Small Space News Story Roundup 78

Because small news is better than snow news. Or something like that 

Rocket Lab's first Neutron launch slips to Q4 

Back in November, Rocket Lab announced the first launch of their Neutron rocket - closer to a competitor to Falcon 9 than their Electron rocket - would slip out in schedule, quoting mid-year or summer here on the east coast, where their Wallops Island (Virginia) launch facilities are. They just pushed it out again.

As part of its quarterly earnings guidance update on Thursday, Rocket Lab provided a new launch target for the medium-lift Neutron rocket. Following the failure of first stage tank during testing, Neutron’s first launch is now targeted for “Q4 2026,” the company said. 

I'll make that Q4 or later. 

Let's be honest. Getting a new rocket tested and to the first launch is full of difficulties and I'm sure those are accompanied by learning things that have never come up before. Eric Berger of Ars Technica (this is from their weekly Rocket Report) reports:

In its news release regarding the fourth quarter of 2025 earnings, the company said it completed successful qualification for Neutron’s thrust structure and entered the qualification phase for the interstage, and successfully qualified Neutron’s Hungry Hippo fairing and delivered it to the Assembly and Integration Complex in Virginia. I hate to do it, but I’m afraid that I am compelled to invoke Berger’s Law for rockets on this one, which states, “If a rocket is predicted to make its debut in Q4 of a calendar year, and that quarter is six or more months away, the launch will be delayed.” Since its inception in 2022, the law has been undefeated. 

This is difficult to say, but it looks like Artemis II will fly before Vulcan can

Not really big news - you've probably realized this already - but think about it this way: it means SLS is better than Vulcan. Wait!... SLS is better than another rocket? Artemis II (flying on SLS) is widely considered off until April at the earliest, and that includes that April is the only month on that calendar I've been showing (for example) that has 6 possible launch days. Those are the 1st, 3rd through 6th and the 30th.  

Meanwhile, in the post about Vulcan being grounded (two days ago as I type), the US Space Force officer in charge of the project, Col. Eric Zarybnisky said, “This is going to be a many-months process as we work through the exact technical issue that happened and the corrective actions we need to make sure, we need to take, to make sure this doesn’t happen again,”

The calendar of possible Artemis II launch days doesn't go past April 30, but a few days in early May seem to be likely as well as days in June and July. I'd honestly be surprised if Vulcan can fly before the fourth quarter.

An anomalous plume, top right, is visible from one of the Vulcan’s solid rocket motors during the fourth Vulcan launch on Feb. 12, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.

NASA Cancels Artemis III Return to the Moon

And more. 

In a live video presentation today, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a sweeping reorganization of the Artemis program to return to the moon. The changes include reassigning the Artemis III mission from the first moon landing to a set of tests in Earth Orbit, which instead moves the landing out to Artemis IV - or possibly farther. A goal is to increase the cadence of missions and it includes using funding from the cancellation of an expensive rocket upper stage. 

Isaacman is seeking to revitalize an agency that has moved at a glacial pace on its deep space programs.  

A key message in the talk was the absurdly low pace of the current program to get to the moon, compared to the pace NASA worked at in the Apollo program. 

During past exploration missions, from Mercury through Gemini, Apollo, and the Space Shuttle program, NASA has launched humans on average about once every three months. It has been nearly 3.5 years since Artemis I launched.

“This is just not the right pathway forward,” Isaacman said.

Yes, it actually mentions 3.5 years since Artemis I even though that flight was uncrewed; not one astronaut on board. How do we get a pace from one launch?  Do we count from completely different vehicles, like the Crew-12 launch, or from the last shuttle flight in 2011?   

“NASA must standardize its approach, increase flight rate safely, and execute on the president’s national space policy,” Isaacman said. “With credible competition from our greatest geopolitical adversary increasing by the day, we need to move faster, eliminate delays, and achieve our objectives.” 

Congress pushed an Artemis IV and V onto NASA, can Boeing even build those two in time?  Much like how temporary Administrator Sean Duffy said back in December, "Artemis I, Artemis II, and Artemis III are all $4 billion a launch, $4 billion a launch. At $4 billion a launch, you don’t have a Moon program. It just, I don’t think that exists."

The changes announced today include:

• Cancellation of the Exploration Upper Stage and Block IB upgrade for SLS rocket
• Artemis II and Artemis III missions will use the SLS rocket with existing upper stage
• Artemis IV, V (and any additional missions, should there be) will use a “standardized” upper stage
• Artemis III will no longer land on the Moon; rather Orion will launch on SLS and dock with Starship and/or Blue Moon landers in low-Earth orbit
• Artemis IV is now the first lunar landing mission
• NASA will seek to fly Artemis missions annually, starting with Artemis III in “mid” 2027, followed by at least one lunar landing in 2028
• NASA is working with SpaceX and Blue Origin to accelerate their development of commercial lunar landers for Artemis IV and beyond

The goal is to standardize the SLS rocket into a single configuration to make it as reliable as possible and to launch it as frequently as every 10 months. NASA will fly the SLS vehicle until there are commercial alternatives to launch crew to the Moon, perhaps through Artemis V since Congress has mandated a IV and V, or perhaps longer.

As is often the case, Eric Berger at Ars Technica claims inside sources in NASA. He has pretty good record with his predictions, and here says the sources said all of the agency’s key contractors are on board with the change, and senior leaders in Congress have been briefed on the proposed changes.

Which leaves Boeing as the one that has the most to win or lose by cranking the changes to SLS. The first item in that list is the cancellation of the Exploration Upper Stage, which Boeing is contracted to develop. They released a positive-sounding message. 

“Boeing is a proud partner to the Artemis mission and our team is honored to contribute to NASA’s vision for American space leadership,” said Steve Parker, Boeing Defense, Space & Security president and CEO, in the news release. “The SLS core stage remains the world’s most powerful rocket stage, and the only one that can carry American astronauts directly to the moon and beyond in a single launch. As NASA lays out an accelerated launch schedule, our workforce and supply chain are prepared to meet the increased production needs.”

From our viewpoint, over a half a century past the Apollo years, and many of us having watched the development from Project Mercury forward, the way NASA implemented the first trip to the moon is an excellent lesson in planning to complete something everyone says is impossible. Like a longtime jogger training for their first marathon, they just kept going a step farther every mission. Apollo 7 was a low-Earth orbit test of the Apollo spacecraft, Apollo 8 tested the spacecraft in lunar orbit, Apollo 9 was a LEO rendezvous with the lunar lander as if it had launched from the moon, and Apollo 10 tested the lunar lander descending to the Moon, without touching down, and getting back to the Command Module in lunar orbit.

With its previous Artemis template, NASA skipped the steps taken by Apollo 7, 9, and 10. In the view of many industry officials, this leap from Artemis II—a crewed lunar flyby of the Moon testing only the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft—to Artemis III and a full-on lunar landing was enormous and risky.

