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

VLEO?

I couldn't begin to guess how many times we've referred to Low Earth Obit or LEO over the years. I'm sure there's a precise definition somewhere, but I've come to conceptualize LEO as starting at the minimum height that can remain stable for some amount of time, probably more like months than years. This weekend was the first time I've seen the term Very Low Earth Orbit. 

LEO is getting crowded, but there’s plenty of real estate available closer to home if you can make it work. California-based Viridian Space is aiming to do just that.

The company is developing air breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) technology to fly future satellites in VLEO, and the US government is lending a hand to get the tech off the ground.

Viridian Space CEO Slava Spektor announced that the company has signed a five-year cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) with the US Air Force to co-develop Viridian’s ABEP tech, and to work together on studies leveraging VLEO. The CRADA will be run out of Albuquerque, New Mexico's, Kirtland Air Force Base. The Air Force will assist Viridian with testing and characterizing the power systems they develop, while Viridian will concentrate on the technology and how it can be used to create new operational concepts for the US military. 

Viridian is expecting to launch their first mission within three years. Among its first priorities will be to collect data on the atmospheric conditions in VLEO, offering the DoD a better understanding of atmospheric drag at different altitudes, and how space weather events impact satellite life spans.  

VLEO has the obvious advantage that being miles closer to the ground than higher orbits, it will offer faster up and downlink speeds, and less optical magnification will be required to image targets, but it goes beyond that. Their air breathing electric proposal isn't just replacing the oxidizer in a chemical engine with oxygen taken out of the air, the air itself is the fuel they'll use. No, the short article on Payload offers no details on that. I'll get back to that in a little while.

Viridian’s aim is not just to get around the growing traffic in LEO, but to create a satellite system that is more capable than chemical prop systems flying in higher orbits. An ABEP sat in VLEO has multiple benefits, according to Spektor: [NOTE: read prop as propellant - SiG]

• Viridian’s sats are aiming to stay in orbit for up to 10 years. Because the system is designed to use air as fuel, the sat will be able to maneuver without worrying about burning through onboard fuel reserves.
• Viridian also expects its sats to provide more maneuverability to its customers. The sats are expected to fly at altitudes as low as 150 km, and to dip in and out of the atmosphere to reach multiple orbital altitudes on a single flight.

Viridian's website offers a link to a paper, but there's nothing there. Some searching led me to a more useful site, which links to a pdf version of a paper published in Acta Astronautica in 2022. The top-level introduction says this about the fuel.

The concept is based on the ingestion of rarefied atmospheric particles to be used as propellant for an electric thruster, thereby removing the need for onboard propellant

Viridian offers this diagram of the engine, but no other details. 

Viridian's ABEP engine conceptual diagram. Image credit: Viridian Space

While I'm always suspicious of things that might come across as "something for nothing," the engineers at Viridian have been working on this for years and I think it's worth experimenting to see if it lives up to the experimental results and analysis so far.

About that potential news article

Back on Thursday, I posted an article about the House NASA Reauthorization bill that was going through the process and the impacts coming, including putting up more programs for the private sector to bid on and take the lead in them. 

When that bill passed, lawmakers had added an additional change to it. 

Another add-on to the authorization bill would require NASA to reassess whether to guide the International Space Station (ISS) toward a destructive atmospheric reentry after it is decommissioned in 2030. The space agency’s current plan is to deorbit the space station in 2031 over the Pacific Ocean, where debris that survives the scorching reentry will fall into a remote, unpopulated part of the sea.
...
The amendment tacked onto this year’s bill would not change the timeline for ending operations on the ISS, but it asks NASA to reconsider its decision about what to do with the complex after retirement.

The amendment would direct NASA to “carry out an engineering analysis to evaluate the technical, operational, and logistical viability of transferring the ISS to a safe orbital harbor and storing the ISS in such harbor after the end of the operational low-Earth orbit lifetime of the ISS to preserve the ISS for potential reuse and satisfy the objectives of NASA.”

Rep. George Whitesides (D-Calif.) and cosponsor Rep. Nick Begich (R-Alaska) submitted the amendment, much like the amendment mentioned in Thursday's post had bipartisan sponsors. It probably "looks better" (sells better) than an amendment put up by only one side. Whitesides was a NASA chief of staff and had been an executive in the space industry before his election to the House. 

