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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes things just don't go as planned

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Origin aiming for 100 launches per year

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We got our Falcon Heavy launch this morning

After a couple of delays, the Falcon Heavy launch I've been waiting for since Sunday made its launch this morning at 10:13 AM EDT or 1413 UTC. The 6.6 ton satellite has been deployed to the geostationary orbit (GEO) 22,236 miles above Earth. The proper deployment to that orbit was announced by SpaceX at 3:30 PM EDT (1930 UTC):

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket launches the ViaSat-3 F3 satellite April 29, 2026. (Image credit: Spacex)

About eight minutes after launch, the twin strap-on Falcon 9 boosters touched down at SpaceX's Landing Zones 2 and 40, each one within about 2 miles from the rocket's LC-39A launch pad - within seconds of each other. This video capture shows LZ-2 on the left and LZ-40 on the right. The booster on LZ-2 had just shut off its engines while the LZ-40 vehicle is still using up the fuel in its lines. Video here

In the coverage by NASASpaceflight (dot com), they said there were several more FH launches coming, far more than this one compared to the previous FH launch 18 months ago. This schedule should work for you - it shows one in September - the Roman Space Telescope NET September - another NET 2026 and nine (!) FH launches NET 2027.

All that said, the launch view was practically a zero from my backyard. I think I saw the FH climbing out early in its mission for perhaps as much as three seconds. There was one tower of cloud that it stayed behind until seconds before it dropped those two boosters. We heard a good rumble and heard our patio doors rattle, but it didn't last long. 

Pencil it in: Artemis III looks to be NET "late" 2027

Of course that should set off a round of "what does that mean?" Certainly December is late in the year, but what about September? It's month 9 out of 12, of course, so early September can almost be late August. When I read something like late 2027, I figure early 2028. 

NASA administrator Jared Isaacman described the likely soonest date that way to a group of lawmakers Monday, Apr. 27, saying that both SpaceX and Blue Origin, the agency’s two lunar lander contractors, say they could have their spacecraft ready for the next Artemis mission in Earth orbit in late 2027, somewhat later than NASA’s previous schedule. As you know, when Isaacman took over running NASA, Artemis III was supposed to be the lunar landing mission. Isaacman thought flying a very complex system like that once a year was not going to succeed, or at best, not be as trouble-free as we'd like it to be. He turned the moon landing flight to Artemis IV and inserted a new vision for Artemis III that would be done in Earth orbit, to test rendezvous and docking of the combination of the Orion capsule with the two different landers.

A launch to Low Earth Orbit may not require the upper stage of the SLS, which is already built and in storage. 

A launch into a higher orbit would require the upper stage, but it would allow NASA to perform tests in an environment more similar to the Moon. NASA is buying a new commercial upper stage, the Centaur V from United Launch Alliance, to pair with the SLS rocket after flying the last of the rocket’s existing upper stages. 

The new Artemis III 'rhymes' with the Apollo 9 mission, which was in March of 1969. It's intended to test out the landers in LEO so that in the event of some big problem, the astronauts are hours or even minutes away from home and not a few days. When the approach was announced, NASA implied mission III could be as soon as mid-'27. Now it's looking more like the end of '27, rather than one year after April's Artemis II mission.

“I’ve received responses from both vendors, both SpaceX and Blue Origin, to meet our needs for a late 2027 rendezvous, docking, and test of the interoperability of both landers in advance of a landing attempt in 2028,” Isaacman said Monday.

Both companies have multibillion-dollar contracts to develop and deliver human-rated landers to NASA for use on Artemis missions. Both vehicles need to be refueled in space in order to fly to the Moon. This added complexity is not required for an Earth orbit mission.

“The taxpayers are making a very big investment to both SpaceX and Blue Origin’s Human Landing System (HLS) capability,” Isaacman said in a hearing before the subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee responsible for NASA’s budget. “I would also appreciate that both those companies are investing well in excess of that, as well.”

While I don't have real specifications for either lander, if they were to use a full-sized Starship, that could put many tons into orbit. It has been talked about for missions intended to carry 100 tons to any point on Earth within 90 minutes. Lifting less payload requires less fuel, which also saves fuel. There has been talk about using a smaller version of Starship for the HLS since the original mission profile Artemis would fly doesn't exist anymore.  

It's not just in the lander's specs that there's a shortage of useful data; the actual mission plans are far from complete, too.  Remember Axiom's space suits being developed for the lunar missions? 

NASA would also like to fly at least one of Axiom’s commercial spacesuits on Artemis III to give astronauts a chance to try it out in space before they need it for walking on the Moon. The suits are undergoing tests on the ground and in NASA’s spacewalk training pool in Houston. Isaacman said Monday that NASA could also send an Axiom suit to the International Space Station for testing by the end of next year. 

There's also a possibility that NASA will try to simplify the mission, perhaps just doing the rendezvous and docking but not undocking the vehicle and letting crew maneuver around the Orion in LEO. That depends on how complete the two Human Landing System vehicles are. Blue Origin is planning an uncrewed landing of their Blue Moon cargo lander near the lunar south pole. SpaceX is looking to test their Version 3 Starship within the next month, although a date hasn't been announced for either of those.

Image from Casey Handmer's blog. He put this graphic together to put raw numbers in front of all the faces who need to know. Those numbers are probably long out of date.   

