It's one-half day

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

Sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something that happened during the eclipse that nobody mentioned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A very slow news day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Origin starts next phase of construction on Cape Canaveral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alternatives to the ionosphere

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solar Cycle 25 Update - a bit late

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

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

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

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

You'll notice that the absolute peak of cycle 25 occurred during 2024. There were some days with very high solar flux in '24: the highest peak was in August as shown here: each black dot is one month. That peak was a highlight in the last post because that was around the time that I got closer to hearing Alaska on 6m as I ever have. Everything I've ever heard about working Alaska from guys around here is it's pretty much a "once in a lifetime" thing. During that "band opening" I never copied a single letter from Alaska, but a friend in Tennessee copied one 15 second transmission from the Alaskan.

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

Update on efforts to rescue the Swift rescue mission

The last update I saw and posted was this past Monday, Aug. 3, and I wasn't really expecting an update today, but just ran across it. This was linked from NASA Science's page, but that article isn't complete. Space.com has a good report if any of this post makes you say, "whut? WTF are you talking about?" 

It's a progress report. The mission isn't back to the expected conditions, but it's much improved and looking like it could be possible for the mission to meet its objectives. 

LINK originally was in a multi-axis spin rotating at about 9 degrees per second, which resulted in sporadic communications and impeded LINK’s progress toward Swift. Using a series of burns from one of LINK’s electric propulsion thrusters, the Katalyst team now has slowed that spin to about 1.47 degrees per second. Katalyst plans to keep LINK at that spin rate as it proceeds with next steps for the mission. This includes uploading a flight software update in the coming days with new attitude controllers designed to maintain LINK’s stability in its current configuration. These updates would allow LINK to begin maneuvering to align with Swift’s orbit.

Artist's illustration of Katalyst Space Technologies' LINK spacecraft (left) meeting up with NASA's Swift space telescope in Earth orbit. (Image credit: NASA)

As a reminder, the Katalyst LINK mission launched on July 3rd on a mission remarkable in many ways. It's a mission that has never been tried before: the LINK satellite will rendezvous with Swift, attach itself with robotic arms, and boost Swift's orbit back up. For a mission that has never been tried, add to the picture that they were working to an absurdly short schedule compared to virtually all NASA missions. NASA estimates they need to boost Swift before its orbit decays to lower than 186 miles, and further estimate that will happen "by October." They don't provide any input on October 1st vs. the 31st.  

The software updates mentioned above are scheduled to be beamed up to LINK "in the coming days," according to NASA. 

Blue Origin gives possible cause of the New Glenn Explosion

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

It started making news this afternoon that Blue Origin released an update on their investigation into the explosion back on the evening of May 28, now over two months ago, that destroyed not only their New Glenn test vehicle but much of their pad and surrounding infrastructure. CEO Dave Limp wrote:

Wanted to give an update on the hotfire anomaly investigation. Progress continues. The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections. Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations. The path forward is clear. We're making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines. We’re manufacturing the updated hardware, which will be ready by the end of this month. In parallel, we're working through the remaining fault tree analysis. 

New Glenn is bigger than SpaceX's Falcon 9, closer in size to ULA's Vulcan Centaur.  Like the Falcon 9, New Glenn's first stage is recovered and that has been done successfully twice. The booster stage is powered by seven of their BE-4 engines, and ULA's Vulcan is powered by the BE-4 engines. New Glenn is "designed to launch at least 25 times" and their Blue Moon lander is a critical part of NASA's Artemis lunar landing goals that has been designed to fly on New Glenn. 

While it's easy to appreciate the honesty of CEO Limp's statement published above, a little thing that stood out to me was also noticed by Eric Berger at Ars Technica in their article about this. 

Limp said the company’s path forward is “clear” as it works toward returning the New Glenn rocket to flight before the end of this year.
...
This is a positive update, and the transparency is appreciated. However, it also seems clear from Limp’s statement that the company has not yet identified the root cause of the issue.

If any of you readers work in modern manufacturing companies, you probably noticed that there was no mention of that term in the statement. They're not done until the root cause analysis is done and followed.

Blue's founder, Jeff Bezos, has made it clear he wants to see New Glenn flying again before the end of this year - that has been the talk since all of the airborne chunks of debris hit the ground. Tory Bruno, who had been CEO of United Launch Alliance and is now the president of national security for Blue Origin, made reference to a major development program that Blue is working on, "Blue Ring."

