Some background on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

I've mentioned a couple of times that NASA's next big telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is launching Sunday morning on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26AM EDT, but I suppose I was quietly assuming that everyone has an idea about what that telescope is. 

I've been covering the NGRST since I first heard of it in February of 2022, and I thought maybe the good thing to do would be repost important parts of what I've covered. Rather than just post links to older posts, I'll "cut and paste" the important stuff.  

From NASA's Next Big Space Telescope 

I stumbled across a story today of an instrument that I should have known about but that had undergone a name change.  It was first referred to as the WFIRST, Wide Field Infra Red Space Telescope, a long but descriptive name for its mission.  It was recently renamed 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.  

The telescope was named in a poll of astronomers as the next most important space telescope behind the James Webb Space Telescope.  Why?  The old name said wide field and that's the telescope's feature. 

That graphic gives the impression that the NGRST can capture 2,000 square degrees of sky in one shot, compared to 1.6 square degrees from the Hubble Space Telescope.  That's not quite right.  The NGRST's field of 2,000 degrees divided by the 1.6 of the HST says NGRST is 1,250 times bigger.  The NGRST website's FAQ says it's field of view is 100 times larger:

It has a primary mirror that is 2.4 meters in diameter (7.9 feet), and is the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror. The mirror has the same sensitivity as Hubble’s primary mirror but will only be one fifth the weight, showcasing an advancement in telescope technology. It will have the sensitivity and resolution comparable to Hubble, but with a field of view 100 times larger, combining excellent image quality with survey power.

Like the JWST, the NGRST will be sent to orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, about 930,000 miles away from earth in the direction radially away from Earth.  The mission is focused on the search for dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets, and will only carry two instruments:

The Roman Space Telescope will have two instruments, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) technology demonstration. The WFI provides wide field imaging and spectroscopy, with performance characteristics optimized for cosmology and exoplanet surveys. The CGI provides high contrast imaging and spectroscopy for observations of exoplanets and debris disks. The WFI is a 288-megapixel multi-band near-infrared camera, providing a sharpness of images comparable to that achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope over a 0.28 square degree field of view, 100 times larger than that of Hubble. The Coronagraphic Instrument is a high-contrast, small field of view camera and spectrometer covering visible and near-infrared wavelengths using novel starlight-suppression technology.

Rendering of NGRST, from NASA

Let me bounce back to the present to throw in that the one thing that stood out to me in that first article was that it said, "target date for launch is currently set for May of '27 and they claim to be on schedule" and, of course, August of '26 is pretty far ahead of "on schedule" when they said it would be ready to fly by May of '27. Fortuitously, they had to schedule the launch on the Falcon Heavy because when they were getting bids, nothing else was available. I've always thought that if you called Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX CEO, to arrange a launch like this, you'd give her all the details and she'd come back with something like "gee, it's too big for a Falcon 9... how about next month?" or something that knocked your socks off like that. 

Moving up to a recent post from this April, The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is complete

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.

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Well, as the kids used to say, whoomp there it is. I think that's more science on the NGRST than you're going to get anywhere else.

SpaceX sets B1067's new record and then turns the world upside down

... at least the world around the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was turned upside down in the afternoon. 

As mentioned in yesterday's post, booster B1067 flew for the 37th time setting a new corporate record for the number of missions it has flown. When I read about these milestones being set, there's a common comparison to Space Shuttle Discovery having flown 39 times. I don't particularly think that's a meaningful comparison for a few reasons. The biggest is that Shuttle missions were always manned while Falcon 9 missions are only manned rarely, and the rework to fly a manned mission vehicle is always done more carefully than non-manned. Still, if they're trying to break Discovery's 39 flights record, that means that three more flights of B1067 sets a new world record for spacecraft reusability. I have regularly wondered if SpaceX has that as an explicit goal inside the company. 

As (bad) luck would have it, my side note of probably sleeping through the launch rather than going out in the yard to watch it turned into reality, but worse than that in a way. I was up at the launch time but it was because I was having a bad allergy attack (itchy, burning eyes, runny nose, sneezing...) While lying in bed trying to decide what to do, I suddenly heard the launch. By the time the noise gets here it's close to three minutes after launch and the chance of seeing anything approaches zero, unless you have a pretty solid idea of where to look. 

But, as noted at the start, the real big change of the day was in the afternoon. 

SpaceX made Florida’s Space Coast home to the world’s busiest spaceport for a decade, but that will change this year. The company is significantly cutting the number of launches from Florida until Starship arrives, a senior SpaceX official confirmed Tuesday. 

Last year, the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station provided 165 Falcon 9 launches, pretty much three flights per week—and about 75 percent of them carried Starlink satellites. To borrow the saying, "that was last year, this is now." So far Vandenberg Space Force Base has launched more Falcon 9 missions than Cape Canaveral, and it looks as if that will continue for the rest of the year. 

Kiko Dontchev, the company’s vice president of launch, said today that this morning's launch from the Cape was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral until SpaceX begins flying Starship missions from Florida. A quick search of NextSpaceflight.com shows it to be the case. There are launches from CCSFS, the manned Crew-13 flight on September 12th, the O3b mPOWER 11, 12 & 13 satellites on Sept. 19th (and satellites with names in the "O3b mPOWER" world have launched here before). There are no missions labelled Starlink. 

It's easy to overlook that while launches have been categorized as "Starlink" that those satellites have gotten bigger in every generation - and we can expect that to continue. The coming Starlink Version 3 sats won't be a reasonable payload for Falcon 9, much more reasonable for Starship, but for at least the remainder of the year, instead of the two (and sometimes three) Falcon 9 launches per week, that will drop to perhaps two per month. Starlink V3 satellites have not been launched yet because the Falcon 9 can only carry a few

It wasn’t long ago when two launches per month was the norm, an indication just how quickly SpaceX’s launch cadence has grown. Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center sit on adjoining property and share the same range on Florida’s east coast, so it is worth considering them a single spaceport. The last time the Florida spaceport did not lead the world in space launches was in 2015.
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Starship is sized to launch up to 60 Starlink Version 3 satellites, which are larger, heavier, and more powerful than the Starlink V2s flying on Falcon 9. SpaceX plans to use the next test flight of Starship, designated Flight 14, to launch the first Starlink V3s into low-Earth orbit from Starbase, Texas, as soon as next month.

The upper stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket flies over Lower Manhattan in New York City on Tuesday morning. Credit: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

Of course, this doesn't impact anything else launching from the CCSFS and KSC - it probably makes life easier for Blue Origin and ULA by reducing crowding. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches this Sunday on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26AM EDT. The next SpaceX mission is the Crew-13 mission to the ISS on Saturday, September 12.

