Now that Spring has sprung

As we went through the spring equinox, I couldn't help but notice that there were some questions about the day and night not being the same exact length, which is the actual meaning of the word equinox, after all. It was a spring "not completely equal night".  Space.com offers some explanations of that. 

The reason is "the usual", if you'll allow that short summary. The world isn't exactly perfect, orbits can be not exactly symmetrical, and imperfections are everywhere. I should note that when you look up the date and time of the equinox, you get a specific time of day - to the minute. 

Saturday (March 20) at 10:46 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (7:46 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time) the vernal or spring equinox was expected to occur. At that moment, the sun comes to one of two places where its rays shine directly down on the equator. It will then shine equally on both halves of the Earth. More precisely, at that moment, the sun will be shining directly down on the equator at a point over the Atlantic Ocean, roughly 790 miles (1,280 kilometers) east of Macapá, Brazil.

When I was learning these things, I filed away that seasons tended to change on the 21st of month. Spring started on March 21, Summer was June 21, Fall was in September and Winter was December. In all cases, that was the first day of "new season." 

Space.com says that's not right. They say that during the 20th century, March 21 was the exception rather than the rule, with the equinox landing on that day only 36 times out of the 100 years in the 20th century. 

From the years 1980 through 2102, it comes no later than March 20. In 2028, in fact, for the Western Hemisphere, spring will officially begin on March 19. This shift in dates happens because the Earth's elliptical orbit doesn't match our calendar perfectly. The vagaries of our Gregorian calendar, such as the inclusion of a leap day in century years divisible by 400, also help contribute to the seasonal date shift. Had the year 2000 not been a leap year, the equinox would be occurring this year on Saturday (March 21), not Friday. 

The Space.com author goes on to note:

One factor to consider is that when we refer to sunrise and sunset, it refers to when the very top edge of the sun appears on the horizon. Not its center, nor its bottom edge.

This fact alone would make the time of sunrise and sunset a little more than 12 hours apart on the equinox days. The sun's apparent diameter is roughly equal to half a degree.

The main reason for this difference is that our atmosphere refracts (or bends) light above the edge of the horizon. Because of that refraction, we end up seeing the sun for a few minutes before its disk actually rises and for a few minutes after it has actually set.

So . . . when you watch the sun either coming up above the horizon at sunrise or going down below the horizon at sunset, you are looking at an illusion — the sun is not really there but is actually below the horizon!

Earth's seasons diagram. (Image credit: NASA/Space Place)

Yet another "who you gonna call?" moment

As has happened before, the US Space Force needs to launch an important payload that had originally been assigned to United Launch Alliance and ULA isn't able to launch it, not having any rockets available to be assigned to this mission. This is partly due to the Vulcan being grounded and partly due to the few remaining Atlas Vs already being assigned to other missions. ULA has nothing that can do the job for Space Force.

So who are they gonna call? SpaceX, who else?

Next month's GPS III-8 mission had been slated to fly atop United Launch Alliance (ULA)'s new Vulcan Centaur rocket. But Vulcan has experienced issues with its solid rocket boosters (SRBs), so the Space Force is moving the GPS spacecraft onto a SpaceX Falcon 9. 

"With this change, we are answering the call for rapid delivery of advanced GPS capability while the Vulcan anomaly investigation continues," Space Force Col. Ryan Hiserote, Space Systems Command System Delta 80 commander and National Security Space Launch system program director, said in a statement today (March 20).

To refresh the big picture for newer readers, ULA developed the Vulcan rocket to replace their Atlas V, and the Vulcan had its first flight in January of '24, flying a total of four missions on a Vulcan Centaur. Half of those four missions - flights three and four - had problems with the solid rocket boosters used to increase the liftoff weight the Vulcan put into orbit. The Vulcan's flight control software overcame the problem both times, successfully reaching orbit and notching its mission goals, but Space Force was concerned enough that the failure rate of the SRBs was too high - and grounded the vehicle until the failure analysis investigation completes. 

To be a bit blunt, today's news about the GPS III-8 mission isn't even remotely surprising. After all, we all remember that Vulcan is currently grounded. If all goes to plan, the satellite — the 10th and final one in the GPS III line — will lift off no earlier than late April from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. 

Since the way US Space Force does these changes to the launch vehicles is to swap missions between their two contractors. SpaceX is going to give up USSF-70, a national security mission that had been manifested on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy. USSF-70 will fly no earlier than summer 2028, according to Space Force officials.
 

An earlier GPS III satellite, SV-08, being readied to ship to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station after being assigned to SpaceX from ULA, Florida. Credit: Lockheed Martin

Failure analysis for December ('25) South Korean launch

Back near the end of 2025, December 22, South Korean rocket company Innospace sent its Hanbit-Nano rocket skyward for the first time ever, from the Alcantara Space Center in Brazil. But the landmark flight — the first-ever orbital launch attempt by a South Korean company — didn't last long, as the Hanbit-Nano exploded less than a minute after leaving the pad. 

Now Innospace has released new details about that launch failure and the results from a joint investigation, which shed light on what went wrong and how the company plans to move forward. 

A gas leak in the forward section of Hanbit-Nano's first-stage hybrid rocket combustion chamber triggered a rupture, ultimately leading to mission failure, according to a March 17 Innospace update.

The leak "was caused by insufficient compression and uneven sealing performance resulting from plastic deformation of sealing components during the reassembly process following the replacement of the forward chamber plug during launch preparation activities in Brazil," the update reads.

Talking about "plastic deformation of sealing components" sounds a lot like the kind of improper sealing that gets seen pretty regularly on SLS and other launch vehicles.  

The Hanbit-Nano first stage uses a fuel combination I don't recall hearing about before, Liquid Oxygen is the oxidizer and the common part, while the fuel itself is paraffin. There are two versions of the second stage, which will run on either the same paraffin/LOX combination as the booster or with a liquid methane/LOX. Hanbit-Nano is a small, 57-foot-tall, light-lift system designed to put 90 kg (about 198 lb.s) into a sun-synchronous orbit from its Brazilian launch pad. For comparison, the Rocket Lab Electron is a small payload launcher as well but it's rated for 660 pounds to LEO, over 3x the Hanbit-Nano's payload.

Innospace conducted its investigation into the mission's failure alongside CENIPA, the Brazilian Air Force authority responsible for aerospace accident investigations. Innospace says it is already implementing design improvements to affected components and introducing additional verification steps to prevent similar failures in future launches.
...
The company plans to move ahead with a follow-up launch, pending authorization from the Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA). That next attempt is currently targeted for the third quarter of 2026, with Brazil expected to remain the launch site.

