Solar Cycle 25/26 Update 2

It hadn't occurred to me until lately that I hadn't updated the solar cycle and solar-terrestrial indices since last April. Guess I'm just getting out of touch with things. 

The last update I posted was on April 28. A highlight I've posted on solar cycle updates has been the "Last solar cycles comparison" from Space Weather News, and produced by a group called solen.info. NOTE: the plot is at the first link, not the second (solen.info). Here is the current plot  - with the exception of a short vertical line I added to point out the solar flux in that April 28th post. 

It's pretty obvious that cycle 25 peaked around that green line. You'll notice that the highest Smoothed Sunspot Numbers (SSNs) are well above cycle 24, the previous cycle, but what you can't see on this graph is that cycle 24 had the lowest SSNs in the last hundred years, so cycle 25 has been quite a bit more active than 24 but that's just not saying much. "Hey, we're not the worst cycle in a hundred years!" A new feature in the April post was a prediction plot from NOAA. I include the current prediction and if you compare the plot from April to this one, you'll see that reality matches the prediction pretty well. The previous two curves on this plot, cycle 23 and 22, have two peaks. Cycle 23 is more noticeable with a deeper dip between the peaks than 22 has, 23 is almost one, relatively constant, high plateau of activity. Cycle 21 has an earlier peak than 23 and 25, and is a wider peak than the others, in addition to being the highest peak on the chart.

Looking at this plot, it's not surprising that there has been no repeat of some things I heard in 2024. You'll notice that the absolute peak of cycle 25 occurred during 2024. There were some days with very high solar flux in '24: the highest peak was in August as shown here: each black dot is one month, and the last dot in this plot is October's number (the plot shows "updated 2025-12-02" bottom right). I was regularly in the shack monitoring 6m activity much of the end of '24 and saw something I've never seen in my life, reports of ham stations in Alaska being heard within a few hundred miles of me. I've never heard an Alaskan signal make the last hop to Florida (on 6m), although a friend in Tennessee heard one, one time. Fifteen seconds out of a lifetime on the radio. 

Is there a chance of hearing Alaska down here again - in this cycle? My guess is that if the current trend of having one cycle peak holds, no. The only thing that I think would help that is for a second peak of SSN, equal to or stronger than the previous peak forms. One thing that's in our favor is that cycle 25 is looking rather asymmetric. We thought it was peaking 20 months ago around 40 months into the cycle, but after remaining at relatively low SSN around month 50 after the cycle start it began moving toward a peak farther out (in time). What we don't know is how much longer the SSN will stay around where it is now. The second plot, on the cycle's progress pretty much predicts the SSN will be lower by 2026 after perhaps another quarter to half year around where it currently is. But those predicted movements are based on prior movements and I've never heard anyone address what causes the dual peaks in any detail of how to predict from them. Maybe they just don't know to predict dual cycle peaks.

A few of the times I've done this sort of post it was after a talk by Dr. Scott McIntosh, formerly a high-placed scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).  Last year, Scott had moved to Lynker Space in the private sector. He's doing one of his update presentations on the Front Range 6 Meter Group on Wednesday, January 14. Those are carried live on their channel on YouTube but I have to say I've never watched one live and don't know if it's possible for non-members to watch it live. It usually shows up for general viewing on YouTube within a couple of days. 

To borrow that wonderful quote from physicist Niels Bohr, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.”

Scrubbed again - tonight's launch is cancelled

As a repeat of the events of last night, tonight's attempted launch of the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation mission has been scrubbed due to problems with the launchpad/ground infrastructure. 

“To allow more time to perform ground system checkouts, standing down from today’s launch of the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation mission,” SpaceX said in a social media post. “A new target launch date will be shared once confirmed.”

FAA flight restrictions indicate the launch had slipped to at least Tuesday evening. The originally planned Saturday night liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4E was scrubbed due to a hydraulic problem with the launch pad’s hold-down clamps.

I see in looking at the previous stories that I haven't mentioned that this is Falcon 9 booster tail number 1081 flying on her 21st flight. Previous missions included Crew-7, PACE and TRACERS, all for NASA. B1081 will Return To Launch Site, to land at LZ-4 (Landing Zone 4). If successful, this will be the 31st landing at Vandenberg's landing zone, and the 554th Falcon booster landing so far.

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Another thing going on in life that has been a bit of a distraction or complication (or some combination of those words) is in our church life. I've told that story a couple of times in my Easter post but in the months since last April, our story has gotten more complicated. We left our old church because of the way they treated our pastor.  To borrow a paragraph from my Easter post:

I went forward for Baptism in an evangelical church and an important part of that change was because the pastor had a similar background to mine, at least in the biochemistry/microbiology portion. He was a pharmacist and the director of the pharmacy department in one of the local hospitals. He quickly became one of our closest friends in the worst time of our lives - Mrs. Graybeard's cancer in 1997. It's a long story, but in the last couple of years the church's elders dumped him. As the story about how they treated him in private came out, we found a new church - a nearby Southern Baptist church. Our pastor who had been kicked out of his position (and practically founded our church) also started going to another Baptist church, but closer to his home. He passed away a little before Easter last year.

The complication is that a few months ago, our new pastor announced his retirement. The process this church used was much, much better than the evangelical church (a Calvary Chapel) and a new pastor has been elected. Our senior pastor will be leaving the church early in January and the elders used a much better approach to choosing and finding people to run for the position, then an election where people who are members of the church voted to choose the new pastor.

This has led to some feelings of instability. The new guy, who has been an associate pastor as long as we've been going to this church, hasn't really come across well in his teachings, but the fact that the church handled the succession so well makes me feel like we should give him a chance to get used to the changes he's going through while we see how his style grows. Today ranks as the best lesson I can recall him teaching.

There's no rush in needing to get into another church fast enough, so we'll go until the current senior (lead?) pastor retires and watch how the new guy progresses.  Give him a chance to grow.

EDIT Dec 29, '25 to add: As of Monday afternoon, the next scheduled launch time for this mission is Wednesday, Dec 31, at 9:09 ET, as it has been for all days with launch attempts. Since that's 0209 UTC, that makes it January 1, 2026 and not the last launch of 2025. 

Wait! It's looking like the last US launch of '25 is Sunday night

Sunday night, not tonight. The scheduled time of 9:08 was still ahead as I sat to type this, as the launch was scrubbed with just over 37 minutes on the clock. This was before the SpaceFlight Now video feed for the mission started, and I only learned later, closer to 9:30 local that it was due to "a ground systems issue at its launch pad" and not the Falcon 9 or the payload.  

