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. 

ULA reports a successful test of the SRB that grounded Vulcan

While the test was in mid-April,this Friday United Launch Alliance announced the completion of a critical milestone on the road to resuming flights with its Vulcan rockets. 

On April 15, the company said Northrop Grumman performed a successful static fire test of a Graphite Epoxy Motor (GEM) 63XL Solid Rocket Booster (SRB). A spokesperson told Spaceflight Now on Thursday that the test served to “demonstrate nozzle design enhancements which were already in work and an advanced propellant technology for future solid rocket motors across their portfolio.” 

You will recall that, like the second Vulcan launch, on the third Vulcan launch an SRB failed during the first stage ascent - the earliest phase of the rockets trip to orbit. This affected the mission, but the control systems on the vehicle were able to compensate for the difference in thrust and its direction and still deliver the payload to the desired orbit. 

“There was some asymmetric thrust when we had that solid motor fail, it reduced performance,” said Gary Wentz, vice president of Government and Commercial Programs at ULA. He spoke with Spaceflight Now in the days leading up to the Artemis 2 launch.

“The BE-4s and our avionics system gimbaled to control that. We did see some roll, and the BE-4s were able to compensate to arrest that roll. We were well within our environments and limits, so it was nothing overly concerning for the BE-4s.”

The ULA voices quoted in the article express confidence that the Vulcan will be cleared to fly before the end of this year, but they don't really provide information about the cause of the SRB problem and what's being done to address keeping it from happening again. They do mention that there are versions of the Vulcan that don't require the extra lift capacity the SRBs provide and those can be launched now. 

“We’re available for other missions. [The Commercial Lunar Payload Services program] had a lot of smaller landers and things that we could fly to do some of those precursor efforts with the Moon and the mission that NASA’s laying out. So, we’re really excited about the opportunities.” 

To accommodate the demand for launches, ULA has modified their launch complex on Cape Canaveral, Space Launch Complex 41, adding a newly finished Vertical Integration Facility – Amazon (VIF-A). This gives ULA two vertical integration options, either an Atlas 5 rocket or a Vulcan rocket in the original VIF, called VIF-G (Government), while a Vulcan rocket uses the new VIF-A.

Amazon Leo’s next flight is scheduled to be the Leo Atlas 07 (LA-07) mission, currently scheduled for no earlier than Friday May 29 at 12:27 PM EDT. The final batch of Leo satellites to fly on an Atlas V rocket will launch later this year on the LA-08 mission. The launch date of the LA-08 mission hasn't been announced yet. 

 

ULA's Atlas V rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Credit: United Launch Alliance

A weekend catchup

I've been referring to this as the year of "guess what broke this time?" That's not quite true, though. It's not only unexpected things breaking it's all sorts of extra expenses, which makes it more like "guess what extra expense we have this time?"  

But before I go there, let me throw in a neat YouTube Short video I stumbled across this afternoon. It's about the Voyagers and presents a lot of fun facts.

If that doesn't work for you, here's the YouTube link itself. 

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The day got taken up with one of those "things we've gotta do" that ended up with some extra impacts, so to speak. We bought this house and moved in here in June of 1984. We've painted it numerous times, planted citrus trees in the backyard, then when a couple of deep freezes killed them, replaced three citrus with one oak - which grew so big that we had to remove it in 2022. The only tree we put in the front yard is a maple, which we got because I grew up in Miami and never had trees with leaves that changed colors. That was one of the first "home improvements" we did and the tree has stayed relatively healthy, growing a little bit every year. I'll hazard a guess the tree is around 38 to 40 years old and around 25 feet tall.

Within the last few weeks, I was looking things over with the aim of seeing if we needed to trim back the tree as hurricane season approaches. I was surprised to see a major branch that looked dead. Nothing growing on it. This tree is to the left when we go out the front door, and the branch is on the left side of the tree, so I'm guessing that's why I didn't tend to notice it until recently. Nine times out of 10 we're going out the front door, we're walking to the right because that's where the driveway is. I just don't walk over to look at the left side of that tree often enough.

After a bit of study, today turned out to be the day to trim back the maple. One of the things I had to do that didn't show up until I studied it a bit more was that there was another branch that was in the way and the whole task was a bit more complicated than just trimming back that one dead branch. Another issue was that the one I needed to cut was about 10 feet above the ground. To get into the position to cut that dead branch, I had to use my multipurpose ladder which has earned the nickname of the OCHFR or Overly Complex and Heavy Finger Remover. It was tough cutting that branch with my reciprocating saw standing on the ladder, stuck between it and the area I had to work in. At some point, the saw blade broke through into an open area near the center of the branch and everything went flying.

Long story short, I ended up getting knocked off the ladder and landing in the grass with the saw nearby but not stuck into me. I was able to get up fairly quickly and nothing seems broken, but I'm a bit more sore than I expected to be. So that's why the low-effort Saturday post.

Asteroid research satellite Psyche had a Mars flyby today

Remember the satellite Psyche, a probe launched in 2023 to visit the asteroid by that name (16 Psyche)? The probe has been en route to the asteroid since '23 and is not expected to arrive at its target until 2029. Psyche flew by Mars today, passing as close as 2800 miles, in a gravity assist-slingshot maneuver.  Since we're going into a weekend, and I haven't run across any statements on how well the slingshot worked, I expect it will be next week before we get any real news on that. 

The "selling reason" for the mission is that 16 Psyche is one of the densest known asteroids so it must have an unusual past compared to the others we can observe. It's often referred to as being a metal asteroid and the possible description that it might be the core of a planet that never completely formed, or that was broken apart long ago. That implies a core of iron and nickel, like the Earth's, but it's also possible it's got some amount of really high density metals like perhaps gold or other valuable metals. 

I've done several posts about psyche starting in 2022, a first attempt to launch that they never got working during it's short launch window, then around the launch in 2023 and once or twice since then. The CalTech Jet Propulsion Laboratory put together this graphic of the mission and where today's flyby is shown: the Mars Gravity Assist in the top center of the graphic.

