So what's a "synthetic aperture radar?"

So what’s a synthetic aperture radar (SAR)? I should take a moment to emphasize that this is all based on the mathematics of combining different signals. It’s essentially “Digital Signal Processing” (DSP) but on reflected microwave signals not audio from a microphone or other source. 

Take a look at the antenna in the previous post again. Each one of those dark spots is a cut out slot in sheet metal, like the dual of a wire on a mounting plate that’s not conductive. A properly sized, non-conductive slot, in a conductive sheet becomes the antenna. I talk about this in a post on aircraft antennas (of all things). It's in the portion below the line about 3/4 the way down the post. Especially the links on slot antennas. 

Consider these slots being cut for 10 GHz.  A quarter wave (90 degrees) slot’s length can be found by (antenna length - in feet) = 234/(freq in MHz)

L = 234/10,000 MHz = 0.0234 feet or 0.2808 inch

so a quarter wave is 0.281 inch and each of those slots is positioned on the sheet so that the E- (electric) fields combine to produce the desired radiation pattern. You’ll note that in some parts of the (more or less) circular outline of the plate, particularly along the left and right sides (in the picture), the slots seem aligned so that any four slots look like a square, while closer to the center, they don’t look to be aligned that way. The squares look cattywampus, to use the southern word. 

Remember the radar is on a moving satellite, and since the satellite's pointing the radar down on the weather, it’s moving fast, but not toward or away from the weather – it’s moving at right angles to the ground on Earth. That’s an approximation, but good enough for now.

The motion of the radar source causes a Doppler shift, the change in returned frequencies higher as radar approaches the reflector and lower as the two bodies separate. It’s hard to catch this from all these mentions of speeds and distances involved, but the reflected wave reaches slots on the antenna different from the ones they were transmitted from because of the satellite's speed in orbit and the time for the radar to get to the ground and bounce back up to the antenna. "Radar reflections from discrete objects in a passing radar beam field each [have] a minute Doppler, or speed, shift relative to the antenna"  

Carl Wiley, working at Goodyear, Arizona, (which later became Goodyear Aerospace, and eventually Lockheed Martin Corporation) in 1951, suggested the principle that – because each object in the radar beam has a slightly different speed relative to the antenna – each object will have its own Doppler shift. A precise frequency analysis of the radar reflections will thus allow the construction of a detailed image

Colburn, Robert (10 March 2009). "Your Engineering Heritage: Synthetic Aperture Radar". IEEE USA InSight IEEE.

In order to realise this concept, electromagnetic waves are transmitted sequentially, the echoes are collected and the system electronics digitizes and stores the data for subsequent processing. As transmission and reception occur at different times, they map to different small positions. The well ordered combination of the received signals builds a virtual aperture that is much longer than the physical antenna width. That is the source of the term "synthetic aperture," giving it the property of an imaging radar.[5] The range direction is perpendicular to the flight track and perpendicular to the azimuth direction, which is also known as the along-track direction because it is in line with the position of the object within the antenna's field of view. 

An illustration of the aperture synthesized - each of the long rectangles is depicting one of the antenna slots in the antenna we show. The motion of the antennas is along the X direction, left to right. 

How About an Intro to Radar?

Back last week, while talking about Rocket Lab launching a Synthetic Aperture Radar for the Japanese, I wrote, 

I used to design radars among other things, and when I thought of the questions being asked, my reaction was, "should I devote some time to things like the basics of what Synthetic Aperture Radars are and how they work?" Comments? 

Comments were in favor of doing that, so I decided to get started. It was starting to look like a long piece, so I started by putting together first a general introduction to radar, primarily to ensure everyone has a common language. 

---

RADAR 101

To me, it’s always stretching myself to take something as involved as radar can be – the word is applied to many different kinds of systems – and write a generally understood text on it.  At root, radar isn’t new; it was known before WWII. The name itself comes from radio detection and ranging. As the name implies, radars use radio waves to determine the distance and velocity (motion) of the targets they hit. 

Radio is ultra low frequency light – and since wavelength is inversely related to frequency, radio waves are much longer than light waves. There are aspects of the frequency chosen and the intended use for the radar, and those are “beyond the scope” of this. That means a radio frequency (RF) source needs to generate the radio waves to use. How are they detected? With a radio receiver, tuned to the frequency of the source. That’s intentionally vague because the bandwidth required for the receiver depends on what the radar is being used for. 

Finally, how is ranging detected? The easiest thing to envision is radar sending a single pulse on a single frequency, and in this case the range is determined by measuring the time between the pulse being sent and the pulse caused by its reflection off the target arriving back at the receiver. That time difference between being sent and received is divided by two to get the time distance to the target. Divided by two because the pulse has gone from the transmitter to the target and back to the receiver and each trip to or from takes the same amount of time. 

All radio and light waves travel at the same velocity, the speed of light, usually referred to as c in physics books. The speed of light is 300 million meters per second (formally 299,792,458 m/sec, but 3*10⁸ or 300*10⁶ m/sec is close enough for now). Which is the same as 300 meters in one microsecond (millionth of a second). If you’re more comfortable in miles, that’s 186,282 miles per second – or 0.186282 miles per microsecond (millionth of a second) which turns to be 983.664 ft/msec.  

Just bear in mind that if you get your return pulse in 1 µsec, it’s not 300 meters or 984 feet away. It’s half that because the pulse had to go twice that distance – half a µsec out and half a µsec back.

You can probably see from this how timing became very important in radar systems, but you may not see how timing became important in the antenna design. You see, every antenna that’s directional requires phasing differences between the elements of the antenna to establish patterns, whether it’s a simple yagi antenna with “a few” elements or a phased array antenna with dozens of elements, phasing is a mechanical way of establishing a timing difference. 

An easy Rule Of Thumb to remember is the more antenna elements you have the smaller and more concentrated your beamwidth will be. It’s why a yagi with seven elements will perform better than one with five or three. That is, the five element yagi will outperform the three, and the three will outperform a single dipole. Such an antenna will deliver a greater percentage of your transmitter’s output power onto a target and simultaneously deliver less power outside its beamwidth. Since part of the first sentence includes saying the smaller and more concentrated your beamwidth can be, that means the uncertainty in the direction the radar’s antenna is pointing goes down as the number of elements goes up. 

If this is new or puzzling, I've written a lot on this. See my post on, “A Ham Radio Series 31 – Phased Arrays, or A Dish Without A Dish” or “A Ham Radio Series 31 – Very Directional, Very High Gain Antennas”

How do these arrays of small antennas operate and produce patterns of gain that produce more signal in the desired direction? The phase differences between all the antennas combine to produce more gain in some directions and less in other directions. When antenna gain is measured and talked about, the antenna isn’t amplifying the signal; that requires active devices and electrical power. Antenna gain is measured in comparison to a defined antenna, usually a dipole or something more omnidirectional (transmits the same power in all directions). What the antenna is doing is combining the output of all the smaller antennas it's made of into one much higher power in one small angular width.