The South Korean rocket company Innospace has closed its investigation into the failure of its Hanbit-Nano rocket in December and is targeting the third quarter of 2026 for its next launch. (Image credit: Innospace)

So then, the space company said, "let's grab a small asteroid..."

... and bring it back to a "safe" spot near Earth. 

Really. 

It may sound fanciful, but a Los Angeles-based company says it has conceived of a plan to fly out to a smallish, near-Earth asteroid, throw a large bag around it, and bring the body back to a “safe” gathering point near our planet.

The company, TransAstra, said Wednesday that an unnamed customer has agreed to fund a study of its proposed “New Moon” mission to capture and relocate an asteroid approximately the size of a house, with a mass of about 100 metric tons.

“We envision it becoming a base for robotic research and development on materials processing and manufacturing,” said Joel Sercel, chief executive officer of TransAstra. “Long term, instead of building space hardware on the ground and launching propellant up from the Earth, we could harvest it from raw materials in space.”

When they say, "approximately the size of a house," that isn't a very well-defined number. Do they mean 500 square feet, which at 22 ft 3in on a side might be better described as the size of an apartment in a small city, or 1500 sq. ft.? That's a moderately-sized suburban house.  That dramatically affects what they plan to do with that small asteroid. Like the first small paragraph quoted says, TransAstra envisions a system that flies out to the desired asteroid, capturing it in a large bag, and slowly bringing it to some place like the L2 (Lagrange 2) point of the Moon/Earth system - about 900,000 miles from Earth, and also the home of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

Such asteroids could provide water for use as propellant and minerals for everything from solar panels to radiation shielding. Various asteroids could be targeted for their content, such as C-type asteroids as a source of water or M-types for metals. 

All of this is the domain of a study underway now which will be completed by May, and should further refine a mission plan with its trajectory and the spacecraft needed to fly it. 

If fully funded, the mission could rendezvous with an asteroid by as early as 2028 or 2029. TransAstra is working with the University of Central Florida, Purdue, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech to complete its analysis. 

This transfer bag has been tested in the International Space Station, flown up to the station on the Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo drone last fall, then taken into an airlock where the bag was opened and closed while in the vacuum. 

Also last fall, TransAstra won a $2.5 million contract from NASA to scale up the size of its inflatable capture bag system to 10 meters in diameter, the size it says it needs to corral small asteroids. Matched by private funding, the combined funds have allowed TransAstra to be able to accelerate development and testing of its larger capture bag.

The next major step for TransAstra is they need to find a spacecraft maker to contract for a spacecraft capable of traveling into deep space and making a rendezvous with an asteroid. 

An artist's concept of the New Moon facility with aggregated small asteroids. Credit: TransAstra

With the exception of noting the Earth and moon in the upper left hand corner of the artwork, those are about the only things that look familiar to me. I'll SWAG the big things in what appears to be a bag on the left edge of the image are captured asteroids or other raw materials and just say I have no idea what anything else is supposed to be or what they're supposed to do. 

Let me remind everyone of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid Bennu that returned samples of the asteroid in September of 2023. That mission returned 121.3 grams from the asteroid Bennu and cost more than $1 billion but it's quite different than this concept and I don't think it's fair to divide the billion dollar cost by 121.3 grams, to get $8.2 million per gram. That would include costs that didn't contribute to getting those grams of Bennu down to Earth.

TransAstra is proposing to bring back vastly more material for significantly less. The initial mission, Sercel said, would cost a “few hundred million” dollars. That may sound borderline impossible, but it’s the kind of breakthrough needed if humanity is going to start building a future for itself in the Solar System, with materials from the Solar System beyond Earth.

Small Space News Story Roundup 79

A slow news day again, so a couple of interesting smaller stories. 

SpaceX launches 10,000th Starlink Satellite on Tuesday

Today was a dual launch day split between Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral, with the Cape Canaveral launch being the second of the day. 

The first Starlink group (17-24) launched Tuesday from Vandenberg's Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at 1:19 a.m. EDT (0519 GMT or 10:19 p.m. PDT on March 16 local time). That mission's Falcon 9 booster (B1088) completed its 14th flight with a touchdown on the Pacific Ocean-positioned droneship "Of Course I Still Love You." 

The second Starlink group (10-46) departed from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) in Florida at 9:27 a.m. EDT (1327 GMT). Booster B1090 returned to Earth for the 11th time, landing on the "A Shortfall of Gravitas" (ASOG) droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. This second launch marked SpaceX's 34th Falcon 9 mission of the year and 378th Starlink launch in its history. 

The milestone 10,000th Starlink was on board the first launch of the day from Vandenberg.  The megaconstellation now numbers 10,049 satellites, of which all but 10 are in working order, according to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. An additional 1,509 Starlink satellites were launched since May 2019, but have since reentered Earth's atmosphere and been destroyed. That's the price of flying in a low orbit to minimize delays.  

Is Artemis II Delayed Again? 

Maybe yes, maybe no. It's hard to know. 

After the roll back to the VAB to fix the helium leak problem that surfaced after the successful Wet Dress Rehearsal, there was an extensive Flight Readiness Review and it was widely reported they would roll the vehicle out to the pad on Thursday (March 19). After the discovery of another minor problem, an electrical harness for the flight termination system was in need of a repair, the announced rollback to pad 39 slipped one day to March 20th. Then it began to look like that extra day delay won't be needed. The latest updates to that are saying they might actually roll back to the pad on the 19th. 

Update for 5:50 p.m. ET on March 17: NASA is now saying that it may be able to hit its original target rollout date of March 19, thanks to faster-than-expected work on the Artemis 2 stack in the Vehicle Assembly Building. A final decision is expected on Wednesday (March 18).

The full Moon is seen behind the Artemis II SLS rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this photo taken before the mid-February WDR. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky

EDIT March 19 at 5:08 PM EDT to add: Rollout of the Artemis II stack to launch complex 39B is scheduled to begin at 8:00 PM EDT on March 19, which is 0100 UTC on March 20. This was announced earlier in the day of March 19.

One hundred year anniversary

Hundred year anniversaries of new technologies don't come up very often, especially in the subject area of space exploration but today is one. 

100 years ago, a liquid-fueled rocket flew into the sky for the very first time. The unlikely contraption was designed by Clark University physics professor Robbert Goddard, and launched from a cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts on March 16, 1926. 

Today, Robert H. Goddard (1882-1945), who directed the flight, is widely considered to be one of the founders of modern rocketry, along with Hermann Oberth in Germany and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia. A tiny rocket by any standards, with a very short flight, his rocket named Nell was fueled by a mixture of gasoline and liquid oxygen. 