A step too far.  

Isaacman makes reference in his message about not having enough missions to develop muscle memory of all the things they need to do.  Before today, the plan before the landing was one lunar orbital mission. That's it - the next mission was the landing. The new plan adds one mission - for the Orion capsule to rendezvous and dock with Starship and/or Blue Moon landers in low-Earth orbit. Yeah, it's true going from one mission to two is doubling the amount of practice that's possible, it's just the question of whether that's enough; or even if it's worth doing. 

For final words, I bow to Eric Berger: 

Although the changes outlined by NASA on Friday are sweeping, they are not completely out of the blue.

In April 2024, Ars reported that some senior NASA officials were considering an Earth-orbit rendezvous between Orion and Starship as a means to buy down risk for a lunar landing. NASA ultimately punted on the idea before it was revived by Isaacman this month.

Additionally, in October 2024, Ars offered a guide to saving the “floundering” Artemis program by canceling the Block 1B upgrade for the SLS rocket, replacing its upper stage with a Centaur V, and canceling the Lunar Gateway. This would free up an estimated $2 billion annually to focus on accelerating a lunar landing, the publication estimated.

That may be the very course the space agency has embarked upon today.

First-time Milestones for the Artemis III Mission prior to Feb. 27, 2025. (Image credit: NASA Aerospace Advisory Panel)

EDIT 2/25 at 10:30 AM: To correct the error pointed out by commenter Brewer

US Space Force grounds ULA's Vulcan

In the least surprising story in a while, the US Space Force has halted all National Security missions slated for ULA's Vulcan rocket for the foreseeable future due to the solid rocket booster failure that occurred in the February 12 launch of the fourth Vulcan mission. Out of the four missions, two have been affected by what appears to be the same sort of failure if not identical failures.

Although the failure dramatically changed the magnitude and the direction of the Solid Rocket Booster's (SRB's) thrust, the control systems controlling the rocket were able to compensate for that change to get the mission's payloads to their respective proper orbits. Nobody approaches 100% confident that will always work out positively if more SRBs have the same sort of nozzle failure.

"This is going to be a many-months process as we work through the exact technical issue that happened and the corrective actions we need to make sure, we need to take, to make sure this doesn’t happen again," Space Force Col. Eric Zarybnisky said during a media round robin during the Air Force Association’s Warfare Symposium on Feb. 25, as reported by Breaking Defense.
...
“We are going to work through this anomaly until we launch again on Vulcan,” Zarybnisky told reporters ... "Until this anomaly is solved we will not be launching Vulcan missions."

On February 12, ULA's Vulcan rocket climbs towards orbit in a shower of sparks from its solid rocket booster. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.

While the focus on national security missions is easy to grasp, an important application that's covered by the phrase may not come immediately to your mind: Space Force is responsible for the GPS constellation, a utility that touches nearly everyone, and the stewards of the satellite navigation network are eager to populate the fleet with the latest and greatest spacecraft.

Aside from routine replacement of GPS Satellites as they age and start to degrade there's more to consider. 

Another motivation is to replace the oldest active GPS satellites, some of which have been in space since the late 1990s, with newer satellites better suited for the modern world. Beginning in 2005, the military has deployed GPS spacecraft with additional civilian signals for aviation and interoperability with Europe’s Galileo navigation satellites. At the same time, the military introduced a new military-grade signal called M-code, designed for warfare.

M-code is more resistant to jamming, and its encryption makes it more difficult to spoof, a kind of attack that makes receivers trust fake navigation signals over real ones. The upgrade also allows the military to deny an adversary access to GPS during conflict, while maintaining the ability for US and allied forces to use M-code. 

Interference with GPS satellites is on the rise, particularly in the trouble spots that have probably popped into your mind already. Russia and Ukraine, for example, are the easy ones, but the middle east and rest of the eastern Mediterranean are trouble spots, as well. 

Recent high-profile examples of GPS interference include an incident in 2024 that resulted in a fatal airline crash, killing 38 people. The International Air Transport Association reported a 500 percent increase in GPS spoofing incidents in 2024.

For these reasons, the Space Force is prioritizing the launch of new GPS satellites better equipped to repel all of this jamming and spoofing. Currently, 26 of the 31 operational GPS satellites carry M-code capability, enough for global coverage with little margin. But just 19 of the 31 satellites broadcast the higher-power civilian L5 signal, which is more resistant to interference than the civilian signals onboard satellites launched before 2010.

The loss of ULA as a launch provider is going to affect the ability to get GPS satellites into orbit. It's also not a new problem. 

In a little more than a year, the Space Force has launched three GPS satellites in relatively quick succession on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. All three were originally booked to launch on ULA’s Vulcan rocket. The first of these three newest GPS satellites, manufactured by Lockheed Martin, was declared complete and ready for launch in August 2021. Three years later, with ULA’s Vulcan rocket still not ready, the Space Force decided to switch it to a SpaceX launcher. 

In addition to the GPS satellites, there are more and different Vulcan military launches scheduled for this year. All of their statuses are unclear. One that's particularly notable is a missile-warning satellite, which is one of the Space Force’s most expensive satellites ever, at over $4 billion. It was supposed to launch on a Vulcan rocket in the coming months and be parked in geosynchronous orbit to detect the heat plumes of ballistic and hypersonic missiles.

Switching over to a Falcon 9 is simple for the GPS satellites because they've already done the hard part, developing the interface between the satellite and booster. For payloads like this missile-warning sat., unless it has a common interface with other payloads, they'll have to develop that. 

We finally know which member of Crew-11 had the medical emergency

From the first mention of the medical emergency on Crew-11 until well after the splash down, there was a ton of speculation about who the crew member was. From what I've read, both in comments here and on other sites, the most common speculation was that the only woman on the crew, Zena Cardman, was pregnant. 

If you'll recall, when the issue first showed up, Zena Cardman and crew mate Mike Fincke were scheduled for a spacewalk on January 8th when the medical emergency was revealed. From my article when the story first went public:

The story broke in the last 24 hours that first, a scheduled spacewalk for this morning (Jan. 8 at 8AM EST) with two astronauts from Crew-11 was being cancelled due to a medical issue with one of the two. Today, NASA decided to do an evacuation of the crew from the ISS while being careful to say it was not a medical emergency. 

One of the aspects rarely mentioned was that with Cardman and Fincke cancelling the spacewalk, it seemed pretty obvious that one of those two was the one with the medical emergency. 

The rumors turned out to be flipped. Today, NASA revealed the Mike Fincke was the one with the emergency.  Mike was the Crew-11 pilot and commander of the ISS' Expedition 74. He requested that NASA identify him, which removes the HIPAA concerns, and posted this to X:

You'll note that at no place does he actually say what the medical condition was or is. I'm not going to imply that he was pregnant, but it was something he doesn't feel comfortable talking about. 

