Isaacman's nomination clears Senate committee

On the journey to being accepted as NASA's next administrator, Jared Isaacman passed the next big hurdle today, being confirmed by the Commerce committee, where he had his first appearance back on April 9th.  Far from unanimous, the vote was 19-9 with the "nay" votes coming from Democratic senators.  The next step is a full senate vote.  It could be within a couple of days, but probably more likely to be in weeks.  

However, some key Democrats voted in favor of Isaacman, including the ranking member of the committee, Maria Cantwell, D-Wash. Before the vote, Cantwell said she appreciated that a candidate like Isaacman, with his background in business and private spaceflight, could bring new ideas and energy to the space agency. 

As a Senator from Washington, one of the biggest employers in her state is Boeing, which "just happens" to be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the SLS and Artemis programs.  Both Cantwell and Texas Senator Ted Cruz are big advocates of Artemis and both emphasized that their support for Isaacman was based on his public support for the Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon.

"A commitment to keeping on with the Moon mission is the key requirement we have to have in this position," Cantwell said. "While it's not clear to me where the Trump administration ultimately will end up on the NASA budget, and I have concerns about some of their proposed cuts today, Mr. Isaacman seems to be committed to the current plan. I think this is a very big competitive issue for the United States of America. That competitiveness is not just a goal; it's a reality that we may some day wake up and find ourselves falling behind."

While both Isaacman and Trump have talked about Mars and the Moon almost as equals, it seems that congress considers the Moon to be the higher priority simply because of the visible "space race 2.0" with China.  Isaacman's direct quote is: 

I believe pursuing both lunar and Martian objectives is not inherently cost-prohibitive nor expressly prohibited by existing federal statute should such efforts not detract from the near-term objective of returning to the Moon first.  There is meaningful hardware commonality across the existing Artemis Human Landing System (HLS) providers. For instance, both contractors are already required to validate reusable heavy-lift launch capabilities—technologies essential for transporting mass beyond low Earth orbit, whether toward the Moon or Mars. In fact, many of the technologies and capabilities NASA is already investing in—such as surface nuclear power systems, nuclear electric propulsion, and nuclear thermal propulsion—are highly relevant for Mars exploration, though they remain underfunded and subscale.

Jared Isaacman, who goes by the name "Rook" in practically every other reference to him on this blog, on his last private mission to orbit, Polaris Dawn in September '24. You can see his shirt is embroidered "Rook Isaacman" on his right in this picture - just right of his thumb. Credit: Polaris Program

Small Space News Story Roundup 58

Two stories:  one on the positive side, one on the negative.

On the positive side, Atmos Space Cargo's First Test 

Back in the April 22nd followup to the first launch of their PHOENIX 1 reentry vehicle, while everything Atmos  publicly stated about the mission was positive, we were left with the fact that they weren't able to photograph and document that everything survived.  All of that came down to being because the main payload of the Bandwagon 3 mission, a Korean Synthetic Aperture Radar sat caused what they called a last minute change to where the PHOENIX 1 would splashdown.  About 1/4 of the globe west of the original splashdown point; from Reunion Island off the SE coast of Africa to 1200 miles off the SE coast of Brazil.  

Space.com reports today that the initial somewhat optimistic views that the mission had been a success are actually correct.  

Phoenix 1 was tasked with demonstrating some key reentry tech, such as the capsule's inflatable heat shield. Atmos also aimed to collect information about the flight and record scientific data from the customer experiments that flew aboard Phoenix 1 as well. All of these objectives were indeed met during the flight, according to Atmos.

I was drawn to the article by the title, "See photos snapped in space by Europe's 1st private reentry capsule" there's only two in the article, and the one that I think is more important is a victim of the terrible lighting that happens pretty often in space missions.  I tweaked the mid-range brightness values up a bit in a photo editor.

Phoenix 1 (left) separates from the upper stage of its Falcon 9 during the Bandwagon-3 mission. (Image credit: Atmos Space Cargo)

"Phoenix 1 was a milestone mission that showcased the incredible capabilities of our team," Marta Oliveira, Atmos' co-founder and chief operating officer, said in an April 23 update. "This mission proves that we’re not only solving the technical challenge of re-entry — we're laying the groundwork for a future where space is accessible, testable and impactful for innovation here on Earth."

On the negative side, Firefly's Alpha rocket had a very rarely seen failure on its mission today

The 6th launch of Firefly's Alpha rocket had a failure just about two and a half minutes into the flight, just after the first stage shut down and dropped away from the upper stage.  This left the upper stage unable to complete the mission of putting an experimental satellite into orbit for Lockheed Martin.  The payload never made orbit.

Alpha suffered an anomaly shortly after its two stages separated, which led to the loss of the nozzle extension for the upper stage's single Lightning engine. This significantly reduced the engine's thrust, dooming the mission, Firefly said in an update several hours after launch.

"Initial indications showed Alpha's upper stage reached 320 km [199 miles] in altitude. However, upon further assessment, the team learned the upper stage did not reach orbital velocity, and the stage and payload have now safely impacted the Pacific Ocean in a cleared zone north of Antarctica," the update reads.

I've watched two videos of the mission, focusing mostly on the view after the stage separation, and it's very clear that something took out the bell-shaped nozzle on the upper stage but there never seemed to be video showing it.  The upper stage engine continued to burn but with no nozzle to concentrate the thrust in the proper direction, it didn't have enough thrust to get to the proper orbit.   Strangely, the videos featured someone from Firefly explaining what we were seeing and I never heard her say a word about the nozzle (which Firefly's statement called a nozzle extension) not looking right.  

Firefly is one of just a handful of active US launch companies with rockets that have reached low-Earth orbit, but its Alpha rocket hasn't established a reliable track record. In six flights, Alpha has amassed just two unqualified successes. Two prior Alpha launches deployed their payloads in lower-than-planned orbits, and the rocket's debut test flight in 2021 failed soon after liftoff.

