Something that happened during the eclipse that nobody mentioned

This week's solar eclipse has been in headlines for weeks if not more, but I saw references today to something I hadn't heard of until this afternoon. 

The orbiting International Space Station passed between the Earth and the moon. When a person jumps in the way of photo you're taking that's referred to as photobombing, but that's not an astronomical term. In this photo, you can see the ISS captured in 8 frames of video that make up the video of the transit. I have no idea why a couple of frames appear to be missing. Starting at the left edge, just below the midline of the sun, there's an image of the ISS practically on the limb of the sun. Count six after that and you're close to exactly the middle of the image. If  you use the same spacing as the group you just counted, two ISS images are missing, then there's another ISS image. The two dark spots, one near the left limb of the sun and one just above the fourth ISS image from the left limb are sunspots.

The silhouette of the ISS transiting across the sun's face during the Aug. 12, 2026 total solar eclipse. (Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky) Image cropped, exposure stretched, and resultant enlarged here.

The original source article at Space.com includes a short video, looping or replaying, of the ISS moving from right to left in that image in eight frames. 

Space.com's author, Chelsea Gohd, closes with this little note:

And while the ISS is featured in this image, we may also want to consider the astronauts aboard. In other words, people on Earth weren't the only ones who got to participate in the marvel.

The Expedition 75 astronauts on the ISS (NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Anil Menon, and Jack Hathaway; ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot; and Roscosmos cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov, Andrey Fedyaev and Anna Kikina) caught the show too as they orbited our planet. There they were, in between Earth and the moon, as our planet's neighbor blocked out our star.

NASA's quiet X-59 supersonic jet finally breaks sound barrier

This is a story that has been languishing in the background for quite some time. NASA has been working to reduce the amount "sonic boom" that aircraft make as they exceed the speed of sound for several years, and rolled out the first prototype of an experimental supersonic airplane called X-59 in August of 2023. The X-59 bears little to no resemblance to current supersonic fighters like the F35 or earlier craft like the F-22 or F-18. That said, they've been modeling and talking openly about it for much longer than just since 2023.  

Today, the X-59 actually flew faster than the speed of sound for the first time. 

Friday's flight began and ended at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The X-59, with NASA test pilot Jim "Clue" Less at the yoke, took off at 2:08 p.m. EDT (1808 GMT; 11:08 a.m. local California time) and touched down 81 minutes later.

Less took the jet to a maximum altitude of 43,400 feet (13,228 meters) and a top speed of 713 mph (1,147 kph). That works out to about Mach 1.1, or 1.1 times faster than the speed of sound, NASA officials said in the statement. (The speed of sound varies with temperature, as sound waves move faster in warmer air. At sea level, where the air is relatively warm, Mach 1 is about 761 mph, or 1,225 kph.)

NASA’s X-59 quiet supersonic research aircraft exceeded the speed of sound for the first time on June 5, 2026. (Image credit: NASA/Lori Losey)

Don't expect the X-59 crew to rest on their laurels - they're planning on a bigger follow-on mission soon. 

In just a few days, they plan to send the plane on its first "mission conditions" flight — one that reaches a top speed of Mach 1.4 and an altitude of about 55,000 feet (16,764 m).

"This speed and altitude are the base conditions for the X-59 when it will eventually fly over several U.S. communities, enabling NASA to gather data about how people may perceive its quiet thump," NASA officials wrote in the same statement. 

"NASA will share this data with U.S. and international regulators to help establish new data-driven noise standards to enable a future viable market for supersonic commercial flight over land," they added.

The X-59 was built by the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works - a group that has quite a range of "first ever" air craft and their flights.

"Since the aircraft’s first flight on Oct. 28, 2025, the team has made tremendous progress, flying 16 times in the last 90 days and getting into a steady test rhythm," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in the same statement. "I'm grateful to the NASA team and Lockheed Martin Skunk Works for their help getting us to this point, and I hope this is the first of many collaborations as we rebuild NASA’s X-plane portfolio."

A Gorgeous Day to Return to the Ground

I'm sure virtually everyone has heard the Crew-9 mission came to a successful conclusion today, returning to splashdown into the Gulf of America off the Florida Panhandle at 5:57 PM EDT today. 

Crew-9 undocked from the ISS and began its nearly 17 hour voyage home at 1:05 AM EDT this morning (Tuesday).

