OK Hams, you've got a week to get ready

I write about this every year because the best VHF contest of the year is pretty much always the June VHF contest put on by the American Radio Relay League or ARRL. As always, the contest starts on the second Saturday of the month, with the peculiarity that it doesn't start at midnight UTC - as the vast majority of contests do - which would be Friday night, June 12th at 8:00 PM. Instead, it starts Saturday afternoon at 1800 UTC which is 2:00PM EDT and goes until 0300 UTC or 11:00 AM Sunday night, which is Monday morning the 15th in UTC. 

WA7BNM's Contest Calendar shows it this way: 

ARRL June VHF Contest: 1800Z, Jun 13 to 0259Z, Jun 15
	Geographic Focus:	United States/Canada
	Participation:	Worldwide
	Mode:	All
	Bands:	50 MHz and up
	Classes:	Single Op All Band (All Modes/Analog Modes)(Low/High) Single Op Portable (All Modes/Analog Modes) Single Op 3-Band (All Modes/Analog Modes) Single Op FM Rover Limited Rover Unlimited Rover Unlimited Multi-Op Limited Multi-Op
	Max power:	(see rules)
	Exchange:	4-character grid square
	Work stations:	Once per band per grid square
	QSO Points:	1 point per 50- or 144-MHz QSO 2 points per 222- or 432-MHz QSO 3 points per 906- or 1296-MHz QSO 4 points per 2.3 GHz (or higher) QSO
	Multipliers:	Each grid square once per band
	Score Calculation:	Total score = total QSO points x total multipliers
	Submit logs by:	0300Z June 24, 2026
	E-mail logs to:	(none)
	Upload log at:	http://contest-log-submission.arrl.org
	Mail logs to:	June VHF ARRL 225 Main St. Newington, CT 06111 USA
	Find rules at:	https://www.arrl.org/june-vhf

 

Almost a month ago, I ran a post called, "Did it just turn into summer?" because suddenly, the VHF bands, in particular 6 meters (50 - 54 MHz) where I do most of my VHF operating these days suddenly came alive like it hadn't been so far this calendar year. Well, the answer was "no" because that 6m opening wasn't long enough lived. As the calendar flipped into June,it started being more like summer, with the sporadic E "red blob" over massive parts of the country happening more like every day. 

I just took another screen copy of the DXMaps site and it's noticeably bigger and wider than the one I posted in May, so let me post the new one and talk a little about what to look for. This plot was grabbed at 0018 UTC on June 7th.   

If you've never seen a plot like this, you might be overwhelmed by the number of contacts shown. Every red, brown or other color line on the map is a contact between two hams. Most, but not all, of those contacts have the call for both ends of the line. That is, if both ends have the call, when you click it will tell you if that station contacted the other or just monitored (heard) the other end.  For example, in the upper left of the USA, there's a station with a white background called N7DNF and it you hover your mouse pointer over the white area, the live DXMaps would display "N7DNF (DN55RS) last reported by" - the call of the station reporting it (so not N7DNF) with the time reported, the frequency it was heard on and modulation mode. The DN55RS is the grid square N7DNF reported being in. If you were doing this "live" on your computer, you'd see somewhere in the blob, another one of those white or yellow rectangles would change its appearance a little to help you find the other end of the QSO.

First important note: you may look at that and think if you turn on your radio, you'll hear all these calls. With luck you'll hear one or two stations that others living near your end of the line will hear. One of the things that still impresses me after decades of observing it on 6m is how "oddly specific" the targeting is. A maidenhead grid square is one degree of latitude by 2 degrees of longitude which is approximately  70 × 100 miles in the continental US. I have seen grid squares open for a contact while the adjacent square north or south is as dead as if it was on another planet; minutes later it would jump over the adjacent square which still wouldn't be audible, and minutes after that it would jump down to the one it had previously jumped over.  

When the map looks like this, I've heard two adjacent - or just "close to each other" - squares and not another station in the country. I've been operating FT8 the majority of the time, which operates in 15 second intervals so that stations alternate which 15 second interval they transmit in: 0 to 15 and 30 to 45 seconds or 15 to 30 and 45 to 60 seconds. I'll hear, for example, two stations in New England on the first (0-15 and 30-45 seconds, called the even intervals) and somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska in the odd intervals.  

There are other sources of maps like this other than DXMaps, and totally different ways of presenting the information. There are other contests besides the ARRL June VHF contest, and July has one I've played around in a couple of times - the CQ magazine contest. And, of course, one of the biggest events of the year is the ARRL's Field Day, the last weekend of June. 

NASA's quiet X-59 supersonic jet finally breaks sound barrier

This is a story that has been languishing in the background for quite some time. NASA has been working to reduce the amount "sonic boom" that aircraft make as they exceed the speed of sound for several years, and rolled out the first prototype of an experimental supersonic airplane called X-59 in August of 2023. The X-59 bears little to no resemblance to current supersonic fighters like the F35 or earlier craft like the F-22 or F-18. That said, they've been modeling and talking openly about it for much longer than just since 2023.  

Today, the X-59 actually flew faster than the speed of sound for the first time. 

Friday's flight began and ended at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The X-59, with NASA test pilot Jim "Clue" Less at the yoke, took off at 2:08 p.m. EDT (1808 GMT; 11:08 a.m. local California time) and touched down 81 minutes later.

Less took the jet to a maximum altitude of 43,400 feet (13,228 meters) and a top speed of 713 mph (1,147 kph). That works out to about Mach 1.1, or 1.1 times faster than the speed of sound, NASA officials said in the statement. (The speed of sound varies with temperature, as sound waves move faster in warmer air. At sea level, where the air is relatively warm, Mach 1 is about 761 mph, or 1,225 kph.)

NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft exceeded the speed of sound for the first time on June 5, 2026. (Image credit: NASA/Lori Losey)

Don't expect the X-59 crew to rest on their laurels - they're planning on a bigger follow-on mission soon. 

In just a few days, they plan to send the plane on its first "mission conditions" flight — one that reaches a top speed of Mach 1.4 and an altitude of about 55,000 feet (16,764 m).

"This speed and altitude are the base conditions for the X-59 when it will eventually fly over several U.S. communities, enabling NASA to gather data about how people may perceive its quiet thump," NASA officials wrote in the same statement. 

"NASA will share this data with U.S. and international regulators to help establish new data-driven noise standards to enable a future viable market for supersonic commercial flight over land," they added.

The X-59 was built by the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works - a group that has quite a range of "first ever" air craft and their flights.

"Since the aircraft’s first flight on Oct. 28, 2025, the team has made tremendous progress, flying 16 times in the last 90 days and getting into a steady test rhythm," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the same statement. "I'm grateful to the NASA team and Lockheed Martin Skunk Works for their help getting us to this point, and I hope this is the first of many collaborations as we rebuild NASA’s X-plane portfolio."