A picture you've probably seen before, Robert H. Goddard with his first rocket, Nell. Image from Wikipedia, with a long description including current NASA ownership and its history.

Nell flew for a blistering 2-1/2 seconds and achieved a height of 41 feet. Still, it showed the concepts would work and it even used one of Goddard's design concepts that is still widely used today allowing the super cold liquid oxygen to cool the rocket combustion chamber while the oxygen was leaving the fuel tank.

For his first liquid-fueled rocket flight, Goddard tried putting the engine on top of the fuel and oxidizer tanks in a belief it would create more stability, according to NASA. Following flight tests, Goddard moved the engines underneath the propellant tanks, which "simplified the overall design", and instead for stability added moveable vanes to the engine exhaust and gyroscopes. "He was one of the very first people to take the theoretical ideas around rocketry, and actually turn them into an experiment and really apply the scientific methods and experimentation,"

I'm sure I've read about Goddard and his contributions to developing modern rocketry, but putting this little post together demonstrated that it was mostly lost to memory decay. "If you don't use it, you lose it." The sources I used put together good, readable and short biographies. These were

• Space.com: "2 seconds that changed the world: Robert Goddard launched the 1st liquid-fueled rocket 100 years ago today" 
• NASA: "95 Years Ago: Goddard’s First Liquid-Fueled Rocket" - obviously a celebration article from five years ago, but very readable and good.  
• Ars Technica: "A century after the first rocket launch, Ars staffers pick their favorites" much less page space on R. H. Goddard   

It's worth noting, and the Space.com article has the details that I looked at, that Goddard died young in 1945, of throat cancer, and his wife Esther was instrumental in conveying his history and advocating for him. She was essential in filing his patents. Often, she was the only person who could read his notes to put the patent applications together. Esther got approval for 131 patents of his 214 overall.

EDIT 3/17 @ 0755 EST: In the last paragraph I inadvertently changed that first sentence from "died young in 1945" to  "died young, 45,"

Changes to ham radio that have upended the old hobby

This post is going to be ham radio heavy, especially old ham radio. If you don't care about that, go check out the blogs on the right side of the page, and check back tomorrow to see if I could find any space-related news. 

Back in early January (the 4th), I did a post mentioning that this February was going to be my 50th anniversary of getting my first amateur radio license, my Novice class license. I figured the date based on having a QSL card in an old file box. 

The only thing I could find that I think is useful was in a QSL card box that was full of cards from my early days in radio. I think that card was from my first QSO. It says the date and time of the contact was February 9, 1976 at 4:15 PM, on 3.720 MHz - allocated to Novice licensees in those days. February 9th was a Monday, and the typical way that contests are timed is to start at midnight (UTC) on Saturday morning. Saturday was February 7th and 0000 UTC would have been 7:00 PM in the evening of Friday, February 6th, EST.  For me to be operating Monday, the license would have been received in the mail, before that Monday at 4:15 PM, although it might have come a day or more before that first contact.  

If you've been working toward getting a ham license, you've probably heard of QSL cards. There are a couple of handfuls of Q signals in common use, and QSL has got to be one of the most commonly used Q signals. The precise definition is a little wordy, but a common reference says.  

I am acknowledging receipt. - ("QSL" as a statement) 
Can you acknowledge receipt (of a message or transmission)? ("QSL?" as a question)

It was an old saying 50 years ago that a QSL card is "the final courtesy of making a contact" and you'll still see that saying today. It's not unusual to find that you don't get a card back in reply to every one you send because it's not unusual for one side of the contact to want a card more than the other side. Especially if you work a rare or hard to contact country.

In all the ways that Ham radio hobby has changed over my 50 years, one of the biggest changes has been exchanging QSL cards. As the name implies, for the vast majority of QSLs exchanged in my first couple of years, a QSL card was made out of a postcard-style card with space to write the other guy's address and the details of the contact. I'd write the other guy's address on it, stick a postage stamp on it and drop it in mail. The other end of the contact either did the same thing such that we both got each other's card within a day or two of mailing ours. We can still do that today, but it has been years since I've gotten plain, postcard-style QSL in the mail. 

The next level after the postcard dropped in a mailbox was to go to cards in an envelope and using first class mail. That's still a perfectly reasonable way to send cards to guys in our country, and the next level of caring is to enclose an SASE - a Self Addressed, Stamped Envelope - to pay the postage for the guy on the other end. This goes for virtually all of the "first and second" world countries. 

The first problem with sending a QSL to some countries is how to pay for their postage. There used to be something we could buy at a US Post Office called an International Reply Coupon or IRC that was redeemable for postage in other countries. I'm not sure if they still exist in some places but these days I regularly see other hams saying where they live the postal services won't accept the IRCs. There have been times when the safe way was to buy fresh postage for the country you're mailing to and either put that on your SASE or the other guy could put that postage on the reply envelope.  You could include a couple of bucks in the envelope with your card and the SAE, but that predictably led to mail being stolen from the guy it was intended for so someone could pocket the couple of bucks. The post office employees would learn who the guys were that had the radio towers and regularly got the large, thick envelopes that contained cash.

With the advent of computers and phones everywhere for everything, that has also affected QSLing. There are services that keep a little memory file for every licensee, like QRZ, and licensees can edit their "Biography" page to include info on how to QSL. In the last decade, hams started turning to various online payment services like PayPal, with the end result being you can send an email to them, listing all the contact details (time, signal reports, frequency, mode and all), send them something like $5 and get a bunch of contacts confirmed. 

In a parallel move to using online services for looking up addresses and paying for QSLs, a group of electronic QSL services got started. You upload the details for one or a bunch of QSOs you've had and depending on the service, you can either make your own QSL or use standard cards they have. 

If you're chasing a particular award, check their rules for what an acceptable electronic QSL is. One of the best services is the American Radio Relay League's Logbook Of The World or LOTW. A competitor is just called eQSL.cc and I've used both of those for as long as they're been around. A startup that's sending me a lot of cards these days is QSL World. I haven't yet joined or supported them, but I've replied to the cards I've gotten. While I'm not 100% sure of this, my guess is that LOTW works a lot like the ARRL's DXCC works. You can submit log entries that get security checks when you upload them, or you can send them physical cards, but I don't know how they handle the electronic cards from eQSL, QSL World or others. 

How safe is the Artemis II mission going to be?

It's a good question because no one in a position to know feels comfortable enough to say. Immediately after the Thursday story broke about rolling the SLS back to pad 39B, videos started showing up on YouTube essentially saying that because flight managers said they weren't going to do another full Wet Dress Rehearsal that they were endangering the crew. 