“On behalf of Crew-9, I’d like to say it was a privilege to call the station home, to live and work and be a part of a mission and a team that spans the globe, working together in cooperation for the benefit of humanity,” said NASA astronaut and Crew-9 commander Nick Hague as he and his crew drifted away from the orbiting outpost.

“To our colleagues and dear friends who remain on the station … we know the station’s in great hands. We’re excited to see what you guys are going to accomplish.”

Crew-9 Commander Nick Hague and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who flew to the station last September 28, returned to Earth after having logged 171 days in space.  Their crewmates, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, returned with 286 days in space.  As you'll remember that's thanks to the decision to send Starliner back to the ground unmanned.

SpaceX's Crew Dragon "Freedom" with the Crew-9 and Starliner astronauts on board splashes down under four parachutes off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida on March 18, 2025. (Image credit: NASA+)

It was really quite a pretty day in the Gulf up there today and there are eye-popping videos from lots of sources.  The skies were a beautiful blue, and photogenic as can be.  The four parachutes visible in this photo fall to the Gulf so slowly it almost looked like animation.  A pod of dolphins came up to the capsule to see what all the commotion in the water was from.  

So what's next?  Well, for the ISS, it's business as usual.  Crew-10 will be in place for the regular more-or-less six months.  Work will resume.  For the crew, they'll be given some extra time off - particularly Butch and Suni with their nearly 10 months in space.  There's always time off for recuperation, getting used to being in normal gravity and such.  

SpaceX looks to be ready to launch a privately-funded, crewed mission we first talked about last August - the first manned flight to go into a polar orbit, called Fram 2. NextSpaceflight shows the launch currently scheduled for Monday Mar 31, 2025 at 11:00 PM EDT.

The four commercial astronauts of the Fram2 mission pose inside a Dragon spacecraft training capsule at SpaceX facilities in Hawthorne, California. From left to right: Eric Philips, Rabea Rogge, Jannicke Mikkelsen and Chun Wang, leader and funder of  Fram2's mission.  He's the equivalent of Jared Isaacman on Polaris Dawn and his missions.  Image credit: SpaceX

What Will NASA, SLS, Artemis, and all Look Like Under Trump?

One of the burning questions that many folks have had since Trump's landslide win, depending as it apparently did on Elon Musk's part in the campaign, is what NASA and the major programs will look like in the Trump administration.  All of it is speculation at this point; because the critical decision points in NASA and the rest of the government are all unfilled.  Eric Berger at Ars Technica had an interesting take on it last Friday with an article focusing on a couple of things Musk said that are critical of NASA's approach.

During the last 10 days, Musk has begun airing some of these private thoughts publicly. On Christmas Day, for example, Musk wrote on X, "The Artemis architecture is extremely inefficient, as it is a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program. Something entirely new is needed."

Then, on Thursday evening, he added this: "No, we’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction."

If you look at that second Tweet, he added the rather realistic, "Mass to orbit is the key metric, thereafter mass to Mars surface. The former needs to be in the megaton to orbit per year range to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars."  Repeat that part about a "megaton to orbit per year" to yourself for a while.  

If it's not obvious from everything I've written about Artemis and the SLS, I'm completely behind Musk's observation that it's "a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program" and it's hard to think of it as being successful in any way other than creating jobs for a select few contractors.  Still, it's not likely to be cancelled.  I don't know how President Trump feels about that now, but Artemis was started in his first term as president.  "I call on NASA to adopt new policies and embrace a new mindset," then-Vice President Mike Pence said in May 2019. "If our current contractors can't meet this objective, then we'll find ones that will."

NASA pretty much ignored that call from VP Pence and the administration, instead keeping its core group of major contractors, such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, in place, and transferring billions of taxpayer dollars to them.  

But this time, the push for change is likely to be more concerted, especially with key elements of NASA's architecture, including the Space Launch System rocket, being bypassed by privately developed rockets such as SpaceX's Starship vehicle and Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket.

It's hard to say there's a buzz about this in the open and I hear next to nothing about NASA Administrator nominee, Jared Isaacman who will be a key in deciding this.  He hasn't publicly addressed Musk's comments but when he was nominated made a statement that sounds like he'd agree with Musk to some degree.  

I was born after the Moon landings; my children were born after the final space shuttle launch. With the support of President Trump, I can promise you this: We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place. We will inspire children, yours and mine, to look up and dream of what is possible. Americans will walk on the Moon and Mars and in doing so, we will make life better here on Earth.

