My other, other stuff going on

I occasionally mention other things I'm working on or that are going on. Life is the simplest word and I think it was Beatle John Lennon who said, "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." That's what this little post will be about.

Let's start with something I haven't talked about in a long time: guitars. I've got a small batch of guitars, like pretty much all players who can get more than one instrument tend to. Unlike the vast majority of home players, I built two of those guitars; an electric guitar from a kit back around 2015, and an acoustic that was more like a very extended repair job. It was a sales demo model from some guitar store and before sending it around to show what their guitars looked like inside, the manufacturer, Breedlove, sliced most of the left side of the guitar off. 

The long story is I started playing in junior high school, around 1967 or '68, and like most others, I learned what was referred to as rhythm guitar. Playing chords. I played in a couple of garage bands, and at a couple of parties, but I never really fantasized about being a musician. It was enough to make some sounds that didn't hurt people's ears or they even actually enjoyed. 

In my "young adult" years, through my 20s, I hardly played at all and didn't get involved with guitars again until maybe 1988 or later. I picked it up with intentions to practice more often a few years ago. Those plans would get derailed every now and then by either an injury or osteoarthritis. Over roughly the last year, that second one had me unable to play for a year or more. The effect of the arthritis was limited entirely to one finger, my left hand's middle finger. The very last segment of that finger, the one that you press onto a string to change the note you're playing, rotated left or toward my pinky finger. 

How much did it tilt? I don't really know how to measure that with what I have, but I'll estimate 10 degrees. The rotation wasn't the issue so much as the insane pain it caused. I'm gonna bet you've heard someone say, "it hurts to look at it?" Exactly.

About a month ago, I realized that I had bumped that finger on something and it didn't hurt. After some time trying to figure out if it was really gone, I started thinking what I could do to test it. I picked up one of the guitars I'd regularly practice with and found I could play without the insane pain.  The problems now are the same ones everybody picking up a guitar and starting to practice faces. Building up calluses on my finger tips so the strings don't hurt as much, strengthening the muscles involved so when I go to play some chord that makes all six strings sound, I can apply even pressure and put all the strings on the neck. Most importantly though is agility of those fingers, and knowing what to play. As in re-learning a few songs. 

My tendency in here is to put up some picture that's relevant or related to the topic, but tonight, I was going to link a video from Woodstock that I've run before. The problem with that is YouTube has decided we're not allowed to embed it, but I think I can run a link to it HERE. And here's a picture:

A photo of my repair job on the Breedlove guitar. The guitar is on my workbench but just for posing, in the final post on this job.  

The finger has better and worse days, so it's not entirely being back to normal and I have no way to know if that's even possible.

Small Space News Story Roundup 80

Because, well, you know. It's not that there isn't any news, it's just not much to talk about.

Another company tests a Rotating Detonation Engine

We've talked about RDEs for a while now. My first post on the subject appears to have been in May of 2020, so almost six years to the day. At the time, I wrote that it wasn't a new idea:

Rotating detonation engines, or RDEs, sound like something out of science fiction, but the concept is about as old as the space age itself. In the late 1950s and early '60s, aerospace engineers working on rocket engines envisioned RDEs as a way to turn a problem into a solution. “Sometimes the rocket motors would get a real bad instability and you’d get an explosion,” pioneer Arthur Nicholls recalled in a University of Michigan interview shortly before his death. “Then it led to the idea—well, what if we use that?” 

Like many things observed that early in space exploration, the physics of what was going on wasn't well understood, but there has been a lot of time for that physics to develop. The main advantage of the RDE is reduced weight of the engine.  In conventional liquid rocket engines, the fuel and oxidizer are pressurized and fed into the ignition chamber using bulky turbopumps and other complicated machinery.  An RDE doesn’t need these pressurization systems, because the shock wave from the detonation provides the pressure. In this week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica, Eric Berger writes about tests from Astrobotic.

Astrobotic on Thursday announced the successful hot fire testing of its Chakram rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Two Chakram engine prototypes completed eight successful hot-fire tests, accumulating more than 470 seconds of total run time without any discernible damage to the engine hardware, the company said.  The campaign included a 300-second continuous burn, which is believed to have set the record for the longest duration hot firing of an RDRE engine to date.

The engines seem too small to me, they produced 4000 pounds of thrust, but I may well be thinking of completely different uses than Astrobotic is aiming for. Berger mentions two engines being used in a vehicle, but that's still around 8000 pounds, certainly under 10,000, which is barely enough to get most of us off the sofa on Thanksgiving. 

Astrobotic's Chakram rotating detonation rocket engine during tests this week. Credit: Astrobotic

With both ULA's Vulcan and Blue Origin's New Glenn grounded, getting to orbit just got harder

I still haven't seen anything with details about what went wrong with New Glenn's second stage last week, but the internet has been buzzing about it being that the BE-3 upper stage engines malfunctioned - presumably one of the two and not both of them. Blue's customer's payload has already re-entered and burned up. 

While Vulcan's solid rocket (first stage) boosters lost a nozzle on one of the two engines on each of their two missions, the vehicles' control systems increased their output enough so that it could still deliver their payloads to orbit. Northrop Grumman said Tuesday it had taken a $71 million charge due to an anomaly with the solid rocket booster that grounded the Vulcan Centaur rocket.

So how do big payloads get to those orbits? Obviously, SpaceX is still flying but they don't have infinite capacity. The ability to put those payloads into tough orbits has really been clamped. 

Still, it's not a total shutdown. There's this:

No solids, no problem … The Space Force could launch certain missions without solid rocket boosters that carry lower mass or are bound for lower orbits. For example, the service could launch an upcoming Space Development Agency mission on Vulcan, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, Space Systems Command chief, told reporters in a separate briefing. “Essentially, if it doesn’t rely on a solid, there’s no reason why we can’t launch, and I’m committed to supporting that and keeping that mission going,” he said. The Space Force has switched four GPS III missions from a Vulcan rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle since December 2024. 

It looks like "the final frontier" can become the next battlefronts

Seems like only the other day when every episode of Star Trek coming into the living room started with that line, "Space: the final frontier. " Buried in the shows most, if not all, episodes implied that the Starship Enterprise was key in many battles. The final frontier was another front line in another battle. And that was absolutely not unique to the Star Trek story universe. 

Space has been an environment that has been involved in every war story since about the mid-1960s, and this week, US Space Command let us know that they know the Russians have crossed the line of putting satellites intended as anti-satellite weapons in orbits that would allow them to attack other countries' satellites in orbit. 

