”

Of course, this is politics and you can bet congress critters will vote on what they think is best for them. If major contractors on SLS are in their district, they're likely to vote against it, but that doesn't figure to be many.

If this passes, we can expect NASA to spend some time creating infrastructure to implement this. Hopefully, they could do this without spending months or years. An advantage they have now is a very successful model that currently contracts with private providers for crew and cargo missions to the International Space Station. Perhaps they could just expand that office for missions to the Moon or beyond.

Not really launch related, but I find catching the Starship booster to be an irresistible picture. Screen grab from the video of Flight Test-5, a few seconds before the successful grab, October of '24. Image credit: SpaceX

The Biggest and Most Expensive POS in History

If you were asked to name the biggest and most expensive POS (piece of shit) in history, what would you vote for? Yeah, there's an implication there that you know something about every POS ever built, and you have justification based on real data of why you name that one and not all the other bad examples. So let's simplify it to the biggest POS you've ever heard of. 

I'm going to vote for the Space Launch System, the SLS, currently in the queue to take the Artemis II crew to loop around the moon and come back to Earth. That's a link to a piece on Ars Technica by their senior space reporter Eric Berger and let me emphasize he DOES NOT SAY THAT. That's my line and I made it up. Eric knows the industry and the players better than I do, and honestly isn't going to say stuff that I'll say. 

Eric opens with the viewpoint that NASA knows the two biggest issues with SLS - and anyone who has been following Artemis knows

The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.  

I’ve reported on the expense of SLS so many times it makes me sick. The SLS, so far, has only launched one time, and that was with actual, already-flown, leftover Shuttle RS-25 engines, also known as Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs). They are 512,000 pound thrust – which may have been remarkable in the 1970s but common now. Both the Blue Origin BE-4s and the SpaceX Raptor engines, all versions, can do it. The SSMEs cost around $125 Million each. The Raptor 2, 3, or 4 engines are in the vicinity of $2 million Blue Origin sells the BE-4 for less than $20 million.   

Think of that. There are four SSMEs on one SLS core, or $500 million. Four Raptors are $8 million. The problem is that SLS can’t just switch because SLS runs on Liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen (LOX) and the other engines run on methane and LOX.

If you keep going down this road, you’ll find that an SLS launch has been priced in the vicinity of $4 Billion. Several times I've pointed out that while the SLS can deliver heavier payloads to orbit than a Falcon Heavy mission, it's not many times the payload, it's only like 130% of a FH launch. Two FH launches will launch more payload than one SLS and cost about 8% of one SLS launch. 

Granted the Falcon Heavy didn’t exist when SLS started up, but how do they stick with SLS with facts like that in their faces? 

Then there’s the ability to make a schedule. As I’m sure you’ve read the Wet Dress Rehearsal Monday evening failed miserably and the current launch schedule is No Earlier Than March 8th. Eric presents lots of info on the one test flight of the SLS, from November of ‘22 that I’d forgotten. 

The SLS rolled out of its hangar and to the launch pad in March. That was followed by failure after failure to fuel the rocket and get it to launch. It took seven attempts to run the WDR and it comes across as the engineers saying, “screw this, we’ll never get it to pass the WDR, just launch that MoFo and see what happens.” I bet that wouldn’t - or shouldn’t - happen with a crew onboard.

Since it’s such a great turn of a phrase, I’ll quote Eric on this:

That was November 16, 2022. More than three years ago. You might think that over the course of the extended interval since then, and after the excruciating pain of spending nearly an entire year conducting fueling tests to try to lift the massive rocket off the pad, some of the smartest engineers in the world, the fine men and women at NASA, would have dug into and solved the leak issues. 

You would be wrong. 

There’s more than just that big problem with fueling here. Because the empty rocket is so expensive, about half the $4 Billion per launch, the program is “hardware poor.” They can’t afford to build test cases to learn more about how they’d behave. A rocket that is so expensive it only flies rarely will have super-high operating costs and ever-present safety concerns precisely because it flies so infrequently. 

Until this week, NASA had largely ignored these concerns, at least in public. However, in a stunning admission, NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, acknowledged the flight-rate issue after Monday’s wet-dress rehearsal test failed to reach a successful conclusion. “The flight rate is the lowest of any NASA-designed vehicle, and that should be a topic of discussion,” he said as part of a longer post about the test on social media.

The reality, which Isaacman knows full well, and which almost everyone else in the industry recognizes, is that the SLS rocket is dead hardware walking. The Trump administration would like to fly the rocket just two more times, culminating in the Artemis III human landing on the Moon. Congress has passed legislation mandating a fourth and fifth launch of the SLS vehicle.

Gee, Congress overruling logical, reasonable requests and setting it up to (I'll bet) get them more money to scrape off the contract for themselves. Who woulda guessed?