[Tory Bruno] indicated on the social media site X that the next flight of New Glenn could carry the company’s “Blue Ring” spacecraft. “She’s in final build now for a flight this year,” Bruno said Wednesday of the spacecraft.

To inject a little unpleasant honesty, Blue Origin has often come across as a bit slow to achieve various goals they publicly state they're aiming for. They really seem to be focused on getting New Glenn launching again, and it seems possible that this is the effect of bringing in CEO Dave Limp to replace Bob Smith - who also replaced a prior CEO (Rob Meyerson). Now, reporters who have regular contacts inside Blue say they seem like a new company, more focused than ever before, this time focused on getting New Glenn flying before the end of 2026. As Eric Berger puts it, "the long-slumbering giant in the US space industry may finally be waking up."

The Falcon 9 upper stage hit the moon - now the race starts

For the last several days, the web has been abuzz with talk about the Falcon 9 upper stage that was expected to crash into the moon. Much of the buzz has been wrong, or just trying to raise awareness (and funds), such as referring to it as a Falcon 9 rocket, when I think we all know that's just not how F9s work. The booster landed when this upper stage was making orbit (or about 8 minutes after liftoff, if you prefer). 

No, this was just the upper stage of the Falcon 9 that launched two private landers to the moon — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Tokyo-based ispace's Resilience — launched to a high, moon-crossing Earth orbit in January 2025. The Falcon used up enough fuel that there wasn't enough to perform the usual maneuver to return to Earth. 

So the company performed a different maneuver to take care of this upper stage, Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a press conference on Aug. 3.

"For high-energy missions, we need to perform a different maneuver to ensure the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations, and so we did that here," she said.

The problem was reality had some other things in mind.

"What has happened is, essentially, a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon," Scheiman said. 

The upper stage slammed into the moon at 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 UTC). Because an exact impact spot wasn't known, they need to work with various other agencies to attempt to learn more, even if just before and after photos of the impact area. 

"NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and NASA’s ShadowCam instrument on the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will look for opportunities to capture before‑and‑after imagery of the impact site," NASA spokesperson Rob Garner, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Space.com. "Image availability depends on several factors, including the impact location, lighting conditions, and when each spacecraft’s orbit next carries it over the area, which may take a few days to receive any imagery." 

Today's impact occurred on the sunlit side of the moon, reducing chances of hobbyist observers seeing anything. A quick search for news like that turned up nothing. So far the only observatory that claims to be sure they saw the impact is the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and reported detections of a lunar plume from the impact.

"We can safely say that we measured a response from the rocket stage impact as a sodium and lithium gas plume a few 10’s of kilometers in size lasting between 5 and 10 minutes after impact," Carl Schmidt told Inside Outer Space's Leonard David.

I'm only vaguely aware of what to expect from a measurement to detect the minerals in the dust column rising from the impact, but the Lowell Observatory provides this photo. I see this as showing two different frequency (or color) lights for sodium and one for lithium. This looks like what I'd expect.

Detections by the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, show evidence of a plume on the moon caused by the impact of a SpaceX rocket on Aug. 5, 2026. (Image credit: Carl Schmidt/Lowell Observatory)

Starship Flight Test 14 looks to be NET August

There just isn't an announced date for it, so I'm assuming Monday August 31. 

FT-14, of course, will be the next flight test after the enormously successful FT-13 back on July 24th. 

The big picture comes from coverage of SpaceX's first ever quarterly earnings report. Starship will achieve orbit and deploy fully operational payloads this time around, according to Elon Musk's talk at the earnings report.

"I'd say things look very good, and that's why we, assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, will attempt to catch the Ship with the tower on the next flight, which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month," Musk said during today's call.

The ship, as you know was recovered after its splashdown into the Indian Ocean west of Australia. It's the first Starship to be recovered after one of these flights. While from what we observers could see, the heat shield looked like it survived very well, except maybe to a couple of observers who expressed doubt immediately after the booster recovery, Elon appears to think it looks pretty good. 

"I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I'd consider the heat shield problem solved at this point," Musk said.

Both of the launch complexes at Starbase Boca Chica have the (pretty amazing, really) large "chopstick" arms that are designed to both stack the SuperHeavy booster and the ship before flight then to catch both of them in midair after the flight. SpaceX has already famously executed a tower catch of the SuperHeavy booster, but it has not yet tried to catch a Ship. That means Flight 14 could be momentous, provided SpaceX gets permission from regulators to make an attempt.