In optics, a telescope like the (78 year old) Hale telescope on Mount Palomar, the aperture of the single primary mirror, 200 inches, is the telescope’s aperture. In multiple mirror telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope, combining the image data from several smaller optical instruments to generate an image as it would appear to a much larger mirror is referred to as the size of the combined image generating mirrors. In the case of the Webb (JWST) that aperture is a 6.5-meter-diameter (21 ft) mirror. Aperture for a radio telescope is the width of the antenna beam at a defined distance from the antenna. It's practically never talked about, but sometimes is mentioned in radar systems talk.

Because these high gain radio antennas approach having all of their gain in one direction with no signal transmitted or received from other directions, we’ve achieved the definition of radar.

Remember radar =  radio detection and ranging? The reflected radio pulse tells us something was detected, the time between the transmission and reception of the pulse tells the range, with the bonus of not just knowing “something’s out there” but the position of the antenna tells us the direction of that thing. If that radar is on something that’s moving, ship, car, airplane, or whatever, the motion of the vehicle and its position is constantly changing so that has to be incorporated in the calculations, too.  

Searching with Duck Duck Go for "Boeing 787 Weather Radar" because I've seen those. I found this and wanted to point out that the circular thing behind the nose with straight lines near the edges is the radar antenna array. Each of those small dark lines on the flat surface is an antenna, and the position of each one, along with how the radio signal gets to the antenna determines the antenna's pattern. 

EDIT 09/28/29 1325 EDT to correct a wrong prefix, changing 1msec to 1µsec - millisecond to microsecond. Thanks to commenter Lowell for pointing that out. 

 

We interrupt this program for a news bulletin

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has named an asteroid for singer/comedian Al - better known as 'Weird Al' - Yankovic, it was reported on Wednesday, Sept. 23. 

The asteroid is formally known as (14331) Alyankovic, or 1981 EC26. 1981 refers to the year of the asteroid's discovery, and Yankovic's name for it was approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the official body that arbitrates the monikers of things in the universe. 

The article goes on to interview the scientist from the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Lab (U of A LPL) Allison McGraw who presented the award to 'Weird Al' right before his Sunday evening show in Tucson. 

University of Arizona's Dr. Allison McGraw.  Image credit: Saddlebag Notes (a newspaper part of or affiliated with the Tucson Star that won't allow me to look at the picture)

Planetary scientist Allison McGraw, an alumna of the University of Arizona who is now with the Lunar and Planetary Science Institute, backed the nomination with several other planetary science researchers, according to the Tucson Star. On Sunday (Sept. 20), McGraw presented Yankovic backstage with a plaque commemorating the naming of the asteroid, ahead of Yankovic's performance at the Tucson Arena.

"I've been working on not being starstruck, the same way I am every time I meet astronauts," McGraw said in the Tucson Star's report, ahead of the meeting. "I'm gonna do my best not to be starstruck, or I guess 'rock struck', but I have the feeling that he's going to be really cool."

If you're not aware that this sort of naming happens regularly, it's a specialized field with its own odd traditions. You can be excused for not having come across one that interests you. There are several other musically-themed celebrity names on asteroids, such as 17059 Elvis, 17473 Freddiemercury, (52665) Brianmay, 249516 Aretha (Aretha Franklin - who else?), 10731 Dollyparton, and all four members of the Beatles (both individually, and as a group for 8749 Beatles.) Of those Brian May, Ph.D. is the only one I've written about before.

The concerns over the lunar south pole

Not the south pole itself, so much as the thought of China capturing it and causing problems for us and everyone else. 

Backing up for a little while, do you remember reading about a Chinese lunar lander called Chang’e 7, first mentioned here in back in April? The lunar lander was set to be launched to the south pole of the moon, in particular the area around Shackleton Crater, a spot that both China and the US are interested in exploring - to the point it's considered some of the most coveted land on the moon. Why? Primarily because its location provides some important its features. 

... the high rims of the crater create permanently shadowed regions known as “cold traps,” where it’s thought that water (in the form of ice, of course) and other useful materials may have accumulated over billions of years. 

But nobody will know how accurate those predictions are until the first landers get there and either analyze samples, or return them to Earth for those studies. 

Chang'e 7 was close to launching in late August (Aug. 23) when the mission was suddenly put on hold for 24 hours, and then cancelled and pushed out into 2027. Very little was said about why they cancelled the mission, the only strong reason quoted was:

“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.”  

As I said at the time, maybe it's just me, but when I read something like that, I get the feeling that either nobody had 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 nothing but a pile of problems, pencil-whipped every step of the way despite someone somewhere being aware of conditions that. The bottom line is they never should have tried to launch with those problems.

To be fair, an alternate view was given by Eric Berger at Ars Technica, who speculated that the reason for the scrub of Chang'e 7's launch was a typhoon in the vicinity, Typhoon Narra, and that was complicated by the presence of conditions that they wouldn't trust to launch into.

I bring this mission back to your attention because NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman recently expressed concern that if China were to be the first nation to land in Shackleton Crater that they might do their best to block our access to the crater entirely. Both countries have expressed desire to get to the area of Shackleton and explore from there.

Isaacman and other US officials have started to express concerns that China could establish exclusion zones where robotic probes and then human missions go. Chang’e 7 will bring considerable mobility to the Moon. 

“[China] has rovers, it has hopper drones like we now have in development but didn’t eight months ago, and could have potentially denied access to some of the most interesting spots,” Isaacman said. “They want to interact with the water ice, and they want to get really good at the skills for where they’ll want to go next for their Neil Armstrong-like moment. Except it won’t be on the Moon, it’ll be on Mars.”

Yet another complication is that no country has successfully landed that close to the lunar south pole (or the north pole, for that matter) and the US has a wild card: Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1. This large lander will carry two NASA probes to the south pole, possibly as early as spring 2027. 

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

It's fair to ask if it really matters if China or the US is the first lander on the moon this time. Closing words to Jared Isaacman:

“That will call into question every other country around the world,” Isaacman said of China landing on the Moon next. “Like, whose security guarantee should I trust? Should I trust the United States and NATO? Should I trust China if they’re the emerging technical superpower here? Whose technology should I buy? Whose military hardware should I buy? Whose standards should I adhere to? Who am I listening to on AI? Am I listening to the United States or am I listening to China on that? All of that’s on the table.”

This should never have been a race, Isaacman said, noting US space policy failures going back to the Reagan administration. He estimates that NASA has spent $100 billion across multiple presidential administrations, Democrat and Republican, that has led nowhere. Meanwhile, China just had its first human spaceflight in 2003 and has since expanded its capabilities to the point where it now rivals the United States in space.