Isaacman needs to do what he can to get funds to the two competitors working to replace SLS and replace it as fast as possible. If I was riding that thing to get into orbit, I’d like it to be more like the Toyota Hilux of space vehicles, one cranked out by the million with an incredible record of survival in the worst of conditions. SLS is more like a piece of sculpture worked on by an artist. No two will ever be the same. Every launch campaign an adventure, every mission subject to excessive delays. 

Looking up at the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as they roll to Pad 39B. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Strongest X-Class Solar Flare in months happened this morning

We are well past the peak of cycle 25 and the activity has been disappointingly low (at least to me) but it's never a good approach to stop watching the sun for unexpectedly large solar flares, coronal mass ejections or other activity. As if to emphasize that message to us, sunspot # 4366, an active region that has grown rapidly in the last day, has been crackling with activity.

The sun has erupted in a relentless barrage of powerful solar flares over the past 24 hours, firing off at least 18 M-class flares and three X-class flares, including an X8.3 eruption — the strongest solar flare of 2026 so far. 

I seriously dislike them saying it's the strongest "solar flare of 2026 so far." Because 2026 is so short that it's like saying, "that was my strongest fart of the year" - pretty much meaningless. It would convey far more information to compare it to the strongest flares of cycle 25. So I went and found this list of the strongest flares of cycle 25, which shows this morning's flare was the third strongest flare of cycle 25 and the strongest in over one year (~16 months), back to October 1, 2024. And note that since the date and time are in UTC, the start of the event at 23:44 UTC means 6:44 PM EST.

Note these are the most powerful dozen flares of Cycle 25, and the page it's found on lists the strongest 50 as the default view

As for impacts, there were some when the things that move the fastest got here but the predictions for the next few days seem pretty minor.

Extreme ultraviolet radiation from the flare ionized the top of Earth's atmosphere. This, in turn, caused a shortwave radio blackout across the South Pacific Ocean: blackout map. Ham radio operators in Australia and New Zealand may have experienced loss of signal below 30 MHz for hours after the flare's peak.

Update: SOHO and NOAA coronagraph images confirm that several CMEs emerged from yesterday's collection of flares. None of them appears to be either potent or squarely Earth-directed. Glancing blows expected on Feb.4-6 could spark G1 (Minor) to G2 (Moderate) geomagnetic storms.

End of the Weekend ...

...and I have no news related to anything important - like anything dramatic in the updates to the Artemis II dress rehearsal.  

The prediction of a 30% chance of snow flurries or showers that came out while writing last night's post disappeared within an hour and while there was snow as close as Orlando, there was none here.  Our morning low was 25, shattering both the February 1st lowest temperature record  (which had been 32) and the month's lowest temperature of 27, the record set on February 26, 1967. Tomorrow is still forecast to break the our February 2nd lowest temp record of 33 with tomorrow's morning low predicted to be 28. 

A full Moon is seen shining over NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion spacecraft, atop the mobile launcher in the early hours of February 1, 2026. The rocket is currently at Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as teams are preparing for a wet dress rehearsal to practice timelines and procedures for the launch of Artemis II.
Image credit: NASA/Sam Lott

Trying to keep up with the Weather Forecasts

The "bomb cyclone" that's affecting the SE USA is also hitting us here in Melbourne. It has been forecast to be cooling off by midday on the Weather Underground 10 day forecast around that long (10 days). It started out a bit higher in temperature and oscillated around that but has settled a bit lower over the last few days, as tomorrow morning's low dropped from 27 to 25.  I know that doesn't mean much without some of idea of what normal temperatures are like, so I copied some data from a .pdf handout that the National Weather Service has on their local website. 

Note this is a couple of years old and you can see nothing more recent than 2021 in the week I clipped out. You'll note the record lows for the 1^st and 2^nd are 32 and 33 respectively. Tomorrow's forecast of 25 is far below the record and Monday's low is forecast to be 28, compared to the record of 33. The lowest temperature ever recorded in a February isn't visible here: it's 27 on February 26, 1967. We look to break that record as well tomorrow, moving the coldest ever in February to the 1^st.

 The Weather Underground Forecast just changed tonight's forecast to this:

 

There have been consistent forecasts for a small chance of snow flurries primarily on the Gulf Coast north of the Tampa Bay area, as well as farther north on the East coast. This is the first mention I've seen of snow in this area. 

As someone said, "Global warming... Is there nothing it can't do?" Dang... sarcasm again...

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For those wondering, the SLS/Artemis Wet Dress Rehearsal started earlier at 8:00 PM EST or 0100 UTC.

Ahead of the first launch window for Artemis 2, which runs from Feb. 8 to Feb. 11, NASA will complete a mission countdown simulation to power on and fuel the Space Launch System rocket. Operators are expected to be called to stations about 49 hours ahead of a simulated T-0, currently scheduled for Monday, at 9 p.m. EST (0200 GMT, Feb. 3).

Blue Origin pauses - or ends - their suborbital tourism flights

Let me rephrase that a little. Blue Origin officially “paused” its New Shepard program for the next two years, but that's being interpreted as a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative. 

