Two "returning to normal" stories

They're both smallish stories - but returning to normal should be pretty close to no news. 

FAA lifts restrictions on launches 

It has been in effect something like one week, but the ban on daytime launches due to the government shutdown that the FAA introduced at the start of the month, the official start was Monday the 10th, is over. Beginning that day the FAA said commercial space launches would only be permitted between 10 pm and 6 am local time, when the national airspace is most quiet. The restriction is lifted as of today. The order officially ended this morning at 6 a.m. EST.

One has to wonder what sort of impact it had. 

The order primarily affected SpaceX, by far the most prolific American launch company. SpaceX has been lofting Starlink missions to expand its growing wireless internet megaconstellation in low Earth orbit every few days; it has already launched more than 100 Starlink missions this year.

SpaceX wasn't totally grounded while the order was in place, though. The company managed to launch four after-hours missions during the week-long restriction phase, including three Starlink missions and the Sentinel-6B ocean mapping satellite. 

You'll remember that Blue Origin's launch of their second New Glenn mission, the ESCAPADE satellites, had to file for an exemption for last Thursday's afternoon launch. My perception is that it's probably easier to get an exemption for a "big deal" NASA flight than routine Starlink missions, but SpaceX never asked for one. They just chose a launch time in allowed time. 

China has a scheduled launch date for the Shenzhou 22 replacement capsule

China has set a NET launch date for the replacement capsule that caused the Shenzhou 21 crew to use the capsule from the previous crew (20) to return to Earth.  In that linked post, we talked about the overall plan being to use the capsule from the SZ22 mission but that it wasn't immediately available. Today, the news was presented that preparations are well underway for a launch next Tuesday.

... China is aiming for Nov. 25 to launch a replacement spacecraft up to Tiangong from its Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Inner Mongolia. An official with China's Manned Space Agency (CMSA) told state broadcaster CCTV that "the mission for launching the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft has been initiated, with preparations for all systems in full swing, including testing the spacecraft and rocket components and preparing the cargo." 

The official added that China will take the opportunity to send up food and additional cargo to the Shenzhou 21 crew, who just began their six-month stay aboard Tiangong on Oct. 31. ...

The Shenzhou (SZ) 22 mission had been scheduled for the April/May time frame, so it's more than a small difference in the mission profile to launch before December and carry more food and supplies than the usual amount - which they're saying is most likely because of the extra consumption that the SZ-20 crew consumed in their extra time on the station (although it seems that has to be a small percentage difference - they only spent an extra few days out of their seven months on station).

Space.com points out that by the time the SZ-22 launches to the Tiangong space station, close to three weeks will have passed since the cracks were discovered in the SZ-20 spacecraft. Similar things have happened to the ISS over the years but we have no photographs of the SZ-20's damage. 

A Long March-2F rocket carrying three astronauts and the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Gobi desert, in northwest China on April 24. The Shenzhou 20 craft would go on to be damaged by space debris while docked at the Tiangong Space Station and deemed unfit to return the crew to Earth. (Image credit: PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images)

Rocket Lab's Neutron first launch slips out

Word has been slipping out over the course of the last week that the first launch of Rocket Lab's Neutron "heavier lift" rocket is slipping out into 2026. To borrow a quote from Eric Berger at Ars Technica:

For anyone with the slightest understanding of the challenges involved in bringing a new rocket to the launch pad, as well as a calendar, the delay does not come as a surprise. Although Rocket Lab had been holding onto the possibility of launching Neutron this year publicly, it has been clear for months that a slip into 2026 was inevitable.

According to Beck, speaking during a third-quarter 2025 earnings call, the new timeline has the company bringing Neutron to Launch Complex 2 at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia during the first quarter of next year. ...

The first launch will be after extensive testing at the launch complex, which makes "summer" sound a bit optimistic. The reason for the schedule slip is simple: they want to succeed. (CEO Peter) Beck said Rocket Lab would not be rushed by an arbitrary deadline. Beck says he has seen too many companies “rush to the pad with an unproven product, and we just refused to do that.” Their goal is to make it to orbit on the first Neutron launch. There will be no claiming success for getting off the ground or making it to MECO - Main Engine Cut Off - but not making orbit. Those are mission failures. Don't forget they're the company that made it to 50 successful missions faster than any other with their Electron rocket. The only drawback to Electron (and the reason for developing Neutron) is Electron's small payload. 

“This is a time when you find out on the ground what you got right, and what you got wrong, rather than finding out that during first launch,” he said. “Now at Rocket Lab, we have a proven process for delivering and developing complex space flight hardware, and I think that process speaks for itself with respect to our hardware, always looking beautiful, and, more importantly, always working beautifully. Now, our process is meticulous, but it works.”
...
“If we think about how many others have tried to develop a launcher, the results have been extremely poor,” he said. “Those who have failed to deliver are numerous. Basically, every new space company except Rocket Lab and SpaceX has failed to build an orbital rocket that is scaled to any kind of launch cadence and is reliable. Now this is the Rocket Lab process in action, and I’ve been resolute about sticking to this approach. Neutron will fly when we’re very confident it’s ready, and we’re not going to break the mold of the Rocket Lab magic.”

An image from the third-quarter 2025 earnings call referred to above. Image credit: Rocket Lab

While their stated goal is to complete all the testing and evaluation by the start of next summer, I can't help but think it's still a pretty large chunk of work to get through. I wouldn't be at all suprised to see the first test flight in August instead of June, for example. To borrow a closing quote from Eric, 

Given all of the difficulty involved in developing a large new rocket, and seeking a high chance of success on the first attempt, a successful launch any time next year would represent a great start to the Neutron era.

In which I yell at clouds

Chances are, you’ve seen one of the hundred versions of the “old man yells at cloud” meme that features grandpa Abe Simpson. Changing the target slightly sets up what follows.

Hey, it’s like yelling at a cloud, only the F layer is a hundred times higher than a cloud – or more. The F layer pays just as much attention as the cloud does. Or less.

After the Geomagnetic storms we went through this week, there were many posts around the places I visit most online where people referred to storms along with either good or bad conditions and their accomplishments (like Every Blade of Grass, or Come and Make it as well as here). Some of us had both good and bad. Along the same line, the only accomplishments I’m actively “chasing” on the VHF six meter band are both in the category of “difficult to practically impossible.” The easier one is probably 6m DXCC (100 recognized countries worked and confirmed). I currently have 87 confirmed with another four “waiting for confirmation.” I’m closer to DXCC on 6m than any of the major awards. Easy or obvious one first, DXCC is more likely than Worked All States - WAS. 