Missed it by that much

In the famous words of Maxwell Smart in the '60s series Get Smart. What in the world am I talking about missing? Last night's post about this morning's scheduled Falcon Heavy launch. The launch was scrubbed late in the countdown due to storms in the area, with the scrub called at just about T-30 seconds, when they ordinarily will issue their "go for launch call." The official forecast was for a 70% chance of good weather, so it was at least somewhat of surprise to everyone.  

Screen capture of NASA Spaceflight's coverage of this morning's scrub. Is that gray cloud taking up the left side of the photo the one that caused the scrub?

The current schedule for this FH launch is Tuesday, April 28, at 10:13 AM. 

Since I'm here, SpaceX had their 50th Falcon 9 launch of the year last night from Vandenberg, carrying another load of 25 Starlink satellites. The magic of the internet tells me that was the 116th day of the year, which calculates to around 155 to 160 Falcon 9 launches this year, if they keep the exact same pace, which seems like it might be a little pessimistic. The big variable is when Vandenberg's second launch pad gets started operating, which would enable two launches/week from both coasts. 

Something that needs to be shared is a video from SpaceX, called Starship - Test Like You Fly and while it's nearly a half hour long, it's absolutely worth watching. They sent me a copy directly to my email address associated with the blog (right sidebar under "WANT TO EMAIL ME?) a couple of days ago and I watched yesterday. It's got me stoked and ready for flight test 12, which will be the first test of a bunch of new systems. You'll see how they got there.

We get a treat tomorrow: Falcon Heavy launch from Kennedy Space Center

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, their heavy lift vehicle until Starship gets certified, will launch tomorrow morning for the first time in 18 months. 

A Falcon Heavy topped with the huge ViaSat-3 F3 communications satellite will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday (April 27), during an 85-minute window that opens at 10:21 a.m. EDT (1421 GMT). 

The last FH launch 18 months ago (October of 2024) was to start NASA's Europa Clipper on its five year journey to Jupiter's moon by that name. 

Falcon Heavy is the second strongest rocket in the US' fleet, second only to the Space Launch System or SLS, used for Artemis launches. The most recent ViaSat-3 Flight 2 or F2 was launched by an Atlas V in November of 2025, and the first, F1, rode a Falcon Heavy in April 2023. It appears to have been April 30 but for some reason I don't seem to have any posts of the launch, just of some rescheduling earlier in the month. 

Getting back to this mission, 

The 6.6-ton (6 metric tons) satellite is headed to geostationary orbit (GEO) which lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth. At that altitude, orbital velocity matches our planet's rotational speed, allowing satellites to "hover" over the same patch of real estate continuously. 
...
The Falcon Heavy's two side boosters will come back for a landing at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station about eight minutes after launch on Monday, if all goes to plan. The central booster won't be recovered; it will fall into the Atlantic Ocean when its work is done.

The Falcon Heavy's upper stage, meanwhile, will carry ViaSat-3 F3 to geosynchronous transfer orbit, deploying it there about five hours after launch.

The Falcon Heavy lifts off Oct. 14, 2024 from the Kennedy Space Center carrying NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft. Credit: Brandon Lindner

My other, other stuff going on

I occasionally mention other things I'm working on or that are going on. Life is the simplest word and I think it was Beatle John Lennon who said, "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." That's what this little post will be about.

Let's start with something I haven't talked about in a long time: guitars. I've got a small batch of guitars, like pretty much all players who can get more than one instrument tend to. Unlike the vast majority of home players, I built two of those guitars; an electric guitar from a kit back around 2015, and an acoustic that was more like a very extended repair job. It was a sales demo model from some guitar store and before sending it around to show what their guitars looked like inside, the manufacturer, Breedlove, sliced most of the left side of the guitar off. 

The long story is I started playing in junior high school, around 1967 or '68, and like most others, I learned what was referred to as rhythm guitar. Playing chords. I played in a couple of garage bands, and at a couple of parties, but I never really fantasized about being a musician. It was enough to make some sounds that didn't hurt people's ears or they even actually enjoyed. 

In my "young adult" years, through my 20s, I hardly played at all and didn't get involved with guitars again until maybe 1988 or later. I picked it up with intentions to practice more often a few years ago. Those plans would get derailed every now and then by either an injury or osteoarthritis. Over roughly the last year, that second one had me unable to play for a year or more. The effect of the arthritis was limited entirely to one finger, my left hand's middle finger. The very last segment of that finger, the one that you press onto a string to change the note you're playing, rotated left or toward my pinky finger. 

How much did it tilt? I don't really know how to measure that with what I have, but I'll estimate 10 degrees. The rotation wasn't the issue so much as the insane pain it caused. I'm gonna bet you've heard someone say, "it hurts to look at it?" Exactly.

About a month ago, I realized that I had bumped that finger on something and it didn't hurt. After some time trying to figure out if it was really gone, I started thinking what I could do to test it. I picked up one of the guitars I'd regularly practice with and found I could play without the insane pain.  The problems now are the same ones everybody picking up a guitar and starting to practice faces. Building up calluses on my finger tips so the strings don't hurt as much, strengthening the muscles involved so when I go to play some chord that makes all six strings sound, I can apply even pressure and put all the strings on the neck. Most importantly though is agility of those fingers, and knowing what to play. As in re-learning a few songs. 

My tendency in here is to put up some picture that's relevant or related to the topic, but tonight, I was going to link a video from Woodstock that I've run before. The problem with that is YouTube has decided we're not allowed to embed it, but I think I can run a link to it HERE. And here's a picture:

A photo of my repair job on the Breedlove guitar. The guitar is on my workbench but just for posing, in the final post on this job.  