Current schedule is Sunday 12/28 at the same time: 9:08 ET or 6:08 PT at Vandenberg.  

We had something pop up today that was unexpected and brought a larger impact than I might have thought it would bring. No, it wasn't a major appliance failure, it wasn't even something bigger and worse than the sink faucet I had to replace. Our internet connection went down for around 4-1/2 to 5 hours.

What was bigger than expected was now much was affected by that. Since we "cut the cord" seven years ago and don't have cable TV, we've been getting our TV from streaming services (currently mostly Hulu). We're in a part of Florida that doesn't have much TV that can be gotten with the outdoor antenna. Of course, the streaming TV comes over the same cable as the internet. That meant the only diversionary entertainment we had was over the air radio. "Great wasteland" is a good descriptor for local AM or FM radio. Well, the ham radio station is still usable and I spent some time playing with that to ensure that it still worked and was still usable, as it was. It seems like it will take more effort to keep that going more than a day or two without the internet, though.

The computers were still fully usable, and I worked on research for some tech writing I've been making slow progress on. I can still use CAD, still use all the design software and other special software I have, but I still had issues with the mental side, of not feeling like working on that stuff. I wanted to do what I do most mornings and just cruise the net for a while. 

For someone who thinks that they'd be ready for the SHTF event, it was a bit eye opening. I simply wasn't ready to change my life with no or even little warning.

The mission patch for the last launch of the year out of the US. Image credit: SpaceX

Looking like the last US launch of '25 is Saturday night

After a couple of weeks of nearly daily launches, the quiet for the last week has felt rather unusual, but the lack of launches on the Cape is going to continue with the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation Mission, CSG-3, from Vandenberg Space Force Base, Saturday the 27th at 6:08 PM Pacific Time, 9:08 EST - which means 0208 UTC on Sunday morning December 28th. 

COSMO-SkyMed second generation (Constellation of Small Satellites for Mediterranean basin observation) or CSG is an Earth observation program of the Italian Space Agency (ASI) to replace the first generation COSMO-SkyMed system.

For the second generation, the COSMO-SkyMed constellation has been reduced from four to two spacecraft. The satellites are improved versions of the original design. They utilize an improved version of the Prima Bus. The CSG-SAR (COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation Synthetic Aperture Radar) is also an improved version of the first-generation X-band SAR system. The contract was signed in September 2015.  

On the main launch page for everything publicly known, everything else from the Saturday, 12/27's launch until 2026 begins will launch outside the US - primarily from China with one from Russia until Saturday, January 3rd and the New Year brings a Falcon 9 from SLC 40 on Cape Canaveral SFS (Space Force Station) doing Starlink group 6-88. They say this be will the first flight of this booster, B1101. 

Speaking of China reminds me that they tried two more launches of their Falcon 9 clones in the last three weeks. Neither one successfully landed the booster.  

The first Long March 12A rocket, roughly the same height and diameter of SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9, lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 9:00 pm EST Monday (02:00 UTC Tuesday).

Less than 10 minutes later, rocket’s methane-fueled first stage booster hurtled through the atmosphere at supersonic speed, impacting in a remote region about 200 miles downrange from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China. The booster failed to complete a braking burn to slow down for landing at a prepared location near the edge of the Gobi Desert.

Fleet leader B1067-32 stands on the drone ship "Just Read the Instructions" after performing its record 32nd propulsive landing on Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX - with minor edits to exposure - SiG) 

Christmas Eve 2025

This year is the 57th anniversary of Apollo 8's lunar orbit mission. The crew, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, spent almost one full day in lunar orbit, completing 10 orbits of the moon before heading back to Earth. At the moment, it looks like we'll get the Artemis II, "not quite enough like Apollo 8 to call it a re-do" mission no earlier than February of 2026. It won't even orbit the moon once, it will just loop around the moon and return to Earth without going into orbit around our neighbor.

The six-day long Apollo 8 mission full of firsts lifted off on Dec. 21, 1968, and it would feature the first time that humans had looked down on the moon from orbit; the first time that humans had seen the far side of the moon with their own eyes, not an orbiting camera.  And it would mark the first time anyone had ever seen the Earth rise over another world.  

I think any vote on the top 10 photos from the Apollo era would include this famous Earth rise shot from Apollo 8, arguably as the most famous or most important. 

Apollo 8 was originally not conceived as the mission it became; it was intended to be part of qualifying the Apollo spacecraft in Low Earth Orbit (LEO).  There had been only one prior manned Apollo mission, Apollo 7, and that had been only two months before in October.  While a Saturn V had been test launched, it had never carried astronauts into orbit.

"NASA officials realized that this was risky, since Apollo 7 had not yet qualified the spacecraft when their tentative decision was made," a NASA historical document reported. The decision was further complicated by Apollo 8's need for a more powerful rocket, called the Saturn V, which had never been tested on a crewed launch. But after months of discussion, NASA decided to move forward with an Apollo 8 moon mission on Nov. 10, about a month before the launch.

Space fans from those days will remember that critical rocket burns happened while the Apollo capsule was out of radio contact - over the far side of the moon.  The burn to stop Apollo 8 from looping around the moon and returning to Earth, enabling them to orbit the moon, had to take place while over the far side.  A day later, the burn to get them out of lunar orbit and returning to Earth took place over the far side as well.

All that remained was the return trip home. Mission controllers waited anxiously Christmas morning as the crew turned their engine on again, on the far side of the moon.

As they re-emerged, Lovell called out, "Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus," signaling that the ship was headed back to Earth. The crew landed successfully on Dec. 27.

Christmas Eve was the day they orbited the moon, the day that the crew spoke to us of the "stark and unappetizing" look of the lunar surface and read from the book of Genesis, the first book in the Christian bible.  Here on Earth, 1968 had been a tumultuous year. There had been riots in many places, assassinations (including Robert F Kennedy) and troubles all around the globe. On Christmas eve, in awe of what these men were accomplishing, it seemed like the world held its breath and watched. 

As I say every year, hold close the ones you love. Give thanks to the people who work the day so that others won't have to, including, police, fire, emergency workers of all kinds including military and hospital workers. If we're very lucky, this will be the worst Christmas of our lives and everything in life gets better year by year for the rest of our lives. And if things get worse, we'll remember this as the "good old days". Either way, hold tight.

Followup to yesterday's mention of three stories

In the lead-in to Monday's post about Tory Bruno resigning from ULA, I mentioned that suddenly there were newsworthy stories:

I guess it figures that after several days with nothing that struck me as interesting and newsworthy, we have three such stories today. One involving United Launch Alliance (ULA), one involving Japan's H3, and the third involving a first ever attempt at an orbital launch from Brazil, from Korea's Innospace.

