What Will NASA, SLS, Artemis, and all Look Like Under Trump?

One of the burning questions that many folks have had since Trump's landslide win, depending as it apparently did on Elon Musk's part in the campaign, is what NASA and the major programs will look like in the Trump administration.  All of it is speculation at this point; because the critical decision points in NASA and the rest of the government are all unfilled.  Eric Berger at Ars Technica had an interesting take on it last Friday with an article focusing on a couple of things Musk said that are critical of NASA's approach.

During the last 10 days, Musk has begun airing some of these private thoughts publicly. On Christmas Day, for example, Musk wrote on X, "The Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient, as it is a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program. Something entirely new is needed."

Then, on Thursday evening, he added this: "No, we’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction."

If you look at that second Tweet, he added the rather realistic, "Mass to orbit is the key metric, thereafter mass to Mars surface. The former needs to be in the megaton to orbit per year range to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars."  Repeat that part about a "megaton to orbit per year" to yourself for a while.  

If it's not obvious from everything I've written about Artemis and the SLS, I'm completely behind Musk's observation that it's "a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program" and it's hard to think of it as being successful in any way other than creating jobs for a select few contractors.  Still, it's not likely to be cancelled.  I don't know how President Trump feels about that now, but Artemis was started in his first term as president.  "I call on NASA to adopt new policies and embrace a new mindset," then-Vice President Mike Pence said in May 2019. "If our current contractors can't meet this objective, then we'll find ones that will."

NASA pretty much ignored that call from VP Pence and the administration, instead keeping its core group of major contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in place, and transferring billions of taxpayer dollars to them.  

But this time, the push for change is likely to be more concerted, especially with key elements of NASA's architecture, including the Space Launch System rocket, being bypassed by privately developed rockets such as SpaceX's Starship vehicle and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.

It's hard to say there's a buzz about this in the open and I hear next to nothing about NASA Administrator nominee, Jared Isaacman who will be a key in deciding this.  He hasn't publicly addressed Musk's comments but when he was nominated made a statement that sounds like he'd agree with Musk to some degree.  

I was born after the Moon landings; my children were born after the final space shuttle launch. With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place. We will inspire children, yours and mine, to look up and dream of what is possible. Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars and in doing so, we will make life better here on Earth.

I can think of this decision being related to the Artemis accords; you've probably heard that Nelson and other NASA "higher ups" have been gathering other nations around the world in signing onto the Artemis accords.  That appears to be trying to build a consensus to not let China claim the moon, and that's now tied to Artemis.  

NASA has pretty much outlined a "moon first, then Mars" plan. Artemis gets us back to the moon by the end of this decade and then we work toward Mars.  Berger thinks what this is going to lead to is both. 

In short, NASA is likely to adopt a two-lane strategy of reaching for both the Moon and Mars. Whether the space agency is successful with either one will be a major question asked of the new administration.

SpaceX first released this artist's conception of a settlement on Mars some years ago.  It shows a domed city surrounded by photovoltaic farms and four Starships. Image credit: SpaceX 

A Ham Radio Shack Update

Something I haven't talked about in a long time is the changes to my station to enable to it to monitor several types of operation in the VHF (6 meter) band where I operate the most.  I think this is the last update, but if not, it's close.  

I never got the system working quite the way I envisioned it and probably the biggest reason why I stopped pushing on it was related to the simple fact that I had it setup to monitor six separate frequencies on the band where different modes are used.  As the year has unfolded, though, the propagation has left Florida and even the SE corner of the US isolated and all the activity seemed to be in only two areas on the band: one for the digital mode FT8 and one for the "old fashioned" or legacy modes of CW (Continuous Wave or Morse code) and phone, or voice. I could just push a button on the rig and go monitor or check those two parts of the band. 

Poor propagation seems inconsistent with this being the peak of the solar cycle, but the first half of the year was better than the second half.  That's not completely true, in the last couple of months, I saw relatively close reports of Alaska being heard.  I never heard the handful of hams in Alaska that were reported but it's still more times and closer to me than I've ever heard of Alaska being reported. 

Another issue I had was that the system needed to be configured to run different instances of the software that the digital modes require. I never got past that point because I was never able to test it and verify it worked.  And that was because whenever I had the multi-receiver (SDR Console pictured at that first link) open I never saw someone using those modes.  

Along the way this year I learned of new piece of software that seemed like it needed to be looked at.  Called JT Skimmer, it's described this way:

JT Skimmer is a freeware, open source 64-bit Windows application for Radio Amateurs. Its main purpose is to monitor the band for digital signals and decode multiple WSJT-X modes, on multiple frequencies, 24 hours a day - and help the operator catch band openings and activity from the rare entities. This is especially useful on 6m because of its unpredictable propagation, but the program may be used on any band.

I can't say everything is working as I'd really like to see it, but as soon as I put a receiver on the FT8 frequency it started decoding. I suppose I could arrange to sit down with a friend some miles away and we could go back and forth with the various modes. 

There are aspects of this that aren't working and one is because it comes with rig control program different from the one I'm using so certain things that go to the rig control don't work, and other things make my setup do weird things. The one that comes with JT Skimmer is called Omnirig while I'm using Ham Radio Deluxe - a story in its own right for another day.

