Blue Origin pauses - or ends - their suborbital tourism flights

Let me rephrase that a little. Blue Origin officially “paused” its New Shepard program for the next two years, but that's being interpreted as a move that likely signals a permanent end to the suborbital space tourism initiative. 

The small rocket and capsule have been flying since April 2015 and have combined to make 38 launches, all but one of which were successful, and 36 landings. In its existence, the New Shepard program flew 98 people to space, however briefly, and launched more than 200 scientific and research payloads into the microgravity environment.

I'd wager that, like me, the early New Shepard flights were the first time you had heard of Blue Origin and the first time you had seen boosters land for reuse. 

So why is this over 25 year-old company, which has been flying these missions for over a decade, ending this flagship program? They're feeling the pressure to perform for the moon landing program, Artemis, and they don't want anything to distract that effort. 

“We will redirect our people and resources toward further acceleration of our human lunar capabilities inclusive of New Glenn,” wrote the company’s chief executive, Dave Limp, in an internal email on Friday afternoon. “We have an extraordinary opportunity to be a part of our nation’s goal of returning to the Moon and establishing a permanent, sustained lunar presence.”

The cancellation came, generally, as a surprise to Blue Origin employees. The company flew its most recent mission eight days ago, launching six people into space. Moreover, the company has four new boosters in various stages of development as well as two new capsules under construction. Blue Origin has been selling human flights for more than a year and is still commanding a per-seat price of approximately $1 million based on recent sales. It was talking about expansion to new spaceports in September.

There's also the not-so-small consideration that even with price around $1 million per seat, there are persistent reports the costs per mission are more than the price of admission can bring in.  There's at least 500 people on the staff at Blue Origin who work on New Shepard flight. They're looking for people for positions both on New Glenn and their other big ticket, NASA programs. 

Look, Blue has gotten lots of criticism for how long it has taken to get New Glenn flying. This is a good way to get experienced employees with a big head start onto those big programs. The only cost is that people like Katy Perry will have to wait longer to get into space. If they actually start flying New Shepard again.

Blue Origin's New Shepard launches its second human spaceflight from West Texas, Oct. 13, 2021. Credit: Blue Origin

NASA moves Artemis II static test to

Nothing is quite as vivid a reminder that the earliest possible launch date for Artemis II is near as realizing that the checkout of the Artemis II SLS launch vehicle is nearly to complete and going into the final tests before launch. 

The rocket's last major hurdle before launch is the SLS wet dress rehearsal, and this week NASA moved that test forward to Saturday, January 31. The previous schedule was "no later than February 2nd." 

If the vehicle passes that test, and the smoother the test goes, the more likely it becomes that Artemis II launches Friday night, in the two hour launch window of 9:41 to 11:41 PM. 

"Engineers have remained on track or ahead of schedule as they work through planned activities at the launch pad and are getting ready to conduct a wet dress rehearsal, leading up to a simulated 'launch,'" the agency wrote in an update on Monday (Jan. 26).
...
The upcoming wet dress rehearsal will officially kick off about two full days ahead of its simulated T-0 liftoff time, as launch teams begin tending their stations. The most critical portion of the test will take place on Saturday, when cryogenic fuel loading of the rocket's two main stages will commence. In total, SLS will take on more than 700,000 gallons (2,650,000 liters) of cryogenic propellant and weigh approximately 5.75 million pounds (about 2.6 million kilograms) once fully fueled.

The goal will be to run the SLS mission clock down to T-33 seconds, the point at which the rocket's computer would take over system monitoring during an actual launch attempt. If all goes according to plan, after SLS' T-33 second countdown hold, mission operators will reset the simulated clock to T-10 minutes and run it down a second time, to T-30 seconds.

NASA plans to put SLS and ground teams through their paces during the test, with several "runs" during the T-10 minute terminal count period to assess operating procedures for holding, resuming and recycling the mission clock, according to the agency's update.

NOTE: Stating the start time of the test as "two full days ahead of its simulated" liftoff time means tonight, Jan. 29. at 9:41 PM Eastern. 

The Artemis I wet dress rehearsal was plagued by fuel leaks - I remember asking rhetorically if NASA had forgotten everything about working with liquid hydrogen. Aside from the fueling leaks there were other issues that forced SLS to be rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) three times for repairs. NASA officials have voiced confidence that they have solved those issues, but even a perfect wet dress rehearsal may not result in a Feb. 6 launch. I think we can confidently say that if they have to roll the SLS back to the VAB at all, even once, Feb. 6th is out. 

NASA has published the same sort of calendar of acceptable launch days for this launch as they did for Artemis I. Note that there are only 5 days available per month - except for April, which seems to have pulled a day out of May. 

Since the vast majority of you readers aren't here near the KSC, I'm betting you aren't aware that our weather forecasts for this weekend are not just record-breaking, they're pretty much completely record shattering. Granted this forecast is a few days in advance, our overnight low temperature forecast, 40-ish miles south of Pad 39B is that Sunday morning will be 25. The existing record low for February 1 is 32 degrees. Monday morning's forecast of 30 is lower than the February 2nd record of 33. About the accuracy of the forecasts, I feel I should point out for both yesterday and today, the forecast low was 40 degrees but the actual temperature was 36. 

The point of this side note is that the SLS has components that can be affected by these unusually low temperatures. NASA says they've taken preliminary steps to safeguard the rocket from the inclement weather. The big picture is that if the launch actually goes Friday night in that launch window, the temperatures appear to be in the range of 50 +/- "a few". 

That out of the way, while missions can always be changed or aborted, the broad brush look at the mission is that it will last 10 days. It will spend time in Earth orbit to verify important systems that haven't been tested yet, like the crew's air supply, before doing its translunar orbit injection. The published look at the mission has been tweaked a bit to look like this:

Not visible in this is that in the lunar space, it could be a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO) that is something core to the Artemis approach to getting to the moon. It's not mentioned here. That NRHO could take the four astronauts farther from Earth than any human has ever been - depending on launch time and how well the mission unfolds.

A major difference between this mission and Apollo 8, for example, this is a trajectory that can't allow Artemis II to go into orbit around the moon - it's called a free-return trajectory. 

The main purpose of the mission, though, is to thoroughly check out the Artemis hardware and verify it can do everything required for the lunar landing mission, Artemis III, currently estimated to be in 2028. 

Never mind 

That didn't take long.  This morning, Jan. 30, NASA broke the headline that they're pushing the final, tanking portion of the test to Monday, Feb. 2, in contradiction to the statement earlier in the week that they were taking steps to ensure the test would be safe with the low temperatures over the weekend.