“If you come up short with who comes down the ladder first, the impact is felt around the world,” Isaacman said.

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.

Starship due for Wet Dress Rehearsal Thursday 9/24

No planned time for the test is available, but Space.com reports that ship 14 was stacked on the launch pad today, and a WDR is planned for tomorrow. Unfortunately, they don't even hint at a test time, which tells me I'll have a YouTube screen connected to NASA Spaceflight's coverage, expected to start at 7:00 AM. That's about all we know, but since the booster had previously been tested before, it's pretty much a test of "did we break anything," or "did we hook everything back up correctly?"

As has been reported for days, launch is expected on Monday, Sept. 28 with the 75 minute launch window opening at 8:15 AM EDT (1215 UTC). Also as reported, this flight will be the first attempt at orbit for Starship, carrying a load of 26 Starlink V3 satellites. 

Starship 41 and SuperHeavy booster 21 attempting orbit for a Starship is a super big deal for SpaceX, and NASA is probably at least as anxious for success as SpaceX is. All Starship test flights through last month's Flight 13 have been suborbital.

In addition to SpaceX’s own eagerness to begin launching the Starlink V3 megaconstellation, NASA has also contracted the vehicle as a lunar lander for the Artemis program. NASA is expecting an orbital spacecraft capable of docking with the agency’s Orion spacecraft in time for Artemis III in mid-2027, and a crew-certified vehicle to land astronauts on the moon on Artemis IV, in 2028. 

Screen capture of the SpaceX flight web site.

And it's fall!

I have no doubts that I welcome fall more than most readers because I live south of all but a few of you in the States. The days of Crematoria are thankfully gone for another 10 months and that's time for celebration. 

The odd part is that depending on where you look, you'll get as many as three different dates for the start of fall. At some point in the year, something I downloaded put Sept. 22 in my phone as the equinox. Generally speaking, over my life to date, the start of fall was often Sept. 21. Today, I get this (from Firefox and the Duck Duck Go browser):

As it pretty clearly explains in the Search Assist box, it's actually Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 0005 UTC. That works out to be Tuesday evening, Sept. 22, at 8:05 PM EDT. It turned to fall in UTC before I wrote this paragraph.

The word "Equinox" literally means "equal night" or that the night and day are the same length. I can't find a place where that works. The Weather Channel's explanation is that the calculations are based on the center of the sun and the times don't always reconcile. The time of sunrise and sunset vary with longitude at any given latitude, and they don't work out to be the same minute on my "Sunrise/Sunset" app on the phone until Sunday the 27th - both at 7:13. 

You can drive yourself nuts looking for those details with what's generally available to us. 

Note that it's the start of Fall only in the northern hemisphere and the start of Spring in the southern hemisphere (someone in the southern hemisphere, correct me if you use the same words we use and have the backward effects - like fall is the season leading into summer not winter). Our nights will get longer and the days shorter until the winter solstice in mid-December, then days get  longer and the nights get shorter until the summer solstice. On the spring equinox, the equal day/night story repeats. 

Our local news had a headline saying we're getting the first cold front of the season on the weekend, but Weather Underground (motto "Approximately Right Approximately 80% of the time") says our high drops from 87 today to 83 by the weekend while the low drops from 76 to 71. I remember the other day getting a laugh over the forecast low was going to be 72 on the 27th - just because of the mirror symmetry of the numbers. What lends WU credence in my opinion, though, is they show winds out of the north at over 15 mph for a couple of days and that's a sign of a cold front.  

On a slow news day, things like this get emphasized

The headline says, "SpaceX rolls giant Super Heavy booster to pad ahead of Starship's 1st orbital flight" and if this was the first time it ever happened that would be news. It's just that this isn't even the first time this booster was rolled to the pad. Yeah, I get that it's cool to watch and it is super cool to see the end result of the engineering it took to get "the biggest rocket in world history" rolling down a two lane road. 

The part about this story that makes me go, "what?" is that I watch for news on this mission nonstop and haven't seen anything about a problem with the vehicles for Flight 14. I've seen more talk about the possible Flight 15 than I have about 14. I saw nothing about the booster for FT-14 being rolled back to Starbase or any problems with it. The counter to that is the announcements about launch date and time have always included something like, "pending FAA approval" so that when they slipped the date for FT-14 six days last Friday, the idea that the FAA didn't approve of something is a natural conclusion to jump to, along with modifications of that - like approval hasn't been granted because the FAA is overworked or doesn't have enough people to read everything. 

The SuperHeavy booster for Flight Test 14 on its way to its launch pad at Starbase. (Image credit: SpaceX)

I'm trying to get more information on just what the story here is; I mean, it would make more sense to me that this is the booster for FT-15 and it's the one that was moved around. I'll report it if I find anything. 

NASA buys three more SpaceX manned flights to the ISS

This extends the amount of time SpaceX will fly Crew Dragon on the Falcon 9 to the Space Station for "at least another four years." On Friday, Sept 18, NASA awarded SpaceX $946 million to fly three more crewed missions to the International Space Station (ISS), a "period of performance" that runs through 2030. 

"As part of the agency's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) contract, this change brings the total missions for SpaceX to 17 and helps NASA to maintain access to the space station with two unique commercial crew industry partners," NASA officials said in a statement on Friday (Sept. 18). 

The other unique partner is, of course, Boeing and their Starliner. Both SpaceX and Boeing won their contracts in 2014 and, as has been widely reported, Boeing got the bigger contract because they were the experts while SpaceX was a small, startup company. SpaceX was considered high risk while Boeing was the "sure thing." It's a mindset common in the military and aerospace contracting.  So far, SpaceX has launched 12 Crew missions plus the one test flight to the ISS to certify the spacecraft in late May of 2020. Boeing has launched only one, which was aborted after the trip back down from the ISS was thought likely to result in loss of the vehicle and crew.  

[SpaceX]'s still conducting the 12th, known as Crew-12, and is gearing up for the launch of Crew-13, which is expected to occur in early October. The new contract modification will take SpaceX through Crew-17 and bring the total value of its CCtCap contract to $5.92 billion. 

Since Space.com published this, Crew-13's launch has been announced to be Thursday, October 1 at 11:10:06 AM.

SpaceX Dragon meets sunrise on the launch pad for Crew-10 flight March 10, 2025. Image credit: SpaceX

Things that make you think

I was wandering around YouTube looking at space-related news topics and saw a few things here and there, but that's not what this is really about.  What it's about is what the coverage says and the strange questions I saw. 