I can think of this decision being related to the Artemis accords; you've probably heard that Nelson and other NASA "higher ups" have been gathering other nations around the world in signing onto the Artemis accords.  That appears to be trying to build a consensus to not let China claim the moon, and that's now tied to Artemis.  

NASA has pretty much outlined a "moon first, then Mars" plan. Artemis gets us back to the moon by the end of this decade and then we work toward Mars.  Berger thinks what this is going to lead to is both. 

In short, NASA is likely to adopt a two-lane strategy of reaching for both the Moon and Mars. Whether the space agency is successful with either one will be a major question asked of the new administration.

SpaceX first released this artist's conception of a settlement on Mars some years ago.  It shows a domed city surrounded by photovoltaic farms and four Starships. Image credit: SpaceX 

Voyager 2 Has Another Instrument Turned Off

Space.com reports that NASA engineers have turned off one of the few remaining scientific instruments that was running on Voyager 2, as the power available on the space probe continues to fall with age.  

Voyager 2 launched back in August of 1977 on a trip to Jupiter and a "Grand Tour" of the outer solar system. That mission was completed decades ago, and the probe left the solar system on Nov. 5, 2018.  Yeah, you can say the two Voyagers are in the 47th year of a 4 year mission. 

...It is currently 12.8 billion miles (20.5 billion kilometers) from Earth and is using four science instruments to study space beyond the heliosphere, the sun's bubble of influence around the solar system. NASA thinks that Voyager 2 has enough power to keep running one science instrument into the 2030s, but doing that requires selecting which of its other instruments need to be turned off. 

Mission specialists have tried to delay the instrument shutdown until now because Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 are the only two active probes humanity has in interstellar space, making any data they gather unique. Thus far, six of the spacecraft's initial 10 instruments have been deactivated. Now, losing the seventh has become unavoidable, and the spacecraft's plasma science instrument drew the short straw. On Sept. 26, engineers gave the command to turn off the instrument.

The plasma science instrument is an interesting concept.  It consists of four "cups" - detectors - to sense the amount of plasma flowing around the spacecraft.  Three of those are pointed toward the sun to measure the charged particles in the solar wind while the fourth is pointed forward, to look for charged particles coming from interstellar space.  To be honest, the instrument really hasn't done much since the probe left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space. Ironically, though, it was that instrument that verified it had left the heliosphere.  

This NASA graphic shows the locations of NASA's Voyager spacecraft in interstellar space. NASA announced the arrival of Voyager 2 in interstellar space on Dec. 10, 2018. Voyager 1 reached the milestone in 2012. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The situation was that the three detectors pointed back where it came from didn't detect anything because there's no solar wind after it crossed the heliopause, and the other detector only provided useful data once every three months when the spacecraft made a 360-degree turn on its axis. It was a very practical choice of an instrument to shut down.

Both Voyagers are in the same condition, losing about 4 Watts every year.  In the 1980s, after their primary mission to the outer planets was complete, several instruments were shut down; things that were never expected to be used again. Voyager 1's plasma experiment equivalent to this one failed back in 2007 and has been off since then.   

It's a common thing among human beings to look for "big round numbers" and the race that both of the Voyagers are in is to see if they make their 50th anniversaries in space. They've both recently crossed into their 47th year, having launched in August and September of 1977.  

Reality, though, is that the Voyagers don't have much time left.  Both probes are powered by Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTGs) and those are expected to keep the few instruments that need to run alive until 2025, but that could change with the random failure of any one of thousands of components.  The RTGs might operate longer than 2025 although probably not much longer.  Either way, eventually the RTGs will no long be able to power enough of the instruments to get data and transmit it back.  Eventually, first one Voyager then the sister spacecraft will go silent.  Even though they won't generate enough heat to power the instruments, the RTGs might keep the Voyagers a little warmer, but eventually they'll cool to almost absolute zero.  

As I said over a decade ago, if we're lucky some day a ship from Earth may find one and bring her back to whatever serves as the equivalent of the Smithsonian in those days.  In all probability, they will simply follow the Newtonian laws of motion, cool to a couple of degrees Kelvin and glide away forever, all alone in the night.

A Peripatetic Friday of Musings

While most of the stories I see in the usual sources is about missions with dates months out in the future, there's a few that go together - and one that doesn't really.  

Is Boeing Going Into Collapse?

This is combining a few stories. I'll try to be brief and coherent. 