The exact nature of his ailment remains undisclosed, but Fincke's statement clarified that the issue, while not considered an emergency, required "advanced medical imaging not available on the space station." As a result, Fincke and his crewmates — NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, Japanese space agency astronaut Kimiya Yui and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov — returned to Earth aboard the Crew Dragon "Endeavour" on Jan. 15, about a month earlier than originally planned.

If I missed work due to something like an inguinal hernia, I probably wouldn't care if it was widely known, but that's as close as I'll get to speculating about what happened. I just wish him the best in healing and getting back to life as normal.

As the days slip away,

As the days slip by, it seems as if the Artemis II mission slides farther out in time more than one day per day.  That mostly has to do with there only being five or six days per month that it can achieve the required orbit, so if it can't launch by March 11th, for example, it just got a possible 21 day delay - it can't get to the moon launching on March 12th, 13th or any day until April 1st. (Coincidentally, what a great day for the big Artemis mission! April Fool's Day!) 

In Sunday's post, we related that they were supposed to roll the Artemis II SLS back today, but that was delayed by the little piece of the "Bomb Cyclone" dumping snow in the Northeast that we're getting here.

Due to weather, NASA now is targeting early Wednesday, Feb. 25, to roll the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis II off the launch pad and back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Cold temperatures and high winds are expected Tuesday, and rolling on Feb. 25, gives teams enough time to complete preparations at the launch pad that were limited today by high winds in the area.

The approximately 4-mile trek is expected to take up to 12 hours. Once back in the VAB, teams will immediately begin work to install platforms to access the area of the helium flow issue.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is getting back to their cadence of close to 3 launches per week, with the launch of Starlink 6-110 from Cape Canaveral at 6:04 PM. (That video starts at T-30 seconds) We replayed a common goof we make here, we know the launch is coming, we know the time, and have some reminders set, but we'll end up forgetting about it until we hear the first rumble of the engines.  By that time, it's always so far downrange that we won't see it from the yard (unless it's at night, cloud free or low clouds in the direction we'll look). 

Neither was the case when the sound got here. First thing I did was look up at a clock and could see it looked like the time I expected to hear the rumble, around 3 minutes after liftoff, and by the time I pulled up YouTube, it was just getting ready for entry burn (around 6 mins after launch) I watched until the booster landed on the recovery drone, Just Read The Instructions. This was the 10th launch of Booster 1092, so "like new" or whatever the used car dealers say. About an hour after the launch SpaceX said all the satellites were delivered into orbit nominally. 

I wonder what the probability is of used rocket dealers becoming a real thing? Unlike cars, they require a LOT of specialized equipment to use them, so maybe used rocket dealers would offer launch services, like"buy the rocket, use our pad and recovery drone!" 

SpaceX Falcon B1092 rocket lifts off from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin the Starlink 6-110 mission, Feb. 24, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

This may be my oddest post ever

But it's still better than last year's.

Last year's post was an awkward one about having forgotten it was this blog's 15th blogiversary, but it was almost a full month late. I posted it on March 15. This one isn't that late, only a little. My 16th anniversary was Saturday the 21st. 

My first post was February 21, 2010, which was a Sunday. Since dates move around, instead of celebrating on February 21, I've just used the last Sunday in February. That would have been yesterday, so I even missed the make believe anniversary. 

So let's do the obligatory thing;

Copyright Adobe Stock, as you can see...

As always, I thank you for stopping by. It's hard to know how many people stop by to read by Blogger's stats, part of that is real differences in people stopping by but my gut feel is that most of the "funny business" isn't real. Check out this plot of traffic for the last 90 days. 

Which is more realistic, the peaks up above 20,000 views per day or the ends mostly under 5000? I'll bet those days with over 10,000 views are some sort of either cyber attacks or something nefarious. At random times, I'll get comments that are obviously spam - not related to the post at all, links to other sites, usually outside the US. Stuff like that. I generally delete those but leave the "deleted" message in hopes that the ones doing it will realize the comment will only be there a few hours. 

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So let me pass on something that I think many people will find interesting, especially hams and broader radio hobbyists. We have just gone through at least 1-1/2 days without one visible sunspot. I first saw this yesterday afternoon, and we don't know when or where the next spot will show up. This is the first time without a visible spot in four years. There's a hole in the sun's atmosphere and we've had minor (G1) geomagnetic storms off and on since yesterday, caused by the solar wind getting here both faster and stronger. 

Both of these things are evidence that cycle 25 is decreasing toward solar minimum. That's not to say we're virtually there, that's likely to be four years away (plus or minus something) just to say that it's almost certain that the "good days" of the cycle are going to be less frequent going forward 

The more things change...

As the modern saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.  Around 8:00 PM this evening I went back to the one of the cameras formerly named Lab Padre (now named Avid) to get a look at the Artemis II vehicle, only to find it seemed to be in exactly the same place as it was 30-ish hours ago. Is it being rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building? Not yet, but they say it will. The NASA blog for the mission says it will be rolling back on Tuesday - Feb. 24. A time has not been set. 

Maybe you've heard the version that goes the more things change the more they stay insane. Seems like it goes well if those things all together are named Space Launch System. 

The NASA post goes on to say:

On Feb. 21, managers decided to remove recently installed platforms before high winds descend on the Space Coast, which poised teams for rollback while discussions about the issue were ongoing. Returning to the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy is required to determine the cause of the issue and fix it. 

Teams are reviewing the exact time to begin the approximately 4 mile, multi-hour trek.

The quick work to begin preparations for rolling the rocket and spacecraft back to the VAB potentially preserves the April launch window, pending the outcome of data findings, repair efforts, and how the schedule comes to fruition in the coming days and weeks. 

Wait... "Potentially preserves the April launch window?" That implies they've given up on March already. 

Screen capture of the Artemis II vehicle on pad 39B, from Avid Space's Cape Cam    

But on a more pleasant note, Sweet Little Wife (SLW) and I went outside last night to watch the 33rd flight of SpaceX's B1067. The liftoff time was changed over the evening from the original 9:18 PM EST to 10:47 PM so it was quiet in the neighborhood. We watched until a minute or two after the stage separation and were back in the house to easily be able to watch the booster landing and earning its B1067-33 designation.

Like virtually all Falcon 9 launches it was almost boringly perfect.  Unlike the vast majority of launches we got a continuous engine rumble from just after dropping the first stage until well after it touched down on ASOG (A Shortfall Of Gravitas). The rumble resonates in our patio doors and other hardware, so we literally hear our house shaking. That sound was around 10 minutes after launch, so it had to be coming from closer to ASOG than the launch pad. Much closer to ASOG.