Psyche's mission plan. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

These gravity assist slingshots were developed in the 1960s and they have several advantages. The first advantage is that they increase the relative velocity of the spacecraft toward its target with very little impact to the planet or body providing the boost. The second big advantage is they require little to no use of the spacecraft's fuel to achieve that increased speed. A third advantage is that it allows the satellite's instruments to be tested more completely close to the slingshot than when its on its own in deep space.

NASA gives more info on Artemis III progress

Five weeks ago, April 8, I passed along some information on planning the Artemis III mission.  Five weeks to the day later, yesterday, Eric Berger at Ars Technica passed along some information he's getting from various sources on how those decisions are going.  

One of the first decisions that had to be made was whether the mission would launch to Low or High Earth Orbit. That decision has to be among the first because it affects so much. 

The space agency chose the orbit close to Earth—as opposed to a higher orbit—because it would preserve the final remaining Interim Cryogenic Propulsion Stage for launching the Artemis IV landing mission later this decade. Instead, NASA will use a “spacer” to simulate the mass and overall dimensions of an upper stage but without propulsive capabilities. 

Artemis III was originally scheduled as the first Artemis moon landing, before the end of 2025, but most recently has been looking to be late in 2027. The mission will now be restricted to Earth orbit for a test of one or (preferably) both lunar landers, SpaceX's Starship-based Human Landing System or Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1.

“For the first time, NASA will coordinate a launch campaign involving multiple spacecraft integrating new capabilities into Artemis operations,” said Jeremy Parsons, Moon to Mars acting assistant deputy administrator, in a news release. “We’re integrating more partners and interrelated operations into this mission by design, which will help us learn how Orion, the crew, and ground teams all interact together with hardware and teams from both providers before we send astronauts to the Moon’s surface and build a Moon Base there.”

The complication of potentially flying two different lunar landers certainly adds complexity to the mission. The crew for Artemis III hasn't been named yet, but since the Orion capsule can seat four people, perhaps a division of two trained more with SpaceX's HLS and two trained more with B.O.'s Blue Moon is a reasonable way to approach this mission. The possibility is mentioned that not only might they not fly the landers, but that the crew might not even enter the landers! 

This sets up a major dilemma for Isaacman and the rest of NASA’s leadership. If they fly Artemis III in 2027, the stated goal, they almost certainly will be rendezvousing with one or two landers that are far short of full maturity. (The NASA release calls them “pathfinders.”) If NASA is contemplating not even having the crew enter the landers, it is possible that neither vehicle will have even basic life support.

This falls short of a well-established maxim in the space industry: test like you fly. The longer NASA waits to fly Artemis III, the better chance it will have to fly with a higher-fidelity vehicle—that is, one closer to landing on the Moon than being a basic prototype. It also increases the likelihood that an Artemis spacesuit, developed by Axiom Space, will be available for testing.

The sun lights the sky behind Artemis II on its SLS launch vehicle sitting at Pad 39B on the Kennedy Space Center, the day before the start of the Artemis II mission. Image Credit: NASA/Jim Ross

The reality of planning for Artemis III is that the longer NASA has to wait to fly Artemis III, the more likely it becomes that NASA will lose the race to the lunar landing in Artemis IV.

Is Blue Origin about to drop an IPO?

If you've been living in a quiet zone, blocking all incoming radio, you might be one of the few people around who don't know that a SpaceX Initial Public Offering (IPO) is going to drop fairly soon. They 're saying "in June" but no more specific than that. You might not know it's being talked about regularly - and excitedly - as potentially the biggest IPO ever.  

Word is starting to pop up that they might not be the only IPO. Their competitor in the private space world, Blue Origin, might be getting ready to drop an IPO as well. 

Chief Executive Dave Limp told employees at a recent all-hands meeting that the company would require outside investment if it were to significantly increase its launch cadence, according to details of the meeting from two people who attended.

He said it would “take a lot of capital” to achieve the number of rocket launches Blue Origin has targeted—more money than would be available with “just one investor,” the people added.

Blue Origin was founded by Jeff Bezos, who also founded Amazon, so a billionaire in the same league as SpaceX's Elon Musk. While their New Glenn was delivered years later than originally talked about, it launched for the first time in 2025 and added a second flight late in '25, then their third mission just a month ago in April. That's when the second stage problem showed up and led to the vehicle being grounded.  

The thing is, Blue is spending lots this year. As one half of the lunar landers picked for Artemis, they're spending to get their Blue Moon Mark 1 lander cleared for Artemis III testing next year and to launch their TeraWave satellite constellation. Plus, they're building a new 800,000 sq ft manufacturing facility and a second launch pad on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. 

Limp was speaking to employees as he responded to questions on a new stock option plan. He said that similar to OpenAI and SpaceX, the group could use fundraising rounds to help staff exercise stock options. “We wrote this plan intentionally to allow for that,” he said.

He said the company needed to be “ready for external funding” and he was confident in strong interest from outside investors. 
...
The company is expected to spend roughly $4.8 billion this year, according to analysts at Capstone, a Washington-based consulting firm. It estimates the group has spent nearly $28 billion since its inception.

Blue has said a couple of times that their goal is 100 launches per year but has yet to make much progress in that direction. This year in April, CEO Limp said the group was planning between eight and 12 launches in total this year with New Glenn. 

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 7:25 am EDT (11:25 UTC) April 19, 2026. Credit: Paul Hennesy/Anadolu via Getty Images

They still acknowledge the goal of 100 launches of New Glenn in a year, but say to think of that as a longer-term goal. 

Starship test flight 12 slips out

In the past few days, the full Wet Dress Rehearsal found a few problems that cause it to slip out in time. What was originally set for this Friday, May 15, has now slipped out to next Tuesday, May 19, at the same time, 6:30 PM EDT. 

The whole aim of this launch is to switch over to the biggest and latest version of Starship, the raptor engines and everything else, all of which seems to be lumped together in calling it version 3. The version 3 stack is a new record for the tallest rocket ever, 408 feet, which is on the order of 10 feet taller than the previous versions of Starship which have already flown. 