Now, Alpha has again missed its aim and didn't reach orbit at all.

Firefly argues that their Alpha has a payload capacity in a niche that's ideal for satellites too large to fly with Rocket Lab or too small to merit a dedicated flight with SpaceX.  They seem to have the contracts to back that up.

NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office, the US Space Force, and several more commercial customers have also reserved slots on Firefly's launch schedule. With these contracts, Firefly has the fourth-largest launch confirmed backlog of any US launch company, following SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Rocket Lab.

I think that last sentence should contain, "Firefly has the fourth-largest confirmed launch backlog of any US launch company," but more importantly, if they keep losing 2/3 of what they launch, that "fourth-largest confirmed launch backlog" won't be there much longer.

NASA's next helicopter clears next major milestone

The Dragonfly helicopter headed for Saturn's moon Titan has very little in common with the Mars helicopter, Ingenuity.  Ingenuity was small, light, and lightly powered - which makes sense when you consider the environment it had to work in.  One source I've seen said flying on Mars is equivalent to flying at 100,000 feet here on Earth.  Titan, while smaller than Mars, has an atmosphere that's denser than ours, with a surface pressure 50 percent higher.  The combination of having lower surface gravity and a denser atmosphere seems to make the task of flying on Titan easier.  

Ingenuity has two propellers and is powered by batteries on board, charged by photovoltaic panels.  Dragonfly is a nuclear-powered, car-sized, eight propeller drone.  That's right, instead of batteries, this helicopter ship is powered by Radioisotope Thermal Generators, RTGs, like the Voyager probes. 

An illustration of NASA's Dragonfly rotorcraft soaring in the skies of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

The milestone?  Dragonfly passed its Critical Design Review, NASA announced on Thursday (April 24).

"Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly's mission design, fabrication, integration and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself," a NASA statement reads.

Because of the necessity to launch at times essentially chosen by the planetary alignments - like flying to all the planets - Dragonfly is currently penciled in July 2028 to fly to Saturn on a Falcon Heavy from the Kennedy Space Center.  As far out as Saturn is, its orbital period (one Saturnian year) is 29.5 Earth years, I'd guess if they can't make it by 2028, the next date will be around two weeks later if they delay until 2029.  The trip to Saturn will take almost seven years.  The mission's goal is to spend more than three years studying areas across Titan's frigid and diverse surface.  Considering how these deep space missions historically have lasted many times longer than the plan, we can hope Dragonfly does the same.

 

EDIT 0824 AM EDT on 4/29: Thanks to commenter Malatrope for pointing out that I missed a big mistake in the first paragraph, saying it was easier to fly on Mars when I should have said Titan!  My proofreading team will be whipped at the earliest opportunity.

 

Solar Cycle 25/26 Update

A bit ahead of being a six month update; my last update was last December 28th, but there's a couple of things that are interesting to note.  

To begin with, though, the regular "formalities" are that most of this information comes from a video talk delivered to a group I belong to of VHF ("six meter band") aficionados on groups.io, called the Front Range 6 meter group.  Originally a group along the "front range" area in Colorado, they now have members from around the world.  As with every such talk I've watched, it's delivered by Dr. Scott McIntosh, formerly with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).  In the last year, Scott has moved to Lynker Space in the private sector.

The first thing is that cycle 26 has begun so we have two cycles in progress now and will continue that way until cycle 25 dies completely.  In December's talk, I used this screen capture from his previous talk showing that he had evidence that cycle 26 has begun.  Perhaps the biggest improvement to forecasting Dr. McIntosh has introduced is a way of identifying the exact time when the new sunspot cycle starts.  That's noted when new sunspots happen at very far northern or southern latitudes and have a magnetic polarity opposite the current cycle.  The diagonals (red and blue) show the progress of the spots in each cycle and the slopes show how the spots progress from higher to lower latitudes as the cycle progresses.  The four belts vertically  are implying the latitudes of the activity, with the solar equator in the middle.

A regular inclusion in these updates is the SSN or Smoothed Sunspot Number, as tracked by the NOAA Solar Cycle Progression chart from their web site. 

A new feature in this plot is colored bands in the future, showing 25, 50 and  75% predicted ranges.  You'll notice that the absolute peak of cycle 25 occurred during 2024.  There were some days with very high solar flux in '24: the highest peak was in August as shown here: each black dot is one month, and the last dot in this plot is March's number (the plot shows "updated 2025-04-02" bottom right).  I was regularly in the shack monitoring 6m activity much of end of '24 and saw something I've never seen in my life, spots of ham stations in Alaska being reported within a few hundred miles of me.  I've never heard an Alaskan signal make the last hop to Florida (on 6m), although a friend in Tennessee heard one, one time.  Both of us consider that a once in a lifetime moment.  It was last December 1.  We haven't had solar flux numbers like that since then but the highest Solar Flux measured in cycle 25 was in August of 2024.  

Finally, a plot I’ve shown regularly which shows the Smoothed Sunspot Number (SSN) for the last five cycles back to 1976. I like this plot because it’s my ham radio biography in one plot. I was first licensed in February 1976 (the blue curve), so every cycle I’ve been through is on this plot (and I was a shortwave listener for the cycle before that).  The plot is posted to Space Weather News (bottom of the page) but is created by a separate site, Solen.info.  I've regularly reported that while cycle 25 has been stronger than cycle 24, pink in this plot, that was the weakest cycle in the last hundred years, but 25 hasn't exceeded cycle 23 once.  So stronger than 24 is better than equaling it, or being weaker than it, but it's a long way from a good solar cycle.

It still hasn't exceeded cycle 23, but it equaled 23 for one graph square and then the recorded cycle 23 SSN out performed it and stayed higher than cycle 25. 

And just between us geeks, I absolutely hate the way the horizontal axis is labeled on this.  It divides the scale into groups of 10 "Months after cycle start", which is fine, but then notice that between numbers, like from  50 to 60 or any group of 10, it has SEVEN minor divisions.  Who on Earth would think to divide 10 months into SEVEN lines?  10/7 of a month?  Why not 10 minor divisions so each line was one month?  Or even five, so each one was two months?