Flight 14 will also carry up a batch of SpaceX's V3 Starlink satellites, a larger and more capable version of the spacecraft that currently populate the company's broadband megaconstellation. Flight 13 toted 20 Starlink V3s, but Ship deployed them into suborbital space; the satellites will be placed into an operational orbit on the upcoming mission, if all goes to plan, Musk said.

Starship FT-12 within seconds after liftoff. It isn't exactly like FT-13 but I couldn't tell you what to look for to demonstrate that. Looks just like it to me. Image credit: SpaceX

To borrow that quote from Nils Bohr, “prediction is very difficult; especially about the future”. The predictions and reality of the AI "singularity" don't really seem to be in much agreement, and that has to apply in spades to SpaceX's orbital data centers. Still, SpaceX is working to being able to launch Starships at rates that are mind-boggling.

"We expect the cadence of flights to be increasing rapidly, and, probably a year from now, we will be doing at least one flight a day, possibly more," Musk said.

Did you see that the plan for them to expand into the Louisiana waterfront of the Gulf of America appears to be close to being agreed on. The more launch complexes they have to call on, the more realistic everyday launches become.

Update on SWIFT rescue mission

Back last Tuesday, the story broke that the reaction wheel attitude control system on the Link spacecraft sent up to rescue the Swift gamma ray observatory had apparently failed and the Link satellite was spinning out of control. Two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels, used for pointing, had stopped working.

Things didn't look good for the little spacecraft.

... Link was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with the ground and complicating efforts to arrest the spin. Two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels, used for pointing, also stopped working. Through sporadic radio contact, engineers discovered a problem with some of the spacecraft’s cold gas thrusters used for finer attitude control.

It's worth pointing out that Link had been working fine, and was out of communication for a while, something that typically happens for many satellites. 

Katalyst’s ground team, working from a control center near Denver, hurried to find a fix and recover the Link satellite. The good news was, the spacecraft’s other systems remained healthy, including its power supply, three xenon-fueled electric thrusters, and the rendezvous and robotics hardware the Link satellite needs to capture Swift.

Remember that, as pointed out last week, Link's electric thrusters are low powered for this sort of task which means they'll need to run them for a long period of time. As of Friday (the 31st), the spacecraft had cut its spin rate in half, from about 9 degrees per second to approximately 4 degrees per second. Naturally, they hope to reduce it much more so they can do the task Link was developed for. 

“Once we are in a more stable configuration, with much more high-bandwidth comms, we’ll be able to use that to downlink all the rich data (about the condition of the spacecraft),” Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst said. “We do know the states of the reaction wheels and the thrusters and things like that. So our GNC team—guidance, navigation, and control team—has been very hard at work with NASA, essentially remapping all of the control algorithms to be able to have an updated controller ready to go for when we are able to stabilize the spacecraft.” 

The Katalyst engineering team hopes to be able to stop the errant motions entirely and to recover the two reaction control wheels that seem to be completely dead. It would help if they knew exactly what was wrong. They don't really know why the wheels stopped working properly - whether it was a component problem of some sort in the Link satellite or even a collision with space junk of some kind. There are cameras on the Link satellite that can be steered around to look for evidence of what happened. Once the data links are running closer to capacity again. 

It's being considered that the automatic fault detection - a fancy version of turn it off and back on again - could be at least part of the cause.

Whatever the cause, Katalyst’s mission control team lost contact with Link for more than 24 hours after it spun out of control. The satellite then automatically reset itself, just as it was supposed to do.

“This was built-in fault protection logic saying, ‘Hey, if I haven’t heard from anybody in 24 hours, there must be something wrong. I’m going to toggle the power, turn it on and off again,’” Lee said. “It’s just built in. However, that shutdown mode is ungraceful. It basically pulls the plug on everything, and that creates some downstream effects for sensitive systems such as the reaction wheels.

“Basically, there was a big thermal spike that came about as a result of this that over-temperatured the upstream electronic circuits that control the reaction wheels, which ultimately led them to being inoperable,” Lee said.

While busy and this setback ensures they're not quite "there" yet, the Katalyst team is working to complete the rescue mission they contracted for.

“We’re very committed to pursuing this mission,” Lee said. “We’re working side by side with NASA. I just came from a technical working meeting with their controls team, where we’re reviewing the algorithms. It seems like there’s nothing that is preventing us from reestablishing three-axis control of the spacecraft with the remaining reaction wheel, with the remaining thrusters, as well as the electric propulsion.