The finger has better and worse days, so it's not entirely being back to normal and I have no way to know if that's even possible.

Small Space News Story Roundup 80

Because, well, you know. It's not that there isn't any news, it's just not much to talk about.

Another company tests a Rotating Detonation Engine

We've talked about RDEs for a while now. My first post on the subject appears to have been in May of 2020, so almost six years to the day. At the time, I wrote that it wasn't a new idea:

Rotating detonation engines, or RDEs, sound like something out of science fiction, but the concept is about as old as the space age itself. In the late 1950s and early '60s, aerospace engineers working on rocket engines envisioned RDEs as a way to turn a problem into a solution. “Sometimes the rocket motors would get a real bad instability and you’d get an explosion,” pioneer Arthur Nicholls recalled in a University of Michigan interview shortly before his death. “Then it led to the idea—well, what if we use that?” 

Like many things observed that early in space exploration, the physics of what was going on wasn't well understood, but there has been a lot of time for that physics to develop. The main advantage of the RDE is reduced weight of the engine.  In conventional liquid rocket engines, the fuel and oxidizer are pressurized and fed into the ignition chamber using bulky turbopumps and other complicated machinery.  An RDE doesn’t need these pressurization systems, because the shock wave from the detonation provides the pressure. In this week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica, Eric Berger writes about tests from Astrobotic.

Astrobotic on Thursday announced the successful hot fire testing of its Chakram rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE) at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. Two Chakram engine prototypes completed eight successful hot-fire tests, accumulating more than 470 seconds of total run time without any discernible damage to the engine hardware, the company said.  The campaign included a 300-second continuous burn, which is believed to have set the record for the longest duration hot firing of an RDRE engine to date.

The engines seem too small to me, they produced 4000 pounds of thrust, but I may well be thinking of completely different uses than Astrobotic is aiming for. Berger mentions two engines being used in a vehicle, but that's still around 8000 pounds, certainly under 10,000, which is barely enough to get most of us off the sofa on Thanksgiving. 

Astrobotic's Chakram rotating detonation rocket engine during tests this week. Credit: Astrobotic

With both ULA's Vulcan and Blue Origin's New Glenn grounded, getting to orbit just got harder

I still haven't seen anything with details about what went wrong with New Glenn's second stage last week, but the internet has been buzzing about it being that the BE-3 upper stage engines malfunctioned - presumably one of the two and not both of them. Blue's customer's payload has already re-entered and burned up. 

While Vulcan's solid rocket (first stage) boosters lost a nozzle on one of the two engines on each of their two missions, the vehicles' control systems increased their output enough so that it could still deliver their payloads to orbit. Northrop Grumman said Tuesday it had taken a $71 million charge due to an anomaly with the solid rocket booster that grounded the Vulcan Centaur rocket.

So how do big payloads get to those orbits? Obviously, SpaceX is still flying but they don't have infinite capacity. The ability to put those payloads into tough orbits has really been clamped. 

Still, it's not a total shutdown. There's this:

No solids, no problem … The Space Force could launch certain missions without solid rocket boosters that carry lower mass or are bound for lower orbits. For example, the service could launch an upcoming Space Development Agency mission on Vulcan, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, Space Systems Command chief, told reporters in a separate briefing. “Essentially, if it doesn’t rely on a solid, there’s no reason why we can’t launch, and I’m committed to supporting that and keeping that mission going,” he said. The Space Force has switched four GPS III missions from a Vulcan rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle since December 2024. 

It looks like "the final frontier" can become the next battlefronts

Seems like only the other day when every episode of Star Trek coming into the living room started with that line, "Space: the final frontier. " Buried in the shows most, if not all, episodes implied that the Starship Enterprise was key in many battles. The final frontier was another front line in another battle. And that was absolutely not unique to the Star Trek story universe. 

Space has been an environment that has been involved in every war story since about the mid-1960s, and this week, US Space Command let us know that they know the Russians have crossed the line of putting satellites intended as anti-satellite weapons in orbits that would allow them to attack other countries' satellites in orbit. 

Gen. Stephen Whiting didn’t name the system, but he was almost certainly referring to a Russian military program named Nivelir, which has launched four satellites shadowing US spy satellites owned by the National Reconnaissance Office in low-Earth orbit. After reaching orbit, the Nivelir satellites have released smaller ships to start their own maneuvers, and at least one of those lobbed a mystery object at high velocity during a test in 2020. US analysts concluded this was a projectile that could be fired at another satellite.
...
The newest suspected Nivelir satellite was launched last May from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. Its launch was precisely timed for the moment Earth’s rotation spun Plesetsk underneath the orbital plane of the NRO’s USA 338 Keyhole-class optical spy satellite. Civilian missions heading to the International Space Station launch with similarly precise timing, down to the second, to intersect with the space station’s orbital plane.

The next line here is that "US officials" likened the Nivelir basic operation to the famous Russian Matryoshka dolls, those nested dolls that contain another, smaller doll, or a series of several smaller dolls inside each other. Perhaps naturally, they view this as evidence that the Russians are putting satellites in orbit that can strike US satellites on very short notice. 

“It’s evident Russia was deploying a space weapon there, and they’re putting it into an orbit where they can reach critical US national security satellites,” Whiting said Tuesday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. 