Is there no chance of hearing Alaska down here again - in this cycle?  One thing  that's in our favor is that cycle 25 is looking very asymmetric.  We thought it was peaking 20 months ago around 40 months into the cycle, but after remaining at relatively low SSN, has been moving toward a peak farther out (in time).  What we don't know is how much longer it will stay around where it is now.  The second plot, on the cycle's progress pretty much predicts the SSN will be lower by 2026 after perhaps another quarter or half year around where it currently is.

To borrow that wonderful quote from physicist Niels Bohr, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

Another Interesting Possibility

Two weekends ago, I did a small update on things going on in my shop, both Saturday and Sunday (with more pictures).  The two general directions are either a more complicated and functional internal combustion engine vs. something more beautiful but still functional, like an orrery.  

Much of the intervening two weeks have been spent doing grown-up or homeowner shit, as we're speeding into summer and there are things that need the attention.  The exception has been something I stumbled across while doing something else.  It's called the Antikythera mechanism.

I'd heard of the Antikythera mechanism before, but hadn't thought about it in longer than I can recall.  It turns out to be rather interesting for a few reasons.  It's an ancient Greek device recovered in 1901 from a shipwreck in the Greek Islands dated to approximately 100 BCE give or take 30 years.  The most succinct description of it might be that it's the world's oldest analog computer.  The "world's oldest" by a thousand years.  If you'd like to be more specific, the kind of analog computer that best describes it is that it's an orrery.  

To borrow from the online Encyclopedia Britannica:

The Antikythera mechanism had the first known set of scientific dials or scales, and its importance was recognized when radiographic images showed that the remaining fragments contained 30 gear wheels. No other geared mechanism of such complexity is known from the ancient world or indeed until medieval cathedral clocks were built a millennium later.

The Antikythera mechanism was fabricated out of bronze sheet, and originally it would have been in a case about the size of a shoebox. The doors of the case and the faces of the mechanism are covered with Greek inscriptions, enough of which survive to indicate clearly much of the device’s astronomical, or calendrical, purpose. It is believed that a hand-turned shaft (now lost) was connected by a crown gear to the main gear wheel, which drove the further gear trains, with each revolution of the main gear wheel corresponding to one solar year. On the front of the mechanism is a large dial with pointers for showing the position of the Sun and the Moon in the zodiac and a half-silvered ball for displaying lunar phases. The drive train for the lunar position is extremely sophisticated, involving epicyclic gearing and a slot-and-pin mechanism to mimic subtle variations (known as the “first anomaly”) in the Moon’s motion across the sky. (See Hipparchus and Ptolemaic system.)

With something as famous as this, you might expect to find many pictures of reconstructions of it in everything from wood, to plastics (including in Legos) to intricate metal versions of it.  Some of those make the effort to recreate the final form and function of the Antikythera mechanism while others just emulate the functions.  This is a deep, deep rabbit hole to dive into.  

An example.  You can be sure the 100 BC Greeks didn't have plexiglass (or whatever that clear plastic is), but it's an impressive model.

Image Credit: Eternal Gadgetry  

There's this metal model on Instructables (design sharing), a 3D Printed model at Printables (Prusa), and another 3D printable on Thingiverse.  

And this illustrates only the gearing:

Image credit:  Communications of the ACM - figure 14 here.  Not that I could sit down with this and figure out what it should look like.  Besides, it shows you there are 65 gears but nothing about their sizes and numbers of teeth.  

Is this the next project?  I honestly don't know.  I like it, but 65 gears of unknown sizes strikes me as a lot for a first project cutting gears.  What's cool about this is the historical aspect.  That first orrery video I posted Saturday the 12th still seems pretty good (that links to the full video, not just the last few seconds).  I need to start looking closer at options.  Once I get my sprinkler system fixed.  And the other stuff.

Is the Sun continually creating water on our moon?

It's an interesting concept from NASA's Goddard Space Flight center, and relayed by Space.com. 

The sun is the continuous source of the streams of particles that have come to be called the solar wind.  The intensity of that wind varies over the 11 year solar cycle and on much shorter time scales but the solar wind is always present at some speed or intensity.  

There have been predictions since the 1960s that solar wind could create water on the moon.  In 2016, a NASA probe called  LADEE found that micrometerorite impacts on the moon release water.  When a speck of comet debris strikes the moon, it vaporizes on impact, creating a shock wave in the lunar soil. With a sufficiently large impactor, this shock wave can breach the soil’s dry upper layer and release water molecules from a hydrated layer below.

Now, in the most realistic lab simulation of this process yet, NASA-led researchers have confirmed the solar wind prediction.  

The high-speed particles, primarily composed of positively charged hydrogen ions, capture lunar electrons to become hydrogen atoms. The newly-formed hydrogen atoms then migrate through the dusty and rocky regolith to bond with oxygen, forming hydroxyl and water molecules across the surface, often concentrating in permanently shadowed polar regions. However, the natural cycle and renewability of these ingredients remained unclear. So, to shed light on this process, Li Hsia Yeo, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, led a lab experiment observing the effects of simulated solar wind on two samples of loose regolith brought to Earth by the Apollo 17 mission. [NOTE: hydroxyl is "half a water molecule", (OH^-) the other half being the H⁺ from the solar wind.  SiG]

Since these samples have been on Earth since 1972, the researchers took steps to ensure they were still valid, drying them out to ensure any water they find was created in the experiment, and built their needed custom test equipment.

To remove any terrestrial water the 50-year-old samples would have absorbed since their return to Earth, Yeo and her team baked the samples overnight in a vacuum furnace. To mimic conditions on the moon, the researchers built a custom apparatus that included a vacuum chamber, where the samples were placed, and a tiny particle accelerator, which the scientists used to bombard the samples with hydrogen ions for several days.