If all goes according to plan, this is the version of Starship that SpaceX will use to begin experimenting with in-orbit refueling, a capability engineers must master before sending ships anywhere farther than low-Earth orbit. In the near-term, refueling will enable Starships to fly to the Moon to serve as landers for NASA’s Artemis program. Starship remains an iterative development program, and new versions are in the pipeline, but Starship V3 should mark a step toward SpaceX actually using Starships in space, rather than solely proving they can get there and get home. 

The "new and improved" version 3 is essentially a slight upgrade - or rather several slight upgrades all at once.

On Monday, SpaceX’s launch team loaded more than 11 million pounds (more than 5,000 metric tons) of super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into both stages of the rocket after halting a previous fueling attempt Saturday night due to a technical issue. The launch rehearsal followed a test-firing of the booster’s 33 Raptor engines at the launch site on May 6, the first time SpaceX ignited a full complement of uprated Raptor 3s. 

At liftoff, the rocket is expected to produce some 18 million pounds of thrust, about 10 percent more than the previous generation of Super Heavy boosters, according to specifications previously released by SpaceX. The scale is staggering. For example, in Version 3, the internal transfer tube that channels methane fuel from the top of the booster to the engine compartment is about the same size as the first stage of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which is roughly 12 feet (3.7 meters) in diameter.

Among the "first time" and "new" aspects of the version 3 is it will be the first launch from Pad 2 in Texas. Pad 2 is about 1,000 feet, so not quite a quarter mile, west of pad 1 where all of SpaceX’s past Starship test flights launched. Not a big difference. 

The preparations for launch are essentially complete, with just a couple of things left to accomplish. 

On the SpaceX side, workers must install hardware for the rocket’s self-destruct system, pyrotechnics that would blow up the vehicle if it deviated from its flight plan. This will require the removal of the ship from the booster. A launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration is still pending. 

SpaceX's Starship V3 rocket undergoes a WDR - wet dress rehearsal - Monday at Starbase, Texas. Image credit: SpaceX.

How much time do the Voyagers have left?

It seems like it was just last week, that I posted about one of Voyager 1's experiments being shut down to save power, but it was April 17, just over three weeks ago. Today, Space.com follows up with some interesting input on the Voyagers and a new (optimistic) prediction on how long the Voyagers can last. 

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched within two weeks of each other in August and September of 1977. They originally left on a multiple planetary flyby missions but those were completed in four years. As they completed missions in our solar system, the pair had their cameras and high power consumption instruments shut down with the intent to save power and prolong their missions. 

When they were launched, their Radioisotope Thermal Generators produced 470 Watts. Today, they're both well under 100W. 

Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in 2012, and Voyager 2 followed suit six years later. For years, NASA has been turning off the probes' instruments one at a time as their power supplies dwindled. They still lose about four watts of power a year. But NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California has an idea, which will be tested out soon, to give them a little more time. 

Both probes were launched with identical sets of 10 instruments, but over the years have progressively shut down more and more instruments until they're down to the last couple of instruments. Communicating with Earth is the most power intensive thing they do, but they only have to do it rarely - either to download data or to respond to queries from the ground. Voyager 1 is very close to one light day (24 light hours) away and Voyager 2 is 19 light hours away. So "chats", if they existed, would take several days to complete. Originally they had a 20 Watt transmitter, but that's the output power and not what it takes to transmit. 

In a 2022 Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at JPL, said in a statement about the probes that  "It takes about 200 watts, approximately, to run the transmitter on the spacecraft, to be able to send signals back to Earth."

"An upcoming engineering activity — nicknamed the ‘Big Bang' — on NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft will continue the agency's efforts to maximize the science output of the mission," the spokesperson said in an email.

"Voyager engineers will turn off three devices on the spacecraft that have been used to keep the thruster fuel lines from freezing — and turn on three other devices that will keep the fuel lines warm, but use a total of almost 10 watts less power," the spokesperson continued.

"If successful, this could delay the need to turn off a science instrument aboard each spacecraft by at least one year. The engineering team will test and implement the program on Voyager 2 in May and June. Based on the outcome, the mission plans to do the same on Voyager 1 sometime this summer."

And this is where project manager Dodd dropped the interesting lines.

In August 2022, Dodd was asked during a JPL livestream how far she thought the Voyagers would go. She predicted each spacecraft would "definitely" make it to the 50th anniversary in 2027 — which still seems to be possible from the perspective of today — but added she has a "stretch goal" assuming that gets accomplished.

Ideally, Dodd said she would love to see the spacecraft reach 200 astronomical units (AU; Earth-sun distances) from our planet, which would happen in about 2035. (At the moment, Voyager 1 is about 169.8 AU from Earth, and Voyager 2 is roughly 143.1 AU away.)

If you'll pardon me, this is the first time I've come across someone "on the inside" of the JPL and familiar with the Voyagers that not only seems to be confident the pair will make their golden (50 year) anniversaries next summer, but thinks they have a good shot at surviving another eight years beyond that. 

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

Did it just turn into summer?

Not weather-wise, or at least not the weather at the ground level. I'm talking about a difference in how the ionosphere's E layer is behaving. 

I've written about Sporadic E propagation, often referred to as Es, many times and I've talked about how Sporadic E showing up at 50 MHz (the 6 meter ham band) is more common in summer than winter.  This one is probably the most read introduction. Several times, I've shown screen captures from a site called DXMaps and the density of "red blob" tracks of contacts visibly goes up as summer arrives and gets going. Here's one I took several minutes ago:

I've mentioned several times that I'm somewhat of a paper chaser in ham radio, spending most of my radio time on 6m pursuing the FFMA (Fred Fish Memorial Award); this post (from November of '25) has the most info and I'll borrow some of it for here. 

Along the same line, the only accomplishments I’m actively “chasing” on the VHF six meter band are both in the category of “difficult to practically impossible.” The easier one is probably 6m DXCC (100 recognized countries worked and confirmed). I currently have 90 confirmed with another three “waiting for confirmation.” I’m closer to DXCC on 6m than any of the other major awards. Easy or obvious one first, DXCC is more likely than Worked All States - WAS. 