First story. The return of the Starliner CFT-1 capsule (Crewed Flight Test) isn't news - that was last Saturday.  But it wasn't widely reported that there were new problems on the return flight.

One of 12 control jets on the crew module failed to ignite at any time during Starliner's flight home. These are separate thrusters from the small engines that caused trouble earlier in the Starliner mission. There was also a brief glitch in Starliner's navigation system during reentry.

The fact that these are different thrusters from the ones that caused them to come back without Butch and Suni doesn't sound good. Did the redesign/recertification task just get bigger? 

Second story. Then there's a story that Eric Berger at Ars Technica related on the 11th.  As a senior journalist with many good sources, he gets invited to the big events and passes on a story that doesn't sound good:

Early on Saturday morning, after Starliner successfully landed in New Mexico without its crew on board, I attended a press conference at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. There were six chairs set up at the table for officials. A week before, NASA had sent out a press release announcing this post-landing news conference, noting that two senior officials from Boeing—Mark Nappi and John Shannon—would be in attendance.

But at about 12:20 am, 10 minutes before the news conference was due to start, two of the chairs were removed. I asked a NASA spokesperson what was happening and was told that I'd have to ask Boeing. Shannon and Nappi were no-shows at the news conference.

Boeing decided, soon after the Starliner mission ended, not to attend this conference? Were there more problems than just the "one of 12 control jets" failing that haven't been reported? Was it the same one that failed to ignite every time or was it a different thruster every time they tried to fire them, but still only one of the 12 at any time?  Eric goes on to suggest, "one possible explanation is that Boeing has decided it will exit the Commercial Crew Program."  

Third story: This one is today. More than 33,000 unionized Boeing workers went on strike today. In doing so, they rejected the deal their union had made with the company. It has (thankfully) been many years since I had any management responsibilities and what I knew about the subject of unions and what's legal has gone through enough half lives of decay that I remember essentially none of it. 

The rejected deal tried and failed to win over workers by offering a 25 percent wage increase and promised to build Boeing's next jet in the Puget Sound region in Washington, which Boeing claimed offered "job security for generations to come."

But after International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) District 751 president Jon Holden urged the union to accept the deal—which Boeing said was the "largest-ever general wage increase" in the company's history—hundreds of Boeing employees immediately began resisting ahead of a Thursday vote that ultimately doomed the deal

Taking these three all together, a possible picture emerges of a company in a severe pinch - if not in "life or death" trouble. They're facing big changes to Starliner that has already cost them well over what they can make from it. The cost to redesign and certify the new one has potentially taken a couple of jumps: the new failures on reentry and now the increasing costs of labor.  I know their new CEO has promised to keep going and make it right, but I don't know how long that can hold up and how long they can absorb the higher costs. Can he be overruled by the Board of Directors (or whatever they're called)? 

And now for something completely, radically different.

Back to Polaris Dawn. A look at what was up today led to a totally unexpected treat posted to X. Sarah Gillis, the SpaceX engineer who took part in the EVA or spacewalk yesterday, is also a musician.  Sarah brought a violin into space and played with a handful of groups of musicians around the globe. 

The song in the video, "Rey's Theme," was written by John Williams for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" and was performed by Gillis aboard the Polaris Dawn mission's Crew Dragon spacecraft. In the video, Gillis can be seen playing the song's solo violin part alongside videos of orchestras performing the song in studios and on soundstages.

"Inspired by the universal language of music and the relentless fight against childhood cancers and diseases, this moment was created with the hope of inspiring the next generation to look towards the stars," the Polaris Program wrote on its website. The video was created in partnership with with St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, for whom the Polaris Program is raising money throughout the mission, and El Sistema USA, a program that aims to promote music education "for positive societal impact."

A still from "Harmony of Resilience," a music video released in space on Sept. 13, 2024 by the Polaris Program during its five-day Polaris Dawn mission. (Image credit: Polaris Program via X)

That's One Small Walk for a Man

Credit where credit is due, that headline is not my creation; rather it belongs to Stephen Green at PJ Media (also known as VodkaPundit), who wrote, “That's One Small Walk for a Man (and a Woman)...”  To further borrow his opening line:

The privately funded Polaris Dawn human space mission just kind of casually reached the highest orbit in more than 50 years on Wednesday and on Thursday conducted the first civilian spacewalks to just as little fanfare.