From my viewpoint, the crew is never going to be out of danger, and re-running every test that they've run so far isn't going to make the SLS safer, it's going to help wear it out. My perspective is that every time they fill and drain those cryogenic tanks, the tanks go through a series of thermal contraction and expansion changes due to the temperature changes, and those reduce the life of the tanks. They could wear the tanks out without ever launching. Testing more times doesn't make the probability of success better, it makes the probability worse. 

I think Space.com has a good summary with an article entitled, "How risky is the Artemis 2 astronaut launch to the moon? NASA would rather not say". There's simply too many unknowns. Remember the quote from Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush in 2002? 

Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tends to be the difficult ones. 

I think I'd change those last few words to the "the latter category tends to be the ones that cause the trouble." 

The fundamental problem is that there has been one flight of the SLS so far. It was unmanned so there are systems that are being used for the first time in flight and it's arguable whether it's really reasonable to use SLS I as an example SLS flight. There's simply not enough data to properly quantify the risks involved.

"I wouldn't actually put a number on it," Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA's Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, said during a briefing on Thursday (March 12) following completion of the Artemis 2 flight readiness review.

Reporters repeatedly pressed Glaze and John Honeycutt, chair of the Artemis 2 mission management team, for numbers during that briefing. And a few did come up.

For example, Honeycutt noted that new rockets have historically launched successfully on their debut flights about 50% of the time.  ...

Human spaceflight programs that are launching regularly could probably expect a failure rate of about 2% — 1 in 50 — on their second or third liftoffs, Honeycutt added. But Artemis' cadence isn't exactly regular, given that there will be about a 3.5-year gap between the first and second missions if Artemis 2 does indeed get off the pad in early April.

Honeycutt went on to say, "That basically means we're probably not 1 in 50 on the mission going exactly like we want to, but we're probably not 1 in 2 like we were on the first flight." (1 in 50 is the mission failure rate). 

For context, a 210-day commercial crew mission to the International Space Station is rated at a 1 in 200 (0.5%), and during the Apollo days, the risk of crew loss was 1 in 10 (10%). In the early days of the Space Shuttle program, they believed the chance of crew loss was 1 in 100, but they later realized that for the early shuttle flights it was actually 1 in 10. 

A persistent problem with doing this calculation for manned spaceflight is the small numbers available to work with. 

"We have pursued loss of mission, loss of crew-type number assessments, but I'm not sure we understand what they mean," Honeycutt said. 

To his credit, Honeycutt realized that he was working with a model that said the most dangerous aspect of the mission would be micrometeors and orbital debris (MMOD) as the biggest single risk, saying "Really? Is that the biggest risk to the mission — MMOD?" 

Honeycutt seemed to realize that such admissions, valid and honest as they are, would probably spawn stories like the one you're reading now. "Well, this oughta make for some good reading over the next few days," he said with a smile, drawing laughter from the journalists in the room.

The four crewmembers of NASA's Artemis 2 moon mission. Left to right: The Canadian Space Agency's Jeremy Hansen and NASA's Christina Koch, Victor Glover and Reid Wiseman. (Image credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

Firefly Aerospace makes it to seven

Almost exactly one month ago, February 15th, I posted a notice to "Keep an Eye out for this launch this week" about a scheduled launch by Firefly Aerospace, with the funny/cute mission name "Stairway to Seven." Little did I know it would take them as long as it did to complete the mission, but complete it they did on Wednesday, March 11.  

"Mission success! Alpha Flight 7 achieved nominal performance and validated key systems ahead of our Block II configuration upgrade."  

The mission was the first successful launch for Firefly Aerospace after two successive launch failures in the last year. The first was at the end of April of '25, on a mission called "Message in a Booster," (second story in a short news story roundup) that was due to an anomaly just after the first stage shut down and dropped away from the upper stage.  This left the upper stage unable to complete the mission of putting an experimental satellite into orbit for Lockheed Martin.  The payload never made orbit. 

Alpha suffered an anomaly shortly after its two stages separated, which led to the loss of the nozzle extension for the upper stage's single Lightning engine. This significantly reduced the engine's thrust, dooming the mission, Firefly said in an update several hours after launch. 

Then, as they began preparations for "Stairway to Seven," in September of '25, the Alpha first stage exploded on the stand during a pre-launch test. This mishap added months to the mission development timeline as the company investigated a cause and got another booster ready for flight. The test-stand explosion was eventually traced to "a process error during stage one integration that resulted in a minute hydrocarbon contamination," which ruled out a design flaw and allowed them to return to work on a booster for this launch.

The three weeks of delays since the first announced February date for this attempt to launch "Stairway to Seven" were relatively typical things, mostly weather and an abundance of caution. The launch went off at 8:50 PM EDT on Wednesday, March 11, and from this viewer's standpoint, it appeared flawless with every major milestone ticking off just as called.  

Firefly Aerospace's Alpha rocket launches on the "Stairway to Seven" mission on March 11, 2026. (Image credit: Firefly Aerospace)

Now that they've successfully regained where they were with the Block I of Firefly's Alpha, they're going to throw it out - figuratively. They've been struggling to get through the past two mishaps before they switch over to working toward the first launch of the Block II Alpha. 

Alpha Block II will stand about 7 feet (2.13 meters) taller than its 96.7-foot-tall (29.6-m) predecessor and will feature upgraded avionics and power systems, as well as improved thermal protections.

[Wednesday's] launch was a significant step forward for Firefly, which has excelled in some areas of its space business more than others. Last year, the company's uncrewed Blue Ghost moon lander became the first private spacecraft to successfully complete a mission on the lunar surface, but Alpha has now managed full mission success just three times in its seven orbital launch attempts.
...
“Flight 7 served as a critical opportunity to validate Alpha’s performance ahead of our Block II upgrade, and this team knocked it out of the park,” said Adam Oakes, Firefly’s vice president of launch.

NASA says: Artemis II ready for April 1st. Rollout to pad soon

At the conclusion of a two day flight readiness review today, Dr. Lori Glaze, NASA's Moon to Mars program manager, announced that the Artemis II vehicle has been successfully repaired, and they're planning to roll the vehicle out to the pad as soon as one week from today, April 19th. With the earliest possible launch window in the coming month still as reported before: April 1st at 6:24PM EDT. 

"During the flight readiness review, we had extremely thorough discussions — very open, transparent," Lori Glaze, NASA's Exploration Systems Development acting associate administrator, said during a post-FRR press briefing today. It's a short timeline, but NASA officials say they're putting safety first as they work toward their next launch opportunity.

"We talked a lot about our risk posture and how we're mitigating those risks," Glaze said. "We reviewed the challenges that we've had and how we've addressed them, and we talked about the work that remains, what's left to do, and how we're going to get through all of that."