WAS is practically impossible from my location. I’m pretty sure last November (‘24) was the closest I ever came to even hearing Alaska, and that was hearing other stations in the southeast calling the guy in Alaska. I saw him “spotted” on some of the sites online that report that, but never actually heard him. I was hoping for this year, but it hasn’t been good so far.

The hardest one, the FFMA (Fred Fish Memorial Award – the first person to achieve this award) is for working and confirming all 488 Maidenhead grids in the continental US. "Continental" means I don't need Alaska. I have 345 grids confirmed with another five that I’ve worked but can’t get confirmed. To be brutally honest, the FFMA is practically impossible from here, too. Unsurprisingly, when your goal is to reach every place  in the country, you're most likely to get everyone from the center of the country, and it turns out there has been one issued in Florida, in the northwestern most corner of the state. That's about 500 miles away - near Pensacola.

You’ll note that linked page refers to them as grid squares. They’re not. It’s a fun fact that these are two degrees in longitude by one degree in latitude, making them grid rectangles. I’ve never seen anyone anywhere refer to them as “grid rectangles.” 

Where these intersect with a meme about the F-layer of the ionosphere is that the F-layer is the key to long distance propagation in radio, especially 6m (50 to 54 MHz in the US). When conditions are good, the F-layer splits into two layers (F and F2), with F2 higher in altitude and allowing ever farther contacts.

As a good, general, Rule of Thumb (RoT), there are two things to watch in a propagation forecast, the Solar Flux Index (SFI), a measure of the strength of the constant radio signal (2.8 GHz) coming from the sun, and the K index, a measure of the geomagnetic field strength and stability. Both of these are given as a single number summary of many measurements in many places. A default page I always have open is the one I can look up “where you at?” when I hear someone I’m interested in. The current solar terrestrial indices are displayed in a dedicated box toward the top of the page, data from N0NBH.

The RoT for SFI is “the more the merrier.” There isn’t a handy RoT for K or the Planetary K index (Kp). Both too low and too high are bad, it’s just that what’s a good Kp depends on frequency and that’s different depending on what band you’re using. My experiences on 6m lead me to think a Kp of 5 is better than 3 while 3 is better than anything below 3, but I tend to think that both 3 and 5 are bad at low HF bands – say 80 and 40 sure – but lower Kp is fine at 80 and 40m. I have more questions as you progress higher in HF.

I have vague memories of hearing that the aftermath of a geomagnetic storm, as the K index is coming down is a better time to operate on the high end of HF, say 20 to 10m, than once the storm is over. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that effect on 6m.

An important point to mention is all of these indices vary both on longer and shorter intervals. If you’ve ever watched the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center’s Planetary K-Index charts, you might have noticed that each bar showing one number for three hours is displayed ending in #.00, #.30 or #60 (where “#” is the whole number below the top of the bar).

That tells me they take a number every hour and the bar they display is an average of three measurements. My mental analogy is measuring the depth of lava in a hole on the side of a volcano. The level goes up and down but is boiling at the same time so there are long and short periods that the level changes over. The number they get is statistically related to the actual levels, but I sure can’t describe how they relate numerically.

Solar Flux (SFI) is the indicator the most people follow, and the more the merrier. The idea that solar flux determines propagation is over simplified because of the effects of the geomagnetic activity and the minute by minute variations in that. The simplest advice is what I heard nearly 50  years ago, when I first got licensed: listen, listen, listen and when you get tired of that, listen some more. There are ways to automate your station, so you don't have to sit there, Butt In Chair, but you can't go wrong with BIC time and listening. 

Three Chinese astronauts take their return trip to Earth

The less pleasant-sounding way of saying that is that the three astronauts (taikonauts) who just arrived on the Chinese space station don't have a safe ride back to Earth, but the crew who had been on the station longer returned to Earth today. 

Commander Chen Dong, concluding his third trip to space, and rookie crewmates Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie touched down inside their spacecraft at the Dongfeng landing zone at 1:29 am EST (06:29 UTC) Friday. The parachute-assisted landing occurred in the mid-afternoon at the return zone, located in the remote Gobi Desert of northwestern China.

You will probably remember that earlier in the month, we passed on the story that a crew was left on the station with no known way of returning home. Commander Chen Dong and his crewmates were the Shenzhou 20 mission, and the crew that arrived on November 5th (Eastern US time) was the Shenzhou 21 mission.

Chen and his crewmates were preparing to board the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft for the ride back to Earth a few days after the arrival of three replacement crew members on the newly launched Shenzhou 21 capsule. Shenzhou 20 is the same spacecraft that launched Chen’s crew in April.

But a little more than a week ago, Chinese officials said the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft was “suspected of being impacted by small space debris” and confirmed the return trip would be postponed. Officials provided no additional details.

The Chinese Space Agency released a cryptic statement that preparations were underway for the crew’s undocking and landing, but little was known until Thursday. The agency revealed the problem with Shenzhou 20 was a cracked window.

“Based on preliminary analysis of photographs, design review, simulation analysis, and wind tunnel tests, a comprehensive assessment determined that the Shenzhou 20 manned spacecraft’s return capsule window glass had developed a minor crack, most likely caused by an external impact from space debris,” the China Manned Space Agency wrote on Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. “This does not meet the release conditions for a safe manned return.”

In light of that the quick and easy solution was chosen: keep the unflyable Shenzhou 20 capsule at the Tiangong station and return the crew on the just-arrived Shenzhou 21 capsule. The next capsule in line (go ahead - guess) is the Shenzhou 22, isn't ready to fly now, but can be sent up at a later date. Instead of a change of crew, 22 will be loaded with fresh food and any equipment needed to sustain the three-man crew already on the station.

Chen Dong, commander of the Shenzhou 20 mission, arrives at the Dongfeng landing site in the Gobi Desert, Inner Mongolia, China, after landing on November 14, 2025. Credit: STR/AFP via Getty Images

Blue Origin Joins the Big League

It's hard to communicate just how much I was amazed that Blue managed to achieve all the major goals of today's New Glenn 2 launch. They had a hold at the originally scheduled launch time, but launched around 45 minutes later. The launch and flight appeared to be completely by the book, but importantly and surprisingly, they succeeded in landing the booster on their offshore drone Jacklyn around 360 miles ESE of the Cape. 

Screen capture from the NASA Spaceflight live coverage. That video is the entire NSF coverage - over 5-1/2 hours - but set to start at 3 hrs 57 mins 00 secs. 