At the risk of repeating myself too often, I remember when they weren't sure they could get 10 flights out of a booster and that keeps pushing to bigger and bigger numbers. The current goal is 40. 

I can't wait to hear how long the doors rattle after Starship launches from the Cape.

"This Just In..." Artemis 2 may be OFF the schedule

This morning (Saturday, Feb. 21), NASA announced that it had detected a problem with Artemis II's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket that has put the Friday launch in jeopardy.

The issue, a helium-flow interruption in the vehicle's upper stage, was noticed overnight from Friday (Feb. 20) to Saturday. It will likely require a rollback from the pad to KSC's huge Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said via X on Saturday. 

"This will almost assuredly impact the March launch window," Isaacman said.

This comes less than 24 hours after the press conference celebrating how well the Wet Dress Rehearsal of Artemis II took place concluding with the launch being assigned and listed on Next Spaceflight. At the moment, it has been pushed to April 1st at 6:24PM. 

It's worth noticing that this helium flow issue was in the upper stage of the SLS rocket while the majority of the WDR test completed Thursday was to the booster or core stage of the SLS. I don't know if this system gets activated during the WDR or not.  

So how about a new world record? 

SpaceX to launch Booster 1067 on its 33rd flight tonight

Tonight at 9:18 PM EST (0218 UTC) SpaceX will launch a batch of Starlink v2-mini satellites for their second-generation high-speed low earth orbit internet satellite constellation. 

Yes, this is B1067, the fleet leader with 32 missions after a 75 day turnaround from its last record-setting flight. The booster landing will be on A Shortfall Of Gravitas or ASOG.

The first stage of B1067 stands on the ocean-based droneship "Just Read the Instructions" after performing its record 32nd propulsive landing on Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX - with minor edits to exposure - SiG)

After successful WDR, Artemis II is on the schedule

Last night, at the conclusion of the Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) for the Artemis II mission, they completed the critical last four minutes until the vehicle's control software terminated the count for the second time and the vehicle correctly aborted the launch. That's almost two sequential WDRs in one day.

This is a massive success, far better than the prior attempt at the WDR, and senior managers had enough confidence to move forward with plans to launch four astronauts around the Moon. The mission is currently on the Next Spaceflight schedule for two weeks from tonight, Friday, March 6 at 8:29 PM EST, 0129 UTC. The top level NASA administrator on the mission credited the success to the fixes carried out after that Feb. 2nd attempt.

“For the most part, those fixes all performed pretty well yesterday,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for NASA’s exploration programs. “We were able to fully fuel the SLS rocket within the planned timeline.”
...
“We’re now targeting March 6 as our earliest launch attempt,” Glaze said. “I am going to caveat that. I want to be open, transparent with all of you that there is still pending work. There’s work, a lot of forward work, that remains.”

This is probably a good place to repeat a graphic shown before, which shows the five or six days available per month after accounting for the position of the Moon in its orbit, the flight’s trajectory, and the various thermal and lighting constraints.

It's important to realize that despite the fact that they might have just had the most successful WDR of every (all both) SLS mission, I don't think we can automatically conclude that the new seals will work in two weeks. Teflon seals can be fussy. Fickle. They worked better than any other set of seals in every other test, and it would be nice to be able to count on them, but I'm not sure we can assume they're perfect. There are no plans to go in and replace them again before launch. If they fail on March 6, maybe they can be replaced to try again before the 11th.

Meanwhile, the Artemis II astronauts, commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, with mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen, entered NASA’s standard two-week-long preflight medical quarantine on Friday at their home base in Houston.

NASA's Space Launch System with the America 250 logos on the SRBs on Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky

NASA Admin releases report on Starliner

We're approaching one year from the much delayed return of the Starliner astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. It ended a 2-week mission that turned into more like nine months all because of the horrific performance of the Boeing Starliner capsule, and I find it interesting that both Butch and Suni retired before the end of 2025. 

Today, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman released a long-awaited summary of the mission. 

The headline is that NASA has classified the Starliner mission as a “Type A” mishap. That level is the most serious on the scale that goes from A down to D and one without a letter but that's minor.  The definition at the linked page (.pdf) is the direct cost of mission failure and property damage greater than or equal to $2,000,000 with two other conditions aimed at aircraft mishaps rather than spacecraft.

As part of the announcement, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent an agency-wide letter that recognized the shortcomings of both Starliner’s developer, Boeing, as well as the space agency itself. Starliner flew under the auspices of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, in which the agency procures astronaut transportation services to the International Space Station.

“We are taking ownership of our shortcomings,” Isaacman said.

It's a big departure from the talk last summer, as we went from the mission up to the station, through the decision to send the two back down on Crew-9's Crew Dragon - by cutting Crew-9 down to two in order to have seats on the Dragon for Butch and Suni to come back down on.  We had months of Boeing saying things like, “We just had an outstanding day” and their “confidence remains high” in the Starliner safely returning the two to Earth. Some of those statements have been wiped from Boeing's public-facing records.

In recognition of NASA taking ownership of its shortcomings, Isaacman went farther.

The letter and a subsequent news conference on Thursday afternoon were remarkable for the amount of accountability taken by NASA. Moreover, at Isaacman’s direction, the space agency released an internal report, comprising 311 pages, that details findings from the Program Investigation Team that looked into the Starliner flight.

“Starliner has design and engineering deficiencies that must be corrected, but the most troubling failure revealed by this investigation is not hardware,” Isaacman wrote in his letter to the NASA workforce. “It is decision-making and leadership that, if left unchecked, could create a culture incompatible with human spaceflight.”

Within weeks of their arrival back on Earth, the crew gave an interview in which they described exactly what they encountered and it was truly scary. Yes, there were moments when they were concerned about whether or not they would survive. 

The short version of what happened is that management - both NASA and Boeing - minimized every problem Starliner had, going back to its second orbital flight test in May 2022, two years before the manned flight. There were failures that should have raised huge red flags that systems on Starliner were seriously bad. 

However, in his letter to NASA employees, Isaacman said the NASA and Boeing investigations into these failures did not push hard enough to find the root cause of the thruster failures.

“The investigations often stopped at the proximate cause, treated it with a fix, or accepted the issue as an unexplained anomaly,” Isaacman said. “In some cases, the proximate-cause diagnosis itself was incorrect due to insufficient rigor in following the data to its logical conclusion.” 

This is about as good a description as you'll get of an arthritic, brainless and useless bureaucracy. The fact that Isaacman recognizes this is a very good sign. There's a lot of hard work to come before they can become a useful, solid engineering team.

At this time, there's another test flight planned for Starliner. Currently expected to be uncrewed and as soon as April. Asked about this, let's Isaacman isn't sure it's ready. He sees need for lots of more work. 