In essence this is the same concept that several people have asked about retiring the ISS here on the blog and, honestly, gets asked everywhere. Instead of splashing the ISS into a deep spot in the Pacific, why not put it into a higher orbit?

“The International Space Station is one of the most complex engineering achievements in human history,” Whitesides said. “It represents more than three decades of international collaboration and investment by US taxpayers estimated at well over $100 billion. Current plans call for the station to be deorbited at the end of its service life in 2030. This amendment does not seek to change that policy. Instead, it asks a straightforward question: Before we permanently dispose of an asset of this magnitude, should we fully understand whether it’s viable to preserve it in orbit for potential use by future generations?”

Of course, this has been analyzed before in the sense of determining just how much orbital velocity has to be changed to get the desired change. That was required to create the contract telling the eventual winning bidder (SpaceX) how much change in orbital velocity is required to start to deorbit the ISS. A good approximation of everything in the Low Earth Orbit range of the station is that its orbital velocity is 17,000 mph. The required change in velocity is 127 mph, which is a tiny percentage of its current velocity: 0.75%. 

Changing its speed by just 127 mph will consume about 10 tons (9 metric tons) of propellant, according to a NASA analysis released in 2024.  

Everyone now is thinking how much mass are we talking about? The station mass is around 450 tons, equivalent to two freight train locomotives, and measures about the size of a football field.

The analysis document shows that NASA considered alternatives to discarding the space station through reentry. One option NASA studied involved moving the station into a higher orbit. At its current altitude, roughly 260 miles (420 kilometers) above the Earth, the ISS would take one to two years to reenter the atmosphere due to aerodynamic drag if reboosts weren’t performed. NASA does not want the space station to make an uncontrolled reentry because of the risk of fatalities, injuries, and property damage from debris reaching the ground.

The amount of fuel required is around twice that 10 tons necessary to de-orbit the ISS. 

At that altitude, without any additional boosts, NASA says the space station would likely remain in orbit for 100 years before succumbing to atmospheric drag and burning up. Going higher still, the space station could be placed in a 1,200-mile-high (2,000-kilometer) orbit, stable for more than 10,000 years, with about 146 tons (133 metric tons) of propellant.

There are two problems with sending the ISS to higher altitudes. One is that it would require the development of new propulsive and tanker vehicles that do not currently exist, according to NASA.

Developing new tankers and a new "Deorbit Dragon" isn't the end to the possible difficulties. Putting the station in a higher orbit, also exposes it to a higher chance of impact from space junk. The engineers who did that 2024 analysis say the peak risk is at an orbital height of 500 miles. “This means that the likelihood of an impact leaving station unable to maneuver or react to future threats, or even a significant impact resulting in complete fragmentation, is unacceptably high.”

An alternative they don't spend much time examining is "leave it where it is." NASA said in 2024 that engineers have “high confidence” that the primary structure of the station could support operations beyond 2030. It's undoubtedly higher risk the longer the station stays there, and maybe some sections could be replaced or just left empty and unused. 

The oldest segments of the station have been in orbit since 1998, undergoing day-night thermal cycles every 45 minutes as they orbit the planet. The structural stability of the Russian section of the outpost is also in question. Russian engineers traced a small but persistent air leak to microscopic structural cracks in one Russian module, but cosmonauts were able to seal the cracks, and air pressure in the area is “holding steady,” a NASA spokesperson said last month.

All that said, there's absolutely nothing wrong with asking, "are we doing the right thing or being stupid?" Paying for another round of analysis, perhaps with some different assumptions, could be good thing.  

Then there's the way NASA has been encouraging the development of private space stations like the Vast Haven-1. Let the private sector develop the stations, make income from them, and let them decide how to handle problems like this. They're not as far along as everyone was talking about, but when has a new technology not had moments like that?  

I'll just conclude with a saying that I like. "When you're doing things no one has ever done before, you learn things no one has ever known before." A decision like this has several of those things no one has done before embedded in it. 