Today, Rocket Lab launched a Japanese Earth Observing Satellite using their Electron rocket. Electron is small payload class vehicle, meaning more lightweight than just physically small satellite, but those kinda go together. In the description of that article, it said, 

An Electron rocket carrying a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) spacecraft for the Tokyo-based company Synspective lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site tonight at 11:22 p.m. EDT (Sept. 18) (0322 GMT and 3:22 p.m. local time on Sept. 19). 

There's a good quality video of the launch from Rocket Lab, if you want to see it. 

I remembered that Rocket Lab had launched other SAR spacecraft that I'm pretty sure were Japanese but not 100% sure it was this customer (Synspective) - although it's kind of specialized stuff and might well be. 

I used to design radars among other things, and when I thought of the questions being asked, my reaction was, "should I devote some time to things like the basics of what Synthetic Aperture Radars are and how they work?" Comments? 

Hey, it's better than "don't forget that today is Talk Like a Pirate Day!  It's called an S A Rrrrrr."  

A Rocket Lab Electron rocket launches a Strix Earth-observing radar satellite for the Japanese company Synspective on Sept. 18, 2026. (Image credit: Rocket Lab)

For reasons unknown to us Rocket Lab tends to give Synspective launches owl-themed names. This mission was called "Owl by the Dozen."

Small Space News Story Roundup 86

Going back to the "good ole" format...

SpaceX has bumped Flight 14 out almost a week

Six days, to be exact. The new liftoff date is Monday, September 28, and the time is "same as before" (8:15 EDT). No reason for delay was stated. That said, the September 22nd launch was conditioned by the statement of "pending approval" from the required agencies so perhaps the issue was SpaceX hadn't gotten approval from the agencies and they're giving those agencies some time. 

China wants a Raptor 3 equivalent

The Chinese launch startup Space Pioneer, which has raised nearly $1 billion, showcased a new design for its Tianhuo-21 methane-liquid oxygen engine this week, which was subsequently shared on social media. From outward appearances, the engine looks strikingly similar to SpaceX’s Raptor 3 engine. Its thrust, 2,450 kN at sea level, is also virtually identical to that of the Raptor 3.

Interestingly, Elon Musk said, "I wouldn't do that if I were you" (in more polite language). 

Would it be difficult to replicate? … In response to Space Pioneer’s engine design, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said copying Raptor 3 would not be easy. “I would recommend against a new company trying to make Raptor 3,” he said on X. “While it appears simple on the outside (necessary to survive extreme heat without a heat shield), the inside has very complex geometry that can only be manufactured using highly modified 3D metal printing.” 

Wait! ... China copying things from America? Who'da thunk it?? I'd recommend they test it as hard as they can figure out how to. From as far away as possible. 

I took a picture of a Raptor 1 next to a Raptor 2 and added a newer (and color) picture of the Raptor 3. The change from 2 to 3 isn't as dramatic as the Raptor 1 to 2, but the simplification is visible. Yes, those are Raptors 1, 2, 3 from left to right.

The "tyranny of the rocket equation" holds for rocket engines, too. Every pound taken out of an engine also saves the amount of fuel that has to be carried to lift that engine's extra pound.

Add Blue Origin to the list of companies studying newer, better engines

One of the big phrases that has been emphasized lately has been, "full-flow staged combustion." Blue Origin and the Rocket and Space Propulsion Division of the Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base have announced an expanded private-public partnership to develop new rocket propulsion technologies, the company said this week. 

The new agreement comes as “we work to develop next-generation rocket propulsion technologies,” said Nicholas Robertson, senior vice president of engines at Blue Origin. “Studying these historic and technical artifacts grounds our engineering models in real government research.”

The Blue Origin news release notes that the Air Force lab has done pioneering work in oxygen-rich and full-flow staged combustion technologies. The company said it would also continue to collaborate on testing and maturing the BE-7 lunar lander rocket engine with the Air Force at the Area 1-42 High Altitude Rocket Test Facility at Edwards.

Is Starliner being Resurrected?

It looks that way. An oddball question that's hard to ignore comes to mind. Is SpaceX contributing to rescuing Starliner? 

In the last year, a couple of unrelated stories have come up often. The first one is that Starliner is the cause of the problems that NASA (and all the ISS suppliers) had with the dreadful first crewed flight of Starliner in June of '24. First of all, Butch Wilmore and Sunni Williams were stranded on the ISS, turning what was planned to be a week long mission into nine months - from June of '24 to March of '25. Later in the year, NASA formally forbade Starliner to carry a crew.  In addition to the ban on all future Crewed missions, they went into a study of how to modify Starliner so that loss of the vehicle wouldn't harm crew, just destroy millions of dollars in supplies

The second story surfaced earlier this summer. SpaceX has said they're discontinuing Falcon 9 flights and retiring the vehicle, and won't commit to flying Crew or Cargo Dragon spacecraft longer than 2030. 

This week, on the All-In Podcast, SpaceX President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell was asked if the company would respond to demand for Crew Dragon and keep flying the vehicle “for some time.”

Then she said something that is practically shocking. Well, maybe just shocking to me. 

Shotwell would not commit to that. “We’re not retiring it today, for sure,” she replied. Then Shotwell suggested that Boeing should really step up and deliver. “There is another provider,” she said. “Boeing has been paid, I think, probably more than we have been paid to develop their human capsule. So we’re just gonna let them have some business. They should fly their capsule. The government paid a lot of money for that.” 

Yes, Boeing was paid more to develop Starliner than SpaceX was for their Dragon capsules, because "everyone knew" that Space is hard and the company with experience dating back to the earliest days in space travel was more likely to get the problem solved than a startup of inexperienced engineers. It's ironic to see the president of SpaceX say, in essence, 'why don't you go to the guys you paid the big bucks to?' Dating back to 2010, for development and certification of their vehicles, NASA paid SpaceX approximately $3.1 billion and Boeing $5.1 billion - 165% of what they paid SpaceX. SpaceX has been the critical provider they simply couldn't live without. With Crew Dragon, SpaceX has launched 13 crewed missions to the ISS, with its next one set for October. All flights to date have been successful. 

In contrast, Boeing has had less than one mission of Starliner and it was as miserable a failure as a mission can be without killing everyone involved.  

A few weeks ago, I posted a piece called "A single sentence Starliner story" with the "punchline" of that title appearing in the third paragraph.

“The redesign of the Starliner deficiencies is going quite well, and we’re feeling pretty good about that,” (Boeing CEO Kelly) Ortberg said.

This week's story is that after being grounded and prohibited from flying, Boeing’s Starliner seems to be ready to get the starring role in NASA’s spaceflight plans.

Back in June, we were given the story that the long investigation NASA had done on the Starliner crewed mission was completed and concluded the problem was a “Type A” mishap, the most serious level they use.  

As part of this review, new NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the space agency also shared some of the blame for the near-disaster.

“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in a letter to the NASA workforce at the time. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.” 