EDIT 08/28 3:20  PM EDT to Add:  While I linked to a source article on Ars Technica, I first learned about SpaceX's announcement to halt Falcon 9 launches of Starlink satellites from comments to Monday's post and especially from this anonymous comment down with info from BillB

 

 

SpaceX going for yet another Falcon 9 reuse record

It's early for all US time zones, but tomorrow morning at 0533 AM, the one booster that I've written about long enough for it to feel like a friend, B1067, will be taking its 37th flight, launching Starlink group 10-49. B1067's last flight was July 9, for a 47 day turnaround. It will also be the 100th Falcon 9 launch of the year - their 100th launch of everything for the year was three launches ago on August 19th. 

The Falcon 9 is by far the busiest rocket in operation today. Last year, it flew 165 missions — more than all of the world's other orbital rockets combined. And all 165 of those flights were fully successful.

Clearly the rocket is well-designed and the crews that work on them are very well practiced. The "secret sauce" of the Falcon 9 is obviously its reusability. The rest of the world is turned on to this, as we've seen in the reports of China reporting two successes with landing two very different boosters for reuse in this month alone. Long-opposed to it, the European Space Agency is talking about reusability now.

But neither one of those newcomers has made it back to the pad for a second flight. SpaceX, meanwhile, has six Falcon 9 boosters with at least 30 flights under their belts, led by B1067's 36. (The others are B1077 and B1078 with 30, B1069 with 32, B1063 with 34 and B1071 with 35). 

While SpaceX has established many records for re-use and number of flights, they've always said that some orbits that customers will want will use every ounce of thrust and every second of fuel that the booster can manage. Back in July, one mission's requirements pushed the booster beyond the point where reuse was possible. The booster was B1069 on its 32nd flight - mentioned in that Space.com article's paragraph.

The combination of the time and direction of the launch (toward the NE) may make me lean toward staying in bed and watching a replay later in the morning. Launches to the NE tend to stay behind neighbors' trees and barely even light the sky. They tend to be more likely to be visible in the winter when the trees are "thinner." 

B1067 flies for the 35th time on the Starlink 9-35 mission the morning of June 8, 2026, a few minutes before sunrise. Image credit: SpaceX

About that "Sunday Chang'e 7" mission

Fuggedaboutit.  Word broke yesterday that the mission had been scrubbed and reset for Monday. As of this morning (US East coast time) the followup is that the Chang'e 7 mission has been cancelled and pushed out into 2027. 

China’s “Manned Space” program issued a terse announcement on Sunday regarding its much-anticipated Chang’e 7 lunar exploration mission.

The agency stated: “In keeping with the principle of proceeding prudently and reliably, and ensuring absolute success, after a comprehensive assessment it has been determined that the Chang’e 7 mission does not meet the conditions for launch and therefore cannot be carried out during the planned launch window this year.”

Maybe it's just me, but when I read something like that, I get the feeling that either nobody found a couple of big problems with the launch vehicle or the various payloads (lunar orbiter, lander, rover, and a mini-hopper probe) that were suddenly discovered in the past couple of days, or the mission was just pencil-whipped every step of the way despite someone somewhere being aware of conditions that they never should have tried to launch with. 

Eric Berger at Ars Technica speculates that the reason for the scrub of Sunday's launch is a typhoon in the vicinity, Typhoon Narra (Tropical Storm 18W (Narra) Warning #13), and the long range forecast shows Narra making a big loop in the Gulf of Tonkin - at least through landfall either late Tuesday or Wednesday the 26th. 

But that's not the big thing. 

Although official Chinese sources have provided no confirmed information, there has been social media chatter indicating that another suitable launch window may not open until next February or March. Why so long? It likely is a combination of factors, including sunlight conditions in polar landing zones as well as the mission plan that requires a 90-day lunar orbit reconnaissance before landing.

Another, lesser possibility, is that some technical issue was discovered at the last minute with either the complex Chang’e 7 payload, or the rocket. The large Long March 5 rocket shares an engine, the YF-100, with the Long March 7A vehicle that was lost during ascent two weeks ago. This engine issue seems unlikely to be the cause of the delay, however, as China had been proceeding toward launch in recent days.

The rush to get this mission off to land near the South Pole (Shackleton crater) is a core part of the 21st century moon race. No country has successfully landed a lunar probe in the south polar region. 

The delay of Chang’e 7 opens up the possibility that NASA could reach this terrain first, with the initial launch of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 vehicle. This large lander will carry two NASA probes to the South Pole. 

Blue Origin was on track to launch Blue Moon lander this year, before the New Glenn's explosion on their launch site at the end of May. At the moment, there's not an announced date for that mission although Blue Origin continues to stick with their previous statements - that New Glenn will fly before the end of '26. It seems to me to be too early to confidently predict when New Glenn will be launching again.

Shaded relief image of Shackleton crater at the Moon's south pole, with false-color interior constructed from elevation measurements by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter Credit: NASA/GSFC/SVS. Image cropped and reduced in size here to fit with Blogger image requirements.

It appears that someone has stolen the E layer of the ionosphere

Longtime readers, and in particular those who are also hams, may well remember this meme I created and posted in November of '25. At that time, I was concerned about a different layer.  

The F-layer is the highest layer of the ionosphere and when solar flux is highest, it splits into an F and F2 layer that's even higher. In short, when the F-layer is propagating signals around globe, the stations we can work (contact) are the farthest ones we'll ever hear. Pretty much around world. 

So while it's the best for long range contacts, I've worked Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and several small island countries in the pacific on 6m, F-layer propagation is actually too long for working around the US. For that we tend to rely on the E-layer, and what's referred to as Sporadic E or Es propagation. Sporadic E is possible for more of the year than just summer, but Es is most dependable as summer mode. It's just not available for as large a part of the day as in the summer. 

The days when the Es first appears tend to be a celebrated surprise, but when it just suddenly stops, it's the ending of some of the best times of the year, depending on what you're pursuing. The last "good" opening in my neck of the woods, west to Montana and Idaho - for example - was on August 10th, so just under two weeks ago. 

I've mentioned before that I'm trying to work what's called The Fred Fish Memorial Award, or FFMA, for working all 488 Maidenhead Grid Squares (which are rectangles because they're two degrees in longitude by one degree in latitude) in the continental US. This ES season I added around 30 grids (I'd have to dig out some notes to be more accurate than saying "around 30"). I'm not quite at 100 left, but I'm close: something like 385 worked instead so 103 left. 