“It’s not the original mode that we expected to control the spacecraft with, but it seems like we will have sufficient stability and controllability of the spacecraft,” Lee said. “With this, we believe we’ll be able to do the rendezvous with Swift. We believe that we’ll be able to go and do things like the inspection of Swift within a close approach of a few dozen meters. And as it stands right now, we have not made a formal assessment, but we believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards.”

A plume of plasma exhaust coming from one of the Link satellite’s xenon-fueled electric engines. Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies

Just like that, it's August in Central Florida

I'm not saying that because of changing the page on the calendar. From the feel of being outside, it has been August for a few weeks. Heck, I know a guy who has a lawn service business and he was saying it has been full tilt summer since about day 1: the solstice back on June 21.  

A sure indicator is when the UV Index says 11 on a scale of 1-10 and uses the description, "Potentially Fatal in one hour." We know that's aimed at visitors to the area who aren't used to it and don't pay much attention.

There are many places where folks look forward to summer; it's time to go outside - maybe for the first time in months, enjoy warm, glorious days; garden, bike, picnic; maybe enjoy a book while lounging on the beach. Songs like Nat King Cole's classic "Lazy, Hazy, Crazy Days of Summer" come to mind.

That's not here. Here, summer is something to be a bit more reserved about. If you live here, you can keep up with your regular life. If you were from a moderate place, not used to our heat and humidity, running or other outdoors activity could conceivably kill you. August marks the Dog Days of Summer; everything outdoors slows down. Fishing slows - sure the fish have to eat, but they become more active after dark. Animals are more sluggish. Ordinarily, it can be nasty here from about mid-July to almost the middle of September. The worst of it is August. 

The Minnesotans for Global Warming cherish the summer and endure the winter. Here it's the opposite. 

When we first got an HDTV around 20 years ago, Mrs. Graybeard and I naturally spent much of our TV time searching out HD programming.  One of the first movies we watched was "The Chronicles of Riddick". You have to understand this is not even particularly good scifi. It's a fun movie to watch, it's a visual treat, it's a fantastic display of special effects perfect for HD, but don't pay too much attention to the story. To quote a review (long gone from the net), "Furyans, Necromongers, Elementals, The Underverse, the Threshold...it so clearly wants to be epic that it forgets to tie all of these disparate worlds, universes and civilizations into a coherent story. (Director) Twohy clearly makes the mistake of not realizing that there is a huge difference between being grand and being simply confusing and the more ideas that are introduced, the more lumbering it becomes…"

We still watch it on the rare occasion when we run into it.

A large portion of the movie, and one of the longest action sequences, takes place on the planet Crematoria (many of the names in the movie are that cheesy).  Crematoria is a planet that has a tremendous temperature variation (probably an impossible amount) with daytime temperatures of 700F and night time temperatures 300 below zero. When the sunrise terminator sweeps through, the force of the heat gales that come with it is literally enough to blow you apart, disintegrating flesh and blowing pieces off until you die. There's a scene where a character (Purifier), a Furyan like Riddick, sacrifices himself by walking into the sunrise terminator and self-immolating. That's him trying to stand up to the gales while being set afire and having pieces of burning flesh blown off him.

The first time I saw that scene, it reminded me of the time we decided to do a long bike ride on July 4th (I think it was a hundred mile ride, but for sure it was a virtually all day ride). I mentioned it to Mrs. Graybeard who said, "sure, we've been out on days like that."

The National Weather Service publishes charts for heat index that show the amount of danger from the combination of heat and humidity.  This is one of their charts.  I've drawn a box around the typical morning conditions here.  This morning, when I was doing some work that required I go outside for a a little while, Weather Underground was reporting 86 with a "feels like" temperature of 96.  That's just about dead center of the black rectangle I added. In the afternoon, it pushes farther into the orange, maybe red.   

 

And that's what life here is like for August or maybe from Mid-July through Mid-September. Stay out of the sun. Do your outdoor activities near sunrise or sunset. Don't expose bare skin to the sun any longer than necessary - and even then, use sunscreen if you need to be out when the sun is intense, say from 10 AM to 4 PM. A protection factor (SPF) of 3 million is adequate. Without air conditioning and mosquito control, a technological civilization could not exist here.

Oh, and for those greenies and others pushing the idea that Americans are lazy for having air conditioning because they don't do that in Europe. Our latitude is well south of Europe, like toward the south end of the Sinai Peninsula. Sharm el-Sheikh airport is just a few miles south of our latitude. All of Europe is well north of us. 

