Busy day coming Friday the 13th, and a big deal for each launch

I've been watching and waiting for this day since first hearing that it was a double launch day last week. We've known something like that was possible, since ULA announced the Vulcan Return to Flight was going to be Friday the 13th back a couple of weeks ago, but the two big launches on the same day wasn't known back then. 

The Launch Schedule from NextSpaceflight.  

The launch times are in Eastern Standard Time. 

The Vulcan mission is important to United Launch Alliance and to the Amazon Leo constellation of satellites it's getting into orbit. The Vulcan has been grounded since the flight of the Vulcan last February on what was the fourth Vulcan mission due to problems with the nozzles on the solid rocket boosters strapped on the sides of the booster. The nozzles broke on two of the first four Vulcan launches. This version is called the VC6L and has six of those solid rocket boosters. The VC6L is the most powerful configuration of the Vulcan rocket thanks to those six solid rocket boosters, and a low-Earth orbit-optimized Centaur V upper stage.

The investigation identified three credible causes of the nozzle liberation issue experienced on USSF-87, and NGC applied fixes to mitigate each. The changes to the booster included design and manufacturing fixes, and these will be tested on LV-01. NGC and ULA will gather data during this flight to help improve the nozzle.
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If the LV-01 flight goes well, ULA is prepared to ramp up its Vulcan flight cadence, with the LV-02 mission for Amazon Leo already being processed in VIF-G. The Space Force and NASA are monitoring the flight, as national security payloads and the Boeing Starliner crewed spacecraft are planned to launch on Vulcan in the future.

As LV-01 is important to ULA and Amazon, Starship's Flight 15 is important to SpaceX. This is the first Starship mission planned to return both the SuperHeavy booster and the ship to the launch site. Other boosters have been captured with the Mechazilla arms before, but only for Version 1 boosters, never a V3. Unlike the boosters, a Starship has never been recovered with the tower's arms. If successful, this will mark the first full recovery of an orbital launch system and a breakthrough moment in making Starship a reliable, rapidly reusable rocket.

Starship’s initial return to launch site mission is expected to orbit the Earth at an altitude of ~275 km and complete approximately 14 orbits around the planet over the course of a more than 22-hour flight. Similar to Starship’s first orbital mission, the flight profile has been designed with the opportunity to insert into a passively safe suborbital trajectory or safely deorbit at multiple pre-determined areas over the ocean after raising to an orbital altitude. 

While these captures of the booster and ship are what many of us will be watching for, the real money-making aspect of the mission will be releasing 26 of the much bigger and more capable V3 Starlink satellites. Each Starlink V3 satellite will add 1 Terabit of capacity to the constellation, with all 26 satellites equaling ~10 Starlink V2 Mini launches on the Falcon 9.

Screen Capture of the SpaceX website with a video about the upcoming mission. Image credit: SpaceX

Another sign the launch market is tight

Another sign that the demand for launches to orbit is expected to be exceeding supply for a while is that Rocket Lab just raised the price of a launch on their Neutron from $55 to $70 Million. Neutron, of course, has never flown so it's more of an unknown than usual. Those quick with mental math or their calculator will confirm it's a substantial increase, over 25% (27.3). 

"Launch is extremely constrained, and that is exactly the situation we predicted," Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said on Monday during the company's third-quarter earnings call. "We saw a pent-up launch market on the horizon, and rather than provide early discounted launches, we set out to deliver a rocket into an environment with extreme demand at full price or higher."

For those who aren't regular followers of the modern space industry and not familiar with the Electron, it's Rocket Lab's main rocket they sell rides to orbit on, and rather on the small side. It's 59 feet tall and capable of putting 660 pounds into low Earth orbit (LEO). That said, it has been successful entry into the launch business for Beck and Rocket Lab. It has been flying since 2017 and has 90 successful orbital missions under its belt. They have successfully recovered boosters for reuse, but I haven't seen numbers for how many flights any recovered boosters have flown. 

The Neutron is their jump into the range of the Falcon 9. Neutron stands 141 feet tall and it can carry 14.3 tons (28,600 lb.s) of payload to LEO. For comparison, the Falcon 9 stands 230 feet tall and will lift 50,265 lb.s to LEO. In both spec.s Neutron is quite a bit smaller than Falcon 9. Neutron has been under development since 2021 and first flights were expected this year, until "a manufacturing issue" interfered, pushing the flights into '27.

During Monday's call, Beck revealed that Rocket Lab booked eight Neutron launches during the third quarter of 2026, which ran from July 1 through Sept. 30.

The contracts for those eight flights are worth "a total of roughly 515 million, including multiple missions on a new escalated base price of $70 million," Beck said. Neutron's first 16 launches are now sold out, he added, and bookings from here on will be for flights in the 2030s.

"The demand is a function of both a tightening global launch supply and our customers' confidence that Rocket Lab is the right partner to break the world's launch bottleneck," Beck said.

Artist's illustration of Rocket Lab's next-gen Neutron launcher in flight while the booster is powering it. (Image credit: Rocket Lab)

If SpaceX is dropping Falcon 9 and out of the launch biz, who's next?

It's a pretty obvious question. The world leader is leaving the business, leaving a massive hole in the supply in a period when demand is surging. Any company that can fill that hole stands to make a lot of money. The dramatic drop in launch capability has the US government scrambling to find replacements; that's a sure indication they see the workhorse rocket’s retirement as a national security risk.

The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital has twice in the last two weeks announced it was sending cash to two of SpaceX’s competitors in the launch business. First, on October 26, the office announced a $150 million conditional loan commitment to Stoke Space. Military officials revealed a second $150 million Pentagon loan Tuesday for Rocket Lab.

Rocket Lab isn't surprising to me - I've long thought they were one of the top few launch companies in the world. The obvious drawback is their flagship rocket is The Electron which is small payload vehicle (660 lb to Low Earth Orbit). That automatically means there's a large number of payloads launched every year that they can't get off the pad. We all know, though, that they're closing in on the first launch of their Neutron; that's currently looking to be in the first quarter of '27. Neutron is a medium/heavy reusable launcher rated at 13,000 kg or 28,660 lb.s to LEO.

Stoke Space, however, is a surprise to me. I've been following them as best as I can for a few years now, and they've been working on their own reusable rocket, the Nova. I see them as fairly far behind Rocket Lab. The rate at which they can catch up to Rocket Lab isn't knowable. At least not to me.

Stoke Space and Rocket Lab are the first two launch companies to receive significant support from the Office of Strategic Capital (OSC), an organization established in 2022 to infuse companies developing “vital” national security technologies with capital. OSC has been on a loan spree in recent weeks, committing hundreds of millions of dollars to companies specializing in batteries, drones, and semiconductors. In the space sector, the office also provided a $150 million loan to LeoLabs, a commercial satellite tracking company, for production and deployment of radar units.

