Europe's Isar Aerospace having a tough time getting off the ground

Isar Aerospace is in a unique place for a private space corporation in Europe. They've actually launched a rocket once, back on March 30 '25, but the rocket didn't make orbit, and honestly didn't get much higher than a few launch towers. You may remember seeing it lose control less than one minute after launch as engines either couldn't or wouldn't run, then it crashed in to the water around Andøya spaceport in Norway and exploded.

Isar has been working toward the goal of the second flight of their Spectrum rocket since then and has been trying since this January, but something keeps coming up that stops them. The most recent scrub was this afternoon (Norwegian time) when ground control systems were “detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems,” and they scrubbed. Isar hasn't named a next day for an attempt, but remarked the launch window is only open (approved) until June 21. 

The Spectrum rocket has missed three launch windows so far this year. Isar called off a launch attempt on January 21 due to an issue with a pressurization valve, and then halted a countdown on March 25, moments before liftoff, when engineers detected rising temperatures in the rocket’s liquid propane fuel. Isar officials attributed the problem to a delay earlier in the countdown caused by an unauthorized boat in restricted waters along the rocket’s flight path.

Managers stood down from another launch attempt on April 9 to evaluate a suspected leak in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel [COPV]. That led to Isar’s latest try to launch the Spectrum rocket on Monday.

“Scrubs are part of the business,” Isar founder and CEO Daniel Metzler said in April. “Each attempt gives us valuable experience and lessons learned.”

As far as I know, every launch site like Andøya that launches from a site close to a beach has issues with some friction between other users of the water, both fisherman (recreational and professional) and people who just want to visit the beach. The same sort of concerns haunt Isar and the Andøya spaceport. Isar sits at the front of the pack of European startups trying to being commercial launch capacity to the European nations. 

Several other companies—Germany’s Rocket Factory Augsburg, France’s MaiaSpace, and Spain’s PLD Space, among others—are developing their own small satellite launchers to provide a lower-cost alternative to Arianespace and Avio, Europe’s incumbent launch providers.

Isar sits at the front of pack because they've gotten closer to successful launch than the others. So far. This is the attempt on March 30, 2025.

There were no customer payloads onboard the failed Spectrum launch last year. This time, Isar has placed five small CubeSats and a non-separating technology experiment into the Spectrum rocket’s payload fairing. The second test flight is supported by the European Space Agency’s “Boost!” program and the German Aerospace Center’s Microlauncher Competition, which provide funding for commercial space transport initiatives.

Isar Aerospace is set to receive up to 205 million euros ($238 million) from ESA through the European Launcher Challenge program, augmenting the company’s private fundraising and financing rounds worth more than 800 million euros (nearly $1 billion), including 270 million euros ($313 million) announced just last week. This makes Isar, by far, the most well-capitalized private launch company in Europe.

So far the weekend is a dud

I mentioned this weekend's ARRL VHF contest a few times and that's where I was all of Saturday - at least until 11:00 PM local (eastern US) time.

It's hard to know this is correct, but yesterday, I thought it might have been the least active, and least interesting of these contests. Ever. Compared to the activity I heard last weekend, it was very low activity and very poor propagation.

Naturally, if I say it was bad, the obvious reply is, "how bad was it?" 

As I've said many times, I tend to use a software package called WSJT-X and a mode called FT8. The "JT" is for Joe Taylor, the physicist who developed the mode and puts the software out for free and I believe the whole name reduces to Weak Signal by Joe Taylor - eXtended (more than just the original few features). The big picture overview is that the FT8 software transmits and receives in alternating 15 second intervals.  And now I can finally answer the "how bad was it?" 

Last weekend, during the busy periods, I would see that in 15 seconds, the software had demodulated and put on screen over 50 different transmissions. For perspective, most of yesterday, I saw four to six. Sometimes it would show two and I don't recall ever seeing the incoming calls get to even 10. The only good part is that while I didn't catch any new stations or new areas I haven't contacted (worked) yet, I did get propagation openings into southern parts of Arizona and California.  

It's practically impossible for me to read over 50 call signs going by in 15 seconds and recognize any I need to respond to. Yes, I have some software that helps with that, too. 

Well it's just after 9AM here, and the band looks even slower than yesterday, but I'll go turn the station on. 

 

 

SpaceX IPO a success

Since a few times during the past week we were dancing around the topic of SpaceX's IPO today, it's convenient to end on that note and talk about it for a minute or two. 

I didn't have to look hard for this; this browser is Firefox under Windows 11 and what I think is the standard installation leaves lots of attention attractors on a blank tab. One of those today was a link to NPR (National Public Radio) who posted a summary of the IPO that seemed correct. 

SpaceX's newly listed stock leapt on its first day of trading on Friday, after an initial public offering that shattered records and made CEO Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire.