Good night and good-bye, MAVEN

Back in early December, the 10th, we learned that NASA's MAVEN satellite that had been in orbit around Mars for 11 years had suddenly gone quiet. The satellite went behind Mars from Earth's viewpoint, an occultation, but ground teams didn’t hear from the spacecraft when it was supposed to regain contact with Earth. In the 10 years of the mission up to that point they had gone through other occultations without issue. 

Ground teams last heard from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, spacecraft on Saturday, December 6. “Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the red planet,” NASA said in a short statement. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.”

As always, the mission had contingency plans that included bad scenarios like this one and various plans to try to contact MAVEN that were invoked. They listened for faint signals and uplinked commands in the blind but never heard the satellite again. Hopes of saving the mission faded over time and on Wednesday they announced they were saying good-bye.

“NASA has ceased efforts to search for the MAVEN spacecraft and are beginning activities to decommission the mission,” said Mike Moreau, MAVEN’s project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. 

It will take some time to decide how MAVEN failed. While not based on a constant download of information in real time, MAVEN was working properly before passing behind Mars and the next time they should have heard it, there was nothing. 

“One of the bits of that we were able to confirm is an inertial rate measurement that told us the spacecraft was spinning at about 2.7 revolutions per minute,” Moreau said. “We also confirmed that that was consistent with a Doppler signature that we saw in the data. That’s faster than the spacecraft is expected to rotate, and that indicates a problem that the spacecraft probably couldn’t recover from.”

Without the ability to point its solar arrays toward the Sun, the tumbling spacecraft likely drained its batteries within hours.

“That was one of the data points that helped us understand that the spacecraft probably reached a power state that was not supportable to continue operations,” Moreau said. “Those are the facts that we know. The anomaly review board is still looking at the root cause of what actually initiated the failure.”

MAVEN orbits Mars in an eccentric elliptical orbit with a low point as close as 110 miles and high point as far as 2,500 miles from the planet’s surface. It's expected to remain in this orbit for the next foreseeable 50 to 100 years before the thin atmosphere of Mars eventually causes it to come out of orbit and smash into the planet.

Artist’s illustration of the MAVEN spacecraft in its elliptical orbit around Mars. Not even remotely to scale. Credit: NASA/University of Colorado/LASP

For most of its time at Mars, MAVEN served as a radio relay for small robots exploring Mars, like the rovers and even landers. This allowed NASA to return significantly more data and imagery from rovers like Perseverance and Curiosity than would be possible through a direct-to-Earth radio connection. NASA has four other satellites that could take the place of MAVEN but three of the four are older than MAVEN was. 

“Over the life of the mission, MAVEN supported more than 8 percent of all of our relay sessions planned by our rovers and landers, but it accounted for nearly 18 percent of all of the data returned, illustrating its usefulness when returning large data volumes,” said Tiffany Morgan, director of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program.

Perhaps the better way to close this is to pass along two big quotes from Wednesday's meeting.

Shannon Curry, MAVEN's principal investigator, described the probe as the "Best. Mars. Mission. Ever." during Wednesday's call. Mike Moreau, the MAVEN project manager, praised the team and said they, "really experienced the loss of a loved one with the end of the mission here."

Sooner or later, every company has a moment like Blue Origin's

Somewhere along the line of developing a launch vehicle, it seems like every company developing a launch vehicle goes through an explosion on the launch pad like Blue went through last week. SpaceX had one in the early September of 2016 as they were getting started with the Falcon rocket. I don't think it's a surprise to say there were a lot more explosions like this in the early days of the 1950s and '60s. 

A former NASA engineer named John Muratore sat on console as launch director in early September 2016 as propellant flowed onto a Falcon 9 rocket in Florida. Ahead of a planned launch two days later, SpaceX was preparing for a static fire test of the vehicle.

Then, all of a sudden, the rocket exploded. “It came out of nowhere, and it was really violent,” Muratore said. This fireball resulted in the destruction of the rocket, much of its launch site, and the AMOS-6 satellite already attached to the vehicle.

While looking for a good, general look at the situation, a good overview, I came across this video. There are aspects I don't like about it, mostly being at a low level, but that just means the video is a bit longer than it could be. 

The video, by someone or some group that calls themselves Dark Ledger converges on how both the 2016 SpaceX and this Blue Origin explosion have ties to Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessels or COPVs. Perhaps the bigger point is that we've also talked about as COPV failures in other explosions, like June '25's Starship 36 explosion or November '25's SuperHeavy 18's RUD on the launch pad. 

Clearly, we don't know if the explosion was caused by the COPV or if the COPV was even damaged by the explosion, but it's a good thing to try to find and a good starting point.  

The narrator then rushes to say the problem with this disaster isn't just the explosion. The problem is actually that Blue Origin only has one functional launch pad. He doesn't mention that Blue Origin has started work on a second pad. It's far enough from ready that what I've read doesn't make it look like the new pad can make a big difference in how quickly BO can get flying again. 

Launch pads are among the most complex pieces of infrastructure involved in sending a rocket into space. They require a lot of brawn, as evidenced by the need for tall and strong steel launch towers. Then there’s the large amount of concrete used for the foundation, flame trench, and surrounding areas.
...
But launch sites are about much more than concrete and steel. There is an incredible amount of electrical wiring that almost certainly got fried by the fireball. And then there is the intricate tubing that provides gas and liquids to fill not just the rocket’s propellant tanks but also smaller pressurized vessels throughout the vehicle for various purposes.

“I’m worried about the tubing,” Harriss said, noting that every launch site has bespoke plumbing and electrical elements, with lots of tasks that must be done by hand; pulling and splicing wire, delicate welding, and so much more. “It takes a lot of time and effort to put that into place.”

As virtually ever visitor here has said either directly or indirectly, the source article on Ars Technica talks about CEO Limp's statement that they'll be back flying before the end of the year. 

None of the former SpaceX employees I spoke with for this article—some on the record, some off—believe this timeline is realistic. Twelve months was generally viewed as the best-case scenario. Eighteen months was seen as most likely.

Much like what the comments here are saying.

Blue Origin says they'll be back launching this year

Alright, who wants to conduct a poll, maybe keep track of people voting for the month of the next New Glenn flight? 

Let me back up a bit and add the story. 

Earlier today, commenter BillB linked to a post on X by Blue's CEO Dave Limp. Limp was rather optimistic about repairing the damage and concluded that most of what has to be repaired is fairly easy to work on and he concluded by saying he expects New Glenn will be back flying before the end of this year. 

Some LC-36 updates. Now that we’ve had access to the pad and integration facility we can share a bit of good news. The propellant farm, oxygen, liquid hydrogen and LNG tanks are all in good shape. This is good luck because these are very long lead items. The water tower is also good. The big support tower is damaged, but it can be repaired in place rather than torn down and replaced. 