In the end, the most useful method they had to detect water was infrared emissions from the Apollo 17-collected regolith being hit with the high energy hydrogen.  The team saw a drop in the light signal that bounced to their detector precisely at the point in the infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum — near 3 microns — where water typically absorbs energy, leaving a telltale signature.  

While they can’t conclusively say if their experiment made water molecules, the researchers reported in their study that the shape and width of the dip in the wavy line on their graph suggests that both hydroxyl and water were produced in the lunar samples. 

One of the experiment's team members put it this way:

“It took a long time and many iterations to design the apparatus components and get them all to fit inside,” said McLain, “but it was worth it, because once we eliminated all possible sources of contamination, we learned that this decades-old idea about the solar wind turns out to be true.” 

Image capture from NASA Goddard's article on the experiments.  Water being released from the moon during meteor showers, when micrometeoroid impacts breach the dry lunar surface and eject water molecules from a hydrated layer below.  The blue haze above the soil and in the cross section is intended to show water.  Image credit: NASA video. 

The Hubble Space Telescope on its 35th birthday

April 24, 1990 was the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), one of the satellites most credited with new scientific discoveries.  

"Hubble is more scientifically productive now than ever before, which is kind of mind-blowing," Jennifer Wiseman, the Senior Project Scientist for Hubble at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told Space.com. 

For years, astronomers had wanted to get an "observatory class" telescope into space; there had been smaller instruments but nothing in the size class as HST, a 2.4 meter (94") aperture Ritchey Chrétien type of Cassegrain reflecting telescope.  It was certified for operation on May 20.  RCs have become the preferred optical configuration in high end research observatories because they provide a wide photographic field with less optical distortion off axis than others. There are a few types of optical Cassegrain reflectors, which have a concave primary (big) mirror and a convex secondary mirror that typically is around 25% to 30% of the diameter of the primary.  In the RC, both mirrors are hyperbolic (a hyperboloid of revolution).  The primary is concave and the secondary convex, as shown here.

Convex mirrors of all sorts are more difficult to test than concave mirrors, and require another calibrated mirror to test against.  It has become common practice in testing optical systems to develop a test system with its own optical surfaces that need to be certified correct and use that to test the system being built.  According to a report in New Scientist in 1990, the issue with the HST was because the test system was built incorrectly and yet certified. The problem?  One of the mirrors in the test system was positioned 1 mm off its intended position.  The first images were glaringly bad due to this.

My fellow metal workers will instantly think of how absolutely huge that is.  The 1mm error is just over .0394 inch and "that's bigger than 1/32" so even woodworkers can work to that!"  (Sorry).   The surface is being judged compared to wavelengths of light, around 20 millionths of an inch.   Because of this error, Hubble's primary was made flawlessly to the wrong shape.  It has been said that an amateur with a light bulb and a straight edge - a Foucault tester - could have told them their mirror was wrong.  And that amateur would have been ignored because their instrument wasn't certified for something that exacting.

I've mentioned a couple of times that I've made a few telescope mirrors grinding glass and then building the telescope.  I've done a lot of Foucault tests.  I think even I could have told them their mirror was wrong.

The fix, called COSTAR, the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, flew up in 1993, and was removed in 2009.  Wait!  Removed?  Didn't I say it had bad images without COSTAR?  While Kodak had ground a back-up mirror for Hubble, it would have been impossible to replace the mirror in orbit, and too expensive and time-consuming to bring the telescope back to Earth for a refit.  Instead, the fact that the mirror had been ground so precisely to the wrong shape led to the design of new optical components with exactly the same error but in the opposite sense, to be added to the telescope at the servicing mission, effectively acting as the COSTAR to correct the spherical aberration.

In overview, the secret to the 35 year old telescope being more productive than ever before is things just like this: very clever people on the ground looking at something that needs to be fixed and figuring out a way to make it better.  For example, after that 2009 flight that removed the COSTAR fix, the coming end of the Space Shuttle missions meant losing the ability to reach the height at which HST orbits, and they identified the next most important system to address. 

Its longevity from thereon was thought to depend upon how long its gyroscopes, vital for accurately pointing the telescope, could last. Hubble was installed with five gyroscopes; the received wisdom was that it needed at least three to operate correctly.

By 2024, only three gyroscopes were left functioning. Then, one of them started malfunctioning.

"It became very noisy and difficult to work with, and ultimately was disruptive to Hubble's observations," said Wiseman. It seemed like perhaps time had finally caught up with Hubble, but others on the ground thought otherwise.

"Our brilliant technical team came up with an ingenious way of honing Hubble's point-and-control system so that it only needs one gyroscope," said Wiseman. "This one-gyro mode is now working very well."

And so, Hubble survived.

For lots more, go read the post that prompted this.

Lucy visits another asteroid

A quick search in the blog history shows the last time we talked about the probe called Lucy was February 6, 2024, the top story in a small story roundup.  At the time, this graphic of the mission rounded out the post (a small summary):

If you look below the blue circle (Earth's orbit)  you'll see an intersection between two dashed lines, small and longer dashes.  There's a white dot that says Donaldjohanson and April 2025.  That was this weekend's flyby.  Just above and right of that is one that says Dinkinesh/Salem in November of '23, and that one went as planned.  Every milestone in that graphic has been met - except for the first of the major mission goals on the right.  The first rendezvous of the L4 Trojan asteroids will be in August of 2027, at Eurybates and its satellite Queta. 

The flyby of asteroid Donaldjohanson along the way to Jupiter's L4 Trojan asteroids was passed this past weekend, on Easter Sunday, April 20.

Lucy launched in 2021, embarking on a 12-year journey toward Jupiter's orbit to study an unexplored swarm of asteroids called Jupiter's Trojans. These asteroids are remnants of our early solar system that share the giant planet's orbit around the sun. Along the way, the spacecraft is also squeezing in time for a few dress rehearsals for its Trojan targets down the road — and on Sunday (April 20), it swooped within 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) of the asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson, named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson who co-discovered the Lucy hominid fossil in northern Ethiopia in 1974.