I happened to be playing the live coverage of the Innospace launch in the background while working on the ULA post and saw that they lost the vehicle around the time that seemed to be fairly soon after the first stage dropped and the second stage took over. That means we're down to one story, about the Japanese H3 rocket launch, and it failed during launch as well.  

The H3 launched from Tanegashima Space Center on Sunday (Dec. 21) at 8:51 p.m. EST (0151 GMT and 10:51 a.m. local Japan time on Dec. 22), carrying a navigation satellite known as Michibiki 5, or QZS-5, aloft.

"However, the second stage engine’s second ignition failed to start normally and shut down prematurely," officials with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a statement early Monday morning (Dec. 22). "As a result, QZS-5 could not be put into the planned orbit, and the launch failed."

This was the seventh flight of an H3, and the second failure - the first was on the first launch in March of '23. 

H3 at 13 seconds into flight, Dec. 21, 2025

The payload is worth mentioning as well: it was the 10,580-pound Michibiki 5, the next addition to Japan's new, home grown, Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), a navigation network in geosynchronous orbit, very high (around 22,200 miles) above Earth. 

"This system is compatible with GPS satellites and can be utilized with them in an integrated fashion," Japanese officials wrote in a description of the QZSS project.

"QZSW can be used even in the Asia-Oceania regions with longitudes close to Japan, so its usage will be expanded to other countries in these regions as well," they added. 

I find that little statement that their new QZSS is compatible with GPS and can be used with them to be quite interesting. 

Tory Bruno is out at ULA

I guess it figures that after several days with nothing that struck me as interesting and newsworthy, we have three such stories today. One involving United Launch Alliance (ULA), one involving Japan's H3, and the third involving a first ever attempt at an orbital launch from Brazil, from Korea's Innospace. 

As ULA's story is the only one that concerns a US company, I'll go with this one: Tory Bruno resigned as CEO of ULA today, Dec. 22, 2025.

The news of Bruno’s sudden resignation was unexpected. His tenure was marked by a decline in ULA’s market share as rival SpaceX competed for and won ever-larger US government launch contracts. More recently, Bruno oversaw the successful debut of ULA’s Vulcan rocket, followed by struggles to ramp up the new rocket’s launch cadence.

Bruno had a 30-year career as an engineer and general manager for Lockheed Martin’s ballistic missile programs before taking over as president and CEO of United Launch Alliance in August 2014. He arrived as SpaceX started making inroads with its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket, and ULA’s leading position in the US launch market looked to be in doubt.

It's not like ULA has been a tremendous failure; when Bruno took over, the signs of trouble coming were everywhere. The big one was probably SpaceX got so far ahead so fast on reusability that no one seemed prepared for it. ULA decided to make Vulcan fully expendable, and when SpaceX started getting away from everyone, they changed that to just recovering the engines out of Vulcan for reuse, "one of these days." In fewer words, they weren't a tremendous failure but they weren't challenging to be #1 either.

The next big challenge came out better. They also needed to replace the Atlas V due to its use of Russian engines with the Vulcan, so they needed US-made engines. Bruno chose Blue Origin which was also a "new generation" company that had never made engines for other users, hadn't flown them on their own rocket (New Glenn) and wouldn't fly them on New Glenn until long after Vulcan's first flight. Still, the selection of the Blue Origin engines for Vulcan was a good choice and the engines have done well. 

Still, Bruno had set the goal that Vulcan would fly up to 10 missions in 2025, and they made one launch. 

The retirement of the Atlas V and Delta IV led to a period of downsizing for United Launch Alliance, with layoffs and facility closures in Florida, California, Alabama, Colorado, and Texas. In a further sign of ULA’s troubles, SpaceX won a majority of US military launch contracts for the first time last year.

Bruno, 64, served as a genial public face for ULA amid the company’s difficult times. He routinely engaged with space enthusiasts on social media, fielded questions from reporters, and even started a podcast. Bruno’s friendly and accessible demeanor was unusual among industry leaders, especially those with ties to large legacy defense contractors.

A statement from the co-chairs of ULA’s board, Robert Lightfoot of Lockheed Martin and Kay Sears of Boeing, did not identify a reason for Bruno’s resignation, other than saying he is stepping down “to pursue another opportunity.”

Tory Bruno, the former president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, participates in a news conference at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Florida, in 2024. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Just for completeness because I always wonder how many people know this: United Launch Alliance is a company created by the two biggest names in "old space" or "space 1.0": Lockheed Martin and Boeing. They're a relatively new company, formed December 1, 2006, as the Space Shuttle program was winding down and the industry was struggling to figure out what was coming next.

Winter Solstice 2025

You can blame Tam at View From the Porch for leading me to this. I saw her celebrating the solstice in this morning's post and was struck with empathy for any one who gets Seasonal Affective Disorder living "up north" and my own rather different reaction to the solstice. 

Solstice, of course, comes from words meaning "sun" and "standing still" and marks the time when the sun's position stops moving south (today) or north (June's summer solstice) for a moment before starting to move in the other direction. Tam was celebrating today because the sun has stopped moving south and is starting back north, leading slowly but inexorably to a longer daylight portion of the 24 hours. Which is the part I tend to dread. Not that I hate daylight, but this is Florida and my chances of being comfortable in the summer aren't as good as during the other 3/4 of the year. "If I've said it once, I've said it a million times" a technologically advanced civilization couldn't exist here without air conditioning. 

That says that from my viewpoint, both the summer and winter solstices have something in common: I'm hoping for cooler weather.  

According to Time And Date (dot com!), the moment of the sun standing still was 10:03AM Eastern Time here, or 1503 UTC.  It's the shortest day of the year but neither the latest sunrise or the earliest sunset.  The earliest sunset was in early December; the latest sunrise will be in early January. According to the Sunrise and Fall app on my phone, sunrise this morning  was 7:10 AM and sunset 5:31 PM. 