“It would be the same as if we had a new fighter, maybe the new F-47 that the Air Force is going to acquire, with a new missile system, and we decided, instead of testing that on our test ranges back in Nevada or Utah, we decided to send that airplane up to Alaska, and as Russian bombers were flying patrols somewhat near our coastline, we sent this brand new F-47 up to test near a Russian bomber,” Whiting said. “It’s just not the kind of thing we traditionally see.”

The field of using satellites to work on other satellites already on orbit, from LEO out to the Geosynchronous orbits, is getting a lot of attention these days. The first article I think I posted on this topic was on February 28, 2020 and was a mission by Northrop Grumman to send a dedicated Mission Extension Vehicle out to rendezvous with a retired (and pushed farther out into space) Intelsat communications satellite in that far orbit, push it back toward the Geosynchronous orbit and return it to service. If their intent would have been to rendezvous and dock with a functioning satellite in orbit and remove it or destroy it, the math is pretty much the same.

So far, none of the Nivelir satellites have gotten closer than a few dozen miles from their NRO counterparts. But they launched into orbits that would allow Russian commanders to approach US spy satellites with little warning. That is no coincidence, according to US officials. Launching these missions just a few minutes earlier or later would put them into a different orbital plane, making it much more difficult—perhaps impossible, depending on fuel loading—to get close to or strike one of the US spy satellites. The circumstances suggest intentionality.

“So the Russians were testing weapons near our satellites,” Whiting said. “And now we assess they’re through testing, and now they’re putting operational systems up within orbit reach of our high-value satellites. It’s evident what they’re doing, and we maintain constant vigilance watching that.”

If anyone talks about this as completely out of nowhere or unexpected, that seems naive to me. Russia has considered us to be at least a rival if not an enemy practically since the communist government was founded early in the last century. Prudence would say they should keep an eye on us. If they wanted to "start something," going first with something like these Nivelir sats to blind us makes sense. 

Whiting said Russia “has come to the conclusion that they’re a conventional arms deficit” compared to the United States and its NATO allies. Russian forces are seeking to get an asymmetric advantage anywhere they can.

“They’re looking for novel ways to try to balance that correlation of forces, to use a Soviet term,” Whiting said. “So they’re looking at nuclear, cyber, and space, and that’s why, when we read the reports over the last two years that Russia may be considering placing a nuclear ASAT [anti-satellite] on orbit, we find those just incredibly troubling.”

A space-based camera owned by the Australian company HEO captured this view of Kosmos 2558, one of Russia's suspected Nivelir satellites in low-Earth orbit. Credit: HEO

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is complete

Complete and being readied for launch in September. 

I've been following the progress of the NGRST since first hearing about it in early 2022. It was first referred to as the WFIRST, Wide Field Infra Red Space Telescope, a long but descriptive name for its mission.  It was renamed around that time in '22 the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope by NASA; the name pays tribute to the late NASA executive and first Chief Astronomer who was one of the driving forces in getting the Hubble Space Telescope program through its hurdles. 

On Tuesday (April 21), NASA had a reveal of the NGRST at their Goddard Space Flight Center along with talks by Administrator Jared Isaacman and several others.  For this:

Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, complete the final integration of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's major components on Nov. 25, 2025, joining the spacecraft and telescope assemblies in the facility's largest clean room. (Image credit: NASA/Jolearra Tshiteya)

"I very much hope, and in fact, expect, that the most exciting science from Roman is going to be the things that we didn't expect, that we couldn't predict, but that will set the new deep questions for future missions to address," Julie McEnery, senior project scientist of Roman said during a press conference on Tuesday.

The NGRST is heading for the L2 Lagrange Point, currently the home of the James Webb Space Telescope, the European Union's Euclid infrared space telescope and a place for passing visitors, such as the Escapade mission on the way to Mars (bottom of that post). 

NASA has chosen a Falcon Heavy to get this payload to its destination. There have been 11 Falcon Heavy launches to date, with a 100% success rate for the 230-foot-tall, heavy lift vehicle. Not surprising since it's three different Falcon 9s strapped together (although the upper stage is different) and it's the most reliable vehicle ever. 

Here's where it gets wild. The September launch for the NGRST is eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget. When's the last time you heard something like that? I'm not sure I ever have.

According to NASA, Roman's primary mirror measures about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, which is similar to Hubble's. However, Roman has the ability to take images that capture a patch of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can.

"Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. "What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them."

To put that into context, over its approximately 35 years of service so far, Hubble has gathered about 400 terabytes of data; once fully operational at its workstation in space, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data per year.

The collection of different space telescopes; the Hubble, James Webb, and more, allow ground based astronomers to choose the right instrument for the objects they want to study in the sky.

Compared to the JWST, Roman's images — taken with its aptly named Wide Field Instrument (WFI) — will be 50 times wider but more shallow, because Roman doesn't need to access the deep universe the way the JWST does. As we discussed, it can't see infrared like the JWST can and therefore would be wasted in looking too far back.

More specifically, WFI is composed of a 300-megapixel visible-to-near-infrared imaging camera and slitless spectrometer (a special tool that allows scientists to capture light dispersion of objects in a field of view). But there is something uniquely special about that shallow, panoramic view.

The wide and shallow field will be well suited to surveying space, not getting too much information from things that it can't look closer at. 

They can just survey and hope to find a cool lead to zoom in on. This offers Roman the ability to catch events that transpire very quickly, such as fast radio bursts, and increases the chances that scientists can witness remarkable supernovas, colliding neutron stars and other easy-to-miss phenomena right as they happen.