Ran across a fun special events ham station last night

My usual hangout in ham radio has tended to be six meters, (50-54 MHz, and the first VHF band in the USA) and the last handful of days 6 has pretty much done one of its "oh, fuggedaboutit" intervals and nothing has been copyable around here. So last night I did one of those things I tend to do when 6 bores me out ofmy mind and dropped down to HF to see if there was anything going on. It was around 10PM here, so 0200 to around 0230 UTC.  

Dropped to 30m. Heard nothing new. 

Dropped to 80m. Likewise. 

Figuring 40m was likely to be the busiest/most crowded but with the same "nothing new" picture, I went up to 7.074 MHz. Very surprisingly, 40 not only wasn't as busy as I frequently find it, but there were a few stations that my copy of the JTAlert software told me I had never worked on 40. I worked three countries for the first time on 40 but that's not the story. The story is that one of them was a special event operation using the call sign GB64MOD. If you're familiar with the ham web site QRZ.com, this is what you see when you look up that call.  Here's a reduced copy of just one of the graphics on that page:

Their QRZ listing says they have a special web page for this event here. It adds this narrative:

GB64MOD ham radio special event station - Celebrates the spirit of the Mod movement through Amateur Radio.. classic British Culture modern communications with fellow Mods, Ham Operators and Shortwave listeners around the globe!

Calling Radio Amateurs worldwide! - Join us in celebrating Mod culture, music, fashion and more... Lets make this an annual event!

A truly modern Mod revival! Let us know your plans? 

Curtis MW0USK and Kevin MW9KJC.

Now, let me tell you why I'm emphasizing this. While I remember much of the "MOD" music, certainly The Who, and Small Faces that they make buttons for in that graphic, as well as many more, that's not what I'm seeing here. What I'm seeing is more evidence for the movement that says "this is why we were called GREAT Britain" with the implied celebration of being Great and not a place that should be wiped out by the suicidal embracing of immigrants who are wiping out the British culture and society.  Which leads to thinking, "we can be GREAT again and we should work at that." Notice there's nothing explicitly leaning in that direction on the website; just a reminder of those days for those who loved them. Make of it what you will.

If you're unfamiliar with special event stations like this they happen quite frequently. The biggest regular events these days are Parks On The Air (POTA) and Summits On The Air (SOTA). People collect certificates and QSLs from activities like all of these. 

Small Space News Story Roundup 84

Just because they're small stories doesn't mean they aren't interesting

Europe's Ariane Group completes test of reusable Themis booster

The Ariane Group announced yesterday that they had completed something resembling a WDR - Wet Dress Rehearsal - of their Themis booster. The test itself was actually on July 23rd.

During the test, the 28-meter-tall demonstrator underwent a simulated pre-flight sequence under cryogenic conditions. The test did not use the liquid oxygen and liquid methane that will be used during powered testing. Instead, liquid nitrogen was circulated through the vehicle’s cryogenic tanks and lines.

This may not seem super exciting, but… The wet dress rehearsal represents the most significant publicly announced milestone in the Themis test campaign since September 2025, when the T1H demonstrator was erected on its four landing legs at Esrange, marking the start of combined testing. In January 2026, then-director of ESA’s space transportation program Toni Tolker-Nielsen explained that Kiruna, where Esrange is located, was under snow and that they were “waiting for spring.” It is not yet clear when the next milestone in the test campaign will take place.

I've been covering whatever I could find about Themis since it was announced in March of 2019, so over seven years ago, and it has generally been the story that they will go months or years without releasing a word about it, then something like this comes along. 

This image was first posted here in that March 7, 2019 article. And, yes, it sure does look like a Falcon 9 from this angle - although grid fins either aren't there or aren't visible.  

A current photo from this test site is on the European Spaceflight page, linked at the top of this section. It's obvious from that photo that this pad isn't a launch pad and couldn't survive engines firing on it for any length of time.

In keeping with their history of "they will go months or years without releasing a word about it, then something like this comes along", there is no mention of what the next testing will be or when to expect it to happen.

The big, surprising, out-of-nowhere story though was:

The DOT is looking to exempt some launches from environmental regulations

The Department of Transportation is proposing to exempt commercial space launch licensing from many environmental regulations, a move praised by industry but (of course) criticized by environmental groups. This week, the DOT said it intends to file a proposed rule for public comment (I assume they're referring to an NPR or Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) that would exempt Federal Aviation Administration licenses for commercial launches and reentries, as well as launch sites, from 13 federal laws and associated regulations. If the NPR is the way they're doing this, it will be open for public comments for a period defined by the laws. You can be sure the greenies will attack this plan.