SpaceX stock, listed on the Nasdaq under the SPCX ticker, rose 19% on its first day of trading to close at $160.95. It became one of the world's biggest listed companies on its first day on the market, valued above $2 trillion.

The company raised some $75 billion selling more than 555 million shares at its offer price of $135,making it the biggest IPO in history.

While it might have been coincidence, NPR implies that to draw attention to the IPO, they launched a Falcon 9 carrying a load of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral. Which I happened to miss because of not remembering the correct launch time.  (By the time we get the rocket sounds here, the flight has been going for over two minutes and there's not much chance of seeing anything. Which is fine because I was in the bathroom and wouldn't have been able to get up and go watch, anyway.). 

Musk was at Starbase, Texas and had a group presentation with President Gwynne Shotwell and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen. 

"Whoever you are watching this, SpaceX wants to be able to take you to the moon, take you to mars, and ultimately beyond," Musk said, noting it was hard to believe the company had just pulled off the biggest IPO ever.

"I gave SpaceX less than a 10% chance of succeeding at all, to be clear," he said of the company's early days. "In fact I told people this, I said 'look, we're probably going to fail, but you know we should give it a try because if we don't, if there's not a new company that enters space, we will never be a truly space-faring civilization."

One of the places I looked at while looking for news on this had a picture of a guy who started at SpaceX as a welder. As of today's market action, the shares he was given as a bonus made him a multimillionaire. Charles Payne of Fox Business had this take.

A look at SpaceX's plan for orbital data centers

Back on Sunday, in the story about SpaceX's imminent IPO, I mentioned the thing I'd seen about the plan for the new public corporation included data centers in space: "Not one or two - a million AI data centers." It's kind of a mind-boggling concept - and if you're not used to thinking at the scale of the requirements they're facing, it can definitely be off-putting. How do you dissipate the heat your processors generate? How do you get the data down? What do we need that much processing power for? Replacing everything on Earth? 

SpaceX and Elon Musk in particular are the people to listen to because with their Starlink constellation they've put more satellite mass in space than any other company (or country). 

Space.com put up an interview with Elon in a casual setting somewhere in their corporate buildings. It turns out this interview is taken from one SpaceX posted on their X account that's just over a half hour long at 31 minutes. As you can see, this one is half that long. 

I'm not convinced it's a good thing to work toward, probably because I'm not convinced that the future we've glimpsed of how AI will affect everything is a good future. That said, it's worth watching. Is he on to something really important? It's possible. That's a different question than "should I invest in the IPO?" 

---

I should add that the next couple of days could end up being spotty. Tomorrow we're having some electric maintenance done on the house - we're replacing our whole-house backup generator, which died back in March and while I don't expect to be taken down, it's more likely than any other day when they're not working on stuff.  This weekend is the ARRL VHF contest from Saturday at 2PM until Sunday night at 11PM - both in my local Eastern Daylight Time.

Well that didn't take long

Yesterday, NASA announced the crew for the Artemis III mission, along with information on the mission itself and what they will be doing.  

By this morning, the complaints that the crew wasn't diverse enough started surfacing. "They're all men! You can't do that!" OK. I made that line up, so here's a real quote for you.

Isaacman wrote on the social media platform X that “I have seen reactions ranging from disappointment to outrage.” One such response on Reddit called the crew announcement “massively upsetting.”

“Women represent 50 percent of the population,” the post read. “They deserve at least one seat on every mission from a government run agency.”

Although he tried, there's nothing that can be said to people who focus on things like that. Everything that Administrator Isaccman said sounded like when people used to say "I'm not a bigot; some of my best friends are black" (or Hispanic or whatever). 

But Isaacman strongly defended the crew selection, saying he had “personally been to space twice with 50 percent female crews. My closest advisors and some of the smartest engineers I know are women. In our latest NASA leadership organization, nearly 50 percent of the center directors and mission directorate leadership are women.

“The last astronaut candidate class selected under this administration was majority female [six women and four men] because they were the best of the best, including one astronaut [Anna Menon] I previously went to space with.”

The article on Spaceflight Now spends its column space talking about how non-discriminatory they are. What do you say to someone who says something like that line, “They deserve at least one seat on every mission from a government run agency.” One seat on a flight with two people, or one seat in a crew of 500 people? What percentage? Does it need to be 50%? What if the ship can only hold five? Do you cut two people in half and sew the halves together? That's how absurd that sounds to me. 

It's a waste of time to worry about such things. Best person for the job, no matter what they look like. If your life is on the line, do you want the best at what they're doing or someone there because they meet someone else's diversity demands? 