This means that Blue Origin is only the second company in history to recover a rocket for reuse at the end of an operational flight. That has to have huge positive impacts on Blue Origin's financial health. I think everyone knows SpaceX has had so much success with their landing and reuse that they hardly ever launch a new booster. With their fleet leader at 32 flights, think of what that means to the cost to fly a mission. They have a fleet that's tough to get a number for, but on the order of 20 boosters. (One of the complications is the same hardware could be first stage for a Falcon 9, a side booster or even the central core of a Heavy - from mission to mission). 

Capable of carrying up to 50 tons (45 metric tons) to low Earth orbit (LEO), New Glenn is comparable to, but not quite as powerful as, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, and has nearly twice the lifting capacity as United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan Centaur. Blue Origin intends to position the 321-foot-tall (98 meters) New Glenn to take on some of the Falcon 9's current share of the launch market.

Going through old posts looking for things I'd swear I remember, I found I correctly remembered that there was a version of New Glenn that had three stages. The last post that showed that was in October of 2020.

Since it's a graphic they produced, I'm going to trust they have the relative sizes of the different New Glenn versions shown correctly as well as the sizes of the other vehicles compared to theirs. I haven't seen anything on that 3-stage version since then.

While the New Glenn is the subject of the post, I need to point out that mission successfully deployed the two ESCAPADE satellites, now en route to the L2 LaGrange point, as well as a previously unmentioned other payload for ViaSat to test that company's InRange launch telemetry relay service as part of a project for NASA's Communications Services Project (CSP). 

It looks like a rather complete success for Blue Origin. As one of the NASASpaceflight announcers said, seeing another private American company become capable of landing and recovering a booster is like suddenly being pushed into the future. We know that other companies talk about recovering boosters and Rocket Lab has done some reuse. We've also seen experiments from Japan, China, and the European Union. For now it seems like there has been major step toward that dream scenario of a space-faring civilization.

Cape Canaveral's latest record

All the way back on Monday the 10th, I posted that an expected SpaceX launch an hour later would break the annual record for the most orbital missions from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station/Kennedy Space Center launch complex. This record has been getting set a bit earlier every year.  The complex is the world's busiest spaceport and the launch marked humanity’s 255th mission to reach orbit this year, itself a new annual world record for launch activity. 

So far this week other launches have pushed the global total this year to 259, putting the world on pace for around 300 orbital launches by the end of 2025. A mere four years ago, 2021, the world orbital launch count was 135. 300 launches for this year would be well over twice as many as in 2021: 2.22 times 135.

Ars Technica's Stephen Clark got the lucky assignment to come here to central Florida (colder and windier than usual over the entire state) to watch and report on the launch. One of the things he noted was that there wasn't a crowd of people waiting to watch the launch. 

Waiting in the darkness a few miles away from the launch pad, I glanced around at my surroundings before watching SpaceX’s Falcon 9 thunder into the sky. There were no throngs of space enthusiasts anxiously waiting for the rocket to light up the night. No line of photographers snapping photos. Just this reporter and two chipper retirees enjoying what a decade ago would have attracted far more attention.

Go to your local airport and you’ll probably find more people posted up at a plane-spotting park at the end of the runway. Still, a rocket launch is something special. On the same night that I watched the 94th launch of the year depart from Cape Canaveral, Orlando International Airport saw the same number of airplane departures in just three hours.

I remember Musk saying several years ago that he would know that SpaceX had succeeded when people found launches boring. I don't know if we can really conclude they're boring yet, but they have absolutely lost some of the mystique. While I can't cite numbers, Clark contends that they have become more routine. 

The crowds still turn out for more meaningful launches, such as a test flight of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket in Texas or Blue Origin’s attempt to launch its second New Glenn heavy-lifter here Sunday. But those are not the norm.  

One of the common cliche's that we hear is "Space is hard" but space is still more dangerous than common airplane flight.

The Falcon 9’s established failure rate is less than 1 percent, well short of any safety standard for commercial air travel but good enough to be the most successful orbital-class in history. Given the Falcon 9’s track record, SpaceX seems to have found a way to overcome the temptation for complacency.

You may have heard this being referred to as SpaceX having dominance over the industry when it comes to mass delivered into orbit. When it comes to putting useful payloads into orbit, it's SpaceX and everybody else. Nothing shows that quite as clearly as something like this graphic created at Ars Technica using data from BryceTech, an engineering and space industry consulting firm. 

The first illustrates the rising launch cadence at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, located next to one another in Florida. Launches from other US-licensed spaceports, primarily Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and Rocket Lab’s base at Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand, are also on the rise.

These numbers represent rockets that reached low-Earth orbit. We didn’t include test flights of SpaceX’s Starship rocket in the chart because all of its launches to have intentionally flown on suborbital trajectories.

In the second chart, we break down the payload upmass to orbit from SpaceX, other US companies, China, Russia, and other international launch providers.

SpaceX is on pace for between 165 and 170 Falcon 9 launches this year, with 144 flights already completed. That's more than the total number of launches from all rocket companies cited earlier for 2021 (135) and reflects launches from both this spaceport and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Last year’s total for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy was 134 missions. SpaceX has not announced how many Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches it plans for next year.

Wait - important update 

Last night's CME impact that kicked the planetary K index up to values we haven't seen in quite a while caused the cancellation of another attempt to launch New Glenn 2 and the ESCAPADE mission to Mars that had been scheduled for this afternoon. I had seen it in the NextSpaceflight schedule early this morning, then noticed it was gone around 2PM.

New Glenn 2 is back in the schedule for tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 13 at 2:57 PM. Also from Cape Canaveral, "a pad or two over" from SLC-40 where SpaceX launches.

Sun Spits out the strongest flare of '25

Not the strongest X-Class flare of Cycle 25, but the strongest flare of the year 2025.  The strongest X flare of Cycle 25 (so far and probably will stay that way) was in July of last year, '24, and was an X14. Today's flare was an X5.1. The strength of the flare isn't generally the whole picture, although it can be. An X5 strength is approximately 0.5 milliwatt per square meter strength, while an X14 is 1.4 mW/sq.mm The bigger story here is that there have been two other Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) in the last 48 hours. 

Spaceweather.com puts it this way:  

SEVERE GEOMAGNETIC STORM WATCH: Strong (G3) to severe (G4) geomagnetic storms are possible on Nov. 12th and 13th in response to three CMEs now approaching Earth. This includes a potent CME from today's X5-flare, which is moving so fast it might overtake and sweep up the CMEs ahead of it. The arrival of such a "Cannibal CME" could spark auroras in more than half of all US states. 