In keeping with the form they like, he concluded his post with, "We will fly again before the end of this year. Gradatim Ferociter." Using what I interpret to be the Latin term I first learned about back in this February, translated as "Gradually, Ferociously" or possibly "Step by Step, Ferociously."

With this update, Limp addresses several things people have been talking about online. The more complex one was probably talk about the new version of New Glenn which has been talked about but not prototyped yet. The New Glenn that has flown is referred to as the 7x2 version and the new one is the 9x4 version. In both cases, the first number is the number of engines in the first stage while the second is the number of engines in the second stage. There must be more hardware changes to use those additional engines or else they couldn't get fuel to run on, and while I haven't seen it actually reported on, I would expect that the new versions will probably have bigger fuel tanks and may also be larger diameter or taller or both. 

The Internet and social media types jumped to suggesting they should just go to the 9x4. Limp said not now, they're staying with the 7x2.

While the launch tower that's still standing can be repaired on site without taking it down, the other must be rebuilt. The New Glenn to be launched has been transported to the launch complex by a massive transporter-erector, and Limp had said Blue Origin had already planned to replace that. That has become a higher priority now, but it makes more sense to build the new one now rather than spend a lot of time and money getting the old design rebuilt, use it for one or two missions and then go to the new one. 

The most important part of all this has yet to be mentioned. Can Blue fly before the end of this year? My inclination is to say I seriously doubt it. During the visit to the company last Friday that provided that photo of him in yesterday's post, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told CEO Limp and Blue's founder Jeff Bezos that he is “all in” on supporting the company’s efforts. So, too, is the US Space Force, which manages the launch range at Cape Canaveral. 

A six-month timeline to return to flight is very optimistic. The LC-36A site will need serious rework, from its concrete foundation on up. Some of these materials require fairly long lead times, and it’s not clear that the company has the personnel needed—particularly the touch-labor technicians, welders, and others who build this specialized launch hardware. Historically, Blue Origin has not operated in such a rushed manner, either. 

This is a risky move for Blue Origin, NASA, and everyone associated with the Artemis program to start establishing a permanent presence on the moon. Others, more familiar with this kind of work than I am say a more realistic timeline for Blue Origin to rebuild its pad and launch from there is 12 to 18 months. That's simply too long to tolerate. It's an engraved invitation to SpaceX to get their version of the HLS on the moon, ASAP.

The LC-36 on CCSFS (Image credit: SpaceFromSpace / © 2026 Planet Labs PBC)

Small Space News Story Roundup 81

I know that things are happening on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Vandenberg Space Force Base beyond just assessing the damages from Blue Origin's New Glenn loss - I've watched some launches from both places. It's just that there's very little being talked about. I've seen a couple of small news stories that I'll pass along. 

NASA to order more Crew Dragon flights from SpaceX 

NASA has decided to add more missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract for launches to the International Space Station (ISS). There are rumors that Boeing is going to drop their efforts for Starliner, but since that's giving up guaranteed income, I'm skeptical of that. Still, the additional flights from SpaceX will protect NASA by ensuring there are ways to get crews to the ISS and back.

The space agency announced its intent on May 18 to add six more missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract. Each will carry four astronauts to and from the space station. NASA last placed an order for more SpaceX commercial crew missions in 2022, when it added five missions for $1.4 billion. That contract extension covers missions through Crew-14, expected to launch sometime next year. The Crew-12 mission is currently docked at the ISS. 

Yes, you can blame it all on Starliner. NASA had originally gone to two providers primarily to protect themselves against just what happened - that one provider would be incapable of meeting the program requirements. The thing is that everyone assumed the big name spacecraft provider with decades of experience, Boeing, would be the survivor and not the no-name start up. SpaceX has been certified for these flights for six years and Boeing's Starliner has yet to cross that hurdle and earn certification. 

The next Starliner mission will be a cargo-only flight, so the earliest time Boeing’s crew capsule will fly with astronauts again is next year. With the ISS nearing retirement in the early 2030s and Starliner still firmly in test phase, NASA has reduced its order for operational Starliner flights from six to four.  

There has been speculation since the disastrous 2024 test flight which stranded the Starliner crew (Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams) on the ISS, turning a two week mission into nine months on the ISS, that Boeing would give up on Starliner.  With those four flights that NASA has just reduced the count to, I doubt they could even cover the money they've lost so far. It seems it will be a loss for Boeing. 

While looking through some pictures of Starliner I've used before to add here, I ran across this one that actually surprised me. The picture was dated 2021 and it's the same Starliner capsule that flew in 2024. It was in an article that was talking about whether or not they would fly then - in 2021 - three years before they were accepted for flying. 

We go where we need to be, and today that was @NASA_Kennedy.

Today, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman led a group of his staff to look over the damage at LC-36. 

Some of my senior engineers and I spent time at @blueorigin with @JeffBezos and @davill, speaking with the workforce and seeing the damage at LC-36 firsthand. I appreciated the opportunity to hear directly from those working through the aftermath and better understand the challenges ahead.

There is a lot of work to do, but this is exactly why people choose careers in aerospace, whether at NASA, Blue Origin, or across the industry. The talent in this field thrives under pressure and performs at its best when solving the toughest problems.

In general, it's a positive post on X and he comes across like a good leader for these tough times at NASA. 

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman looks out of the window of the helicopter flying with LC-36 off to the port side. Photo taken May 29, 2026.

Is that Hunga Tonga volcano still affecting the world?

In his daily posting over at Virtual Mirage, "Bad Moon Rising," Larry Lambert mentioned the incredible volcanic eruption of Hunga Tonga, more properly Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, that erupted in January of '22. I've written about the eruption and its effects several times and by coincidence had recently been thinking that we're closing in on five years since that eruption. Shortly after the eruption, reports began appearing that the "experts" were saying this was the most violent explosion ever recorded by the worldwide network that monitors for nuclear explosions:

Titled “A nuclear-test monitor calls Tonga volcano blast 'biggest thing that we've ever seen',” it reports that an international group that monitors for likely atomic detonations has reported that at every one of their sites around the world - 53 of them - the infrasonic wave from the Tongan volcano is the largest thing they've ever measured, even bigger than the Soviet Union's Tsar Bomba, the biggest nuclear detonation in history. [BOLD added - SiG] 

It absolutely wasn't just another volcano going off. Hunga Tonga injected three times more water into the upper stratosphere than was originally estimated. It injected 150-million metric tons or almost 40 Trillion gallons of water vapor into the atmosphere. The concern expressed at the time of the eruptions was that water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas and it was going to affect the weather for years. How big an effect and for how long?

The problem with answering that is hidden in the part about "most violent eruptions ever seen" - nobody had any real experience to base calculations on. How can anyone trust a model that has never been verified to properly model this sort of input? 