Military space officials have held to a policy of assured access to space since the 1990s, with the Pentagon paying to support at least two US rocket programs capable of launching national security satellites. The two companies currently swapping off missions for the Space Force are SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA).

Alongside SpaceX and ULA, Space Systems Command has tapped Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Relativity Space, and Impulse Space for eligibility to compete for some of those national security launches. Blue Origin is the only company that has flown a rocket that could meet the Space Force’s requirements. Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, and Relativity Space are developing their own medium- and heavy-lift launch vehicles, while Impulse Space is working on in-space propulsion. 
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Stoke Space’s loan is tailored to support the buildout of the company’s second launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The second launch site would support flights of Stoke Space’s Nova Block 2 rocket, an upgraded version of the company’s fully reusable Nova Pathfinder, which is set to debut sometime next year.

A test-firing of Stoke Space's methane-fueled Zenith engine. Seven of these engines will power the company's Nova Pathfinder rocket, and 14 will fly on the booster of Nova Block 2. Credit: Stoke Space

The reactions of both Stoke Space and Rocket Lab show they think the loans are a pretty good idea. Yes, they're loans that need to be paid back, but they're going to speed up the improvements they're aimed at. The DOD will most likely get the increase in launch capacity they're pushing for, they'll just get some of what they spent paid back to them.

SpaceX now an “infrastructure company” - says VP of launch

If you're a regular reader here, you'll have seen the name Kiko Dontchev, Vice President of launch for SpaceX. While they are obviously still in the process of development on Starship, the rest of their fleet was pretty much designed by the time the first Falcon Heavy launched in 2018. I'd be surprised if they haven't tweaked the designs of either the Heavy or the 9, usually referred to informally as "rev-ing" or revising, the design. While it's true that the vehicles themselves are probably touched less often than the infrastructure supporting their launch operations, I'm sure things like the Starship launch pads and Mechazilla arms get touched far more often than a Falcon 9 or Heavy. 

At last week’s UP.Summit conference in Florida, the vice president of launch at SpaceX, Kiko Dontchev, offered some of the most revealing comments to date about the company’s changing focus, how it is embracing AI, and why the Falcon 9 rocket—which has dominated global launch for a decade and remains the world’s preeminent launch vehicle—is firmly on the road to retirement.

“In the last couple years, when I talk about SpaceX, yes, we are a rocket company, but fundamentally we are an infrastructure company at this point,” Dontchev said. “We’re building infrastructure on the ground and low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and obviously eventually Mars.”

Earlier in the year, SpaceX acquired another of Elon Musk's companies, xAI, and while SpaceX engineers had been using AI to help them get more done, there's always a learning curve with such things. Dontchev says that it has really been starting to speed up accomplishments.

“What’s happened at SpaceX is we’ve really gone through a huge acceleration of adoption,” Dontchev said. “Even just a year ago, we weren’t adopting it that quickly, but really starting this year, we started to adopt it extremely rapidly. And the acceleration we have seen in our ability to do engineering is unlike anything I’ve ever seen at the company in my 16 years.” 

He goes on to say that tasks which would take would take hours to days now take seconds to minutes. Perhaps more surprisingly, it's also helping difficult "assembly and test" operations.

“We’ve automated being able to detect FOD,” he said. “We’ll have an inspector go in and borescope a tube, and we find that humans are about 94 percent perfect (at) finding a piece of it. Grok analyzing the same video is 99.9 percent perfect.” 

Seeing this, they've expanded the use of AI into inspection of Starlink customer terminals and other operations. Dontchev says the same improvements are following everywhere. And he says it will enhance efforts to get settlements going on Mars. 

Dontchev started at SpaceX before they flew the first Falcon 9 but has always been aiming for something better. You see, the second stage of every Falcon 9 that launches gets thrown away just like every other rocket family until Falcon started flying. Yes there have been boosters that have flown over 30 times;  B1067 flew its 36th flight back on July 9 but with the long term goal of being totally, rapidly reusable, not being able to get the second stage re-flying seems to have eaten at him.   

“Falcon 9, I love that rocket to heart,” he said. “I’ve launched many of them, all of them, in fact. But it’s still not fully reusable. We still throw that second stage away every single flight. Starship—we’re going to catch both the first stage and the second stage.”

When you think of their long term goals in the thousands of Starship launches per year, maybe 10,000 in a year, reusing everything certainly seems like what they've got to do. At some point, the cost and time associated with building second stages wipes out some of their desired launches. 

It is also significant that Dontchev spoke less about Starship’s payload capacity and more about its productivity per launch. The first orbital Starship launch, in late September, carried larger Starlink V3 satellites. And in the aggregate, this single mission carried 10 times the bandwidth of the Starlink payload launched by a Falcon 9.

Flying Starship from Florida, he said, will further improve capacity compared to Texas launches. Launching from Florida offers more favorable trajectories to certain orbits, potentially allowing Starship to carry more satellites without expending propellant on dogleg maneuvers. Dontchev said a single Florida Starship launch will be able to carry up to 20 times the bandwidth of a single Falcon 9. 

My favorite part of the interview was when he said, “We’re going to transport boosters and ships over barge here to the Cape. We’re hoping to actually do the first transports this year in December, and then maybe even fly by the end of the year.” 

Starship Flight Test 14 Monday morning, Sept. 28 from Starbase, Texas, looking north along the gulf coast. I want to see this from the backyard - even though it will be a smaller image. Image Credit: SpaceX

My 2¢ worth

Fifteen and a half years ago, when I started this blog, I tended to blog mostly about politics and economics, along with guns, gun rights, fishing and many of my other interests. It’s hard to say sitting here now when I cut back on that, but space missions became a main topic/interest and I throttled back to close to zero on political things. The list of Post Labels on the bottom of the right column says there have been 1292 posts with “space” as their label and another 337 under the “space-biz” label as I tried to come up with a label for things that weren’t about specific missions or launches, but about a general interest or something off on an undefined future mission. If all I ever posted was those two subjects, that’s not much. I’ve moved to more space and tech related but this is like post 5780 and the two space topics are a small percentage of that. The root cause was that I was simply bored with constantly talking politics.  

The point of all this was to say it has been a LONG time since I’ve done something like I’m doing now. My 2¢ worth on the “blue tsunami”. 

To begin with, I think there has been a ton of evidence for a longer than I can recall that the general population of Republicans were deeply dissatisfied with the results coming out of DC. Especially the results in the Senate under John Thune – I see stuff about firing him every day. People are saying in so many words that “we wanted change and you did nothing.” You can change that to “you didn’t do enough” if you want, but the overall picture is the same. Don’t expect logic from people that mad. Don’t tell the red voters that jumped over to blue that they made everything worse.  

An example from 90 Miles from Tyranny - kinder than many I've seen.