Environmental concerns raised… Among the laws that would be waived in the proposed rule is the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which requires environmental reviews for “major federal actions” that include licenses. “America won the first Space Race, and we can do it again, but only if we get government red tape out of the way,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said about the proposed rule. Environmental groups, though, strongly oppose the proposal, noting it would waive not just NEPA but other environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, and Clean Air Act.

If you saw the post before Flight Test 13, it was full of environmentalist complaints about using the Texas Starbase to launch anything. As I've said many times, reading Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never showed me in more detail than anything I've come across how modern environmentalism is basically the result of rich, or "well to do" people who want a pretty place to go on vacation. 

SpaceX launch for NRO was by the book

It's hardly news when a Falcon 9 mission goes exactly as described, whether the customer is the National Reconnaissance Office, like this one, or some company we've never heard of. I didn't get out of bed for this one and didn't intend to know it was going on, but something woke me as the low frequency sounds from the launch started rattling the north-facing windows. I recognized the sound and could see the clock well enough to realize it was after 3:10 AM (ordinarily, the sounds of liftoff reach our place when the F9 is about to drop the first stage, at pretty much 2 min 30 sec. That can be seconds different launch to launch, but if it gets to be over 3:00 minutes, I tend to think, "we're not going to hear anything this time."

A streak shot of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket from liftoff through landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on the NROL-95 mission on July 30, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

In a long exposure like this one, that "not as bright as the launch short streak" on the lower right is the booster's  landing burn. The layout of the photo looks to me like it's taken from the mainland, looking toward the East Southeast, perhaps a place in Titusville, the nearest city.

“The collaboration between NRO, U.S. Space Force, and SSC continues to advance our nation’s intelligence architecture through next-generation satellite technology and integrated operations,” said Col. Kathryn Cantu, director, NRO Office of Space Launch, and NROL-95 mission director. “This collaboration enables us to swiftly field resilient intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems while preserving the flexibility and persistence required to counter evolving challenges.”

As I mentioned in passing last night, this was the 7th launch of this booster, B1096, so it's a "like new! Low mileage!" booster, as the used car dealers would say.  Its previous flights were NASA’s IMAP and CRS-34; Kuiper Falcon 1; NROL-77; GPS III-9; and Starlink 6-87. 

Also by the book, 8-1/2 minutes after liftoff, B1096 touched down at Landing Zone 2 at the Cape. The local papers assure me there was a sonic boom, but either it didn't make it this far or I just fell asleep and didn't hear it. After all, the sonic boom also takes around 2-1/2 minutes to get here from the Cape.

The NROL-95 mission was the third mission procured for the NRO and launched on a Falcon 9 rocket as part of the National Security Space Launch Phase 2 contract, managed by the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command.

A single sentence Starliner story

A much larger story about Boeing's Starliner appears at Ars Technica, but the whole article can be summed up in one sentence. The sentence came from Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg at an earnings call Boeing made to investors and followers, when he was asked how the work on resolving the problems and redesigning everything was coming along.  

The single sentence was:

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

You will remember the disastrous first manned flight of the Starliner, in the summer of '24. The two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, barely made it to the ISS. While there, as flight data was reviewed NASA decided not to return the two on their Starliner, but by a series of changes to crews and launches, turned Butch and Suni's two week mission in June of '24 to the nine month mission that had them return to Earth in March of '25. You'll note both of the retired after that mission.

This February, NASA announced that the failure analysis had rated it a “Type A” mishap, the worst or most serious level failure. 

At the time, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the space agency was working with Boeing to “fully understand the risks associated” with the Starliner spacecraft, and to remediate them. Starliner would not fly its next mission, a cargo flight to the International Space Station, until those problems were identified and remediated. He declined to put a date on the test flight. 

During the earnings call Ortberg suggested much of that work was completed, and that the primary issue now is scheduling a launch date with NASA for Starliner to ferry cargo to the space station to ensure there was an open docking port and astronaut time to unload the vehicle.

An official told Ars that the primary factor now for when Starliner launches is aligning port availability on the space station and launch capabilities on the ground. That means the next flight could possibly be this year, since we're still closer to midyear than the start of the last quarter. 

It turns out, that something none of us thought about while the Summer of '24 mission was going on is suddenly poking its nose up and becoming a concern. Remember the story two weeks ago that mentioned crew dragon might be becoming an issue? 