I also mentioned DXCC as a target, which I expect to achieve as opposed to the FFMA which I'll be lucky to be around long enough to get all 488. I have worked over 100 countries on 6m, but I'm at 97 confirmed. I could use the F layer, too. 

So whom do I report the theft of the E layer to? FCC? EPA? It's part of the environment, after all. I bet that Greta kid stole it. Someone convinced her the E layer added to global warmening. 

ULA names new CEO to replace Tory Bruno

Tory Bruno was CEO of United Launch Alliance when I first started blogging 80% or more on space, and became the only name I knew of for a CEO at ULA. He left ULA for Blue Origin last December. At Blue, instead of moving into the CEO role, he is now the president of national security. I have to assume he has knowledge of the people he needs to know and the procedures Blue needs to follow to climb higher into the national security world. ULA has been there, Blue Origin hasn't. 

This Monday, Aug. 17, ULA announced they had promoted Chief Operating Officer Mark Peller to president and CEO, finally naming a successor to that position since Bruno left. 

Peller joined ULA at the company’s formation in 2006 and most recently led development of the Vulcan rocket, which successfully debuted in 2024 but has been grounded since early this year by a problem with its solid rocket boosters. 

Peller will have his work cut out for him. ULA had been the Pentagon's preferred launch contractor, but lost that position to SpaceX in '25. ULA has some serious catching up to do.

That was before ULA grounded the Vulcan rocket following an anomaly with one of its strap-on solid-fueled boosters on a launch in February. The rocket overcame the malfunction and still delivered its payload to orbit, but it was the second time such an anomaly has occurred in the last three Vulcan missions. It’s not clear whether ULA will be able to resume Vulcan launches before the end of the year as engineers redesign parts of the booster’s nozzle structure. In the meantime, Boeing and Lockheed Martin last month confirmed they guaranteed a loan to ULA to help it through “financial challenges” caused by the grounding. 

ULA President and CEO Mark Peller. Image credit: United Launch Alliance

NASA and Katalyst end the Swift rescue mission

NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on the robotic mission to save the Swift gamma-ray telescope.  

The last update I saw and posted was back on August 7th, and while the complete loss of attitude control that had occurred has been reduced to lower levels, Katalyst said that “ongoing attitude control issues” will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. While the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory and LINK rescue satellite remain close to each other in orbit, they won't try to rescue Swift, leaving it to re-enter the atmosphere. NASA had estimated they need to boost Swift before its orbit decays to lower than 186 miles, and estimated that will happen "by October." 

The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link’s remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite’s close-in navigation system.

“While the mission will not have the ending we originally intended, NASA and Katalyst are assessing what milestones remain ahead,” Katalyst said in a statement. “We will continue working to extract technical and operational value from the spacecraft.”

While the rescue will not be attempted, the two spacecraft are still close to each other in orbit, and LINK will still attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with Swift to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration. 

The Swift rescue was always a risky program, and was developed on an unprecedentedly short schedule compared to other NASA missions: NASA awarded Katalyst the $30 million contract less than a year ago to build and launch the Link satellite, by no later than early July - and the launch was July 3rd. A more typical contract for a new satellite for a mission that has never been attempted before would have been "several" years. 

“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future. We are going to learn everything we can from LINK’s rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow.” 
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“We knew this was a high-risk, high-reward mission – a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun’s activity,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We were all hoping for more science from Swift. But we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way, and we have gained so much through the series of accomplishments up to this point.”

Swift itself is a remarkable mission, launched on a planned two year mission to observe gamma ray bursts, some of the most energetic explosions in the universe. The two year mission launched in 2004. Nobody wants to see Swift burn up and get destroyed on reentry, but I think getting 22 years of results out of a two year mission is a pretty good return on investment. NASA has used this opportunity to advance U.S. spacecraft servicing technology,

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, shown in this artist’s concept, has orbited Earth for more than 20 years, studying the ever-changing universe. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Another Chinese company successfully lands a booster

It looks like booster reuse has landed in China, if you'll pardon the expression, and we can expect many more attempts and possibly even going full tilt into operational status. 

Back on last Monday (8/10) in the coverage of China's Long March 7A's inflight explosion and loss of vehicle there was mention in the source materials of a coming flight of a totally different vehicle, called a Zhuque-3 that was expected to be launched soon but after the explosion, they expected maybe the rocket would re-checked again, but the coverage included an expectation they'd try to recover the booster.  

The Zhuque-3 flew last December (12/3 local) and the rocket attained orbit but missed the booster landing. In that way, the overall picture resembles many other attempts at recovery we've seen, from early attempts with the Falcon 9 in 2014 and '15 to, well, pretty much everyone else on their first attempts to land. 

Meanwhile the engineers working on the rocket kept at it and while another Chinese rocket, the Long March 10B, landed its booster into a capture net on a vehicle offshore, they finally were ready to try the Zhuque-3 again today.  

The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, rocket lifted off from a commercial launch zone at China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:35 pm EDT (23:35 UTC) Tuesday, about an hour after sunrise Wednesday at the spaceport in the Gobi Desert. Nine methane-fueled engines powered the 216-foot-tall (66-meter) rocket on a course southeast from Jiuquan, then the rocket’s upper stage took over the task of placing a single satellite into orbit.

The rocket’s first stage, made of stainless steel, soared to the edge of space, then maneuvered toward a prepared landing zone some 240 miles (390 kilometers) downrange, settling to a propulsive touchdown on four extendable landing legs. LandSpace, founded in 2015, declared the mission a total success.

NOTE: This is a screen grab, not the video and the "Continue watching on X" box is not a link. If you want to go to see the full video here's the link. 

While this Zhuque-3 isn't exactly a copy of a Falcon 9, it certainly looks like one, and the specifications look a lot like a Falcon 9's specs as well. The fact that the second flight of this booster successfully landed is the advantage to not developing everything first. And even watching SpaceX's "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" video. 

The Zhuque-3 is the design of what's called a private company named LandSpace (I'm skeptical there are any private companies in the PRC). There was a smaller Zhuque-2 that became the world’s first methane-fueled launcher to reach orbit in 2023, but has been replaced by this more powerful booster. 

The Zhuque-3’s basic design can place a payload of more than 17,600 pounds (8 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit after accounting for the fuel reserves required for booster recovery. LandSpace eventually plans to debut an upgraded Zhuque-3 carrying more propellant and using more powerful engines, raising its payload capacity to more than 40,000 pounds (18.3 metric tons) in reusable mode or a few tons more with an expendable booster. 

LandSpace says they intend to do a thorough inspection of this booster and fly it again ASAP. They claim they're aiming for "at least 20" flights for each booster.

This the strongest contender for competition for the Falcon 9 so far.  

