Sometimes a Story is so Silly ...

Every now and then you run across a story that isn't so much news but something that you just have to pass on.  That story belongs to Eric Berger at Ars Technica this week for "Europe has the worst imaginable idea to counter SpaceX’s launch dominance."

The setup is not surprising: the European Space Agency is concerned about SpaceX and how far ahead of everyone else in the space industry they are.  The numbers are recognizable but still eye-popping when you read them.   

Last year, for example, SpaceX launched 134 orbital missions. Combined, Europe had three.

After this intro, Eric outlines several more legitimate reasons for the ESA to be looking for ways to regain some of their previous magic.  For one thing, Europe wants to launch something comparable to the Starlink satellites, but ultimately a smaller presence in space than Starlink to be available by the end of the decade.  

Sounds reasonable, right?  The issue is how they seem to be going about how to get there.

However, the approach being pursued by Airbus—a European aerospace corporation that is, on a basic level, akin to Boeing—seems like the dumbest idea imaginable. According to Bloomberg, "Airbus has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for advice on an effort to forge a new European space and satellite company that can better compete with Elon Musk’s dominant SpaceX."

The publication reports that talks are preliminary and include France-based Thales and Italy's Leonardo S.p.A. to create a portfolio of space services. Leonardo has hired Bank of America Inc. for the plan, which has been dubbed Project Bromo. (According to Merriam-Webster, "bromo" is a form of bromide, which originates from the Greek word brōmos, meaning bad smell.)

Project stink?  I swear I'm not making this up. 

While European companies have been playing catch up with the US for around 15 years, it's hard to imagine companies like Airbus, Thales Alenia Space and the others banding together to become nimble and more efficient operators in spaceflight.  But going to Goldman Sachs for advice? 

Two decades ago, the US military forced Lockheed and Boeing to merge their launch businesses to create a single company. Although there were several goals of this venture, which became United Launch Alliance, one of them was that by combining operations, the companies could avoid duplication and become more efficient. The opposite happened. Launch prices ballooned, and America consistently ceded the commercial launch market to foreign players into the 2010s, right up until when SpaceX got its Falcon 9 rocket flying frequently.

Europe's first Ariane 6 rocket takes flight for the first time on July 9, 2024. Credit: ESA - S. Corvaja

Americans on Mars By 2029?

I would say it's doubtful, but betting against Elon Musk has proven to be a pretty foolish thing to do.  The thing is, it doesn't seem to be Musk's idea, it seems to be President Trump's.  

Let me back up a little. 

Like every other government agency, NASA is in the throws of changes from President Trump's first weeks in office, along with Musk's department, DOGE.  The NASA folks are a bit rattled by it all.  Jared Isaacman, Trump's pick to lead the organization, hasn't been confirmed yet, and hearings are currently anticipated to be in the second half of February.  In the meantime, an interim administrator named Janet Petro was appointed, and like every other agency, has passed on the Executive Orders to remove diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility contracts and to "report" on anyone who did not carry out this order.  As I'd expect, there are people in NASA upset by that like every other agency we read about.

Isaacman's approval taking until nearly March seems to be more an issue of the large numbers that congress is having to approve and not a sign of likely disapproval.  In his last five years of funding orbital missions, Isaacman seemed to have come to be regarded as an earnest individual, genuinely interested in spaceflight and in advancing exploration for all.  He is seen as the kind of young, dynamic, pro-space leader with the potential to usher NASA into the 21st century and out of the Apollo era it has been stuck in for decades.  Most importantly, the idea of reaching Mars by 2029 is not his idea.  

January of '29 also happens to be the last days of Trump's term and many speculate that's why he talks of "men on Mars by the end of this decade." At this point, I find it hard to imagine the Artemis program will be successful in getting astronauts to the moon by 2030 and putting people on Mars is orders of magnitude harder.  

Artemis still depends on the horrific SLS, the Gateway station in a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit near the moon and more.  It also depends a lot on Starship, and the setback of losing the Starship on Flight Test 7 impacts this schedule when the required numbers of Starship flights are seen.

Going to Mars puts enormous demands on Starship.  There's going to be a need to launch numbers of Starships unlike anything ever launched before.  In a posting on X, Musk said, "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."  A megaton to orbit?  The current Starship is the highest capacity ever built and the largest Version 3 Starship proposed carries 200 tons to LEO.  Musk calculates that he would have to achieve 5,000 Starships launches of this size per year to support a Mars colony. That's on the order of 14 Starship launches per day.  You think near Earth orbit is crowded now?

All that Musk has said that I can find is that he plans to start launching unmanned Starships to Mars in the next launch window (optimum planetary alignment) in 2026, and, if that goes well, perhaps manned flights by 2028/29.

As hard as 5000 Starship launches a year sounds, there are still many problems out there.  Many of them are related to the "couple of months every two years" launch windows and the problems of being in space that long for a crew.  Crews will be exposed to more radiation from the sun and deep space than any other crew ever has been, and it doesn't get much better than that once they're on Mars.  The planet's lack of a protective atmosphere and magnetic field creates that.  A nuclear engine that could get them to Mars in a very short order and reduced the dependence on those tiny launch windows would help exposure during flight but not on the planet.

Final words to the summary on Space.com

Generally, as laid out by Bob Zubrin in the last century, a Mars Direct approach would begin with successfully landing many uncrewed cargo ships in the same location on Mars with supplies including construction materials, consumables, mining & drilling equipment, electrochemical reactors for production of methane and oxygen, tankage, and the components of a nuclear power plant. Much of this would have to be done 2 years before the first humans were launched.

Actually, in theory, all of this could be done over decades, but 2029 is wildly unlikely, even for a one way, one astronaut suicide mission to plant a flag.