I’ve seen similar things said about Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, but there are lots of things that have been passed by the house, that Senate Leader Thune has just let get overgrown by mold. 

Something related I’ve seen in many times and places for years, but a factor that I don’t see anyone talking about is that people who spend their lives online, be it social media or playing games, are unaccustomed to the fact that things like this take time. Big wheels turn slowly. I tend to think that younger voters expect things to happen much faster than they can, regardless of how fast those governments seem to think they can move. Some of that was done deliberately by the founding fathers, specifically to slow things down. The result, though, is that we reach a point where nothing can happen fast enough to please everyone. That limit is getting shorter as those born with computers everywhere move farther into the voting population. I can see this being a problem when things that have been promised end up waiting on a desk for some reluctant congress critter to finish it and they don’t for whatever reason. 

Another issue I hear being addressed by name is inflation. Inflation can be influenced by the president and the majority party in both halves of the legislature, even when they’re not the same party, but in reality the cause is the Federal Reserve Bank and our “fiat” currency. For those not used to that word, it means they declare the value of the dollar and using the dollar is taken as proof that users concede it’s real. The problem is that when the supply of dollars goes up, the value of each dollar can be assumed to have gone down. Rather than saying the dollar is defined as some amount of some thing that’s valued, be it gold, silver, some stone, or whatever, we effectively ask how many of these slips of paper do you want for what you’re selling.

It’s really the case that whatever you think you’re buying you’re actually trading slips of paper for. Say you’re the seller. Wouldn’t your natural thought be what you could trade those slips of paper for? By extension, let’s say you’re trading something you no longer need versus something you really still need and would rather not trade away. Do you think your tendency would be toward more reluctance than if you were trading something you had lots of, so that you have what you really need and lots of spares? What if you’re selling something and the Fed suddenly says we now have 5% more slips of paper than we had before. Would you be inclined to think you want 5% more slips of paper? 

Why do the central banks and world governments want this? It’s the appearances. It seems everyone thinks their house and property should be worth more as the years go by, just as so many seem to think they should be making more money every year. They can give you more slips of paper and raise the price of your house if they make each slip of paper less valuable. Likewise, your paycheck could be more slips of paper but in terms of buying power you can be worse off.

This turns the “cost of living” in dollars into something that can go up when the Fed creates more dollars or go down if (when) the Fed pulls dollars out of circulation. The reality is this is done simply by saying “it is so”.

To increase the monetary base, the Fed buys securities from any party and pays with a check. That check, written on the Fed, is deposited by a bank in its account with the Fed, thereby adding to its reserves and increasing the monetary base. The same process works for decreasing the monetary base: The Fed sells securities, getting a check from a bank in exchange. When the check is deposited, the bank's balance at the Fed decreases. 

 (From the St.Louis Federal Reserve bank). 

What I meant by “simply saying it is so” is that nothing of value actually changed hands. They simply wrote some numbers on a deposit slip, deposited that slip of paper by writing that number on another form and bing! There's more money! Chances are no actual deposit slips ever existed, and it was all done by typing some numbers into a computerized form. 

Well, that's just some thoughts. FWIW, which approaches zero. 

We have a scheduled date and time for Starship Flight 15

We have a date and time for the next flight test of Starship, Flight 15, which is an orbital mission primarily to put a load of 26 V3 Starlink satellites into orbit, as FT-14 did.

The liftoff is scheduled for 5:45 PM EST next Friday, 11/13. The launch window will be open until 7:00 PM. 

SpaceX has posted a lengthy description of the mission including several videos and their approaches to the critical aspects. As has been widely reported, the plan is to recover the booster and the ship, returning both to the launch site and grabbing them with "Mechazilla". What hasn't been widely reported is that they expect this to be a nearly 24 hour mission, with the capture of the ship 22 hours and 32 minutes after launch. 

Screen capture from a video of the mission posted at that site. Image credit: SpaceX

The emphasis of their discussion is how mission safety and their confidence in being able to do everything safely is really the most important aspect of the mission. 

To borrow part of the first page:

Our Approach to a Safe Return

On Flight 15, Starship will initially launch to a passively safe suborbital trajectory. This is the same flight profile used on Starship’s first orbital mission and ensures that any issues encountered during ascent or shortly thereafter will result in Starship reentering over a cleared area of the Indian Ocean.

After this initial ascent, flight controllers will assess the health of Starship’s systems before giving a “go” or “no-go” for orbit. If “go”, Starship will then perform an orbital insertion burn with a single Raptor sea-level engine, increasing its speed and achieving orbit around Earth.

Once on orbit, Starship will deploy its payload of Starlink V3 satellites. Three of these satellites have been modified to acquire imagery of Starship’s heatshield. This method of analyzing Starship’s heatshield has been tested on previous flights and is one of several data sources to help inform Starship’s readiness to return to the launch site on Flight 15.

After deploying its payload, Starship will then coast in orbit for another ~21 hours until its orbit aligns with Starbase for a return. During this multi-hour orbital coast, flight controllers will continuously perform manual and automated checks of Starship systems which, similar to the first orbital flight, will be intentionally conservative. They include Raptor engine health, loss of power or communications, the health of the flight computers and navigation sensors, the structural integrity of the propellant tanks and feedlines, the ability to hold tank pressure, and Starship’s ability to control its attitude. 

A screen capture from one of the videos on linked to at the top, after the ship has been captured by the Mechazilla jaws. Note the moon in the background. Image credit: SpaceX

Small Space News Story Roundup 88

Suddenly it seems a lot of news broke in the last couple of days. Most of this is from Ars Technica's  Rocket Report.

There might be an unexpected answer to the (western world) launch shortage 

The approach might be more obvious if you think of it from a different point of view. What if the satellite makers decided to also make their own launch vehicles? The rocket makers obviously approach the issue as creating more versatile launchers, so why wouldn't the satellite makers say they can launch their own payloads? That's a story that appears on Ars Technica that didn't make this week's Rocket Report. 

AST SpaceMobile is a Texas-based company building very large satellites to provide direct-to-cell communications on Earth. They've been having trouble finding dependable rides into space, having lost their first satellite when Blue Origin lost the upper stage of their New Glenn back in April of '26. That led AST SpaceMobile to consider developing their own orbital class rocket, called Blacklift. 

They're saying it will have the capacity to lift 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, adding that it would start launching in late 2028.

“The Blacklift rocket is the springboard to significantly expand our total addressable market, providing AST SpaceMobile with regular unconstrained access to orbit and providing for most favorable owner’s economics in the industry,” said Abel Avellan, founder, chairman, and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, in a news release.

To anyone with even a basic understanding of rockets, that timeline is wildly, fantastically, and stupidly optimistic. Still, the announcement is worth examining because it underscores two important trends in today’s launch industry.