Two missions to keep an eye out for

A couple of missions currently planned for tonight (Aug. 18) and Sunday (Aug. 23). The first one is "just" one of those milestone missions for SpaceX - tonight at 11:46 PM EDT, 8:46 local, the 100th mission of the year for SpaceX will launch from Vandenberg's SLC-4E. The mission will be covered at that previous link, NASA Spaceflight or SpaceX where it will be starting around 10 minutes before launch (11:36 EDT).

This is the 12th flight of booster B1097. It will be the 97th Falcon 9 launch of the year and the 100th mission of 2026 overall for SpaceX (the other three were one Falcon Heavy and two Starship test flights). Further, of the 97 Falcon 9 launches, 73 have been Starlink launches. 

The second one to be aware of is Sunday at 8:00PM EDT from the People's Republic of China. This a mission to the moon, in particular to Shackleton Crater, very nearly at the South Pole, and a target that gets interest from the US as well as China. This won't be televised live, as is generally the case, so you'll need to check for trustworthy sources of news on such a launch. 

It barely needs to be mentioned that China has been emphasizing doing missions to demonstrate to the rest of the world that they're not some primitive country, but can do anything the US can. This mission is part of that overall "space race." 

The mission will pack a punch: It contains a lunar orbiter with high-resolution cameras and other sophisticated tools, a lunar lander, a lunar rover, and a mini-hopper of a probe. Although the lander’s mass has not been disclosed publicly, it is several times larger than the NASA-backed probes that have recently landed on the Moon, such as Firefly’s Blue Ghost.

In case it has gotten by you, the reason for the interest in the south polar region on the moon and Shackleton crater is that the craters have a high rim and with the sun pretty much on the horizon all the time, the crater walls create permanent shadows that keep the prospects for finding water ice high. It's also thought that other materials that might be lost from solar heat influx might be more likely to have survived there. Water is critical to manned settlements on the moon not just for "human reasons" like drinking, cooking and all but potentially for use as liquid hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. 

So we’re faced with the prospect of a Chinese rover rolling around this most interesting but heretofore unexplored region of the Moon. Undoubtedly, there will be stunning images and videos. And the rover and hopper, if successful, will provide the best available data on the presence and prevalence of water there. 

Scientists created this mosaic of Shackleton crater 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

While NASA administrator Jared Issacman is very aware of the Chinese competition, and NASA has done much since his arrival on the job to get rid of the needless complication that was embedded in Artemis when he took over, the real questions about a mission like this are about how China is going to behave. Are they going to claim the crater and say that the US missions aren't allowed to explore there? Are they going to live by treaties they've already signed about rights like those? 

Satellite operators near panic over not enough launch capacity

Their view is this should be the Golden Age of launch, especially in the US, which leads the world. Instead, they want to launch more and the prospects look to be a reduction in launch capability rather than continuous increase. 

Over the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have launched from Earth, a more than threefold increase from only a decade ago. Apparently unexpectedly, demand for launches is going up while launch capability is expected to be declining. 

As part of his job as the director of research at Quilty Space, Caleb Henry speaks with satellite operators all the time. And he is hearing a constant and increasingly loud refrain from companies that want to put stuff into space.

“What we have is an industry in panic,” Henry said.

Stories from around the industry are pouring in. The Amazon LEO constellation can't get enough launches to keep up with the number of satellites they want to put up in orbit, so they're dropping the production rate. These are launches Amazon booked five years ago and enough boosters aren't ready to launch the payloads. AST SpaceMobile is waiting to get their constellation into orbit, and had to tell investors at an earnings call last Monday that they were unable to get enough launch capacity to remain on schedule. They told investors that launch availability was now pacing the deployment of the constellation.

With a growing number of constellations big and small, there is a huge and growing demand signal. The Commercial Space Federation predicts demand for thousands of satellite launches annually in less than a decade. Analysys Mason forecasted that more than 37,000 satellites will need to be launched between 2023 and 2033. Henry’s own firm, Quilty Space, has charted a change in the discussion from how many launch companies the US market can support to who can execute the fastest to meet surging satellite needs. 

For several years, SpaceX and the Falcon 9 have led the launch business. There are two aspects of this "more launches than the rest of the world combined" title that SpaceX has that need to be kept in mind. First, most of the Falcon 9 launches are their own Starlink network satellites so if they accelerate launches for everyone else, they have to either massively increase their launch cadence to add the new customer's launches, or cut their own Starlink business by launching other companies satellites over their own. Second, they've already been making statements that as Starship comes online, that Falcon 9 operations will be slowed and eventually stop. 

In financial documents, it’s clear that SpaceX views commercial launch as a rounding error compared to revenues from its own satellites in space. A majority of the company’s revenue ($4.3 billion out of $7.8 billion) during the second quarter of 2026 came from Starlink, whereas less than 12 percent was due to space services, of which commercial launch is but a fraction. This disparity is only likely to widen.

SpaceX has already moved beyond “peak” Falcon 9 operations. The company flew the rocket 165 times last year, and it will probably fly about 20 fewer missions this year. SpaceX is already making ground system changes to reflect these reductions.

The company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, has previously said the operational lifetime of the Falcon 9 may end in 2030 or 2032. However, more recently, commercial satellite customers have been running into difficulties when trying to purchase a launch after 2028. One source said SpaceX has told the US government that it intends to end commercial launches after 2028 but will continue flying the Falcon 9 rocket for a limited number of federally contracted missions after that.

It's always best to look at numbers like that "life of the Falcon 9 may end in 2030 or 2032" as what we used to call BAGATOE (pronounced like BAG-A-TOE) an acronym for Best Available Guess At Time Of Estimate. Those dates are very much able and likely to move around. 

The bottom line is the biggest enabler of the start of the commercial space sector being the biggest contributor to growth has been the workhorse Falcon 9. As Eric Berger over at Ars Technica put it, “Without SpaceX, the Western launch market would have been completely screwed over the last half-decade.” Almost entirely due to one simple thing, the war in Ukraine. And the world's not so simple reactions to it. 

Amid all the opportunities to respond to Russia’s retreat from the Western market, only one company stood up. As Russian soldiers marched into Ukraine, SpaceX was beginning to perfect the reuse of the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage. The company flew the Falcon rocket 31 times in 2021. By 2023, this number nearly tripled to 91 rockets.

As SpaceX’s main competitors struggled to bring new vehicles online, the Falcon 9 rocket flew and flew. It backstopped the entire Western Hemisphere’s launch needs, boosting everything from Europe’s prized Galileo satellites to NASA astronauts to Jeff Bezos’ Amazon LEO vehicles into orbit.