That means the first potential opportunity to launch is no earlier than Sunday, Feb. 8.

Edited to add this 1/30 at 1155 AM EST

About that December Japanese H3 mission failure

It was practically a side note that there was a launch three days before Christmas of the Japanese H3 rocket carrying a navigation satellite, and the mission failed. This was the seventh flight of an H3, and the second failure - the first launch was the other failure.

Ordinarily, when a mission fails the inevitable failure analysis gets carried out and we learn a bit more about what happened. In this case, the day after the launch we got this feedback.

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

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

Here we are just over a month since the failed mission and a new release from JAXA sounds a bit different from the stated, "...the second stage engine’s second ignition failed to start normally and shut down prematurely." As Ars Technica's Stephen Clark put it, “Japan’s H3 rocket found a new way to fail last month, apparently eluding the imaginations of its own designers and engineers.”

Even with all the photos and video captures they have, it isn't entirely clear what happened. The "big picture" set up will be familiar to you if you've watched lots of mission videos. In most launches we can watch, if there's a payload fairing, it stays on until the rocket is well above the thickest part of the atmosphere, well beyond "Max Q" or the highest dynamic pressures on the rocket that come from a combination of air density and speed. Some vehicles seem to drop the booster and start the second (or upper) stage engine(s) before they drop the fairings while others will drop the fairings before Main Engine Cut Off (MECO). 

Some of the material is difficult to grasp for a non-Japanese speaker unfamiliar with the subtle intricacies of the H3 rocket’s design. What is clear is that something went wrong when the rocket released its payload shroud. Video beamed back from the rocket’s onboard cameras showed a shower of debris surrounding the satellite, which started wobbling and leaning in the moments after fairing separation. Sensors also detected sudden accelerations around the attachment point connecting the spacecraft with the top of the H3 rocket.
...
The jolt from staging dislodged the satellite from its mooring atop the rocket. Then, the second stage lit its engine and left the satellite in the dust. A rear-facing camera on the upper stage captured a fleeting view of the satellite falling back to Earth. In the briefing package, Japanese space officials wrote that Michibiki 5 fell into the Pacific Ocean in the same impact zone as the H3’s first stage.

Whatever caused the satellite to break free of the rocket damaged more than its attach fitting. Telemetry data downlinked from the H3 showed a pressure drop in the second stage’s liquid hydrogen tank after separation of the payload fairing.

“A decrease in LH2 tank pressure was confirmed almost simultaneously,” officials wrote. A pressurization valve continued to open to restore pressure to the tank, but the pressure did not recover. “It is highly likely that the satellite mounting structure was damaged due to some factor, and as a result, the pressurization piping was damaged.”

In this day of computer assisted drawing and image generation, JAXA presented this stunningly realistic rendering of the damage to the satellite's mounting structure as the payload (blue block on the right) breaks away and starts to fall back to Earth. 

Japan's space agency provided this illustration of what happened, just in case you couldn't visualize it. Credit: JAXA

I really need to work on being less sarcastic.

Whatever caused the satellite to break away led to immediate damage to the upper stage liquid hydrogen fuel tank. Telemetry from the upper stage showed an immediate drop in pressure. A system on board that's supposed to help re-pressurize the second stage turned on but had no effect, indicating damage as shown in the above CAD rendering. 

Even with this damage, the second stage engine lost 20 percent of its thrust, but it fired long enough to put the rocket into a low-altitude orbit. The orbit was too low to sustain so the second stage reentered the atmosphere and burned up within a couple of hours. 

Technicians mount the H3 rocket’s payload fairing, containing the Michibiki 5 satellite, on top of the launcher’s second stage. Credit: JAXA

JAXA must complete the latest H3 failure investigation in the coming months to clear the rocket to launch the nation’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission in a narrow planetary launch window that opens in October. MMX is an exciting robotic mission to land on and retrieve samples from the Martian moon Phobos for return to Earth. MMX’s launch was previously set for 2024, but Japan’s space agency delayed it to this year due to earlier problems with the H3 rocket.

Artemis planners have a suit of problems

Notice I didn't say a suite - a group of related problems. I said suit of problems in reference to the lunar EVA suits they'll be wearing. Somewhere in the list of problems they're working through is that some observers are going to say, "why were suits not a problem for Apollo over 50 years ago but we have problems with them now?" The answers there get into the differences between Apollo's focus on "doing everything we can to ensure we can put a couple of guys on the moon for a couple of days to do what they can do" and Artemis' realization that no matter what Apollo did or accomplished, they have to somehow do more to make it look better for people that aren't paying as much attention as, say, YOU are paying. 

We've been tracking the work on the Artemis suits since they were first getting mentioned and through the development. Monday, we get a report from Ars Technica on the suits Axiom built and they're testing now.  According to former astronaut Kate Rubins who left the agency last year but is involved with testing and evaluating the new suits, “I don’t think they’re great right now.”

Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA’s Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to do more than the first Moonwalkers did more than 50 years ago.

The Moonwalking experience will amount to an “extreme physical event” for crews selected for the Artemis program’s first lunar landings, a former NASA astronaut told a panel of researchers, physicians, and engineers convened by the National Academies. 

Kate Rubins attended a conference at The National Academies of Science last Tuesday through Thursday and outlined the concerns NASA officials often talk about: radiation exposure, muscle and bone atrophy, reduced cardiovascular and immune function, and other adverse medical effects of spaceflight.

It's widely quoted that there has been a continuous presence of humans in space for decades thanks to the International Space Station - with the implication that being in space isn't a big deal anymore. The important exception is that the lunar environment is not that of the ISS. It's harsher. Probably the most important of those is that the Moon is outside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere for half of the lunar month. Lunar dust is pervasive, and will get into lander. Probably the only thing that could be helpful is the Moon's partial gravity, about one-sixth as strong as the pull we feel on Earth. 

Rubins is a veteran of two long-duration spaceflights on the International Space Station, logging 300 days in space and conducting four spacewalks totaling nearly 27 hours. She is also an accomplished microbiologist and became the first person to sequence DNA in space. 

“What I think we have on the Moon that we don’t really have on the space station that I want people to recognize is an extreme physical stress,” Rubins said. “On the space station, most of the time you’re floating around. You’re pretty happy. It’s very relaxed. You can do exercise. Every now and then, you do an EVA (Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk).”