For what it's worth, after about a year, a consensus began to circulate that it would cause warming for five years. It took perhaps a whole minute to get this copy of the University of Alabama Huntsville plot of global temperatures as reported by the experts, and draw a vertical line on it to show the eruption of Hunga Tonga. (On the right at 2022 and a black line)

It's a busy plot. When the volcano blew at the start of 2022, the running average temperature in red was cooler than the prediction dotted line, and it started warming noticeably by the beginning of 2023. As of the end of the red line at the beginning of year four, the red line is still above the predicted temperature's dotted line, which includes the modeled global warming. You'll note that the peak temperature in early '24 is the highest temperature on the entire chart.

The right side of this plot is the beginning of 2027, and I think the current shape of the plot looks like the temperature will be close to the predicted, dotted line by the start of next year. 

Hunga Tonga was a very different event than people are used to even for big volcanic eruptions. Typically, volcanic eruptions cause cooling because they're a source of sulfur dioxide, SO₂. Instead, Hunga Tonga injected the trillions of gallons of seawater which causes warming. 

It's practically a running joke that people think whatever weather they had when they were five years old is the way it always was and always should be. They don't recognize that changes happen both over short and long time intervals; basically "the only thing that's constant is change". Look at the plots I posted in my Earf Day piece and tell me what the temperature should be to within a tenth of a degree.

Those Pico Balloons Again

I can sense the "what are you talking about?" questions in the air. 

Three years ago in February, after the headline Chinese Balloon Incident, I started looking into the responses, starting from the question, "Did The USAF Shoot Down a Ham Radio Balloon?" and first encountered the idea of hobbyists that made small or downright tiny balloons that they'd let ascend into the atmosphere and transmit a low power signal with some information that could be monitored wherever they happened to be. It eventually turned into a fairly long introduction to the topic of hobby balloons that go around the world. 

Again, that was over three years ago, and groups like the Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade are still online, and growing. 

Earlier in the week, I came across an article on one of the forums I read where a guy, working on his own, had found a way to get a very lightweight balloon into the upper atmosphere - above most airline traffic - and it made me want to do a post about what he did. Maybe to encourage you, or maybe to encourage me. Let me show a map he posted showing the travels of his cheap little balloon. 

What I really want to show about this is the information in the upper left hand corner. I'll enlarge it, and add it here. 

While the big picture shows what appears to be around 3 laps, this says 3.821 laps - and much more impressive to me: 68 days and 8 hours floating around the world. Just above the bottom of the summary, it says the last altitude was 13.70 km - which converts to just under 45,000 feet: 44,948.

Now here's the embarrassing part. I dutifully saved this image but I apparently didn't leave myself a link to the source where he shows off the heart of the balloon, a folded piece of paper with a few solar cells to power it, and a few small printed circuit boards. They look professionally done, not hobbyist level, and that's telling me that they're probably among the many professionally designed and produced boards used by hobbyists for many things that the developers never dreamed of people doing. Which means I can't say "just do this" and you can launch your own pico-balloon.

I'll keep looking for that, and hope to be able to round it up soon. 

Clearly, New Glenn is NOT launching June 4

(While sitting and watching the second orbital launch of the day from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. this one a group of Amazon Leo satellites on an Atlas V... The first orbital launch of the day was a load of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 at about 8AM)

Pretty much all of the talk in the space press is about last night's major disaster with the loss of the next New Glenn rocket. After I posted last night's piece that the next New Glenn launch being No Earlier Than next Thursday I wasted some time watching some videos on YouTube and needed to turn in for the night. As I started to shut down, YouTube offered me a video from Ellie in Space that was saying something terrible had just happened. I looked at a couple of descriptions and thought "this is so bad we'll know nothing tonight that won't be changed by tomorrow" and went to bed. 

That was only a slight overstatement. 

As we've chatted about in the comments to the coming launch that were posted Thursday night, there are two big issues in the aftermath of this disaster and both of them come down to the impact on Artemis. On Tuesday, NASA contracted with Blue to deliver two rovers to the Moon using the Blue Moon Mark I lander, presumably on separate flights. That seems pretty iffy right now. If the New Glenn can't launch, I don't know if the Falcon Heavy could handle the rovers, but the rovers are being designed to fit the Blue Moon Mark I and some modification may be necessary.

An artist’s rendering of a Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander deploying Astrolab’s Crewed Lunar Vehicle (CLV-1) on the surface of the Moon.  You'll note the wheels of the rover aren't touching the lunar regolith, and that large bar is holding the rover just above the surface after taking the rover off the top of the lunar lander.  Graphic: Astrolab

While the amount of information has barely changed as the day has gone by, I hope more comes out in the next few days. Yes, including the weekend. Meanwhile, Scott Manley's video "Blue Origin's Rocket Explosion - How Bad Is It?" is good, and better than that Ellie in Space video mentioned and linked to above. I'm afraid there's very little more I can add now.

Blue Origin's next New Glenn flight is next week

It was just over two months ago that the third New Glenn mission launched, and resulted in a failure of the upper stage of the vehicle and the customer's satellite in an unusable orbit. 

The Federal Aviation Administration and Blue Origin announced the closure of the failure investigation May 22. Yesterday, officials confirmed Blue Origin’s next launch will loft a payload of 48 commercial satellites for Amazon’s broadband network in low-Earth orbit. This will be the most satellites Amazon has launched on a single rocket, surpassing previous flights on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V, SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and Europe’s Ariane 6.

The launch is currently scheduled for No Earlier Than next Thursday, June 4, 1:21 PM EDT from Launch Complex 36 - or LC-36 - on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS). While there's no indication of how the size of these Amazon Leo satellites compare to the various versions of Starlink, that's really only important if you're comparing payload sizes between the various vehicles that are available - which the Ars Technica source article indirectly did in that reference to "the most satellites Amazon has launched on a single rocket" and the various launch vehicles Amazon Leo has used. 

It's best to consider that June 4th date and time as a goal that might slip in the event of troubles going through the next tests before they can launch, but a two month turnaround from a mission failure to clearing for the next launch is positive for Blue Origin. It's saying that the efforts to increase launch cadence are having the desired effects. 

While SpaceX has over 10,000 Starlink satellites in service, that's a difficult task for Amazon Leo and really any other new providers. Simply from the viewpoint of catching up with the service that has the longest head start in the market, given how many satellites they want to launch and that inevitably turns into questions about how many a given launch vehicle can lift at a time. 

Getting New Glenn into service for Amazon should help accelerate deployment of the Amazon Leo satellite constellation, a would-be competitor with SpaceX’s Starlink network. ULA boasts a large backlog for the Vulcan rocket, which can loft 45 Amazon Leo satellites in one go. But the US Space Force has reserved numerous Vulcan missions of its own. ULA says it is equipped to support two Vulcan launches per month once the rocket is flying routinely.

Blue Origin has the advantage of reusability. The New Glenn rocket’s first-stage booster is reusable, a capability first demonstrated on the company’s last flight April 19, despite the upper-stage failure that occurred later in the mission.

