Small Space News Story Roundup 71

Two updates to stories in the last few days. 

New Glenn and NASA's Mars satellites launch pulled up to Friday 11/7 in the early afternoon

This story broke this morning, prompting a revision to the previous story saying the launch date would be Sunday but no launch time was available.  

A minor side note to this story is that the way the mission's name is shown has changed. Until this morning, its NextSpaceflight listing referred to the mission in all caps: ESCAPADE. Slightly unusual but it's easy to hit Caps Lock on the keyboard and just type the one word.  Today's update goes to a weirder spelling: EscaPADE. 

The Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (EscaPADE) are a dual-spacecraft mission to study ion and sputtered escape from Mars.

The weather looks darn near ideal, on the Weather Underground 10 day forecast. Winds under 10mph from the East, temperatures in the upper 70s. The only questionable forecast is the cloud cover. While the chances of rain are under 25%, cloud cover is 75%. 

The BIG Talk on Capitol Hill is the Athena program

In followup to last night's post on how awful the Orion lunar capsule is, I received my daily copy of Payload's newsletter.  I posted to the comments:

In today's newsletter from Payload there's an item reflecting that Jared Isaacman is back in the running for NASA Administrator and so Politico thinks they're attacking him.

"Jared Isaacman’s confidential manifesto has been acquired by Politico, and calls for NASA to quit climate science, buy more space data from industry, and terminate SLS and Gateway."

I'm completely down with all of that.

This afternoon, the story expanded onto Ars Technica emphasizing a copy leaked to their senior Space correspondent, Eric Berger. 

After receiving a copy of this plan from an industry official, I spoke with multiple sources over the weekend to understand what is happening. Based upon this reporting there are clearly multiple layers to the story, which I want to unpack.

In the big picture, this leak appears to be part of a campaign by interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to either hold onto the high-profile job or, at the very least, prejudice the re-nomination of Isaacman to lead the space agency. Additionally, it is also being spread by legacy aerospace contractors who seek to protect their interests from the Trump administration’s goal of controlling spending and leaning into commercial space.

The leaked plan is 62 pages long, and while it isn't presented, probably not easy reading. Berger believes the document is an edited-down version of a more comprehensive “Athena” plan devised by Isaacman and his team earlier this year, after President Trump nominated him to be NASA Administrator. 

The Athena plan lays out a blueprint for Isaacman’s tenure at NASA, seeking to return the space agency to “achieving the near impossible,” focusing on leading the world in human space exploration, igniting the space economy, and becoming a force multiplier for science. 

It's worth noting that a copy of this “Athena”plan was provided by Isaacman to Sean Duffy as well as his chief of staff, Pete Meachum as a courtesy. To my way of thinking, that reflects an intent to help whomever gets the job. 

Tonight, President Trump re-nominated Jared Isaacman to the administrator's position. 

You can already sense what this is really all focused on. Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and the other companies living in luxury on cost-plus contracts like SLS, Orion and all the bad examples we see. 

In recent weeks, Duffy has been building ties with the space industry, trying to paint Isaacman as someone who would come in and force big changes on NASA and its traditional space contractors. There is also an effort to paint Isaacman as a stooge of Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX. However, the Athena plan, read in full, does not seem to support the conclusion that Isaacman has a pro-SpaceX bias. Instead, Isaacman seems equally bullish on Blue Origin.

Ironically, the plan reflects the priorities of the Trump administration for human space exploration.

The Athena plan seeks to transition away from cost-plus contracts for the Space Launch System rocket and Orion, while looking at repurposing elements of the Gateway for a nuclear-powered tug vehicle. These are all in line with the changes sought in the Trump administration’s proposed budget for NASA.

I don't quite know why Eric Berger chose to use the word "Ironically" in the second paragraph there. One would expect the guy the president nominates would do what the president wants to see done. To me the surprise is that Duffy wants to suck up to the companies that have so royally screwed up Artemis and the rest of the post-shuttle space programs. I can only conclude that he wants them to buy his loyalty, too. Which is too bad. I used to have some respect for him.

Interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy provides remarks at a briefing prior to the Crew 11 launch in August. Image Credit: NASA