“When we get to the lunar surface, people are going to be sleep shifting,” Rubins said. “They’re barely going to get any sleep. They’re going to be in these suits for eight or nine hours. They’re going to be doing EVAs every day. The EVAs that I did on my flights, it was like doing a marathon and then doing another marathon when you were done.” 

They'll be in these suits eight or nine hours? Per day? How much do those suits weigh?

Including a life-support backpack, the commercial suit weighs more than 300 pounds in Earth’s gravity, but Axiom considers the exact number proprietary. The Axiom suit is considerably heavier than the 185-pound spacesuit the Apollo astronauts wore on the Moon. NASA’s earlier prototype exploration spacesuit was estimated to weigh more than 400 pounds, according to a 2021 report by NASA’s inspector general.

“We’ve definitely seen trauma from the suits, from the actual EVA suit accommodation,” said Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut and medical doctor. “That’s everything from skin abrasions to joint pain to—no kidding—orthopedic trauma. You can potentially get a fracture of sorts. EVAs on the lunar surface with a heavily loaded suit and heavy loads that you’re either carrying or tools that you’re reacting against, that’s an issue.”

Note: When you see numbers like 300 pounds for these Axiom suits or 185 for the Apollo era suits, divide those by six to estimate what they'll feel like on the moon (100 or 33.8 lb.s) and remember that only applies when lifting the suit in lunar gravity. In the low G (or zero G) environments, the mass feels like the full number (300 or 185) when it's the inertia being felt while moving the weight. That's something they "have to get used to." - SiG 

When comparing specifications, the Axiom suits come across as more capable than the Apollo suits that are 120 lbs lighter. They can support longer spacewalks and provide greater redundancy, and they’re made of modern materials to enhance flexibility and crew comfort. But the longer space (moon) walks are because they have more storage to use, needed because they’re bringing essentials – air, water, waste storage room with them. On the moon they’ll be a slog, Rubins said.

Never forget RA Heinlein’s observation, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, or TANSTAAFL. The Axiom suits fly in the face of what astronauts using the Apollo suits concluded – to quote one of them, Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who spent 22 hours walking on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972 said. “I’d have that go about four times the mobility, at least four times the mobility, and half the weight,” and if he didn’t say that word directly, it’s pure TANSTAAFL.

“Now, one way you can… reduce the weight is carry less consumables and learn to use consumables that you have in some other vehicle, like a lunar rover. Any time you’re on the rover, you hook into those consumables and live off of those, and then when you get off, you live off of what’s in your backpack. We, of course, just had the consumables in our backpack.”

It’s worth pointing out that the first landing (currently NET 2028) will not have a rover. At present, that’s not expected to go to the moon until “sometime in the 2030s.” That seems to mean they have to live with the 300 lb suits.

“I do crossfit. I do triathlons. I do marathons. I get out of a session in the pool in the NBL (Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory) doing the lunar suit underwater, and I just want to go home and take a nap,” Rubins told the panel. “I am absolutely spent. You’re bruised. This is an extreme physical event in a way that the space station is not.”

The new suits are better than the Apollo suits in some motions – mostly those that are improved by the new joints. That doesn’t include recovering from a fall onto the lunar surface by yourself.

“You’re face down on the lunar surface, and you have to do the most massive, powerful push up to launch you and the entire mass of the suit up off the surface, high enough so you can then flip your legs under you and catch the ground,” Rubins said. “You basically have to kind of do a jumping pushup… This is a risky maneuver we test a whole bunch in training. It’s really non-trivial.”

NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara kneels down to pick up a rock during testing of Axiom's lunar spacesuit inside NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston on September 24, 2025. Credit: NASA

Yes, this is the story I mentioned Monday and said it was too long and involved to get it done in the time I had.  There's more at the Ars Technica source that ended up getting cut, including some meaty aspects of the story and what has been going on. When I try to mentally balance the state where they appear to be and what appear to be possible directions they could go, I keep coming back to that first Axiom story I linked to being nearly four years ago. Is there enough time to do anything beyond simple band-aids?

Well, this is a new one...

I started trying to summarize, shorten and link to a good space-related story tonight and I couldn't do it. The source is so long and so involved that I didn't have enough time to summarize it.  I'll try to work at that tomorrow. 

Small Space News Story Roundup 76

There seems to be at least a few stories around indicating that 2026 isn't off to a good start in the space industry. 

Rocket Lab's Neutron slips after test failure

Rocket lab has been developing the Neutron for a few years and had been talking about a first launch early this year, when they announced a schedule slip to this summer back in mid-November ('25). During tests on Jan. 21 (Wednesday), they suffered a structural failure of the Neutron’s Stage 1 tank during a hydrostatic pressure test. “There was no significant damage to the test structure or facilities,” Rocket Lab reported. They haven't directly addressed schedule impacts, understandable considering the limited time to examine the damaged tank, when this report first showed up online. 

The Neutron rocket is designed to catapult Rocket Lab into more direct competition with legacy rocket companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. “The next Stage 1 tank is already in production, and Neutron’s development campaign continues,” the company said. Setbacks like this one are to be expected during the development of new rockets. Rocket Lab has publicized aggressive, or aspirational, launch schedules for the first Neutron rocket, so it’s likely the company will hang onto its projection of a debut launch in 2026, at least for now.

The Neutron rocket’s Stage 1 tank. Image credit: Rocket Lab

It was a bad day for Chinese Rockets

January 16, to be specific. They lost two vehicles on the same day.  

The first loss was a failure of a Long March 3B booster, a rocket that has worked up a good number of successful launches. 

The first of the two failures involved the attempted launch of a Shijian military satellite aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang launch base in southwestern China. The Shijian 32 satellite was likely heading for a geostationary transfer orbit, but a failure of the Long March 3B’s third stage doomed the mission. The Long March 3B is one of China’s most-flown rockets, and this was the first failure of a Long March 3-series vehicle since 2020, ending a streak of 50 consecutive successful flights of the rocket. 

And then… Less than 12 hours later, another Chinese rocket failed on its climb to orbit. This launch, using a Ceres-2 rocket, originated from the Jiuquan space center in northwestern China. It was the first flight of the Ceres-2, a larger variant of the light-class Ceres-1 rocket developed and operated by a Chinese commercial startup named Galactic Energy. Chinese officials did not disclose the payloads lost on the Ceres-2 rocket.

Isar Aerospace stands down from their next test flight

You might not remember their name but you probably remember their March 30th (2025) 40-second first test flight from Andøya Spaceport in Norway that ended up crashing into the water alongside the launch complex.