A 'GROUND LEVEL EVENT' IS UNDERWAY: Today's X5-class solar flare from sunspot 4274 hurled a fusillade of energetic protons toward Earth. Some of the particles are so powerful, they are penetrating the atmosphere all the way to the ground. "This is a very significant event," says Professor Clive Dyer of the Surrey Space Centre. "Neutron monitors around the world are detecting it."

This is called a Ground Level Event (GLE). GLEs of this magnitude are rare; they happen only once or twice every solar cycle. "This one is comparable to the GLE of Dec. 13, 2006," says Dyer. That makes it a ~20-year event.

When a Flare erupts, the electromagnetic effects of the radio/light it emits arrive here quickly. The particles that constitute the CME (a Coronal Mass Ejection is Mass, after all) so it can't move as fast as light. The geomagnetic storms they talk about in that first indented paragraph are forecast to be here either on the 12th or through the 13th (which I read as midnight on the 13th, so pretty much the 14th).  In UTC it's the 12th now here in the Eastern time zone. Note the couple of days of uncertainty in when it will have effects. 

The arrival of the radio energy from the X5 was close to sunrise here on the coast, while it was midday over Europe and the western areas of Africa. There were stronger effects on radio propagation, with HF being pretty much wiped out for several hours over Africa and Western Europe - good graphic over on Space.com. The Space Weather Prediction Center issued this forecast at around 12 hours after the flare erupted.

Small Space News Story Roundup 72

Kind of a slow night here. Been trying to find something worth talking about and there's pretty much one story - maybe two depending on how it develops.  

Story 1 - Another Potential Record for SpaceX

I don't tend to report on SpaceX records because they're at the point where almost every other flight is company record of some sort, but this one isn't a SpaceX record it's a Cape Canaveral/Florida record. 

Weather permitting, the launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will be the 94th launch for an orbital class rocket from Florida, surpassing the total achieved in 2024.

Weather isn't likely to be an issue - in the sense of rain or things like the Cumulus cloud rule that scrubbed the New Glenn flight Sunday afternoon. Late last night we had the passage of the first strong cold front of the season, and temperatures here a bit south of the cape are going to be close to record low for this time of year - with our morning low forecast to be around 39 or 40.   

Wind is the only concern, with no real limit number put on it. At Patrick Space Force Base, winds at 9:30 PM are WNW at 23 gusting 36 

That aside the mission name you'll see is 6-87. As I understand it, the numbers describe the place around the Earth where the satellites will be stationed.  The first is the shell number and the second is the satellites' places in that shell. 

Story 2 - New Glenn Rescheduled

New Glenn was rescheduled by Sunday evening, after yesterday afternoon's scrub. The new schedule is tomorrow, Weds., Nov. 12 at 2:50 PM EST.  

Putting 1 and 2 together, it becomes obvious that if New Glenn had launched yesterday, it would have set the record for total launches out of the Cape Canaveral/Kennedy Space Center complex.  It seems like a special kind of ironic for a rocket-type on its second launch ever to set a record like that. Just luck. 

Between its two Falcon launch pads, Launch Complex 39A and Space Launch Complex 40, SpaceX will have launched 88 times after flying the Starlink 6-87 mission, about 95 percent of the launches from Florida’s Space Coast.

Weather scrubs New Glenn launch of EscaPADE to Mars

The passage of the first cold front that will dramatically change our weather has been predicted for a week so it's not much of a surprise but this afternoon's scheduled launch of the second New Glenn flight was scrubbed almost at the end of its two hour launch window this afternoon, due to the violation of the cumulus cloud rule of the weather squadron (pdf warning). The warning about cumulus clouds is intended to prevent flying into or above clouds that could help create a lightning strike. 

This is an unusually cold front and the forecast is for the winds Monday at launch time to be North at 15 gusting to 20, and winds will be a little higher on Tuesday.  The launch is currently scheduled for Wednesday, Nov. 12, at 2:45 PM. 

In the Halloween post about this mission, I mentioned the strange path this mission is taking. Part of the reasoning for that is to test out the concept of using the L2 point as a waiting point. It also can test the ability to put other ships in orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, and perhaps send multiple missions to Mars when we get the shorter flight missions that come roughly two years. 

“ESCAPADE is pursuing a very unusual trajectory in getting to Mars,” said Rob Lillis, the mission’s principal investigator from the University of California, Berkeley. “We’re launching outside the typical Hohmann transfer windows, which occur every 25 or 26 months. We are using a very flexible mission design approach where we go into a loiter orbit around Earth in order to sort of wait until Earth and Mars are lined up correctly in November of next year to go to Mars.”

Currently, Mars is on the opposite side of the sun from Earth - we're closer to the midpoint between Hohmann windows than being near one - which means we're going to launch a couple of probes to Mars at the worst possible time, keep them in an orbit completely unrelated to where they're going and barely relatable to where they're coming from, taking on all the risks of life in deep space.

In the words of the famous meme: This Is Fine. 

But there are several reasons this is perfectly OK to NASA. The New Glenn rocket is overkill for this mission. The two-stage launcher could send many tons of cargo to Mars, but NASA is only asking it to dispatch about a ton of payload, comprising a pair of identical science probes designed to study how the planet’s upper atmosphere interacts with the solar wind. 

But NASA got a good deal from Blue Origin. The space agency is paying Jeff Bezos’ space company about $20 million for the launch, less than it would for a dedicated launch on any other rocket capable of sending the ESCAPADE mission to Mars. In exchange, NASA is accepting a greater than usual chance of a launch failure. This is, after all, just the second flight of the 321-foot-tall (98-meter) New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the US Space Force.

As usual, this is summary of the source article, this time at Ars Technica, called "Here’s how orbital dynamics wizardry helped save NASA’s next Mars mission". It's worth a read for how it describes the way the kidney-bean shaped orbit works; the one around the L2 point published on the Friday before last. 

New Glenn 2 on the way to the pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station back on Oct. 8, 2025. It has been built up a bit more since this photo was taken. (Image credit: Blue Origin)

“ESCAPADE has identified that this is the way that we want to fly, so we launch from Earth onto this kidney bean-shaped orbit,” said Jeff Parker, a mission designer from the Colorado-based company Advanced Space. “So, we can launch on virtually any day. What happens is that kidney bean just grows and shrinks based on how much time you need to spend in that orbit. So, we traverse that kidney bean and at the very end there’s a final little loop-the-loop that brings us down to Earth.”