Gen. Stephen Whiting didn’t name the system, but he was almost certainly referring to a Russian military program named Nivelir, which has launched four satellites shadowing US spy satellites owned by the National Reconnaissance Office in low-Earth orbit. After reaching orbit, the Nivelir satellites have released smaller ships to start their own maneuvers, and at least one of those lobbed a mystery object at high velocity during a test in 2020. US analysts concluded this was a projectile that could be fired at another satellite.
...
The newest suspected Nivelir satellite was launched last May from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. Its launch was precisely timed for the moment Earth’s rotation spun Plesetsk underneath the orbital plane of the NRO’s USA 338 Keyhole-class optical spy satellite. Civilian missions heading to the International Space Station launch with similarly precise timing, down to the second, to intersect with the space station’s orbital plane.

The next line here is that "US officials" likened the Nivelir basic operation to the famous Russian Matryoshka dolls, those nested dolls that contain another, smaller doll, or a series of several smaller dolls inside each other. Perhaps naturally, they view this as evidence that the Russians are putting satellites in orbit that can strike US satellites on very short notice. 

“It’s evident Russia was deploying a space weapon there, and they’re putting it into an orbit where they can reach critical US national security satellites,” Whiting said Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. 

“It would be the same as if we had a new fighter, maybe the new F-47 that the Air Force is going to acquire, with a new missile system, and we decided, instead of testing that on our test ranges back in Nevada or Utah, we decided to send that airplane up to Alaska, and as Russian bombers were flying patrols somewhat near our coastline, we sent this brand new F-47 up to test near a Russian bomber,” Whiting said. “It’s just not the kind of thing we traditionally see.”

The field of using satellites to work on other satellites already on orbit, from LEO out to the Geosynchronous orbits, is getting a lot of attention these days. The first article I think I posted on this topic was on February 28, 2020 and was a mission by Northrop Grumman to send a dedicated Mission Extension Vehicle out to rendezvous with a retired (and pushed farther out into space) Intelsat communications satellite in that far orbit, push it back toward the Geosynchronous orbit and return it to service. If their intent would have been to rendezvous and dock with a functioning satellite in orbit and remove it or destroy it, the math is pretty much the same.

So far, none of the Nivelir satellites have gotten closer than a few dozen miles from their NRO counterparts. But they launched into orbits that would allow Russian commanders to approach US spy satellites with little warning. That is no coincidence, according to US officials. Launching these missions just a few minutes earlier or later would put them into a different orbital plane, making it much more difficult—perhaps impossible, depending on fuel loading—to get close to or strike one of the US spy satellites. The circumstances suggest intentionality.

“So the Russians were testing weapons near our satellites,” Whiting said. “And now we assess they’re through testing, and now they’re putting operational systems up within orbit reach of our high-value satellites. It’s evident what they’re doing, and we maintain constant vigilance watching that.”

If anyone talks about this as completely out of nowhere or unexpected, that seems naive to me. Russia has considered us to be at least a rival if not an enemy practically since the communist government was founded early in the last century. Prudence would say they should keep an eye on us. If they wanted to "start something," going first with something like these Nivelir sats to blind us makes sense. 

Whiting said Russia “has come to the conclusion that they’re a conventional arms deficit” compared to the United States and its NATO allies. Russian forces are seeking to get an asymmetric advantage anywhere they can.

“They’re looking for novel ways to try to balance that correlation of forces, to use a Soviet term,” Whiting said. “So they’re looking at nuclear, cyber, and space, and that’s why, when we read the reports over the last two years that Russia may be considering placing a nuclear ASAT [anti-satellite] on orbit, we find those just incredibly troubling.”

A space-based camera owned by the Australian company HEO captured this view of Kosmos 2558, one of Russia's suspected Nivelir satellites in low-Earth orbit. Credit: HEO

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is complete

Complete and being readied for launch in September. 

I've been following the progress of the NGRST since first hearing about it in early 2022. It was first referred to as the WFIRST, Wide Field Infra Red Space Telescope, a long but descriptive name for its mission.  It was renamed around that time in '22 the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope by NASA; the name pays tribute to the late NASA executive and first Chief Astronomer who was one of the driving forces in getting the Hubble Space Telescope program through its hurdles. 

On Tuesday (April 21), NASA had a reveal of the NGRST at their Goddard Space Flight Center along with talks by Administrator Jared Isaacman and several others.  For this:

Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, complete the final integration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's major components on Nov. 25, 2025, joining the spacecraft and telescope assemblies in the facility's largest clean room. (Image credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya)

"I very much hope, and in fact, expect, that the most exciting science from Roman is going to be the things that we didn't expect, that we couldn't predict, but that will set the new deep questions for future missions to address," Julie McEnery, senior project scientist of Roman said during a press conference on Tuesday.

The NGRST is heading for the L2 Lagrange Point, currently the home of the James Webb Space Telescope, the European Union's Euclid infrared space telescope and a place for passing visitors, such as the Escapade mission on the way to Mars (bottom of that post). 

NASA has chosen a Falcon Heavy to get this payload to its destination. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches to date, with a 100% success rate for the 230-foot-tall, heavy lift vehicle. Not surprising since it's three different Falcon 9s strapped together (although the upper stage is different) and it's the most reliable vehicle ever. 

Here's where it gets wild. The September launch for the NGRST is eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget. When's the last time you heard something like that? I'm not sure I ever have.

According to NASA, Roman's primary mirror measures about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, which is similar to Hubble's. However, Roman has the ability to take images that capture a patch of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can.

"Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. "What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them."

To put that into context, over its approximately 35 years of service so far, Hubble has gathered about 400 terabytes of data; once fully operational at its workstation in space, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data per year.

The collection of different space telescopes; the Hubble, James Webb, and more, allow ground based astronomers to choose the right instrument for the objects they want to study in the sky.

Compared to the JWST, Roman's images — taken with its aptly named Wide Field Instrument (WFI) — will be 50 times wider but more shallow, because Roman doesn't need to access the deep universe the way the JWST does. As we discussed, it can't see infrared like the JWST can and therefore would be wasted in looking too far back.

More specifically, WFI is composed of a 300-megapixel visible-to-near-infrared imaging camera and slitless spectrometer (a special tool that allows scientists to capture light dispersion of objects in a field of view). But there is something uniquely special about that shallow, panoramic view.

The wide and shallow field will be well suited to surveying space, not getting too much information from things that it can't look closer at. 

They can just survey and hope to find a cool lead to zoom in on. This offers Roman the ability to catch events that transpire very quickly, such as fast radio bursts, and increases the chances that scientists can witness remarkable supernovas, colliding neutron stars and other easy-to-miss phenomena right as they happen.