In the Space.com video, at https://cdn.jwplayer.com/previews/5pNdTD1G, you'll see that the asteroid is shaped a bit like a weightlifter's dumbbells except not as narrow in the middle.  It's about 5 miles long by 2 miles wide, so longer than wide, but at 2-1/2 times longer than wide, it's not stick-like but "potato shaped" could be anything.  If you watch that video be careful of how they repeat a few seconds of video several times and then switch to a new video.  

This image was taken at 1:51 p.m. EDT (17:51 UTC), April 20, 2025, near closest approach, from a range of approximately 660 miles (1,100 km). The spacecraft’s closest approach distance was 600 miles (960 km), but the image shown was taken approximately 40 seconds beforehand. The image has been sharpened and processed to enhance contrast. (Image credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL/NOIRLab) 

The dumbbell shape leads investigators to think it's a fragment left over from a collision at some point in the past.  

As the flyby was just Sunday afternoon, all of the data hasn't been processed yet, so we can expect more to follow. 

The mission team anticipates it will take up to a week to download the remaining encounter data from the spacecraft, which will provide a more complete picture of the asteroid's overall shape. 

In the earliest days of the mission, Lucy had trouble getting her large solar panels deployed properly, but problems like that aren't very scary when you have six years before your probe gets to its destination.  The solar panel issue was resolved fairly quickly and it has been a smooth mission.  At least to us outsiders. 

"These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery," Tom Statler, the program scientist for the Lucy mission at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in the statement. "The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense."

SpaceX launches nearly empty Bandwagon 3 mission

As a quick refresher, Bandwagon is a SpaceX rideshare platform different from their longer-established Transporter rideshare platform.  Transporter has flown many times; Monday night's Bandwagon 3 mission tells us that's the third mission of the platform.  The primary difference is the orbits available to the new platform are different.  Bandwagon flies to orbits inaccessible to Transporter.

The Transporter platform provides launches to sun-synchronous orbits, which are polar orbits that go over the same places on Earth at the same time every day so that the angle of sun and lighting is the same every day - but not every customer wants to launch to an SSO. It should be mentioned that the term polar orbit doesn't require the satellite go precisely over the north and south poles; deviations to 20 or 30 degrees are acceptable.  Enter bandwagon, which flies to the second most requested orbit, at inclinations of up to approximately 45 degrees and satellites at altitudes of 550 to 605 kilometers.   

Bandwagon-3 carried only three payloads: the 425Sat-3 spacecraft for South Korea’s military, Tomorrow-S7 for weather forecasting company Tomorrow.io and Phoenix, the first reentry vehicle by ATMOS Space Cargo, a German startup. By comparison, Bandwagon-1 carried 11 satellites while Bandwagon-2 had 30 satellites.

You'll find reports elsewhere that the 425Sat-3 spacecraft is a Synthetic Aperture Radar imaging satellite.   I'll skip over the second and go to the ATMOS payload, because I covered that mission back in February.  Interestingly, I find the European Spaceflight news is reporting that even though they haven't processed all the flight data of their Phoenix reentry vehicle, they're tentatively declaring it has been successful.  Bandwagon 3 was launched Monday night, April 21, at 8:48 PM EDT, making it Tuesday morning, Apr. 22, at 0048 UTC.  Approximately two hours after liftoff, the capsule re-entered the atmosphere, and a splashdown was expected to occur 30 minutes later. 

While the company stated that it had not yet completed an analysis of all the data it collected, it confirmed that it had successfully received data from four commercial payloads aboard the vehicle and that it had initial indications that the heat shield had been inflated successfully.

“All in all, I would say it was a very successful mission,” said ATMOS Space Cargo CEO Sebastian Klaus during a post-flight press conference.

The company had said they hoped to acquire data and imagery of the vehicle following re-entry from a small chase plane, but the splashdown point ended up being about 300 miles farther off the coast than initially anticipated. 

While the inclusion of this phase of the mission hinted that the company anticipated the vehicle successfully re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, it’s not clear that it had any chance of achieving this milestone.

PHOENIX 1 was reliant on the Falcon 9 upper stage to place it on a re-entry trajectory into Earth’s atmosphere. While SpaceX had initially outlined a re-entry angle for the Bandwagon-3 mission that was within acceptable limits, a last-minute change resulted in a significantly steeper re-entry angle than anticipated. According to Klaus, this angle exceeded the design constraints of the vehicle’s heat shield, thereby reducing the likelihood of the prototype surviving re-entry. However, a successful re-entry of the vehicle was not one of the three objectives outlined by the company before the mission was launched.

"... a last minute change resulted in a significantly steeper re-entry angle than anticipated"?  Doesn't that sound like something went wrong either with the Falcon 9's upper stage, the Bandwagon hardware or something?  Apparently not.  

A comment to that post on European Spaceflight says that "last minute" was actually "a few weeks ago", so more like last month, and the adjustment wasn't just 300 miles further off the initial landing spot; the splashdown moved from Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean to 1200 miles off the coast of Brazil in the Atlantic.

The three mission objectives for the PHOENIX 1 test were to collect in-flight data from the capsule and its sub-components while in orbit, gather scientific data from customer payloads operating in low Earth orbit, and record data on the deployment and stabilization of the inflatable heat shield during atmospheric re-entry. According to the company, the first two objectives were completed successfully, while the third has been tentatively deemed a success.

Credit: SpaceX / ATMOS Space Cargo / European Spaceflight

With a first mission under its belt, the company is now working toward testing an upgraded version of its capsule, called PHOENIX 2. The first test flight of this upgraded variant is expected to take place in 2026.

The upgrade to the capsule is to its propulsion system, which means it will no longer be dependent on its launch vehicle’s upper stage to complete the deorbit maneuver.