They had been preparing for January 21st launch of the Spectrum rocket, when a technical issue surfaced and they scrubbed.  

Hours before the launch window was set to open, the German company said that it was addressing “an issue with a pressurization valve.” A valve issue was one of the factors that caused a Spectrum to crash moments after liftoff on Isar’s first test flight last year. “The teams are currently assessing the next possible launch opportunities and a new target date will be announced shortly,” the company wrote in a post on its website. 

The Spectrum rocket is in the one metric ton payload class, or 2200 lbs to Low Earth Orbit. About twice the payload of a Rocket Lab Electron, but well short of the Neutron or Falcon 9.

Europe’s satellite industry is looking for more competition for the Ariane 6 and Vega C rockets developed by ArianeGroup and Avio, and Isar Aerospace appears to be best positioned to become a new entrant in the European launch market. “I’m well aware that it would be really good for us Europeans to get this one right,” said Daniel Metzler, Isar’s co-founder and CEO. 

What? Two Blue Origin headlines in one week?

I suppose it might have happened here before but I'm not sure how to navigate the search engines to show that.

This Wednesday (Jan. 21) the story was Blue Origin's satellite megaconstellation called TeraWave. Today's story is about Blue's pursuit of reusability. Blue confirmed on Thursday that they will reuse the New Glenn booster used on flight two back on November 13th No Earlier Than late February. It will be launching the next-generation Block 2 BlueBird satellite for AST SpaceMobile.

“The mission follows the successful NG-2 mission, which included the landing of the ‘Never Tell Me The Odds’ booster. The same booster is being refurbished to power NG-3.”  

That November 13th NG-2 mission was 10 weeks ago. Let's assume they launch NG-3 on February 28th, just to get a number to play with - that's five weeks from today, making a 15 week turnaround from first flight of the booster to its second. If the launch is two weeks later, mid-March, it's still only 17 weeks for the turnaround time. 

A direct comparison to SpaceX is difficult, partly because Blue Origin is working in an aspect of reusability that SpaceX didn't have for their first successful booster recovery. Essentially, Blue Origin is learning things about reusability that didn't exist for SpaceX. Nobody had the experiences they learned from.

By way of comparison, SpaceX did not attempt to refly the first Falcon 9 booster it landed in December 2015. Instead, initial tests revealed that the vehicle’s interior had been somewhat torn up. It was scrapped and inspected closely so that engineers could learn from the wear and tear. 

SpaceX successfully landed its second Falcon 9 booster in April 2016, on the 23rd overall flight of the Falcon 9 fleet. This booster was refurbished and, after a lengthy series of inspections, it was reflown successfully in March 2017, nearly 11 months later.

It's pretty ballsy. Blue Origin is looking to launch a booster on just the third overall flight of a New Glenn and will turn the rocket around in less than four months. Blue Origin is not a newbie startup - they've existed since 2000 and started launching their New Shepard suborbital flights in 2015. They're well-funded and have access to more information than any other company has had. 

Blue Origin originally planned to launch its MK1 lunar lander on the third flight of New Glenn, but it pivoted to a commercial launch as the lunar vehicle continues preparatory work.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it had completed the integration of the MK1 vehicle and put it on a barge bound for Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, it will undergo vacuum chamber testing before a launch later this spring—or, more likely, sometime this summer.

Artist's concept drawing of two Block 2 BlueBird satellites for AST Space Mobile. The satellites will provide direct-to-cell connectivity. Credit: AST SpaceMobile

America's Worst Week in Spaceflight - An Annual Remembrance

NASA had their annual day of Remembrance yesterday:  Thursday, Jan 22. I usually run my annual remembrance post during the actual week, but I'll follow their example rather than my own tradition and bring the remembrance forward.

It's an oddity of US Space travel that every mission which ended in loss of crew and vehicle occurred in less than one calendar week - six days, although those accidents span 36 years. That week is January 27th through February 1st; while the years run from 1967 through 2003.

January 27, 1967 was the hellish demise of Apollo 1 and her crew, Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White, during a pad test, not a flight.  In that article, Ars Technica interviews key men associated with the mission.  In the intervening years, I've heard speculation that we never would have made it to the moon without something to shake out a bit of the NASA management idiocy, but that may just be people logically justifying their opinions.  Like this quote from Chris Kraft, one of the giants of NASA in the '60s. 

There was plenty of blame to go around—for North American [they built the Apollo capsule - SiG], for flight control in Houston, for technicians at Cape Canaveral, for Washington DC and its political pressure on the schedule and its increasingly bureaucratic approach to spaceflight. The reality is that the spacecraft was not flyable. It had too many faults. Had the Apollo 1 fire not occurred, it’s likely that additional problems would have delayed the launch.

“Unless the fire had happened, I think it’s very doubtful that we would have ever landed on the Moon,” Kraft said. “And I know damned well we wouldn’t have gotten there during the 1960s. There were just too many things wrong. Too many management problems, too many people problems, and too many hardware problems across the whole program.”

The next big disaster was January 28, - the next day on the calendar, but in 1986, 19 years later.  Space Shuttle Challenger was lost a mere 73 seconds into mission 51-L as a flaw in the starboard solid rocket booster allowed a secondary flame to burn through supports and cause the external tank to explode.  It was the kind of cold day that we haven't had here in some years.  It has been reported that it was between 20 and 26 around the area on the morning of the launch and ice had been reported on the launch tower as well as the external tank.  O-rings that were used to seal the segments of the stackable solid rocket boosters were too cold to seal.  Launch wasn't until nearly noon and it had warmed somewhat, but the shuttle had never been launched at temperatures below 40 before that mission.  Richard Feynman famously demonstrated that cold was likely the cause during the televised Rogers Commission meetings, dropping a section of O ring compressed by a C-clamp into his iced water to demonstrate that it had lost its resilience at that temperature.  The vehicle would have been colder than that iced water.  

As important and memorable as that moment was, engineers such as Roger Boisjoly of Morton Thiokol, the makers of the boosters, fought managers for at least the full day before the launch, with managers eventually overruling the engineers. Feynman had been told about the cold temperature issues with the O-rings by several people, and local rumors were that he would go to some of the bars just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center and talk with workers about what they saw. The simple example with the O-ring and glass of iced water was vivid and brought the issue home to millions.

There's plenty of evidence that the crew of Challenger survived the explosion. The crew cabin was specifically designed to be used as an escape pod, but after most of the design work, NASA decided to drop the other requirements to save weight. The recovered cabin had clear evidence of activity: oxygen bottles being turned on, switches that require a few steps to activate being flipped. It's doubtful they survived the impact with the ocean and some believe they passed out due to hypoxia before that. We'll honestly never know.