An illustration of the field of view of Roman Space Telescope vs. the Hubble Space Telescope. From the NASA Roman telescope mission website.

It's My Favorite Fake Holiday - It's Earf Day 2026

Yes, it's time for our annual bacchanalia of the made-up holiday they call Earth Day, my very favorite holiday to make fun of. Even more than Kwanzaa. 

As befitting the environmental movement, my tribute to Earth Day is almost entirely recycled, and is almost entirely useless. The only way it could fit the environmental movement better would be if everything I said was factually wrong. Everything here is factually correct. 

I've posted on Earf Day so many times that it's hard not to be repetitive, even if I was trying not to be. So nothing this time about Ira Einhorn murdering his girlfriend or the completely discredited book, The Population Bomb.  No, wait.  I just mentioned them both.  Rats! 

The simple truth is that virtually everything about the holiday and the environmental movement is crap. The modern green movement is simply about rich, privileged people wanting to have places to visit that they think are pretty; and especially unspoiled.  They want pretty, natural, wild-looking places to visit on vacations. If that means the people who are living in or near those places have to live lives that range from austere to practically unsurvivable, the greenies think that's just wonderful.  

When you think of it that way, it's easy to realize that the greenies care only about themselves and their enjoyments of life. Of course we should all protect the wilderness! It's theirs! That was never as clear to me as it was while reading Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger a couple of years ago. He vividly talks about people in the wilds of Africa who desperately need better ways to grow food, get water and most desperately need electricity. Instead they're kept in a life of desperation by the environmentalists.

Probably the worst example is the one that we get beat up about every day: climate change. Notice they don't mention "global warming" any more. It's just "change." As if the worldwide climate has always been the same. Let's start with that simple observation. They scream that the temperature has gone up since 1850! We're all going to die! What they don't tell you is that the temperature in 1850 was among coldest periods in the last 10,000 years. 

That's Indonesia. How about if we reconstruct the temperature half a world away? North Atlantic instead of south Pacific; Greenland instead of Indonesia (the scale is different, but 10,000 years ago is 7975 BC).

Sorry. The temperature has gone up not just from 1850 but from from one of the half-dozen coldest periods in the last half billion years.  

The closer you look, the worse the picture is. Borepatch ran a piece in 2024 about one of the more insidious things they do: they change the historical records to make the older temperatures look cooler and the newer ones look hotter. That's right; they're lying in all the official documents and have been for as long as this Con has been going on. One of the things that convinced me that skepticism was proper was the Surface Stations Project that Watts Up With That? started back in the '00s and was closed a few years ago. Their final product was a report on the official stations that create the weather record and how large percentages of them weren't sited properly; over 62% were incapable of accuracy better than 2 degrees C. Another 6% couldn't measure within 5 degrees C. They're too close to roads, too close to sources of heat like air conditioner outputs, even airport runways, and more problems. Then there was outright fraud in editing records. 

And this isn't even going near things like how bad their models are. They still basically can't handle clouds properly. Virtually none of their predictions ever actually prove to be the case. Instead we get useful idiot celebrities who are too young to understand that both weather and climate change (to be charitable). If a 20 or a 40 year old can't remember similar weather, it doesn't mean anything. 

You know the current fuss about the temperature by 2100 isn't supposed to go up more than 1 degree or "we all gonna die"? (say that like Jasmine Crockett saying "we done pickin' cotton"). In these two plots the one on the left is the prediction they push on us; the one on right is shows the error expected in yellow.  For example, at the right end of the plot on the left, it shows their global temperature as increasing by 3.75 degrees by 2100.   The uncertainty shown on the right is +22.5 / -15 degrees.  That's over 37 degrees uncertainty out of 4?  In the kind of simulations I'm used to that's so bad it's unusable.  The remarkable part is how bad the people who released this plot were at doing this math (read this). They're an embarrassment to people who can do this math, and the ones who can should get listened to far more than they do. 

Maybe if the people pushing this climate change stuff could do this math they wouldn't have their morons burning down cities. If the people burning down cities or ruining their lives by getting upset by this could understand the papers referenced, the world would be safe from them. 

Another SpaceX record set Sunday

It's a reality that every single Falcon 9 mission sets a record for SpaceX so we can't make a big deal over every launch or landing, we just note them as they go by, reserving the hoopla for Big Round Numbers. They are so far ahead of every other launch company in the world that there isn't a snowball's chance in the Florida Keys that anybody will be doing these things for years.  So let's just put up the numbers.

The big round number in this case is the middle one: 600 Falcon 9 landings in 640 completed missions. Of those 640, 562 were reflights of already flown boosters. Gee, 600 landings is first place in booster reuse, but who's in second place and how many have they flown? Is there anyone on Earth with more than even 10 landings? (Yes, I'm ignoring the Space Shuttles because they no longer fly, but maybe I should count them, too?) 

Launch 600 and completed mission 640 were Sunday morning, April 19, from Vandenberg Space Force Base, at 9:03 AM PDT, 1603 UTC and 12:03 PM here on EDT. It was batch 17-22 of 25 Starlink satellites, and about 8 minutes after liftoff, booster B1097 landed on OCISLY (Of Course I Still Love You), the only recovery drone ship working out of Vandenberg. B1097 is practically new, this being its 8th mission and earning B1097-8. The overall fleet leader is B1067-34 which flew mission 34 on March 30. 