There are many problems here that aren't obvious on first reading. First off, even though Boeing was paid more than SpaceX, it was a fixed cost job and they have to pay for their own mistakes. Starliner has already led to Boeing having spent in excess of $2 billion to "fix" Starliner. (When I screw up something I'm working on, instead of saying "fix," I use "unscrew".) 

But Ars now understands the space agency will provide some funding—it’s not clear how much—to Boeing to resolve the propulsion system issues experienced by the spacecraft in its last two flights.  

Starliner is designed to fit the Atlas V, which is well into doing the last missions in the Atlas family's history, and ULA has just six rockets left. One of them will be used for the uncrewed Starliner 1 test flight, and then five subsequent crewed missions. There will most likely be a competition for a replacement for the Atlas V, and I would expect that ULA is ready for that. Since ULA is joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, I can imagine them having the inside track to launch Starliners after those six Atlas V missions. 

Why would NASA go to these lengths to keep Starliner in the game? There have been questions about Boeing’s commitment to Starliner in recent years, given its financial losses. Boeing might well have thrown in the towel. So it’s possible that NASA is meeting Boeing halfway to keep a needed spaceflight capability going. (It also helps that Boeing has excellent lobbyists.)

But NASA had limited choices given that SpaceX has repeatedly indicated that its plans to retire Dragon by 2030 are more than aspirational. Although the Dragon development program was financially backed by NASA, SpaceX has contractually fulfilled its obligations with the Dragon missions to the space agency. SpaceX can therefore do as it pleases with Dragon.

After the ISS is retired and given a decent "burial at sea" (the mission SpaceX has won), the future of manned flight to a group of privately owned and run Space Stations is going to become an issue. If there's no Falcon 9 with a Crew Dragon, how will crews get to these stations, and get back to the ground? NASA is expected to be an anchor tenant, but that doesn't simplify the problem, it adds to the demand for flights but does nothing for supply. That drives costs up. 

If you're waiting for nifty, easy and cheap conclusion here, I'm sorry. We know the launch providers and the companies possibly able to design something to get customers to private space stations, but there are no solutions mentioned in the source. 

Starliner is getting a helping hand from NASA. Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

I should point out that while the artwork is described as "getting a helping hand" it doesn't really say whether the hand is lifting the Starliner up out of or pulling it down into the mud and dirt. Depends on how you see NASA and Boeing.

And now for something completely different

I've been struggling to find newsworthy space stories on the usual handful of places I look and there just isn't anything that's striking me as interesting enough. In general, the stories are largely about "big picture" things like missions off in the future. For example, NASA contracted with Blue Origin for comm sat systems to relay radio signals from Mars to Earth. Kinda interesting and clearly really for years from now, but then Rocket Lab started disputing something about the contract - basically arguing they should have gotten the contract. OK - kinda interesting but not very. 

While poking around on YouTube, I found a video that really hit home with me. 

Purdue University gives out an award for superior engineering named for one of their biggest names among their graduates, Neil Armstrong. This year, the award was given to the team that developed the ability for the Falcon 9 to land and be re-used. The idea of reusability has always been there but it was always a "we'll get to that some day" kind of story. Those almost always have implications that it was tried but found to not be as robust and straightforward as the big picture guys thought.

The Falcon 9 Booster Landing Team at SpaceX has been awarded the 2026 Neil Armstrong Space Prize in the Innovation category for proving that rockets could be recovered, refurbished and reused — a feat much of the industry once considered impossible. This video traces how that breakthrough happened, from early NASA and Air Force reusability research to the moment engineers watched a booster descend out of the darkness and land perfectly upright.

Team members, including Jon Edwards, Yoshiaki Kuwata, Lars Blackmore, Shana Diez and Eduardo Valazquez, describe the persistence behind hundreds of engineers' work, and how those lessons carry forward into Starship's booster-catch landings. Purdue University's Dan Dumbacher and Kathleen Howell explain how reusable rockets changed the economics of access to space: Falcon 9 has now flown more than 600 missions on recovered boosters. What made this reusability breakthrough possible? The team points to a culture that rewarded trying and failing, precise engineering under enormous stakes and years of incremental proof, from the first landing to the 600th.

The prize honors innovation in the spirit of Neil Armstrong, a Purdue alum whose legacy still inspires students walking past his statue on campus every day.

As you can see from the lower left hand corner of that screen capture, it's a not quite a ten minute video. I seriously recommend you watch the whole thing because it's a fundamental transformation of the launch industry, dramatically cutting costs and increasing flexibility. I've long thought that SpaceX should get some serious recognition for getting reusability working. It's even better that it's the team of engineers who achieved it getting the recognition not just the corporation.

Or you could watch it here if they continue to allow the embedded version.

Hey, 10 minutes isn't that long. Grab a coffee or some thing and sit back for a watch.

A couple of post updates

How does this differ from my other news roundups or updates or just plain small news stories? What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros? Elephino. 

The expected lifetime of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope just jumped

Seriously jumped. The NGRST was originally planned to have a primary five-year mission followed by a five-year extended mission, but a major improvement was announced today. The lifetime is now being given as 22 years. I'm going to assume that the primary and extended missions have been increased from five years to 11 years each. 

"As a result of exquisite planning by our orbital dynamics team, brilliant execution by the operations team, and a precise launch from SpaceX, Roman has fuel for at least 22 years of potential science operations," said Jamie Dunn, the center director at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, in a statement.

Now that captures my attention and gets a skeptical reaction. "exquisite planning?" "Brilliant execution?" Why is it even possible to double the expected life of the propellants needed onboard by those things. Why aren't exquisite planning and brilliant execution expected? 

Then they dropped a little bomb. 

— and it's all thanks to the spacecraft coming in less massive than the original design had projected.

Add that to the most stunning words I've ever reported. NGRST was done eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget. 

The first link in this sub-topic, in the first paragraph, has details on how well all this worked out, but I think a good, short statement is this has been a well-run project. 

An update to yesterday's post on SpaceX Starship Flight 14

The main update is that the booster is not going to attempt a recovery on the launch tower with the "mechazilla arms". One of the issues on the pretty astounding Flight 13 was that the SuperHeavy booster did not make a controlled soft landing in the gulf east of the Boca Chica launch site. Several modifications have been made and priority is being given to verification and not the (always very watchable) "grab it with the monster arms." SpaceX reports: 

The booster’s primary test objective on Flight 14 will be executing a successful launch, ascent, stage separation, boostback burn, and landing burn at an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America. There have been several modifications to hardware and software to address issues seen on the previous flight. 

After stage separation and flip on Flight 13, the Super Heavy booster was able to use all 33 engines on its boostback burn for the first time. In the terminal phase of the burn, the three center engines showed signs of ice clogging which triggered an early end to the maneuver. The booster went on to attempt a landing burn, with 8 of the 13 planned engines reigniting before the booster made a hard splashdown in the Gulf. The Super Heavy on this upcoming flight has hardware modifications to improve filtering to the engines and software changes to enhance relight reliability.