Artist’s illustration of SpaceX’s deorbit vehicle, based on the design of the company’s Dragon spacecraft. The modified spacecraft will have 46 Draco thrusters—30 for the deorbit maneuvers and 16 for attitude control. Credit: SpaceX

The problem with the new US Dietary Guidelines

I've seen quite a few comments in opposition to the new, inverted food pyramid that the USDA released early last month. Most of these comments are from the groups and individuals that wanted the old pyramid the way it was, or who wanted the food pyramid to completely ban not just meat but anything that an animal was involved with in any way. But I've only seen one person who actually mentioned a genuine problem with what the USDA said, and that person is Nina Teicholz who wrote an extremely influential book on diet, called the Big Fat Surprise back in 2014. In this article I'll quote from Nina's substack on the subject; I've been a subscriber to her substack since she started it. When you click on this link, you'll be offered a prompt to read it for free or subscribe. I've never paid a cent.

Getting back to the subject, though, the problem with the guidelines is simple: the math doesn't work. 

See, the food guidelines have always had an absurd emphasis on the reduction of fat in the diet, especially "dat ol' debil" saturated fat, largely due to some studies from the post-WWII days that have been discredited - mainly by not having measurable positive effects - and at least one that reeks of fraud. Both HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary have repeatedly pledged to “end to the war on saturated fat” since they took office. To quote from Nina's article on this:

The cap on saturated fats has been a bedrock piece of advice since the launch of this policy in 1980, and it is why so many Americans avoid red meat, drink skim milk, and opt to cook with seed oils over butter.

Yet I learned from two administration officials that saturated fats will not be liberated after all. The longstanding 10% of calories cap on these fats will remain.

At the same time, the guidelines’ language will encourage cooking with “butter” and “tallow,” both of which are high in saturated fat. It will also introduce a colorful new food pyramid with proteins—including red meat—occupying the largest portion. These are powerful messages, never before conveyed by our national food policy, and are likely to influence consumer behavior. 

Let me put the food pyramid here, from her article again.

Her concern is that it isn't clear from this display that the old low fat diet guideline of 10% calories from fat (CFF) still applies. For individuals on their own, at home or free-living anywhere: Fine. As always, if you ignore it, it can't hurt you. 

But there’s another audience: the roughly 30 million children eating school lunches daily, plus military personnel, and the vulnerable populations—elderly and poor Americans—who receive food through federal programs, roughly 1 in 4 Americans each week. These programs are required by law to follow the Dietary Guidelines. For them, the numerical cap will trump any contrary language about butter and tallow. Cafeteria managers and program administrators will continue to adhere to the 10% limit, because that’s what the law requires.

For these captive populations, seed oils will remain the mandated cooking fat. The encouraging words about butter and tallow will essentially be meaningless.

For someone on a 2000 calorie/day diet, 10% calories from fat means 200 calories in a day; with fat at 9 roughly calories per gram, that's 22 grams/day. Nina goes on to show how little that is in a day. 

• 1 cup whole-fat yogurt for breakfast: ~5 grams

• 1 chicken thigh with skin, cooked in 1 tablespoon butter for dinner: ~12 grams

Total: ~17 grams of saturated fat for two small meals.

or

• 2 eggs cooked in 1 tablespoon of butter: ~13 grams

• 4 oz ribeye steak: ~6 grams

• Broccoli with 1 tablespoon butter: ~7 grams

Total: ~26 grams of saturated fat for two small meals

Her next topic is that the limit on fat impacts another good aspect of the recommendations, to increase protein. 

I’ve also learned that the new guidelines will increase the recommended amount of protein from the current RDA minimum of about 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight to 1.2-1.5 grams. This is genuinely good news. Studies show this higher range is far better for weight loss, muscle maintenance, recovery from serious illness, and overall well-being—especially for school-aged children and older adults, two populations whose protein needs have been chronically underserved by current recommendations.

But here’s the paradox: with the cap on saturated fats still in place, this increased protein cannot realistically come from animal sources. A 4-ounce serving of lean beef provides 24 grams of protein but also delivers about 6 grams of saturated fat. Meeting the higher protein targets through beef, pork, or chicken thighs with skin would blow through the saturated fat limit by lunchtime.

So where will this protein come from? The only options that fit within the 10% saturated fat cap are peas, beans, and lentils—plant proteins that are mostly incomplete (lacking at least one of the nine essential amino acids), harder for the body to absorb, and packed with starch. To match the protein in 4 ounces of beef, you’d need over 6 tablespoons of peanut butter—between 500 and 600 calories, compared to 155 for the beef.