The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.

I'd wager that, like me, the early New Shepard flights were the first time you had heard of Blue Origin and the first time you had seen boosters land for reuse. 

So why is this over 25 year-old company, which has been flying these missions for over a decade, ending this flagship program? They're feeling the pressure to perform for the moon landing program, Artemis, and they don't want anything to distract that effort. 

“We will redirect our people and resources toward further acceleration of our human lunar capabilities inclusive of New Glenn,” wrote the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, in an internal email on Friday afternoon. “We have an extraordinary opportunity to be a part of our nation’s goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence.”

The cancellation came, generally, as a surprise to Blue Origin employees. The company flew its most recent mission eight days ago, launching six people into space. Moreover, the company has four new boosters in various stages of development as well as two new capsules under construction. Blue Origin has been selling human flights for more than a year and is still commanding a per-seat price of approximately $1 million based on recent sales. It was talking about expansion to new spaceports in September.

There's also the not-so-small consideration that even with price around $1 million per seat, there are persistent reports the costs per mission are more than the price of admission can bring in.  There's at least 500 people on the staff at Blue Origin who work on New Shepard flight. They're looking for people for positions both on New Glenn and their other big ticket, NASA programs. 

Look, Blue has gotten lots of criticism for how long it has taken to get New Glenn flying. This is a good way to get experienced employees with a big head start onto those big programs. The only cost is that people like Katy Perry will have to wait longer to get into space. If they actually start flying New Shepard again.

Blue Origin's New Shepard launches its second human spaceflight from West Texas, Oct. 13, 2021. Credit: Blue Origin

NASA moves Artemis II static test to

Nothing is quite as vivid a reminder that the earliest possible launch date for Artemis II is near as realizing that the checkout of the Artemis II SLS launch vehicle is nearly to complete and going into the final tests before launch. 

The rocket's last major hurdle before launch is the SLS wet dress rehearsal, and this week NASA moved that test forward to Saturday, January 31. The previous schedule was "no later than February 2nd." 

If the vehicle passes that test, and the smoother the test goes, the more likely it becomes that Artemis II launches Friday night, in the two hour launch window of 9:41 to 11:41 PM. 

"Engineers have remained on track or ahead of schedule as they work through planned activities at the launch pad and are getting ready to conduct a wet dress rehearsal, leading up to a simulated 'launch,'" the agency wrote in an update on Monday (Jan. 26).
...
The upcoming wet dress rehearsal will officially kick off about two full days ahead of its simulated T-0 liftoff time, as launch teams begin tending their stations. The most critical portion of the test will take place on Saturday, when cryogenic fuel loading of the rocket's two main stages will commence. In total, SLS will take on more than 700,000 gallons (2,650,000 liters) of cryogenic propellant and weigh approximately 5.75 million pounds (about 2.6 million kilograms) once fully fueled.

The goal will be to run the SLS mission clock down to T-33 seconds, the point at which the rocket's computer would take over system monitoring during an actual launch attempt. If all goes according to plan, after SLS' T-33 second countdown hold, mission operators will reset the simulated clock to T-10 minutes and run it down a second time, to T-30 seconds.

NASA plans to put SLS and ground teams through their paces during the test, with several "runs" during the T-10 minute terminal count period to assess operating procedures for holding, resuming and recycling the mission clock, according to the agency's update.

NOTE: Stating the start time of the test as "two full days ahead of its simulated" liftoff time means tonight, Jan. 29. at 9:41 PM Eastern. 

The Artemis I wet dress rehearsal was plagued by fuel leaks - I remember asking rhetorically if NASA had forgotten everything about working with liquid hydrogen. Aside from the fueling leaks there were other issues that forced SLS to be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) three times for repairs. NASA officials have voiced confidence that they have solved those issues, but even a perfect wet dress rehearsal may not result in a Feb. 6 launch. I think we can confidently say that if they have to roll the SLS back to the VAB at all, even once, Feb. 6th is out. 

NASA has published the same sort of calendar of acceptable launch days for this launch as they did for Artemis I. Note that there are only 5 days available per month - except for April, which seems to have pulled a day out of May. 

Since the vast majority of you readers aren't here near the KSC, I'm betting you aren't aware that our weather forecasts for this weekend are not just record-breaking, they're pretty much completely record shattering. Granted this forecast is a few days in advance, our overnight low temperature forecast, 40-ish miles south of Pad 39B is that Sunday morning will be 25. The existing record low for February 1 is 32 degrees. Monday morning's forecast of 30 is lower than the February 2nd record of 33. About the accuracy of the forecasts, I feel I should point out for both yesterday and today, the forecast low was 40 degrees but the actual temperature was 36. 