Dr. Glaze spends a few seconds on the launch window availability and points out that even with their calendar of windows we've seen many times, it's not necessarily possible to try on every day that's green, as well as pointing out that in the previous calculations that gave us the "green days," they've missed some times. She added that a recent re-check showed an acceptable launch window on April 2nd.

Artemis 2's mission remains unchanged: fly a single figure-eight loop around the moon and back to Earth. As talked about last Friday, NASA changed the overall Artemis program recently, changing Artemis III from being the first moon landing, currently in 2027, to a mission to test rendezvous and docking between the Artemis/Orion craft and one or both of the human landing systems, SpaceX's HLS or Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK2. That pushed the first lunar landing on Artemis IV out to 2028. Artemis V is tentatively scheduled for later in that year.

NASA doesn't like SpaceX HLS Manual Controls

This Tuesday, March 10 (yesterday as I write), NASA released a report on their management of the HLS -or Human Landing System - that has been under development contracts to SpaceX and Blue Origin. While NASA originally contracted SpaceX alone, after Blue Origin and Dynetics sued NASA, even though NASA couldn't afford to build more than one model HLS, Blue Origin was contracted to deliver their lander, the Blue Moon MK2.   

With two competitors producing lunar landings, an atmosphere of wanting more competition began emerging, and neither company has said much about their landers other than releasing some good computer renderings of their vehicles. That means yesterday's NASA report has made for some interesting reading.  To begin with, they admit the fixed price contracts have worked well for the agency.

Overall, the report, signed by Office of Inspector General senior official Robert Steinau, finds that the fixed-price contracting approach has been beneficial for NASA as it seeks to broaden its utilization of the US commercial space industry.

“We found that the Agency’s contract approach has been effective at controlling costs and provided the HLS Program with insight into SpaceX’s and Blue Origin’s development of their lunar landers,” the report states. “The providers have also been able to utilize the Agency’s subject matter expertise and unique capabilities and facilitates to advance their lander development.”  

At this point you're probably thinking there's a Big But coming (Nota Bene only one "t" - I'm not Sir Mix-A-Lot). 

NASA doesn't like the pilot's controls in the SpaceX HLS. 

NASA had similar reactions during the design of the crew dragon, and the reaction seemed like a typical old school vs. new school reaction, or what you'd get if you put someone who had never flown anything newer than maybe 50 years old into new design.   

The space agency and SpaceX engaged in a similar back-and-forth during the design process for the Crew Dragon spacecraft a decade ago. SpaceX initially wanted touchscreens only, with limited flight commands available to astronauts. NASA pushed back and wanted what were essentially joysticks for astronauts to fly the vehicles like previous spacecraft. A former NASA astronaut then working at SpaceX, Garret Reisman, helped broker a compromise by which astronauts could manually fly the vehicles using controls on touchscreens. 

This is one of those circumstances where I find that both sides make sense to me. In the event of everything going to hell in a handbasket, it's important for the guy flying to work as seamlessly as if he'd been using those controls and flying that vehicle all his life. He could control it without a moment of thinking about it. Totally automatically. You don't want him spending time grabbing the joystick and taking time to do a mental change. On the other hand, these are NASA astronauts we're talking about, "the best of the best" who should be able to learn to fly anything faster, and then fly it smoother and better than non-astronauts. Plus having the flight controls on touchscreens is fine if the touchscreens are working and the astronauts are that smooth with them. 

While Crew Dragon has flown many times, the controls in HLS are going to be new. 

“Starship will not have the same level of proven flight heritage in the actual operating environment for its crewed lunar missions,” the report states. “Incorporating this system capability is a key element of HLS’s human-rating certification and part of an essential crew survival strategy.”

Now balance that with knowing absolutely nothing about Blue Origin's flight controls. It's not that Blue hasn't released the info on the controls, Blue hasn't designed them. 

There is other interesting information in the report, including details on the uncrewed demonstration flights that SpaceX and Blue Origin are both required to fly before human missions can take place. The inspector general notes that these flights will not require life support systems and airlocks, as human missions will. Nor will the tall Starship vehicle be required to test an elevator to bring crew down to the surface.

Maybe it would be better if they did a more thorough flight test.

Artists' renderings of SpaceX's Starship HLS (left) and Blue Origin's lander. Image credit to the respective company.

A little addendum ...

The talk about the reentering Van Allen Probe A last night reminded me of things I've posted about several times over the years, the big one that the Chinese have dropped boosters onto populated areas for years. 

This example is from a post dated November 27, 2019 and the Tweet here is dated the 23rd. 

I hesitate to start with this example because while I believe they still drop boosters with minimal effort to protect the people on the ground, I know that China is working seriously on reusable boosters now. Several recent articles have focused on test flights of reusable boosters. We did stories about them testing reusable boosters just one month ago, a little over a month before that, and so on (second story in a roundup). Still, while there are still US launch companies that don't reuse boosters they don't knowingly drop them on populated areas. 

A big difference is that boosters weigh considerably more than more typical satellites and can cause much more damage. China launched four heavy-lift Long March 5B rockets between 2020 and 2022, and let their approximately 24 ton core stages fall back to Earth. The NASA requirements for public safety from re-entering spacecraft were published in early 1996, and require better than a 1 in 10,000 probability assessment, obviously a smaller chance than the "approximately 1 in 4,200" chance this Probe A was evaluated at. 

“Due to late-stage design changes, the potential risk of uncontrolled reentry increased,” a NASA spokesperson told Ars. “After taking into account the mission’s scientific benefits and the low risk of harm to anyone on Earth, NASA granted a waiver to address the non-compliance with the US Government Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices. Consistent with national policy, NASA notified the US Department of State about the exception.”

Is there anything that screams "big gubmint" more than exempting your own projects (like this NASA satellite) from requirements everyone else is expected to meet? 

All the sources I've read yesterday and today repeat that no one has been injured by reentering satellites. That said, it seems the same can't be said about things falling from the sky. I ran across this photo around 2017, and vividly recalled seeing this picture in a magazine while in the waiting room at my dentist. That would have been somewhere around 1966 to maybe '68. Note that the picture itself is dated 1954. Also, where it says, "Ann Hodges, after she became the only person in history to have been struck by a meteorite,"  that sentence should end with "that we know of."

Another Reentering space debris story

These stories come up on occasion and while the chances of being affected are typically pretty low, they're always interesting. My gut feel is stories about reentering satellites are going to become more unusual because the industry is getting more concerned about potential damages to things or injuries to people. 