This isn't news to pretty much anybody that takes their fitness and health seriously, whether gym bros, marathon runners, distance cyclists, you name it. Vegetarian sources of protein are generally incomplete and require combing sources that complement each other and turn it into a proper mixture of the nine essential amino acids. Most people just reflexively believe that vegetables are good for you; so much that "fruits and vegetables" turn into one word. "Don't forget your fruitsandvegetables!" 

---

Nina devotes a few inches of column space to look at the "why" of the updates, especially with the consideration that much of what secretary Kennedy and others had said they wanted to do in the guidelines either never got added or the addition got deleted along the way. It all comes down to silly political decisions. Things like how repeated reviews by teams of scientists around the world have concluded that things like the 10% calories from fat and limiting saturated fat are contradicted over and over again yet they still didn't want to get rid of those. 

"The large, rigorous clinical trials on saturated fats—on 60,000 to 80,000 people worldwide—could never demonstrate that reducing saturated fat lowered a person’s risk of death from heart disease or any other cause." 

Small Space News Story Roundup 77

Because small news is better than no news. Or something like that

SpaceX Pauses Falcon 9 Missions 

This isn't even big news here on the Space Coast but showed up on some of the space news sites earlier in the week. 

On Monday, February 2nd, SpaceX had their first launch of the year from Vandenberg Space Force Base, a rather common Starlink satellite launch, but the upper stage had a malfunction after a nominal deployment of the 25 satellites payload into the right orbit.

After liftoff from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:47:11 a.m. PST (10:47:11 a.m. EST / 1547:11 UTC), the rocket flew on a south-southwesterly trajectory to deliver 25 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites into low Earth orbit.
...
“During today’s Falcon 9 launch of Starlink satellites, the second stage experienced an off-nominal condition during preparation for the deorbit burn,” SpaceX wrote in a social media post. “The vehicle then performed as designed to successfully passivate the stage. The first two [Merlin vacuum engine] burns were nominal and safely deployed all 25 Starlink satellites to their intended orbit.”

The issue is that the upper stage was supposed to make a guided, destructive reentry into an unoccupied area (probably open ocean) and not having the second stage operating properly put that into question. Instead, the second stage remained in a low-altitude orbit and made an unguided reentry later in the week.

SpaceX took the prudent step of putting coming launches on hold until the conditions are well understood. As SpaceX said in a statement, “Teams are reviewing data to determine root cause and corrective actions before returning to flight.” 

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 team in Florida is now focusing on preparations for launch of the Crew-12 mission to the International Space Station, targeted for no earlier than February 11. The schedule for Crew-12 will hinge on how quickly SpaceX can complete the investigation into Monday’s upper stage malfunction. You can bet that NASA will be rather interested in seeing that data before they'll allow that launch. 

A interesting side note is that this Booster 1071 on its 31st launch. Nearly 8-1/2 minutes after launch B1071 successfully landed on drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You” or OCISLY.

Amazon books another ten launches with SpaceX

... so that they can keep their FCC approval to complete their satellite constellation. 

Back in mid-January, in a post about Amazon booking an Ariane 64 launch to put up a batch of their Leo satellites, Commenter jeff d posted a reminder of the way the FCC regulates these efforts:

Amazon LEO (Kuipier) is required by FCC to have 50% of their 3,200 satellites deployed by July 2026. Doable (by SpaceX production and launch) but the Amazon team / pace does not seem up to it. Likey get an extension. Still, would love to see them actually do it (or even just try) and additionally give some competition to SpaceX above what the Viasat Marketing department dreams of. 

That's what this is all about. Amazon is demonstrating to the FCC, "we're trying as hard as we can" to get that 50% into orbit.

The deal, which neither Amazon nor SpaceX previously announced, was disclosed in an Amazon filing with the Federal Communications Commission on January 30, seeking an extension of a July deadline to deploy half of its Amazon Leo constellation. Amazon has launched only 180 satellites of its planned 3,232-satellite constellation, rendering the July deadline unattainable. Amazon asked the FCC to extend the July deadline by two years or waive it entirely, but did not request an extension to the 2029 deadline for full deployment of the constellation.