To tease the article a bit.

The Headline of the Week

I'd be the first person to tell you I have a somewhat strange way of looking at things and a "few sigma" sense of humor - where I use that to mean "far from normal." Telling you that means I think you're going to need to keep it in mind. 

On Thursday, Legal Insurrection blog (one that's not regular or everyday reading but that I visit maybe a couple of times a week) ran a headline story that simply caught my eye, at first, but blossomed into my favorite headline of the week. 

Let me start out the normal way. In reality, this is a sad story. The greenies, in their perpetual dream that they can save the planet from any real or imagined doom, got legislation passed to drug the cows with a medication called Bovaer that somehow reduced the methane the cows produce during digestion. This was a new drug, apparently never widely used before. From the first few words of the article's title you might have figured out the problem.  The drug (or some combination involving the drug) is killing the cattle.

There are now reports that from Denmark of cows collapsing and suffering illness after eating Bovaer, which is now legally required for many farms in Denmark as part of its national climate policy. Some farmers claim their cattle experienced severe symptoms after eating the additive-infused feed, including collapse, lethargy, reduced feed intake, fever, diarrhea, miscarriages, and significant drops in milk production. 

The article isn't very long, and it's another shining example of how when legislatures pass laws to address a problem they apparently never think, "...and then what happens?" The author points out, "Consumers are also alarmed by the introduction of a supplement to animals, with no consideration given to the long-term effects of humans consuming meat and dairy products from animals that eat the additives."

The reason it became my favorite story of the year ties back to that 3-sigma sense of humor. See, it fires off pretty regularly with no thought on my part. This time, my brain grabbed the music and lyrics of a song I grew up listening to 60 years ago, "Big Girls Don't Cry" by a group called The Four Seasons. (Here if you want to listen to it). Instantly, the repeating lyrics went from "Big Girls Don't Cry" to "Dead Cows Can't Fart." Then it became impossible to go more than a couple of hours without thinking of - or even singing it in as close to Frankie Valli's falsetto as I can get. 

From: Big girls doh-on't cry-yi-yi
To: Dead cows cah-an't fa-ar-art

Now that I've passed on the mental virus to you, my work here is done. To quote The Big Guy: thank you for your attention to this matter.

The airline travel slowdown is spreading to launches, too.

As the Federal Government (AKA Schumer) Shutdown goes into its 38th day, the FAA has issued an emergency order that will prohibit rocket launches during daylight hours. Beginning Monday, the FAA said commercial space launches will only be permitted between 10 pm and 6 am local time, when the national airspace is most quiet.

It was fairly widely reported that the FAA ordered commercial airlines to reduce domestic flights from 40 “high impact airports” across the country in a phased approach beginning Today, Friday Nov. 7.

Because Air Traffic Control and the controllers are practically a perfect example of essential workers, they're still at work - which means that they're now working without pay. Until congress can agree on and pass a budget, they'll continue to work without pay.

In a statement explaining the order, the FAA said the air traffic control system is “stressed” due to the shutdown.

“With continued delays and unpredictable staffing shortages, which are driving fatigue, risk is further increasing, and the FAA is concerned with the system’s ability to maintain the current volume of operations,” the regulator said. “Accordingly, the FAA has determined additional mitigation is necessary.”

Two things come to mind immediately. First is that the only launch company in the world that's likely to be affected the most is SpaceX because they launch more than the rest of the world put together. OTOH, they have more flexibility than other launch providers. Most of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket launches deploy their own Starlink Internet satellites.

SpaceX has some flexibility in scheduling Starlink launches because the network, comprising nearly 9,000 active satellites, flies in dozens of orbital planes at different altitudes and inclinations. In the short term, SpaceX could choose to target orbital planes that are reachable at night.

The most important factor in setting the launch time is not surprisingly where they want to launch to. Unlike Starlink Launches, some missions have virtually no flexibility. The second thing to cross my mind was Sunday's New Glenn launch of the EscaPADE probes to Mars, which is an example of that. The launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station must be at 2:45 PM EST.

NASA signed a commercial contract with Blue Origin for this weekend’s launch, making it a commercial mission licensed by the FAA. The space agency saved money by taking this approach instead of going with a more traditional contract with government oversight.

It’s unclear whether NASA could ask for a waiver if the New Glenn launch delays into next week. The situation with the New Glenn launch puts Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who also serves as NASA’s acting administrator, in the unique position of potentially requesting and granting such a waiver.

Submitting a request to yourself and granting it is about as good an example of doing the process just to do the process as you'll find. It happens.

The payload fairing of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, containing NASA’s two Mars-bound science probes. Credit: Blue Origin

It's easy for us to forget that the ground crews are working to prepare the Artemis II mission for its trip to the moon, but they are there.

Ground crews at Kennedy Space Center in Florida have continued working to prepare for the launch of the Artemis II mission NET Feb. 5th, but civil servants and contractors are working without pay. Officials anticipate the shutdown will eventually impact the schedule for Artemis II, which will send astronauts to the vicinity of the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

Chinese Taikonauts getting the ISS/Starliner treatment

Chinese astronauts (referred to as Taikonauts - from the Chinese word for "space" with the Greek suffix "-naut," meaning "traveler") are getting an extended stay at their Tiangong space station like Butch and Sunny got last year on the ISS, although the reason is different. They didn't switch to the Boeing "Stay-liner" to get the longer stay on orbit.  The belief is that their capsule for the return to Earth was hit by some space debris while docked to the station.

The astronauts are part of the Shenzhou 20 mission, which launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on April 24 and arrived at Tiangong after a six-hour orbital chase.

The Shenzhou 20 trio — mission commander Chen Dong, Chen Zhongrui and Wang Jie — were scheduled to depart Tiangong today (Nov. 5), but a suspected impact from a small piece of debris on their spacecraft has called off that departure, according to an online post from China's Manned Spaceflight Agency (CMSA).

The Shenzhou 20 crew was preparing to return to Earth, once the replacement crew arrived - apparently similar to how ISS crews fly up, and they spend a couple of days updating the new crew, transferring knowledge on the latest changes to what the new Shenzhou 21 crew will be working on. 

The China Manned Space Agency, run by the country’s military, announced the change late Tuesday in a brief statement posted to Weibo, the Chinese social media platform. 

“The Shenzhou 20 manned spacecraft is suspected of being impacted by small space debris,” the statement said. “Impact analysis and risk assessment are underway. To ensure the safety and health of the astronauts and the complete success of the mission, it has been decided that the Shenzhou 20 return mission, originally scheduled for November 5, will be postponed.”