Finally, at the end of the worst week, Shuttle Columbia, the oldest surviving shuttle flying as mission STS-107, broke up on re-entry 17 years later on February 1, 2003 scattering wreckage over the central southern tier of the country with most debris along the Texas/Louisiana line. As details emerged about the flight, it turns out that Columbia and everyone on board had been sentenced to death at launch - they just didn't know it. A chunk of foam had broken off the external tank during liftoff and hit the left wing's carbon composite leading edge, punching a hole in it. There was no way a shuttle could reenter without exposing that wing to conditions that would destroy it. They were either going to die on reentry or sit up there and run out of food, water and air. During reentry, hot plasma worked its way into that hole, through the structure of the wing, burning through piece after piece, sensor after sensor, until the wing tore off the shuttle and tore the vehicle apart. Local lore on this one is that the original foam recipe was changed due to environmental regulations, causing them to switch to a foam that didn't adhere to the tank or stand up to abuse as well as the original.

In 2014, Ars Technica did a deep dive article on possible ways that Columbia's crew could have been saved.  They republished that on February 1, 2023, the anniversary of the disaster.  It's interesting speculation, very detailed, compiled by a man who claims to have been a junior system administrator for Boeing in Houston, working in Mission Control that day.

Like many of you, I remember them all. I was a 13 year-old kid midway through 7th grade in Miami when Apollo 1 burned. By the time of Challenger, I was a 32 year old working on commercial satellite TV receivers here near the KSC and watched Challenger live via the satellite TV, instead of going outside to watch it as I always did. Mrs. Graybeard had just begun working on the unmanned side on the Cape, next door to the facility that refurbished the Shuttles SRBs between flights, and was outside watching the launch. Columbia happened when it was feeling routine again. Mom had fallen and was in the hospital; we were preparing to go down to South Florida to visit and I was watching the TV waiting to hear the double sonic booms shake the house as they always did. They never came.

The failure reports and investigations of all three of these disasters center on the same things: the problems with NASA's way of doing things. They tended to rely on "well, it worked last time" when dealing with dangerous situations, or leaned too much toward, "schedule is king" all as a way of gambling that someone else would be the one blamed for delaying a mission. Spaceflight is inherently very risky, so some risk taking is inevitable, but NASA had taken stupid risks too often. People playing Russian Roulette can say, "well, it worked last time," but having worked doesn't change the odds of losing.

Last year was the first time I linked to a post on Casey Handmer's blog on this topic, but not the exact incidents, but the management problems that get us to the point where such accidents happen. The post is about Dittemore's law and you might recognize the name. 

Ron Dittemore is the retired former Space Shuttle program manager who was ultimately responsible for the series of decisions that resulted in the Columbia disaster, which killed seven of the lost 25 astronauts.  Here's Handmer's money quote: 

Dittemore’s Law states that “A team composed of sufficiently competent, motivated, well-resourced individuals will tend to produce a collective outcome that is diametrically opposed to the intended, individually desired outcome.”

In physics terms, it’s something like diamagnetism.

Casey Handmer's Dittemore's Law post is definitely worth a read.

Day got away from me

It has been oddly busy this week and especially late yesterday through today. The busy managed to conflict with my regular times to go find something to write about. 

All could think of was to repost one of my all-time favorite goofy posts, about breeding Spider Chickens. It was from the period of peak crazy over Covid, June of 2021. 

 (Somebody's wonderful conceptual art of spider-chicken, from the previous link)  ("Spider chicken, spider chicken.  Does whatever a spider chicken does." (Source))

Yet Another Satellite Megaconstellation looks to be starting up

This time the megaconstellation, with the numbers being discussed that are bigger than Amazon's Leo (formerly known as Kuiper) but smaller than SpaceX's Starlink with over 10,000 satellites now and clearance to launch another 4,000. This new one, called TeraWave, will be 5,408 optically interconnected satellites, with 5,280 in low-Earth orbit and another 128 in medium-Earth orbit. 

If there's a surprise to this announcement, it's in just who looks to be doing the constellation: Blue Origin. While Jeff Bezos founded both Blue and Amazon, and Amazon already has been launching satellites for the LEO, it seems a little harder to pin down that Blue will launch all of them, but they throw around some pretty spectacular numbers for it.

Conceptual drawing of the TerraWave system. Image credit: Blue Origin

The 5280 satellites in LEO will communicate at up to 144Gbps through the microwave and millimeter wave radio spectra (Q and V bands), whereas those in medium-Earth orbit will provide higher data rates up to 6 Terabits per second (Tbps) through optical (laser) links. 

“This provides the reliability and resilience needed for real-time operations and massive data movement,” Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp, said on social media. “It also provides backup connectivity during outages, keeping critical operations running. Plus, the ability to scale on demand and rapidly deploy globally while maintaining performance.”  

A big difference is at the start of the "social media" link just above. Limp says it's not intended for widespread use by the general public like Starlink. 

It is purpose-built for enterprise customers. Unmatched speeds of up to 6 Tbps through a multi-orbit constellation of 5,280 LEO and 128 MEO satellites with both RF and optical links. Globally distributed customers can each access up to 144 Gbps of capacity through Q/V-band links from LEO satellites, while up to 6 Tbps point-to-point capacity can be accessed through optical links from MEO satellites.

That means TeraWave will seek to serve “tens of thousands” of enterprise, data center, and government users who require reliable connectivity for critical operations. 

Time to borrow a familiar line. I'd answer with something like, "that sounds nice and all, but you guys aren't doing all that well with your core business of being a launch service." The much-ballyhooed New Glenn has exactly two missions completed, years after originally planned. The second test flight was impressive with the successful booster recovery looking almost as routine as, well, you know who. But...

One industry concern about Blue Origin is that it has taken on too many responsibilities too quickly—a large rocket, two different lunar landers, a space station, a crew capsule, the Blue Ring spacecraft, a Mars orbiter, and more projects. This has led to a competition within the company for resources and, at times, a seeming lack of focus. Adding TeraWave to the mix represents a major new initiative that will also require an extraordinary amount of effort to bring to market.

In what appears to be a response to this industry concern, Blue Origin launched a new division within the company called Emerging Systems, which is intended to be a “new strategic initiative driving innovation across advanced aerospace technologies.” TeraWave appears to be an accomplishment of the Emerging Systems (department? group?) 