Unlike the scenarios I played with last night, such as Flight 15 being sent up soon after 14 for tests of the two Starships' abilities to transfer fuel - which means having to navigate and dock in space autonomously - SpaceX says the ship will do orbital tests. 

Starship’s initial orbital mission is expected to fly at an altitude approximately 275 km (171 miles) above Earth and complete approximately six orbits around the planet over the course of a nearly 10-hour flight, with splashdown targeted in the Pacific Ocean to the west of Chile.

SpaceX says they've made some changes to heat shielding on Starship based on examining Flight 13's ship. 

Several upgrades and experiments related to Starship’s heatshield will also be tested, with some improvements derived directly from data gathered from the Flight 13 Starship as it floated in the Indian Ocean. They include additional retention mechanisms added to tiles in areas deemed to be at highest risk of falling off during ascent, addressing recently discovered areas that offer flow paths behind tiles for plasma, and flying multiple areas with a curved tile design that has shown the ability to reduce heating in the gaps between tiles. And finally, two tiles recovered from Ship 40 are planned to be reflown on Ship 41, marking the first tile reuse for Starship.

The middle of that paragraph, from "They include" to "the gaps between the tiles" is especially interesting. 

A close-up of Flight 13's heat shield after it landed in the Indian Ocean. This was before it was towed to Christmas Island and loaded for return to Starbase. Credit: SpaceX

And oh, by the way 

Back on September 10, the peak day of the Atlantic hurricane season, I did a post on how there was nothing in the Atlantic with a chance of becoming a storm within a week. We're not a week out from that day and we have seen an area of interest on the NHC maps. Earlier today it went from a forecast possible development at 30% in the next 7 days, to a 40% chance and then back to a 30% chance of development. The area they're watching is mostly east of Bermuda and with systems at this point, they don't give potential paths that the potential storm might follow. Potentially. 

Ars Technica's main space reporter, Eric Berger, is actually a meteorologist by degree and job experience. He has an article today pointing out that the Atlantic is about to break a record that has held for 85 years. Berger states: "But in 1941, the first hurricane did not form until September 17. This is the date of the latest first Atlantic hurricane on record." I can see no way that mess east of Bermuda could become a hurricane by Thursday. 

Starship Flight 14 has a more definite launch date and time

It was just 10 days ago when Starship Flight 14 was listed as flying September 15th but with no launch time. I think I remember seeing the date of September 18, three days later, and the "next Friday" to us, but without a launch time. That mystery disappeared and the flight now has both: Tuesday September 22, at 8:15 AM EDT. 

This is going to be a BIG test flight. Exactly what's going to go on is hard to pin down, but there are a couple of interesting side notes going around. The least important of them is that this launch will carry the first batch of version 3 Starlink satellites. That means it's a commercial flight, one in which SpaceX is both the launch contractor and the customer whose payloads are going into orbit. That makes their financial situation look a bit better, but not incredibly better.

Another interesting side note is that the booster for Flight 15 is being prepared now. That raises the question of "why?" The simple explanation is that SpaceX needs to increase their Starship flight cadence but the more interesting explanation is that they need to start making progress on their orbital refueling technology that they've been working on for years. 

They need more than one Starship for that, one to be the on-orbit "fuel depot" and the other(s) to bring fuel to it. Depending on the mission that needs the fuel, it almost certainly needs more than one fuel transfer loaded onto it. In the past, I've seen posts saying on the order of ten to a dozen Starships would be required to fill one Starship as the fuel depot and that much fuel would be required for a lunar mission.

The logistics of doing the "10+" flights to fill a tanker in orbit which will fuel the SpaceX HLS (Human Landing Ship) are mind-boggling - some models talk about launching ten Starships in ten days, or even less time. That's never been done before. There are also rumors and reports all over about new designs for the Human Landing System and how it's going to be much easier to get to the moon with this new one. Obviously, this test would only be two Starships but they don't really need to load enough fuel to send a Starship to the moon. Lots will be learned from docking and transferring enough fuel to get started. 

Blue Origin infographic about the differences between the lunar Starship (HLS) and their National Team lander. Reduced file size, more detail in the source version at Reddit. File is dated 2021 - image at that Reddit link.

Another big question is whether or not the booster is coming back to Starbase to be readied for reuse. I've seen arguments both ways and I can only say to stand by because we're likely to find out before the launch. Things like the need for "ten Starship (flights) in ten days" has a huge impact on the need for rapid reusability. A commercial airplane doesn't need days between flights, and a rapidly reusable Starship and SuperHeavy booster could eliminate the need for a fleet of "ten Starships and ten boosters" - or at least drop it from ten Starships and boosters to "a few". 

The VHF Contest is about what I expected

I had to shut down the station for an hour or so to let the daily thunderstorms roll past (it is August 43rd, after all), but I had the station on for a couple of hours before that and since then. 

The short summary is it's pretty much as I expected last Sunday night. Most of what I heard were stations within a 25 mile radius of my place, but I'd get maybe one or two 15 second windows when I'd hear someone farther away. A couple of stations around Atlanta and about that radial distance.  I'll go back when I'm done here and try not to fall asleep from boredom as the night goes on.  

In other places around the country, people will load up a van or car with radios, computers and portable antennas they can set up - like this guy. Not here. At least no one I know of does it. It is August 43rd, after all. Maybe in January.  

Photo from the ARRL.org. This link says the guy in the photo is Ed Parsons, K1TR, but no more details than that. 

On that Super El Nino Season

Yesterday, September 10th, was the peak of the Northern Hemisphere's hurricane season, I generally always run a post about that. So far this year, it has been very quiet, but I didn't realize it was this quiet until I saw this headline from Watts Up With That.  

There have been no hurricanes in the Atlantic — Yet! Making 2026 the quietest since satellite tracking began in 1966

Sure enough, I went to the National Hurricane Center (one of my everyday visits) and found this map.

Pretty much since last spring, the weather sites have been saying this year's El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle was looking to be a very strong or even "Super" El Nino. As soon as I heard that, my memory fired on the other years we've had that were the El Nino side of the El Nino/La Nina cycle. In El Nino seasons, the north Atlantic storms tend to either be weaker or they stay away from Florida. Many re-curve out to the North Atlantic farther east than during La Nina years, even east of the Bahamas. I was looking forward to it. The fear mongering about how bad a Super El Nino is just seemed like the regular "if it bleeds it leads" Golden Law of the TV news.

You may have heard that Hawaii is having a busier hurricane season than usual. 

There are currently THREE hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean: Lowell, Karina, and Marie. The warming El Niño trend in the Pacific is increasing storm activity there while the Atlantic remains calm. 