WAS is practically impossible from my location. I’m pretty sure last November (‘24) was the closest I ever came to even hearing Alaska, and that was hearing other stations in the southeast calling the guy in Alaska. I saw him “spotted” on some of the sites online that report that, but never actually heard him. I was hoping for this year, but it hasn’t been good so far.

The hardest one, the FFMA (Fred Fish Memorial Award – the first person to achieve this award) is for working and confirming all 488 Maidenhead grids in the continental US. "Continental" means I don't need Alaska or Hawaii. I have 345 grids confirmed with another five that I’ve worked but can’t get confirmed. To be brutally honest, the FFMA is practically impossible from here, too. Unsurprisingly, when your goal is to reach every place  in the country, you're most likely to get everyone from the center of the country, and it turns out there has been one issued in Florida, in the northwestern most corner of the state. That's about 500 miles away - near Pensacola.

All of that is to set up that, to some degree, I can look at the map of contacts being reported on DXMaps and have a pretty good idea if areas I need to work are being heard and reported. I don't see any on that display map. 

While that's a bit of a downer, the number of Es openings should be going up with the highest numbers showing up in mid-June through mid-July. It's not coincidental that two of the biggest 6m contests of the year are the in this interval. Contests are good ways to get lots of stations on the air for quick, short contacts. 

Summer is a good time of year around here for staying inside the house. At least I have things to chase on the radio.

A technogeek anniversary to celebrate

WARNING: Extreme electronics hobbyist geek content 

I recently found out, due to a couple of videos showing up on YouTube that it's the 55th anniversary of an analog integrated circuit that was instrumental in pushing analog integrated circuits into more and more products. Originally designed at Signetics corporation, it's the 555 timer circuit, AKA "the triple nickel" timer. Ironically, the triple nickel has outlived Signetics itself, which was bought by Philips Semiconductor in 1975 and Philips is now part of NXP semiconductors. 

The first video I watched, from the EEVBlog , talked about the 555 timer design effort being led by Hans Camenzind (1934 - 2012) in 1971, and that it has been a remarkably successful product. As seen in many other times and places, the right concept at the right time becomes a standard approach to many things. The first time I ever used one is hard to recall exactly, but I remember it being in the late 1970s, and like most people, once I've successfully used one it tends to be the one I think of when I need a part like this. Yes, there's all manner of planes, civilian and military with triple nickel timers in them and only a few were designed in by me. 

That EEVBlog video is a good overview, but a better technical overview of using the part is at Build-Electronic-Circuits (.com!) They provide this illustration as a simplified equivalent circuit, pretty much a good description of the part. BTW, there's probably no connection between the three 5k resistors in series at the top (5k 5k 5k) and the part's name. Probably. That's what the experts say.

When I decided to post about this, I didn't really intend to get into how to design circuits that use this chip. There are many different things that this chip can be used for, and that Build-Electronics-Circuits page shows many - something with that much deep coverage wouldn't be a good fit for this blog. A second video talks a bit more about various things that it can do with more details. 

The 55th anniversary year of the 555 is unusual and part of that has got to be that it's an analog part and not a microprocessor. The closest equivalent microprocessor from 55 years ago would be the Intel 4004 -the first CPU ever sold as a standalone product - and only a four bit processor. I can't tell you the last time I saw a 4004, but I think it was in radio being repaired 30 years ago. The radio was obsolete and no longer in production, but it was customer's return and the warranty is honored as long as possible. 

I figure there's a chance that some of you will have worked with the 555 and remember it fondly.  

Looks like we have a date for Starship 12

While they're still testing and preparing, it's looking like Starship test flight 12 is going to be a week from today, May 15, at 6:30 PM EDT, 5:30 PM local (CDT).

The date has changed before (it was originally May 12) and it might change again, but the latest test was the super heavy booster with all engines running at full thrust for around 15 seconds. This will be the 12th Starship test flight, but a totally new, Version 3 (V3) with a different SuperHeavy booster as well as the V3 Starship itself. 

SpaceX cleared a big hurdle on the path to liftoff on Thursday (May 7), conducting a static-fire test with Starship's Super Heavy first stage at its Starbase site in Texas. The company lit up all 33 of Super Heavy's Raptor engines while the booster remained anchored to the pad — and everything apparently went well. 

"Full duration and full thrust 33-engine static fire with Super Heavy V3," SpaceX wrote in a Thursday post on X that shared two videos of the 14-second-long test. (One video is about a minute long, but it seems to be a slow-motion version of the trial.)

Screen capture from the Space.com video of the static fire test.

Because this is the first test of the V3 system, it appears they're going to take it very cautiously. I've read (not in the Space.com source) that they aren't going to attempt to recover either the SuperHeavy booster or the ship. The lengthy delay between flights 11 and 12 owes partly to a mishap involving the original Flight 12 Super Heavy, which was destroyed during a pressure test this past November. Because the launch time is similar to the previous suborbital Starship test flights, I expect that the trajectory will be similar, toward the east, over the Florida straits and Caribbean eventually splashing down near Australia. I will try to see this one by eye, crossing from SW to SE, like we saw flight 10. It will probably be lighter than that launch, IIRC.

A look at the coming hurricane season

Since the usual space news stories are on the small side, I'm going to divert to a different sort of science - atmospheric physics and weather. That was driven by it being the time of year to ensure we're ready for the coming Atlantic hurricane season which starts on June 1. And that's partly motivated because storms before the season officially starts happen often enough that they capture attention in planning.

I think it should be obvious if you've read here before, but I should say that I'm not a meteorologist or a hurricane expert in any sense. I'm just someone who has lived through many hurricanes because of growing up in Florida and being 72 years old. The state of Florida takes hurricane preparation seriously, especially with the numbers of people moving in from the overbearing-to-collapsing blue states, so they publish a variety of websites with information on preparing. Like the Plan & Prepare website here. 