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

From a very important holiday from a historical viewpoint on Sunday to a totally made-up fest for Tuesday, it's a holiday start to the week. 

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. Plus, it's late. 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 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 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.

Those match fairly well but 1200 years ago was colder than the little ice age, while not as cold as about 8300 years ago.

Sorry. The temperature has gone up from one of the coldest periods in the last half billion years.  

 

The closer you look, the worse the picture is. Borepatch ran a piece last year 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. It 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. 

I'm old enough to remember when the fear was a coming ice age. Anything to scare you into compliance. 

 

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 weather and climate both 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 Jasmin Crocket 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 bands expected.  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 is +25 / -15 degrees.  That's 40 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 are at (I'll just call it) math (read this).

Maybe if the people pushing this climate change stuff could do this math they wouldn't have their morons burning down stuff.  Like Teslas, for example.

It's Resurrection Sunday - Happy Easter

 

It's Easter, Resurrection Sunday, and as I do regularly, I look at what I've posted for the major holidays in the past, and often modify them quite a bit. Not wholesale tear it up and start over, but some extensive additions and deletions.  FWIW, this one is largely unchanged from 2024.

Looking for the Living One in a Cemetery

Luke 24: 1-12 New Living Translation

24 But very early on Sunday morning^[a] the women went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared. ² They found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. ³ So they went in, but they didn’t find the body of the Lord Jesus. ⁴ As they stood there puzzled, two men suddenly appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes.

⁵ The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground. Then the men asked, “Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? ⁶ He isn’t here! He is risen from the dead! Remember what he told you back in Galilee, ⁷ that the Son of Man^[b] must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified, and that he would rise again on the third day.”

⁸ Then they remembered that he had said this. ⁹ So they rushed back from the tomb to tell his eleven disciples—and everyone else—what had happened. ¹⁰ It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and several other women who told the apostles what had happened. ¹¹ But the story sounded like nonsense to the men, so they didn’t believe it. ¹² However, Peter jumped up and ran to the tomb to look. Stooping, he peered in and saw the empty linen wrappings; then he went home again, wondering what had happened.

---

Coming from my background, becoming an evangelical Christian was a large change.  I had studied biochemistry and microbiology in college through my third year before life imposed some detours, eventually getting my degree and starting my career as an engineer late in life (over 30).  I had been an amateur astronomer since about age 10, so between them I was deeply marinated in the standard model of Cosmology as well as conventional biological evolutionary theory.  Frankly, I wasn't giving it much thought any longer, but my wife had re-affirmed her faith (she had first accepted Christ as child) and I was having all of my mental models disrupted.  She had started a subscription to Bibical Archaeology Review and the constant refrain from archaeologists, not religiously motivated, along the lines of "we thought this was old Jewish folklore, but here it is" got me thinking "if that's true, maybe there's more that's true."  Strobel's The Case for Christ, played a role in filling in the gaps in my historical knowledge.  

I went forward for Baptism in an evangelical church and an important part of that change was because the pastor had a similar background to mine, at least in the biochemistry/microbiology. He was a pharmacist and the director of the pharmacy department in one of the local hospitals. He quickly became one of our closest friends in the worst time of our lives - Mrs. Graybeard's cancer in 1997. It's a long story, but in the last couple of years the church's elders dumped him. As the story came out, we found a new church - a nearby Southern Baptist church. Our pastor started going to another Baptist church, but closer to his home. He passed away a little before Easter last year.  

Easter is the most important day in Christianity and far more important than Christmas because of the resurrection.  Everyone has a birthday, but history only records one resurrection.  The resurrection is essential to Christianity; without it there simply is no reason for Christianity to exist.  Since virtually everyone, including honest atheists, agrees Jesus was a real man in history (I've always found it amazing that Jesus' existence is better attested in ancient sources than that of Julius Caesar - but no one claims Julius Caesar was not a real person) and died on the cross, the question becomes whether or not it can be verified that Christ was seen after the resurrection by someone other than the closest circle of disciples. Strobel says:

Did anyone see Jesus alive again? I have identified at least eight ancient sources, both inside and outside the New Testament, that in my view confirm the apostles’ conviction that they encountered the resurrected Christ. Repeatedly, these sources stood strong when I tried to discredit them. 

Could these encounters have been hallucinations? No way, experts told me. Hallucinations occur in individual brains, like dreams, yet, according to the Bible, Jesus appeared to groups of people on three different occasions – including 500 at once!

In the end, after I had thoroughly investigated the matter, I reached an unexpected conclusion: it would actually take more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a follower of Jesus.  

I still think a great summary is "Five Confounding Facts About Jesus' Resurrection" a 2016 post at Donald Sensing's Sense of Events, which has been gone for a while and replaced by Sensing Online.  He has done several excellent posts on the subject, including Jesus and History and links to articles put together by working scientists, "On what basis would a scientist accept the Resurrection?" and "Is Belief in the Resurrection Unscientific?"

Enjoy your day and your time with your family.  This is going to be a very far from normal day here; while doing an image search for the one I used up top I was looking at a few different images and their websites and later found one of them left a bomb download on this PC.  As you can see, I've restored it to operation, but it's like replacing my CNC machine tools with a hammer and chisel.  Much work is required to get back to normal. The bomb was a link to a site in India that probably would have done much more damage, and I've deleted it from everyplace I know to look.

There's something funny going on at the Cape

The response to a statement like that used to be "funny as in ha-ha, or funny as in strange?"  Funny strange. 

Stephen Clark at Ars Technica pointed this out last night, saying "There's a secret reason the Space Force is delaying the next Atlas V launch."  I was quickly going from not having noticed it to the "now that you've mentioned it" side.  

As the title suggests, the weirdness started on the scheduled next launch of an Atlas V back on April 9th, a mission to carry 27 Kuiper satellites for Amazon.com's version of a satellite internet constellation like Starlink.  While working on that night's post (about Jared Isaacman's first senate confirmation hearing), I had the live coverage of that mission playing audio, so I heard it going on and switched to watch things a couple of times.  It looked like a plain old scrub due to a line of storms violating some launch criteria or another.  No big deal.  Happens fairly often. 