Private Space Station Haven-1 enters final assembly

Back at the end of September 2025, I did an article on the race to a private space station called "The Other Other Space Race."  The Other Space Race that everyone knows about is the race to start settlements on the moon; while the "Other Other race" I was referring to was the race to put a private Space Station into orbit. Searching with Blogger search box (top left of this page) just for "private space station," I find I've been writing about this topic since 2020. 

The company this post is centered on, Vast, appears to be mentioned first in 2023, recent posts have been in reference to a test flight for testing out systems on their private space station called Haven-1.  

Let me lead with something I probably don't need to say. The expected launch this May has been called off and it's looking to be in Q1 of '27. First flights of complex spacecraft not running into delays are pretty unusual.  

Ars Technica has been diving into the various private space station companies and after an opening article about Voyager, goes into Vast today with, "The first commercial space station, Haven-1, is now undergoing assembly for launch." It's primarily  an interview with Max Haot, the chief executive of Vast. The company is furthest along in terms of development, choosing to build a smaller, interim space station, Haven-1, capable of short-duration stays.

Ars: Where are you with the hardware?

Haot: Last Saturday (January 10) we reached the key milestone of fully completing the primary structure, and some of the secondary structure; all of the acceptance testing occurred in November as well. Now we are starting clean room integration, which starts with TCS (thermal control system), propulsion, interior shells, and then moving on to avionics. And then final close out, which we expect will be done by the fall, and then we have on the books with NASA a full test campaign at the end of the year at Plum Brook. Then the launch in Q1 next year. 

Note: you probably know Plum Brook as the Neil Armstrong Test Facility. I know it was mentioned when Dream Chaser was being tested there.  

The whole interview is interesting for the perspectives that Max Haot bring as well as the overall discussion of that sector of the space industry. I'll borrow one here:

Ars: What happens after you launch Haven-1?

Haot: We are not launching Haven-1 with crew inside. It’s a 15-ton, very valuable and expensive satellite, but still no humans involved, launching on a Falcon 9. So then we have a period that we can monitor it and control it uncrewed and confirm everything is functioning perfectly, right? We are holding pressure. We are controlling attitude. These checkouts can happen in as little as two weeks.

At the end of it, we have to basically convince SpaceX, both contractually and with many verification events, that it will be safe to dock Dragon. And if they agree with the data we provide them, they will put a fully trained crew on board Dragon and bring them up. It could be as early as two weeks after, and it could be as late as any time within three years, which is a lifetime of Haven-1. But we have a very strong incentive to send a crew as quickly as we can safely do so.

The Haven-1 habitat will be usable for three years, and they are trying to book more crews for the two-week missions it's intended for. As of the interview, Haot talks about four missions. Not much chance of overstaying the three year life of the "very valuable and expensive satellite."

The Haven-1 space station undergoing acceptance testing in November '25. Credit: Vast Space

The Geomagnetic Storm has begun

On Sunday afternoon, Jan. 18th, UTC, a moderately strong solar flare and Coronal Mass Ejection erupted on the directly Earth-facing portion of the sun. The flare was an X class (X-ray flare) that sent the CME in our direction, but not a particularly strong flare. Originally predicted to affect Earth well into the day (in UTC) on the 20th, it ended up being rather fast moving and stronger than the typical CME. 

Arriving earlier than expected, a CME struck Earth's magnetic field on Jan. 19th (1930 UT). The impact sparked a severe G4-class geomagnetic storm. The timing of the impact favored Europe, where widespread auroras are now being reported. It remains to be seen whether the storm will persist long enough for a similar display in North America. 

The CME that struck Earth today crossed the sun-Earth divide in only ~25 hours. That's fast. For comparison, most CMEs take 3 or 4 days to get here. The high speed of this CME (~1660 km/s) places it in the top few percent of all CMEs observed in the past 30 years.

The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center posted this summary of planetary K-index (Kp) values as the last update for Jan. 19:

The two red "towers" Kp at 8.33 and then 8.67 (or 8-1/3 and 8-2/3) are obvious signs of CME impacts. The two yellow boxes at the top right labelled S2 and G2 are Solar Radiation Storm and Geomagnetic storm cautions.

S2 (Moderate) Solar Radiation Storm Impacts

Biological: Passengers and crew in high-flying aircraft at high latitudes may be exposed to elevated radiation risk.
Satellite operations: Infrequent single-event upsets possible.
Other systems: Small effects on HF propagation through the polar regions and navigation at polar cap locations possibly affected.

G2 (Moderate) Geomagnetic Storm Impacts

Power systems: High-latitude power systems may experience voltage alarms, long-duration storms may cause transformer damage.
Spacecraft operations: Corrective actions to orientation may be required by ground control; possible changes in drag affect orbit predictions.
Other systems: HF radio propagation can fade at higher latitudes, and aurora has been seen as low as New York and Idaho (typically 55° geomagnetic lat.).

At the top level of the website with that Planetary K index graphic, lies this one:

Across the top of the graphic under SPACE WEATHER CONDITIONS it shows that earlier today S4 and G4 conditions were observed. I was doing some paperwork in the shack today, closer to 5PM or 2200 UTC, and the G4 condition was displayed. Note that the prediction for the next 24 hours at the right edge of this graphic also includes severe G4 storms. I have to add my usual summary: if you think plain old NOAA weather forecasts for your city are bad, they're generations of progress better than solar-terrestrial storm forecasts.

The usual thing people ask about is if auroras will be visible. The aurora forecasters seem more inclined to be cautious than plain old weather forecasters. They say tonight will be more active than last night and more active than tomorrow night, but they don't say something specific like they'll be visible from northern Illinois but not southern Indiana, for example. This plot, from the NOAA SWPC, was generated 0223 UTC, and I happen to typing at 0226 UTC. It's hard to get a much fresher forecast than that. That thin red line is marked as the view line, meaning that from around that line, the auroras might be visible as color on the horizon. 

 

As the Artemis II Vehicle sits on the launch pad...

Yesterday, Jan. 17, the Artemis II hardware was rolled to launch pad 39B of the Kennedy Space Center side of the Cape. Breaking Space (NASA Spaceflight's) video here, but let me caution that it doesn't show the whole move and doesn't show the final position.  

The thing that's most important here is that preparations for the Artemis II mission have stepped to the next level. There will be tests performed out on the pad that can't be done in the more restrictive environments that they've been working in up to now. For the crews that work well away from the headlines and get things done, it's exciting.