About that 20 metric tons to LEO number, it's in the ballpark that Falcon 9 lives in, and several times what Rocket Lab's Electron can lift. Their Neutron, which is expected to fly in '27, is in that 20 metric tons class. I've been writing about the Neutron since March of '21, so five years was passed eight months ago and Neutron is probably going to be No Earlier Than next March. We'll see, but that's six years for a very experienced company. For sure, it depends on how much investment they can attract, but the best time to develop a rocket in this class was probably SpaceX and the Falcon 9 at 4.7 years. 

What about other companies? Since 2015, a number of other US companies—United Launch Alliance (Vulcan), Rocket Lab (Neutron), Relativity Space (Terran R), Firefly/Northrop Grumman (Eclipse), and Stoke Space (Nova) have announced medium to heavy lift vehicles, ranging in payload capacity from about 7 to 27 metric tons (Blue Origin’s New Glenn is much larger than any of these).

Of these, only Vulcan has reached orbit. It took 8.7 years, with an incredibly experienced launch team behind the vehicle and about $2 billion in aggregate federal support across its suppliers.

China published a document saying they expect to land on the moon in three years

Chinese officials confirmed reports the nation plans to land its taikonauts (their word for astronauts) on the Moon before 2030. 

At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, officials, including Wang Xiang, chief designer for the lunar exploration program, laid out the country’s most publicly detailed plans yet for a series of missions leading up to a crewed lunar landing “before 2030.” China’s lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Apollo program. However, lacking a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V vehicle, the crew and lunar lander will launch separately to the Moon. 

China’s Long March 10 rocket family will be the workhorse for the country’s initial crew missions to the Moon. The source goes into more details on the succession of missions. The next big test will be the demonstration flight of a Long March 10A rocket, which flies with a single core booster, and China’s new Mengzhou Moon ship to low-Earth orbit in early 2027. 

I wanted to say the gauntlet has been thrown down, but that was thrown years ago and this is just another step along the way.

New Glenn won't be returning to flight this year 

This probably isn't going to be a surprise, I think everyone has been saying this since that New Glenn exploded on the launch pad the night of May 28. Immediately after the explosion, Blue was saying they'd be returning to launch before the end of the year. The healthiest response was "I'll believe it when I see it." 

The Jeff Bezos-backed company had been driving to launch New Glenn again before the end of the year in its quest to challenge SpaceX. But Blue Origin Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp told employees on Wednesday that they are now targeting a flight early in 2027.

What’s a month? … The slight delay is unsurprising, and a January launch would still put Blue Origin well head of initial fears of how long it would take to rebuild its launch pad in Florida. New Glenn has a busy launch manifest after the return-to-flight mission, including a crucial launch in the spring of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, an uncrewed precursor to the company’s future human-rated lander for NASA’s Artemis missions.

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket erupts in a fireball at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida on May 28, 2026. Credit: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

Blue Origin publicizes some upgrades to New Glenn

Blue Origin announced two significant upgrades to its New Glenn rocket today, Nov.5, intended to reduce the cost of manufacturing the rocket as well as increasing its capacity for payloads to high energy orbits well beyond low and medium Earth orbit as well as to the Moon.

Their stated goal is to, "launch more than 1000 times per year." 

“There has never been higher demand for launch, ever,” Dave Limp, chief executive officer of Blue Origin, said during the UP.Summit conference at the Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida.

Blue Origin has already begun test firing a new engine, called Northstar, that will eventually replace the BE-4 engine that powers the first stage of New Glenn. Separately, the company also said it was developing a hydrogen-oxygen third stage for the rocket, GS3, to give it an extra kick.

The Northstar engine is a simpler but more powerful version of their present BE-4 engines. Limp said it has half the number of parts, 30 percent less mass, and about 65 percent can be 3D-printed. 

Blue Origin believes it can manufacture the engine at 25 percent of the cost of a BE-4 engine, and eventually reach the point where each engine can be assembled in less than a day. The company is deep into development and testing of Northstar, having already begun a test-firing campaign.

Today's BE-4 has a thrust of 640,000 pounds and Limp said Northstar will have a starting thrust of 715,000 pounds - not quite 12% more. Like the BE-4 it's a Methalox engine - burning methane in liquid oxygen - using an oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle and a single-shaft turbopump architecture. 

That's just the start. They're also developing a third stage for the New Glenn called GS-3 (Glenn Stage 3) designed to go between the second stage and the payload fairings. It will be usable by both the 7x2 and 9x4 first stages of the New Glenn. 

According to Blue Origin, a GS3-equipped New Glenn 7×2 can carry 8 metric tons directly to geostationary orbit and 10 metric tons to translunar injection. Those figures increase to 14 tons and 20 tons, respectively, for the larger 9×4 variant. 

The only thing they've mentioned in this information dump that seems questionable to me is that the GS3 will be powered by the BE-7 engine that they're using on their lunar landers. The issue is the engine is optimized for in-space operations and uses liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants. Hydrogen is, of course, the smallest atom there is, and therefore the easiest fuel to leak through pipes, tank walls and pretty much everything. While it has been used since the earliest days of spaceflight, there have been times during the preparations for the two Artemis missions that I've wondered aloud if everyone who knew how to work with it has retired or otherwise left the business (here, for example).

While it increases my pucker factor, Blue has been working with it on those BE-7 engines for a while and has already begun testing the tanks tentatively designed into the new GS-3. 

The company recently had a breakthrough at Launch Site One in Texas, when it completed its first composite liquid hydrogen tanking test. During the test, the tank was pressurized to 100 percent of the maximum force expected during operation for 2.5 hours. It was even successfully tested at 150 percent of this maximum pressure for 10 minutes. 

I honestly don't know what to think of that. It says the tank held 100% of the expected pressure for 2.5 hours. How many days does this tank need to hold that pressure? 

The Northstar engine. Blue Origin is planning to build one about every 10 days. Credit: Blue Origin

I suppose the important answer to that "how many days" question is that Blue feels confident enough in the tanks to commit to the hydrogen/oxygen system on GS-3 and they've got a government customer that's comfortable enough to contract Blue Origin for a 2028 mission to cislunar space.

SWIFT space telescope reentered this morning

To tie a "completed" ribbon on the stories here about the SWIFT gamma ray observing satellite, SWIFT crashed to Earth today, November 4th, 22 years after its launch. 

The 3,200-pound (1,450 kilograms) observatory reentered Earth's atmosphere at 7:39 a.m. EST (1239 GMT) today over northern Sumatra, according to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who cited U.S. Space Force data. The fall likely didn't make much of an impact; NASA officials predicted beforehand that most of the minibus-sized Swift would burn up as it fell, and they put the odds of any of the surviving pieces hurting anyone on Earth at just 1 in 2,100.