“We are committed to helping Boeing work through this problem, to remediate the technical challenges, to fully understand the risk associated with this vehicle, and to try and minimize it to the greatest extent possible,” he said. “And if we can implement a lot of the report recommendations, then we will fly again.”

For their part, Boeing says they're committed to being a commercial crew mission provider. 

Starliner docked to the ISS during June 2024's flight. Image credit: NASA

Elon Musk talks about plans to build catapult to launch from moon

Now that SpaceX has bought the AI company xAI, it seems that SpaceX is leading them into the often-talked about solution to the enormous power problems with AI - data centers in space.

Last week, SpaceX founder Elon Musk advised workers at the newly acquired company xAI that he wants to set up a factory on the moon to build artificial intelligence (AI) satellites. And he called for a colossal catapult on the lunar surface to fling them into space.

"My estimate is that, within two to three years, the lowest-cost way to generate AI compute will be in space," Elon Musk wrote in a Feb. 2 update that announced SpaceX's acquisition of xAI.

While launching satellites with existing technologies like the Falcon family or the Starship, Musk envisions something launched by the planned human outposts on the moon. Factories on the moon could take advantage of lunar resources to produce the satellites, as well as to build mass drivers on the moon to hurl the satellites into their orbits. 

"By using an electromagnetic mass driver and lunar manufacturing," he wrote, "it is possible to put 500 to 1000 TW/year [terawatts per year] of AI satellites into deep space, meaningfully ascend the Kardashev scale and harness a non-trivial percentage of the sun’s power." 
...
Musk isn't the first person to propose the use of mass drivers — which are basically railguns — on the moon. He's following in the footsteps of space visionary Gerard O'Neill, who floated the idea back in 1974.

Railguns may not be as familiar as coil guns, which are numbers of coils aligned along a straight path with the power to each coil pulsed in time to add energy into a payload traveling along the controlled path as the payload reaches each coil. O'Neill worked on the design of mass drivers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with colleague Henry Kolm and a group of student volunteers to construct their first mass driver prototype. They eventually concluded that a mass driver only 520 feet long could boost material off the lunar surface.

Artist's illustration of an electromagnetic mass driver launching a payload from the surface of the moon. (Image credit: General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems)

You may have heard of the existing electromagnetic aircraft launch system, now operating reliably on the U.S. Navy's Gerald R. Ford nuclear aircraft carrier. It's the same basic technology as a mass driver.

How far out in the future is a scenario like this? It's going to require a largely self-sufficient colony on the moon that operates at all times - not shutting down for the (two week) night. I'd guess such a colony would be underground for a number of reasons. Starship is the only vehicle being talked about that has capacity to deliver the kinds of numbers of tons of payloads that it would require to build and support such a colony, with the ability to deliver 100 metric tons at a time to the lunar surface. While I like the way Musk refers to "... within two to three years, the lowest-cost way to generate AI compute will be in space," I'd love to see that, but it doesn't look like anything is moving that fast. I think predicting 2035 is going out on a limb.

I stand by my opinion that AI is the biggest hype episode in world history. Everyone acts like there will be one winner and they'll be the one.

A small Artemis II story - next WDR is on NOW

Because I really can't find anything new to write about.

NASA to fuel up for a full Wet Dress Rehearsal until Friday, Feb. 20

The headline is basically the story.  We all knew it was going to happen just not the official date. 

The agency plans to load more than 700,000 gallons (2.65 million liters) of liquid hydrogen (LH2) and liquid oxygen (LOX) into Artemis 2's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket on Thursday (Feb. 19), wrapping up a crucial two-day-long test called a wet dress rehearsal.

This will be the second wet dress for Artemis 2, the first crewed moon mission since the Apollo era. The first rehearsal, which began on Jan. 31, ended prematurely due to an LH2 leak detected during propellant loading.

There was an attempt to repeat the test last week (Feb. 12) that didn't actually pass, but enough indications of improvement were present to make the team think they made progress. 

Artemis 2 teams replaced two seals in the aftermath of the first wet dress. Then, on Feb. 12, they partially filled SLS' tanks with LH2 in a "confidence test" designed to assess the efficacy of that fix. A problem with ground support equipment restricted the flow of LH2 during that test, but the team nonetheless was "able to gain confidence in several key objectives."

Artemis 2 team members soon tied the ground-support issue to a filter, which they replaced over this past weekend. They now feel ready to conduct another wet dress rehearsal, which will run through the key operations leading up to launch.

The test countdown clock officially started this evening, Feb. 17 at 6:50 p.m. EST (2350 UTC) and is scheduled to run until approximately 12:30 a.m., Friday, Feb. 20 (2530 UTC).  

The full Moon is seen behind the Space Launch System rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Yeah, I ran this picture the other day, but it's pretty. NASA/Ben Smegelsky

The next private company to send a crew to the ISS

If you've been following the space news to any degree, it's probably not going to surprise you to read that California startup, Vast, will be the next company to send a crew of four up to the International Space Station. 

NASA announced on Thursday (Feb. 12) that it has picked Long Beach-based Vast to conduct the sixth private astronaut flight to the International Space Station (ISS), which will launch no earlier than summer 2027.

The selection is a big deal for Vast and for NASA, which wants private companies to take the reins from the ISS when it's decommissioned in 2030.

There have been four other private astronaut crews to visit the ISS and all have been from Houston-based Axiom space. Axiom is also scheduled for a fifth mission to the ISS, currently scheduled for No Earlier Than (NET) January 2027. Axiom's missions have all been flown on SpaceX hardware; Crew Dragon capsules lifted by Falcon 9 boosters. Vast's mission will fly the same hardware, which has got to be good training. We don't know who will be flying for Vast; they have to choose a crew and get them approved by NASA before they'll be named. 

Flying the same missions isn't the only similarity between Axiom and Vast.

Vast and Axiom have similar long-term ambitions: Both companies aim to establish and operate a private space station in low Earth orbit (LEO), and both see organizing tourist flights to the ISS as a step toward achieving that goal.

"Leveraging the remaining life of the space station with science and research-led commercial crewed missions is a critical part of the transition to commercial space stations and fully unlocking the orbital economy," Vast CEO Max Haot said in the same statement.

I'm sure it's purely coincidental that NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman says similar things. 

"Private astronaut missions represent more than access to the International Space Station — they create opportunities for new ideas, companies and capabilities that further enhance American leadership in low Earth orbit and open doors for what’s next," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement on Thursday.

"We're proud to welcome Vast to this growing community of commercial partners," he added. "Each new entrant brings unique strengths that fuel a dynamic, innovative marketplace as we advance research and technology and prepare for missions to the moon, Mars and beyond."

When we talk about Vast and Axiom working on private space stations, don't forget that's just part of the bigger effort to build private space stations. Blue Origin and Sierra Space are working on a station they call Orbital Reef, and a handful of others including NanoRacks and Voyager Space are developing another station named Starlab.