Whether you follow these storms or not,  you may have heard about a persistent (if not permanent) weather condition that goes back and forth between el Niño and la Niña states, and is called the el Niño/Southern Oscillation or ENSO. This is seen primarily in sea surface temperatures along the equator between South America and Pacific islands. In the el Niño pattern the temperatures in that belt are warmer than "usual" and in the la Niña state they're cooler. (and I'll drop the accent marks over the "n" from here on)

Earlier in the year, we were told to expect a la Nina pattern this season, but that has been reversed to el Nino with some sources warning of a "Super El Nino". In general, in Florida and the SE US, el Nino seasons reduce our chances of a hurricane. The National Weather Service ENSO prediction (April update) doesn't sound like the "Super El Nino" prediction.  

I've mentioned meteorologist Ryan Maue on these pages several times (earliest post? I think) starting when he was a graduate student at Florida State University, one of the major meteorology departments that study hurricanes. Simply, in an era of insanity and blaming everything that happens on CO₂ concentrations - followed by perennially making up new things to blame on CO₂ - he has remained data-driven and therefore a voice of sanity. Ryan keeps track of a metric they call Accumulated Cyclone Energy or ACE and provides this summary showing it's a far below average year. 

I think when the year to date ACE is 12% of a normal year, that's far below average.

The next thing I like to keep track of is the predictions for the hurricane activity for the season. One of the big names in doing this is Colorado State University, and Dr Phil Klotzbach issues numbers annually. His predictions are for lower activity than average, but spread over the entire Atlantic basin from Africa to the US and the west ends of the ocean, the Gulf of America, and the Caribbean, there are variations to keep track of, too. 

While the photo predicts every line in that chart to be lower than normal, it's important to realize that there's also luck involved and it's better to be more prepared than you need to be. Like everything else in life. 

To borrow some of the notes that appear below that photo:

Primary Drivers: The "El Niño" Factor
The defining feature of the 2026 season is the transition from a weak La Niña to a moderate-to-strong El Niño during the peak months (August–October).

• Wind Shear: El Niño typically creates high vertical wind shear across the Atlantic's Main Development Region (MDR). This "rips" storms apart before they can organize.
  
• Atmospheric Stability: Sinking air (subsidence) over the Caribbean and Atlantic is expected to suppress storm formation further.
  
• Atlantic Temperatures: While the Atlantic remains warm, it is not as anomalously hot as in recent record-breaking years, and the shear from El Niño is expected to be the dominant "hurricane slayer" this season.

In my years of observing, I've noticed that el Nino moves the tendency for storms to "re-curve" to a northerly path and then toward the east farther out to the east than in la Nina years. Yeah, I tend to get an early sigh of relief when I see predictions for an el Nino year.

Historical Analogs
CSU identifies years with similar climate setups to help predict 2026’s behavior. The primary analog years are:

• 2006 and 2009: Very quiet seasons for Florida landfall due to strong El Niño conditions.
  
• 2015: An extremely quiet year for the U.S. East Coast.
  
• 2023: A high storm count (20) but mostly storms that stayed out to sea, though Florida’s Big Bend was hit by Hurricane Idalia.
  
• Quality over Quantity: A below-average forecast does not mean zero risk. Forecasters frequently cite 1992 (Hurricane Andrew) as the ultimate warning: a very quiet, below-average year that produced one of the most devastating Category 5 landfalls in Florida history.
  
• Western Formation: Because El Niño suppresses storms in the deep tropics, 2026 may see more "homegrown" development in the Gulf of Mexico or Western Caribbean. These storms often have shorter lead times for us here in Florida.

So that's an overview of what we know about the coming hurricane season. It's always appropriate to keep an eye on the weather patterns and the one week forecasts with probabilities of development. Much like a loonie with a gun and intent to do something violent, it only takes one.

SpaceX's world is starting to shift

Through the end of 2025, I had noticed SpaceX launches were close to three a week or every other day. I posted about this on New Year's Day this year, writing in that post:

SpaceX shattered their launch record in '25 with 165 launches which works out to one every 3.1 days. These were orbital launches using only the Falcon 9. They also have five sub-orbital test flights of Starship. In case you don't watch them closely, they've set a new record every year for six years. 

The record has risen from 25 orbital liftoffs in 2020 to 31 (2021) to 61 (2022) to 96 (2023) to 134 (2024) and, now, to a whopping 165.

As 2026 has started unfolding, they seem to be falling back from that pace. Ars Technica goes into a deeper dive into what's going on today, in a piece entitled "SpaceX is starting to move on from the world’s most successful rocket." It's written by Stephen Clark, whom I still tend to think of as "the new guy," but I'm pretty sure he has been there over a year. 

It is far too soon to mention retirement, but astute observers of the space industry have noticed SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket is not launching as often as it used to.

The decline is modest so far, and it does not signal any problem at SpaceX or with the Falcon 9. Rather, it is a manifestation of SpaceX’s eagerness to shift focus to the much larger Starship rocket, an enabler of what the company wants to do in space: missions to land on the Moon and Mars, orbital data centers, and next-gen Starlink.

This shouldn't be a secret, since SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said the company plans “maybe 140, 145-ish” Falcon launches in 2026, but that wasn't widely quoted - it was an interview in Time magazine. She went on to say, “this year we’ll still launch a lot, but not as much,” she said. “And then we’ll tail off our launches as Starship is coming online.”

The changes are most obvious here near Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, where SpaceX has been launching from two pads regularly: Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC or Slick 40) from the Space Force Station side and Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex-39A or LC-39A. LC-39A is out of the rotation for Falcon 9 launches, although it remains available for occasional flights of the more powerful, triple-core Falcon Heavy. There are relatively quite a lot fewer Falcon Heavy missions than Falcon 9, and those will launch from SLC-40 this year.

LC-39A is going to be the Space Coast home of Starship. Starships seem to all be intended for RTLS (Return To Launch Site) missions, while the smaller number of Falcon 9 missions had SpaceX retire recovery drone Just Read The Instructions (JRTI), leaving A Shortfall Of Gravitas (ASOG) as their only recovery drone ship in use on the east coast.