The bulk of Amazon’s satellites have so far been launched on ULA’s Atlas V rocket, a reliable workhorse that is nearing retirement. Amazon has just two more launches on the Atlas V, each carrying 29 satellites. 

The next Atlas V mission for Blue Origin is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on Friday evening at 7:33 PM EDT from SLC-41. Amazon Leo currently has 302 satellites in orbit, and this launch should push the network past the 10 percent mark for the total number of 3232 spacecraft. You may recall that the FCC approved Amazon Leo's plans for their satellite-based service with a condition that they have 50% of the planned 3200 satellites in service by this July. 

That absolutely can't happen - there's not enough satellites and even if there were, there's not enough launch capacity to put them up in orbit.  The best argument Amazon LEO has is to say they're doing as much as they can to get there. 

The 7-meter-diameter payload fairing offers twice the payload volume of the smaller 5-meter fairings used on Falcon 9, Vulcan, and Ariane 6. Credit: Blue Origin

As I often do, last words to Stephen Clark at Ars Technica - who goes into many details I left out here.

With Blue Origin’s New Glenn soon to fly its first mission for Amazon, Arianespace’s Ariane 6 on stable footing, and the prospect of more Falcon 9 launches on the horizon, Amazon may have turned a corner in solving its rocket conundrum.

If it has, a well-funded competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink service, long dominant in the satellite broadband market, may finally be at hand. Still, Starlink has the advantage of launching satellites cheaply and reliably on Falcon 9. SpaceX’s internal costs for a Falcon 9 launch are thought to be close to $15 million, one-fifth of the $74 million SpaceX charges external customers like Amazon for a dedicated flight.

FAA Grounds Starship

It took them a while to get to it, but the FAA has imposed a "Do Not Launch" order onto SpaceX for Starship Version 3 due to the failure of the Super Heavy booster to perform it's intended flight during Friday's first test flight. 

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) just declared the May 22 Starship V3 launch a mishap and is requiring an investigation before the huge vehicle can take to the skies again.

"A return to flight of the Starship-Super Heavy vehicle is based on the FAA determining that any system, process, or procedure related to the mishap does not affect public safety," FAA officials wrote in an update today (May 27).

Super Heavy was intended to perform a soft splashdown in the Gulf of America instead of returning to the new launch pad it had left minutes earlier, but instead was unable to perform the engine burns needed for this controlled return and ended up "experiencing a hard splashdown" in the Gulf, as SpaceX wrote in their mission update.

Following stage separation, the Super Heavy booster performed a directional flip maneuver and attempted its boostback burn. It was unable to light all planned engines and performed a partial boostback burn that ended early. Super Heavy attempted to reignite its engines for the landing burn before experiencing a hard splashdown in the Gulf of America.

Doesn't "hard splashdown" sound nicer than "disintegrated when it hit the water at Mach 1"? 

As I write, this Space.com news story says it was published six hours ago. I don't expect this launch prohibition to last very long, given the relative rates that SpaceX works at and similar holds that have been put in place before. You may remember the FAA grounded the world's busiest rocket workhorse, Falcon 9, this past February. That was resolved in just four days. I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if this issue was solved already and it takes longer to communicate the fix to the FAA than to implement it.

SpaceX's first Starship V3 megarocket launches from the Starbase site in South Texas on May 22, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)

NASA proposes a lunar settlement development plan

Since Jared Isaacman took over as NASA administrator, one of the topics he has talked about regularly is not just returning to the Moon, and beating China to this little goal, but creating a sustained presence on the Moon; more like colonizing than visiting to say we left footprints. He began talking publicly about creating a base on the Moon. “For those waiting patiently, the grand return is close at hand, and we will not slow down,” he said.

Today, the talk was elevated to a presentation.   

NASA officials announced contract awards for the initial elements of a lunar base on Tuesday, including two rovers that will provide mobility to astronauts.
...
The manager for the lunar base, Carlos Garcia-Galan, said the space agency had selected two companies, Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, to build approximately one-ton rovers that would be ready for delivery to the Moon in 2028. Astrolab will receive $219 million for its “CLV-1” rover, and Lunar Outpost $220 million for its “Pegasus” rover, building upon initial contracts awarded two years ago. Each rover is expected to have a range of 200 km and be capable of driving autonomously, with guidance from operators on Earth, in addition to being driven by astronauts.

From left to right: Models of the Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, Astrolab Crewed Lunar Rover, Lunar Outpost Pegasus rover and Firely's Elytra Dark orbiter are unveiled at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. on May 26, 2026. (Image credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

Garcia-Galan announced that Blue Origin has been contracted to deliver the two rovers to the Moon using their Blue Moon Mark I lander, presumably on separate flights. The two delivery contract awards were said to be worth $280.4 million.

An important point is that despite the Apollo Program and six landings, we have much to learn about what the Moon's surface is really like. As Isaacman put it, “we know so little from what is a combined 80 hours of lunar astronaut EVA time across the Apollo missions, and that was more than a half century ago.”

To that end, one of the central elements of the early Moon Base program is the development of the MoonFall program, which will entail three or four drones each about 1 meter tall, with a mass of 225 kg, including propellant. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is leading development of the MoonFall drones, and these will be delivered to the lunar surface by Firefly Aerospace, Garcia-Galan said.

The goal is to get these spacecraft to the Moon before the Artemis IV lunar landing mission, scheduled for no earlier than 2028, to provide high-resolution imagery of the lunar surface. For most of the Moon, the current imagery resolution is 1 meter, and NASA wants to improve it to 1 cm, Garcia-Galan said.

The MoonFall drones will be deployed for long missions, and their ability to stay longer on the moon and work through the hostile environment will enable them to scout for water (perhaps as ice), provide data on soil mechanics, lighting conditions, and the terrain. Not requiring food, air and a narrow temperature range makes them better suited for a task like this than astronauts. At the end of their flying lifetime, the drones could then be used to set a boundary for the Moon Base. 

“We’re hoping to … establish a Moon Base perimeter with four or three lunar drones,” Garcia-Galan said. “We’re going to be able to basically put them at the corners of the areas where we think we have either key scientific objectives, or we want to build up the Moon Base.” In these positions, he added, the retired drones could also provide a beacon with retro-reflectors, or even perhaps serve as the first lunar cell towers.

This NASA chart outlines the three major steps of NASA's Moon Base program from 2026 through 2032, starting with unpressurized rovers and sorties, and ending with a permanent lunar base. (Image credit: NASA)

This raises problems with the concept of private property and claiming an area on the Moon, due to a small treaty signed in 1967 called the Outer Space Treaty. The treaty essentially says no country can claim sovereignty over territory on the Moon. Even building a base on the lunar surface does not confer ownership of that area under the treaty. But the Outer Space Treaty isn't the only set of agreements that might have to be lived by. You've very likely heard the term "Artemis Accords" but know little to nothing about what's in the Accords. At least that's my summary. 