You'll recall that just Monday, I relayed a prediction from the Aerospace Corporation saying it would reenter on Nov. 4th at 09:30 UTC +/- 26 hours. The actual reentry was pretty much 3 hours 9 minutes later than that predicted time, which is a heck of a lot less than the +/- 26 hours they predicted. 

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory orbits above Earth in this artist’s concept. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab)

“Swift delivered an incredible, lasting return on investment for the nation, designed for a two-year primary mission but productive for more than 10 times as long,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “In that time, Swift played a major role in advancing our understanding of the changing universe and was part of a revolution in astrophysics that showed how critical rapid-response observations are to the entire community. To support rapid response to cosmic events in a post-Swift world, we’re exploring our ability to use and augment NASA’s fleet of existing space telescopes, from fast-to-orbit commercial capabilities to efficient, innovative new missions. And Swift leaves us with an extraordinary archive of multiwavelength observations that will fuel new discoveries for decades more.”

That's from NASA's Science hub, science.nasa.gov and the dedicated page for this mission. That's a good easy read, they say 4 minutes, but I don't find those notes particularly meaningful. That said, it's an easy and interesting read.

In its storied career, Swift has observed more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the cosmos. It has studied more than 1,400 supernova explosions, witnessed stars shredded by black holes, monitored active galaxies, conducted an all-sky X-ray survey, studied asteroids and comets, and more. Swift data has contributed to about 7,000 published scientific papers. 

This SpaceX headline snuck by me

The headline snuck by me. I mean, yeah, "it's just another Falcon 9 launch"- except it wasn't. It was a milestone launch, the 700th successful flight of a Falcon 9. Friday night, October 30th or "Halloween Eve" at 9:04 PM.PDT (12:04 AM. EDT / 0404 UTC). 

The Starlink 15-18 mission on the eve of Halloween will add another 27 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation.

SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1093. This was its 18th flight following the launches of Transporter-16, two missions for the Space Development Agency, and 14 batches of Starlink satellites.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1093 landed on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 231st landing on this vessel and the 675th Falcon booster landing to date.

While the article linked on Spaceflight Now doesn't mention it, 700 launches is still pretty far off the record for the most launches of a launch vehicle. While slightly out of date, SpaceStats shows the old Russian Soyuz-U is the all time leader at 765 launches. The Soyuz-U is retired, though, having last flown in 2017. Falcon 9 is still flying although its rate of launches per year is down, and it's expected to keep flying through the "early 2030s". With only 66 launches left to take the top rank, it's likely to happen. Today's launch was the 108th of this year for the workhorse rocket. 

The Starlink 15-18 mission lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Oct. 30, 2026, local time. Image: SpaceX.

Lessee.... this is the 108th launch and it's the 45th week of the year, so that's 2.4 week. At that rate, adding another 66 launches should take 27-1/2 weeks - call it 28 weeks. That says 28 weeks minus the 7 weeks of 2026, so 21 weeks into 2027, which sounds like by the middle of next May Falcon 9 will have the record for the rocket with the most launches. There's a mess of numbers that can change in there, but it's a rough number to keep a look on. 

Pardon me. I just realized that there's only seven weeks left in the year! Thanksgiving!! Christmas!!!

A couple of space telescope stories

Neither one is a particularly good story - they're both End Of Life stories. 

The long lead time story is about the Hubble Space Telescope 

If we were to mention just the phrase "space telescope", my impression is that a fairly large percentage of the population would only know about the HST; it has been up there the longest and gotten the most press mentions over the years. Proportionally fewer people will know that the Hubble has been slowly getting superseded by the James Webb and now the Nancy Grace Roman telescopes. 

If you've been aware of the HST since its launch, this story is even a redo of a similar story years ago, but NASA is now asking for ideas of how to save the HST and keep it doing science after its expected EOL. Something I suspect very few HST fans know is that the last time the telescope was lifted to a higher orbit to help delay its reentry into the atmosphere and destruction was by a Space Shuttle (Columbia) and not in 2011's last couple of shuttle flights. It was in 2002 - Columbia's disaster was in '03. The current estimates for when Hubble reenters and burns up are in "the early-to-mid-2030s". There are orbital dynamicists that currently predict probable reentry in 2033 or 2034, but solar activity can interfere with that prediction. In either case, it's not exactly really soon, but time to ask for ways to keep it running. 

The space agency released a Request For Information (RFI) on Thursday (10/29) asking commercial companies for ideas on how to reboost, service, or conduct a controlled disposal of Hubble. Responses are due November 30. Specifically, NASA is looking for information about companies’ current and near-term capabilities for capturing Hubble and boosting it to an altitude of at least 373 miles (600 km), enhancing the telescope’s performance, or guiding Hubble to a controlled reentry.

“The requirement includes that the boost and/or servicing mission must not harm the HST and that this mission is expected to occur by 2032,” NASA wrote in the RFI. The contractor would be responsible for providing the launch vehicle, servicing spacecraft, mission operations, and “crew if applicable.”

This has to be bounded by reality and part of that has to be that HST was launched in 1990, so it's undoubtedly the best of mid-1980s technology (to be charitable) and just turned 36 years old. How much money is it worth spending on the HST? Being 36 years old implies that there's a better chance that they could drop a couple of hundred million on boosting its orbit higher and another important part then fails almost immediately. 

Last year, on Hubble's 35th "birthday", I did a post that was a bit of overview of the 35 years including details on problems with Hubble's main mirror, the Corrective Optics fix (COSTAR) and more history. 

The other mission will be over within weeks

The other mission is the SWIFT Gamma Ray observatory, which we spent a lot of time talking about back earlier in the year, because of the effort to send a rescue satellite up to SWIFT's orbit, grab onto it, and push it to a higher orbit. The mission, which was remarkable in many ways, eventually failed and NASA had no choice but to end the mission and prepare for SWIFT to reenter. 

The telescope launched to Earth orbit in November 2004, tasked with studying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) — the most powerful explosions in the cosmos. Swift was designed to operate for two years, but it continued studying the high-energy universe for more than two decades.

Launching in 2004 and making it to 2026 isn't as impressive as HST's 36 years (so far), but it's still a good performance from that satellite. IMO, the conversation about saving SWIFT got started too late, and a contract wasn't awarded until September 2025. Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies came up with a concept, a design, and launched it on July 3rd, a little over nine months after they won the $30 million contract. 

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

Spaceweather.com adds:

NASA's Space Weather Operational Readiness Development Center predicts reentry on Nov. 3rd at 16:18 UTC +/- 12 hours. The Aerospace Corporation says Nov. 4th at 09:30 UTC +/- 26 hours. Uncontrolled reentries are hard to pin down, and the orbit is decaying fast. Only in the final hours will we know for sure when and where it will re-enter. 