In this case, there are really two satellites in the forecast, a pair of US satellites designed to study the Van Allen belts, called Van Allen Probe A and Probe B. Both were launched in 2012. Both satellites were deactivated in 2019, and have been just following their orbits while they decayed over time. Probe A is the one expected to reenter soon.

As of Monday afternoon (March 9), the U.S. Space Force predicted that the satellite will reenter Earth's atmosphere on Tuesday at 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT), plus or minus 24 hours.

As always the chances of being affected by something reentering is pretty low, and NASA has given odds of "approximately 1 in 4,200," or roughly 0.025%. 

Van Allen Probes A and B in an artist's conception before the start of the mission. (Image credit: JHU/APL, NASA)

The Van Allen Probes are a project from The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, LLC. The Van Allen Probes were originally called the Radiation Belt Storm Probes as part of NASA's Living With a Star program, and launched to a highly elliptical orbit, with an apogee (highest point of the orbits) as far away from Earth as 18,900 miles and a perigee (lowest point) as close as 384 miles. 

The mission was supposed to last just two years, but the spacecraft managed to continue operating until July 2019 (Probe B) and October 2019 (Probe A). They gathered data that scientists and mission planners analyze to this day.

"By reviewing archived data from the mission, scientists study the radiation belts surrounding Earth, which are key to predicting how solar activity impacts satellites, astronauts, and even systems on Earth such as communications, navigation and power grids," NASA officials said in the same statement. "By observing these dynamic regions, the Van Allen Probes contributed to improving forecasts of space weather events and their potential consequences." 

An interesting note here is that they were expected to stay on orbit until 2034, but the effects of some of the unusually large solar flares of this past couple of years degraded Probe A's orbit more than probe B's. Probe B isn't expected to reenter before 2030.

I'm not sure where NASA and I differ in how we figure the chances of getting hit by this kind of space junk - mainly because I've never seen how NASA (or other professionals) figure it - I just assume I'm wrong and they're right. But for comparison, the main thing to bear in mind is that things like getting hit by reentering space junk is so unlikely that it makes winning the Lotto seem like an absolute certainty. The Earth's surface is 71% water and an area of just under 197 million square miles when you take away that 71%. Both the target (you) and the satellite are a couple/few square feet out of those millions of square miles, so to convert the square miles to square feet, multiply the 197 million square miles by 27.878 million square feet per square mile to get the surface area of the Earth in square feet (5.492 x 10¹⁵). Your surface area facing the satellite's path is a few square feet, and the satellite's area (or what survives reentry) is also small.

I've touched on this topic a couple of times over the years. Like I said, I expect the number of stories about reentering satellites will be getting smaller. Gradually, over the coming years as older satellites like these come down. We'll still be seeing them. 

As Kermit said ...

... time's fun when you're having flies. I hope it's not a stretch to realize I'm playing with the words of the saying "time flies when you're having fun."

Six months ago, September 7, 2025, I posted that the count of the total (all time) views of the blog had surpassed 10 million views. 

That's 10 million views in 15-1/2 years, or around 645,000 views per year. Last night after I posted that summary of the Space Launch System's Exploration Upper Stage being cancelled, I noticed that the total had gone over 12 million views. That's 2 million more views in six months or 4 million more views per year, over six times more than that 645,000. 

Screen capture from Blogger's statistics display. If that number is tough to read due to its size or whatever, it's 12,014,668.  

While I'd like to claim that I really get four million views per year, that's on the order of 11,000 per day and what blogger reports as views per day doesn't tend to look like that. It just has lots of variation and isn't remotely constant. 

I really should add that I feel honored and humbled by all the nice things said in the comments going through my medical junk this week. Thanks to you all. 

And just like that, the Artemis/SLS Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) is gone!

In an opening to an article about something that seems so esoteric as why this EUS exists, and tons of technical analysis, I just have to admire a writer that opens a piece like Eric Berger does at Ars Technica, starting out by entitling the article, “Ding-dong! The Exploration Upper Stage is dead”. 

In his 1961 novel The Winter of Our Discontent, John Steinbeck wrote of loss, “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.”

The death of NASA’s Exploration Upper Stage today represents the inverse of that sentiment. The world of spaceflight is so much brighter now that its light has gone out. 

Eric then goes on to say that the end of the EUS came with no big announcement, no celebration, just the notice, “NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch System (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA).” 

I just think his next statement should have more sarcasm and nastiness in it. He wrote: 

If the Exploration Upper Stage was anything, it was a survivor—a testament to the power of pork, and the value of political support from key southern senators in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Florida.

This is truth that we're going through on the entire Artemis moon landing program - as comments to the previous post dove into last night.  

The article is a good summary of the corruption in the program, characterized as just "pork (excess spending)" but that hides just who this extra money is going to. Certainly some of it went to the people working on things like building the new launch tower that the EUS requires - taller than the original Artemis launch tower (currently with the Artemis II stack on it). Some of it went to skilled workers doing complex, large (huge) jobs, but the overall picture is less of that and more of what we used to call waste, fraud, and abuse. "I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine," gets morphed into, "I'll spend some money on your pet projects if you'll spend some on mine."

The original cost estimates of these projects are always instructive to look back on. Boeing’s initial contract to build the Exploration Upper Stage started at $962 million, and NASA planned to launch the rocket on the second flight of the SLS in 2021. Oops. As for the launch tower, the initial estimate for its cost was $383 million, but as of late, it was heading north of $2 billion. So we are talking billions and billions and billions of dollars for a relatively straightforward upper stage, using off-the-shelf engines and a large launch tower.

It didn’t have to be this way. Over the years, from time to time, a company like Blue Origin would show up and say, ‘Hey, NASA, we could provide you with a more powerful and low-cost alternative.’ And the space agency would just laugh and send them away with a pat on the head. 

Again, it didn't have to be that way. There seems to be a new trending meme these days that shows something like the news media and says, "you don't hate them enough." That goes for NASA, and every other agency I can think of. 

It was all staggeringly and stupidly expensive. And I just want to underscore this point: The Exploration Upper Stage did not, in any way, get NASA closer to landing the Artemis III mission on the Moon. Taxpayers were spending billions of dollars to hinder, rather than help, the United States beat China back to the Moon.

Finally, sanity has prevailed. Mere weeks into the job, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman looked at NASA’s convoluted plans for exploring the Moon and asked some simple questions. Like, why are we building a space station around the Moon when we, our allies, and our competitors are all much more interested in having a presence on the surface? And then, why are we spending billions of dollars on an upper stage that only exists to support that space station?