The Agency hasn't said what part of the station was damaged, how they decided it was space debris, or how long they expect the "no flight" status for Shenzhou 20’s departure to last.

The Tiangong Space Station - Image credit: China Manned Space Agency

A three launch day

It has been a three launch day and we're waiting for number three, just "up the road" at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Just a reminder that a three launch day is nothing at all like a three dog night.

But let me start at the beginning - that's a very good place to start. 

The first launch was a Rocket Lab mission from their seaside launch facility in New Zealand at 2:51 PM here (EST). 

An Electron rocket carrying the QPS-SAR-14 satellite, nicknamed Yachihoko-I, lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site today at 2:51 p.m. EST (1951 GMT; 8:51 a.m. on Nov. 6. local New Zealand time). 

An SAR is a Synthetic Aperture Radar and is an additional satellite for a constellation being implemented by Japanese company iQPS. 

"This satellite will join the rest of the QPS-SAR constellation in providing high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images and Earth monitoring services globally," Rocket Lab wrote in a mission description. "iQPS aims to build a constellation of 36 SAR satellites that will provide near-real-time images of Earth every 10 minutes."

The second launch was a SpaceX Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Starlink Group 6-81 at 8:30 PM EST.  Like the Rocket Lab launch before it, the payloads were deployed to the intended orbit on time. Unlike the other two launches, the booster landed on Just Read the Instruction for reuse.

The third launch is an Atlas V, launching a ViaSat-3 F2 built by Boeing to become part of ViaSat's constellation. Launch is currently set for 10:24 PM EST. This payload is headed for a geosynchronous orbit. 

The ViaSat-3 constellation is comprised of three Ka-band satellites, each designed to be capable of rapidly shifting capacity throughout its coverage area to deliver bandwidth where and when it’s needed most. Once in service, ViaSat-3 F2 is expected to more than double the bandwidth capacity of Viasat’s entire existing fleet, adding more than 1 Tbps capacity to Viasat’s network over the Americas, with anticipated service entry in early 2026. 

While typing that previous paragraph, the Atlas V went into a countdown hold. It might not make it tonight.

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 Sunday at 2:45PM

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%.  not as good as that Friday forecast. The chances of rain are higher at around 50% but the cloud coverage is lower all day. 

   

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

EDIT NOV. 5 @ 11:00 AM to add: My first visit to Next Spaceflight this morning shows the EscaPADE launch has been pushed back to Sunday, Nov. 9th, the date I've been reporting since early October, this time with a launch time of 2:45PM. 

Chances are Orion is worse than you think

That is, unless you're privy to lots of inside information, Orion is undoubtedly worse than you think.  

Casey Handmer, whom I mentioned a few times on these pages (like here), does a deep dive on the Orion capsule called NASA's Orion Space Capsule is Flaming Garbage.  As you know, Orion is currently being prepared to bring a group of four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, a somewhat inferior version of 1968's Apollo 8 mission, which orbited the moon and famously aired a Christmas Eve broadcast to the world. Apollo 8 orbited the moon 10 times, something Handmer says Orion will never be able to do.

Let's start where Casey starts. Orion is absurdly expensive to build and operate. According to Wikipedia, the Orion program has already burned through over $30 Billion. Yes, with a "B". You might remember that the Orion program has been in development since 2006, originally begun under the Presidency of George W Bush. Coincidentally, I was working on cleaning up this computer a bit and ran into pictures from the first flight of an Orion capsule on the Ares 1-X mission, the first (and only) launch of what was called the Constellation program. To borrow from the Wikipedia article:

The Ares 1-X vehicle used in the test flight was similar in shape, mass, and size to the planned configuration of later Ares 1 vehicles, but had largely dissimilar internal hardware consisting of only one powered stage.

Ignoring the dead end vehicle made from Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster sections, Handmer points out that if SpaceX had started at the same time as the Constellation program, "by expense alone, SpaceX would have shipped Crew Dragon by 2008, before Obama was elected. Going by schedule, even Boeing’s irredeemably broken Starliner capsule would have flown by 2018." Then he adds this statement for more detail in referring to duplicating Apollo 8.

But if all we want to do is fly around the Moon and back, a lightly modified Crew Dragon on Falcon Heavy could have done this at any point since 2020. We could do it today, or tomorrow. It wouldn’t mean very much in the context of the ongoing Chinese land rush, but it could be executed for well under $500m if SpaceX was cooperative – roughly equivalent to a single month of burn on the SLS and Orion programs. That is, for the same budget, we could fly a crew around the Moon every month indefinitely. [bold added - SiG]

While it sounds cool, flying a crew Dragon (with four people) around the moon every month forever for the same cost as Orion doesn't do much for anyone's spaceflight goals. Still, Orion is a barely flown, barely developed vehicle. It has flown exactly once (November of '22) and its life support systems weren't even used on that flight test - there was no crew to need them. Yet Orion has taken four times longer and cost six times more to develop than Crew Dragon. Even that's not a fair comparison, because Crew Dragon today is already a seasoned operational vehicle that has flown many crewed missions, with a functional heatshield that has never shown any of the kinds of problems Orion's did.

When you factor in the way Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy has been saying that Artemis and NASA are behind schedule because SpaceX hasn't finished the Human Landing System it's worth pointing out, as Handmer says:

Unlike SLS and Orion, which might one day manage to repeat a mission we first flew almost sixty years ago and which commercial providers could do for 1% of the cost this year, the HLS program is doing the hard part (actually landing on the Moon and then flying back) with less than $3b and has been in active development only since 2021.

At one time or another, Boeing and Lockheed seem to have hired every former senior NASA official who is still alive and who is for sale to try and sell Congress and the public on their version of reality. Telling your story is important, but it helps to have an actual story to point to, not just the ashes of $100b of private money and a system that’s still too dangerous and too slow to ever use.

A name you may have noticed joining in on the effort sell Orion and lobby against SpaceX may be familiar: Jim Bridenstine, former NASA Administrator and now a lobbyist for Boeing. Bridenstine did his job and pushed how Orion and SLS are just so superior to landing in the HLS, getting backed by the New York Times. Casey Handmer put this graphic together to put raw numbers in front of all the faces who need to know.

This isn't wrong so much as it isn't the full picture and Handmer points that out. In the upper right, that $31.6 billion cost doesn't include the SLS. Orion and SLS have burned through nearly $100b - so far.