So, yeah, it seems to be fixed

To rip off on last Sunday's dive into troubleshooting my audio oscillation problem in my ham shack. I haven't seen a single repeat of that issue since the one I described in a comment to that post on Monday  10/26.

After cleaning the two USB B connectors on the one side of the SignaLink I did last weekend, I did 10 tests of 10 transmissions on all five bands that my one antenna covers (a Tennadyne T6 log periodic) and the first transmission on the band that was giving me the most troubles started the comb problem. After Monday's test, I decided to move a clamp-on ferrite bead on the back of the SignaLink from one side to the other. Before I did that, though, I operated hours on that band (17m) without a repeat of the problem.

It looks like this now. That's the back of the SignaLink on the right edge of the photo: 

In this picture, the cable closest to the camera is the USB B (square) connector I cleaned with Deoxit5. It has one clamp-on ferrite bead now, but had two before. I moved the second bead just over to the next cable.

The connector closest to the camera is just labelled USB on the SignaLink box, and you can see that far cable looks more like a phone cable. That black plastic part between the molded part of that cable and the ferrite bead I moved onto that cable might well be holding a ferrite bead as well. 

From the pilot's seat, the station looks like this now. 

At the top of this frame, you can see a string of white LEDs that produce an even light in the area that I do things. You can see a piece of wood running left to right at the top, and that's the front of relatively large, table-like area, about 2'x6' (it has been years since I measured that, so it's a SWAG - but close). On top of that is the computer that controls all this, a huge monitor (well, 27" - biggest monitor we have) so I can watch several pieces of software running at once. There are my antenna and radio selector switches, the manual antenna rotator controller (I do that from the computer most of the time), a power distribution box and some odds. Or ends.   

Happy Halloween 2026

A slightly edited repost from four years ago...

I'm not big on Halloween and never really have been.  Yeah, I went trick or treating as kid, maybe up to age 12, when Mom used to say, "have fun and be back by 9" instead of coming with us.  It's gotten even less involved since the kids are long out of the house and PGD (Precious Grand Daughter) is over a thousand miles away.  We don't even buy candy for the neighborhood munchkins because there's always leftovers that neither one of us would eat and I don't have the convenient "I'll leave the rest near the coffee pots at work" backup I used when I was working. 

That said, there are some aspects of the holiday that I like. 

When I think Halloween, I think Jon Neill, the professional artist who has become famous for carving pumpkins.  This guy has "mad skilz" as they say.

Meet Slushy the Cyclops.  Like most of Jon's work, Slushy is apparently done with your average, grocery store pumpkin, but another pic from his website appears to show a carving made from an entry in one of those biggest pumpkin contests we hear about this time of year; in this case something called the Fair Oaks Farms Cowtoberfest.  This particular pumpkin was in Cowtoberfest '19.  No mention of how big it was.

While these are impressive, I think it's more impressive to carve recognizable faces out of a pumpkin.  I looked at a couple from his website, two musicians: Guns 'n Roses guitarist Slash and Alice Cooper.  Of the two, I think Alice Cooper is a more impressive carving.  His carving of Slash has less details because of large sunglasses Slash wears. 

Go look around on his website.  The guy has some serious talent.

And Happy Halloween!  I think most people will see this on November 1st: All Saints Day or All Hallows' Day. Something to lighten the mood for Tuesday, the 3rd. 

An unexpected Halloween scare

Over the course of the last several months, I've run stories saying SpaceX is cutting launches of their ultra-reliable workhorse Falcon 9 on the way toward completely shutting down Falcon 9 operations "real soon now" and a shortage of launch capabilities - worldwide - is coming.  

To borrow a joke we used to throw around at work all the time, "don't worry - it's not that bad. It's worse." 

Along that line, yesterday, Ars Technica's senior space editor Eric Berger ran a longer than usual post based on the evidence that for roughly the last 25 years, SpaceX needed NASA - sometimes desperately - and that has changed to the point that now NASA needs SpaceX far more than SpaceX needs NASA. In a way, this should be completely obvious; I mean, in calendar 2025, SpaceX launched more than the rest of the world combined. Of the US' global leading 181 launches, 165 of them - 91.1% - were SpaceX launches. China launched 91 times.

Today, Ars follows up with a headline that Analysts find that the looming launch crisis is “more severe” than anticipated. The short version of the story is that the US will be really pinched for at least the next five years, and probably won't be over the shortage until more like "the late 2030s".

A new report from the analytics firm Quilty Space confirms that, outside of China, the world faces a significant shortage of rockets over the next five years.

The firm estimates that between now and 2030, there will be a shortfall of about 150 launches compared to demand from satellite operators and civil space agencies. If demand from the US military is added in—and SpaceX does not extend the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy program to accommodate increased national security needs—the shortage could be doubled.

Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, put it this way. “What we wanted to get at is to understand how severe this launch crisis is and when will it be resolved. What we learned is that the launch crisis is more severe than we thought and that it will not go away this decade for sure, and it might not abate until sometime late in the 2030s.” 

It's true that SpaceX is a major contributor to the problem - since they did over 91% of last year's US launches, how could they not be? There's more than one reason for that, and the two big ones are that Starship is far behind schedule and that SpaceX has gone public on the stock market. To remain a good investment they need to be making money. The biggest chip that SpaceX has that can pay them well isn't putting small satellites into orbit, it's Starlink, and the biggest thing they can do for Starlink is to continually upgrade their network. Launching the V3 Starlink satellites is a job for Starship. 

Of course, SpaceX isn't the only factor, they're just the big, obvious one. In addition, the war in Ukraine took Russian launches off the Western market, Amazon's Leo constellation's demand is using up Atlas Vs and European Space Agency's Ariane 6s, developmental delays like the Vulcan being grounded, the New Glenn blowing up its launch complex, Rocket Lab's Neutron not being quite ready, along with Relativity Space's Terran R, and Nova. The retirement of the Falcon 9 as a rocket for commercial service is looking to be in the early 2030s, but that still adds into the big picture Quilty is trying to understand.

At a time when the supply of commercial rockets is contracting, demand for satellite launch is soaring, from megaconstellation operators such as Amazon to a flurry of small satellite startups. The report estimates the crunch will become most acute in 2028 but should then slowly improve.

“How should people react and plan around this?” Henry asked. “To be honest, I don’t have a good answer. If you haven’t booked your launch already, and you need one, you’re late.”

It seems to me that this could be temporary. Starship isn't operational, yet, but it could well be that the talk about launching not just more than once a week, but more than just once a day is the way out of this. Now it's true that we haven't seen a model Starship with a more conventional or typical looking cargo bay, just the Pez dispensers, but it doesn't seem like something that should take a lot of development. Not much design effort, just coordination, meaning a subcontractor could do that. It's true that, as Quilty points out, “SpaceX has also stopped affirming Starship as a commercial launcher” and there's no evidence that the company is putting effort into developing a conventional payload fairing door for the vehicle to accommodate traditional satellites and spacecraft.