That's really the most succinct way of summing up the mission to date. To borrow the frequently used line from the old commercials, "but wait! There's more." While the first day of the mission marked the milestone of reaching the highest altitude a crew has been since the last Apollo mission crossed that altitude on the way back to Earth, the last mission to orbit at that altitude for an extended time was Gemini 11 in 1966.  That flight was crewed by Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon - both of whom have passed on. The two would fly together to the moon on Apollo 12. Pete Conrad walked on the moon while Dick Gordon had the job of  being "the loneliest man in the universe" - the Command Module pilot.

These two legends of the astronaut corps had their record broken by four young and newly minted astronauts. The experienced two were commander Jared Isaacman, billionaire tech entrepreneur, and pilot Scott Poteet, U.S. Air Force, retired. The two new astronauts on their first flight were SpaceX engineers Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon. Both Gillis and Menon are on their first flight to orbit, got that altitude record, and Sarah Gillis got to do a spacewalk on her first trip to space! Anna Menon is serving as medical officer for the flight.

Wednesday, as the Polaris Dawn capsule was slowly increasing its orbital apogee, they were also slowly and methodically having their air pressure reduced while increasing the percent oxygen. This is done to reduce the amount of nitrogen dissolved in their blood, to reduce the possibility of decompression sickness. I know they were doing other things and not just sitting there noticing their breathing, but I find no references to what they were doing.

While the walk was supposed to start earlier, 2:23 AM EDT, it didn't start until just about four hours later: 6:12 AM. The start isn't when they open the hatch, it's when they start bleeding the air out of the Dragon while doing some functional checks on their suits. I watched both of them do their spacewalks and they weren't dramatic - a good thing - but were functional tests of different aspects of the suits, while supported by specialized hatch hardware designed just for this mission and known as "Skywalker." Similarly, the EVA wasn't over when Isaacman and Gillis had completed their tests, it was declared over when the cabin had repressurized and returned to the conventional Oxygen/Nitrogen mix used.  According to SpaceX, that was 7:58 AM EDT. 

A detailed look at getting through the stages to take today's spacewalks. From SpaceX.

I've been looking for links to videos of the two spacewalks themselves, something on the order of the 10 minutes doing tests on Skywalker. There are short videos on SpaceX's page on X.  A minute and change of Isaacman's with his notable quote, "SpaceX, back at home we have a lot of work to do, but from here it looks like a perfect world." Plus a shorter one (that repeats) of Sarah Gillis' walk.  The SpaceX page on X also has a long video (3 hrs 15 minutes) that you could look around in here. 

I watched the NASASpaceflight.com coverage, which was then posted as a 3 hr 19 minute video. They don't even approach opening the hatch until almost 1 hr 54 minutes into the video (01:53:30). 

Returning to where I started, with VodkaPundit's article, I think he ends it really well, on a good note.  All props to him for this perspective.

What Polaris Dawn and other SpaceX missions remind me of is NASA's Mercury and Gemini missions of the 1960s. There were numerous technological [hurdles] to be overcome and skills to be learned before the Apollo program could take its final shape and send men to the moon.
...
NASA also had to learn about known unknowns, like whether radiation in space would sicken or kill our astronauts in higher orbits. The men who performed those Mercury and Gemini missions, from Alan Shepard on Freedom 7 to Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin on Gemini 12, were pioneers in every sense of the word. What they accomplished made Apollo possible. Without them, JFK's challenge to land a man on the moon before 1970 would have been a largely forgotten speech by a dead president.

Elon Musk wants to send humans to Mars (eventually including himself), preferably beginning in 2028. SpaceX, like NASA in the '60s, has to learn many lessons before that becomes possible.

SpaceX's genius play is that Musk has figured out how to get other people to help pay for his R&D — and I don't mean your tax dollars. Polaris Dawn was funded by Isaacman. While the billionaire refuses to say how much he paid, I'd be shocked if it was anything less than $200 million, and I wouldn't be too surprised if it turned out to be double that.
...
Isaacman is getting what he wants, and SpaceX is getting the data and experience it needs to keep pushing the boundaries of human space travel.

So if anyone tells you that Polaris Dawn is just some rich man's stunt, you can tell them the truth. It was one small walk for a man and woman, and one giant leap for mankind.

SpaceX to Start Launching Starships to Mars in 2026

In a Tweet on his X platform Saturday evening, Elon Musk announced unmanned Starship flights to Mars will begin two years from now in the next Mars launch window coming in the 4th quarter of 2026. These will be test flights and test landings to ensure the Starship can land on Martian soil in chosen areas.  