...  there are uncertainties about the availability of Crew Dragon in the 2030s, and more recently SpaceX has been telling industry officials that it plans to retire Crew Dragon (which flies on the Falcon 9 rocket) no later than 2030. This raises serious concerns for not just NASA, which may seek to fly to the International Space Station into the early 2030s, but also for planned private space stations intended to take its place. These companies are having difficulties negotiating crew transportation services as a result. 

The loss of Crew Dragon will be an immediate concern for NASA, and Cargo Dragon isn't far behind that. I can imagine that NASA would have an easier time convincing SpaceX to build another one or two of each format dragon than the problems Boeing has dealing with Starliner.  The last six Atlas 5s are dedicated to Starliner launches, and after those, there is no launch vehicle for Starliner. That's probably far enough in the future that there's time to figure out ways around it. 

Starliner, by contrast, has several disadvantages. Its Service Module, which houses all of the costly propulsion systems, does not return to Earth after each flight but rather burns up in the atmosphere. Sources said this expendable module costs tens of millions of dollars. There is also the fact that, after its initial run of NASA missions, Starliner will have no rocket following the retirement of the Atlas V vehicle. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket is an option, but there would be not-inconsiderable costs to human-rate the rocket, and it would be more expensive than a Falcon 9. 

SpaceX is in an enviable position as being not simply the single biggest launch provider in the world, but the company that launches more than the rest of the world combined. The other side of that is customers might not be inclined to switch over from the world's most reliable rocket to the less well-known Starship. (Thursday morning at 3:09AM EDT, SpaceX is launching a National Security Payload for the NRO from Cape Canaveral. When I saw this will be the 7th flight for this booster, I literally said, "ooh! A new one!")

Boeing's first Starliner capsule to fly, "Sea Anchor" (visible just below the American flag) before the 2024 flight. Image credit: Boeing

Looks like the Link satellite to rescue Swift has some problems

News broke late today, Eastern, that the Link satellite sent to rescue the Swift satellite from burning up on reentry is in dire conditions itself. Two of Link’s three reaction wheels currently aren't working. 

The Link satellite developed by Katalyst Space Technologies “experienced issues with attitude control” over the weekend, NASA said, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.

“Preliminary investigation shows that two of Link’s three reaction wheels currently are not operable, and there is some loss of functionality in its cold gas thruster system,” NASA said. 

The Link mission was Launched on July 3 of this year on its "one of a kind" mission to grab a satellite that's nearing end of life and boost it back up to a higher elevation in its orbit. It was launched on the last flight of the Northrop Grumman Pegasus launch vehicle over the Pacific, closely approached Swift and started checkouts to proceed. 

Over this weekend, the Link satellite “experienced issues with attitude control”, NASA said, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications. Some additional control has been implemented but the spinning hasn't been eliminated. 

Reaction wheels work by spinning in orthogonal orientations on the spacecraft, which transfers momentum to the craft allowing the wheels to change and control the position (attitude), of spacecraft in orbit. They are standard components on many satellites. In addition to the reaction wheels Link also has several cold gas thrusters used for finer control, particularly as it nears the Swift gamma ray observatory. 

The electric thrusters are one of the most critical elements of the rescue mission. They are used for orbit raising to allow Link to rendezvous with the Swift satellite some 200 miles above Earth. Once Link attaches itself to Swift with a set of three robotic arms, the electric thrusters will turn on again to raise Swift’s orbit and save it from destruction. Katalyst is now calling upon the electric thrusters to stabilize the Link spacecraft’s attitude, something they were not intended to do.

Over the course of the next few days, the team will be working to control the spin using the electric thrusters. After reestablishing stable attitude and further investigating spacecraft status, Katalyst plans to update Link's guidance, navigation, and control to accommodate the spacecraft’s new configuration.

Concept of operations for the SWIFT rescue mission. Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies

A look at FT-13's heat shield by NASA Expert

The week is off to a slow start with most talk still about Starship's FT-13 last Friday, with one or two smaller, less-interesting (at least to me) stories. The big story about FT-13 is about the heat shield efforts the company has been going through, and a conversation with a former NASA engineer who studied heat shield materials for nearly four decades at NASA Ames Research Center. This expert warns that the current Starship heat shield tech is a “dead end” for rapid reuse. Even video channel Alpha Tech did a discussion that touched on the subject. 