The point of this side note is that the SLS has components that can be affected by these unusually low temperatures. NASA says they've taken preliminary steps to safeguard the rocket from the inclement weather. The big picture is that if the launch actually goes Friday night in that launch window, the temperatures appear to be in the range of 50 +/- "a few". 

That out of the way, while missions can always be changed or aborted, the broad brush look at the mission is that it will last 10 days. It will spend time in Earth orbit to verify important systems that haven't been tested yet, like the crew's air supply, before doing its translunar orbit injection. The published look at the mission has been tweaked a bit to look like this:

Not visible in this is that in the lunar space, it could be a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) that is something core to the Artemis approach to getting to the moon. It's not mentioned here. That NRHO could take the four astronauts farther from Earth than any human has ever been - depending on launch time and how well the mission unfolds.

A major difference between this mission and Apollo 8, for example, this is a trajectory that can't allow Artemis II to go into orbit around the moon - it's called a free-return trajectory. 

The main purpose of the mission, though, is to thoroughly check out the Artemis hardware and verify it can do everything required for the lunar landing mission, Artemis III, currently estimated to be in 2028. 

Never mind 

That didn't take long.  This morning, Jan. 30, NASA broke the headline that they're pushing the final, tanking portion of the test to Monday, Feb. 2, in contradiction to the statement earlier in the week that they were taking steps to ensure the test would be safe with the low temperatures over the weekend.

That means the first potential opportunity to launch is no earlier than Sunday, Feb. 8.

Edited to add this 1/30 at 1155 AM EST

About that December Japanese H3 mission failure

It was practically a side note that there was a launch three days before Christmas of the Japanese H3 rocket carrying a navigation satellite, and the mission failed. This was the seventh flight of an H3, and the second failure - the first launch was the other failure.

Ordinarily, when a mission fails the inevitable failure analysis gets carried out and we learn a bit more about what happened. In this case, the day after the launch we got this feedback.

The H3 launched from Tanegashima Space Center on Sunday (Dec. 21) at 8:51 p.m. EST (0151 GMT and 10:51 a.m. local Japan time on Dec. 22), carrying a navigation satellite known as Michibiki 5, or QZS-5, aloft.

"However, the second stage engine’s second ignition failed to start normally and shut down prematurely," officials with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a statement early Monday morning (Dec. 22). "As a result, QZS-5 could not be put into the planned orbit, and the launch failed."

Here we are just over a month since the failed mission and a new release from JAXA sounds a bit different from the stated, "...the second stage engine’s second ignition failed to start normally and shut down prematurely." As Ars Technica's Stephen Clark put it, “Japan’s H3 rocket found a new way to fail last month, apparently eluding the imaginations of its own designers and engineers.”

Even with all the photos and video captures they have, it isn't entirely clear what happened. The "big picture" set up will be familiar to you if you've watched lots of mission videos. In most launches we can watch, if there's a payload fairing, it stays on until the rocket is well above the thickest part of the atmosphere, well beyond "Max Q" or the highest dynamic pressures on the rocket that come from a combination of air density and speed. Some vehicles seem to drop the booster and start the second (or upper) stage engine(s) before they drop the fairings while others will drop the fairings before Main Engine Cut Off (MECO). 

Some of the material is difficult to grasp for a non-Japanese speaker unfamiliar with the subtle intricacies of the H3 rocket’s design. What is clear is that something went wrong when the rocket released its payload shroud. Video beamed back from the rocket’s onboard cameras showed a shower of debris surrounding the satellite, which started wobbling and leaning in the moments after fairing separation. Sensors also detected sudden accelerations around the attachment point connecting the spacecraft with the top of the H3 rocket.
...
The jolt from staging dislodged the satellite from its mooring atop the rocket. Then, the second stage lit its engine and left the satellite in the dust. A rear-facing camera on the upper stage captured a fleeting view of the satellite falling back to Earth. In the briefing package, Japanese space officials wrote that Michibiki 5 fell into the Pacific Ocean in the same impact zone as the H3’s first stage.

Whatever caused the satellite to break free of the rocket damaged more than its attach fitting. Telemetry data downlinked from the H3 showed a pressure drop in the second stage’s liquid hydrogen tank after separation of the payload fairing.

“A decrease in LH2 tank pressure was confirmed almost simultaneously,” officials wrote. A pressurization valve continued to open to restore pressure to the tank, but the pressure did not recover. “It is highly likely that the satellite mounting structure was damaged due to some factor, and as a result, the pressurization piping was damaged.”

In this day of computer assisted drawing and image generation, JAXA presented this stunningly realistic rendering of the damage to the satellite's mounting structure as the payload (blue block on the right) breaks away and starts to fall back to Earth. 

Japan's space agency provided this illustration of what happened, just in case you couldn't visualize it. Credit: JAXA

I really need to work on being less sarcastic.

Whatever caused the satellite to break away led to immediate damage to the upper stage liquid hydrogen fuel tank. Telemetry from the upper stage showed an immediate drop in pressure. A system on board that's supposed to help re-pressurize the second stage turned on but had no effect, indicating damage as shown in the above CAD rendering. 