An illustration of the field of view of Roman Space Telescope vs. the Hubble Space Telescope. From the NASA Roman telescope mission website.

It's My Favorite Fake Holiday - It's Earf Day 2026

Yes, it's time for our annual bacchanalia of the made-up holiday they call Earth Day, my very favorite holiday to make fun of. Even more than Kwanzaa. 

As befitting the environmental movement, my tribute to Earth Day is almost entirely recycled, and is almost entirely useless. The only way it could fit the environmental movement better would be if everything I said was factually wrong. Everything here is factually correct. 

I've posted on Earf Day so many times that it's hard not to be repetitive, even if I was trying not to be. So nothing this time about Ira Einhorn murdering his girlfriend or the completely discredited book, The Population Bomb.  No, wait.  I just mentioned them both.  Rats! 

The simple truth is that virtually everything about the holiday and the environmental movement is crap. The modern green movement is simply about rich, privileged people wanting to have places to visit that they think are pretty; and especially unspoiled.  They want pretty, natural, wild-looking places to visit on vacations. If that means the people who are living in or near those places have to live lives that range from austere to practically unsurvivable, the greenies think that's just wonderful.  

When you think of it that way, it's easy to realize that the greenies care only about themselves and their enjoyments of life. Of course we should all protect the wilderness! It's theirs! That was never as clear to me as it was while reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger a couple of years ago. He vividly talks about people in the wilds of Africa who desperately need better ways to grow food, get water and most desperately need electricity. Instead they're kept in a life of desperation by the environmentalists.

Probably the worst example is the one that we get beat up about every day: climate change. Notice they don't mention "global warming" any more. It's just "change." As if the worldwide climate has always been the same. Let's start with that simple observation. They scream that the temperature has gone up since 1850! We're all going to die! What they don't tell you is that the temperature in 1850 was among coldest periods in the last 10,000 years. 

That's Indonesia. How about if we reconstruct the temperature half a world away? North Atlantic instead of south Pacific; Greenland instead of Indonesia (the scale is different, but 10,000 years ago is 7975 BC).

Sorry. The temperature has gone up not just from 1850 but from from one of the half-dozen coldest periods in the last half billion years.  

The closer you look, the worse the picture is. Borepatch ran a piece in 2024 about one of the more insidious things they do: they change the historical records to make the older temperatures look cooler and the newer ones look hotter. That's right; they're lying in all the official documents and have been for as long as this Con has been going on. One of the things that convinced me that skepticism was proper was the Surface Stations Project that Watts Up With That? started back in the '00s and was closed a few years ago. Their final product was a report on the official stations that create the weather record and how large percentages of them weren't sited properly; over 62% were incapable of accuracy better than 2 degrees C. Another 6% couldn't measure within 5 degrees C. They're too close to roads, too close to sources of heat like air conditioner outputs, even airport runways, and more problems. Then there was outright fraud in editing records. 

And this isn't even going near things like how bad their models are. They still basically can't handle clouds properly. Virtually none of their predictions ever actually prove to be the case. Instead we get useful idiot celebrities who are too young to understand that both weather and climate change (to be charitable). If a 20 or a 40 year old can't remember similar weather, it doesn't mean anything. 

You know the current fuss about the temperature by 2100 isn't supposed to go up more than 1 degree or "we all gonna die"? (say that like Jasmine Crockett saying "we done pickin' cotton"). In these two plots the one on the left is the prediction they push on us; the one on right is shows the error expected in yellow.  For example, at the right end of the plot on the left, it shows their global temperature as increasing by 3.75 degrees by 2100.   The uncertainty shown on the right is +22.5 / -15 degrees.  That's over 37 degrees uncertainty out of 4?  In the kind of simulations I'm used to that's so bad it's unusable.  The remarkable part is how bad the people who released this plot were at doing this math (read this). They're an embarrassment to people who can do this math, and the ones who can should get listened to far more than they do. 

Maybe if the people pushing this climate change stuff could do this math they wouldn't have their morons burning down cities. If the people burning down cities or ruining their lives by getting upset by this could understand the papers referenced, the world would be safe from them. 

Another SpaceX record set Sunday

It's a reality that every single Falcon 9 mission sets a record for SpaceX so we can't make a big deal over every launch or landing, we just note them as they go by, reserving the hoopla for Big Round Numbers. They are so far ahead of every other launch company in the world that there isn't a snowball's chance in the Florida Keys that anybody will be doing these things for years.  So let's just put up the numbers.

The big round number in this case is the middle one: 600 Falcon 9 landings in 640 completed missions. Of those 640, 562 were reflights of already flown boosters. Gee, 600 landings is first place in booster reuse, but who's in second place and how many have they flown? Is there anyone on Earth with more than even 10 landings? (Yes, I'm ignoring the Space Shuttles because they no longer fly, but maybe I should count them, too?) 

Launch 600 and completed mission 640 were Sunday morning, April 19, from Vandenberg Space Force Base, at 9:03 AM PDT, 1603 UTC and 12:03 PM here on EDT. It was batch 17-22 of 25 Starlink satellites, and about 8 minutes after liftoff, booster B1097 landed on OCISLY (Of Course I Still Love You), the only recovery drone ship working out of Vandenberg. B1097 is practically new, this being its 8th mission and earning B1097-8. The overall fleet leader is B1067-34 which flew mission 34 on March 30. 

Falcon 9 B1097-7 and its disposable upper stage lift off carrying 25 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in southern California on Sunday, April 19, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)

And by the time you see this, those numbers may have changed. Mission 641 and landing 601 are scheduled for early Tuesday morning, 2:53 AM EDT, 0653 UTC from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The launch window is open until 3:08 AM EDT - 15 minutes. Current forecast is 90% Go For Launch.

Blue Origin's rocket reuse mission misses its main job

Blue Origin's morning launch of their New Glenn was looking like an unqualified success when the launch coverage shutdown on YouTube. The second flight of the booster named, Never Tell Me the Odds, started late due to a countdown hold for unknown reasons; starting at 7:25 AM instead of the expected 6:45 AM. The flight itself looked to be by the numbers and recovery of the booster on their recovery drone, Jacklyn, looked like it was exactly on the mark. 

The problem didn't show up for more than another hour, when the upper stage was to ignite to put the payload into the desired orbit. The payload was the second "Block 2" satellite in the internet constellation of Texas-based company AST SpaceMobile, called BlueBird 7. Its predecessor, BlueBird 6, is a phased array of antennas on a large plane. It's one of the largest satellites in space, with an antenna that spans 2,400 square feet. BlueBird 7 has the same dimensions. While not actually square in shape, for reference, that would be a square almost 49 feet on a side. The purpose is "direct to cell" coverage from orbit. 