“With 39A becoming a primarily Falcon Heavy and Starship pad, we don’t actually need two operational droneships on the East Coast to maintain our Falcon manifest,” wrote Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, in a post on X last month. The other landing vessel in Florida can support a launch and recovery every four days, according to Dontchev, and some Falcon missions can return their boosters to land onshore.

As you'll read at the link to X, "After 156 successful Falcon 9 landings, Just Read the Instructions will be fully dedicated to support Starship operations going forward." 

The shift in emphasis to Starship on Cape Canaveral is going to reduce the number of launches from the Cape, at least in the short term, and may give the title of busiest launch site to Vandenberg. Depending on if Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance can meet their goals for launch numbers. With both New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur currently grounded, it's not looking very good for 2026. 

A Falcon 9 rocket with multiple satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office heads over the horizon after a predawn launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on April 20, 2025. Credit: George Rose/Getty Images

Col. Brian Chatman, commander of the military unit overseeing Cape Canaveral’s launch range, said the Space Force is preparing for as many as 500 launches per year from Florida’s Space Coast by 2036. The growth will require new construction, access to utilities, and increased reliance on automation at the military ranges, which are responsible for ensuring public safety during rocket launches.

SpaceX aims to routinely launch Starships from multiple launch pads in Florida and Texas (it has not announced plans for a Starship pad in California), and last month, the Space Force selected Blue Origin to build a brand new launch pad for its New Glenn rocket on an undeveloped site at Vandenberg. Stoke Space and Relativity Space are building launch sites at Cape Canaveral. The only other orbital-class spaceport on federal property is at Wallops Island, Virginia, where Rocket Lab, Northrop Grumman, and Firefly Aerospace plan to base their rockets.

A new kind of story - mergers of space service providers

I find it hard to just come up with a simple, one word description of this. It's a three company alliance, all of which have incentives to work together. Not a merger, that implies they become one. An alliance is as good a word as there is.

Regardless of what you call it, SpaceFlight Now reports today that Firefly Aerospace, the small company that hasn't had much success in launching their Alpha rocket so far but who built the first commercially made lunar lander that successfully landed on the moon has joined small provider Seagate Space with old industry giant Lockheed Martin to work on offshore launch platforms for their small capacity Alpha launch vehicle. The not-quite 100 foot tall Alpha (~97 ft) rocket currently only launches from Space Launch Complex (SLC) 2 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

On Monday, Jonathan Caldwell, the vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Strategic and Missile Defense Systems, announced Lockheed Martin’s participation in this proposal in a post on his LinkedIn profile on May 4. He said it was a fusion of Lockheed Martin’s “legacy” in national security matters and “the innovative spirit” of the comparatively much younger companies of Firefly Aerospace and Seagate Space.

“The three companies will work together on mission‑application concepts and flight‑demonstration projects that leverage Seagate’s Gateway offshore launch platform,” Caldwell wrote. “This sea‑based launch facility, combined with Firefly’s responsive Alpha launch vehicle, will provide rapid, flexible access to space from diverse locations, an essential capability for tactical payloads and national‑security missions.”

Bear in mind that's it not a full month since Seagate Space announced a memorandum of understanding with Firefly to create off-shore infrastructure for its Alpha rockets, and now Firefly is announcing a partnership with Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin may be an "old space" or "space 1.0" company, but they sound like they're all-in on this project, too. I could imagine the younger engineers at Firefly perhaps learning some tricks from the Lockheed Martin graybeards. 

“Partnering with Firefly to align our Gateway platform with their Alpha vehicle is a major step toward making offshore launch a practical reality for the industry,” said Sean Fortener, President & COO at Seagate Space, in a statement. “We’re building a platform designed for mobility, responsiveness, and global access – key factors that complement our current launch infrastructure.”

An artist’s interpretation of a Firefly Aerospace rocket atop a Seagate Space Gateway Series spaceport. Graphic: Firefly Aerospace/Seagate Space

In a statement to Spaceflight Now, Caldwell said Lockheed Martin wanted to direct some of its future payloads to this aquatic undertaking in order to support the needs of the Department of Defense.

“With our mission understanding in missile defense and targets systems, we are well aware that our warfighter’s operational requirements are rapidly evolving to stay ahead of growing adversarial threats,” Caldwell said. “A unique, mobile, sea-based launch platform like this — which is not dependent on the availability of a fixed, terrestrial launch location — provides not only increased rapid responsive launch capabilities but also can help alleviate some of the traffic pressure on current ground launch facilities.”

“With more than 70 percent of the Earth covered by water, that greatly increases our mission flexibility by taking advantage of the platform’s mobility to generate multi-azimuth launch geometries driven today by limited availability for air launched target delivery and unconstrainted by typical land-based launch locations. Our payloads integrated with the Alpha rocket allow us to accelerate end-to-end delivery solutions for our customers that are focused on delivering effects at speed while leveraging commercial approaches. We’re involved in this project because it will get mission into the hands of our warfighters faster. Firefly’s flexible Alpha rocket will help Lockheed Martin rapidly launch future spacecraft, including new payload technologies. With Seagate Space potentially making any ocean our launch pad, this collaboration could redefine responsive space operations.”

While the Alpha currently only launches from Vandenberg's SLC (Space Launch Complex) 2, Firefly has been working toward expanding their options. First there was a partnership with Northrop Grumman to fly from Launch Pad 0A (LP-0A) at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) within the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It's worth mentioning that the Antares 330, the launch vehicle Firefly is building for Northrop Grumman to resume launching CRS (Cargo Resupply Services) missions to the Space Station, is part of this agreement. The Wallops Flight Facility agreement was announced in 2024. 

A few days after that was announced, Firefly said it was working with SSC Space (formerly the Swedish Space Corporation) to allow for Alpha rocket launches from the spaceport at the Esrange Space Center in Sweden. Firefly would use Launch Complex 3C for its missions. That was supposed to go into effect this year, but in a March 2026 press release, SSC Space said that an agreement with the Swedish Defense Materiel Administration pushed that back to 2028.  That sounds to me like a Swedish government decision independent of what Firefly, Seagate Space and Lockheed Martin are doing. 