“Near-term shortage in launch capacity”… In the filing with the FCC, Amazon said it faces a “near-term shortage of launch capacity” and is securing additional launch options “wherever available.” That effort includes working with SpaceX, whose Starlink constellation directly competes with Amazon Leo. Amazon bypassed SpaceX entirely when it made its initial orders for more than 80 Amazon Leo launches with United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. But Amazon later reserved three launches with SpaceX that flew last year and has now added 10 more SpaceX launches to its manifest. So far, Amazon has only launched satellites on ULA’s soon-to-retire Atlas V rocket and SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Amazon has not started flying on the new Vulcan, Ariane 6, or New Glenn rockets, which comprise the bulk of the constellation’s launch bookings. That could change next week with the first launch of Amazon Leo satellites on Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket.

At the risk of sounding too much like a SpaceX Fanboi, whenever I hear about Starlink competitors doing things like this I kind of shake my head and say, "who you gonna call?" As I pointed out in the early January post, "The 10 biggest rocket companies," SpaceX not only has more launches than any other American launch provider, they had more launches than every company in every country combined. You need to get some satellites up ASAP for some emergency need. Who you gonna call? There's a lot of companies I like and that I think are good, who are pushing at getting even better, but, seriously, who has the best track record? Who you gonna call? 

Obligatory pretty picture of a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, SLC-4E. Same launch pad, different mission, different time of day. Image credit: SpaceX

EDIT 0920 EST Feb. 7 to add: And... the SpaceX stand down from launches is over. Since the mission that caused it was on Monday, it's a bit of an exaggeration to say they stood down for a minute as NASA Spaceflight did, but it's sure not the typical shutdown. Falcon 9 launches are set to resume this morning (Saturday, Feb. 7) from Vandenberg at 9:21 a.m. PST (12:21 p.m. EST / 1721 UTC). Another Space 2.0 vs "old space" story.

A bit of potential news

Since I really can't find anything interesting going on, let me mention something that doesn't mean much right now, but has the potential to have major, great impacts. 

A US House committee with oversight of NASA unanimously passed a “reauthorization” act for the space agency on Wednesday. The legislation must still be approved by the full House before being sent to the Senate, which may take up consideration later this month. 

Just to underline and emphasize, this isn't a law yet, and will probably change before it becomes law, if it ever even does become law. Congress passes reauthorization bills like this every couple of years, not just for NASA but for all agencies with complex fields they regulate, to give a sense of what the administration wants to see them accomplish. These aren't bills that actually regulate appropriations (spending) but can have effects for years. 

One of the more important parts of the bill is considered the first step toward creating a “commercial” deep space program.  

Most notably among these was the Amendment No. 01, offered by the chair of the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas), as well as its ranking member, Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), and three other legislators. 

The amendment concerns acquisition powers bestowed upon NASA by Congress, stating in part: “The Administrator may, subject to appropriations, procure from United States commercial providers operational services to carry cargo and crew safely, reliably, and affordably to and from deep space destinations, including the Moon and Mars.”

Now that sounds pretty generic, as it should, but it may show a way around the need for more SLS launches; as in nothing past Artemis V or possibly not even beyond III. 

NASA’s initial missions to the Moon, through Artemis V, have a clearly defined architecture: They must use the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and a lander built by either SpaceX or Blue Origin to complete lunar landings.

But after that? With this amendment, Congress appears to be opening the aperture to commercial companies. That is to say, if SpaceX wanted to bid an end-to-end Starship lunar mission, it could; or if Blue Origin wanted to launch Orion on New Glenn, that is also an option. The language is generalized enough, not specifying “launch” but rather “transportation,” that in-space companies such as Impulse Space could also get creative. Essentially, Congress is telling the US industry that if it is ready to step up, NASA should allow it to bid on lunar cargo and crew missions.

Yes, that first paragraph says "missions to the moon, through Artemis V" but it doesn't seem to say, NASA must perform Artemis V as envisioned now and must buy SLS systems. If SpaceX or Blue Origin or some startup we've never heard of comes out of the blue and sells NASA upper management on a totally different approach, that doesn't sound impossible to me. Need I add, "I'm not a lawyer" or some sort of disclaimer to that?

It's important to remember that NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman is not a fan of SLS, he just thinks it's the best chance we have to get to the moon before 2030. He has enough experience with private space to - perhaps - be more willing to take what others consider big chances.