Even with this damage, the second stage engine lost 20 percent of its thrust, but it fired long enough to put the rocket into a low-altitude orbit. The orbit was too low to sustain so the second stage reentered the atmosphere and burned up within a couple of hours. 

Technicians mount the H3 rocket’s payload fairing, containing the Michibiki 5 satellite, on top of the launcher’s second stage. Credit: JAXA

JAXA must complete the latest H3 failure investigation in the coming months to clear the rocket to launch the nation’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission in a narrow planetary launch window that opens in October. MMX is an exciting robotic mission to land on and retrieve samples from the Martian moon Phobos for return to Earth. MMX’s launch was previously set for 2024, but Japan’s space agency delayed it to this year due to earlier problems with the H3 rocket.

Artemis planners have a suit of problems

Notice I didn't say a suite - a group of related problems. I said suit of problems in reference to the lunar EVA suits they'll be wearing. Somewhere in the list of problems they're working through is that some observers are going to say, "why were suits not a problem for Apollo over 50 years ago but we have problems with them now?" The answers there get into the differences between Apollo's focus on "doing everything we can to ensure we can put a couple of guys on the moon for a couple of days to do what they can do" and Artemis' realization that no matter what Apollo did or accomplished, they have to somehow do more to make it look better for people that aren't paying as much attention as, say, YOU are paying. 

We've been tracking the work on the Artemis suits since they were first getting mentioned and through the development. Monday, we get a report from Ars Technica on the suits Axiom built and they're testing now.  According to former astronaut Kate Rubins who left the agency last year but is involved with testing and evaluating the new suits, “I don’t think they’re great right now.”

Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA’s Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to do more than the first Moonwalkers did more than 50 years ago.

The Moonwalking experience will amount to an “extreme physical event” for crews selected for the Artemis program’s first lunar landings, a former NASA astronaut told a panel of researchers, physicians, and engineers convened by the National Academies. 

Kate Rubins attended a conference at The National Academies of Science last Tuesday through Thursday and outlined the concerns NASA officials often talk about: radiation exposure, muscle and bone atrophy, reduced cardiovascular and immune function, and other adverse medical effects of spaceflight.

It's widely quoted that there has been a continuous presence of humans in space for decades thanks to the International Space Station - with the implication that being in space isn't a big deal anymore. The important exception is that the lunar environment is not that of the ISS. It's harsher. Probably the most important of those is that the Moon is outside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere for half of the lunar month. Lunar dust is pervasive, and will get into lander. Probably the only thing that could be helpful is the Moon's partial gravity, about one-sixth as strong as the pull we feel on Earth. 

Rubins is a veteran of two long-duration spaceflights on the International Space Station, logging 300 days in space and conducting four spacewalks totaling nearly 27 hours. She is also an accomplished microbiologist and became the first person to sequence DNA in space. 

“What I think we have on the Moon that we don’t really have on the space station that I want people to recognize is an extreme physical stress,” Rubins said. “On the space station, most of the time you’re floating around. You’re pretty happy. It’s very relaxed. You can do exercise. Every now and then, you do an EVA (Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk).”

“When we get to the lunar surface, people are going to be sleep shifting,” Rubins said. “They’re barely going to get any sleep. They’re going to be in these suits for eight or nine hours. They’re going to be doing EVAs every day. The EVAs that I did on my flights, it was like doing a marathon and then doing another marathon when you were done.” 

They'll be in these suits eight or nine hours? Per day? How much do those suits weigh?

Including a life-support backpack, the commercial suit weighs more than 300 pounds in Earth’s gravity, but Axiom considers the exact number proprietary. The Axiom suit is considerably heavier than the 185-pound spacesuit the Apollo astronauts wore on the Moon. NASA’s earlier prototype exploration spacesuit was estimated to weigh more than 400 pounds, according to a 2021 report by NASA’s inspector general.

“We’ve definitely seen trauma from the suits, from the actual EVA suit accommodation,” said Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut and medical doctor. “That’s everything from skin abrasions to joint pain to—no kidding—orthopedic trauma. You can potentially get a fracture of sorts. EVAs on the lunar surface with a heavily loaded suit and heavy loads that you’re either carrying or tools that you’re reacting against, that’s an issue.”

Note: When you see numbers like 300 pounds for these Axiom suits or 185 for the Apollo era suits, divide those by six to estimate what they'll feel like on the moon (100 or 33.8 lb.s) and remember that only applies when lifting the suit in lunar gravity. In the low G (or zero G) environments, the mass feels like the full number (300 or 185) when it's the inertia being felt while moving the weight. That's something they "have to get used to." - SiG 

When comparing specifications, the Axiom suits come across as more capable than the Apollo suits that are 120 lbs lighter. They can support longer spacewalks and provide greater redundancy, and they’re made of modern materials to enhance flexibility and crew comfort. But the longer space (moon) walks are because they have more storage to use, needed because they’re bringing essentials – air, water, waste storage room with them. On the moon they’ll be a slog, Rubins said.