As I always say, "it's not that bad. It's worse." Despite the $100 billion, the SLS rocket and the Orion capsule can't get to the moon. Orion is too heavy. Payloads are too small. These things have been known for a long time.  Here’s 434 pages of NASA talking around the subject last year without getting anywhere. Remember the talk about the lunar space station called the Lunar Gateway? That was originally done to come up with a way to get a system able to get to the moon without looking like complete and utter morons by throwing away everything they've done so far. They could dress it up with all sorts of fancy names, add new things like The Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit and more.

Casey Handmer's presentation is very readable, and very (Very) long. Using my "Print to PDF" option results in a copy to read from that's 63 pages long. I tried to get some good top level stuff here to pique your interest, but I'm not sure I'm doing it any justice.

SpaceX launches first mission for Vast this morning

Only morning in the fullest definition of the word; for most of us it was "zero dark thirty" or "middle of the freakin' night!" It was 1:09 a.m. EDT (0509 GMT). Yes, I slept through it and watched the NASA Spaceflight replay on YouTube this morning. That video should start at about t-30 seconds, and I paid attention until the booster landed on the Cape at Landing Zone 2, amid speculation that might be the last landing there will be on LZ-2. That was at 7:35 on the onscreen timer (minutes and seconds since liftoff).

The mission was one of their Bandwagon ride share flights, and was carrying the Haven Demo payload for the private space station company Vast. 

"The first step in our iterative approach towards building next-generation space stations, Haven Demo will test critical systems for Haven-1, including propulsion, flight computers and navigation software," Vast wrote in a description of the satellite.

Vast's Haven-1 will launch to low Earth orbit (LEO) atop a Falcon 9, perhaps as soon as the second quarter of 2026. If that schedule holds, Haven-1 — which can support up to four astronauts at a time — will be the first standalone private space station in human history.

The other 17 payloads on this mission are naturally for other customers: South Korea's Agency for Defense Development (ADD), the Berlin-based company Exolaunch, Turkey's Fergani Space, the weather-forecasting outfit Tomorrow Companies and Starcloud, which aims to build data centers in space.

As you'd guess from the mission name, Bandwagon-4 was the fourth mission in SpaceX's Bandwagon series to lift off. The company also operates another rideshare program called Transporter. The Transporter platform provides launches to sun-synchronous orbits, which are polar orbits that go over the same places on Earth at the same time every day so that the angle of sun and lighting is the same every day - but not every customer wants to launch to an SSO. It should be mentioned that the term polar orbit doesn't require the satellite go precisely over the north and south poles; deviations to 20 or 30 degrees are acceptable.  Enter bandwagon, which flies to the second most requested orbit, at inclinations of up to approximately 45 degrees and satellites at altitudes of 550 to 605 kilometers. 

There have been 14 Transporter rideshare missions, so clearly more popular than the Bandwagon series, which had its first flight on April 7, 2024. The Transporter-1 mission was January 24, 2021. It was an ambitious rideshare mission as one of SpaceX's veteran Falcon 9 boosters hoisted 143 small satellites — a new record for a single rocket

The most important question you can ask yourself

At some point, whether you're involved in big discussions in your job, or your life, or just contemplating things like the stuff you hear about big news events, like global warming, comet 3I-Atlas or anything you have to ask the big question.  It's a question that's hardly ever asked, which is a shame because it's important everywhere and for all time.

How do you know what you think you know? I assume if you're reading stuff like this you've heard the old line that "when you assume something you make an ass out of you and me." Considering how few people want to be made an ass of, there sure is a lot assuming going on. 

In even the "hardest hard sciences" there are stacked assumptions that aren't obvious to the vast majority of us. How do we know the speed of light? We can (and do) measure that. That can be done in a well-equipped laboratory. How do we know the distances to nearby stars, those within "a few" light years? That's more complex but let me jump around that to something that's more fundamental. How do we know how far away another galaxy is? The technique is based on the observation that certain stars vary in brightness over time in such a predictable way that the maximum brightness they will show is the same absolute brightness (in astronomy that's called the star's magnitude). That's saying if you had a sample of those stars, they're all the same magnitude when they're at their brightest. Since the decrease in brightness with distance is constant, the period of the star tells you how bright the light was when it left there and the magnitude at our observatories tells you how much brightness made it here, which tells you the distance. 

The assumption buried in there is the laws of nature are the same everywhere, and that's perhaps the biggest assumption there can be. I'm not saying those laws aren't absolutely the same, I'm saying we have no way of knowing that because we can only measure them in this neighborhood. We assume they're the same because it's convenient. There's nothing we could say to answer so many fundamental questions people have. For example, we constantly see things like how far to some galaxy or the size of the universe or all kinds of things. If those laws aren't absolutely the same all of those headlines are meaningless. 

Since I did the well-received post about Comet 3I-Atlas last Monday (Oct. 27), let me drag out a point or two from that. One of the arguments about this one is that it has abnormally large amounts of nickel in it, compared to the iron/nickel (Fe/Ni) ratios we're used to. They're saying because it's a comet, every comet should have the same Fe/Ni ratio or it has been changed by some sort of intelligent process. That's assuming every star system everywhere has the exact same elements in the exact same proportions and I see no reason to expect that. Same elements? They're the only ones we know that exist. Same proportions depends on too many factors. High nickel space rocks exist and are often the source of the biggest deposits of the metal here on Earth. But they bounce around in space, some hitting the planets, some never hitting one. The amount of any mineral should vary.

A topic I've seen talked about since I was about 15 is the red giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion going Supernova "any day now." Since I'm not sure of when I first read nervous stories about this happening, I'll just say it was in 1970 as a "close enough" disclaimer. Close enough to say the star going supernova has been "any day now" for nearly 56 years. 

The main thing I remember from reading about Betelgeuse going supernova back then, is that it would be such an incredible disaster there'd be horrible things happening all over Earth. I don't know anything about this girl's videos (TheSpaceChick on this story) but it's the best thing I've bothered to watch. I've seen people talking about this happening on some very specific date in something like next March. SpaceChick's version is the astronomical community says it could blow somewhere between 100,000 and a million years, which in cosmic terms is like tomorrow, while in human time it's more like never.

Without going too far down the global warming/climate cataclysm road, that stuff is based on so many models with entirely PFA (Pulled From Ass) justifications that it's nearly impossible to summarize. 

If there's any takeaway from this it's to be aware that even the best "hard science" has many assumptions tied to it. The best thing to talk about are things that can be measured accurately in a small lab. If you can do it yourself on equipment you trust, all the better. Want to measure the speed of light? You need a bright light, a long distance and spinning octagonal mirrors. 