That's the other side of the story.  They're not having a La Nina out there - that name applies to both the tropical Atlantic and Pacific waters. We're having very unusual conditions here, and I assume they're having very unusual conditions there. It's just that we're having better conditions, while they're having worse. 

The number of storms per 100 years - plot from 2024. As you can see, September 10th is the peak but the curve is a bit higher on the "later than" (right) side than earlier. Our lack of storms so far this year isn't an excuse for all my fellow Floridians to not keep an eye out for things that could develop. Hurricane season lasts until the end of November ("close enough" to Dec 1 on this graph) and what has happened so far this year has little to nothing to do with what's coming in the second half of the season. We have had storms in November before. 

To borrow someone's quote and beat it about the head and shoulders, "the season's not over until it's over." Keep your eyes open and enjoy the quiet times we're having.

On the 25th anniversary of 9-11

For me, 9-11 always rolls in like a fog of memory.  Like the tragedies of JFK's assassination, space shuttle Challenger exploding on ascent, or the triumph of Apollo 11's landing, I'll always remember where I was and details of the day it happened.  As I've said before, 

On that bright Tuesday morning, I was out of the office at a small company that we contracted to do some testing on our radios. As the technician and I were setting up the test, the company's secretary/receptionist came in and said the local radio station had a bulletin that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center. My first reaction, perhaps strangely, was that radio navigation systems can't be that wrong, it must have been a terrible accident. Act of war did not enter my mind. As the morning went on, a TV set was put in place and large antenna hooked up outside (there are no local over the air TV channels). We watched the second plane hit and quickly realized this was no accident. That's when the thoughts of Pearl Harbor and other acts of war started. I've heard it credited to Ian Fleming as his character Auric Goldfinger, but the saying goes, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action." And so it appeared that day.

In the days that followed, I learned that friends were affected by the events of 9-11, but weren't directly involved. A co-worker was on business at Boeing, and had to rent a car to drive home. A very close friend was waiting at JFK airport to fly home, and saw the attacks in real time. He also had to rent a car and drive home. A cousin lives within viewing distance of the Twin Towers and watched it. And now I have friends who have sons in the armed forces in Afghanistan, and others who have been in Iraq. We need to remember we are at war, even if our enemy isn't a convenient nation-state. You can pretend we're not at war if you'd like, but if someone swears to destroy you, it's prudent to believe them.

I'm a mix of groups of responses. The first group of feelz is "remember the fallen", "remember the first responders who ran into the buildings", "remember the dead and wounded servicemen, the ones who came back with missing limbs, or injuries that can't be seen" and "remember their families." The second group of feelz is along the lines expressed best by Aesop at Raconteur Report in his excellent post in 2018: "Every Day is 9/11. That's Exactly the Problem". Unfortunately, while his blog is there with a six month old post, this one doesn't come up. While I'm not sure, that may be the column that made me a regular reader over at his place. 

But then came 2021 and the Bidenistas. We weren't defeated, we formally demonstrated defeating ourselves to the whole world. We lost in what might have been the most incompetent cluster fuck in the history of man. A team of Brownie Girl Scouts could have planned and executed that abandonment of Afghanistan better than the Biden military did. As Keith Finch, a former Marine writing for GAT Daily, says:

That’s the strangest thing about this longest war. We weren’t defeated. We won the fights. We’re damn good at fighting. We lost because ‘winning’ never had a defined end state. It wasn’t ‘When we get Bin Laden’ or ‘The Total Annihilation of the current Al-Qaeda structure no matter where they hide.’

This would have been a very different war if we had told certain states to shove it, we are going hunting anyway. It wouldn’t have been diplomatic, but with the righteous rage of the United States at that moment who could have lodged more than token protests?

We lost because we just said, okay we’re done and went home in a way that looked shaky weak and deceptive… we didn’t even have the fortitude to stand up and declare, Afghanistan you are on your own guys because we’re out. Biden boldly promised that he didn’t believe and we had no indication that the Taliban would roll up the country… which was utter bullshit of course. They were our escort out. An ass-backwards neobarbarian culture that we kicked out was back in the seat of power.

It makes it feel like we were never there to many.

While that's a good summary it ignores the aspect of the war that may be the most telling.  The incredible transfer of wealth to the so-called beltway bandits - the contractors that profit off war.  Everyone focuses on the businesses, especially the defense contractors, but it's just as big a crime for the congress critters and the Fed.gov employees who participate with the dirty money, too.  Early on, we could have easily turned Afghanistan and more of the Mideast into plains of Trinitite, but we didn't do that "for the chidrin."  We didn't do it because our civilization respects not punishing innocents for things they didn't do. That's hard to believe when you look at things from abandoning people like Biden's translator in Afghanistan to the Covid response. The problem is that nation building doesn't really work.  Does it ever? I don't really know. Maybe now and then.

Just to be clear, it's not that I think we should still be in Afghanistan, I'm closer to those who have said we should have gotten out long ago, only we should have done it competently. We didn't leave from any position of strength, we left with our tails between our legs looking so weak as to be pitiful to the charitable observers and pathetic to the rest of the world. I'm sure we're especially pathetic to the heirs of Bin Laden who declared us "a weak horse" easy to roll over. I expect lots more actual attempts to emulate 9/11 while we're showing weakness. Less like shirtless guy with buffalo horns and more like, you know, actual acts of terrorism. 

In the end, I always think of it by personalizing it. Imagine you were in those buildings. It's a normal workday, maybe you had the usual morning rush, getting your kids off to school. All normal. You get to work, get settled into your place, start digging into whatever sort of problems your job has you solving. Just like every other day. Suddenly, because of a 7th century mandate, as interpreted by a nutjob in a cave half a world away, your building shakes. Pretty soon it's on fire. You try for the stairs but can't get there, the stairwell is choked with flames and smoke. You're trapped. The fire is getting worse. There's nobody coming to help you that can give a tiny bit of hope. The only way out is death. But staying where you are means being slowly burned to death. Which way do you take? Do you burn to death, slowly, agonizingly, or jump and get it over with in one moment, after a long fall to think about it? 

A group of 9-11 victims who chose the "get it over with in one moment" option.

European space business. Is it dead?

Is the European space capability stuck with turn of (this) century technology? We know that European Space Agency (ESA) has a couple of launch platforms, but nothing is reusable. Nothing has landed and been flown again even as test. On this side of the Atlantic, the goal is "rapidly reusable," as in being able to depend on a short inspection and then launch. Nobody has actually achieved that yet, but that's the stated goal. We saw Isar Aerospace launch on Saturday afternoon as planned, a company started by a couple of young engineers from a German university. Isar hasn't successfully launched two of anything. 