With the ISS having been on orbit and continuously occupied since 2000, it's probably easy to think it'll always be there. Reality is that it's dependent on the continuous stream of supplies from the ground, so it's not hard to think of things that could render it impossible to maintain and a future (or just a future period) without a space station. 

The Zvezda service module, seen here near the top of this image, is talked about as the module that made the International Space Station habitable, opening the life of the ISS. Image Credit: NASA

Keep an eye out for this launch this week

Firefly Aerospace is scheduling their next launch toward the end of this week. 

This week, Firefly said that its next Alpha rocket underwent a successful 20-second static fire test. This clears the way for the rocket to make a launch attempt no earlier than February 18 from its launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. 

The mission, which has been given the cutesy mission name "Stairway to Seven," is currently scheduled for Friday, Feb. 20 at 7:20 PM EST from Vandenberg SFB. (Link to where a video will be streamed on that page)

Au revoir Block I … It’s an important mission, because the previous Alpha launch, in April 2025, ended in failure when stage separation damaged one of the rocket’s upper stage engines and prevented the mission from reaching orbit. Moreover, the company lost the first stage of the flight in September during an accident in Texas. The upcoming flight, “Stairway to Seven,” will be the final flight of Block I of the Alpha booster. 

Firefly has been a subject here many times, for both their lunar lander missions launched by SpaceX and for their Alpha launch vehicle that is being developed to replace Northrop Grumman's Antares 330 launch vehicle that has had its cargo drone missions to the Space Station cancelled because of the Russian engines it originally used.

Northrup Grumman October 2022 rendering of the new Antares 330 booster from Firefly with a Cygnus cargo vehicle mounted to the top.

Artemis II's next Wet Dress Rehearsal this week

I should say it will probably be this coming week or something more tentative than just saying it'll definitely be this week.  

There was a fueling test last week that wasn't hyped about in advance, it just suddenly got announced while we all seemed to be concentrating on the coming Crew-12 launch. Today we learned that they're planning more tests fueling WDRs due to some things noticed during that test - not just the previous (Feb. 2nd) WDR test that failed. 

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said today (Saturday Feb. 14) the agency is looking at ways to prevent the fueling problems but didn't say before Artemis II's flight; he said before Artemis III.

There were a couple of interesting statements made about the WDR test that made Looney Tunes-style question marks appear in the air above my head. 

First:

Fuel leaks are nothing new for the Space Launch System. The same kind of leak delayed the first test flight of the SLS rocket for several months in 2022. With that launch, ground teams thought they fixed the problem by changing how they load super-cold liquid hydrogen into the rocket’s core stage. The launch team used the same loading procedure February 2, but the leak cropped up again. 

That means a "fix" that worked for Artemis I was duplicated on this Artemis II SLS and it didn't work? It only worked once, on one system? That's not an encouraging outcome; it implies there's so much variation from unit to unit that you can never know if a given rocket will work properly. They're one-of-a-kind systems, not consistently built. Today's buzz word would be bespoke instead of manufactured. Maybe custom made. The big issue there is not knowing if something that fixed a problem before will ever fix it again.

Second:

Isaacman wrote Saturday that the test “provided a great deal of data, and we observed materially lower leak rates compared to prior observations during WDR-1.”

So this week's test, had "materially lower leak rates" than the first run of a WDR and they didn't give it a "passing" mark? 

During the first WDR earlier this month, hydrogen gas concentrations in the area around the fueling connection spiked higher than 16 percent, NASA’s safety limit. This spike was higher than any of the leak rates observed during the Artemis I launch campaign in 2022. Since then, NASA reassessed their safety limit and raised it from 4 percent —a conservative rule NASA held over from the Space Shuttle program—to 16 percent. 
...
John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s Artemis II mission management team, said the decision to relax the safety limit between Artemis I and Artemis II was grounded in test data.

“The SLS program, they came up with a test campaign that actually looked at that cavity, the characteristics of the cavity, the purge in the cavity … and they introduced hydrogen to see when you could actually get it to ignite, and at 16 percent, you could not,” said Honeycutt, who served as NASA’s SLS program manager before moving to his new job.

Another way of interpreting all this is that NASA used the three-year delay between Artemis I and Artemis II to get more comfortable with a significant hydrogen leak, instead of fixing the leaks.

Doesn't sound good? Doesn't sound even slightly professional? NASA chief Jared Isaacman said, “I will say near-conclusively for Artemis III, we will cryoproof the vehicle before it gets to the pad, and the propellant loading interfaces we are troubleshooting will be redesigned.”

Back for the Artemis I mission, during the months of fighting hydrogen leaks, they were found to be from ground support equipment. 

Specifically, the hydrogen leaks originate in the area where fueling lines on the rocket’s launch platform connect to the bottom of the core stage. Two Tail Service Mast Umbilicals, or TSMUs, route liquid hydrogen and and liquid oxygen into the rocket during the countdown, then disconnect and retract into protective housings at liftoff. 

The TSMU supplying liquid hydrogen to the core stage has two lines, 8 inches and 4 inches in diameter, connecting through matching umbilical plates on the ground side and the rocket side. Technicians replaced seals around the two fueling lines after the practice countdown, or Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), earlier this month.

The full Moon is seen behind the Space Launch System rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Tail Service Mast Umbilicals (TSMUs) are the gray structures that extend above the launch platform on the bottom left of the core stage. Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky

I didn't think I could get a lower opinion of SLS than I already have.

Jeff Bezos taunts Elon Musk with a turtle picture?

On Monday, Feb. 9, Jeff Bezos did a really unusual thing for him. He posted to his own, personal account on X an unusual picture of a turtle. More specifically, a black-and-white image of a turtle emerging from the shadows. As you can verify by clicking on that link, it wasn't a "poster" or meme with messages written on the picture, or the name of who it was addressed to. There's no text at all this evening as I look at it. 

Step by step, ferociously? Credit: Jeff Bezos/X

I'm sure that a lot of people were confused by this; I mean what does a turtle have to do with anything? Why? For whom? 

I found out about this doing my daily scrolls of Ars Technica and a handful or others. Ars' senior space correspondent apparently quickly interpreted this as being a message to Elon Musk. Why a turtle?

The photo, which included no text, may have stumped some observers. Yet for anyone familiar with Bezos’ privately owned space company, Blue Origin, the message was clear. The company’s coat of arms prominently features two turtles, a reference to one of Aesop’s Fables, “The Tortoise and the Hare,” in which the slow and steady tortoise wins the race over a quicker but overconfident hare.

Bezos’ foray into social media turtle trolling came about 12 hours after Musk made major waves in the space community by announcing that SpaceX was pivoting toward the Moon, rather than Mars, as a near-term destination. It represented a huge shift in Musk’s thinking, as the SpaceX founder has long spoken of building a multi-planetary civilization on Mars. 