"These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years."  

Note the remainder of the quote in the top tweet:

"Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years.  Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet."

Musk went on to say (in the “show more” link at the bottom of the second tweet), “It currently costs about a billion dollars per ton of useful payload to the surface of Mars. That needs to be improved to $100k/ton to build a self-sustaining city there, so the technology needs to be 10,000 times better. Extremely difficult, but not impossible.”

Making it cost 0.0001 times the current price is difficult but not impossible?  Since he has run the effort to get there with the Falcon 9 we have to consider he's sitting on or gets better access to the information than anyone else on Earth. I'm more likely to believe it coming from Elon than from pretty much anyone else.

Polaris Dawn Crew Arrives at KSC for Final Preps

The four member crew of Polaris Dawn arrived at the Kennedy  Space Center on Monday, August 19, to work in the final preparations for their flight, currently scheduled to launch next Monday, August 26 at 3:38 AM.  Amid the August conditions of high heat and humidity - but no thunderstorms - the four arrived in two of the camouflaged Dassault jets owned by mission commander Jared Isaacman, founder of The Polaris Program.

Left to right: Mission Specialist Anna Menon, Pilot Scott “Kidd” Poteet, Commander Jared Isaacman, Mission Specialist Sarah Gillis. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now 

As has been mentioned here before, “Kidd” Poteet is former USAF fighter pilot. He will pilot the mission. Anna Menon and Sarah Gillis are both Lead Space Operations Engineers in the manned spaceflight side of SpaceX.  The best-known highlight of this mission is that it will be the first private mission to do a spacewalk. The two astronauts doing the spacewalk will be Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis. 

“It’s been two-and-a-half years since we announced the Polaris Program and Polaris Dawn,” Isaacman said. “It’s been a really exciting journey of development and training.”
...

Isaacman and his crewmates have four main objectives over the course of the five days they will spend on orbit:

• Achieve an Earth-orbit altitude record at 1,400 km (879 mi) apogee
• Conduct the first commercial spacewalk using SpaceX-designed extravehicular activity (EVA) suits
• Perform a technology demonstration of Starlink onboard the Dragon spacecraft
• Conduct about 40 experiments from 20 partner research institutions

Menon said the science data collected during the mission doesn’t end when the crew splashes down off the coast of Florida at the conclusion of their mission.

“When we get back, we will be recovered by the SpaceX recovery vessel and then we will owe some time to science and research and reconnecting with our families,” Menon said.

The Monday morning launch will push the Dragon capsule into a 190 x 1,200 km (118 x 746 mi) orbit. The first day on orbit will include raising Dragon’s apogee and passing through the inner regions of the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belt, an area that sees additional charged particles, largely from solar wind, a target of the mission. 

“We stand to learn quite a bit from that, in terms of human health, science and research. If we get to Mars someday, we’d love to come back and be healthy enough to tell people about it,” Isaacman said. “So, I think that it’s worthwhile to get some exposure in that environment.

“It also informs vehicle architecture because, generally speaking, vehicles don’t like radiation. So that’s why we’re going to stay there for the shortest amount of time that’s necessary to gather the data we want.”

Beyond the human research benefit of this, Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of Build and Flight Reliability, said the mission’s dynamic flight profile will also help the company towards certifying their Crew Dragon spacecraft beyond five flights.

“The high altitude will give us exposure to this high-radiation environment, which will test a lot of avionic systems and their ability to recover,” Gerstenmaier said. “We build a lot of auto sequences to take care of that for us, but we’ll see how it really works. We’ll also get a chance to see the laser communication, which I think is a big deal moving forward.”

The laser communication will be a test between the Dragon capsule and the Starlink network, which currently can communicate by laser. SpaceX Engineer Anna Menon teased that test by saying, “You’ll want to stay tuned for that,” but didn’t go into details about the planned demonstrations. It's set for flight day four.

The highlight of the mission, though, is the space walk.  It has been an emphasis of the mission since it was first publicized, partly because of this artist's rendering you might have seen before:

Image credit: PolarisProgram

It won't be like that. 

One of the marquee moments of the mission will be when the crew brings the Dragon down to vacuum and performs the first commercial spacewalk. The full operation will take roughly two hours, during which time, both Isaacman and Gillis will egress the vehicle, one at a time, while remaining attached to a roughly 12-foot-long tether.