As we edge closer to spring, I expect the propagation on 6m to improve with Sporadic E propagation leading the way.  With that trend may come regular transequatorial (TE) openings into South America as well as skewed TE into Africa or the south Pacific. A true sign of the solar cycle peak will be long propagation that comes from F2 layer of the ionosphere and could reach to opposite side of the planet.  Perhaps it will be worthwhile to monitor more modes simultaneously.

The First Launches of 2025 All Slipped Later

On New Year's Eve, I posted a screen capture of the first three launches of the year from Next Spaceflight to show the first three launches of the year. I'll just repost it here.

All three of those launches have shifted later. We just watched the Thuraya 4-NGS launch from the backporch here south of the Cape. Instead of being at the earliest time that would be called Jan. 2nd, it was about 3-1/2 hours less than two full days late. 

The Starlink 6-71 mission is bumped from Sunday afternoon at 12:10 PM to Monday, Jan. 6 at 11:44 AM.  Since it's launching from the same complex as tonight's flight, I figure there must be some amount of time allowed to recycle everything between launches.  

New Glenn is currently set for Weds. Jan. 8 at 1:00 AM.

A new Starlink mission, Group 12-11 which will be launched from Pad 39A, is now inserted between Sunday's Starlink 6-71 and New Glenn early Wednesday morning.  This new group 12-11 mission will launch NET Tues. Jan 7 @ 10:51 AM EST.

And if you can keep all that straight without going reflexively back and forth to NextSpaceflight, you're doing better than me! 

The first launch of 2025, tonight's Falcon 9 launch from SLC-40 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Screen capture from the NSF (NASA Spaceflight) video. 

There are reports or rumors that SpaceX has set their goal for this year at around 180 launches. I've also seen 188 mentioned as the goal, and I don't know of an official place to see that. So pick one or the other of those and divide 365 days by that number of launches.  You'll get a number close to two, which implies a launch every other day.  Last year, SpaceX launched more than every other launch provider on Earth, combined.  I don't see that as likely to change.

Small Space News Story Roundup 49

Because there's still nothing big going on, where big is defined as more than one news service talking about it.  

Parker Solar Probe Updates for the Second Time

On Dec. 27, I updated the previous story to add the Parker solar probe was in contact, downloading the status that it had successfully conducted (and survived!) its close approach to the sun.

In that same story, it was mentioned that a more detailed report would be sent back to Earth on January 1st.  That data came down as expected on New Year's Day. 

On Wednesday (Jan. 1), mission control at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland began receiving the Parker Solar Probe's first telemetry — or housekeeping data — that confirms Parker's systems and science instruments are "healthy and operating normally" after its historic rendezvous with the sun, NASA shared in an update on Thursday (Jan. 2).

"All is looking good with the spacecraft systems and instrument operations," Michael Buckley, a spokesperson at JHUAPL, which oversees the Parker Solar Probe mission, told Space.com in an email. "It really is a remarkable spacecraft!"

Briefly, the probe survived with no problems at all; the data indicates every instrument behaved properly, the spacecraft had executed the commands that had been programmed into its flight computers before the flyby and all instruments report being healthy. 

The measured data is still to be downloaded but no source I could find would say when to expect that. 

A visualization of the Parker Solar Probe in front of the sun. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

Update to SpaceX Flight to be the First Crewed Orbital Mission over the Poles

Remember talk about this mission?  On August 12, SpaceX announced they will provide launch and space hardware for the first human flight that will go into a polar orbit. The private mission is being led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years.  The projected launch date back in August was said to be "around the solstice" but not exactly which solstice.

We learned today from the Payload newsletter that the mission has the mission, called Fram2, is expecting to launch No Earlier Than this spring.  To be pedantic, that's an equinox not a solstice:

The crew of Fram2 from left to right: Rabea Rogge, Eric Philips, Chun Wang, and Jannicke Mikkelsen. Image credit: Fram2 on X.

(as an aside, I had completely forgotten that Fram2 is the mission name, and that it's named after a Norwegian research ship named Fram. I honestly thought "it's named after an oil filter brand?"

That Payload Newsletter is worth taking a look at. It's a couple of screens of "What to Expect in 2025"

Very Little Space News Today

You'd think it was some sort of holiday observed in most of the world or something. 

The only thing I saw reported that was pretty much new was the SpaceNews (dot com!) article on the record year that the US Space Force had at Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center.  

Florida’s Space Coast capped off a record-breaking year with 93 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, up from 74 launches in 2023.

Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, commander of the Eastern Range and Space Delta 45, credited the accelerated pace to innovations by both Space Launch Delta 45 and the private sector. “We’ve been able to reach these crazy numbers by leveraging automation, modernizing infrastructure, and streamlining processes,” Panzenhagen told SpaceNews.

The interesting thing General Panzenhagen pointed out was of those 93 launches, 88 were SpaceX.  The other five were United Launch Alliance.  

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All that out of the way, two memes that have been on my mind. The first one is just a simple observation.

The second one is an observation that seems obvious to me.

I think Candace Owens is absolutely right: those people being against Tulsi is as good an endorsement as  you'll see.  I guess I'm assuming this is either exactly the same group that covered up Hunter's laptop and called it Russian disinformation or there's a lot of overlap.  A favorite observation I came across years ago is that the biggest benefit of true Freedom of Speech is that it makes it easier to know who the assholes are.  If everyone is censored, it's harder.  In this case, by giving their names publicly, they've made it easier to identify who the corrupt operators are so they can be gotten rid of faster.