Image from: https://image.slideserve.com/257821/speed-of-light14-l.jpg

New Glenn Looks to be ready for second mission

The path to the next and second ever launch of a New Glenn mission got a lot closer to completion last night with the successful static firing of the ships main engines at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station here in Central Florida.  

Standing on a seaside launch pad, the New Glenn rocket ignited its seven BE-4 main engines at 9:59 pm EDT Thursday (01:59 UTC Friday). The engines burned for 38 seconds while the rocket remained firmly on the ground, according to a social media post by Blue Origin.

The hold-down firing of the first stage engines was the final major test of the New Glenn rocket before launch day.

Since early October, we've known the earliest launch window to be Sunday November 9th, with no time given, but the launch window runs until the 11th, so just two days. It will be worthwhile keeping an eye on the mission's NextSpaceflight page to see what launch time gets posted. Meanwhile we know the 9th is only a week away and this booster has been rolled back to its nearby hangar to have the two ESCAPADE satellites mounted and be readied for launch. 

“Love seeing New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines come alive! Congratulations to Team Blue on today’s hotfire,” the company’s CEO, Dave Limp, posted on X.

Blue Origin reported that the engines operated at full power for 22 seconds, generating nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust. CEO Limp went on to say:

We extended the hotfire duration this time to simulate the landing burn sequence by shutting down the non-gimballed engines after ramping down to 50 percent thrust, then shutting down the outboard gimballed engines while ramping the center engine to 80 percent thrust. This helps us understand fluid interactions between active and inactive engine feedlines during landing. 

While it seems like a higher stakes gamble than the typical new rocket launch, Blue expects to recover this booster for reuse and re-fly it "early next year" to launch their first Blue Moon lunar lander to the Moon. If the landing and recovery should not be achieved, as happened on the first New Glenn mission, there isn't a "next New Glenn" available. That means the Blue Moon lander mission will have to wait while a new one is built and tested. 

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket fires up its seven BE-4 engines Thursday night. Credit: Blue Origin

Ars reporter Stephen Clark points out that NASA is getting a good deal and this flight is mutually beneficial for both NASA and Blue.

The space agency is paying Bezos’ company $20 million for the launch, millions less than a dedicated launch on another rocket. But there’s a trade-off. NASA is accepting more risk on this mission because it’s just the second flight of the New Glenn rocket, which hasn’t yet been certified by NASA or the US Space Force for high-priority government launches.

Officials are fine with that because ESCAPADE is part of a new family of relatively low-cost Solar System missions. The mission’s total cost amounts to less than $80 million, an order of magnitude lower than all of NASA’s recent Mars missions. At this cost, NASA managers can live with a little more risk than they would for an $800 million mission.

The strangest part of this mission, though, is in the details Clark provides. 

 Normally, Mars missions can launch from the Earth for only a few weeks about once every 26 months, when the planets are in the right position for a spacecraft to make a direct trip. ESCAPADE is launching outside of the normal Mars interplanetary window, so the twin probes will loiter relatively close to the Earth until next November, when they will fire their engines to set off for the red planet.

"Relatively close" means in a Sun-Earth L2 orbit, detailed at that link at the end of the previous paragraph. The Mission Design webpage says this will be the first mission ever to harness the Sun-Earth L2 orbit en route to Mars. That L2 point is what the James Webb Space Telescope is orbiting.

EDIT Nov. 4, 2025 @ 10:00 AM to add: This morning's news brings a date and time for the launch: NET Friday, Nov. 7 at 2:51 PM EST.  

SpaceX starting down a new design path for Lunar Landing

Back on Monday, Oct. 20, acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy reset the schedule for the Artemis program and return to the moon. The essence of the message was "everyone's taking too long! Everything's too expensive! I want new bids for a new lunar lander on my desk ASAP!" By the next day, Elon Musk had referred to Duffy as "Sean Dummy" and had said, “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry. Moreover, Starship will end up doing the whole Moon mission. Mark my words.”

Today, SpaceX let out some information on what they've been looking into. 

On Thursday (Oct. 30), the company posted an update called "To the Moon and Beyond," which summarizes the progress that SpaceX has made with Starship to date and lays out the vehicle's potential to make NASA's lunar ambitions a reality.

"Starship provides unmatched capability to explore the moon, thanks to its large size and ability to refill propellant in space," the blog post reads. "One single Starship has a pressurized habitable volume of more than 600 cubic meters, which is roughly two-thirds the pressurized volume of the entire International Space Station, and is complete with a cabin that can be scaled for large numbers of explorers and dual airlocks for surface exploration."

I knew a Starship was big, but one ship having 2/3 of the volume under pressure of the entire ISS is mind-blowing. And they're going to use that just to put four astronauts on the moon? Yes, and that's not all. But in the update, SpaceX showed a rendering of just how much room is available in Starship:

Artist's rendering of the cabin of SpaceX's Starship vehicle during an Artemis moon mission for NASA. (Image credit: SpaceX)

I don't believe I've ever read about an astronaut saying their capsule was too big and empty inside. I guess I never heard them saying it was too small, either, but nobody ever said it was so big and empty that it was creepy.

In the update, SpaceX announced they were working on two parallel design paths for Starship: the core Starship and a moon-lander upper stage exclusively for Artemis. 

SpaceX is self-funding the core path, and its contract for the Artemis lander is of the fixed-price variety, "ensuring that the company is only paid after the successful completion of progress milestones, and American taxpayers are not on the hook for increased SpaceX costs," the company wrote. 

In the "To the Moon and Beyond" update, SpaceX said they have already completed 49 of the milestones for the Artemis lander, including testing of micrometeoroid and space debris shielding as well as "lunar environmental control and life support and thermal control" systems. The company plans to make even more progress soon, sending a Starship upper stage to Earth orbit and completing an in-space fueling test with the vehicle in 2026, if all goes to plan.

Scott Manley has a YouTube short on this subject which is definitely worth the 80 seconds to watch. In it, Scott mentions that many have been recommending that SpaceX go over to much shorter version of Starship, and I've seen mentions of that as a way to minimize the amount of fuel they'd have to transfer to the lander. That has such a large impact on the difficulty and cost of the mission that I wouldn't be very surprised if the next time the give us something like this update that the Human Landing System of Starship instead of having 2/3 the volume of the ISS had something smaller like maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of the volume of the ISS. Maybe that's the "a moon-lander upper stage exclusively for Artemis" mentioned as their second parallel design path.