NASA announced its 2025 Astronaut Candidate Class on September 22, 2025. The 10 candidates, pictured here at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston are: U.S. Army CW3 Ben Bailey, U.S. Air Force Maj. Cameron Jones, Katherine Spies, Anna Menon, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Erin Overcash, U.S. Air Force Maj. Adam Fuhrmann, Dr. Lauren Edgar, Yuri Kubo, Rebecca Lawler, and Dr. Imelda Muller. Credit: NASA

Let me point out that of the 10 candidates, six are women and four are men. I should point out that in the left A, posing on the floor, the blonde is Anna Menon, the former SpaceX engineer who flew on Polaris Dawn with NASA administrator Isaacman, and there are many pictures of her here on the blog. 

NASA unveils crew and details of the Artemis III Mission

Today, June 9, NASA introduced the crew for next year's Artemis III mission and updated information about the mission.  

The international crew consists of three spaceflight veterans and one first-time spaceflyer, all with backgrounds specially suited for their upcoming mission. The three NASA astronauts and one European Space Agency astronaut of Artemis 3 include commander Randy Bresnik of NASA, ESA's Luca Parmitano as pilot, and NASA astronauts Andre Douglas and Frank Rubio as mission specialists. All were present at the announcement ceremony today (June 9) here at NASA's Johnson Space Center.

The crew of NASA's upcoming Artemis 3 mission (from left to right): NASA's Randy Bresnik, Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency.  NASA's Frank Rubio, and NASA's Andre Douglas. (Image credit: Future/Josh Dinner)

The linked story goes into more details about the crew members but the most important part of this story is the mission itself. It seems that the most likely date for this mission is toward the second half of 2027, so more than a year from now, especially in light of the loss of Blue Origin's vehicle back on May 28th. The mission is not going to have much in common with Artemis II and will not leave low Earth orbit. The details are all pretty loose for the time being, but before the loss of the New Glenn, the concept that was that Blue would launch their Blue Moon Mark I lunar lander and SpaceX would launch their Human Landing System version of Starship. The crew of Artemis III would rendezvous with both landers, preferably docking with both and testing as many systems as they can. 

"Artemis 3 will be an extraordinary demonstration of what is possible when the greatest aerospace companies across the United States, alongside our European partners come together to showcase the technological might and ambition of the free world," Isaacman said during the event. "This seems like the beginning of the future that we imagined as children. This seems like the very beginning of Earth's first Starfleet to me" 

Since Artemis' Orion capsule launches on the SLS, Blue Origin's lander launches on New Glenn and the HLS launches on Starship, and those are pretty much the three most powerful launch vehicles on Earth, that's going to be the most resources ever used on a mission. Temper that with not having a clue if New Glenn can be flying by then. While SpaceX's HLS hasn't technically flown yet, the modifications to the Starship are small, and while Starship hasn't technically made orbit, that has been a bunch of very deliberate decisions to reduce risks and the cost of recovering from risks. I think Starship is in better shape than Blue Moon Mark I. Put another way, it seems to me, Starship could go into orbit immediately, and the differences between Starship and the HLS are simply different parts used in a handful of places.

In what seems to be a very possible outcome, if Blue Origin can't get back to launching fast enough to join this party, that leaves HLS to be the one that delivers astronauts to the lunar surface for the program's first moon landing on Artemis 4, which NASA is hoping to launch in 2028. Should neither lander be ready to launch by NASA's 2027 window for the upcoming mission, a moon landing the following year would be unlikely, and would probably shift NASA's entire timeline for establishing a permanent lunar base at the turn of the decade further into the 2030s.

Go ahead and say this sentence - that nobody on Earth could say before

Here's the short version of this sentence, a sentence that nobody alive on Earth could have said honestly yesterday.  "A rocket just flew its 35th orbital mission and stuck the landing coming back."

Or how about a longer, more informative sentence?  Falcon 9 booster B1067 turned 5 years old—and just set another reuse record. A rocket developed by a private company, manned by a staff largely not from the existing government-run space programs. 

Yeah, what's gotten to feel like an old friend, booster 1067 - the fleet leader, broke the 35th flight barrier, just like it has broken the previous 34 flight milestones, essentially flawlessly. Eric Berger at Ars Technica begins his coverage this way:

A little more than five years ago, a shiny white Falcon 9 rocket made its debut flight, boosting a Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Over the next year, it would launch a pair of astronaut missions and a handful of commercial spacecraft.

But since then, this first stage booster, designated B 1067, has mostly flown Starlink missions. It has launched them one after another, always returning safely to a drone ship before undergoing refurbishment and flying again. Sometimes it has flown twice in a single month.

Something that I regularly get reminded of is how in their early days, nobody had any idea how many flights they could get out of a Falcon 9 and I recall reading quotes about how someday they hoped they could get 10 flights out of one. Now a booster with 10 flights is considered, "like new." I remember them making the 20th flight (it wasn't B1067) and it was all still experimental, but the talk had shifted to their expecting to certify for 40 flights. Here's the kicker: that was just over two years ago; April of '24. 