The Artemis Accords, while recognizing the Outer Space Treaty, allow for the possibility of creating “safety zones” that would establish areas in which “harmful interference” is not allowed. “A safety zone should be the area in which nominal operations of a relevant activity or an anomalous event could reasonably cause harmful interference,” the Artemis Accords state. NASA and China have not formally discussed or mutually approved the concept of safety zones, and some Chinese commentators have been critical of the idea. 

Chinese commentators are critical of ideas that may allow American missions to mine or otherwise get resources from the Moon? This is my shocked face. 

Establishing a perimeter would seem to be the first manifestation of a safety zone on the lunar surface, although Isaacman would not confirm this when asked directly.

“There are areas of great interest on the lunar surface, and we do want to get there and explore them,” he said. “We also obviously want to be very mindful of the Outer Space Treaty, so that we are respectful of other nations that are putting assets on the lunar surface. We would expect that to be reciprocal, but I think that’s just one objective of many that the MoonFall drones intend to accomplish.”

Memorial Day 2026

A constantly evolving annual re-post. 

For the 16+ years I've been blogging, I've tended to wonder how many more of any holiday that our republic will survive to see, but this one is the hardest to come to grips with. Memorial Day is the day to honor those who fell fighting to preserve the republic and if Memorial Day falls, that's dishonoring every one of them. Every one of them gave themselves, their lives, their futures, for something bigger than themselves.  

It's not just "the greatest generation" that saved the west in the all out war of WWII; it's all of them, from those who fought in the first battles of the Revolution on April 19, 1775, (commemorated as Patriots' Day but some states shift the date to get a Monday Holiday) to those who were lost in Bumbling Biden's disastrous abandonment of Afghanistan, and those lost since then. We include losses from training accidents as well as actual enemy action. 

For most people, Memorial Day is the semi-official Start of Summer, and it's a rare year indeed that it doesn't feel fully like summer by Memorial Day around here. The day tends to be marked by barbecues, trips out on the boat, or other outdoors activities. Let me join the chorus of folks saying that while you're enjoying your day, take a moment to remember or think of and thank those who gave their all in service to us. The ones who don't get to mark the holiday with us.

I say that in the belief that those who made that sacrifice wouldn't hold it against us to have a little fun on their day.  

In the life of this blog, now in my 16^th year, there's only a small number of pictures I've reposted many times.  Two of them are Memorial Day pictures and I just have to conclude they hit me in a way that others haven't.  I'm going to repost those today.

The first, at least to me, is the more unexpected.  The main interest in this photo isn't a spouse or a child; it's the fallen veteran's dog.  A dog just isn't generally expected to have feelings this deep.

In a final act of loyalty, Hawkeye, the dog of slain Navy SEAL U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Jon T. Tumilson walked up to his fallen master’s casket during the funeral in Rockford, Iowa, and then laid mournfully down beside the body for the rest of the proceedings. [Note: Petty Officer Tumilson was one of the 30 killed in Afghanistan in the shoot down of Extortion 17 which the families blamed squarely on the Obama administration - SiG]

Far too large a portion of the Deep State could use Hawkeye's loyalty. There are signs that's improving; only time will tell if it's temporary or not. The others could use to ponder showing less humanity than a dog. 

The second one is a person, the widow of an Army Sargent buried at Arlington National Cemetary.

If I read that correctly, Ms. Sayne was visiting her husband's grave when taps sounded from another funeral in process, causing her to almost roll up into a little ball. Her pain is palpable in the picture. I can feel her pain.

Memorial Day is personal. I am blessed to not have lost friends or family in the wars and "actions" that have taken place in my 71+ years in this country, but that doesn't mean I don't see things like this and feel the pain, along with the gratitude and appreciation. 

Around Castle Graybeard, the weather has been relatively mild and dry for late May, but looks to take a turn to the stormy side on Thursday afternoon, when the chances of rain step up quite a bit. 

Reviews of Flight Test 12 are coming in

While it's a weekend, some "reviews" of the Starship flight test yesterday are starting to show up in the professional circles. The broad sense of it that I get is that while it obviously wasn't perfect in everything to put a grade on it, the flight was broadly in the "A minus to B plus" band. That's where I put it and there's plenty of room for opinion. 

Stephen Clark at Ars Technica mentions it being better than the first flights of version 1 or 2, which I regard as correct but too easy a landmark to clear. Version 1 was in 2023 and ver. 2 was in 2025. I should hope that their goals for the flight would be loftier than just being better than those. 

You saw NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman's comment on X posted here yesterday, and Ars Technica adds Gwynne Shotwell's similar message to the company. 

“Congrats and a huge thank you to the SpaceX team that always delivers,” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s second in command, wrote in an X post. “This was an incredible first flight of a brand new vehicle. Our collective future flying amongst the stars has become so much closer.” 

Elon Musk's message was a little more brief, but just as positive.

“Congratulations @SpaceX team on an epic first Starship V3 launch landing!” Musk posted on his social media platform X. “You scored a goal for humanity.” 

It's hard to recap everything that worked because most of it did work. The ship’s heat shield appeared flawless during reentry over the Indian Ocean. Onboard cameras over their Starlink showed the aerodynamic flaps staying intact with no obvious melting throughout reentry. Without trying to look this up, I think this was the first mission where the heat shield and flaps didn’t suffer damages. 

That all went well, with the descent culminating in a dramatic maneuver to flip from horizontal to vertical. A final landing burn with the ship’s Raptor engines downshifted from three to two, then to a single engine as the rocket settled to a gentle water landing. Drones and buoy cameras recorded live views of the on-target splashdown. As expected, the ship—wider than and nearly as long a Boeing 777 jetliner—tipped over and exploded in a fireball, putting an exclamation point on V3’s trip halfway around the world from the Texas Gulf Coast.

Earlier in the flight, they tested a new "Pez dispenser" for putting Starlink's coming generation of satellites into orbit. We've seen a Pez dispenser before, but this upgrade carried two satellites on each layer. On Friday, the dispenser deployed 20 mockups of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink satellites, plus two spacecraft fitted with flashlights and cameras to inspect Starship’s exterior in space. This photo came from one of those two Next Gen Starlink satellites. 

The elongated rectangle in the middle of the ship, with two large bright circular areas to the left of the rectangle, is the Pez dispenser's door that deployed this satellite. Image credit: SpaceX 

The good has to be balanced with the bad - or not so good - and that was the failure of one Raptor 3 engine on SuperHeavy and one Vacuum Raptor 3 on the ship. Neither one affected the mission because the system was so lightly loaded that the control systems could run the other engines a little bit longer to achieve the desired orbit, but it's obviously not the way things are supposed to go. One impact of the Starship engine that stopped running is that restarting the engines in orbit was a mission goal and they didn't attempt that. That almost certainly means the next test flight will also be suborbital - unless they find a simple reason for the engines turning off that absolves the engines of being defective.  