SpaceX launches the week with a rideshare mission

A rideshare mission carrying 45 payloads launched out of Vandenberg Space Force Base early Sunday morning. 

The mission, dubbed CAS500-2, is named for the primary payload called Compact Advanced Satellite 500-2 from the Korea Aerospace Industries, Ltd. (KAI). It’s the second of two satellites that KAI calls Phase 1 of its CAS500 program, which is designed for “precision ground-based observation.”

Liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East happened at 12 AM PDT (3 AM EDT / 0700 UTC). The rocket deployed the CAS500-2 satellite into a Sun-synchronous orbit about 60 minutes after launch. 

The story gets a bit longer here. CAS500-2 has been delayed years after the "-1" flight.

According to Korea JoongAng Daily, a South Korean publication, the CAS500-2 satellite was originally scheduled to launch in 2022 on a Russian rocket, but the mission faced years of delays due to Russia’s war against Ukraine.

“Additional delays occurred after SpaceX changed plans for a joint launch with another satellite, resulting in a separate launch,” reporter Yoon Seung-Jin wrote. “As a result, CAS500-2 will launch later than CAS500-3, which was sent into space aboard Korea’s Nuri rocket in November last year.”

CAS500-4 and CAS500-5 round out Phase 2 of KAI’s CAS500 program. Those satellites were slated to launch in 2025, but a new launch date for those has not been announced.

In what's getting to be a bit less remarkable every time it happens, booster B1071 completed its 33rd flight on this mission. To be honest, when I think completing anything over 30 flights is getting to be unremarkable, that thought always gets slapped by another part of my brain saying, "remember when they thought maybe they could get 10 launches out of a Falcon 9? And now they're saying they think they can get to 40."  The overall fleet leader is B1067-34 which flew mission 34 on March 30. I want to see B1067 get to 40. 

Around 7.5 minutes after liftoff, B1071 landed at Landing Zone 4 (LZ-4), adjacent to the pad it launched from on Vandenberg SFB. This was the 34th landing at this site and the 608th booster landing for SpaceX to date.

As mentioned, this was a rideshare mission and B1071 carried 44 other payloads manifested by multiple partners. The vast majority of the satellites were supplied by Exolaunch, using a variety of deployment mechanisms. The launch support company deployed 21 CubeSats and 18 MicroSats across two deployment sequences.

The first batch of satellites were released beginning about an hour and 16 minutes after liftoff, over a period of six minutes, and the second batch about two hours and 22 minutes after liftoff, in a sequence lasting about eight minutes.

“This mission reflects how Exolaunch is scaling alongside growing launch demand,” said Jeanne Allarie, chief investor relations officer at Exolaunch, in statement. “As we quickly expand the number of missions we support each year, we’re strengthening our sales pipeline and deepening collaboration with SpaceX to deliver consistent, reliable access to orbit for our global customers.”

And there were more. This one caught my eye because it's in my hometown.

Argotec, an Italian company that opened a new satellite integration facility in Melbourne, Florida, in April 2026, manifested seven of its HEO (Hawk for Earth Observation) MicroSats, which are part of the IRIDE (Iniziativi di Resilienza per l’Italia Dalle Emergenze) constellation. IRIDE also has support from the European Space Agency (ESA).

There were eight HEO satellites on orbit prior to May 3, which launched on two previous Falcon 9 rockets.

IRIDE is described by participant company Telespazio, a Leonardo and Thales company, as a “constellation of constellations.” There are more than 73 Italian companies participating in its construction and operation.

Screen capture of the X posting by Exolaunch.

There are still more companies and payloads on this mission, thanks to the combination of the low cost, reusable Falcon 9 and rideshare model of launching "anybody that wants to put a satellite into some of the more desirable orbits." An impressive mission, but for most people around the country, I'm sure it's "just another launch." 

It's a Good Thing It's Star Wars Day

Cause otherwise, I got nothing. 

An oldie but a goodie - so old the couple of uses I can find have no attribution to where it came from.  As is the case with the second irresistible meme. Because if the bad guy in last sequence of films is Kylo Ren (played by Adam Driver), that implies the universe must create a need for a Kylo Stimpy to maintain symmetry. 

Image source: Imgflip

Last year I did a bit of a summary of my Star Wars life. I was going to say that I hadn't seen any Star Wars content since the last trilogy, episodes 7, 8 and 9 with Daisy Ridley (Rey Skywalker),  Adam Driver (of course), John Boyega (Finn) and many more.  That's what I originally thought, but it's not complete at all.  I watched Rogue One - "the prequel" movie, the original Andor series on Disney+/Hulu streaming, the Obi Wan Kenobi series, the first two Mandalorian series and probably more that I can't remember now.  I mentioned being aware of the Mandalorian and Grogu which is a full length feature film that IMDB says is coming May 22 - (they didn't have a date last year). That's just three weeks from last Friday (May 1). Yeah, I think I've been following SciFi, reading and watching, since I was about 12. 

The only "after" photo of Artemis II's heat shield I've seen.

I'll be honest: this doesn't mean much. Back on the 28th, Space.com posted a "photo of the day" from the team that recovered the Artemis II Orion capsule. It was taken underwater the day of the recovery. 

The Artemis 2 Orion heat shield underwater after splashdown on April 10, 2026. (Image credit: U.S. Navy) Some image processing by me to bring up the overall brightness of the image and get more of the shield to show up.

On this past Tuesday (April 28) the Orion capsule returned to the KSC.  You can bet that we'll see better pictures of the heat shield once they get going. 

Engineers and technicians will now begin "de-servicing operations" on Integrity at KSC's Multi-Processing Payload Facility, collecting data that could aid future Artemis missions to the moon.