...

“We’ve covered everything from life-cycle testing, pressure testing, MMOD testing, extreme hot and colds testing, an entire campaign on ESD and flammability testing. It’s been a really impressive amount of work by the SpaceX team to test this suit for flight,” Gillis said. “As a crew, we’ve spent probably more than 100 hours in this suit at this point… We’re really looking forward to testing this first generation of suit.”

She noted that during the spacewalk, the Dragon spacecraft will be oriented in a way that will shield the crew members from direct sunlight.

Isaacman said that while he and Gillis in turn won’t be free-floating outside of the spacecraft, he said they will fully exit the vehicle during the spacewalk. He said during the operation they will be “well above where the hatch is.”

“We have a hands-free demonstration where it’ll only be our feet engaged in a mobility aid, we’re just not going to be just floating around,” Isaacman said. “It takes a lot of effort to move in the suit when it’s pressurized. What looks like really heavy clothing, becomes super rigid when it’s pressurized.

“So, you want to be very deliberate with your movements. You want to make good use of mobility aids.”

The mission has been a long time coming. Part of that was development of the suits, and part has been modifications to the Dragon capsule itself. A neat little tidbit I picked up at SpaceNews.com is that Kidd Poteet (remember, a former Air Force fighter pilot), said that he spent 1500 hours in simulators for combat training during 20 years of Air Force service. In the 2-1/2 years training for Polaris Dawn, he noted the crew spent 2,000 hours in simulators. 1500 hours over 20 years for combat training vs. 2000 hours in simulators over 2-1/2 years? Which group seems more serious? He said the four of them also did other training that ranged from scuba diving to mountain climbing. 

Closing words I found inspirational.

[Bill] Gerstenmaier, who came to SpaceX following a decades-long career at NASA said it’s been a fun process creating the suits and now being on the cusp of seeing them used in practice. He described the process as leveraging knowledge from NASA and “then we push it a little bit further in other areas,” making sure to share lessons learned along the way.

“This pace of development that we get to do at SpaceX is very much like the pace of development that was required back in the early Apollo days,” Gerstenmaier said. “We’re getting a chance to do that again where we’re really starting to push frontiers with the private sector and learning new things that we would not be able to learn by staying in the risk-free environment here on Earth.

“It’s time to go out. It’s time to explore. It’s time to do these big things and move forward.”

Post #5000

This is it, and I don't have much to say except thank you to my regular readers and to everyone who stops by.  Since Blogger tells us the number of the post, I've known this has been coming for quite a while and have been counting down for a while. You regular readers will have noticed I tend to put up one post a day, so a thousand posts takes about three years. My 4000th post was on Halloween 2021, so 2-1/2 months shy of three years.  

Among the interesting things in the "what else is going on?" thread is the sun's magnetic field looks to have reversed, a sure sign that the present solar cycle has peaked. Solar flux and smoothed sunspot numbers aren't likely to change right away, but it's a sign of being at solar maximum. This is from the latest video by Scott McIntosh who did the single best prediction of this solar cycle's activity and has apparently left the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for the private sector.  The video says he's VP of Space Operations from Lynker Space, and they appear to be starting a space weather forecasting service.

The part of this plot that shows the reversal is on the right, in the red ellipse,and you can see the north polar field (in gray) going south behind the south polar field (in ... not gray). 

By the way, you'll hear people talking about the sun's poles flipping. "Flipping" brings to mind those amazing Olympic gymnasts. It's not that dramatic, and nowhere near that fast. Reversing is a better word because it brings to mind putting a car in reverse and moving cautiously (slowly). You can see it takes from the left edge of the plot in 2010 until 2016 for the south pole field to get as far south as it goes. The Reversals are in late 2013 and mid 2024 close enough to 11 years to sound like what we call a solar cycle - which is one half of the real 22 year solar cycle.

EDIT Aug. 17 1826 EDT to correct:  Of all things to forget, I went and found an image for the number 5000 and completely forgot to put in the post.

SpaceX Announces First Human Flight to Polar Orbit

On Monday, SpaceX announced they will provide launch and space hardware for the first human flight that will go into a polar orbit. The previous highest latitude a manned spacecraft has flown to is 65.1 degrees, done by the Soviets 61 years ago (1963). The private mission will be led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years.