Now I'm pretty sure I remember seeing a corporate page that had turtles on it, but that seems as if it was years ago and a short search of Blue Origin.com doesn't turn up anything like a coat of arms, or a corporate seal, or anything with a couple of turtles on it. It took an open web search to find examples of the art at Inverse.com. Then I went to a couple of online Latin to English translators and neither said anything quite like the "step by step, ferociously" it shows in the caption for that picture. The better translation was one word: "gradually."

Ignoring that etymology, I'll just follow with Eric's take on this, the most important aspect being that it's because Musk pivoted from talking constantly about going to Mars ASAP, and over to a permanent colony on the moon. A few days after the first successful landing of a Falcon 9, on the KSC in December of 2015, Jeff Bezos Tweeted (it wasn't X back then) "welcome to the club" - 

...[S]econdly, Bezos was telling Musk that slow and steady wins the race. In other words, Bezos believes Blue Origin will beat SpaceX back to the Moon.

In a bit more detail, Blue has launched around 20 of their "New Shepard" suborbital flights and two New Glenn flights. Bezos concludes his team will beat the team that has launched 600 orbital Falcon 9 flights. So far.

The reason may be a combination of their belief that SpaceX's Human Landing System (HLS) mission plan is too complex and Simpler is Always better - along with Blue Origin's contribution to delaying the Human Landing System by suing SpaceX over the HLS.  This large graphic is Blue Origin's comparison between what they think SpaceX proposes to do versus what they think they can do.

Blue Origin infographic about the differences between the lunar Starship (HLS) and the National Team lander. Reduced file size, more detail in the version at the Reddit link above. File is dated "Five years ago" or 2021 - image from Reddit.com

This is the place where what Eric thinks they can talk about (from "inside sources") diverges from things I think we can have higher confidence in. Add to that complication, a more important consideration - that the same sorts of inside sources are saying China may well have a simpler lander that could put taikonauts on the Moon before 2030. 

It's hard to come to a nice, clean conclusion to this story. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have big complex tasks in front of them. Both are going to be doing things they've never done before. Refueling in space is great example because it has been known since the Apollo days that refueling in space will be needed at some point, but nobody has ever done it.  Which means whoever gets experience doing it is going to have a lot of power.  

The logistics of doing the "10+" flights to fill a tanker in orbit which will fuel the SpaceX ship are mind-boggling - some models talk about launching ten Starships in ten days, or even less time. That's never been done before. There are also rumors and reports all over about new designs for the Human Landing System and how it's going to be much easier to get to the moon with this new one. 

As Eric Berger says, "the 21st century space race back to the Moon now includes three participants: China’s state-run program, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. Game on."

Third Vulcan launch repeats the second

Not the good parts of the second launch but the bad part, with what looked like a repeat of one of the solid rocket boosters blowing it's nozzle out.  

The launch was at 4:22 AM EST (0922 UTC), and since it was a MOTN launch (Middle Of The Night), I had resigned myself to not getting up and going outside to watch it.  Well MOTN and launches that don't result in Return To Launch Site and booster landing are pretty much a one minute event which doesn't seem worth getting up for. Totally unplanned was that I was awake when the sound of the launch started rattling the house. The sound typically takes a couple of minutes before it reaches us - exact delay depending on the trajectory - so the big deal was over with by the time I heard it. 

Less than 30 seconds into the flight, there appeared to be a shower of glowing points, probably the result of burn through of one of the nozzles on a Northrop Grumman-built graphite epoxy motor (GEM) 63XL solid rocket boosters (SRBs). 

This morning's ULA Vulcan rocket climbs towards orbit in a shower of sparks from its solid rocket boosters. Image: Michael Cain/Spaceflight Now.

The tracking cameras allowed the ground control crew to get a close up look at the booster and they saw something that wasn't supposed to be there. On the right side of this image, exhaust is coming out of the SRB at a wrong angle. Instead of going straight down out of the nozzle, you can see a bright streak going more horizontally than it should, perhaps 20 to 30 degrees below horizontal. That appears to be originating in the nozzle of the booster on the right.

An anomalous plume is visible from one of the Vulcan’s solid rocket motors during the launch of the USSF-87 mission on Feb. 12, 2026. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now.

When an engine is pushing in a direction other than intended, the rockets going to move in a direction that wasn't planned.

Shortly after, as the rocket performed its pitch over maneuver, the vehicle began to roll in a more pronounced way than is typical for this stage of flight. The Vulcan rocket appeared to counteract the anomaly and the SRBs jettisoned as planned at T+ 1 minute, 37 seconds into the flight.

“We had an observation early during flight on one of the four solid rocket motors, the team is currently reviewing the data,” ULA said in a statement roughly an hour after liftoff. “The booster, upper stage, and spacecraft continued to perform on a nominal trajectory.”

We started this report by saying the launch repeats the second Vulcan launch, which was in October of '24. 

The 2024 booster malfunction occurred on the Vulcan rocket’s second test flight. The rocket did not return to action for 10 months as engineers probed the nozzle failure. Investigators determined that a carbon composite insulator, or heat shield, inside the nozzle failed to protect the nozzle’s metallic structure from the superheated exhaust coming from the booster. Engineers traced the cause of the failure to a “manufacturing defect” in one of the insulators, which led to the melting and burn-through of the booster nozzle. Officials said the damaged motor continued firing on the 2024 launch, albeit with less thrust and lower efficiency, and the Vulcan’s BE-4 main engines, supplied by Blue Origin, compensated for the thrust differential. The BE-4s on Thursday’s flight appeared to save the rocket once again. 

The second to last sentence in that quote contains the money quote. "The damaged motor continued firing with less thrust and lower efficiency, and the Vulcan's BE-4 main engines supplied by Blue Origin compensated for the thrust differential." That implies the Vulcan has a control system that compares its expected position and engine characteristics to the actual values and increases thrust, burn time, and very probably other parameters to put the booster in the desired place.  This is how it should be. 

Since the mission was to put classified satellites into classified orbits, all we know about it is the payloads are headed toward geosynchronous orbits. It's possible there might be more information coming on whether this mission was as successful as it seems - this morning Spaceflight Now said they expected to find out more in the afternoon, and that didn't seem to happen.  

Despite the booster problem, the Vulcan rocket deployed multiple military satellites into an on-target geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator. This mission, codenamed USSF-87, launched the Space Force’s seventh and eighth GSSAP surveillance satellites, also manufactured by Northrop Grumman. The satellites will maneuver around geosynchronous orbit to monitor other spacecraft, such as the clandestine fleets operated by China and Russia. 

China carries out test of new capsule and reusable rocket

Late Tuesday, US time, China tested both a new spacecraft intended to go to the moon and its reusable booster. 