De-servicing "includes removing payloads from the crew module, removing avionics boxes for reuse, and retrieving data on the spacecraft to better understand how it performed to inform procedures and plans for future Artemis missions," NASA officials said in an April 28 statement.

"Orion's heat shield and other elements will be removed for extensive analysis, and remaining hazards such as excess propellant will be offloaded," they added.

Sometimes things just don't go as planned

As if that's news, but as they say, "the best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray." Friday didn't go as planned and at 9:00 PM I'm not finding any stories that look like big Space news. I'm ordinarily well into the next day's post by this time. 

So since we're short of space news anyway, I'm going to shift gears and get into something I thought I'd write about over the weekend. A visit to a movie theater. Our first in more years than I can think of.

On Wednesday, we took a break from the endless spring of "what needs expensive work done on it now?" to go see what comes across as a surprisingly popular movie, Project Hail Mary. It's long movie based on a complicated story by Andy Weir, who wrote the book The Martian was based on. The movie is primarily Ryan Gosling on screen, although that's an over simplification. It seems to be that rare combination of a sci-fi movie that tries to get the science right for a story that's long and involved.  

Gosling plays biologist Ryland Grace who was essentially kicked out of his science career when he published something that was poorly accepted by big names in his field, and he's working as an elementary school teacher. It was the only kind of job he could get. But you don't know that fact when the movie starts. The movie opens up with Grace coming out of an induced coma, on a space ship in deep space; lost and not remembering where he is or why he's there. Everyone else on the ship is dead. The movie bounces back in time to set up the answers to that and it starts with him being told someone had discovered an unexplained stream of something going from the sun to Venus. Researchers then discovered this mysterious thing was actually slowly destroying the sun and calculated that within a short time (20 years, I think) the sun will stop working and the entire population of Earth will die off. Every one and every thing will die.

They go farther to point out that every star in our part of the galaxy is showing the same effects except one, so why is that star unaffected? The name of the movie comes from realizing their only hope is to stop this thing which is pretty quickly determined to be some exotic microbe they call astrophage (star eater). Astrophage needs to be exterminated and they've found no way to kill it. It comes down to this mission named after the desperation hail Mary pass from football. Humanity can build a one-of-a-kind ship that can go nearly lightspeed and get a crew to that star to find out why it's different, but it's a one way flight and the crew is expected to die off because they don't have enough fuel to get back home. 

If they go, the world may have a chance. If they don't go there is no chance. Either way, the crew is expected to die. 

I found it a very well done movie and enjoyed it a lot. Gosling is the only person in the cast I recognized and know I've seen in movies before. If you go watch trailers and other videos on YouTube, you'll see that featured side to the story is that he meets a sentient, rock-creature (alien) from another planet. After they learn to communicate coarsely, Grace calls the rock alien "Rocky" and Rocky calls him Grace. The story goes back and forth between the past and present situations to explain why some parts are setup the way they are; I found those transitions fairly easy to get used to. 

A large crowd scene from one of the memories before the launch of their "Hail Mary" mission. Next to Ryan Gosling (Grace) is actress Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt, one of the project leaders, and seemed to be the one that tracked down Grace for the mission.

Blue Origin aiming for 100 launches per year

They simply have to, but it's still an ambitious goal and I think they won't get there as fast as they want.

Eric Berger from Ars Technica breaks the news that earlier this week, he found that Blue Origin posted a "help wanted" ad for an intriguing sounding position. There's a lot of news down this rabbit hole.

“As part of a hardworking team of specialists, technicians, and engineers you will be the Senior Manager of Gen 2.0 Tank Fabrication, and will own the production execution of the most structurally complex and schedule-critical subsystem on the vehicle—the propellant tank,” the job posting states. [NOTE: the original link in the Ars Technica source was rejected by Blue Origin's site. This one I replaced it with was found by searching there for just "Gen 2.0 Tank Fabrication" - SiG]

Quattro is the company’s nickname for a more powerful upper stage for the New Glenn rocket, which will feature four BE-3U engines instead of the two currently powering the booster. Blue Origin revealed plans for this more powerful variant of New Glenn, 9×4 (nine first stage engines, and four upper stage engines), last November.

It is possible this rocket, significantly larger than the 7×2 variant currently flying and necessary for the company’s lunar ambitions as part of NASA’s Artemis program, could make its debut next year.

The job responsibilities include being responsible for executing a “rate ramp” - as in “ramp up” - from the current 12 per year (in somebody's dreams somewhere) to 60/year, and do it by the third quarter of 2028. Sorry, I just realized I ran out exclamation points. After that 60/year, they want a production of 100 upper stages per year by 2029.

For the time being, Blue Origin is still studying whether to pursue a reusable upper stage for New Glenn, so each launch of the vehicle requires a new upper stage. A production rate of 60 a year in 2028 suggests the company is targeting a launch rate of 60 New Glenn 9×4 rockets annually just three years from now. That would be in addition to the 7×2 variant currently flying, which would continue to be used for less demanding missions.

In case you haven't picked up on my sarcasm, I think you're more likely to find a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow than they are to meet these goals. Berger, for example, reminds us that in 2024 Blue Origin's founder Jeff Bezos told the company he wanted New Glenn to launch eight times in 2025. It ended up flying twice, in January and November. Then he concludes that for a rocket that new and that large, it wasn't a bad accomplishment to get that flight total for '25. 

That may or may not be a reasonable conclusion but the first thing that popped into my mind was the failure of the most recent launch's upper stage to place the payload into the desired orbit. Get it to work properly before you put a lot of money into getting it to fly more often. There's no benefit to having more launches that fail in a year. 

That said, Bezos has plenty of money to push Blue Origin with, and he has been pushing for more launches for years. 

Bezos continues to make major investments in infrastructure in Florida, most recently in an 800,000-square-foot new manufacturing facility known as “Project Horizon.” It is possible that New Glenn second stages could be manufactured at this facility.  

This facility is on Merritt Island, where Blue Origin has been building infrastructure for their space hardware for years, now. 

A rendering of the 9x4 variant of a New Glenn rocket taking off. Image Credit: Blue Origin