The motion of the sun north and south over the course of the year traces out a curve called an analemma, which you usually see printed on globes.  You can photograph one of these yourself if you care to dedicate a camera to doing nothing else for a year.  It takes a bit of planning, but you just need to take a photograph at the exact same time (use UTC so you don't get messed up DST chances) from a camera left at the exact same place throughout the year and be sure before you start that the image will fit on the film or sensor.  Once a week is a good, round number and you pretty much can't make the exposures too short.  Take the photograph when the sun is high enough above the horizon to record on the winter solstice, and leave the camera pointed at the same place for a year.  Add one longer exposure picture when the sky has a pretty look you like and maybe you can get a picture as pretty as this one, taken by István Mátis from a window in his apartment in Romania.  He wrote,

The discs of the Sun are taken between 11/6/2012 and 1/19/2014 at 7:00 UT, which is 9'o clock in the morning local time during winter and 10'o clock during daylight saving time. The background is made on 1/14/2014 at 7:55 local time, from the original location of the analemma.

My guess is that the gaps in the pattern were caused by cloudy days. 

Of course today also has another important meaning that was mentioned last Thursday. It's the 10th anniversary of the first successful landing of a Falcon 9, December 21, 2015. While I vividly remember standing outside watching everything visible about the launch, the landing was below our visual horizon so we couldn't see it that night. SpaceX released this video some time later.

The pure emotion of everyone working the launch is awesome to see.

Plumbing

Friday by early evening, I finished the plumbing repair issue I mentioned in Thursday's post. What kept me from getting to a post last night was testing out the installation to make sure nothing leaked. No one was more surprised than I was that nothing leaked. 

An ironic thing here is that my right sidebar has a list of the most viewed posts of the last year, and for the last month or two, one of them has been a post about fixing my kitchen's water supply from August of '23. Not to be too redundant but I'm no plumber and of the various things I've had to do around the house, plumbing is my least favorite. Building bookshelves, or sets of shelves for books, magazines, whatever is much more interesting or fun for me.

In that article, I borrowed a quote that's sort of at the heart of the issue. Someone once told me that "there's nothing 3/4" about a 3/4" pipe," which is true but it's worse than that. There are multiple sizes of pipes or hoses and there are many different connectors for each one. You almost need to have done this sort of work to know how to do it. 

The problem I got finished with last night started out the weekend before Thanksgiving, November 23rd, and it was minor thing. The kind of thing you have to be affected with anal-retentiveness to even be aware of. In our bathroom (it's an old house and the old style 3 bedroom/ 2 bathroom) I noticed that the little screen on the bottom of the faucet - called an aerator - started squirting some water toward the base of the faucet. I've replaced those before and the procedure is to unscrew the old one and screw in a new one. I even had a cardboard piece from the package a new one had come in, so I knew what should fit (and note the builtin doubt that made me write "I knew what should fit" rather than I knew what would fit). It was 15/16" x 27.

Almost immediately, the threads on the old one sheared off and the threaded portion remained in the faucet's spout. I spent from the Monday before Thanksgiving until last Monday, 12/15 trying to get that out. I finally decided to just replace the faucet primarily because we don't remember when we put that faucet in, but it was probably around 1990. How much longer will it last? Will there be a bad valve next? Something else? We went with this one because its primary advantage is the spout is farther up and over the sink, making it easier to wash hands. 

Removal was pretty straightforward, but I made a newbie mistake that had me make another trip up to a hardware store. I assumed that the existing hoses would fit. It turned out they were around 1/2" too short to connect the faucet to the water supply, and a trip to the store yesterday led me to something like this. The original hoses were vinyl and cut with no slack whatsoever, and the replacement hardware making the connection a little farther from the house than where it had been attached is what led them to be too short. The new hoses had the opposite problem of being longer and having to be worked with to find a way to curl them up and put the faucet end where it needed to be. 

But the problem with working on stuff like this is access. It's all close to the back wall of the cabinet with the sink on top, and I'm too big to get in there comfortably. The best thing one can say about any task like this is that it's done. 

The Delta faucet we chose.

Yesterday Isaacman was named, today the Prez drops an EO

I had planned to "call in sick" tonight, but it's not really sick, I just spent too much of the day working on plumbing - my least favorite kind maintaining the house. It's more like simply that everything hurts. 

Then I go look at Ars Technica and see Eric Berger posted a news item, "Trump commits to Moon landing by 2028, followed by a lunar outpost two years later."  

While I hear the stories about Trump working pretty much 24/7, I think this was worked on by more than one man for more than one day. That said, there's a lot stuff in there worth reading. I'll just paste Eric's top level summary and add that there's far more than that in the Executive Order itself. 

• 2028 lunar landing: Trump commits to returning Americans to the Moon by 2028 through the Artemis Program. Isaacman is to submit a plan within 90 days for achieving this and other policy objectives and mitigating any problems. Presumably, this will include ideas to expedite the development of a Human Landing System and lunar surface spacesuits.
• A lunar outpost: Establish “initial elements of a permanent lunar outpost by 2030 to ensure a sustained American presence in space and enable the next steps in Mars exploration.” The use of “outpost” could mean surface activities or the Lunar Gateway in orbit around the Moon, and it seems deliberately ambiguous.
• Nuclear reactors on the Moon: Seeks to deploy nuclear reactors on the Moon and in orbit, including a lunar surface reactor ready for launch by 2030. With this item, it does seem like the administration is committed to some sort of lunar surface activities in the long term.
• Private launch: “Enhance sustainability and cost-effectiveness of launch and exploration architectures, including enabling commercial launch services and prioritizing lunar exploration.” It’s good to see the administration acknowledge that privately developed rockets are the future.
• End of ISS: “Spurring private sector initiative and a commercial pathway to replace the International Space Station by 2030.” This is a restatement of NASA’s goal to end the space station in 2030 and have one or more commercial stations ready to go as a follow-up. That’s easier said than done.
• A focus on leaner procurement: “Use of existing authorities to improve efficiency and expedite space acquisitions, including a first preference for commercial solutions and a general preference for Other Transactions Authority or Space Act Agreements, customary commercial terms, or any other pathways to promote effective or streamlined acquisitions.” Cost-plus contracts are not mentioned.
• End the National Space Council: “This order supersedes Executive Order 14056 of December 1, 2021 (The National Space Council), which is hereby revoked.” Trump brought back the Space Council during his first term, but perhaps Vice President JD Vance is not interested in this area of policy.

NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya, left, along with NASA employees, welcomes NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman to the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters Building in Washington on his first day of work, Thursday, Dec. 18, 2025. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

On a totally unrelated note, Eric Berger does a story on the first successful landing of a Falcon 9, December 21, 2015. While I vividly remember watching the launch, the excitement of them successfully landing back on the Cape, and that it was 2015, the thing that's missing from my memory was that was three days after my last day of work. Which means I didn't think about work for a nanosecond.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I'm going to treat myself to a couple of Tylenol.