While it probably goes without saying that both Representatives Brian Babin and Zoe Lofgren said nice things about the bill, it goes farther than that. 

Advocates of commercial spaceflight, who have long argued that the private sector is ready to step up and play a more comprehensive role in deep space transportation for NASA, hailed the new amendment.

“This is quite a step in the right direction for the future of commercial space transportation options for deep space,” Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, told Ars. “It is also very much in line with this administration’s focus on commercial solutions and competition. This provides NASA with flexibility to procure additional services for the Moon and Mars in the future.”

Of course, this is politics and you can bet congress critters will vote on what they think is best for them. If major contractors on SLS are in their district, they're likely to vote against it, but that doesn't figure to be many.

If this passes, we can expect NASA to spend some time creating infrastructure to implement this. Hopefully, they could do this without spending months or years. An advantage they have now is a very successful model that currently contracts with private providers for crew and cargo missions to the International Space Station. Perhaps they could just expand that office for missions to the Moon or beyond.

Not really launch related, but I find catching the Starship booster to be an irresistible picture. Screen grab from the video of Flight Test-5, a few seconds before the successful grab, October of '24. Image credit: SpaceX

The Biggest and Most Expensive POS in History

If you were asked to name the biggest and most expensive POS (piece of shit) in history, what would you vote for? Yeah, there's an implication there that you know something about every POS ever built, and you have justification based on real data of why you name that one and not all the other bad examples. So let's simplify it to the biggest POS you've ever heard of. 

I'm going to vote for the Space Launch System, the SLS, currently in the queue to take the Artemis II crew to loop around the moon and come back to Earth. That's a link to a piece on Ars Technica by their senior space reporter Eric Berger and let me emphasize he DOES NOT SAY THAT. That's my line and I made it up. Eric knows the industry and the players better than I do, and honestly isn't going to say stuff that I'll say. 

Eric opens with the viewpoint that NASA knows the two biggest issues with SLS - and anyone who has been following Artemis knows

The Space Launch System rocket program is now a decade and a half old, and it continues to be dominated by two unfortunate traits: It is expensive, and it is slow.  

I’ve reported on the expense of SLS so many times it makes me sick. The SLS, so far, has only launched one time, and that was with actual, already-flown, leftover Shuttle RS-25 engines, also known as Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs). They are 512,000 pound thrust – which may have been remarkable in the 1970s but common now. Both the Blue Origin BE-4s and the SpaceX Raptor engines, all versions, can do it. The SSMEs cost around $125 Million each. The Raptor 2, 3, or 4 engines are in the vicinity of $2 million Blue Origin sells the BE-4 for less than $20 million.   

Think of that. There are four SSMEs on one SLS core, or $500 million. Four Raptors are $8 million. The problem is that SLS can’t just switch because SLS runs on Liquid Hydrogen and Oxygen (LOX) and the other engines run on methane and LOX.

If you keep going down this road, you’ll find that an SLS launch has been priced in the vicinity of $4 Billion. Several times I've pointed out that while the SLS can deliver heavier payloads to orbit than a Falcon Heavy mission, it's not many times the payload, it's only like 130% of a FH launch. Two FH launches will launch more payload than one SLS and cost about 8% of one SLS launch. 

Granted the Falcon Heavy didn’t exist when SLS started up, but how do they stick with SLS with facts like that in their faces? 

Then there’s the ability to make a schedule. As I’m sure you’ve read the Wet Dress Rehearsal Monday evening failed miserably and the current launch schedule is No Earlier Than March 8th. Eric presents lots of info on the one test flight of the SLS, from November of ‘22 that I’d forgotten. 

The SLS rolled out of its hangar and to the launch pad in March. That was followed by failure after failure to fuel the rocket and get it to launch. It took seven attempts to run the WDR and it comes across as the engineers saying, “screw this, we’ll never get it to pass the WDR, just launch that MoFo and see what happens.” I bet that wouldn’t - or shouldn’t - happen with a crew onboard.

Since it’s such a great turn of a phrase, I’ll quote Eric on this:

That was November 16, 2022. More than three years ago. You might think that over the course of the extended interval since then, and after the excruciating pain of spending nearly an entire year conducting fueling tests to try to lift the massive rocket off the pad, some of the smartest engineers in the world, the fine men and women at NASA, would have dug into and solved the leak issues. 