Naturally, with a situation this dire, the pressure is on for new vehicles to come online. Ariane 6 has had a relatively smooth development to this point, but their production goal is 10 vehicles per year, and that's not going to have a big effect. The two that could, Blue Origin's New Glenn and ULA's Vulcan - both of which have often been referred to as competition for SpaceX are currently grounded. Worse than simply grounded, New Glenn has the problem of having to build an entirely new launch pad due to the explosion during the test at the end of May. Still, both of these are being built to be reusable, so they're like the Falcon 9 but able to lift bigger payloads.

In 2020, as part of the National Security Space Launch program, the US Space Force procured dozens of Vulcan launches for military missions. Two years later, Amazon purchased 38 Vulcan launches and options for up to 27 New Glenn flights for the Amazon program, which later would be renamed Amazon LEO. Both had more missions than they could fly for a while.
...
Six years after the Space Force award, Vulcan has launched just two military missions. Vulcan has stumbled due to ongoing problems with the performance of its solid rocket boosters, which are provided by Northrop Grumman. The Pentagon has grown increasingly frustrated with the delays and has already moved several payloads previously intended for Vulcan onto SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

What about Starship itself? It's being built partly as replacement for putting the Starlink constellation into orbit, and one concern I've come across (not in the source article for this) is the industry is concerned about having to create satellites that will fit Starship's Pez dispenser for deploying satellites. It seems that would be a relatively minor change compared to the development of Starship itself, but this is the time to consider this.

Yes, there are other systems under development. Rocket Lab's Neutron isn't a heavy lift system, but in the size class of the Falcon 9. As we've talked about before, the goal is to fly Neutron before the end of this year, so compared to some other options, it's closer to being real. Firefly and Northrop Grumman are developing the Eclipse rocket, which will have a lift capacity of 16 metric tons. Less has been published about progress on this rocket, and it will most likely arrive later than the other vehicles on this list.

My personal bet is that no one vehicle is going to get the launch industry out of this current problem. It's going to take years and a mix of different vehicles. 

This isn't a recent picture - I took it from a 2025 post - but it always struck me as an essential, if not the essential, Falcon 9 picture. One taking off while another sits on its launch pad waiting to be next. Image credit: SpaceX

Part of an adult conversation about hamfests

Anybody been to any hamfests lately? 

There's a thread going around on public media like YouTube that paints a dim picture of the market for used gear, saying that prices have fallen off dramatically for popular classic radios from the last century. We haven't been to a hamfest in a couple of years, and our local fest is coming up in a couple of months, so I'm thinking about trying to find new homes for some of my old books or gear. 

That video, by Australian ham VK3USA, starts out with lots of video clips of old Collins Radios and talks about the situation from the creator's viewpoint. He points out that he's of a much younger age than us old guys who were enchanted by those radios - he says he just turned 40. His conclusion is that ham radio is going through a phase where the older guys who idolized that gear are aging out of the hobby and the younger guys aren't as dedicated to these older radios. 

That certainly seems like it could be a driving force. There is a tendency for older folks to move to smaller or assisted-living places that might be especially bad for hams. Places where they aren't able to put a station on the air, or they can use small receiver but couldn't put up an outdoor antenna.  

Another video by The History Archive, doesn't look at things the same way as that previous one. He talks about the economic pressures brought on by things like the Chinese Baofeng UV-5R radios that slashed prices incredibly, the advent of software defined radios and software defined modes like the WSJT modes I've talked about often. Those impact prices, too, by shifting the demands from buyers. Then there were new aspects to the ham hobby itself, with the introduction of Parks On The Air and Summits On The Air (SOTA & POTA) and more. The summary was that the world shifted in many ways all in the same few years.

Has anybody seen this happening or not in their local American hamfests?

A big concern of mine is books, and Virtual Mirage's post on the End of Books brought this topic higher in priority. In front of me are two 7’ tall by 3’ wide bookcases - the one on my left is mostly full of technical books on radio circuit and systems design as well as programming in various languages like Delphi, MathCAD, HTML, and MATLAB. The bookcase on my right has a whole shelf or two on woodworking, another one or two shelves on boating and fishing. Another two shelves contain Bibles and study books about those Bibles. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve looked at any one of those hundreds of books. And this is just one room. In the next room over it's the same story of two practically ceiling to floor bookcases – just different subjects. And there are more bookshelves in other rooms. I think books actually outnumber insects in the house, and maybe even bacteria.

It's possible hams or other engineers would want some of the books on my left-hand bookshelf but if I had to ship them cross country, postage would be a concern. 

So what say you all? Any experience with this? Opinions? Stale jokes? I'm not particularly ready to empty out the station and put it all for sale at the hamfest, but part of the effort of keeping the house cleaned and easier to deal with is to get rid of things that we just don't use much anymore. Besides, we all check out sooner or later and less crap makes it easier and better on whoever cleans up after we're gone.

The Collins KWM-2, an early version of their very succssful HF SSB transceiver. Image credit: Rigpix

No, it's not mine, but I can't find a nice pic of mine. If I do, I'll replace this.

It's one-half day

Not one half of a day, one-half day. 8/16, as we write the date as a fraction, reduces to 1/2. 

Sorry.

Around here in East Central Florida, also called the Space Coast, our highlight for this evening is we have a Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral SFS. The launch is for the Globalstar 2-R Mission. The launch time is 9:12 PM EDT. 

The Globalstar global mobile communications network offers global, digital, real-time voice, data, and fax via a constellation of minisatellites. The constellation operates in a 1410 km orbit inclined at 52 degrees.

In early 2022, Globalstar contracted with MDA for the construction of 17 new 2nd generation refresh satellites to replenish the existing constellation. Rocket Lab is sub-contracted to build the satellites' buses and the launch dispensers. 

The launch will be the 14th flight of B1090, and the booster will return to the launch site and we're being "warned" that sonic booms will be heard around here. 

"But that's not all" There's a second launch tonight, this time from Vandenberg SFB and this one's launch time is 9:50 PM EDT. This is the launch of a US Space Force classified payload, and the booster is B1088 on its 18th flight.

USSF-366 is a classified mission for the United States Space Force. It is possibly a batch of classified LEO satellites for a US government entity based on SpaceX’s Starshield satellite bus, based on locations of rocket stage drop zones being exact fits with previous Starlink Group 15 launches. 

Because it's from the other side of the country, this isn't one we can go outside to see, but the 38 minute time delay between the east and west coast launches means we'll be able to watch both on NASA Spaceflight's YouTube Channel. 

“A few moments later ...” OK, an hour later...