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  I'd love to live long enough to see it, but seriously doubt that's possible.

Japan Launches Navigation Satellite on H3 Rocket

The Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H3 is Japan's flagship rocket, and available in several configurations.  This morning at 3:30 AM EST or 0830 UTC, an H3 was launched from Tanegashima Space Center. 

Aboard was the 1,900-kilogram Michibiki 6 satellite, also known as the Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZS-6), for Japan’s navigation satellite system. The system aims to provide Japan with positioning, navigation and timing services, while increasing the accuracy and reliability of GPS services in the region. 

The first Michibiki spacecraft for a four-satellite system was launched in 2010.  Since that time, an 11-satellite system, to provide redundancy, is being considered, according to a 2024 policy document from the Cabinet Office of the Government of Japan. 

You might recall that the H3 had a failure on its first flight in March of 2023 - due to a failure in the upper stage; leading ground controllers to issue a destruct command to destroy the stage and its ALOS-3 payload. It was over a year, July of '24, before they had a successful H3 launch, and they've had two more successes since then. This is vehicle number five.

The 63-meter-long H3 comes in configurations with no solid rocket boosters, two SRBs or four SRBs for higher payload needs. The latter pair of configurations can also utilize an elongated payload fairing. 
...
The expendable rocket was designed to be more cost-effective and therefore competitive on the international commercial launch market.

The H3 received a boost last year with the announcements that the H3 will launch an asteroid mission for the United Arab Emirates, currently scheduled for 2028, while Eutelsat signed a contract to use multiple H3 rockets from 2027.

This morning's launch from Tanegashima Space Center. Photo from The Mainichi (Image credit: Kyodo)  Studying the vehicle as best as I can, it looks like an SRB is facing the camera and in line with the booster's body, which makes this the two SRB version.  Watching the Japanese launch video confirms that.

This was Japan's first launch of the year.  The moon-bound lunar lander Resilience from Japanese company ispace is still said to be in excellent health and en route to the moon, after taking a ride on a Falcon 9 back on Jan. 15. 

Small Space News Story Roundup 52

Largely from this week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica, but not only from there.

Space Force Has Big Dreams For 2025

The main emphasis in this section was launches on ULA's Vulcan, but it's not just Vulcan. The US Space Force is projecting 11 national security launches aboard the Vulcan rocket in 2025.  That's an aggressive schedule considering that Vulcan isn't certified for national security payloads yet.  

While ULA aims to ramp up Vulcan flights for military missions, SpaceX has maintained its dominance in the commercial launch market and even absorbed additional national security launches in 2024 that were originally slated for Vulcan, highlighting the Space Force’s growing reliance on SpaceX’s proven Falcon rockets to maintain critical military space access.

Add New Glenn to the mix.  The first mission of the New Glenn in January was deemed a success by the Space Force and it seems Blue Origin is going to do a second qualifying launch by the spring.  Space Force doesn't appear to be concerned about Blue's inability to land the booster for recycling and re-use.  Brigadier General Kristin Panzenhagen emphasized that booster recovery isn't a criterion for NSSL eligibility.  

“For our national security space launch missions, the primary measure of success is delivering the payload to its destination,” she said. 
 
The flight positions New Glenn to compete for Lane 1 of the NSSL Phase 3 program, which covers less complex missions. A second successful flight will likely be required for the rocket to qualify for the more demanding Lane 2 missions.

Blue Origin’s path to certification remains proprietary, with the company given the option to balance demonstration launches and detailed data reviews to meet Space Force requirements. ULA publicly disclosed that its plan to certify Vulcan would require two successful flights.

Vulcan is still under pressure with certification expected in late February.  If Space Force gets 11 NSSL launches out of the 10 months left in the year ULA is going to have operate at a pace we haven't seen them meet in years - if ever. 

Sorry, but this story makes me laugh

It's actually a headline in the Rocket Report that SpaceX expended a Falcon 9 this past Wednesday, Jan. 29.  You know, like virtually every other launch by every other launch service in the world, they used up every pound of payload to orbit they could get out of this system before letting it crash into the Atlantic ocean. That included taking steps like removing the landing legs and grid fins to add those few pounds to the payload it could put in orbit.  

The payload was the SpainSat NG-1 satellite launched from Kennedy Space Center's Pad 39A. 

The gigantic difference between SpaceX expending booster B1073 and every other example you can think of is that this was the 21st flight of B1073.  I'm unaware of any other launch provider that currently is able to recover and re-fly boosters over 20 times.

The Airbus-built satellite, known as SpainSat NG-1 (New Generation), is the first of two satellites for Hisdesat. It was developed under a partnership with the European Space Agency, making its launch on a Falcon 9 somewhat notable.

Apparently, the FAA is still being the FAA

Apparently enough people think that the FAA is just going to let SpaceX operate without doing their usual process on Starship's Flight Test 7 that it's news the FAA is going to follow FAA policies.

Within hours of the Starship's RUD, people were reporting finding debris, although there were no reports of any serious damages. 

The good news is there were no injuries or reports of significant damage from the wreckage that fell over the Turks and Caicos. "The FAA confirmed one report of minor damage to a vehicle located in South Caicos," an FAA spokesperson told Ars on Friday. "To date, there are no other reports of damage."

It's not clear if the vehicle owner in South Caicos will file a claim against SpaceX for the damage. It would the first time someone makes such a claim related to an accident with a commercial rocket overseen by the FAA. Last year, a Florida homeowner submitted a claim to NASA for damage to his house from a piece of debris that fell from the International Space Station.

A piece of what appears to be heat shield tile recovered in the Caicos, as shown on X.