You would be wrong. 

There’s more than just that big problem with fueling here. Because the empty rocket is so expensive, about half the $4 Billion per launch, the program is “hardware poor.” They can’t afford to build test cases to learn more about how they’d behave. A rocket that is so expensive it only flies rarely will have super-high operating costs and ever-present safety concerns precisely because it flies so infrequently. 

Until this week, NASA had largely ignored these concerns, at least in public. However, in a stunning admission, NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, acknowledged the flight-rate issue after Monday’s wet-dress rehearsal test failed to reach a successful conclusion. “The flight rate is the lowest of any NASA-designed vehicle, and that should be a topic of discussion,” he said as part of a longer post about the test on social media.

The reality, which Isaacman knows full well, and which almost everyone else in the industry recognizes, is that the SLS rocket is dead hardware walking. The Trump administration would like to fly the rocket just two more times, culminating in the Artemis III human landing on the Moon. Congress has passed legislation mandating a fourth and fifth launch of the SLS vehicle.

Gee, Congress overruling logical, reasonable requests and setting it up to (I'll bet) get them more money to scrape off the contract for themselves. Who woulda guessed?

Isaacman needs to do what he can to get funds to the two competitors working to replace SLS and replace it as fast as possible. If I was riding that thing to get into orbit, I’d like it to be more like the Toyota Hilux of space vehicles, one cranked out by the million with an incredible record of survival in the worst of conditions. SLS is more like a piece of sculpture worked on by an artist. No two will ever be the same. Every launch campaign an adventure, every mission subject to excessive delays. 

Looking up at the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as they roll to Pad 39B. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Strongest X-Class Solar Flare in months happened this morning

We are well past the peak of cycle 25 and the activity has been disappointingly low (at least to me) but it's never a good approach to stop watching the sun for unexpectedly large solar flares, coronal mass ejections or other activity. As if to emphasize that message to us, sunspot # 4366, an active region that has grown rapidly in the last day, has been crackling with activity.

The sun has erupted in a relentless barrage of powerful solar flares over the past 24 hours, firing off at least 18 M-class flares and three X-class flares, including an X8.3 eruption — the strongest solar flare of 2026 so far. 

I seriously dislike them saying it's the strongest "solar flare of 2026 so far." Because 2026 is so short that it's like saying, "that was my strongest fart of the year" - pretty much meaningless. It would convey far more information to compare it to the strongest flares of cycle 25. So I went and found this list of the strongest flares of cycle 25, which shows this morning's flare was the third strongest flare of cycle 25 and the strongest in over one year (~16 months), back to October 1, 2024. And note that since the date and time are in UTC, the start of the event at 23:44 UTC means 6:44 PM EST.

Note these are the most powerful dozen flares of Cycle 25, and the page it's found on lists the strongest 50 as the default view

As for impacts, there were some when the things that move the fastest got here but the predictions for the next few days seem pretty minor.

Extreme ultraviolet radiation from the flare ionized the top of Earth's atmosphere. This, in turn, caused a shortwave radio blackout across the South Pacific Ocean: blackout map. Ham radio operators in Australia and New Zealand may have experienced loss of signal below 30 MHz for hours after the flare's peak.

Update: SOHO and NOAA coronagraph images confirm that several CMEs emerged from yesterday's collection of flares. None of them appears to be either potent or squarely Earth-directed. Glancing blows expected on Feb.4-6 could spark G1 (Minor) to G2 (Moderate) geomagnetic storms.

End of the Weekend ...

...and I have no news related to anything important - like anything dramatic in the updates to the Artemis II dress rehearsal.  

The prediction of a 30% chance of snow flurries or showers that came out while writing last night's post disappeared within an hour and while there was snow as close as Orlando, there was none here.  Our morning low was 25, shattering both the February 1st lowest temperature record  (which had been 32) and the month's lowest temperature of 27, the record set on February 26, 1967. Tomorrow is still forecast to break the our February 2nd lowest temp record of 33 with tomorrow's morning low predicted to be 28. 

A full Moon is seen shining over NASA’s SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion spacecraft, atop the mobile launcher in the early hours of February 1, 2026. The rocket is currently at Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, as teams are preparing for a wet dress rehearsal to practice timelines and procedures for the launch of Artemis II.
Image credit: NASA/Sam Lott