BlueBird 7 was to be deployed into orbit one hour and 15 minutes after launch. Nothing was said or streamed until about two hours after liftoff, when Blue Origin reported that something appeared to go wrong.

"We have confirmed payload separation. AST SpaceMobile has confirmed the satellite has powered on," Blue Origin wrote in a social media update. "The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit. We are currently assessing and will update when we have more detailed information."

A little later on Sunday, AST SpaceMobile provided its own update, and the news was not good.

"While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will [be] de-orbited," the company said in a statement. "The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy."

An artist's concept of a giant AST SpaceMobile BlueBird mobile broadband satellite for smartphone connectivity. (Image credit: AST SpaceMobile)

In my mind any mission that ends with a statement like, "the cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy" was a failure - so even though the booster performed remarkably well, that's not the point of the mission. The point of the mission, what the customer is paying for, is to put their payload into its assigned orbit. Reusability is tremendously important but that's after the primary mission has been completed. 

The drive to increase the pace of the Artemis moon missions could quite possibly be affected by this second stage failure. It was mentioned recently that Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander was being shipped across the Gulf of America to the space coast here for testing to continue. The goal is to test that lander and SpaceX's Human Landing System on next year's Artemis 3 mission. There are many, many ways to delay that and only one way to accelerate it; to be perfect all the time.

Got me thinkin

Some time ago, Mike Myles down at 90 Miles from Tyranny posted this meme in one of his many collections. 

Ignoring "who's CT?", the rest of it seems like real truth to me. The first obvious one to me is our weight being determined entirely by Calories In vs. Calories Out or CICO (pronounce that “psycho;” or “sicko” – whichever you prefer), often stated as the way to lose weight is “eat less and move more.” I don't think it's an overstatement to say many millions of people have tried that and found that our bodies are too adaptive, too much "learning systems" for a simple approach like that. A very common scenario is for someone to try caloric reduction, have some quick success losing weight, only to find they gain weight back to close to their starting point. Then the after effect is that once the system learns it can turn down the amount of calories it needs, it can leave that so that to drop weight requires continually reducing intake. 

His emphasis, though, seems to sound more like the crowd that seems to be afraid of chemical names and no familiarity with how chemistry works. If instead of telling them you were giving them water but said it was di-hydrogen monoxide (H₂O), they'd run in fear.

Another one of Mike Myles' posts that stuck out to me is the essence of being afraid of chemical names. 

The statement that the source of the Fluoride ion in our water supplies (and toothpaste, dental treatments and ... whatever) is hydrofluorosilicic acid (also known as hexafluorosilicic acid - H
₂SiF
₆) is true, but it's irrelevant. The nature of chemical reagents is that they get used up so there is none of that hydrofluorosilicic acid left in the water supply. The fluoride ions are removed from the acid and attach to sodium ions resulting in sodium fluoride, NaF, a salt like table salt, sodium chloride.  

Since there's no hexafluorosilicic acid remaining in the water we drink, testing it for safety doesn't make much sense. Whether or not Fluoride itself is toxic or "safe" in our water doesn't appear to be anything the makers of this poster care about. 

Well, just some rambling. Weekends tend to be the slowest news days, so I picked up some memes I've been meaning to write about. I'm open to suggestions about other things to write about.

NASA Shuts down a long-running experiment on Voyager 1

Voyager 1, the darling of deep space, is well into old age, coming up on the 50th anniversary of its launch and the first known thing from Earth to ever leave the solar system. The harsh side of that is Voyager 1 is running low on power and they're trying to keep the old girl going. Over the years, the solution to achieve a longer life has been to shut down old experiments and after much discussion, Voyager project leaders elected to shut down an experiment that has been gathering data since 1977 (with a few short interruptions).

On April 17, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California sent commands to shut down an instrument aboard Voyager 1 called the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP. The nuclear-powered spacecraft is running low on power, and turning off the LECP is considered the best way to keep humanity’s first interstellar explorer going.

The LECP has been operating almost without interruption since Voyager 1 launched in 1977 — almost 49 years. It measures low-energy charged particles, including ions, electrons, and cosmic rays originating from our solar system and galaxy. The instrument has provided critical data about the structure of the interstellar medium, detecting pressure fronts and regions of varying particle density in the space beyond our heliosphere. The twin Voyagers are the only spacecraft that are far enough from Earth to provide this information.

The Voyager probes are powered by Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, RTGs, which run on small amounts of atomic decay from plutonium, turning the heat generated by the plutonium into electricity. Both Voyagers lose about 4 watts of power every year. The loss of power is something that was undoubtedly considered carefully during the design stages of the mission. All fuel sources run out, and plutonium RTGs are among the best for reliability and long life. After their close flybys in our solar system, the ground crews would order the turn off of power drains, like the video cameras, eventually becoming the only manmade objects to leave our solar system. After almost a half-century in space, the available power has dropped and the margins of "power available versus what you'd like" have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off heaters and instruments while making sure the spacecraft don’t get so cold that their fuel lines freeze.

During a routine, planned roll maneuver on Feb. 27, Voyager 1’s power levels fell unexpectedly. Mission engineers knew any additional drop in power could trigger the spacecraft’s undervoltage fault protection system, which would shut down components on its own to safeguard the probe, requiring recovery by the flight team — a lengthy process that carries its own risks.

The Voyager team needed to act first.

“While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody’s preference, it is the best option available,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL. “Voyager 1 still has two remaining operating science instruments — one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields. They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored. The team remains focused on keeping both Voyagers going for as long as possible.”

Years ago, the project managers put together a plan of what to shut down, when to shut it down, in the correct order.

Of the 10 identical sets of instruments that each spacecraft carries, seven have been shut off so far. For Voyager 1, the LECP was next on that list. The team shut off the LECP on Voyager 2 in March 2025.

While the Voyagers are beyond our solar system, and among the fastest things mankind has ever launched, they're not remotely close to the next star system. That's in the vicinity of four light years away, while the Voyagers are barely one light day away. Still, that makes sending instructions to the probes inconvenient at best. That means being really sure the message you're sending is thoroughly tested to know it's correct and once transmitted, the soonest you can know if it worked is another day away. 

Artist’s illustration of one of the Voyager spacecraft. Credit: Caltech/NASA-JPL

Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.

The team will implement the Big Bang on Voyager 2 first, which has a little more power to spare and is closer to Earth, making it the safer test subject. Tests are planned for May and June 2026. If they go well, the team will attempt the same fix on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a chance that Voyager 1’s LECP could be switched back on.