I expected (along with many others) that they would do a 24 hour reset and go the next night. The next morning, a time for the next launch attempt still  hadn't been posted to NextSpaceflight.com.  April 9th was Wednesday, and it wasn't until the weekend that a Monday launch time was announced.  Then that launch date was deleted, too.  At some point, I start wondering if something else really caused the launch scrub and it was just convenient to blame it on the weather. 

At first, there seemed to be a good explanation for the extended turnaround. SpaceX was preparing to launch a set of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket around the same time as Atlas V's launch window the next day. The Space Force's Eastern Range manages scheduling for all launches at Cape Canaveral and typically operates on a first-come, first-served basis. 

Except that SpaceX was delayed, too.  

It wouldn't have been surprising for SpaceX to get priority on the range schedule since it had already reserved the launch window with the Space Force for April 10. SpaceX subsequently delayed this particular Starlink launch for two days until it finally launched on Saturday evening, April 12. Another SpaceX Starlink mission launched Monday morning.

There are several puzzling things about what happened last week. When SpaceX missed its reservation on the range twice in two days, April 10 and 11, why didn't ULA move back to the front of the line?

Clark says that ULA has always been pretty transparent about launch scrubs, but they've never said anything detailed about the reasons for waiting to launch, only saying, "a new launch date will be announced when approved on the range."  After being sure to say, "The rocket and payload are healthy."

Then, a few days ago, SpaceX postponed one of its Starlink missions from Cape Canaveral without explanation, making this a rather rare week without a launch on the Eastern Test Range.  NextSpaceflight says SpaceX is planning their next launch early this coming Monday, 4/21 (4:15 AM EDT); that delayed Starlink mission will launch around 16-1/2 hours later, Monday evening at 8:48 PM EDT.  The early morning launch is a Cargo Resupply Mission, Cargo Dragon, to the ISS and those missions seem to be higher priority to the Space Force Station.

One more twist in this story is that a few days before the launch attempt, ULA changed its launch window for the Kuiper mission on April 9 from midday to the evening hours due to a request from the Eastern Range. Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, the range commander, spoke with reporters in a roundtable meeting last week. After nearly 20 years of covering launches from Cape Canaveral, I found a seven-hour time change so close to launch to be unusual, so I asked Panzenhagen about the reason for it, mostly out of curiosity. She declined to offer any details.

"The Eastern Range is huge," she said. "It's 15 million square miles. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of players that are using that range space, so there's a lot of de-confliction ... Public safety is our top priority, and we take that very seriously on both ranges. So, we are constantly de-conflicting, but I'm not going to get into details of what the actual conflict was."

Stephen Clark comes to the conclusion that there's something going out in those 15 million square miles that is making Space Force clamp down on launches and it's secret enough that they're not going to say anything about it.  There are several possibilities that can be considered, for example, launches of vehicles that the public isn't supposed to know about.  Perhaps submarine launched missiles or new missiles that the Space Force wants to keep as secret as possible.  That sort of testing, typically leads to cautions in "Notices to Mariners" for boaters or "Notices to Air Men."  Searches for those kinds of notices don't show any released lately.

It's possible that there's something (or some things) that are broken or that need some sort of maintenance.

When launches were less routine than today, the range at Cape Canaveral would close for a couple of weeks per year for upgrades and refurbishment of critical infrastructure. This is no longer the case. In 2023, Panzenhagen told Ars that the Space Force changed the policy.

"When the Eastern Range was supporting 15 to 20 launches a year, we had room to schedule dedicated periods for maintenance of critical infrastructure," she said at the time. "During these periods, launches were paused while teams worked the upgrades. Now that the launch cadence has grown to nearly twice per week, we’ve adapted to the new way of business to best support our mission partners."

Perhaps, then, it's something more secret, like a larger-scale, multi-element military exercise or war game that either requires Eastern Range participation or is taking place in areas the Space Force needs to clear for safety reasons for a rocket launch to go forward.  

As of this evening, that Atlas V launch (Project Kuiper (KA-01) ) is back on the schedule. Monday, Apr 28, 7:00 PM EDT

Pushed by trackmobile railcar movers, the Atlas V rocket rolled to the launch pad last week with a full load of 27 satellites for Amazon's Kuiper Internet megaconstellation. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Lunar Gateway Just Notched a Milestone

The Artemis program's Lunar Gateway crossed off a significant accomplishment this month; on April 1st, but word apparently just got released today.  The milestone is that part of the lunar space station called the Gateway was shipped from its manufacturing at Thales Alenia Space in Italy to the US Counterpart, Northrop Grumman, in Gilbert, Arizona.  

The part of the Lunar Gateway that shipped here is called the Habitation and Logistics Outpost, referred to as the HALO module.  As the name implies, this is the living and working space for astronauts before going to the lunar surface or before returning to Earth.  

NASA calls the HALO module a "core component" of Gateway. Aside from providing astronaut living quarters, the module will offer a range of utilities like command and control, power distribution, communications and tracking. It will also enable research, supporting internal and external science payloads.

The Lunar Gateway is controversial for several reasons.  It's essentially a space station in lunar orbit rather than Earth orbit, and nothing like it has ever been a part of operational missions.  As people familiar with the Apollo landings will immediately recognize, there was nothing like this in the Apollo program.  They flew to the moon, orbited it, landed the (disposable) landing module.  On the way back to Earth, they left part of the lunar module on the moon, flew the other half to lunar orbit, and then threw away that half before leaving for Earth.  Gateway seems to be a work around for inadequacies in the design of the SLS and became obsolete when the Starship versions for landing on the moon were conceived of and settled on.  Let me grab a few words from an older post (November 2022) on Lunar Gateway.