After he got the usual nonsensical answers, Isaacman made some decisions and, in a short time, rounded up political support to get Artemis moving. The expensive upper stage and its boondoggle launch tower? Gone. That space station that will be thousands of kilometers from the Moon? It’s not necessary. Instead, the space agency is putting its resources into returning to the surface of the Moon with the best available technology.

NASA should have selected the Centaur V upper stage a decade ago. The next best time was today. To his credit, Isaacman decided that vehicles to get us on the Moon are better than vehicles to enrich contractors.

The Hat with green smoke in the background strikes me as a reference to the Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz," just as the title of the Ars article is a reference to the movie. Eric Berger (apparently) preferred a Texas-based explanation for the image, saying, "The Exploration Upper Stage was all hat and no cattle." Credit: Aurich Lawson | NASA

Ketchup Time

Or to borrow the famous quote from Airplane: "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue." Considering the amount of times it seems like there are no interesting, newsworthy stories, we get two between yesterday and today. 

The first story, dated yesterday, is that a key committee in congress is pushing NASA to "get moving" on developing private space stations to replace the aging International Space Station. Two months ago, a "key staffer" on Senator Ted Cruz's committee, said in a public meeting that she was “begging” NASA to release a document that would kick off the second round of a competition. 

There has been no movement since then, as NASA has yet to release this “request for proposals.” So this week, Cruz stepped up the pressure on the space agency with a NASA Authorization bill that passed his committee on Wednesday.

Regarding NASA’s support for the development of commercial space stations, the bill mandates the following, within specified periods, of passage of the law:

• Within 60 days, publicly release the requirements for commercial space stations in low-Earth orbit
• Within 90 days, release the final “request for proposals” to solicit industry responses
• Within 180 days, enter into contracts with “two or more” commercial providers for such stations

Cruz is trying to inject some sort of sense of urgency into the agency, which doesn't seem have one. Several private companies - including Axiom Space, Blue Origin, Vast, and Voyager - are finalizing designs for space stations. All have expressed a desire for clarity from NASA on requirements for their space stations; requirements such as how long the space agency would like its astronauts to stay on board, the types of scientific equipment needed, and much more. 

This has got to be rough for the companies trying to put up their own space stations. Unlike just about any business you can think about starting here on the ground, there hasn't been a private industry that got space stations going.  What do they charge? Getting there is going to be expensive, but getting to space has always been expensive. It's just not going to be the only expensive part. I suppose NASA will be the best source for info that there is, but ultimately, the company leasing time on their station is going to have to make a profit and there will need to be enough demand to keep the business running. There's just no existing model to base their rates on. 

Nominally, NASA plans to have one or more of these companies operating a commercial space station in low-Earth orbit by 2030. This is the date at which the US space agency has stated it will retire the aging laboratory, some elements of which are now nearly three decades old. However, some space policy officials have questioned whether any of the companies might be ready by then.

Cruz and other senators on the committee appear to share those concerns, as their legislation extends the International Space Station’s lifespan from 2030 to 2032 (an extension must still be approved by international partners, including Russia). Moreover, the authorization bill states, “The Administrator shall not initiate the de-orbit of the ISS until the date on which a commercial low-Earth orbit destination has reached an initial operational capability.”

With this legislation, the US Senate is making clear that it views a permanent human presence in low-Earth orbit as a high priority. This version of the authorization legislation must still be passed by the full Senate and work its way through the House of Representatives.

Rendering of the first Axiom habitat module attached to the International Space Station. Credit: Axiom Space

There's only a handful of companies looking to provide this service, and the source article only interviewed a couple of them: Max Haot, CEO of Vast Space and Dr. Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of Axiom Space. Neither wanted a hard, fixed date to de-orbit the ISS, but were confident they can be ready to provide hardware in the time frame a 2030 de-orbit would require. 

---

The second big story is centered on Artemis and the goal of establishing a sustained human presence on the moon. 

Last week brought some big changes to the whole Artemis program and how to improve the chances of success. The changes focused largely on increasing the launch cadence of NASA’s large SLS rocket and putting a greater emphasis on lunar surface activities. The problem is that there was no mention of how to resolve the problem that created the Lunar Gateway was developed to work around. The enormous SLS is not powerful enough to bring four astronauts to the surface of the moon.  

The concept eventually turned into a space station in lunar orbit - the Gateway - an absurd compromise that would allow Artemis to get to the moon by launching to that Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO), docking the astronaut carrying - Orion capsule to the Gateway, and taking another new vehicle, a lunar lander, down to the lunar surface. NASA has contracted with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop these landers, Starship and Blue Moon MK2, respectively.

As part of his announcement, Isaacman said a revamped Artemis III mission will now be used to test one or both of these landers near Earth before they are called upon to land humans on the Moon later this decade.

NASA will launch Artemis III next year, he said, to be followed by one or possibly even two lunar landings in 2028. A single landing before the end of 2028 seems like a stretch, even for glass-half-full optimists in the space community. And for there to be a chance of happening, SpaceX or Blue Origin, or both, need to get hustling quickly.

Isaacman is becoming more aware of these challenges, and one of his first moves as administrator was meeting with engineers from both SpaceX and Blue Origin to hear their ideas for accelerating NASA’s Artemis timeline. 

After this meeting on January 13, Isaacman said NASA would do what it could to facilitate the faster development of a Human Landing System: “We will challenge every requirement, clear every obstacle, delete every blocker and empower the team to deliver… and we will do it with time to spare.” 

An unstated law of the universe is that the more contractors there are involved (who all tend to be competitors of each other) the more complicated the mess becomes. 

For example, to reach the Moon during the initial Artemis missions, a lander must dock with the Orion spacecraft. That may sound routine, as spacecraft have been rendezvousing and docking in space for six decades.

However, Orion is saddled with thousands of requirements, and virtually every decision point regarding docking must be signed off on by the lander company—SpaceX or Blue Origin—as well as NASA, Orion’s contractor Lockheed Martin, and the European service module contractor Airbus. Additionally, Orion has a lot of sensitive elements to work around, such as the plumes of its thrusters, and engineers have spent a lot of time working on issues such as ensuring consistent cabin pressures between vehicles. In short, it gets complicated fast.

One of the ways NASA is trying to help simplify things is to eliminate the NRHO, an elliptical orbit that comes as close as 3,000 km to the surface of the Moon with its high point as far as 70,000 km from the moon. The intent is to not build the Lunar Gateway, partly because the requirement to dock to the Gateway in that NRHO added requirements that make the mission harder. 

Why not simply have Orion meet the landers in a low-lunar orbit, similar to the Apollo Program? This would allow the landers to consume less propellant on the way down and back up from the Moon. The reason is that, due to a number of poor decisions over the last 15 years, the Orion spacecraft’s service module does not have the performance needed to reach low-lunar orbit and then return safely to Earth. Hence the use of a near-rectilinear halo orbit.