Jared Isaacman gets senate approval as NASA Administrator

Today, Wednesday, Dec. 17, Jared Isaacman won senate approval to be administrator at NASA, a journey started just over a year, 377 days, ago. The final vote was 67 to 30, so not strictly along party lines. 

The source article at Ars Technica does a list of the major hurdles he had to overcome, but at ten items taking over half a screen, and in the final analysis, not that important now that it's over, it seems improper to just copy it here. As usual, go RTWT if you want the info. Instead, I'll use author Eric Berger's overview:

One of the biggest questions about Isaacman after his nomination in late 2024 was whether he had the political gamesmanship to run NASA. Few questioned his interest in space, knowledge of the industry, or flight experience. But he had no political experience. Could he handle the rigors of managing a tempestuous White House and fractured Congress?

The answer after he navigated the last year appears to be, quite clearly, yes.

Isaacman is younger than I thought - I had 48 or 50 filed away in my mind, but he's actually 42. That makes him the youngest NASA administrator ever. During the already-mentioned 377 days between his first nomination last December and now, he had to go through examination of his financial dealings, had to divest himself of perceived possible conflicts of interest, and go through the question after question periods in front of the Senate more times than if he was approved last year.

Regular readers may remember mention of a leak to the press of something he called Athena (second story here) that was an overview of his ideas about priorities in NASA once he took over. Eric Berger gives this perspective:

As the Project Athena plan clearly demonstrates, Isaacman has a good handle on the problems besetting NASA, an aging and increasingly bureaucratic agency. NASA can still do great things, but it has become almost infinitely harder since the heady days of Apollo six decades ago.

Isaacman has ideas to shake things up, but not to the extent of wanton change for the sake of change. It is clear from the interviews he has given to others, and in talking to him myself, that Isaacman is also a good listener. He wants to understand problems so he can work with others to apply thoughtful solutions.

NASA isn't the powerhouse it was in the past, as anyone who has paid attention for a while will know. About 20% percent of NASA's 17,500 employees a year ago took buyouts or early retirements. There have been layoffs at various facilities around the country. Their biggest problem (in my view), though, is bad decisions in the past, and the biggest of those is SLS and the Artemis program in general. The monster problem there is the high-stakes race with China to return humans to the Moon. Over the last year, that race has swung markedly in China’s favor to the point where two weeks ago, (Dec. 4) a former NASA Administrator said Artemis and the plans to get back to the moon simply won't work. 

Jared Isaacman, nominee to be NASA Administrator, during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee confirmation hearing in Washington, DC, on December 3, 2025. Credit: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Looking over the last year, it would be easy to say NASA and Isaacman have lost more than half a year because of the withdrawal of Isaacman’s nomination in late May, when he was within days of bipartisan Senate approval. However, in the intervening months, Isaacman has made strong contacts within the US Senate and the White House. As part of the campaign to build support for his renomination, Isaacman emerges with considerably more political experience, a much closer relationship with Trump, and a deeper roster of contacts in his phone.

All of which is good, because for all of the fancy flying Isaacman has done to reach this point, his most difficult sorties lie ahead of him.

The MAVEN probe at Mars is looking worse than initial reports

Back last Wednesday, we learned that a NASA scientific research satellite in orbit at Mars called MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) had gone radio quiet instead of contacting Earth again. 

In the last 24 hours we've learned it's not just that the radio link isn't working, it's worse.

"Analysis of that signal suggests that the MAVEN spacecraft was rotating in an unexpected manner when it emerged from behind Mars," NASA officials wrote in the update. "Further, the frequency of the tracking signal suggests MAVEN's orbit trajectory may have changed."

Apparently, MAVEN is spinning around some untold axis affecting the radio signals from the probe. There are other spacecraft on and around Mars that can help, so they're not sounding desperate. At least, not yet.  

"For the next two weeks of scheduled surface operations, NASA is arranging additional passes from the remaining orbiters, and the Perseverance and Curiosity teams have adjusted their daily planning activities to continue their science missions," NASA officials wrote in the update.  

NASA's update explains:

Four orbiters at Mars, including MAVEN, relay communications to and from the surface to support rover operations. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Mars Odyssey, and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter all remain operational.  

It's not sounding very good for MAVEN. 

The MAVEN spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of its launch in 2013. Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Small Space News Story Roundup 74

Because I'm guessing that except for a couple of launch service providers, the industry has started Christmas break. 

A Chinese-launched satellite came close to a collision with a SpaceX Starlink satellite

One of the nine payload satellites launched on December 9th from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi Desert came "too close for comfort" to the SpaceX Starlink satellite.

"As far as we know, no coordination or deconfliction with existing satellites operating in space was performed, resulting in a 200-meter close approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at 560 km altitude. Most of the risk of operating in space comes from the lack of coordination between satellite operators — this needs to change," Michael Nicolls, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX, said via X on Friday evening (Dec. 12). 

Another article on the same site (Space.com) states that SpaceX launched their 10,000th Starlink into orbit around the middle of October. I think with 28 or 29 satellites per launch I've watched them add at least a hundred more to that total. Space.com goes on to say:

In 2020, for example, fewer than 3,400 functional satellites were whizzing around our planet. Just five years later, that number has soared to about 13,000, and more spacecraft are going up all the time.

Pardon me for the grade school-level arithmetic to follow, but I find this hard to believe. If we had 3,400 satellites in 2020 and five years later we have 13,000, that's pretty close to 10,000 in five years, which is what the previous link said about the 10,000th Starlink being launched. Either that or both numbers are wrong because they imply that no other country, company, or any entity has launched anything.

Starlink satellites avoid potential collisions autonomously, maneuvering themselves away from conjunctions predicted by available tracking data. And this sort of evasive action is quite common: Starlink spacecraft performed about 145,000 avoidance maneuvers in the first six months of 2025, which works out to around four maneuvers per satellite per month.

Atoms from Earth's atmosphere identified on the moon

New research has concluded that atoms and molecules from Earth's atmosphere have been traveling across space to settle on the moon for billions of years, solving a puzzle that has existed since the Apollo program.

In samples of lunar regolith brought back from the moon by Apollo astronauts, scientists have found puzzling amounts of volatiles, which in this case are elements such as water, carbon dioxide, helium, argon and nitrogen that have low boiling or sublimation points. Some of these volatiles are brought to the moon from the sun via the solar wind, but the abundances of these volatiles, particularly nitrogen, cannot solely be explained by the solar wind.