I'm not sure what they mean by "about a year of breathing room." Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977 with Voyager 1 following 16 days later on September 5. They're closing in on their 49th year in space this coming August and early September with the 50th anniversary the following year. I've been hoping they'd make 50 years for as long as I can remember. 

Today's Space Race is real, and an interesting step is looming

It's no secret that there's an undercurrent of the 1960s Space Race to the moon going on as our returns to the moon start to play out. It's also no secret that what's looking to be the ultimate target of the next round of missions isn't the large, open areas on the Earth-facing side of the Moon, like the Sea of Tranquility was for Apollo 11. Showing up in nearly every large story of the next manned mission to the Moon are references to landing near the lunar South Pole. 

There are big, practical reasons for choosing the South Pole: the day to night temperature swings aren't as large as those in the huge Mare (seas) of the middle latitudes, and there appears to be large amounts of water (ice) available there. 

Currently, the Space Race is that two lunar landers are set to visit Shackleton crater, that is actually on the south pole. 

The two landers will arguably be the most ambitious robotic missions ever sent to the Moon. The Endurance spacecraft, built by Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, will become the largest lunar lander in history, exceeding the size of NASA’s Apollo lunar module that ferried crews to and from the lunar surface more than 50 years ago. China’s Chang’e 7 mission will feature a smaller lander, but the project also includes an orbiter, rover, and a hopper drone to scout for hidden ice deposits. 

Blue Origin's Endurance lander has just completed some extensive thermal/vacuum tests at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The tests were completed last week, and the spacecraft left Houston on Saturday. It's currently en route from Houston to here (Florida's Space Coast) for final preparations to launch on the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. NextSpaceflight doesn't show anything about a Blue Origin Endurance launch. Two days before Endurance's trip began, so last Thursday (Apr 9), Chang’e 7 arrived at a spaceport on Hainan Island in the South China Sea to be integrated with China’s own heavy-lifter, the Long March 5. NextSpaceflight shows the Long March 5 but only says No Earlier Than 2026. The source doesn't say much about a launch date other than "later this year."

Shackleton Crater is about 13 miles (21 kilometers) wide, with a surface area roughly the same as the cities of Philadelphia, Las Vegas, or Detroit. The crater measures 14,000 feet (4.2 kilometers) deep. If Endurance and Chang’e 7 land on or near the crater rim, as expected, it would be the first time landers from different nations have operated simultaneously so close to one another on another planetary body.
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The highest crests of Shackleton’s rim offer the advantage of near-continuous sunlight, providing a lander or future Moon base a stable source of solar power right next to a crater floor in eternal shadow, where temperatures are cold enough to preserve ancient ice deposits. The Moon’s polar cold traps, including Shackleton, are attractive targets for future exploration. The ice at these locations could be harvested to supply drinking water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for a lunar outpost.

A mosaic of the Shackleton Crater showcases the power of two lunar orbiting cameras working together to reveal unprecedented detail of the lunar south pole region. Scientists created this mosaic using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the ShadowCam instrument on South Korea's Danuri orbiter, revealing the dark interior of Shackleton in new detail. Credit: NASA/KARI/ASU

Part of the reason for Blue Origin sending their Endurance lander is that it's essentially their Blue Moon Mark 1 lander that they're preparing for the Artemis lunar landing mission next year.

Blue Origin has not publicly identified the exact landing site for the Endurance test flight, other than saying it will target the Moon’s south pole region. In a social media post last year, Bezos said it would land “near Shackleton Crater.” The south pole lies directly on the crater rim. Endurance will carry a suite of NASA-funded stereo cameras to observe interactions between the lander’s engine plume and lunar soil, along with a laser ranging reflector to help scientists pinpoint the craft’s precise location on the Moon. Blue Origin has not yet revealed what else the mission might do after landing, but getting to the surface intact and upright is the primary goal for Endurance. 

The Chinese officials haven't publicly identified much detail about their mission either. They have said that one of their goals is to “directly confirm the existence and source of water ice” in the south pole region. Chang'e 7 will deploy a rover and a “mini-flying probe” after landing. The rover and drone will carry instruments to analyze and measure the abundance of water ice in lunar soil in and around Shackleton Crater. 

Image of the south pole area from Sky & Telescope magazine.  The Diviner instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the temperatures of the south polar region, shown here. Shackleton crater is at the bottom center, and the south pole is where the thin white lines intersect. The upper left corner of Shackleton crater seems to be the pole.

With both landers targeting the same crater it only seems logical to ask what happens if they interfere with each other? 

The United States and China are parties to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits claims of territorial sovereignty on the Moon and other celestial bodies. But the treaty allows for bases, and it requires parties to the agreement act with “due regard” to the interests of other nations.

In an article published last year, Michelle Hanlon, a professor of air and space law at the University of Mississippi, outlined the advantages of being first at the Moon. The first country to succeed in placing a nuclear reactor on the Moon, for example, could “shape the norms for expectations, behaviors, and legal interpretations,” she wrote.

These first-mover advantages could extend to future lunar bases, mining, and other resource extraction activities on the Moon. NASA has proposed the concept of “safety zones” to avoid interference between the operations of different nations on the Moon.

Lawyers. In my mind, I'm hearing the Morgan and Morgan commercials about "when your property on the moon is damaged by somebody touching it without your permission..."  

NASA Administrator Isaacman talks budget issues

With the Artemis mission is largely done with its distractions, the news is going to switch to the annual budget concerns. The least important word there is annual because congress hasn't actually passed an annual budget since 2009, but while they don't pass an actual budget, they pass funding mechanisms by other names, especially "continuing resolutions" - where the phrase "CR" you'll be hearing comes from - and other forms of what I call an LCS budget (LCS = Lie, Cheat, Steal). 

You may have heard some of the dire reports last week about the White House's NASA budget being significantly lower than congress had wanted. In this year's Space Symposium, currently going on this week in Colorado Springs, NASA Administrator Isaacman gave a talk that covered the topic of working to the White House budget, and reported on by the online industry journal Payload. 

The interview is a two screens full of text that would probably print out to two pages if done at printer settings that would yield a magazine-style page, and it's a good interview, but I will respect their ownership of the written words and not just lift everything, but let me start out with an early Question and Answer:

I saw your early findings on the heat shield. Anything else you can share that you’ve already learned post mission?

I had seen the underwater photos of the heat shield as soon as the divers could transmit them. So I knew when that picture was going around on the internet. I was like, “No, there’s no chunk missing, that’s discoloration that got washed away.” The heat shield looked great. So a lot of credit to the JSC, and the folks at Ames, for doing the right work to get us to flight. 