Falcon 9 B1097-7 and its disposable upper stage lift off carrying 25 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in southern California on Sunday, April 19, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)

And by the time you see this, those numbers may have changed. Mission 641 and landing 601 are scheduled for early Tuesday morning, 2:53 AM EDT, 0653 UTC from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The launch window is open until 3:08 AM EDT - 15 minutes. Current forecast is 90% Go For Launch.

Blue Origin's rocket reuse mission misses its main job

Blue Origin's morning launch of their New Glenn was looking like an unqualified success when the launch coverage shutdown on YouTube. The second flight of the booster named, Never Tell Me the Odds, started late due to a countdown hold for unknown reasons; starting at 7:25 AM instead of the expected 6:45 AM. The flight itself looked to be by the numbers and recovery of the booster on their recovery drone, Jacklyn, looked like it was exactly on the mark. 

The problem didn't show up for more than another hour, when the upper stage was to ignite to put the payload into the desired orbit. The payload was the second "Block 2" satellite in the internet constellation of Texas-based company AST SpaceMobile, called BlueBird 7. Its predecessor, BlueBird 6, is a phased array of antennas on a large plane. It's one of the largest satellites in space, with an antenna that spans 2,400 square feet. BlueBird 7 has the same dimensions. While not actually square in shape, for reference, that would be a square almost 49 feet on a side. The purpose is "direct to cell" coverage from orbit. 

BlueBird 7 was to be deployed into orbit one hour and 15 minutes after launch. Nothing was said or streamed until about two hours after liftoff, when Blue Origin reported that something appeared to go wrong.

"We have confirmed payload separation. AST SpaceMobile has confirmed the satellite has powered on," Blue Origin wrote in a social media update. "The payload was placed into an off-nominal orbit. We are currently assessing and will update when we have more detailed information."

A little later on Sunday, AST SpaceMobile provided its own update, and the news was not good.

"While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will [be] de-orbited," the company said in a statement. "The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy."

An artist's concept of a giant AST SpaceMobile BlueBird mobile broadband satellite for smartphone connectivity. (Image credit: AST SpaceMobile)

In my mind any mission that ends with a statement like, "the cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy" was a failure - so even though the booster performed remarkably well, that's not the point of the mission. The point of the mission, what the customer is paying for, is to put their payload into its assigned orbit. Reusability is tremendously important but that's after the primary mission has been completed. 

The drive to increase the pace of the Artemis moon missions could quite possibly be affected by this second stage failure. It was mentioned recently that Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander was being shipped across the Gulf of America to the space coast here for testing to continue. The goal is to test that lander and SpaceX's Human Landing System on next year's Artemis 3 mission. There are many, many ways to delay that and only one way to accelerate it; to be perfect all the time.

Got me thinkin

Some time ago, Mike Myles down at 90 Miles from Tyranny posted this meme in one of his many collections. 

Ignoring "who's CT?", the rest of it seems like real truth to me. The first obvious one to me is our weight being determined entirely by Calories In vs. Calories Out or CICO (pronounce that “psycho;” or “sicko” – whichever you prefer), often stated as the way to lose weight is “eat less and move more.” I don't think it's an overstatement to say many millions of people have tried that and found that our bodies are too adaptive, too much "learning systems" for a simple approach like that. A very common scenario is for someone to try caloric reduction, have some quick success losing weight, only to find they gain weight back to close to their starting point. Then the after effect is that once the system learns it can turn down the amount of calories it needs, it can leave that so that to drop weight requires continually reducing intake. 

His emphasis, though, seems to sound more like the crowd that seems to be afraid of chemical names and no familiarity with how chemistry works. If instead of telling them you were giving them water but said it was di-hydrogen monoxide (H₂O), they'd run in fear.

Another one of Mike Myles' posts that stuck out to me is the essence of being afraid of chemical names. 

The statement that the source of the Fluoride ion in our water supplies (and toothpaste, dental treatments and ... whatever) is hydrofluorosilicic acid (also known as hexafluorosilicic acid - H
₂SiF
₆) is true, but it's irrelevant. The nature of chemical reagents is that they get used up so there is none of that hydrofluorosilicic acid left in the water supply. The fluoride ions are removed from the acid and attach to sodium ions resulting in sodium fluoride, NaF, a salt like table salt, sodium chloride.  

Since there's no hexafluorosilicic acid remaining in the water we drink, testing it for safety doesn't make much sense. Whether or not Fluoride itself is toxic or "safe" in our water doesn't appear to be anything the makers of this poster care about. 

Well, just some rambling. Weekends tend to be the slowest news days, so I picked up some memes I've been meaning to write about. I'm open to suggestions about other things to write about.

NASA Shuts down a long-running experiment on Voyager 1

Voyager 1, the darling of deep space, is well into old age, coming up on the 50th anniversary of its launch and the first known thing from Earth to ever leave the solar system. The harsh side of that is Voyager 1 is running low on power and they're trying to keep the old girl going. Over the years, the solution to achieve a longer life has been to shut down old experiments and after much discussion, Voyager project leaders elected to shut down an experiment that has been gathering data since 1977 (with a few short interruptions).

On April 17, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California sent commands to shut down an instrument aboard Voyager 1 called the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP. The nuclear-powered spacecraft is running low on power, and turning off the LECP is considered the best way to keep humanity’s first interstellar explorer going.