The puzzle of how these components ended up on the moon is a bit involved, but in the big overview, it was originally thought some of the volatiles have come from Earth, as particles leaking out from our planet's upper atmosphere when they receive a nudge from energetic particles riding the solar wind. It was believed, though, this could only have happened in the early days of Earth's history, before our planet had a chance to develop a strong global magnetic field. It was thought a strong field would block particles from escaping. This was eventually run through computer simulations which showed a strong magnetic field didn't stop the particles leaving Earth.

There are interesting details in the source (first link) but a bit long to lift and reproduce here. If you're interested, RTWT.

How atoms and molecules from Earth's atmosphere, knocked into space by the solar wind, are transported to the moon along magnetic field lines. (Image credit: University of Rochester illustration/Shubhonkar Paramanick)

Final words to space.com.

This means that the lunar regolith could still hold a very long-term record of Earth's atmospheric history, which in turn could teach us about how Earth's climate, environment and even life has changed over billions of years. Furthermore, the insights gained don't have to be confined to our planet.

"Our study may also have broader implications for understanding early atmospheric escape on planets like Mars, which lacks a global magnetic field today but had one similar to Earth in the past, along with a likely thicker atmosphere," said Paramanick. "By examining planetary evolution alongside atmospheric escape across different epochs, we can gain insight into how these processes shape planetary habitability."

This is a big week

This is a personal big week. This is the 10th anniversary of my retirement, my last week and last day of working. That was Friday, December 18, 2015. The 18th is this coming Thursday. 

As I said that day, I started working full time in late 1975.  Before that, I worked part time while going to school.  From 1975 to 2025, I had been unemployed for 6 weeks.  It was '82, during the post-Carter recession, when Fed Head Paul Volcker raised the prime rate to 21.5% (at one point) to stop the near-runaway inflation of the late 70s.  Since then, I had been laid off, but generally left one job on Friday and started a new one on the following Monday.  

I started in college in the fall of '72, three months after high school, with intent to study biochemistry but never had a good feel for what was available in terms of where to work and what to do. I ended up dropping out of that program, got a job as an electronics technician based on what I learned as a hobbyist and started going to school at night for that. I worked full time and took two night classes per term until 1988 when I finally got my bachelor's degree. 

There's a saying everyone knows about "the best laid plans of mice and men" and it describes this part of my life. In high school, I was in all the "honors" classes, graduated with honors, had some recognition I don't remember the name of from the National Merit Scholarship Qualification test, and was accepted to both colleges I applied to. In my senior year of high school, my dad fell at work (US Postal Service), re-injuring an old injury from WWII and became disabled - wheelchair bound. Mom and dad had to tell me they couldn't pay my tuition like we had planned. So I went for some "discount knowledge at the junior college" - Miami Dade Junior College. Until they moved to the next county north and further disrupted life.

In my adult life, I never took more than a week long vacation while working and since retiring, we haven't gone anywhere for more than 10 days. We took a couple of trips but really nothing much, and I think our last trip was to the August 2017 Total Solar Eclipse. We went to a small city in Tennessee that was closer to the centerline of the eclipse path, called Goodlettsville. We drove up, 800 miles each way, spending one night in Chattanooga on the way up, and one just south of Atlanta on the way back. Yeah, we could have done each drive in one day but took it easy.  

Now that I sit down to tell the story, that's really just about all of it. We paid off our house early, and really tried to get into a good position financially so that we might be less likely to need to go back to work. It worked out well. The house was built in 1980 (IIRC - we bought it from the first buyer in 1984) so while it was built well, survived the various hurricanes and tropical storms well, it's still a 45 year old house. While I fight to keep hiring contractors to a minimum, every so often, I need to. We replaced the central Air system in 2020 - where system means not just the air conditioner itself, but the duct system as well keep. I need an expert for that. I mostly keep an eye on things. 

After I graduated Junior College we played with some goofy pictures. Here I am pondering a lawn sprinkler as if it's some sort of alien technology. I think this was in 1985, but I'd need to go find my degree or an old resume to verify that.

About that Geminid Metor shower

You may have seen a bit of a headline buzz about the annual Geminid meteor shower peaking. The peak is going to be tonight (Dec. 13-14), and the Geminid shower is typically considered one of the best of the year - if not the best. The general rule of thumb is that the best viewing is with the moon in its darkest phases, and moonrise is after 1:00 AM Sunday the 14th, local time - my local moonrise is 0134 ET. The phase is in the last quarter so the moon doesn't get much less light than this. All things considered, if your skies aren't cloudy, this could be a very good meteor shower to watch.  

If you're going to be watching visually, the standard advice is to get to the darkest skies you can.  Outside of town, if possible, which means in most the country you'll need to have planned this before the last minute. Of course, considering the time of year and local weather is important, too. Maybe even life threatening if you don't have adequate warm clothing, and maybe even a thermos bottle of hot coffee or tea. You know your conditions and weather better than I can say. 

A composite view of the Geminid meteor shower taken from Arizona. (Image credit: Alan Dyer/VW Pics/UIG via Getty Images)

If you trace the bright streaks, you'll notice the streaks get shorter as you get closer to two brighter stars just right of center: those are Castor and Pollux, the two stars at the "top" of Gemini. The constellation stretches up and to the right in this picture. 

Of course, this is written from the perspective of watching the shower. If sitting up all night or until the early morning doesn't sound like fun, and you're also a ham or the radio aspects are more interesting to you, there's always Meteor Scatter.  I covered a lot about meteor scatter in that article, but not the details of how to set up a computer driven VHF radio to make contacts via meteor scatter. Unfortunately, that's too involved for you to set up everything if you aren't already. If you've already setup a station, and you're using WSJT-X or the Improved version, just click the MSK button, and it will change you to the default frequency and other settings.

I've posted screen captures from DXMaps before, and this one is from about 0220 UTC - less than 15 minutes ago as I type. Every dark blue line on this map was reported as a Meteor Scatter QSO, on or near the agreed frequency to hang out on and try for MS contacts: 50.260 MHz.

A less often talked about aspect of meteor showers is that they're typically usable for radio contacts for several days around the peak. This one, for example, will probably continue to provide contacts for at least another week, it's just the number of the rocks or grains of sand that cause the show and allows the radio contacts drops off. A benefit of radio is that you can make contacts well after sunrise or before sunset. Visually, you can only see the meteors while it's dark. 

Hungry Hippo is ready to fly

Rocket Lab announced Monday that the Neutron rocket’s innovative “Hungry Hippo” captive fairing has successfully completed qualification testing and is en route to Virginia's Wallops Island Flight Facility launch complex LC-3 in preparation for Neutron’s first launch. Neutron is Rocket Lab's entry into the Falcon 9 class of rockets and will be reusable. 