All that aside, if you’re going to wait three and a half years between missions, just replace the heat shield. 

Other findings are super minor. Orion is a very robust vehicle, with lots of redundancy in systems. So a helium leak in ESM [the European Service Module, attached to Orion]—very, very minor.

We had a water-valve issue—one of four that didn’t perform as expected—but there was no issue accessing drinking water. With the data we’re getting right now, I don’t have the early read on why that primary wastewater line was clearly getting clogged. But these are all very fixable things.

There are several things that Isaacman said that just hit a proper chord with me.  When asked about the big picture lunar and deep space things he has talked about publicly, he gave a good answer: “No one at NASA that I’ve spoken to, at any level of the organization, thought it was a good idea to fly Artemis II and wait three years to try and attempt a [Moon] landing. No one thought that was a good idea.” One of Isaacman's first talks was to turn Artemis III from the lunar landing to a mission intended to test out docking with the landing systems and to increase the launch frequency. The Apollo/Saturn V flew much more often than once a year, although there was irregularity and not always “every  3 months.” I believe the pace is part of doing it properly.  

There was something that Isaacman said that I thought was very healthy. When asked about CLD (Commercial LEO Destination) providers being concerned his approach might be wrong he said, “I’m not surprised that CLD providers didn’t like what we had to say. So prove that we got it wrong.” I like the competition of ideas. “You've got a better idea? Prove it!” 

Jared Isaacman during a talk at the Space Symposium. Image credit: NASA

I think his final Q&A is worth excerpting. Or at least the first answer.

How do you politics-proof your Moon plans?

That’s exactly what we are putting in place. Administrations past have thought the right approach was to make a program that is too big to fail. What they didn’t realize is that you can also make it too big to succeed. 

About the Artemis 2 heat shield questions

I think it's fair to say that everyone who paid attention to the heat shield problems Artemis 1 showed was a bit concerned about them going with the same exact heat shield. One of the YouTube channels I've watched enough to think subscribing wasn't too insane is Alpha Tech, and they posted a video this morning saying that no bad effects like even the excessive wear on the heat shield were seen. It seems I can embed it, so I will. If it goes invisible, here's the link to video itself.

While it's a bit wordy and probably could be a couple of minutes shorter, the trade off is he shows you videos of some major players so that you watch them yourself rather than take his word for it. There are video tracks in there that I've never seen and facts to go with them, so I don't think it's a waste of time to watch it. 

He dives into the reasons for the first test's issue's, the root cause of the first test's shield blowing out chunks, and how altering the trajectory worked. The animations of how the two return trajectories compare are worth the watch. 

For me, I'd have to say the only thing that would make me feel much more comfortable with NASA's fix would be More Pictures. Like the ones that showed Every Single Pit in Artemis I's shield. So we could see what a used but undamaged heat shield looks like.

Three years from now...

I suppose it's a fact of life that when we get a string of very busy news days, the next slow news days seem even slower, even harder to adapt to. So here's just an interesting look at April 13, 2029 - three years from now, but a Friday not a Monday, that we will get the closest known flyby of an asteroid in history, and of the biggest body to ever approach Earth. 

A rare naked-eye asteroid will light up the night sky on April 13, 2029, when the near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis makes an extraordinarily close flyby of Earth. For skywatchers, it's a once-in-a-lifetime event — and one worth traveling for.  

This will be one of the closest approaches ever recorded for an object of its size. The night sky will tell a story billions of years in the making. 

At its nearest point — 5:45 p.m. EDT (2145 GMT) on April 13, 2029 — it will pass closer than Earth's geosynchronous satellites, at a distance of roughly 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). Just over an hour earlier, at 4:30 p.m. EDT (2035 GMT), it will reach peak brightness, with a magnitude of around 3.1. That's bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from dark locations — but only some locations.

For observers in Europe, Africa and western Asia, Apophis will appear for one night only. An asteroid this big, getting this close to Earth, happens only once every few thousand years, making it truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a celestial encounter both dramatic and deeply humbling.

To be honest, maybe I'm spoiled, but I don't think a magnitude 3.1 object is going to stand out in the sky. I suppose if we sit outside adapting our vision to the dark, it will be better than if we were to just walk outside from well-lit house in the suburbs but magnitude 3 just isn't going to grab your eyes. If its motion is visible, that will help.

If you poke around, you'll find that Apophis gets talked about pretty often. When it was first discovered, early calculations of its trajectory said that it might hit Earth. Interestingly, that's how it got its name. Apophis, was the Ancient Egyptian God of chaos. As observations improved, the calculated trajectory improved and now Apophis is not predicted to hit, but is still classified as a "potentially hazardous asteroid," not because the current predictions show impact, but because of its size (approximately 1230 feet long) and how close it's going to get. At some point, these predictions have to factor in that we don't know 100% of what's out there that could tweak its trajectory and move it slightly. Especially if it hit Apophis.

Remember our OSIRIS-REx satellite? This is the one that took samples of asteroid Bennu, bringing them back to Earth in September of 2023. If you do recall that, you'll probably also remember that OSIRIS-REx was reassigned to rendezvous with Apophis, getting renamed as OSIRIS-APEX (OSIRIS-Apophis Explorer).

The European Space Agency's proposed Ramses mission aims to launch in 2028 to observe the asteroid up close before and during its flyby, while NASA's OSIRIS-APEX is scheduled to orbit Apophis in June 2029 to see how the close encounter with Earth affected it. ... ExLabs also intends to launch a commercial mission, called Apophis EX, to rendezvous with the asteroid.

A rare stargazing spectacle will unfold on Friday, April 13, 2029, as the asteroid Apophis passes closer than satellites over Europe and Africa in a true once-in-a-lifetime event. (Image credit: Apophis: ESA-Science Office, Earth added in Canva Pro.)

A remarkable and old Ham radio accomplishment

This is actually old news, it happened in March of 2009, 17 full years ago but I just learned about it recently and was embarrassed that I didn't know about it. 

A couple of members of the German AMSAT, a club dedicated to working satellites and more difficult modes, such as Earth-Moon-Earth (EME or Moonbounce) successfully bounced signals off the planet Venus and heard their own signals.  For comparison, the moon is many times closer than Venus and if you're listening for your own signals bouncing off the moon, they take around 2.6 seconds (based on one way distance to the moon of 250,000 miles and the speed of light being 186,000 miles) per second or 1.3 seconds each way.  