I can see someone like a major satellite launch customer (cough, like Amazon Leo, cough) coming to Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX saying, "if we can get the launches to put up our satellites, we'll design the Starship Payload door and the stuff behind it, and qualify it for flight so that you don't have to stretch staff to do it." Or, as Dan Goldberg, president and chief executive of Telesat, said, they could design their satellites to fit in the SpaceX Pez dispenser's layout. Granted not every satellite could be "Pez-shaped," but it's a starting point. 

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

It's never a good time for this

Word is breaking this afternoon/evening East Coast time that the world has lost Sir Patrick Stewart. Sir Patrick was 86.

While perhaps being best known as Captain Jean Luc Picard in "Star Trek, the Next Generation", or perhaps as "Professor X", Charles Xavier in the Marvel X-Men movies, he was in many important roles over his years in the industry. 

Zendo Deb at 357 Magnum posted what I'm posting as flat image (.png) file but hers is a live link to X - best if you have an account. (That text on the right of his photo does enlarge if you click on it and is readable.)

To her point, we sure seem to be losing a lot of a generation of actors these days. It was less than a week ago that we lost Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Chekov in the original (late 1960s) Star Trek series.

ULA Announces Return to Flight for Vulcan

ULA has announced a planned date for the next Vulcan mission, return to service nine months after the Space Force grounded the vehicle after the February 12, 2026 launch of the fourth Vulcan mission. The date is Friday, November 13th - yes, "Friday the 13th."

The return-to-flight mission will launch 40 satellites for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation, the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked to deploy the bulk of its network. The mission will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and ULA said the launch date is pending range approval.

The launch is critical for ULA after its new flagship rocket suffered nozzle failures on its solid rocket boosters on two of its first four missions, most recently during a flight in February. In both cases, the rocket overcame the nozzle failure and completed its mission, but officials at the US Space Force, ULA’s primary customer, lost confidence in Vulcan.

The mission is in the NextSpaceflight line up already (IIRC, earlier in the week, it said, "NET November") where NET is the standard abbreviation for No Earlier Than. It does not include a liftoff time.  

As much as this mission is critical for ULA, demonstrating that their vehicle is trustworthy, it's critical for their customers - both Amazon Leo and US Space Force. The Pentagon has tasked ULA with around half of their classified launches through the early 2030s. The Space Force certified the Vulcan in 2025, then flew the two missions on which the Solid Rocket Boosters' nozzle failures occurred. The second failure triggered grounding the vehicle until it passes tests. 

In a statement, United Launch Alliance said engineers “made great strides” in understanding the booster anomaly that occurred in February. Engineers “have identified several potential contributors, which have been mitigated through design and process improvements to the nozzle,” ULA said. 

ULA also said, “To support our customers, this upcoming launch will utilize the improved nozzle design, and additional testing and analysis will continue in parallel with the mission. By flying the improved design, ULA gains valuable flight data that validates these improvements and is the most beneficial path in support of all our customers.”

Vulcan has a very full agenda in front of it. The Amazon LEO constellation is far from the extent of it - you might recall that SpaceX and ULA were chosen by Space Force to launch classified missions, with a contract that will actively swap missions between the two providers. That means in a case like this, Space Force may be moving payloads that they view as more critical to SpaceX and they'll tell SpaceX which future mission on their schedule to move to ULA in trade - more or less. 

For example:

A launch carrying the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Oracle-M lunar mission will now fly on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket instead of ULA’s Vulcan, which will receive a future SpaceX-assigned launch in compensation. Space Systems Command completed a similar swap to move a large strategic missile warning satellite from Vulcan to Falcon Heavy.

So far the swaps have had no effect on the number of missions the Space Force has awarded to ULA and SpaceX. The trades are separate from the Space Force’s assignment of unallocated future missions to launch providers, which may already be hamstrung by SpaceX’s plans to retire the Falcon rocket family.

ULA’s Vulcan rocket is fully stacked with 40 Amazon Leo satellites in its payload fairing. This version of the rocket will debut an extended fairing, bringing the rocket’s total height to 221 feet (67.4 meters). Credit: United Launch Alliance

The next launch (two weeks from this Friday) will be the first Vulcan to fly with six SRBs. That increases the chances of getting a bad booster nozzle (if it really was a random 1 of 4 chance on the previous two failures). They plan on two flights before Vulcan could be certified again.

Aspiring competitor to SpaceX introduces themselves

Back in 2024 a company called Aetherflux was founded with the intent to put up huge solar power arrays and beam the power back down to Earth. That goal apparently didn't last very long because the California-based company with everything named as if it's Texan, called Cowboy Space, has made it known their intent now is to launch a fleet of orbital data centers, which means to compete directly with SpaceX. 

The California-based company, which is run by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, intends to operate a constellation of 20,000 AI data centers in low Earth orbit (LEO). It will build those satellites in house and launch them on a homegrown rocket — a vehicle Cowboy Space unveiled here on Monday night (Oct. 26), at an event it called "Big Sky Rising."

"It's a fundamentally novel approach to rocketry in the modern era, in our opinion," Bhatt said during the event. "The idea is that you have a two-stage rocket where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite." 

The rocket is named Big Iron, as is the data-center satellite, which I suppose is another way of saying it's a two stage rocket where the upper stage stays in orbit to become that satellite. Founder Baiju Bhatt is an Indian billionaire and absolutely can't be accused of not having visions for developing businesses. 

The stainless-steel rocket will be 282 feet (86 meters) tall and 15.4 feet (4.7 m) wide. It will be powered by Cowboy Space's Clydesdale engines — nine in the first stage and one in the upper stage, the same configuration employed by SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. And, like the Raptor engines that power another SpaceX launcher, the giant Starship, Clydesdale will burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, a combo known as methalox.

The first stage of the Big Iron rocket will be reusable and while they don't have a launch site named yet, they plan to be close enough to an ocean to recover the booster on a barge ship, like the vast majority of Falcon 9 launches. The upper stage, as mentioned, will stay in orbit as a Big Iron satellite and if there are going be tens of thousands of these on orbit, I'm sure they'll have something like a serial number or other Data Center identifier. The spacecraft will tip the scales here on Earth at about 33,000 pounds, and after unfurling its solar panels will be about 433 feet long.

During launch, the Big Iron will have a nose cone to protect the rest of the upper stage from the first minute or two of ascent, but it will not be dropped, as the Falcon 9 drops its payload fairings for recovery and reuse. Instead, the fairing will turn into a radiator, to dump the prodigious heat generated by Big Iron's GPUs (general processing units) into space. 