“These are the kinds of days that we live for when you do the kind of work that we do,” said John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s Mission Management Team for the Artemis II mission. “The rocket and the spacecraft, Orion Integrity, are getting ready to roll to the pad … It really doesn’t get much better than this, and we’re making history.”

A topic that doesn't get talked about widely is that the farther they advance toward the scheduled February 6th launch, a mindset called "launch fever" begins to affect the entire chain of command. Although the phrase isn't widely used, it doesn't take much reading of the fatal accidents in the past to encounter talk about it without using those two words. Shuttles Challenger, and Columbia as well as the Apollo 1 fire during a test on the pad - anything that resulted in the loss of vehicle and crew.

Artemis I back in November of '22 was an unmanned mission, so vitally important systems like the crew compartment's air system, weren't flight tested. I've read that before they leave for their translunar injection that this will be fully tested while in Earth orbit. NASA named the program Artemis back in 2019, but pieces have been around for 20 years.

NASA selected Orion contractor Lockheed Martin to oversee the development of a deep space capsule in 2006 as part of the George W. Bush administration’s soon-to-be canceled Constellation program. In 2011, a political bargain between the Obama administration and Congress revived the Orion program and kicked off development of the Space Launch System. The announcement of the Artemis program in 2019 leaned on work already underway on Orion and the SLS rocket as the centerpieces of an architecture to return US astronauts to the Moon.

The Orion capsule flew on a test flight called ARES 1-X on October 28, 2009, a decade before the Artemis name was chosen. There are good photos available at that Wikipedia link. 

There's still much to be done before launch, and much to be implemented from Artemis I. They had lots of trouble with the liquid hydrogen fuel that the SLS uses. 

Assuming the countdown rehearsal goes according to plan, NASA could be in a position to launch the Artemis II mission as soon as February 6. But the schedule for February 6 is tight, with no margin for error. Officials typically have about five days per month when they can launch Artemis II, when the Moon is in the right position relative to Earth, and the Orion spacecraft can follow the proper trajectory toward reentry and splashdown to limit stress on the capsule’s heat shield.

In February, the available launch dates are February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11, with launch windows in the overnight hours in Florida. If the mission isn’t off the ground by February 11, NASA will have to stand down until a new series of launch opportunities beginning March 6. The space agency has posted a document showing all available launch dates and times through the end of April.

The guy in the hot seat for this mission is John Honeycutt mentioned in that first indented quote above.

One of Honeycutt’s jobs as chair of the Mission Management Team (MMT) is ensuring all the Is are dotted and Ts are crossed amid the frenzy of final launch preparations. While the hardware for Artemis II is on the move in Florida, the astronauts and flight controllers are wrapping up their final training and simulations at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“I think I’ve got a good eye for launch fever,” he said Friday.

“As chair of the MMT, I’ve got one job, and it’s the safe return of Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy. I consider that a duty and a trust, and it’s one I intend to see through.”

NASA’s 322-foot-tall (98-meter) SLS rocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building on the eve of rollout to Launch Complex 39B. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

"I've had worse"

Or how to tell you've had a bad weekend without going into more details. 

I'm sure most people are saying something along the lines of "what??" Let me back up a bit and start over. 

Something I talk regularly about is my ham radio hobby, and the annual VHF contests I play in a few times a year. There are several of these contests over the course of the year, where the goal is to exchange a piece of information, sometimes two small pieces, and call signs, of course. Well, the real goal depends on why you're playing in the contest. If you're trying to win the contest, it's different than if you're trying to contact places you've never confirmed contact with. 

While there are more than these three, the USA's national ham radio organization, the American Radio Relay League, puts on three contests per year, June, September and January - around the second weekend of the month. Without a doubt, I consider the June contest the best of the year; my results have always been worse than June's in the other two. The reason June is better is purely that the radio propagation is regularly among the best of the year. Another group/company - ISTRC it's CQ Magazine - puts on a July contest and that one is also good. 

Long introduction out of the way, the title is my summary of the contest so far. "I've had worse." At 2PM Eastern (1900 UTC), when the contest started, the band was better than usual, with stations in New England coming in strong and steady. As is often the case, the openings weren't to all of New England, but to a small stripe of the grid squares. I clipped this image of the grid squares in the area from a US Map that Icom America gives away at hamfests. 

The exact spots I was hearing varied a bit. Most often I heard the stripe of FN31 and FN41 north to FN35/FN46. At other times I heard FN00 and 01 in western Pennsylvania, and FN13 quite often. In my quest to contact every grid square in the continental US, the four I'm really hoping for in FN are 57 and 65 to 67.

In and out of the shack for a while (making a jar of Mayonnaise to turn into Caesar salad dressing) and a few other things didn't change the overall picture of being open to a few of these grid squares, the squares I could hear just moved down into the SE states, until this evening when the only grids I heard were peninsular Florida. EL96, 97, 98, 99, EL 87, 88, 89, and EM 00, which is as far into the NE of Florida as we can get, and includes some of SE Georgia. 

The contest continues until tomorrow night at 0359Z (which is actually early Monday morning UTC, not Sunday night). That's 10:59 PM Eastern time. I'll keep the station on and keep trying "asbestos" possible.

Arianespace to launch their first Amazon LEO sats

Not the first ever Amazon sats but Arianespace's first batch of 32 of Amazon's LEO satellites (formerly called the Kuiper constellation).  The reason this gets a story and not just mention is that this will be the first launch of what they're calling the Ariane 64, which is an Ariane 6 with four strap on solid rocket boosters. 

The Ariane 6 is fairly well-established for a new launch vehicle, with five launches, including its debut flight in July 2024. All of the launches were considered a success, although the first flight failed to relight the upper stage in order to make a controlled reentry. I'm guessing declaring it a success was the payload achieved the desired orbit.  Given that they had a full year instead of roughly half a year (first launch in July '24), Arianespace went from one/year to four launches last year and has set the goal to eight for this year.

Arianespace has sold 18 Ariane 6 launches to Amazon; this mission, called VA267, will be the first of them. The launch has a preliminary date of NET February 12th, three weeks from yesterday, January 15, with no time assigned. The launch will be from Arianespace's launch facility in French Guiana. 

Artist's rendering of Ariane 64 in operation. Image credit: Arianespace

VA267 will be the first flight of Ariane 6 in its full-power Ariane 64 configuration, capable of carrying payloads of more than 20 metric tons to orbit. The 32 Amazon Leo satellites will be accommodated under a 20-meter-long fairing and delivered by the Ariane 64 rocket to a Low Earth Orbit.