It took the signals to and from Venus "a round trip delay of about 5 minutes."  Sounds like Venus bounce isn't very practical for conversation, but I think doing Venus bounce will be like Moonbounce with an automated software system the sends a signal report and another small piece of info, maybe taking a minute to reply, we're talking 2-1/2 minutes there, the message time, and 2-1/2 minutes back, maybe a Venus bounce contact (QSO) could take place in under six minutes. 

I'm full of questions about this, and the source article at the American Radio Relay League has almost no technical details. The ARRL reports, "According to an AMSAT-DL press release, the team's transmitter was generating about 6 kW CW on 2.4 GHz," and that's about all.

I've written about moonbounce and trying to hear my own signal reflections from the moon before; several times. So let me play with some numbers. The first hurdle is how far we're trying to send a signal to. At it's closest, Venus is 24 million miles while at its farthest, it's 162 million miles. Both Venus and Earth are in elliptical orbits around the sun and we're both constantly moving around the sun. There are more complications there, but I'll skip them for now and use a number that isn't the closest or farthest. Since it's a nice round number, let's say 100 million miles. 

The big concern is the same as every communications link everywhere else: the amount the signal attenuates - weakens - over that 100,000,000 miles. The term for this is path loss, and many times I've used a handy equation to calculate it that gets you within less than half a dB of the more theoretically-backed equation. We haven't talked about a frequency, so let me use that 2.4 GHz (2,400 MHz) the Germans used. It's a ham band here in the USA as well. 

Path loss in dB = 37 dB + 20log(f) + 20log(d) where,f is the frequency in MHz and d is the distance in miles.

Path loss in dB = 37 dB + 20log(2400) + 20log(10⁸)

Path loss = 264.6 dB

If you're not used to this world, this may shock you, but the impact in path loss isn't terribly big for the return back to you doubling the distance. If you double the 100 million miles in the last term to 200 million (2*10⁸) the increase is 6 dB. Right, 270.6. There's more uncertainties to come than that 6 dB.

The problem with that number is not knowing how much signal you get back because of a big unknown. How much signal is lost in the reflection sending the signal back to you? It seems a safe bet that your signal isn't going to exactly light up the entire earth-facing side of Venus, it'll be wider than the planet out that far, so there will losses I can't guess at - say your signal's diameter at Venus is 10 times the diameter of the planet, yes, you're losing 9/10 of your signal strength in that reflection. The next problem is how much of what hits the planet reflects? Venus is famously clouded over, how much loss is there? Let me PFA some numbers, and I'll say I lose 20 dB in the combination. 

What does it mean to increase the path loss from 271 dB to 291 dB?

The real problem, then, is not knowing how much loss there is in those places. I'll use the 6000 watts that the German guys did.  That's +67.8 dBm (decibels above 1 milliwatt) If I had no antenna gain the signal I'd get back would be +67.8 dBm minus 291 dB or -223.2 dBm. I don't know of any way to detect and use a signal that weak, regardless of modulation and receiver enhancements. 

What if I had an antenna like the one on the right here, with LOTS of gain?

I don't know exactly how big this is or how much gain it would give at 2.4 GHz, but it's a site in New Jersey where a secret military radar project first bounced radar off the moon. Not with that antenna, it's just a nice looking model for a ham radio project. My guess is the AMSAT Germany guys probably had something like that, if not bigger. 

There's a lot of what I consider reasonable guesses here, and (as always) some "hand-wavium" but it doesn't sound easy - more like on border of impossible. Good antennas for 2.4 GHz aren't hard to get and will do nothing but help. I'm not sure about the amplifier to get 6 kW, but I think they're out there. 

Now that that's over with

Artemis II is in the record books. The reaction comments yesterday surprised me. I was happy the mission succeeded because I don't like the idea of anyone being incinerated to death, and these seem like good people we'd all want to see "live long and prosper," to quote my best, make-believe friends. 

Back in February, I put up a post about the SLS calling it the "biggest and most expensive POS in history." And, yes, I spelled out Piece Of Shit. By no means am I a big fan of where the agency is now, but add that to pretty much everything else that the Big Freakin' Out of Control Government has grown like a fungus in the last 50 years. Look down the right sidebar and at the bottom, the last index is the list of Post Labels I group posts under. I started that in the last 10 years, I think, so it's not perfect, but "big freakin' out of control government" is one of the labels. 

All that to say, NASA has visibly improved since Jared Isaacman took over. I suspect (without good, direct evidence) that it's because of his experience with the modern space industry (Space 2.0 as we tend to call it), flying in SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules a couple of times, when we called him Rook Isaacman. 

As I've said before, all the talk comparing Artemis II to Apollo 8 is wrong.  Artemis II pales in comparison to Apollo 8. Apollo 8 did 10 orbits of the moon, Artemis II didn't go into orbit at all; it was sent on a guaranteed return trajectory meaning there were no critical engine burns or restarts. The most impressive thing to me is that this most expensive POS in history, the SLS, didn't blow up or burn into slag on reentry killing everyone and the Artemis program itself. SLS is over $4 billion per launch. I think it was when Sean Duffy was temporarily head of NASA before Isaacman that someone said there can be no space program at $4 billion a launch. $4 billion here, $4 billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money. 

Isaacman is trying to kill off SLS and congress keeps ordering more missions because it's an easy way to buy votes in their districts. And that's why it's a POS. That and it's a completely unnecessary POS.

SLS is "the most powerful rocket ever built" only until Starship goes orbital. SLS can put more into orbit than Falcon Heavy, but not lots more - it's only like 25 or 30% more. So with some R&D / Non Recurring Engineering done you can launch two Heavies, that together are carrying more than one SLS can for about 8% of what an SLS costs. Don't stop looking for advantages there. Remember all the time and money wasted on hydrogen leaks and fixing them? That's because liquid hydrogen engines are only "best" from one perspective. Falcon Heavies are basically three Falcon 9 first stages with one upper stage. They fly with kerosene (RP-1) and LOX, and they've only flown those Falcon 9s around 400 times, so it's far more common than LH2 and LOX

The SLS has only launched with actual used (already-flown) or leftover Shuttle RS-25 engines, also known as Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs). I'm happy they got a few launches out of them before throwing them out. Those are 512,000 pound thrust – which may have been remarkable in the 1970s but it's common now. Both the Blue Origin BE-4s and the SpaceX Raptor engines, all versions, can do half a million pounds of thrust. The SSMEs cost around $125 Million each. The Raptor 2, 3, or 4 engines are in the vicinity of $2 million each while Blue Origin sells the BE-4 into ULA's Vulcan for less than $20 million.  That means the four engines of an SLS are $500 million, while four BE-4s would cost $80 million. At most. 