Never forget RA Heinlein’s observation, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, or TANSTAAFL. The Axiom suits fly in the face of what astronauts using the Apollo suits concluded – to quote one of them, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who spent 22 hours walking on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972 said. “I’d have that go about four times the mobility, at least four times the mobility, and half the weight,” and if he didn’t say that word directly, it’s pure TANSTAAFL.

“Now, one way you can… reduce the weight is carry less consumables and learn to use consumables that you have in some other vehicle, like a lunar rover. Any time you’re on the rover, you hook into those consumables and live off of those, and then when you get off, you live off of what’s in your backpack. We, of course, just had the consumables in our backpack.”

It’s worth pointing out that the first landing (currently NET 2028) will not have a rover. At present, that’s not expected to go to the moon until “sometime in the 2030s.” That seems to mean they have to live with the 300 lb suits.

“I do crossfit. I do triathlons. I do marathons. I get out of a session in the pool in the NBL (Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory) doing the lunar suit underwater, and I just want to go home and take a nap,” Rubins told the panel. “I am absolutely spent. You’re bruised. This is an extreme physical event in a way that the space station is not.”

The new suits are better than the Apollo suits in some motions – mostly those that are improved by the new joints. That doesn’t include recovering from a fall onto the lunar surface by yourself.

“You’re face down on the lunar surface, and you have to do the most massive, powerful push up to launch you and the entire mass of the suit up off the surface, high enough so you can then flip your legs under you and catch the ground,” Rubins said. “You basically have to kind of do a jumping pushup… This is a risky maneuver we test a whole bunch in training. It’s really non-trivial.”

NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara kneels down to pick up a rock during testing of Axiom's lunar spacesuit inside NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston on September 24, 2025. Credit: NASA

Yes, this is the story I mentioned Monday and said it was too long and involved to get it done in the time I had.  There's more at the Ars Technica source that ended up getting cut, including some meaty aspects of the story and what has been going on. When I try to mentally balance the state where they appear to be and what appear to be possible directions they could go, I keep coming back to that first Axiom story I linked to being nearly four years ago. Is there enough time to do anything beyond simple band-aids?

Well, this is a new one...

I started trying to summarize, shorten and link to a good space-related story tonight and I couldn't do it. The source is so long and so involved that I didn't have enough time to summarize it.  I'll try to work at that tomorrow. 

Small Space News Story Roundup 76

There seems to be at least a few stories around indicating that 2026 isn't off to a good start in the space industry. 

Rocket Lab's Neutron slips after test failure

Rocket lab has been developing the Neutron for a few years and had been talking about a first launch early this year, when they announced a schedule slip to this summer back in mid-November ('25). During tests on Jan. 21 (Wednesday), they suffered a structural failure of the Neutron’s Stage 1 tank during a hydrostatic pressure test. “There was no significant damage to the test structure or facilities,” Rocket Lab reported. They haven't directly addressed schedule impacts, understandable considering the limited time to examine the damaged tank, when this report first showed up online. 

The Neutron rocket is designed to catapult Rocket Lab into more direct competition with legacy rocket companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. “The next Stage 1 tank is already in production, and Neutron’s development campaign continues,” the company said. Setbacks like this one are to be expected during the development of new rockets. Rocket Lab has publicized aggressive, or aspirational, launch schedules for the first Neutron rocket, so it’s likely the company will hang onto its projection of a debut launch in 2026, at least for now.

The Neutron rocket’s Stage 1 tank. Image credit: Rocket Lab

It was a bad day for Chinese Rockets

January 16, to be specific. They lost two vehicles on the same day.  

The first loss was a failure of a Long March 3B booster, a rocket that has worked up a good number of successful launches. 

The first of the two failures involved the attempted launch of a Shijian military satellite aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang launch base in southwestern China. The Shijian 32 satellite was likely heading for a geostationary transfer orbit, but a failure of the Long March 3B’s third stage doomed the mission. The Long March 3B is one of China’s most-flown rockets, and this was the first failure of a Long March 3-series vehicle since 2020, ending a streak of 50 consecutive successful flights of the rocket. 

And then… Less than 12 hours later, another Chinese rocket failed on its climb to orbit. This launch, using a Ceres-2 rocket, originated from the Jiuquan space center in northwestern China. It was the first flight of the Ceres-2, a larger variant of the light-class Ceres-1 rocket developed and operated by a Chinese commercial startup named Galactic Energy. Chinese officials did not disclose the payloads lost on the Ceres-2 rocket.

Isar Aerospace stands down from their next test flight

You might not remember their name but you probably remember their March 30th (2025) 40-second first test flight from Andøya Spaceport in Norway that ended up crashing into the water alongside the launch complex.