Don't forget there will be 20,000 of these GPU satellites up there. That's a lot of GPUs: each satellite will carry five racks of them and will provide about 1 megawatt of compute payload. 

Cowboy Space plans to operate about 20,000 Big Iron satellites in LEO, a constellation it calls Stampede. Each rocket will carry just one of these satellites to orbit, so it will take 20,000 launches to build Stampede — and, likely, several thousand more every year to maintain it at that number.

Cowboy Space therefore intends to launch very often — multiple times per day, from launch complexes it calls Trailheads. The company has not yet announced where these complexes will be, but each one will likely feature four active launch mounts, Bhatt said on Monday night.

So when does all this go live? In their minds, they're going now, but if you're wondering about when we'll see launches starting, I've got to think mid- to late-'29. At best. 

Artist's illustration of Cowboy Space's newly announced Big Iron rocket lifting off. Note one on the right 30 seconds or so into its flight curving toward the upper right corner and one on a pad near the left edge that seems to be releasing some cold gas, so possibly in some part of a countdown. (Image credit: Cowboy Space)

An interesting note to end this with is that Cowboy Space is operating one piece of space hardware at the moment. It's a satellite called Reason-1, launched on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission back on Oct. 1.

"Its job is to prove out power beaming: using a high-power laser to transfer energy from low Earth orbit to a receiver on the ground," Cowboy Space said via X on Sept. 28. "If you want to build data centers in space, you have to master the optical systems between orbit and Earth. This is where that journey begins." 

'More missions, more often' - NASA on selecting science missions

NASA is talking about overhauling how it selects and develops science missions, in an effort to reduce costs, and increase the pace of missions.  

The new approach, called Competition Model 2.0 (CM 2.0), was announced on Oct. 21 in an open letter from Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD), to the NASA science community. The changes, directed by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, could significantly reshape how scientists, universities, NASA centers and commercial companies vie for future missions.

"We have heard you. We have listened. We know that the burden of bringing great ideas forward has been too heavy for too long," Fox stated in the letter. 

Fox and other top NASA science officials provided an overview of the reforms during a virtual town hall today (Oct. 26) at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT). 

The current process for deciding on and conducting science missions is that NASA announces intended missions in what's called an Announcement of Opportunity (AOs), inviting scientists and research institutions to submit proposals. Groups or companies interested in doing the missions go through a two step process in which the competing teams create thorough engineering and financial details as part of their proposals before NASA selects finalists for further study. The process can take up to three years, neither fast nor low cost for providers working toward getting the missions. 

CM 2.0 aims to reduce that burden by emphasizing scientific distinction during initial evaluations, allowing teams to defer much of the engineering and financial planning until later. Instead, initial proposals will focus on the scientific objectives of a mission and a preliminary plan for how to accomplish them. 

Currently, NASA organizes missions ranging from smaller Explorer missions to large, expensive flagships like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). 

Under CM 2.0, programs including smaller Discovery planetary missions, larger New Frontiers spacecraft and Astro-Probes, a program that focuses on mid-sized astronomy missions, will retain a streamlined version of the existing two-step process, but with nearly half of the material required for initial proposals. "This means that the original 35-months timeline will be reduced to about 19.5 months, all while having a stronger, more mature mission at the time of selection," Fox wrote. 

Flagship missions, meanwhile, will continue following their current procedures, which were recently revised based on lessons learned from a study of best practices examining the development of JWST.

Medium-sized missions (between those two major classes) will continue to exist and be open to smaller companies and schools. NASA plans to evaluate these missions based on their track records with projects of similar size, cost and complexity. Fox specifically mentioned that missions with a principal investigator will be able to request support from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center or Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) during the first stage of selection. That could conceivably help the customer and NASA doing the review.

Smaller, lower-cost science programs will see a more substantial selection process shakeup. "Our smallest missions will be riding the momentum of a maturing commercial space economy and will move even faster," Fox wrote. 

These are specifically listed as 

Small Explorer (SMEX) and Earth Venture missions, which conduct astronomy and heliophysics research, and targeted studies of Earth and its climate. Missions of Opportunity, which allow researchers to piggyback scientific investigations onto other missions, as well as hosted payloads and rideshares, will fall under the same one-step umbrella, which is expected to drop final selection timelines from approximately 32 months to just 19.

"This means more missions, more often, with more incredible science at a lower cost," Fox wrote.

Whenever we get information on proposals like this it's really hard to evaluate whether these attempts to fix a sub-optimal process will actually improve the results. Will having a smaller number of steps to go through really improve the processes? More to the point, will the people working on proposals do just as well as they do currently if we kept the same number of overall steps but cut the time allowed for each step?  What if we just had someone stand at their door, tapping their feet and practically chanting, "are you through yet? Are you through yet? ...' over and over all day? Deliberately absurd example. I hope to be shown this was a good thing to do. 

And speaking of "expensive flagships"... 

So Is It Fixed?

Followers of yesterday's post on the problem I'm having with my station have probably read my description of today's work, but I copy it here for everyone else. 

The most effective thing I did yesterday was to unplug and replug the USB cable into the audio input box on top of the rig. It's one of those square plugs, about 1/4 on a side, so I think those are USB A family. Today, I tried the station the way it was last night and it was doing better. I did about 10 transmit tests before it went into the "audio comb mode". Once I reset everything, I grabbed my can of "Deoxit 5" spray that's always on hand and gave a small spray into the end that plugs into the audio box on top of the rig.

Since then, I worked a couple of stations on 17m, figure about 10 T/R changes (both to and from that box), for them and ran around three dozen "tune" button transmissions. No returns of the "comb". 

So given that connector issues like this are about as common as can be - although I can't say I've seen one with these square USB-B connectors - and since I've done lots of transmissions without seeing the problem again, it might well be "all better." Between working the two new countries on 17m and my roughly "three dozen" transmit tests, that's more than I tend to transmit in most full days of making contacts on any band. 

Let me add some info that I should have included last night but wasn't prepared. 

First is the "red comb" effect, at the top of this screen capture. From the start of continuous lock out of the system until this screen grab is five 15 second intervals, and this was early this afternoon before the Deoxit5.

I've seen the red comb continue after I've turned off the radio that had been transmitting, so it's got to be coming from the audio system. The transmit audio is generated by the WSJT software running on the PC that gave us this plot. The audio from the computer goes over the USB cable that appears to have fixed it. That goes to a SignaLink USB box that controls both the transmit and receive audio levels. 

It has been a tricky problem to work on because it seemed different at different times. On the first day I spent time testing other bands, I found it on 20m and while I'm not 100% sure at the moment, I'd swear I saw it on 15m. I haven't seen it on any other band as much as 17m, and none on 20 and 15 since Thursday. Intermittent or "flaky" problems can suck up a lot of time.

So while I think it might be fixed, I'll be keeping an eye out for milder issues or more cases of this.