The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Friday, June 19, 2026

Small Space News Story Roundup 82

Two interesting launches are coming before the end of June. Let's start with more obscure story.

SpaceX will test their Starfall vehicle NET Tuesday

Word started getting around within the last two weeks or so that SpaceX had gotten FAA approval to do a test flight of new orbital reentry vehicle called Starfall. As of now, the launch is scheduled for No Earlier Than Tuesday morning, June 23, at 6:40 AM EDT from SLC-40 here at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

So what is it?

Starfall is a new concept for a reentry vehicle, originally intended for small manufacturing operators in space who might need to send small lots of chemicals like pharmaceuticals which they produce in zero G, or perhaps microchips from semiconductor manufacturers, down to coworkers on the ground. Instead of the conventional, more or less conical vehicles currently widely in use, Starfall is essentially pill-shaped; that is, a round, short, relatively flat circular tablet. Overall, it's 3.1m (10.2 feet) in diameter and 0.75m (2.5 feet) tall. They weigh approximately 2,100 kg (4630 lbs), and capable of carrying 1,000 kg (2200 lbs) of payload.

Image credit: to Eggasaurus Rex (no, I'm not making that up).

SpaceX has also released a rendering of a holder that would handle four Starfall landers at a time.

Image credit: to Eggasaurus Rex

The initiative was first reported by Bloomberg in July 2025 as a confidential internal project exploring space-based industrial manufacturing.^[1] By vertically integrating both the launch system and the cargo return vehicle, the program positioned SpaceX to offer end-to-end space manufacturing services at scale, competing with standalone capsule startups.

In May 2026, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a Final Environmental Assessment and a Record of Decision, officially granting SpaceX approval to conduct its first two prototype Starfall reentry test flights. According to the regulatory findings, these initial missions are authorized to splash down in international waters within the Pacific Ocean, roughly 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) off the coasts of California and Mexico.

Concurrently, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulatory filings revealed that SpaceX intends to mount integrated Starlink Earth stations on the prototype vehicles. These terminals will undergo testing to maintain active data telemetry links directly through the plasma blackout phase experienced during atmospheric reentry.

If this isn't enough info, you might want to watch Scott Manley's video on Starfall that was posted nine days ago. It goes quite a bit deeper than this, and is well done on Scott's part.

A bold, "wild and crazy" plan to rescue a doomed satellite launches on June 27

Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What’s more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?

The satellite they're trying to save is called Swift, launched in November of 2004 to detect gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. Despite its age, astrophysicists still rely on Swift’s multi-wavelength instruments to identify and locate gamma-ray bursts for follow-up observations by other observatories. The problem is that as solar cycle 25 has gotten more like the solar cycles before Swift launched in cycle 24, our atmosphere has expanded, which increases drag on the satellite.

The observatory launched into an orbit roughly 363 miles (585 km) above the Earth. As of Thursday, Swift was flying at 225 miles (363 km). The decay rate will increase as the spacecraft dips into denser layers of the atmosphere until Swift finally burns up during reentry.
...
NASA engineers estimate Swift will fall below an altitude of 186 miles (300 km) this fall—perhaps around October.

NASA's leader on this project, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, selected a small company already working for NASA because they simply didn't have the time to follow their normally required procedures.

“To be honest, no one thought it was going to be possible. No one thought we would get as far as we’ve already gotten today,” Domagal-Goldman said. “And I have to be honest, there are still risks ahead of us, but I’m both deeply thankful and as optimistic as I can be that we’ll meet those challenges because of the people that have worked on it.”
...
In September, NASA awarded Katalyst Space Technologies a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst’s Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift’s orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.

It's an interesting and impressive story. The Link satellite will launch on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL, a "far from typical" launch vehicle in a program that's far from typical everywhere you look. The Pegasus XL is airdropped at 39,000 feet by what appears to be a moderately-sized commercial jet, it ignites a series of three solid rocket motors and makes it to orbit. After 45 missions since 1990, this is scheduled to be the last Pegasus rocket to fly.

The launch is scheduled for Saturday, June 27, at 5:00 AM EDT to 10:28 AM. The "launch site" - which I interpret to be where the airplane starts from - is the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, in the Marshall Islands.