They had been preparing for January 21st launch of the Spectrum rocket, when a technical issue surfaced and they scrubbed.  

Hours before the launch window was set to open, the German company said that it was addressing “an issue with a pressurization valve.” A valve issue was one of the factors that caused a Spectrum to crash moments after liftoff on Isar’s first test flight last year. “The teams are currently assessing the next possible launch opportunities and a new target date will be announced shortly,” the company wrote in a post on its website. 

The Spectrum rocket is in the one metric ton payload class, or 2200 lbs to Low Earth Orbit. About twice the payload of a Rocket Lab Electron, but well short of the Neutron or Falcon 9.

Europe’s satellite industry is looking for more competition for the Ariane 6 and Vega C rockets developed by ArianeGroup and Avio, and Isar Aerospace appears to be best positioned to become a new entrant in the European launch market. “I’m well aware that it would be really good for us Europeans to get this one right,” said Daniel Metzler, Isar’s co-founder and CEO. 

What? Two Blue Origin headlines in one week?

I suppose it might have happened here before but I'm not sure how to navigate the search engines to show that.

This Wednesday (Jan. 21) the story was Blue Origin's satellite megaconstellation called TeraWave. Today's story is about Blue's pursuit of reusability. Blue confirmed on Thursday that they will reuse the New Glenn booster used on flight two back on November 13th No Earlier Than late February. It will be launching the next-generation Block 2 BlueBird satellite for AST SpaceMobile.

“The mission follows the successful NG-2 mission, which included the landing of the ‘Never Tell Me The Odds’ booster. The same booster is being refurbished to power NG-3.”  

That November 13th NG-2 mission was 10 weeks ago. Let's assume they launch NG-3 on February 28th, just to get a number to play with - that's five weeks from today, making a 15 week turnaround from first flight of the booster to its second. If the launch is two weeks later, mid-March, it's still only 17 weeks for the turnaround time. 

A direct comparison to SpaceX is difficult, partly because Blue Origin is working in an aspect of reusability that SpaceX didn't have for their first successful booster recovery. Essentially, Blue Origin is learning things about reusability that didn't exist for SpaceX. Nobody had the experiences they learned from.

By way of comparison, SpaceX did not attempt to refly the first Falcon 9 booster it landed in December 2015. Instead, initial tests revealed that the vehicle’s interior had been somewhat torn up. It was scrapped and inspected closely so that engineers could learn from the wear and tear. 

SpaceX successfully landed its second Falcon 9 booster in April 2016, on the 23rd overall flight of the Falcon 9 fleet. This booster was refurbished and, after a lengthy series of inspections, it was reflown successfully in March 2017, nearly 11 months later.

It's pretty ballsy. Blue Origin is looking to launch a booster on just the third overall flight of a New Glenn and will turn the rocket around in less than four months. Blue Origin is not a newbie startup - they've existed since 2000 and started launching their New Shepard suborbital flights in 2015. They're well-funded and have access to more information than any other company has had. 

Blue Origin originally planned to launch its MK1 lunar lander on the third flight of New Glenn, but it pivoted to a commercial launch as the lunar vehicle continues preparatory work.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it had completed the integration of the MK1 vehicle and put it on a barge bound for Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, it will undergo vacuum chamber testing before a launch later this spring—or, more likely, sometime this summer.

Artist's concept drawing of two Block 2 BlueBird satellites for AST Space Mobile. The satellites will provide direct-to-cell connectivity. Credit: AST SpaceMobile

America's Worst Week in Spaceflight - An Annual Remembrance

NASA had their annual day of Remembrance yesterday:  Thursday, Jan 22. I usually run my annual remembrance post during the actual week, but I'll follow their example rather than my own tradition and bring the remembrance forward.

It's an oddity of US Space travel that every mission which ended in loss of crew and vehicle occurred in less than one calendar week - six days, although those accidents span 36 years. That week is January 27th through February 1st; while the years run from 1967 through 2003.

January 27, 1967 was the hellish demise of Apollo 1 and her crew, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, during a pad test, not a flight.  In that article, Ars Technica interviews key men associated with the mission.  In the intervening years, I've heard speculation that we never would have made it to the moon without something to shake out a bit of the NASA management idiocy, but that may just be people logically justifying their opinions.  Like this quote from Chris Kraft, one of the giants of NASA in the '60s. 

There was plenty of blame to go around—for North American [they built the Apollo capsule - SiG], for flight control in Houston, for technicians at Cape Canaveral, for Washington DC and its political pressure on the schedule and its increasingly bureaucratic approach to spaceflight. The reality is that the spacecraft was not flyable. It had too many faults. Had the Apollo 1 fire not occurred, it’s likely that additional problems would have delayed the launch.

“Unless the fire had happened, I think it’s very doubtful that we would have ever landed on the Moon,” Kraft said. “And I know damned well we wouldn’t have gotten there during the 1960s. There were just too many things wrong. Too many management problems, too many people problems, and too many hardware problems across the whole program.”