Artemis isn't making the future in space, it's holding the future back. As much as I'd like to redirect everything, moving over to the Falcon Heavies and either SpaceX Human Landing System or Blue Origin's Blue Moon isn't in the cards.  

The real future that's being talked about is a space or moon-based economy and that requires a lot of tons sent up to the moon. They'll have to figure out and rotate crews of construction experts, development experts, mining experts and more. There will be a lot of prospecting, so lots of geologists. What's the first thing you see when you look at telescopic photos of the moon? Craters? The leading experts on how these form say meteor impacts, which implies a meteor under every crater. Is that titanium? "Heavy metals?" Gold? Platinum? Osmium? If the moon and Earth "condensed" out of the same part of a cloud of dust or whatever, then it should be the same elements as Earth, but probably distributed differently. More light elements with the heavier ones. There are no volcanoes on the moon, and I'm sure that must have an effect, too. 

I consider this a successful mission because everyone and everything made it back to Earth in one piece and good shape. I really want to see pics of the heat shield but nobody has them online yet. We're not better than we were in the Apollo days but we're better than we've been in a while.  

Looking up at the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as they roll to Pad 39B, February 2026. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Hard to think of a better conclusion to Artemis II than that

For the last hour before splashdown and the first 20 minutes or so after it, I was watching the NASA feed as it happened. It seemed that Every Single Milestone they called out was good. The whole time was exceptionally smooth, by the book, and as close to perfect as it gets. 

Odyssey, the Orion capsule, as the splashdown is happening. As close to a perfect conclusion to that as close to a perfect mission as we get.

Go celebrate a little. It's worth it. 

We're in the final 24 hours of Artemis 2

The crew is in the final hours of their mission, which will end Friday evening East Coast time, right around midnight UTC. From the running series of posts on Space.com: 

Orion will begin its plunge through the atmosphere on Friday (April 10) at around 7:53 p.m. EDT (2353 GMT), entering a 6-minute communications blackout. The spacecraft's two parachute groups, its drogues and the main chutes, will deploy around 8:03 p.m. EDT (0003 GMT, April 11) and 8:04 p.m. EDT (0004 GMT, April 11), respectively, with splashdown expected at 8:07 p.m. EDT (0007 GMT, April 11). 

Like everyone who has been on such a historic mission, they haven't really had everything they've been through sink in to their heads. Buzz Aldrin famously went through this after Apollo 11 and being the second person to step on the moon in human history. After something that big, how do you return to an ordinary life? 

"I wanted to resume my duties, but there were no duties to resume," Aldrin said in his book. "There was no goal, no sense of calling, no project worth pouring myself into." 

Tomorrow brings a big test that I think many of us have been fearing.

I think all of you who follow the space program know about the heat shield issues that Artemis 1 had, with holes essentially scattered around the entire heat shield. This has been tested about as well as it could be tested without a "disposable" Artemis mission throwing away an SLS booster to get an Orion capsule on the intended trajectory at the right speed so it could be tested under the worst case conditions.  The results were approved by NASA Chief Jared Isaacman just three months ago.

The Orion heat shield as seen after the Artemis I flight. Credit: NASA

There has been mention in a couple of places of a task for this mission of putting instruments in positions that can track the Orion capsule during reentry to capture images of it. It might reveal details about the reentry that other instruments can't or won't. 

Reentry is always a scary time in a mission. Some reentries are scarier than other. Godspeed, Artemis 2!

NASA working on plans for the new Artemis III

Artemis II is still on the way home and the existing plans for Artemis III were scrapped just over a month ago, but the agency under Jared Isaacman isn't wasting time trying to reduce the wasted time between missions. 

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said Tuesday afternoon that the space agency is debating about which orbit to fly Artemis III in before locking in a blueprint, noting that the first “senior level” Artemis III mission design discussion had taken place earlier in the day.
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“One of the questions is what the initial orbit will be for Artemis III,” Isaacman said during a news conference. “Is it going to be LEO or HEO? There are pros and cons for each of them, for sure.” 

Most readers will remember that Artemis III was originally scheduled as the first Artemis moon landing, and the date being talked about was originally 2025 but was most recently looking to be 2027. Artemis I was in November of '22, so about 3-1/2 years from flight one to two. Having III even at the end of '27, would be an incredible amount of progress. Plus the mission has been massively changed, so that instead of a lunar landing next year it's looking to be restricted to Earth orbit for a test of one or (preferably) both lunar landers, SpaceX's Starship-based Human Landing System or Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1.

The first question, though LEO or HEO has to be decided quickly because it affects other decisions. Low Earth Orbit is commonly referred to as 100 to 1240 miles (2000 km) while High Earth Orbit ranges from there up to 22,400 miles. 

A rendezvous in low-Earth orbit would potentially allow NASA to fly the SLS rocket without using an Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage, or ICPS. This is valuable because it could then save this final remaining ICPS stage for the Artemis IV mission (for future SLS missions, NASA would use a Centaur V upper stage, also provided by United Launch Alliance). For an Artemis III mission in a higher orbit, however, NASA would need the ICPS to push Orion there. 

A rendezvous in high-Earth orbit would better mimic thermal and other conditions near the Moon, and this might be a more benign environment for the Orion spacecraft, which is sensitive to thruster pluming and other thermal issues. High-Earth orbit would also provide a stiffer test for Orion’s modified heat shield.

The concept of doing this mission as a test of rendezvous and docking with the lunar landers is just plain common sense. It was done during the Apollo program two missions before Apollo 11's first landing. Apollo 9 took place in low-Earth orbit between 125 and 310 miles.  

The biggest question hanging there in my mind is which lander will be ready before the end of '27. Will they both be ready? The answer is both seem to be progressing as intended. The launch of the next Starship test flight was said to be "in March" but I've seen May mentioned lately. Part of that could be there was a latest version Raptor 3 engine that blew up in the last week during testing, but while engines blowing up isn't necessarily a design problem, it seems prudent to make sure it's not something that needs redesign. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mk. 1 lander is said to be “wrapping up” vacuum-chamber testing at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Blue Origin's Blue Moon Lander. Image credit: Blue Origin

Final words to Eric Berger from Ars Technica.

Isaacman said it is important for SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to reach higher launch cadences to support not just Artemis III but many future missions to the lunar surface. NASA is clearly watching both closely.

“We’ll all have a sense of which path we’re going to go down based on launch cadence of our two HLS (human landing system) providers, both of which have launches coming up in the next month or less,” Isaacman said. “A big key to our strategy—to not just return to the Moon but to stay and build a base—is the rapid reusability of heavy-lift launch vehicles. The more they get experience doing that, the more options that are available to us for Artemis III.”