An unexplained issue is that the failed Raptor 3 on Super Heavy apparently led to the booster not coming to zero velocity just before landing in the Gulf, close to Starbase. The booster didn't fire the Raptor engines and slow down to stand on the water for a second or two. It was not immediately clear what caused the early end to the rocket’s boost-back burn: whether the malfunction stemmed from an external problem during stage separation or a separate issue within the booster’s propulsion system.

The pressing fact is that Starship is behind schedule. A bit over a year ago, March of 2025, Elon Musk posted on X that he expected to be launching V3 at a "rate of once a week in [about] 12 months." While it's still "about 12 months" from when he said that, I don't see a test flight 13 coming next week. Or even on the NextSpaceflight schedule at all. 

Starship Flight Test 12 was better than expected

I'm a bit overwhelmed from watching Flight Test 12, to the point that I don't have much to say. I watched on the streaming channel I usually watch, NASASpaceflight, and they're still putting their flight videos together. 

So here are some things that captured my attention in no particular order. 

The V3 stack, SuperHeavy and Starship, seemed to fuel considerably faster than Version 2 did. I tuned into the coverage with about 20 to 25 minutes left in the count and fueling had started but the fuel and oxygen levels were no more than 1/4 full. They were full before T-60 seconds. One of the things that gets mentioned in various places is how they increased the size of the fuel pipe into the booster's tank and point out that the pipe is essentially the height and diameter of a Falcon 9. 

The V3 stack seems to accelerate faster than V2 did, reaching Max Q faster and running through its fuel load to staging faster. 

I'm not sure if the reason I couldn't see the Ship after stage separation like I did for Flight 11, was from the trajectory being on the south side of Cuba instead of north of it or because it was still broad daylight and well over an hour before sunset. Considering how much harder it is to see in the daylight when you're not sure exactly where to look, I'll put that in the "maybe next time or some other time" file. 

NASASpaceflight lost coverage of the returning SuperHeavy booster and I have no idea if that went as expected or just what. I know they had one engine shut down, and 1 of 33 wouldn't show up on a test like this - at least not in terms of having too little thrust to make some flight goals.

All in all it looked like quite an improvement from the Version 2 Starship/SuperHeavy. Watching the Ship come down through the atmosphere to splash down in the Indian Ocean west of Australia looked smoother and better than other test flights. I didn't notice any areas where parts of the hull or the flaps were melting through. 

So it struck me as a giant leap in performance, and worth the wait. As Jared Isaacman put it:

Reset and try again! SpaceX's flight test 12 scrubbed

Flight test 12 scrubbed this evening after about 10 minutes spent with the countdown at T-40 seconds and trying to get going smoothly again. I didn't bother to count the number of times the clock stopped and then restarted with 40 seconds on the clock.  The clock has been set to try again in 24 hours, Friday 5/22 @ 6:30 PM EDT.  

Of course, Flight 12 is the 12th test flight of the Starship vehicle, which flew for the first time in 2023, but the first for this year, and the first Starship test flight since last October's Flight Test 11 - 7 months ago.  

"New rocket, new pad, we're learning a lot about these new systems as we execute them for the first time," SpaceX's Dan Huot said in live commentary. "We are expecting to be able to make another flight attempt tomorrow."

The exact issue wasn't mentioned in that Space.com article linked at the top, but about an hour after the stand down from attempting the launch, Elon tweeted this to X:

The aspect I wasn't prepared for was when pop singer Nicki Minaj showed up on the SpaceX coverage in a Starship Tee shirt. I barely know who she is, don't know a single song of hers, but I did see her visiting with President Trump and acting like she thought he was a good guy.

L-R, Kate Tice, SpaceX Quality Manager, Nicki Minaj, SpaceX's Jake Berkowitz - Lead Propulsion Engineer.

EDIT 05/22/26 0720 EDT: to correct the name of the SpaceX team member on the right. Thanks to an email from a reader.

Trying to find out if tomorrow's big story is what I think it is

As the launch day has moved further out as the week went by, it has reduced my confidence that flight 12 is going to launch when promised. Currently, everything I can find is saying launch will be Thursday 5/21 at 6:30 PM EDT, which was first talked about Monday. 

The reason for my reduced confidence is that around noon EDT, I noticed that another Wet Dress Rehearsal was scheduled and opened the NASA Spaceflight live coverage to see it. I started watching with about 1 hour, 35 minutes on the timer (1:35:00) and they appeared to be in the process of cancelling the test for the day. I didn't spend the rest of the afternoon watching the live stream continuously. 

So the real question is simply if they're going to launch Thursday at 6:30 PM EDT? I have no idea. All I can see is still saying yes, but there have been times where schedule changes don't show up until the next morning. 

The other big story is that the long-talked about IPO for SpaceX suddenly got more understandable now that they've released a bunch of pretty closely guarded financial records. The one that stood out to me was in the 9th paragraph. Everyone knows that Elon Musk is a billionaire, right? Everyone knows he's practically drowning in money. Get a load of this:

Musk’s salary in 2025 was $54,080, a value tied to California’s minimum salary for exempt employees. Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of the company, received a salary of $1.08 million in 2025, but including stock awards, her total compensation was valued at $85.8 million. 

Total salary of $54k/year? That's $26/hour. Not even remotely an upper tier income.  Gwynne Shotwell at just over $1 million/year is almost 20x Musk's pay, or $519.23/hr. Salary alone, not stock awards and other compensation. The $85.8 million works out to be $41,250/hr.

There's no real breakdown of the costs for a Falcon 9 mission. The industry reporters quote a base public price of $74 million but estimate it really costs in the neighborhood of $15 million. With approximately 660 Falcon 9 missions, they probably have a pretty good set of numbers on the expenses for launches as the vehicles age, and that appears to be closely guarded. On a different note, I'm sure those numbers don't exist for Starship since it's still in development. 

The numbers that professional buyers will probably be concentrating on are the total size of the SpaceX business - the Total Addressable Market or TAM. 

SpaceX projects a “total addressable market,” or TAM, of $28.5 trillion across its present and future offerings in space, data, and AI services. However, of this amount, only about $2 trillion is directly related to space or the company’s Starlink network. The remaining $26.5 billion is believed to come from AI, largely from enterprise applications. 

“We believe we have identified the largest TAM in human history,” the company states on page 171 of the filing. “We believe our next trillion-dollar market is AI compute, which we contemplate will leverage our rockets and satellites for massive orbital deployment.”

SpaceX estimate of total addressable market. Credit: SpaceX S-1 filing

Not a typical space story

Not a typical space-story, but one that I find heartwarming. It's centered on Space Camp, that summer camp for kids that's near the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and one of the people the story is focused on is one who went there as a kid. That kid is now NASA Administrator, Jared "Rook" Isaacman. 

The article's focus is that Space Camp officials report registrations have doubled this summer since the successful completion of Artemis II's lunar flyby mission in April.

When he was 12 years old, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman attended the week long “Aviation Challenge” program at Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama.