Neutron, though, operates rather differently from the Falcon 9. As you know, Falcon 9 drops its fairings, and after some time trying to catch the fairings with huge nets on offshore fishing-style boats, settled on dropping them into the ocean near a recovery vessel that then goes and pulls them out of the water. 

Neutron's first stage, by contrast, will open its top like a giant mouth to spit out the vehicle's entire second stage and payload, and will then close the two halves back together before descending back through Earth's atmosphere to land and fly again.

Video here, but it's tests of the opening and closing of the fairing, not an animation of a mission. 

Before departing Rocket Lab's California-based test facility, the fairing was exposed to 275,000 pounds of external force to simulate dynamic pressures during launch, rapid cycling of the open and close mechanisms to ensure faster-than-necessary operations, software integration and load forces exceeding 125% design requirements.

Once the fairing is incorporated with Neutron's first stage, Rocket Lab will perform a series of prelaunch tests, including a static hotfire of the nine Archimedes engines that power the reusable booster. Neutron will stand 141 feet (43 meters) tall with a 23-foot (7 m) diameter, and is expected to deliver up to 28,700 pounds (13,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit.

It has been a few years since Rocket Lab first started talking about developing Neutron. While Rocket Lab's main income source is the Electron, they seem to be a "Space 2.0" company. They have flown some reused boosters and engines, but don't seem to have made all the effort on reuse SpaceX has, which makes me assume it's probably less of an economic incentive for them. The Electron is a small satellite launch vehicle, just under 60 feet tall and putting a payload of 660 pounds to LEO. Neutron will be a big step up for them. Like Electron, Neutron has a graphite body. 

Rocket Lab has had 18 Electron launches in 2025 with 100% mission success. NextSpaceflight.com shows more launches: Saturday and next Thursday followed by a much larger bunch (seven) labelled No Earlier Than 2025. That puts them in a niche that features far more launches than United Launch Alliance, an even larger multiple of Blue Origin's launches than ULA's, but still a tiny fraction of SpaceX's. 

Illustration of Rocket Lab's Neutron with the "Hungry Hungry Hippo" system delivering an upper stage with payload. Image credit: Rocket Lab

In the wake of the Russian damaged pad

You'll recall that the story broke on Black Friday (last Friday in November) that in the aftermath of the successful launch of the Crewed Soyuz flight to the International Space Station, Roscosmos discovered some substantial damage to the launch pad. Briefly, a large platform under the rocket, with a mass of about 20 metric tons was apparently not secured prior to launch, and the launch vehicle's thrust knocked it into the flame trench.

Word broke today that NASA is moving up launches of SpaceX Cargo Dragons scheduled for later in '26 due to the uncertainties of not knowing when the Soyuz pad will be usable again.

According to the space agency’s internal schedule, the next Dragon supply mission, CRS-34, is moving forward one month from June 2026 to May. And the next Dragon supply mission after this, CRS-35, has been advanced three months from November to August.

To grab a paragraph from my original piece on this accident, Russia has "plenty of launch pads" in Russia, Kazkhstan and former republics of the USSR; the issue is that Site 31 at Baikonur is the country’s only pad presently configured to handle launches of the Soyuz rocket and the two spacecraft critical to space station operations: their manned Soyuz vehicle and their unmanned Progress cargo drones. 

NASA has more options than Russia, by far. It's probably fair to say that SpaceX doesn't need mentioning, since they do more launches than any other launch service in the world - and more than most of them combined. NASA has Northrop Grumman, and their Progress cargo vehicle. Progress has been out of service for a while and SpaceX has been launching Grumman's Cygnus cargo ships until the replacement for the rocket that Grumman has contracted for is delivered. Cygnus could fly on that booster as early as April '26. Don't forget Japan has a new cargo ship as well, HTV-X, which could deliver supplies in the summer of '26.

It is by no means certain that Russia will be able to fix the Site 31 launch infrastructure during the next four months. The average temperature during winter months is typically well below 0 degrees Celsius, and the country’s economic and industrial resources have largely been devoted to a war against Ukraine, rather than civil activities such as human spaceflight.
...
So for NASA and the international partnership that operates the space station, the damage at Site 31 is unlikely to become acute unless work is delayed into next fall—when Progress vehicles will be needed for propellant delivery and Soyuz spacecraft to relieve the crew in orbit.

Technicians work on the pad in Baikonur with the fully fueled Soyuz rocket. Credit: NASA TV

A Martian Coincidence

Since the topic of moving toward more emphasis on going to Mars than to the moon, a follow-on story today underlines the reality that current satellites observing the Red Planet are not just the rovers on the surface, but others in orbit. An issue with all of them is that they're not recent launches and so they're getting older. Those satellites always have a rated lifetime and while many of those have operated far beyond the specified life, they all eventually wear out or fail in some other way. We need more of them.

NASA has lost contact with one its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission is running well past its warranty. 

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.”

The oddity that jumps off the page at me is that MAVEN is said to be the newest of NASA’s three operational Mars orbiters - and it arrived at Mars 11 years ago: 2014. It launched 10 months before that in 2013 so it has been operational for more like 12 years than 11. When the newest probe is 11 years old, that doesn't sound like they have much of a chance to be useful to missions another 11 years into the future - or more.  

Built by Lockheed Martin, MAVEN has far outlived its original design life. More recently, MAVEN became an important node in NASA’s Mars relay network, passing signals between rovers on the Martian surface and controllers on Earth. If NASA is unable to revive the MAVEN spacecraft, the agency has two other orbiters that can pick up the slack. 

MAVEN is a child compared to other satellites observing Mars.

But NASA’s two other Mars orbiters have been in space for more than 20 years. The older of the two, named Mars Odyssey, has been at Mars since 2001 and will soon run out of fuel, probably some time in the next couple of years. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2005, is healthy for its age, with enough fuel to last into the 2030s. MRO is also important to NASA because it has the best camera at Mars, with the ability to map landing sites for future missions.

What the groups behind a story like this are most concerned about is losing high speed data links back to Earth. Both of NASA's newer Mars rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, have the capability for direct-to-Earth radio communication, but the orbiting relay network can support vastly higher data throughput. They're concerned that if those overhead satellites fail, much of the science data and spectacular images collected by NASA’s rovers might never make it off the planet. 

Technicians work on the MAVEN spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of its launch in 2013. Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA began planning for a dedicated Mars Telecommunications satellite more than 20 years ago, but cancelled the project in 2005. That's one of the reasons the rovers that can communicate with Earth directly; they have that hardware (or close to it) built on. The orbiting communications satellite concept appeared again this year in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed this July. 