The Arianespace website adds:

The VA267 launch at a glance:

• 359th launch by Arianespace, 1st Arianespace launch in 2026
• 6th Ariane 6 launch and 1st launch of Ariane 64, its most powerful configuration, and 1st use of Ariane 6's long fairing configuration
• 1st Arianespace launch for Amazon Leo, within a series of 18
• 1st Ariane 6 launch for a commercial customer

Nothing says State Of The Art...

Nothing says "State Of The Art" quite like a graphic of a 50-ish year old design that was mothballed 15 years ago. I was rather surprised to see this image from a company like Viasat in a Payload daily email. The only reason I can think of for such an image rather than something that's actually modern boils down the current designs that are flying might involve royalty payments to the company flying them. 

Awkward introduction aside, it does sound like something that might be useful.

For decades, space launch providers have faced the same persistent challenge: intermittent loss of telemetry data when rockets travel out of range of ground stations. These “blackouts” can last for minutes—leaving long and critical periods when vehicle health, performance, and safety information go dark. Viasat’s HaloNet Launch Telemetry Data Relay Service (DRS)aims to change that, by providing continuous, global coverage from ascent through early orbit.

“Whenever anyone launches a multimillion-dollar rocket or a billion-dollar payload, they need to know the continuous health of that rocket,” said Arnie Christianson, Senior Director, Program Management, Viasat Government, Space and Mission Systems. Launch telemetry to ground controllers provides the equivalent of a car’s dashboard, he explained. “Engine temperature, trajectory, pressure, performance—it’s how you know everything is working as intended.”

Again, it might well be useful, but I'm kind of focused on the use of the word "need" in that first sentence of the second paragraph. I'm sure the responsible people would like to "know the continuous health of that rocket," but the thousands of launches that didn't have that continuous knowledge argues it's a "nice to have" thing but not a "need." 

The rest of the short article on Payload gives lots of details justifying their project, including that gathering this information currently depends on TDRSS,the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, that has been in use since the 1980s. The first TDRSS satellite was lifted to orbit on Space Shuttle Challenger. The TDRSS system is aging out and will be retired over the next decade.

Another SpaceX record set today

It has nothing to do with the Crew-11 return, the number of flights on one booster, or the number of launches in the year (it's a new year - last year's 165 launches probably won't be a target until the fourth quarter of the year). No, this one is setting a new record for the speed of turning around a launch pad, between Monday's and Today's Starlink missions from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40 or "slick 40").

SpaceX’s launch of its Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday afternoon broke the turnaround record at its launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station by more than five hours.

The Starlink 6-98 mission lifted off at 1:08 p.m. EST (1808 UTC), just 45 hours after the launch of the Starlink 6-97 mission at 4:08 p.m. EST (2108 UTC) on Monday.

The previous record, set in December 2025, was 50 hours and 44 between the launches of NROL-77 and Starlink 6-90. 

We've met Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX Vice President of Launch before, a guy with an interesting job. He wrote on social media that, “The rocket was actually ready to fly at roughly 40 hours, but we needed to wait for the optimal deployment t-zero. Love seeing us continue to improve on our speed, efficiency, safety and reliability!” Dontchev went on to summarize something we constantly see about SpaceX:  “We once thought it was crazy town to launch from the same pad in two days. Now it feels crazy not to be launching from the same pad multiple times a day. Physics is the only constraint. Everything else is just an engineering challenge waiting to be solved.” 

That comparison from thinking it was "crazy town to launch in two days" to not launching multiple times a day is this week's version of my old observation that, "remember when we used to wonder if they could make 10 launches on the same booster?" Now the Fleet Leader, B1067, is at 32 flights and they're going for 40. A Falcon 9 booster with the one-time crazy goal of 10 launches is now considered "like new". Today's booster, B1085, was on its 13th flight.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin the Starlink 6-98 mission on Jan. 14, 2026. The flight, which lifted off at 1:08 p.m. EST (1808 UTC) marked the fastest turnaround of SLC-40 to date with liftoff occurring just 45 hours after the launch of Starlink 6-97 on Jan. 12. This broke the previous record by more than five hours. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

It's not really visible in that photo, but my only issue with the launch was that our cloud cover was too thick to get a glimpse of the vehicle and the cold front overhead kept us from hearing the launch rumble.

At 0215 UTC on January 15th, the Crew-11 Dragon is safely in orbit and heading toward its early morning deorbit burn. 

In memory of Scott Adams

A departure from the normal here due to Scott Adams' passing away sometime between Monday night and this morning. I've known since it became public that he had aggressive stage 4 prostate cancer and that it looked like he wasn't going to make it to the end of 2025. It looks like he got a longer extension than many. Some of that was undoubtedly personal; perhaps genetics, perhaps attitudes and we heard several times in his last year that he was familiar enough with and to people in high places that could help. 

Like most, I got to know Scott Adams through Dilbert when the comic first started making papers and magazines. We have some Dilbert cartoon collections around the house but I'm not sure about his "real" books. By the time the TV series came out in 1999, I was a regular who watched every episode.  This clip is one of my all time favorites from Dilbert's world.  

Over the years, I've run many Dilbert cartoons.

I posted this on September 8, 2015.

This one was November 25, 2012.

This may be the oldest one I have. It says: Dilbert for September 30, 1995. Amazingly, I remembered it almost word-for-word.

Of course, this next one spoke to me. Alright, they all did, but this one in a different sense. 

This one affected me for life:

Yes, I have bike shorts and always refer to them as my dorky pants. I used to have a printed version of this cartoon on my office wall. 

Related to companies that patent minor things but sue any company that gets close to their turf.

When talk turned to grade inflation in college, this one had to show up:

I believe that's every Dilbert cartoon I've ever run, and it's a bit of guaranteed outcome that when I'm looking for some humorous thing to include, I'll go to cartoons I remember, but it's going to be tough for a while.  I can't claim to have any tremendous insights into Scott as a person. His last interviews bring some things I can relate to, along with things we'll all face someday.  One of my first quotes from Scott was in a post in the fourth month of the blog: 

Like Scott Adams says on risk vs reward:

For a manager: Success: you get tons of money. Fail: someone under you gets laid off.

For an engineer: Success: you get a handsome certificate, suitable for framing. Fail: think Space Shuttle Challenger, Columbia, Hyatt Regency walkway. Money lost, possibly large numbers of people die.

Perhaps the most recent risk/reward quote of his will live much longer. From his final post to X about becoming Christian:

"I'm not a believer but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So here I go," according to the statement by Adams.

"I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven."

So long, Scott. I hope we meet on the other side some day.