Eric Berger asks if 40 is really the goal, or will they extend it again? He doesn't ask "why stop at 40?" But he does say something important: We take the Falcon 9 rocket for granted. But we probably shouldn’t.

We take the Falcon 9 rocket for granted. It now launches so often—a few times a week—that its flights are a complete non-event. Even a milestone like a 35th launch and landing, bringing it closer to space shuttle Discovery‘s record of 39 spaceflights across nearly four decades, seems hardly worth mentioning. 

But in reality, the Falcon 9 rocket is the bedrock of SpaceX’s success today. And whatever one might think of the company’s impending IPO—whether it’s a financial boondoggle or a long-awaited opportunity for investors to own a piece of SpaceX—its valuation is largely due to the Falcon 9 vehicle.

B1067 flies for the 35th time on the Starlink 9-35 mission this morning, a few minutes before sunrise. Image credit: SpaceX

Let's wind up this fan-letter with some perspective.

Finally, it’s worth considering just how much work this single Falcon 9 rocket, once so clean and shiny and now so dark and grimy, has accomplished in its short lifetime.

For some context, consider the performance of SpaceX’s top US-based competitor in medium- and heavy-lift launch, United Launch Alliance. Since Booster 1067 made its debut in June 2021, the company has flown its workhorse Atlas V rocket a total of 22 times and the Vulcan rocket four times, and the Delta IV Heavy vehicle made its final three flights.

So in the time that this single Falcon 9 first stage has flown and landed 35 times, its competitor company has made 29 total launches. Put another way, this rocket has put more mass into orbit than more than two dozen expendable rockets over half a decade of effort.

I think that last observation is good way to define excellence.

This week: SpaceX's IPO Hits the markets Friday

Here's one of those news stories that I keep an eye out for but isn't what I consider particularly big and important news. 

By now, I assume most people remotely interested in the launch industry or space industry have heard of and are maybe even tracking that SpaceX is going public and is going to launch an IPO, or Initial Public Offering, of shares of their stock. 

Space.com carried the story that SpaceX is going to start selling shares of their stock, this coming Friday, June 12th, and they're expected to become the 7th most valuable company in the US at $1.77 trillion. 

The company revealed this week that it plans to sell shares at $135 apiece during the IPO, which will occur June 12 when SpaceX begins trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SPCX.

That share price would give the company a valuation of $1.77 trillion, according to CNBC. Just six American companies are worth more: NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon and semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom. [From 1 to 6 in order - SiG] 

Now I personally don't get involved in trading and I'm not going to play in the IPO, so I don't need to tell you, "dammit, Jim, I'm an engineer, not a daytrader! Don't put any weight on financial stuff I say." That said, the reference link to CNBC has an article that says one of their experts says the IPO is overpriced and he's not buying. Their article is entitled, "‘Dean of Valuation’ Aswath Damodaran is not buying SpaceX: ‘Too richly priced’". They may not be expecting their article to change the results of the IPO, but the market value isn't settled until the people bidding on the prices of shares are settled and SpaceX may well end up being worth more or less than that predicted $1.77 trillion. 

The market has the final word. Just as every launch is on schedule until the weather speaks, we won't know if SPCX is valued at $1.77 trillion until the dust settles on Friday night - NASDAQ time.

My main concern is that this isn't really an IPO for the SpaceX we've come to know and admire.  They have diversified beyond launch and their Starlink telecommunications into artificial intelligence. 

SpaceX recently acquired xAI, the startup that Musk founded in 2023. xAI owns X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter), built the generative AI chatbot Grok and operates Colossus, a supercomputer cluster in Tennessee. 

You've probably heard that they intend to put AI data centers in space. Not one or two - a million AI data centers. They're undoubtedly better suited to do this than any other launch provider but that doesn't mean it's a given that they'll put it all up and everything will work. 

My bias is that I think the whole AI thing going on is the biggest hype cycle in history. There are things that AI seems to be good at, but too much of what we see/hear/read is pi in the sky, if you'll pardon the John Wilder joke. 

Starship Flight Test 12 takes to the air back on May 22nd. (Image credit: SpaceX)

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

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

WA7BNM's Contest Calendar shows it this way: 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good night and good-bye, MAVEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much like what the comments here are saying.

Blue Origin says they'll be back launching this year

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

Let me back up a bit and add the story. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small Space News Story Roundup 81

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

NASA to order more Crew Dragon flights from SpaceX 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that Hunga Tonga volcano still affecting the world?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those Pico Balloons Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clearly, New Glenn is NOT launching June 4

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

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

That was only a slight overstatement. 

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

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

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

Blue Origin's next New Glenn flight is next week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAA Grounds Starship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NASA proposes a lunar settlement development plan

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

Today, the talk was elevated to a presentation.   

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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