The LECP has been operating almost without interruption since Voyager 1 launched in 1977 — almost 49 years. It measures low-energy charged particles, including ions, electrons, and cosmic rays originating from our solar system and galaxy. The instrument has provided critical data about the structure of the interstellar medium, detecting pressure fronts and regions of varying particle density in the space beyond our heliosphere. The twin Voyagers are the only spacecraft that are far enough from Earth to provide this information.

The Voyager probes are powered by Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators, RTGs, which run on small amounts of atomic decay from plutonium, turning the heat generated by the plutonium into electricity. Both Voyagers lose about 4 watts of power every year. The loss of power is something that was undoubtedly considered carefully during the design stages of the mission. All fuel sources run out, and plutonium RTGs are among the best for reliability and long life. After their close flybys in our solar system, the ground crews would order the turn off of power drains, like the video cameras, eventually becoming the only manmade objects to leave our solar system. After almost a half-century in space, the available power has dropped and the margins of "power available versus what you'd like" have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off heaters and instruments while making sure the spacecraft don’t get so cold that their fuel lines freeze.

During a routine, planned roll maneuver on Feb. 27, Voyager 1’s power levels fell unexpectedly. Mission engineers knew any additional drop in power could trigger the spacecraft’s undervoltage fault protection system, which would shut down components on its own to safeguard the probe, requiring recovery by the flight team — a lengthy process that carries its own risks.

The Voyager team needed to act first.

“While shutting down a science instrument is not anybody’s preference, it is the best option available,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL. “Voyager 1 still has two remaining operating science instruments — one that listens to plasma waves and one that measures magnetic fields. They are still working great, sending back data from a region of space no other human-made craft has ever explored. The team remains focused on keeping both Voyagers going for as long as possible.”

Years ago, the project managers put together a plan of what to shut down, when to shut it down, in the correct order.

Of the 10 identical sets of instruments that each spacecraft carries, seven have been shut off so far. For Voyager 1, the LECP was next on that list. The team shut off the LECP on Voyager 2 in March 2025.

While the Voyagers are beyond our solar system, and among the fastest things mankind has ever launched, they're not remotely close to the next star system. That's in the vicinity of four light years away, while the Voyagers are barely one light day away. Still, that makes sending instructions to the probes inconvenient at best. That means being really sure the message you're sending is thoroughly tested to know it's correct and once transmitted, the soonest you can know if it worked is another day away. 

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

Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.

The team will implement the Big Bang on Voyager 2 first, which has a little more power to spare and is closer to Earth, making it the safer test subject. Tests are planned for May and June 2026. If they go well, the team will attempt the same fix on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a chance that Voyager 1’s LECP could be switched back on.

I'm not sure what they mean by "about a year of breathing room." Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977 with Voyager 1 following 16 days later on September 5. They're closing in on their 49th year in space this coming August and early September with the 50th anniversary the following year. I've been hoping they'd make 50 years for as long as I can remember. 

Today's Space Race is real, and an interesting step is looming

It's no secret that there's an undercurrent of the 1960s Space Race to the moon going on as our returns to the moon start to play out. It's also no secret that what's looking to be the ultimate target of the next round of missions isn't the large, open areas on the Earth-facing side of the Moon, like the Sea of Tranquility was for Apollo 11. Showing up in nearly every large story of the next manned mission to the Moon are references to landing near the lunar South Pole. 

There are big, practical reasons for choosing the South Pole: the day to night temperature swings aren't as large as those in the huge Mare (seas) of the middle latitudes, and there appears to be large amounts of water (ice) available there. 

Currently, the Space Race is that two lunar landers are set to visit Shackleton crater, that is actually on the south pole. 

The two landers will arguably be the most ambitious robotic missions ever sent to the Moon. The Endurance spacecraft, built by Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, will become the largest lunar lander in history, exceeding the size of NASA’s Apollo lunar module that ferried crews to and from the lunar surface more than 50 years ago. China’s Chang’e 7 mission will feature a smaller lander, but the project also includes an orbiter, rover, and a hopper drone to scout for hidden ice deposits. 

Blue Origin's Endurance lander has just completed some extensive thermal/vacuum tests at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The tests were completed last week, and the spacecraft left Houston on Saturday. It's currently en route from Houston to here (Florida's Space Coast) for final preparations to launch on the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. NextSpaceflight doesn't show anything about a Blue Origin Endurance launch. Two days before Endurance's trip began, so last Thursday (Apr 9), Chang’e 7 arrived at a spaceport on Hainan Island in the South China Sea to be integrated with China’s own heavy-lifter, the Long March 5. NextSpaceflight shows the Long March 5 but only says No Earlier Than 2026. The source doesn't say much about a launch date other than "later this year."

Shackleton Crater is about 13 miles (21 kilometers) wide, with a surface area roughly the same as the cities of Philadelphia, Las Vegas, or Detroit. The crater measures 14,000 feet (4.2 kilometers) deep. If Endurance and Chang’e 7 land on or near the crater rim, as expected, it would be the first time landers from different nations have operated simultaneously so close to one another on another planetary body.
...
The highest crests of Shackleton’s rim offer the advantage of near-continuous sunlight, providing a lander or future Moon base a stable source of solar power right next to a crater floor in eternal shadow, where temperatures are cold enough to preserve ancient ice deposits. The Moon’s polar cold traps, including Shackleton, are attractive targets for future exploration. The ice at these locations could be harvested to supply drinking water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for a lunar outpost.