While the Artemis III landing will be about as barebones as possible, the Artemis IV Starship will be upgraded with the ability to transport more NASA astronauts (four instead of just two) and more cargo to the lunar surface. It’s not entirely clear, but NASA reportedly wants to land just ~180 kilograms (~400 lb) of cargo with the first crewed Starship, a vehicle likely capable of landing dozens of tons of cargo in addition to several astronauts. NASA hopes that future “sustainable” lander missions, a category that Starship’s Option B landing may or may not fall under, will transport up to one ton (~2200 lb) of cargo to and from the lunar surface.

Gateway’s HALO (Habitation and Logistics Outpost) habitat module arrives in Mesa, Arizona on April 1, 2025, after traveling from Italy, where Thales Alenia Space fabricated its primary structure. (Image credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel)

After Northrop Grumman finishes its HALO work, the module will head to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. There, it will be integrated with Gateway's Power and Propulsion Element ahead of a planned 2027 launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket.

US and UK Militaries Pick Rocket Lab's HASTE Program

Anyone who pays attention to the buzzwords making the news these days will have been sensitized to the word "hypersonic" especially when thrown around with "the M word" - missile.  I personally think it's a bit over-hyped*, but it's a thing.  In a press release on Monday the 14th, Rocket Lab announced they've been cleared by both the US and UK militaries to contract the HASTE system (the Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron - their main launch vehicle) to help with testing and development of hypersonic systems.

"The ability to contribute toward the collective security of the United States and the United Kingdom across both of these important programs is a proud moment for the HASTE team, and a demonstration of Rocket Lab’s commitment to lead from the front when it comes to innovative and unique solutions for hypersonic technology development," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said in a statement on Monday (April 14), when the news was announced.

"Keeping pace with global developments means more affordable tests at a higher rate that expands the boundaries of hypersonic technology — and that’s a capability we're already providing all in one platform with HASTE, at a commercial price and cadence that serves the mission of both nations," he added.

Space.com reports the US budget is $46 billion run by the Air Force called the Enterprise-Wide Agile Acquisition Contract while the UK budget is about $1.3 billion (US dollars) run by the U.K. Ministry of Defense project, called the Hypersonic Technologies & Capability Development Framework.  

They also report that HASTE has flown three missions so far, but I seem to find only the first mission got a blog post.  I don't know if something else just bumped them out of the news or if being military missions they didn't get much coverage.  All three missions have been from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex 2 in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. 

Image credit: Rocket Lab USA 

*The reason I think "hypersonic missile" is a bit overhyped is that they're not a new thing. Everything that has ever made orbit has been hypersonic. Every ICBM, which operationally don't fly an orbit, is hypersonic. Yeah, I understand that they increase the capability required from anti-missile systems by reducing the available time to respond. The weak spot of every anti-missile system I've ever been aware of is if the other side "floods the zone" by simply sending more than the system can respond to.

The Uncertainties Start Hitting Home

Some years ago, when I started to cover the increasing space activity at my neighbors' place "up the road" part of my reasoning was that I was just plain tired of day-to-day politics and the same old sh.. stuff taking up so much column space.  To reuse my very highly re-used Shakespeare line,  “it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing.”  Dropping all but the occasional references to pending laws and other day to day politics made working here more bearable.  

Now we find ourselves in the position that those day to day politics stories are grabbing space headlines.  

The first big example story today traces back to NASA's budget proposals that were revealed last week (second story here).  The budget news was that while the overall department budget was cut by 20 percent, or $5 billion from an overall total of about $25 billion.  What people were upset about is that the cuts seem to be centered on the agency's Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.  A 66% cut to astrophysics; a bigger cut than that to heliophysics; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science. 

The second big story traces back to the questions about keeping the SLS, and all of the Artemis program  questions.  In particular, Lunar Gateway.  The Lunar Gateway is a very complex subject partly because it has been changed so many times that it's probably (my idea) too late and too over budget to save.  That combination of words might well apply to the entire Artemis program.

A realistic way of looking at the budget issues is the way most people think and talk about budget cutting is "they can cut anything they want except my favorite programs."  No, we all need to cut something we'd rather not cut.  I crossed that bridge mentally before the last shuttle flight in 2011.  When the bosses want to cut some total number of dollars out of the budget, their tendency is to cut the smallest number of big dollar programs. The talk last Friday was about cutting the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.  Today, Eric Berger at Ars Technica switches to talking about the money spent on the James Webb Space Telescope.  

The JWST cost $10 billion, spread over many years, not just a few.  

However, it is difficult to put a price on advancing our species' understanding of the natural world and the wide Universe we're swimming in. And Webb is doing an amazing job of that.

In 2009, NASA launched the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, mission to make infrared observations. This was the latest in a line of space-based infrared observatories, and it cost about 3 percent as much as the Webb telescope. [BOLD added - SiG]

To compare the 2009 WISE with the JWST, take a look at this photo of a planetary nebula called NGC 1514 (NGC is the New General Catalog, one of a few standard international catalogs of deep space objects):

Two infrared views of NGC 1514. At left is an observation from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, NASA-JPL, Caltech, UCLA, Michael Ressler (NASA-JPL), Dave Jones (IAC)

The Webb image is absolutely more usable than the Wise image.  Berger completes this by saying:

Today's photo concerns the planetary nebula NGC 1514. In 2010, using the WISE telescope, NASA project scientist Mike Ressler discovered "rings" around the planetary nebula. Now, thanks to Webb, the rings—which are likely composed of small dust grains, heated by ultraviolet light from a white dwarf star—can be seen clearly. And, oh my, they're spectacular.

The clarity in the Webb photo, compared to what came before, is remarkable.  So, is seeing the Universe in a new light worth $10 billion?

Part of the reason NASA is in a budget crisis now is because of bad decisions made in the last 20 years - like the Lunar Gateway - and the proverbial "chickens coming home to roost."  Seems to me some neat missions are going to have to be dropped.  We can hope the leadership won't be totally stupid, I'm just not sure I see reasons to believe that can happen.