Now those two are over, both successful, both fully as expected. The launch itself induced a long-lasting rumble causing a rattle that I could hear in the house, and a the sonic boom from the booster returning to launch site was audible - like someone kicked the back door. 

Of course this isn't from tonight's missions; not with the sun low on the horizon like that. It's a picture I have on file, from Starlink 10-50 mission on July 5, 2026. 

Something that happened during the eclipse that nobody mentioned

This week's solar eclipse has been in headlines for weeks if not more, but I saw references today to something I hadn't heard of until this afternoon. 

The orbiting International Space Station passed between the Earth and the moon. When a person jumps in the way of photo you're taking that's referred to as photobombing, but that's not an astronomical term. In this photo, you can see the ISS captured in 8 frames of video that make up the video of the transit. I have no idea why a couple of frames appear to be missing. Starting at the left edge, just below the midline of the sun, there's an image of the ISS practically on the limb of the sun. Count six after that and you're close to exactly the middle of the image. If  you use the same spacing as the group you just counted, two ISS images are missing, then there's another ISS image. The two dark spots, one near the left limb of the sun and one just above the fourth ISS image from the left limb are sunspots.

The silhouette of the ISS transiting across the sun's face during the Aug. 12, 2026 total solar eclipse. (Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky) Image cropped, exposure stretched, and resultant enlarged here.

The original source article at Space.com includes a short video, looping or replaying, of the ISS moving from right to left in that image in eight frames. 

Space.com's author, Chelsea Gohd, closes with this little note:

And while the ISS is featured in this image, we may also want to consider the astronauts aboard. In other words, people on Earth weren't the only ones who got to participate in the marvel.

The Expedition 75 astronauts on the ISS (NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Anil Menon, and Jack Hathaway; ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot; and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov, Andrey Fedyaev and Anna Kikina) caught the show too as they orbited our planet. There they were, in between Earth and the moon, as our planet's neighbor blocked out our star.

A very slow news day

It's really a very slow news day with nothing particular visibly going on any of sites I typically scan for news. 

In the sorta-news out there, Blue Origin is starting operations of a new ground network called Quartz, reminiscent of NASA's first "deep sky network" - three ground stations spread more or less equally around the globe to receive downlinks from different satellites. More satellites are in the plans. 

Phase one of the Quartz ground stations feature 3.7-meter aperture antennas supporting S-band and X-band frequencies for low Earth orbit (LEO) operations. Blue Origin's Global Network Operations Center provides continuous oversight and incident response across all sites, resulting in a ground communications architecture with no third-party dependencies. Quartz was designed with security in mind and supports radiometric tracking, signal intelligence, and Space Domain Awareness capabilities across all sites.

For those unfamiliar with satellite communications, 3.7 meters (12' 1.6") isn't even remotely big for antennas used for satellite downlinks. 3.7 meters is about the size of the old Satellite TV antennas we had in the early 1980s. Back when they were much bigger than the little dishes we see now. On the other end of the scale, the big dishes of NASA's Deep Sky Network (DSN), used to listen to the Voyager satellites out in interstellar space are 70 meters (240 feet) in diameter. Which is not to compare the jobs they're designed for, just to show that they're like everyday size dishes as opposed to really big dishes. 

An interesting people-related story is on the retirement of Michael Fincke, a NASA astronaut for 30 years. We know him from the Starliner fiasco in the second half of '24. He got delayed from a trip to the ISS due to shuffling crew and ships to fly to the ISS on the Crew-11 mission with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui, NASA astronaut Zena Cardman and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov on Aug. 1, 2025. That mission was ended earlier than intended when Fincke had a medical emergency. What's interesting in that article is that it contains two videos that total an hour of watching time, and those two videos are said to describe just how "eff-ed up" that Starliner mission was. And, no, I haven't watched those two videos - yet. 

Really, those are the only two moderately interesting stories I've come across today. 

Around "Castle Graybeard" things are pretty much as usual except for yesterday. As I've commented many other times over the years, if there's a movie we want to see, we tend to go to a weekday morning or midday matinee, and yesterday we went to see "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" primarily based on hearing it was doing exceptionally well in theaters, and secondarily because we've seen all of the other Spider-Man movies with this group: Tom Holland as Spidey, Zendaya as MJ and Jacob Batalan as their friend Ned. I'm happy to add they've all gotten better onscreen personas as they've grown. 

I have vague memories of reading the early '70s Spider-Man comics, but I'm sure we started watching the modern Marvel Universe version first trilogy with Tobey Maguire as Spidey, and the next trilogy with Andrew Garfield. When Tom Holland popped up in the last trilogy, I'd never heard of him, but thought he came across well. Since then, I've seen him in other movies and thought he did well in all of them. I think I've read that in almost all the spider-man movies, the guy playing Spidey and the girl playing MJ ended up in some sort of off-screen relationship for a while. I think Holland and Zendaya are the only two who actually got married in real life. I ran across something yesterday that gave me the impression they're both 30. Someone somewhere (Tyrus on "Gutfeld!" I think) conditioned me to react to this by saying they're both grown-ass adults so good luck to both of them. 

I know many readers are anxiously waiting for my review, although most readers have shut down the blog and are reading somewhere else, so let me tell you that I'll give it an 8 out of 10. I think there's a lot going on in the movie and I just got the feeling we're being clued in to a lot of movies yet to come. For example, one of the characters in this movie is named Jean Gray (played by Sadie Sink - whom I've never heard of), and she was a character in the X-Men movies. Is that a lead-in to another X-Men series? Or crossover between the X-Men and other Marvel movies? You know everything I know. 

NASA’s Crew-11 mission members stand inside the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Nov. 13, 2024. From left are Mission Specialist Kimiya Yui from JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Commander NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, Mission Specialist Oleg Platonov of Roscosmos, and Pilot NASA astronaut Mike Fincke. Image: NASA/Josh Valcarcel

Blue Origin starts next phase of construction on Cape Canaveral

Blue Origin announced today that they've begun construction of a second launch complex, dubbed LC-36B, on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The requirement that drives them to create this second launch complex is to support the new 9x4 version of the New Glenn and Blue is constructing additional operational infrastructure nearby to support high-cadence launch operations and infrastructure resiliency for New Glenn. 

LC-36 has served as a cornerstone of American spaceflight for decades, supporting a broad range of missions for NASA and commercial partners. Now, this historic site is entering a new era, furthering New Glenn operations. LC-36B will serve as the operational home for New Glenn 9x4, while LC-36A remains the operational home for the New Glenn 7x2 vehicle. 

As the commercials say, "But wait! There's more!" In addition to the new launch complex to support the bigger and more powerful 9x4 New Glenn, they're building a new Vertical Integration Facility (VIF) for the 9x4 vehicle, and a Payload Processing Facility (PPF).