The test seems to mark significant progress for the Chinese space program, as both vehicles performed well, including successfully landing a model of the Long March 10 booster. I'm not aware of China successfully landing a booster and recovering it before. The China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement that the test flight, “marks a significant breakthrough in the development of [China’s] manned lunar exploration program.” 

The launch of a subscale version of the Long March 10 rocket, still in development, provided engineers with an opportunity to verify the performance of an important part of the new Mengzhou capsule’s safety system. The test began with liftoff of the Long March 10 booster from a new launch pad at Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost province, at 10 pm EST Tuesday (03:00 UTC or 11 am Beijing time Wednesday).

A test version of the Mengzhou spacecraft, flying without anyone onboard, climbed into the stratosphere on top of the Long March booster before activating its launch abort motors a little more than a minute into the flight as the rocket reached the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure, known as Max-Q. The abort motors pulled the capsule away from the booster, simulating an in-flight escape that might be necessary to whisk crews away from a failing rocket. The Mengzhou spacecraft later deployed parachutes and splashed down offshore from Hainan Island.

In this photograph, the Mengzhou spacecraft's engines are clearly firing but separation from the Long March 10 isn't very noticeable. My guess is the escaping spacecraft is to the right of the Long March 10 and we can't really know how much farther to the right it is in this image.

The abort motors on China's Mengzhou spacecraft ignite to pull the capsule away from a Long March 10 booster shortly after liftoff from the Wenchang Space Launch Site. Credit: VCG/VCG via Getty Images

NASA and SpaceX performed similar in-flight abort tests before flying astronauts on the Orion and Dragon spacecraft. The test boosters on the Orion and Dragon abort tests were expended, but the Long March 10 rocket wasn’t finished after the Mengzhou abort command. Remarkably, the booster continued its ascent without the crew capsule, soaring into space on the power of its kerosene-fueled YF-100 engines before reentering the atmosphere, reigniting its engines, and nailing a propulsive landing in the South China Sea, right next to a recovery barge waiting to bring it back to shore.

This was an important test of the Mengzhou abort systems, since it was tested at Max Q. When combined with a ground-level abort test last year that verified the spacecraft’s ability to escape an emergency on the launch pad, it gives confidence that it can handle a mission abort at any altitude and environment. Again, American spacecraft up through crew Dragon routinely go through both tests. Mengzhou brings reusability to a new level in Chinese space programs. It will replace the Shenzhou spacecraft currently used to get their taikonauts (the Chinese word for astronauts) to and from their space station. 

The Mengzhou capsule has the capability for “multiple reuses,” according to the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA). Mengzhou flights to low-Earth orbit will carry crews of up to seven astronauts, with smaller crews for lunar missions. 

Testing the Mengzhou capsule isn't complete. 

Mengzhou, which means “dream vessel” in Chinese, is scheduled for its first orbital test flight later this year. The spacecraft will launch on a Long March 10A rocket and dock with China’s Tiangong space station in low-Earth orbit. The Long March 10A, optimized for low-Earth orbit flights, will consist of a single reusable first-stage booster flying in combination with an upper stage. The full-size Long March 10, with 21 engines on three first-stage boosters connected together, will have the power to place payloads up to 70 metric tons into low-Earth orbit, and enough energy to propel the 26-metric-ton Mengzhou spacecraft to the Moon. 

Overall, it's an impressive day's accomplishments, and a nice recovery from the last story here, about losing two launch vehicles on the same day (Jan.16) (second of three stories at that link).

SpaceX tests next Starship SuperHeavy Booster four days

The only date that has been talked about for the next Starship Integrated Test Flight, IFT-12, has been "March, 2026" but since it's the first test of Version 3 of the Super Heavy, the preparations it's going through are a bit more than another flight of Version 2 would get.

So it's not surprising that they took four days of test to fully ready everyone involved. There has been a lull in Starship testing, primarily because the first one they brought out to the Orbital Launch Mount had a RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly) back in November. The rocket’s liquid oxygen tank ruptured under pressure, and SpaceX scrapped the booster. This booster, 19, was up for testing at the Massey’s Test Site last week. 

SpaceX announced the milestone in a social media post Tuesday: “Cryoproof operations complete for the first time with a Super Heavy V3 booster. This multi-day campaign tested the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”

Ground teams at Starbase, Texas, rolled the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) stainless-steel booster out of its factory and transported it a few miles away to Massey’s Test Site last week. The test crew first performed a pressure test on the rocket at ambient temperatures, then loaded super-cold liquid nitrogen into the rocket four times over six days, putting the booster through repeated thermal and pressurization cycles. The nitrogen is a stand-in for the cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen that will fill the booster’s propellant tanks on launch day.

Booster 19 appeared to sail through the thermal stress testing and SpaceX returned the booster to the factory early Monday (Feb 9). There, technicians will mount 33 Raptor engines to the bottom of the rocket and install the booster’s grid fins. Among the many changes to the SuperHeavy in the change to version (or block) 3 is replacing the four grid fins with three, and the hot-staging ring added earlier in the test campaign has been made into part of the first stage rather than effectively a separate stage that was dropped when the first stage was jettisoned. 

After receiving its engines and grid fins, the Super Heavy booster will roll out to the launch pad at Starbase. SpaceX’s launch team will fill it with methane and liquid oxygen for a test-firing of its 33 engines.

Meanwhile, the first of SpaceX’s upgraded Starship vehicles—essentially the upper stage that flies on top of the Super Heavy booster—will travel to the Massey’s Test Site for its own cryogenic proof test campaign. It is also expected to undergo a static fire test of its six Raptor engines.

While we don't have a tentative scheduled date, this set of tests didn't insert any delay and if the coming sets of tests go smoothly we should be looking at a test in four to six weeks - in other words, before the end of March. IFT-12 will, of course, be the 12th full-scale Starship/SuperHeavy test flight overall, and the mission will probably follow the same profile as previous flights; that is, launching around 7:30 PM Central time, with Starship arcing halfway around the world from South Texas to a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.  My calendar says DST starts on Sunday morning March 8th, so we'll almost certainly be on DST by the launch - as we were on flight 11's launch when we got to see the ship going over the southern tip of Florida, doing a bit of the "Space Jellyfish" phenomenon for us.

Starship isn't as far along as it was always intended to be by now - which shouldn't be news to you since it's in so many plain old news media stories. There's some inevitable attempt to rush things, but SpaceX wants to get to their orbital refueling missions and launching an uncrewed Starship to the moon. The days of Starship launches becoming regular should be approaching quickly.  

Vapors from the boil-off of cryogenic liquid nitrogen surround the 237-foot-tall (72.3-meter) Super Heavy booster over the February 7-8 weekend. Credit: SpaceX