“For the first time, I got behind the controls of an airplane when I attended Aviation Challenge,” Isaacman said on Friday evening during an event at the US Space & Rocket Center. “I became a pilot because I thought that was the closest I would ever get to the stars.”

Decades later, after founding a successful online payments company and flying to space twice as a private citizen aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, Isaacman has returned to Space Camp in Alabama on multiple occasions to meet with participants and share a bit of the awe he experienced as a kid. In 2022, a year after the first of these flights, Inspiration4, Isaacman donated $10 million to kick off a Space Camp expansion.

Donating $10 million to Space Camp is a positive thing if I'm keeping score, even for a borderline billionaire. (As a side note, is there a word for someone whose net worth is over one billion, but not as much as two billion?) It's more than just that, though. He donates his NASA salary to Space Camp, and on Friday, he returned to open the new “Inspiration4 Skills Training Complex.” That's a 50,000-square-foot facility completed with an additional $15 million donation from Isaacman - which will also support development of a new dormitory.

If the Apollo era was representative of how people relate to seeing others on the moon doing interesting things, Space Camp could well be on the way to a continuous period of more activity with many more teens and young adults interested in going. 

Final words to Rook Isaacman:

“Off the success of Artemis II, America’s return to the Moon is just getting going,” Isaacman said during the ribbon-cutting event for the new facility.

“And it is that kind of magic that inspires the next generation to attend Space Camp, get hands-on experiences at this national treasure, unlike anywhere else in the country, and grow up ready to pick up the baton and join in this great adventure.” 

Crewmates on Inspiration4, commercial astronaut Chris Sembroski and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the Inspiration4 Skills Training Complex in Huntsville, Ala. Credit: Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images

Starship Flight Test 12 slides out another day

This afternoon, Next Spaceflight showed that Tuesday's Starship Flight Test 12 had been pushed back until Wednesday, May 20, at the same time of 6:30 PM EDT. I haven't seen an explanation of what led to the extra day, so I can't rule out another slip out later after this one, but that's pretty much always the case. 

It's hard to overstate how important this launch is to SpaceX, and by extension to the space industry and the US space programs. There are two fairly big articles about the modifications that brought the Starship from version 2 to 3 for this mission, and there's a lot riding on it. Again, not just for SpaceX but for the US space program, and the private space launch industry in general. 

For the details on getting from version 2 to 3, SpaceX themselves have a large article on their web presence, under their updates, in this case devoted to just the version 2 to 3 update.  

The article that I think gives the better overview is by Eric Berger at Ars Technica, and titled, "The US space enterprise is desperately waiting for Starship—will it finally deliver?" This is the one that I think will have more meaning for readers who have been following the development of Starship since they first started talking about it and testing ideas. Like the first awkward hops in August 2019 by the little version of Starship they called Hoppy. 

Eric starts from a high level view of how different Starship and SuperHeavy booster are from pretty much every other rocket you've ever heard of. Something he doesn't talk about in these few words is how hard what they're trying to do is. Gravity is tough taskmaster. I've never really played with the math on these things, or any of the (sort of) games and simulations like Kerbal Space or others, but one of the things that comes out of studying spaceflight is that at some size planet, the gravitational pull is strong enough that it's not possible to get away from the planet. Earth is said to be close to that size, such that if we were not much bigger than we are, we could never even get into low Earth orbits. (And I don't want to give a number for how much bigger because I just don't know enough)  

Where this converges onto Starship is that this is the largest rocket humans have ever created. The performance that can be obtained is a tough fight. 

And yet everything SpaceX aspires to accomplish in the next quarter of a century, all of its enormous valuation, is predicated on a new launch vehicle. A rocket that, to date, has a decidedly mixed record of success. A rocket that has not flown in seven months. A rocket that, finally, may return to the skies on Wednesday.

We are speaking, of course, of Starship—a truly revolutionary rocket. If it works. And after a long period of development and three years of test flights and setbacks, it kind of has to.

A saying that I grew up around so I've had in my head for a good 50 years or more, is "when you try to do things no one has ever done before, you'll see things no one has ever seen before." They may be finding problems in the way SuperHeavy does something that no one in history has ever seen. Could that fact be a reason why they've had more troubles than they thought? Instead of scaling up older designs easily, they find the materials don't work right or other things they didn't consider "just ain't right" because no one has ever done this before. Remember, Starship and SuperHeavy started out to be carbon fiber because it's just the way everyone does this. Early in preliminary design, someone realized that stainless steel had serious advantages and SpaceX shifted to stainless early in the process. 

I've covered this before, but consider the engines that NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) uses - the couple of SLS flights that have flown both were powered by Space Shuttle Main Engines that actually flew on Shuttle missions. The SSMEs happen to have almost the same thrust as the Raptor engines SpaceX has been developing for Starship. In May of 2020, I found out that the first stage engines for SLS cost $146 million per engine, so nearly $600 million ($584 m) for just the four engines of the booster core. The SSMEs are rated at 512,000 pounds of thrust and both SpaceX's Raptor 2 and the newer Raptor 3 are in the same class. The Raptor's design price point is under $1 million. 

I took a picture of Raptor 1 next to 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 mass of the Raptor sea-level engines has been reduced from 1,630 kg to 1,525 kg - just over 1000 kg, or 2200 lbs. Overall vehicle-level mass savings reach approximately 1 ton per engine through simplification of the engine itself, vehicle-side commodities, and supporting hardware. There are 33 of these engines in the SuperHeavy, so that's a savings of 33 tons that the vehicle was lifting that's now available for payload. 

Well, I don't want to quote everything that Berger talks about in his article, but it's an honest and realistic look at Starship and SuperHeavy. As he said, Starship has absolutely had a mixed record of success, with several bad problems in the last couple of years. Who can forget things like the loss of Starship 8 on the way to the Indian ocean raining Starship debris over Caribbean islands?

Debris from Starship falls back into the atmosphere in this view over Hog Cay, Bahamas, in March 2025. Credit: GeneDoctorB via X

I've frequently noted that when it comes to the private launch industry, it's SpaceX and then everyone else. While Starship hasn't lifted a single pound to orbit for any entity, SpaceX lifted over 82% of all the mass put into orbit in 2025. That's pretty much all due to the Falcon 9.

EDIT to Add May 19 @ 10:25 AM EDT: As of this morning, the launch has slipped to Thursday May 21 at the same time as before, 6:30 PM EDT.

NASA Spaceflight's weekly video does a pretty deep dive on this launch and points out that SpaceX is being pretty careful with this mission because of the high stakes involved. They point out that with Monday being Memorial Day, SpaceX isn't allowed to close the beach for a launch on a holiday, so if the launch doesn't go by Saturday, they're not launching until Tuesday. They've said they are doing another full Wet Dress Rehearsal before the launch. That doesn't rule out launching on Thursday, it just adds another thing to bear in mind.