A render of the Vertical Integration Facility with Launch Complexes 36A & 36B in the distance. Image Credit: Blue Origin

The new 9x4 version of the New Glenn has been talked about here before, and last November I ran this computer rendering posted on X by CEO Dave Limp. It shows the 9x4 as rather larger than the Saturn V with the Apollo capsule and escape system on top, but it doesn't tell us how tall the 9x4 is. The Saturn V was approximately 365' tall. SpaceX's current version of Starship is just over 400 feet tall, but without a number from Blue, I can only say the new 9x4 must be close in size to Starship. 

CEO Dave Limp posted this image showing the existing (7x2) and coming (9x4) New Glenn rockets on X.

In that November '25 post, I quoted these figures:

New Glenn 9x4 will be capable of lofting 77 tons (70 metric tons) of payload to low Earth orbit, compared to 50 tons (45 mt) for the original "7x2" variant. The new rocket will also have an even bigger payload fairing — one that's 28.5 feet (8.7 meters) wide, compared to an initial 23 feet (7 m).  

I found it interesting that Blue ended their post by talking up how good they are for Florida. Not that there's anything wrong with that. 

This infrastructure reinforces Blue Origin's commitment to Florida and the Space Coast community. With more than 4,500 employees and over $3 billion invested across 500+ Florida suppliers, Blue Origin supports a supply chain that creates thousands of additional jobs and strengthens Florida's space economy. 

Will Rocket Lab's Neutron make a flight this year?

Rocket Lab has been saying their new, heavier lift yet fully reusable rocket called Neutron would fly before the end of this year. How's that looking? 

According to Spaceflight Now, it's squeezing. Delays are pushing the first launch toward the right, but that the goal isn't moving.

As the third quarter of the fiscal year is closing, Rocket Lab is filing their reports with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and having conference calls for investors to keep track of them. The company noted that it’s working through qualification testing and made “significant milestones across the Neutron program.” 

“Production of the Stage 1 tank is currently aligned with the target delivery of Neutron to the launch pad in Q4 2026,” the company wrote in its filing. “While the window for an end-of-year launch date is narrowing, we are balancing the schedule of the first launch with entering Neutron into service as a system ready for full-scale production and high-cadence launch beyond flight one.

“Exact launch timing will also depend on the outcome of first stage qualification and other critical tests occurring later in 2026.”

I think the vast majority of industry watchers right about now are thinking "sounds like business as usual". The schedule slipping out to the right is the normal way of the world while developing big projects like this, and Neutron has not been an exception. 

Failures in developing a big, complicated system show what Roseanne Roseannadana used to say, "It just goes to show ya. It's always something. If it's not one thing, it's another." The biggest, easiest example of that is back on January 21, during a completely ordinary test that every rocket flying today has gone through, the Neutron's first stage fuel tank ruptured unexpectedly during a water loading test called a “hydrostatic pressure trial.” I've never gone looking for an explanation of what happened, but in the world of plain old water systems, not even rocket boosters, this is like elementary school arithmetic. Everybody knows the equations, everybody has done the work. That setback pushed the planned debut from the middle of the year to late 2026.

During Monday's conference call, Rocket Lab's always insightful founder and CEO Peter Beck said the characteristic of Neutron that will make it what they want it to be is its reusability. 

“As we’re working forward with the vehicle right now, and the way we’re thinking about things, it’s not just to get to the pad quickly for flight one. Of course we all want that and no one more than I, but it’s really about how do we get to flight ten in the shortest time possible,” Beck said.

“So for us, it’s all about reusability. And we’re constantly trading the timelines and the qualification criteria for the various systems and subsystems to get to the pad for flight one, but also making sure that when it comes to flight ten, that we don’t have to go back and re-qualify things,” he added. “So there’s a constant assessment along that way.”

When asked about the tests he's most concerned about, Beck said it would be the integrated static fire testing that will happen at the launch pad in Virginia. 

“The stage testing is always the thing that gets your adrenaline running because you have fully fueled vehicles on the pad and you’re igniting the engines for the first time. And I think you can also see for another space company that when it doesn’t go well, it really doesn’t go well,” Beck said, making a nod to the explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket during a static fire test on May 28 prior to its fourth planned launch. 

A slide shared with Rocket Lab’s investors during an earnings call on Aug. 10, 2026, showing engine testing progress for the engines that will power the Neutron rocket. Image: Rocket Lab

I don't read that last line from Beck as taking a poke at Blue Origin. Everyone knows that sort of outcome seems to always to be there, hiding in plain sight. Like Roseanne Roseannadana said...

Japan launches a big one; China loses one early in flight

China led the day's rocket launches - at least these two - with the 8:00 AM (EDT here, 1200 UTC) launch of the Long March 7A rocket, from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, in the country's Hainan province.  

The mission was short-lived, though. About 85 seconds into the flight, rather close to when other vehicles are going through Max Q, or the maximum dynamic pressure the vehicle will experience, the Long March 7A first stage exploded generating a massive fireball with a cloud of smoke and debris.

A Long March 7A rocket carrying the ChinaSat 4B satellite explodes shortly after launching from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Aug. 10, 2026. (Image credit: Meng Zhongde/VCG via Getty Images)

The Long March 7A is a vehicle that has flown before, this was the 18th flight, under the name of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). It's important to note that this doesn't mean this particular rocket flew even once because they're not reusable. Every flight is unused hardware. 

The 7A — a variant of China's Long March 7 rocket family — stands just over 197 feet (60 meters) tall and combines the first two Long March 7 stages with a hydrolox (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen)-powered third stage capable of launching up to 7 tons to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).

According to China National Radio, today's launch carried China's Zhongxing-4B spacecraft,, a communications satellite presumably bound for GTO. China's Zhongxing satellites provide telecommunications and broadband internet services and are also thought to provide services for China's military.

An interesting aside to this story is that a test flight of the Chinese Zhuque-3 rocket had been scheduled for Monday evening (presumably US EDT again).

That mission is scheduled to fly from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, more than 1,500 miles (2,415 kilometers) from Wenchang, at 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT; 7:45 a.m. local time), and is expected to feature a first-stage landing attempt.

The article these details come from on Space.com was posted this morning (EDT) and at the time there were no updates to details like that, or statements from CASC or any other Chinese source.

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Moving to the Japanese launch, that was a fully successful mission. The overview is that the Japanese H3 rocket launched a 10,800-pound navigation satellite to high Earth orbit.

Japan's H3 rocket flew for the ninth time ever this afternoon (Aug. 10).