Ars Technica today devoted an article to The Exploration Company, being led by Hélène Huby (Huby and her company have been featured here before), and went with the headline “Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment.” For her part, Huby said, “We will not be relevant without a massive rocket at a massive cadence.” Sounds right to me! They open by noting Huby seems to suddenly be everywhere.

This week she is serving as one of two envoys, alongside astronaut Thomas Pesquet, at a high-profile International Space Summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron. The government’s website [in French - SiG] for the event describes her as chief executive of “the fastest-growing space company in Europe.”

Also this week, that firm, The Exploration Company, announced a significant capital raise of $450 million in Series C funding. Although not spectacular by the standards of some US space businesses, this is the largest-ever Series C funding round by a Europe-based space company, and likely the largest funding round ever raised by a female-led company in Europe.

When I led off by saying the European space industry is stuck at turn of the century technology, I meant things like this quote. 

So many of the biggest European space projects of this decade feel dated. The flagship rocket, the Ariane 6 vehicle, is flying. But its costs are high, it is fully expendable, and its flight rate of 10 launches a year feels antediluvian in the megaconstellation era. Europe’s response to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is a project called IRIS², which is already years behind schedule and has seen its estimated cost balloon to more than $15 billion before much metal has even been cut.

"Estimated cost" (which you know is going to be cheaper than reality) is $15 billion and the program is already "years behind schedule?" Who's running this? Gavin Newsom? Who or whatever is going on has led to a situation where it's easy to say Europe's space efforts are going to keep them low on any measures of success. Eric Berger at Ars Technica sees a positive light here.

All of this makes Huby refreshing because she is honest about the situation and has big ambitions. She seems to be one of the only people in Europe who recognizes these problems, speaks publicly about them, and is trying to do something about it. 

Huby's background is as an economist, and while there are some flaming basket cases that are university-trained economists, they do tend to be a bit more reality-bound than many other "degreed professionals."

After working in the existing European space industry, Huby founded The Exploration Company. Their first goal was cargo ship similar to the Cargo Dragon SpaceX is flying to the ISS. This resulted in the Nyx spacecraft, now undergoing NASA safety reviews for a cargo mission to the International Space Station as early as November 2028. She is said to also be working on a manned version like the Crew Dragon, which has pretty thoroughly taken over crew flights to the ISS. 

Her work in this area could be rewarded in Europe, where there is growing frustration with the United States as a reliable partner in space and a desire to have independent access to orbit for European astronauts. The leader of the European Space Agency, Josef Aschbacher, said this week he hopes to receive a mandate from European leaders to develop this capability by the end of the year. The Exploration Company, which is already deep into the development of a cargo spacecraft, would instantly become one of the frontrunners in a competition to provide crewed service.

That's not all the Exploration Company has in its sights. Remember her quote, “We will not be relevant without a massive rocket at a massive cadence?” They have announced the development of an engine named “Storm,” a full-flow staged combustion engine fueled by liquid oxygen and methane with approximately 400,000 pounds of thrust. This would be used to power a reusable rocket intended to launch 40 metric tons in reusable mode, and 60 tons in expendable mode. An aggressive timeline for the rocket’s development, she said, is 2033. Huby notes that no European company produces anything like that. 

At this point, it's entirely appropriate to remark that The Exploration Company has had one, single, partial success in spaceflight to its credit. That's a lot of big talk for the equivalent of a baby. What they have over the big competitors in European Spaceflight is the vision of what they want to do and when. Much like here in the states, the big companies have spent their time seeking government handouts to protect their turf. Sure sounds like “Starliner.” What the US has, and this is probably mostly an effect of being a much larger economy than the European Union, is the billions of dollars that companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, Amazon and the smaller companies have invested in space. Add in the many imitators of the US in China, and it's all radically transforming spaceflight. 

Hélène Huby, chief executive officer of The Exploration Co., during an interview in London, UK, on Friday, March 8, 2024. Credit: Betty Laura Zapata/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Can they do it? Can The Exploration Company do these things? Good question! We get to see how it progresses. The answer to whether or not the European space industry is dead might well be, "Ask me again in five years." 

Stoke Space sets another milestone

Remember Stoke Space? They developed a novel way of making a rocket's stages steerable that depended on regulating the fuel flow to the engines on a ring, so that instead of moving the engine bells in angles to the vertical, the engines are fixed and the fuel flow is varied. 

Shown here are the upper stage engines of their first test vehicle, named Hopper 2, which flew in September of 2023. The difference between this ring and a conventional array of engines steered by changing the directions they point kinda jumps off the page at you. There are no engine bells, just spots on the ring that appears to be flat. Above each plume you can make out what appears to be the rest of the engine. 

The Kent, Washington-based company just raised $1 billion via its"Series E" capital campaign, bringing Stoke’s total investor haul to $2.3 billion. The Sept. 8 announcement provided a development update for Stoke’s fully reusable Nova Pathfinder launch vehicle and included plans for its never-before-seen Nova Block 2 rocket, a more powerful system designed to be able to deliver up to 15 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). 

Stoke is actively developing two launch vehicles: the Nova Pathfinder and Nova Block 2. Pathfinder will be the first one to be test flown and results from the testing figures to be incorporated into Nova Block 2.

The initial version of Nova is planned to have a lift capacity of 3 metric tons in fully reusable mode and up to 7 tons in a fully expendable configuration. The rocket’s first stage is powered by seven Zenith engines, with a combined thrust of 700,000 pounds. The novel upper stage features a ring of 24 thrusters that surround a regeneratively cooled heat shield to protect the rocket during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

After completing an extensive set of structural tests earlier this summer on the first stage, CEO Andy Lapsa said Stoke will ship this stage “pretty soon” to the company’s launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. After additional testing there, the vehicle will undergo a static fire test before being mated with the upper stage.

Nova Pathfinder upper stage flight article 1. (Image credit: Stoke Space)

The upper stage will soon be shipped to Stoke’s test site at Moses Lake, Washington, for its own set of structural tests, followed by a hot fire test. Then the upper stage will also be shipped to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

For the first time since Stoke was founded in 2020, Lapsa publicly put out a target launch date for Nova, saying the company is aiming for “early” 2027 to launch. Of course, he is fully aware that problems can, and often do, occur during stage testing and final integration of the vehicles.

“I feel good about that launch date,” he said. “I think that’s pretty realistic. But as you know, in our industry, we’ll go when we’re ready.” 

The Block 2 version of the Nova rocket will use their methane-liquid-oxygen-fueled Zenith engines although there will be more of them. The upper stage will similarly use hydrogen and liquid oxygen for propellant. Probably the biggest change in the Block 2 version is that it gets rid of that triangular shape for the upper stage and goes over to the much more prevalent cylindrical shapes

Stoke is targeting 2029 for the first launches of the Block 2 Nova rockets.