However, a research paper published in July 2022 by NASA engineers at Johnson Space Center analyzes several other circular and elliptical orbits that Orion could reach with its present propulsive capabilities. Out of this analysis came another useful orbit with a name that just rolls off the tongue: Elliptical Polar Orbit with Coplanar Line of Apsides, or EPO/CoLA.

The source article goes into a few paragraphs on whether both lander contractors, SpaceX and Blue Origin can get moving fast enough to meet this improved schedule. Here's where the years of watching these things being developed makes me think that if you need good and fast SpaceX is generally the safest option to go with. 

Image from Casey Handmer's blog. He 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.

Now that the big one is mostly over with

Yesterday's adventure with getting Radio Frequency cables shoved up my circulatory system into my heart didn't go quite as smoothly as hoped but was far better than possible "worst case" scenarios that played off and on in my mind.  

I had expected to come home last night but instead spent the night in the hospital due to some excessive bleeding in a couple of the areas that cables or IV fluids went through. Which turned in bruises as the day went by.

So with the combination of less good sleep due to being in a hospital and general raggedness from the collection of bumps and bruises, I'll take tonight off, too. This is just a little note to keep anyone interested up to date.  

 

 

I Can't NOT comment on this story

Especially since suggesting this one week ago tonight, February 24th. 

NASA is targeting April 1st for the launch of Artemis II. 

NASA has fixed the problem that forced the removal of the rocket for the Artemis II mission from its launch pad last month, but it will be a couple of weeks before officials are ready to move the vehicle back into the starting blocks at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The biggest joke of a launch system launching on April Fool's Day is just too good to be true.

Screen Capture from NextSpaceflight. Image credit NextSpaceflight.com.

One of my favorite old jokes is from Jeff Foxworthy, who made a career out of "talk like a redneck" jokes. The joke was based on the word "sensuous". Jeff turned it into "since you is up, would you get me a beer?" 

So what? That turns into someone saying to the Artemis II vehicle "since you is" in the VAB, how 'bout we fix another few things.  More details in the Ars Technica article on this.  

And I'mma bet nobody who reads this would have thought about that "since you is in the VAB" line. 

Looks like congress (and NASA?) are trying to hold SpaceX back

Former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine says he's “encouraged” that Congress is considering legislation to prevent NASA from spending more than 50 percent of its launch funding on any single provider. 

The first thing to say is that Bridenstine isn't part of NASA anymore, he's now a lobbyist for United Launch Alliance or ULA. Of course, he wouldn't say that here, he just says pending legislation will protect the industry and the smaller companies. 

“America succeeds in space when American companies compete, innovate, and grow,” former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wrote on LinkedIn. “I’m encouraged to see Congress taking meaningful steps to strengthen the industrial base that underpins both our civil and national security space missions.” 
...
“Congress is reinforcing competition and protecting the small and medium-sized manufacturers, propulsion companies, avionics developers, and suppliers that make up the backbone of America’s space enterprise,” Bridenstine wrote. “Competition lowers costs, accelerates innovation and provides redundancy.”

The legislation Bridenstine is praising is being credited to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and ranking member Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). It's a new provision that appears in the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2025, and Cruz is planning a "markup hearing" for the legislation on Wednesday (3/4). 

It's hard to not see this as being aimed at SpaceX just for being so far ahead of the other launch providers. SpaceX launches the only capsule capable of flying astronauts to the International Space Station, Dragon, as well both cargo vehicles currently allowed to fly to the ISS, Cargo Dragon and Northrop Grumman's Cygnus craft.  SpaceX has been contracted by Northrop Grumman to launch their Cygnus cargo vessels until Firefly gets Grumman's replacement Antares rocket qualified. The story doesn't end there. In case you haven't noticed, SpaceX has launched lunar landing missions for smaller companies as well as a majority of NASA’s science missions. In other words, NASA flops on the ground without them.

What Bridenstine did not say on social media is that his consulting firm, The Artemis Group, netted $990,000 from United Launch Alliance in 2025, according to public records. This was nearly a third of all revenue raised by his lobbying last year, a total of $3,385,000. United Launch Alliance was formerly a major competitor to SpaceX in the US launch industry. 

Interestingly, the Senate’s provision targets launch revenues but has been said to exclude space transportation services (such as the human landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin). 

Another former NASA official, Phil McAlister, replied to Bridenstine’s post that it was “disappointing” to see him attach his name to the provision. Instead of promoting competition, McAlister said the new language is actually anti-competitive.

“What it supports is using the political process to funnel money to favored companies with inferior products,” said McAlister, who directed commercial space at NASA from 2005 to 2024. “Competition is a full and open match between companies where the best company wins. If this legislation passes as is, it ensures that the best company will not win. Instead the second or third place company will get an award because they could not compete and win fairly. And the country will see that superior performance does not win, having the best lobbyist does.”

McAlister and other critics of the provision say no one wants a launch monopoly and that NASA has sought to on-ramp new providers through programs such as its venture class services program that allocates payloads to riskier providers. However, they note that, as United Launch Alliance has struggled to bring its Vulcan rocket online over the past five years, SpaceX has stepped up to keep the International Space Station flying and to launch critical missions like NASA’s $4 billion Europa Clipper spacecraft.

It's an interesting footnote that ULA had a monopoly earlier in the company's life; they were formed in 2006 as a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, the two giant rocket companies of the time. SpaceX came along and developed the key technology that everyone knew was needed - reusability - but nobody else committed the engineering time and effort to achieve it. The first successful landing of a Falcon 9 was in December 2015, just over a decade ago, and now they've landed boosters for reuse over 600 times and reflown boosters on missions 527 times. Both numbers get revised several times per week. 

Now United Launch Alliance must compete not only with SpaceX but a newer generation of more nimble companies building reusable rockets, including Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Firefly, and Stoke Space. NASA has made it clear to these companies that it is eager to buy launch services at competitive prices from them.

Bridenstine was generally regarded as a good administrator at NASA; he was in the big seat in May of '20 when SpaceX returned manned spaceflight to the US. On the other hand, once he left NASA, he's become critical of them and Elon Musk. He joined the board of directors of Viasat, a SpaceX competitor. As I look over his history in space leadership, I think that at a total look, he's done well. 

It's just that right now, it looks like nothing but the DC Revolving Door, where senior officials go back and forth between government positions and industry.  He's getting paid by ULA to attack the competition so he's doing it. Like all whores, he'll put out for whoever is paying. 

Jim Bridenstine (L) and Elon Musk in happier times (2020). Image credit NASA