The H3 lifted off from Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:23 p.m. EDT (1923 GMT; 4:23 a.m. on Aug. 11 local time), carrying the Michibiki 7 navigation satellite aloft.

The two-stage H3 is the successor to Japan's workhorse H-2A rocket, which retired last year after a total of 50 flights. 

The term "navigation satellite" brings GPS or the European Galileo satellites to mind. The Michibiki 7 will be part of Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), a homegrown navigation system that operates high above those satellite constellations in geosynchronous orbit. The QZSS is compatible with GPS.

"QZSS can be used even in the Asia-Oceania regions with longitudes close to Japan, so its usage will be expanded to other countries in these regions as well."
...
Michibiki 7 is carrying a payload for the United States as well — the Situational Awareness Camera Hosted Instrument (SÃCHI), which was developed for the U.S. Space Force by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. This is the second of two SACHIs to go up on a QZSS satellite; Michibiki 6, which launched atop an H3 in February 2025, hosts the other one. (Yes, Michibiki 6 launched before Michibiki 5.)

"This program will allow the United States to monitor satellite behavior within the GEO belt over a very interesting part of the world," Mark Huber, a technical staff member in the Lincoln Laboratory's Space Systems and Technology Division, said in a statement in December 2020.

"It is also a pathfinder in several ways," he added. "The U.S. team is blueprinting methods to allow sensitive data sharing between the United States and Japan."

Alternatives to the ionosphere

A natural follow up to watching the solar cycle progress, like we did with yesterday's post, is to ask what can we do if the ionosphere just won't cooperate? 

This assumes you want to contact other people or places via ham radio, for some piece of wallpaper or other. I mean, obviously, if you're stuck in a broken down car in the middle of nowhere, you want some sort of phone or high bandwidth connection. 

An answer that's easy to overlook and can work very well on VHF is meteor scatter. Back in April of '24, I put up a post about it, called "When Hobbies Converge or What The Heck is Meteor Scatter?"

Back in the 1950s, hams discovered that the trail created in the upper atmosphere by meteors burning up acted like a radio reflector, as if the ionosphere was enhanced. The effect is most beneficial to VHF stations which typically don't have regular, predictable ionospheric propagation. In the early days, this was done with Morse code, or CW as the hams typically call it (CW for Continuous Wave). Now that we're firmly in the age of computer assisted modulation modes, most people trying to bounce signals off the meteor trails are using a computer assisted mode. The most popular appears to be MSK144 (.pdf alert).

MSK stands for minimum shift keying, a form of continuous-phase frequency-shift keying (FSK) with shift equal to half the baud rate. MSK144 uses message frames of 144 bits and modulation at tone frequencies 1000 and 2000 Hz to transmit channel symbols at keying rate of 2000 baud. The resulting audio waveform can be viewed as a form of offset quadrature phase-shift keying (OQPSK) with individual pulses shaped like the first half-period of a sine wave.

Contacts made via meteor trails in other modes sometimes happen without either end of the contact knowing the connection was caused by a meteor and without using MSK144. Generally, though, your chances of success are better during the named meteor showers that get talked about regularly on sites like Space.com, as well as sites aimed more at amateur astronomers. While the number of meteors per hour varies widely between showers, there's generally one named shower per month, and there's some "sporadic meteor", also called a pebble or something, burning up in the atmosphere even on days when no "shower" is predicted. You'll have more luck looking for contacts in MSK144 mode on the frequencies hams have been using. 

That's why I'm bringing this subject up now. One of the biggest regular annular showers has been ramping up, the Perseid shower, which will (purely coincidentally) peak overnight on Aug. 12-13 under the dark skies of the new moon. It so happens the 12th is the day of the solar eclipse that will be seen to reach totality from a few small areas in east Greenland, western Iceland and northern Spain, so the people who experience totality of the solar eclipse may be treated to a meteor trail or two.  

While sporadic meteors can provide short duration openings, long messages can take excruciatingly long times to send. Meteor scatter also tends to be shorter distances. While multiple hop sporadic E can enable contacts across the US, meteor scatter tends to be more like 1000 miles or less. Occasionally, 1500 miles can happen. That cross-USA kind of multiple hop sporadic E seems to happen less often than meteor scatter, too. 

Still, there have been a handful of grid squares in the SE US that I've worked by meteor scatter easier than waiting for other openings. There's such a thing as the other station being too close, too. 

Perseid meteors streak over Lucerne, Switzerland, during the 2018 shower's peak. The photo was taken with an Olympus E-M1 Mark II camera in Live Composite mode. Scene exposure of 2 seconds; the Perseids exposure was about 30 minutes long. Orest Shvadchak

Solar Cycle 25 Update - a bit late

I've been forgetting to update the solar cycle and solar-terrestrial indices for a while. I mean I last updated this last December 29 and that update was even later than this.  

A highlight I've posted on solar cycle updates has been the "Last solar cycles comparison" from Space Weather News, and produced by a group called solen.info. NOTE: the plot is at the first link, not the second (solen.info). Here is the current plot:

It's pretty obvious that cycle 25, 2nd from the bottom (that is, 2nd weakest), peaked a little before the 60 months after cycle start line and the current reading is vertically between cycle 24 (weakest in the last hundred years) and cycle 22 (the black curve) which was in 1986-1996. What's not quite as obvious at first glance is the highest Smoothed Sunspot Numbers (SSNs) of cycle 25 are well above cycle 24, the previous cycle, on the bottom everywhere, but what you can't see on this graph is that cycle 24 had the lowest SSNs in the last hundred years, so cycle 25 has been quite a bit more active than 24 but that's just not saying much. "Hey, we're not the worst cycle in a hundred years!" 

Let's look at Cycle 25's raw data, note the first two vertical lines on the left (2018 and 2020) are still cycle 24:

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. That peak was a highlight in the last post because that was around the time that I got closer to hearing Alaska on 6m as I ever have. Everything I've ever heard about working Alaska from guys around here is it's pretty much a "once in a lifetime" thing. During that "band opening" I never copied a single letter from Alaska, but a friend in Tennessee copied one 15 second transmission from the Alaskan.

Is there a chance of hearing Alaska down here again in what's left of cycle 25? My guess is that if the current trend holds, almost a smaller and mirror image of cycle 21, then no. The only thing that I think would help the chance of getting Alaska is for a second peak of SSN, equal to or stronger than the previous peak forms. A second peak would completely wipe out the right side (prediction) of the SSN for the rest of the cycle. The only hope would be that the SSN in the time I heard Alaska was well after that peak of the cycle in August. The November/December time frame I heard Alaska in is that short little straight line two dots after the August peak.