From the quote about, "nearly four decades at NASA", I have to assume that was starting before the shuttles flew for the first time, so (in rough numbers) 1975 until 2015. The design work was done (or declared that way) by the late '70s, and my impression is they may have done some monitoring of the shuttle heat shields but this wasn't like "continuous process improvement" as much as it was "keeping an eye on things." 

So what's up? Why? A point both Alpha Tech's video and Ars Technica's article make is the Shuttles had an aluminum chassis that the heat shield was mounted on. SpaceX uses stainless steel, but not a conventional austenitic alloy like 304. That means that they developed their own alloy with improved properties (including cost!) over the common, COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) alloys. This source says SpaceX patented it as 30x. (Do I need to mention that Musk seems to like the letter X in product and business names?) 

The powerful advantage to using stainless steel instead of something like the aluminum alloys the Space Shuttles used is a much higher tolerance for heat. On top of that, it's better at the cryogenic temperatures of the fuels and oxidizers the ship uses. 

“Starship’s current thermal protection system is a dead-end for all missions that require full and rapid reusability,” Dan Rasky, a former NASA engineer who studied heat shield materials for nearly four decades at NASA Ames Research Center, told Ars. Rasky is credible: He co-invented PICA, the material used for Crew Dragon’s heat shield.

NASA confronted this same issue half a century ago during development of the Space Shuttle, which used thousands of lightweight ceramic tiles to insulate the vehicle’s aluminum structure. Although the tiles worked fairly well, the US space agency was never able to crack the code on “rapid” reuse. Each tile required post-flight inspections, so reuse of Space Shuttle orbiters remained expensive and time-consuming.
...
However, according to a new analysis by Rasky and two other space industry officials, former NASA astronaut Charles Camarda and the head of the NASA transition team for the Trump-Vance White House, Charles Miller, significant challenges remain for rapidly reusing Starship.

They give us a handy photo to concentrate on. Notice that whitish streaks seem to diverge from edges and corners (points) on the hexagonal tiles. Seams or boundaries between the tiles. That implies that it's the super hot gas from the upper atmosphere, melting and pushing out material from under the tiles. SpaceX has shown in their own videos that they put something like a white plastic foam under the tiles. 

A close-up of Starship's heat shield after it landed in the Indian Ocean last week. Credit: SpaceX

The problem is that, with the signs of damage, such a heat shield would appear to require a fair amount of inspection and refurbishment before another launch. In other words, SpaceX has a ways to go to reach “full and rapid” reuse of Starship. “Full” means reusing both the booster and the Starship upper stage, and “rapid” reuse means turning each Starship around in days or weeks, instead of months, at considerable expense.

Here, the person that's saying this is completely missing the story. “Full rapid reuse” doesn't mean landing and flying again “in days or weeks” to Elon and crew. It means taking off again in a few hours. More like a commercial jet than a spaceship. 

On various podcasts and X social media postings, SpaceX founder Elon Musk has repeatedly stated that solving the reusable heat shield problem is one of the toughest problems the company faces. Back in February on a podcast with Dwarkesh Patel, Musk expounded on this, saying a reusable heat shield is “the biggest problem that remains” for Starship. “If you want to be able to land it, refill propellant, and fly again, you can’t do this laborious inspection of 40,000 tiles type of thing,” he said.

The Ars article reduces this down to the reasonable conclusion that Starship's heat shield will likely be good enough to deploy the third generation Starlink constellation like the ones FT-13 carried to orbit. But the experts are concerned that it will be unable to hit the high flight rate needed, with several hundred to thousands of low-cost launches annually, for large settlements on the Moon and Mars, orbital data centers, or large-scale space-based solar power. 

This sounds like the kind of "advancing the art and science of spaceflight" that we think NASA could help with, but the problem with that is that NASA dropped this kind of research decades ago. 

The experts noted that NASA has not made substantial investments in thermal protection research for vehicles entering from low-Earth orbit (speeds of Mach 25) for three decades. The underlying technologies on Starship, they note, are all based on work done for the space shuttle, National Aerospace Plane, or X-33 programs. No one today, they said, is seriously investing in new, advanced thermal materials for orbital reentry. 

I think that SpaceX has shown that they might be the best place to go for this sort of development. I've seen video clips where Elon discussed how they've altered the recipe for the heat shield tiles and gotten better performance. Perhaps they just haven't gone far enough down that adventure. Or perhaps it's something else entirely. Maybe instead of the white plastic foam sheet they have the tiles mounted on, perhaps they need a layer of something else there. Another tile? In other words, a sandwich of tile, foam, tile, and foam?