A mosaic of the Shackleton Crater showcases the power of two lunar orbiting cameras working together to reveal unprecedented detail of the lunar south pole region. Scientists created this mosaic using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the ShadowCam instrument on South Korea's Danuri orbiter, revealing the dark interior of Shackleton in new detail. Credit: NASA/KARI/ASU

Part of the reason for Blue Origin sending their Endurance lander is that it's essentially their Blue Moon Mark 1 lander that they're preparing for the Artemis lunar landing mission next year.

Blue Origin has not publicly identified the exact landing site for the Endurance test flight, other than saying it will target the Moon’s south pole region. In a social media post last year, Bezos said it would land “near Shackleton Crater.” The south pole lies directly on the crater rim. Endurance will carry a suite of NASA-funded stereo cameras to observe interactions between the lander’s engine plume and lunar soil, along with a laser ranging reflector to help scientists pinpoint the craft’s precise location on the Moon. Blue Origin has not yet revealed what else the mission might do after landing, but getting to the surface intact and upright is the primary goal for Endurance. 

The Chinese officials haven't publicly identified much detail about their mission either. They have said that one of their goals is to “directly confirm the existence and source of water ice” in the south pole region. Chang'e 7 will deploy a rover and a “mini-flying probe” after landing. The rover and drone will carry instruments to analyze and measure the abundance of water ice in lunar soil in and around Shackleton Crater. 

Image of the south pole area from Sky & Telescope magazine.  The Diviner instrument aboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter imaged the temperatures of the south polar region, shown here. Shackleton crater is at the bottom center, and the south pole is where the thin white lines intersect. The upper left corner of Shackleton crater seems to be the pole.

With both landers targeting the same crater it only seems logical to ask what happens if they interfere with each other? 

The United States and China are parties to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which prohibits claims of territorial sovereignty on the Moon and other celestial bodies. But the treaty allows for bases, and it requires parties to the agreement act with “due regard” to the interests of other nations.

In an article published last year, Michelle Hanlon, a professor of air and space law at the University of Mississippi, outlined the advantages of being first at the Moon. The first country to succeed in placing a nuclear reactor on the Moon, for example, could “shape the norms for expectations, behaviors, and legal interpretations,” she wrote.

These first-mover advantages could extend to future lunar bases, mining, and other resource extraction activities on the Moon. NASA has proposed the concept of “safety zones” to avoid interference between the operations of different nations on the Moon.

Lawyers. In my mind, I'm hearing the Morgan and Morgan commercials about "when your property on the moon is damaged by somebody touching it without your permission..."  

NASA Administrator Isaacman talks budget issues

With the Artemis mission is largely done with its distractions, the news is going to switch to the annual budget concerns. The least important word there is annual because congress hasn't actually passed an annual budget since 2009, but while they don't pass an actual budget, they pass funding mechanisms by other names, especially "continuing resolutions" - where the phrase "CR" you'll be hearing comes from - and other forms of what I call an LCS budget (LCS = Lie, Cheat, Steal). 

You may have heard some of the dire reports last week about the White House's NASA budget being significantly lower than congress had wanted. In this year's Space Symposium, currently going on this week in Colorado Springs, NASA Administrator Isaacman gave a talk that covered the topic of working to the White House budget, and reported on by the online industry journal Payload. 

The interview is a two screens full of text that would probably print out to two pages if done at printer settings that would yield a magazine-style page, and it's a good interview, but I will respect their ownership of the written words and not just lift everything, but let me start out with an early Question and Answer:

I saw your early findings on the heat shield. Anything else you can share that you’ve already learned post mission?

I had seen the underwater photos of the heat shield as soon as the divers could transmit them. So I knew when that picture was going around on the internet. I was like, “No, there’s no chunk missing, that’s discoloration that got washed away.” The heat shield looked great. So a lot of credit to the JSC, and the folks at Ames, for doing the right work to get us to flight. 

All that aside, if you’re going to wait three and a half years between missions, just replace the heat shield. 

Other findings are super minor. Orion is a very robust vehicle, with lots of redundancy in systems. So a helium leak in ESM [the European Service Module, attached to Orion]—very, very minor.

We had a water-valve issue—one of four that didn’t perform as expected—but there was no issue accessing drinking water. With the data we’re getting right now, I don’t have the early read on why that primary wastewater line was clearly getting clogged. But these are all very fixable things.

There are several things that Isaacman said that just hit a proper chord with me.  When asked about the big picture lunar and deep space things he has talked about publicly, he gave a good answer: “No one at NASA that I’ve spoken to, at any level of the organization, thought it was a good idea to fly Artemis II and wait three years to try and attempt a [Moon] landing. No one thought that was a good idea.” One of Isaacman's first talks was to turn Artemis III from the lunar landing to a mission intended to test out docking with the landing systems and to increase the launch frequency. The Apollo/Saturn V flew much more often than once a year, although there was irregularity and not always “every  3 months.” I believe the pace is part of doing it properly.  

There was something that Isaacman said that I thought was very healthy. When asked about CLD (Commercial LEO Destination) providers being concerned his approach might be wrong he said, “I’m not surprised that CLD providers didn’t like what we had to say. So prove that we got it wrong.” I like the competition of ideas. “You've got a better idea? Prove it!” 

Jared Isaacman during a talk at the Space Symposium. Image credit: NASA

I think his final Q&A is worth excerpting. Or at least the first answer.

How do you politics-proof your Moon plans?

That’s exactly what we are putting in place. Administrations past have thought the right approach was to make a program that is too big to fail. What they didn’t realize is that you can also make it too big to succeed.