The next big disaster was January 28, - the next day on the calendar, but in 1986, 19 years later.  Space Shuttle Challenger was lost a mere 73 seconds into mission 51-L as a flaw in the starboard solid rocket booster allowed a secondary flame to burn through supports and cause the external tank to explode.  It was the kind of cold day that we haven't had here in some years.  It has been reported that it was between 20 and 26 around the area on the morning of the launch and ice had been reported on the launch tower as well as the external tank.  O-rings that were used to seal the segments of the stackable solid rocket boosters were too cold to seal.  Launch wasn't until nearly noon and it had warmed somewhat, but the shuttle had never been launched at temperatures below 40 before that mission.  Richard Feynman famously demonstrated that cold was likely the cause during the televised Rogers Commission meetings, dropping a section of O ring compressed by a C-clamp into his iced water to demonstrate that it had lost its resilience at that temperature.  The vehicle would have been colder than that iced water.  

As important and memorable as that moment was, engineers such as Roger Boisjoly of Morton Thiokol, the makers of the boosters, fought managers for at least the full day before the launch, with managers eventually overruling the engineers. Feynman had been told about the cold temperature issues with the O-rings by several people, and local rumors were that he would go to some of the bars just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center and talk with workers about what they saw. The simple example with the O-ring and glass of iced water was vivid and brought the issue home to millions.

There's plenty of evidence that the crew of Challenger survived the explosion. The crew cabin was specifically designed to be used as an escape pod, but after most of the design work, NASA decided to drop the other requirements to save weight. The recovered cabin had clear evidence of activity: oxygen bottles being turned on, switches that require a few steps to activate being flipped. It's doubtful they survived the impact with the ocean and some believe they passed out due to hypoxia before that. We'll honestly never know.

Finally, at the end of the worst week, Shuttle Columbia, the oldest surviving shuttle flying as mission STS-107, broke up on re-entry 17 years later on February 1, 2003 scattering wreckage over the central southern tier of the country with most debris along the Texas/Louisiana line. As details emerged about the flight, it turns out that Columbia and everyone on board had been sentenced to death at launch - they just didn't know it. A chunk of foam had broken off the external tank during liftoff and hit the left wing's carbon composite leading edge, punching a hole in it. There was no way a shuttle could reenter without exposing that wing to conditions that would destroy it. They were either going to die on reentry or sit up there and run out of food, water and air. During reentry, hot plasma worked its way into that hole, through the structure of the wing, burning through piece after piece, sensor after sensor, until the wing tore off the shuttle and tore the vehicle apart. Local lore on this one is that the original foam recipe was changed due to environmental regulations, causing them to switch to a foam that didn't adhere to the tank or stand up to abuse as well as the original.

In 2014, Ars Technica did a deep dive article on possible ways that Columbia's crew could have been saved.  They republished that on February 1, 2023, the anniversary of the disaster.  It's interesting speculation, very detailed, compiled by a man who claims to have been a junior system administrator for Boeing in Houston, working in Mission Control that day.

Like many of you, I remember them all. I was a 13 year-old kid midway through 7th grade in Miami when Apollo 1 burned. By the time of Challenger, I was a 32 year old working on commercial satellite TV receivers here near the KSC and watched Challenger live via the satellite TV, instead of going outside to watch it as I always did. Mrs. Graybeard had just begun working on the unmanned side on the Cape, next door to the facility that refurbished the Shuttles SRBs between flights, and was outside watching the launch. Columbia happened when it was feeling routine again. Mom had fallen and was in the hospital; we were preparing to go down to South Florida to visit and I was watching the TV waiting to hear the double sonic booms shake the house as they always did. They never came.

The failure reports and investigations of all three of these disasters center on the same things: the problems with NASA's way of doing things. They tended to rely on "well, it worked last time" when dealing with dangerous situations, or leaned too much toward, "schedule is king" all as a way of gambling that someone else would be the one blamed for delaying a mission. Spaceflight is inherently very risky, so some risk taking is inevitable, but NASA had taken stupid risks too often. People playing Russian Roulette can say, "well, it worked last time," but having worked doesn't change the odds of losing.

Last year was the first time I linked to a post on Casey Handmer's blog on this topic, but not the exact incidents, but the management problems that get us to the point where such accidents happen. The post is about Dittemore's law and you might recognize the name. 

Ron Dittemore is the retired former Space Shuttle program manager who was ultimately responsible for the series of decisions that resulted in the Columbia disaster, which killed seven of the lost 25 astronauts.  Here's Handmer's money quote: 

Dittemore’s Law states that “A team composed of sufficiently competent, motivated, well-resourced individuals will tend to produce a collective outcome that is diametrically opposed to the intended, individually desired outcome.”

In physics terms, it’s something like diamagnetism.

Casey Handmer's Dittemore's Law post is definitely worth a read.