The space agency has investigated using commercial relay services to replace the government-owned network currently in place at Mars. NASA awarded study contracts to Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and SpaceX in 2024 to examine possible data relay architectures.

... Lawmakers included $700 million for a “high-performance” telecom relay station in Mars orbit to be developed through a fixed-price contract. ...

The agency hasn't released any formal request for bids for such a Communications Satellite, but Blue Origin and Rocket Lab have let out some design concepts for a Mars telecom orbiter. 

Early signs that Mars is becoming the Next Big Goal

There has been a quiet, background story centered on making the moon less of a target with Mars the bigger goal. It's not like the idea of a lunar colony is going away, it seems to be that more and more people are seeing Mars as a more interesting goal. A major new report on the topic was released today (Tuesday Dec. 9) on the subject. It starts by addressing the major question: if we look at Artemis, years late and billions of dollars over budget, why would any country want to take on such a mission?

A new report published Tuesday, titled “A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars,” represents the answer from leading scientists and engineers in the United States: finding whether life exists, or once did, beyond Earth.

“We’re searching for life on Mars,” said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, in an interview with Ars. “The answer to the question ‘are we alone‘ is always going to be ‘maybe,’ unless it becomes yes.”

If you go to that "report published Tuesday" link you'll find that it offers you a chance to buy a preprint of the report, or a paperback version (presumably later - after publication) but also has options of "Read Online" or "Download PDF." The report was researched and put together over the last two years, then published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In addition to Dava Newman named in that second quoted paragraph, the committee was co-chaired by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, director of the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory.

“There’s no turning back,” Newman said. “Everyone is inspired by this because it’s becoming real. We can get there. Decades ago, we didn’t have the technologies. This would have been a study report.”

The goal of the report is to help build a case for meaningful science to be done on Mars alongside human exploration. The report outlines 11 top-priority science objectives. In order of priority, they are:

• Search for Life: Is there evidence of life, past or present, on Mars?
• Water and carbon dioxide: Understand how water and carbon cycles changed over time
• Mars geology: Better understand the geological history of the planet
• Crew health: How do humans fare psychologically, cognitively, and physically in the Martian environment?
• Dust storms: Understand the origin and nature of large dust storms on the planet
• Search for resources: Develop in situ resource utilization, focusing initially on water and propellant
• Mars and genomes: Determine whether Mars changes reproduction and genome function in plant and animal species
• Understand microbes: Are microbial populations stable on Mars?
• Martian dust: How harmful and invasive is dust on humans and their hardware?
• Plants and animals: Does Mars affect plant and animal physiology and development across generations?
• Radiation sampling: Better understand the level and impact of radiation on the surface of Mars

That strikes me as a rather thorough list and something that won't be solved on the first mission or the the first several missions put together. So how? Without a massive improvement in rocket performance, remember that missions to Mars need to launch near closest approach of Mars to Earth, the typical Hohmann transfer windows, which occur every 25 or 26 months. Returns typically seem to be thought of as, "they'll take however long it takes to get back to Earth." 

The committee also looked at different types of campaigns to determine which would be most effective for completing the science objectives noted above. The campaign most likely to be successful, they found, was an initial human landing that lasts 30 days, followed by an uncrewed cargo delivery to facilitate a longer 300-day crewed mission on the surface of Mars. All of these missions would take place in a single exploration zone, about 100 km in diameter, that featured ancient lava flows and dust storms. 

There seem to me to be issues that aren't addressed in that list, and potentially even bigger problems. Imagine sending a crew of astronauts to Mars and finding something in the environment is deadly. At first they don't know what killed off the crew member(s). Is it something toxic on Mars or a microorganism that killed them? Not knowing the answers to what it was, do you bring the survivors back to Earth and risk the entire population on Earth? 

Since the first missions sending robots to Mars, a principle our missions complied with was "planetary protection," which aims to protect both the bodies being studied (i.e., the surface of Mars) and visitors doing the studying (i.e., astronauts) from biological contamination. "Don't bring nothing, don't take nothing home." There are scientists that say people from Earth should not visit any other planet known to contain life. That could eliminate Mars missions before they ever take place. 

In response, there have been talks about leaving some areas alone, "pristine" and untouched by Earth. Considering how many places on Earth that were thought to be sterile have turned out to have "extremophiles" - organisms that live in environments that were thought to be so severe, life would never settle there, can there truly be pristine areas that something won't settle in?  Other than things like active volcanoes.

The Curiosity rover near the site of Mont Mercou on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

If NASA is going to get serious about pressing policymakers and saying it is time to fund a human mission to Mars, the new report is important because it provides the justification for sending people—and not just robots—to the surface of Mars. It methodically goes through all the things that humans can and should do on Mars and lays out how NASA’s human spaceflight and science exploration programs can work together.

“The report says here are the top science priorities that can be accomplished by humans on the surface of Mars,” Elkins-Tanton said. “There are thousands of scientific measurements that could be taken, but we believe these are the highest priorities. We’ve been on Mars for 50 years. With humans there, we have a huge opportunity.”

SpaceX's Latest Double Record Launch

This evening, SpaceX conducted the Starlink 6-92 mission at 5:26PM ET, which set two new records. Now one of them is almost a formality: it was the latest launch record on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and every launch from CCSFS since the start of November has been a new record.  

The more interesting record is that Booster 1067 flew for a new record: flight 32. From our detached observing position (sitting here in front of the computer) it's hard to tell how smoothly the flight went but the landing looked to be inside the 10-ring. The last flight of B1067 was just short of two months ago, October 19th, and that's far from a record for turnaround time between flights, but we don't know if it was just the "next in line" or if there was something that had to be repaired. 

But as I've said many times, just use your best Grandpa Simpson / old man voice to say, "I remember when they weren't sure they could get 10 flights out of a booster and now they're going for 40." 

The first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands on the ocean-based droneship "Just Read the Instructions" after performing its record 32nd propulsive landing on Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX - with minor edits to exposure - SiG) 

Monday's launch from Florida was SpaceX's 158th Falcon 9 launch of the year and 510th reflight of a first stage since 2017. The company launched another set of 29 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sunday (Dec. 7).

If you look at the SpaceX page on NextSpaceflight, you'll see eight launches of Falcon 9 missions with assigned dates and times up to December 28 and three more launches that just say NET (no earlier than) 2025. Eight launches would get them to 166 Falcon 9 launches in one year. Like today, a new world record, but any launch would be. Every launch is some sort of record.