The "Fram2" mission, named after the Norwegian research ship Fram, will launch into a polar corridor from SpaceX's launch facilities in Florida and fly directly over the north and south poles. The three- to five-day mission is being timed to fly over Antarctica near the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, to afford maximum lighting.

The four-person crew will fly, fittingly, aboard Crew Dragon Endurance, which is named after Ernest Shackleton's famous ship that was trapped in the Antarctic ice and eventually sank there about a century ago. The spacecraft will be fitted with a cupola for both photography and filming.

The summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere is the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, so they're hoping to launch in four months, but while look-ups will confirm for you that the date is December 21st, we don't know what kind of "tolerance" goes along with that. That is, can they launch on any date within one week either side of that, one month either side, or just what?

It's also an unusual mission in private spaceflights in not being funded (or flown) by Jared Isaacman, who has been involved with both the Inspiration4 mission in September of '21 and the coming Polaris Dawn mission, currently set for August 26th. During an interview, Wang said he modeled the Fram2 mission's crew and public outreach programs on the template established by Isaacman. 

Wang had said that he became a billionaire when cryptocurrencies soared in price in 2021. He had always been interested in flying into space and started asking SpaceX about the cost to take a ride. In 2023 the discussions matured, and Wang realized that if he bought an entire mission he could set its parameters. Since another love of Wang's is the arctic and antarctic, it seems like an obvious choice. 

The crew of Fram2 from left to right: Eric Philips, Jannicke Mikkelsen, Chun Wang, and Rabea Rogge.  Image Credit: SpaceX

The mission's three crew members joining Wang are:

Jannicke Mikkelsen, Vehicle Commander: A film director and cinematographer, Mikkelsen specializes in remote and hazardous environments such as the Arctic, ocean, aviation, and space. In 2019, she served as Payload Specialist on the record-breaking polar circumnavigation flight One More Orbit mission in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

Eric Philips, Vehicle Pilot: A professional polar adventurer and guide, Philips has completed dozens of ski expeditions to the North and South Poles since his first polar expedition in 1992. He is co-founder of the International Polar Guides Association and co-creator of the Polar Expeditions Classification Scheme.

Rabea Rogge, Mission Specialist: A robotics researcher from Berlin, Rogge is currently pursuing her PhD in Norway. Her work spans from having led a satellite mission to researching ocean robotics in the Arctic, reflecting her commitment to advancing technology in both the polar regions and space.

"I'm amazed that you can now become a commercial astronaut," Mikkelsen said in an interview. "I have a pretty gnarly injury background, being in a wheelchair for a good year, and then learning to walk again between three and five years old. I wish I could tell that girl that she can become an astronaut."

Wang said he met two of the crew members while on a ski trip several years ago, and another in Svalbard. All share his interests in exploration, adventure, and the poles. He said it is his hope that they will all help the mission contribute to increasing humanity's understanding of the Earth's poles and spread the inspiration of spaceflight.

In my mind, I can see Wang talking with someone from SpaceX and asking about the cost to just "buy a seat" on another mission. After a lot of back and forth someone tells him a number. He says to himself, "is that all?!?  Gee, I should just buy all four seats and take a lifetime dream flight."

A Take on the Relevance of Apollo 11 55 Years Later

55 years ago yesterday, July 16, 1969, the world watched in great wonder as the massive, dragon-fire-spitting Saturn V rocket lifted off launchpad 39A at Kennedy Space Center. 

Of course, we know the rest of this grand and magnificent history and we still marvel at the extraordinary feat that was finally achieved on July 21^st when both Armstrong and Aldrin embossed human footprints in the lunar dust. That astounding achievement may have happened over a half-century ago but its imprint on culture, on scientific exploration, on human understanding, on America and indeed, on the world, is still strong and deep. A few additional perspectives on the legacy of Apollo are worth considering.

This is a relatively short and relentlessly optimistic piece about the early days of the Space Program, not just Apollo but also Gemini and Mercury. It's authored by Grant Anderson, the President and CEO of Paragon Space Development Corporation. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Aeronautical & Astronautical Engineering from Stanford University. 

On a very broad and basic level, when I think of Apollo 11, I’m reminded of what Americans are capable of, particularly when we’re unified and focused on important shared goals. Americans make up a nation of great vision with citizens who are often willing to take a few calculated gambles in order to see that vision become reality. Despite periodic episodes where we hesitate to commit to grand endeavors, we excel when we are compelled to act, often demonstrating a capacity for greatness in a way that other nations and societies have a hard time matching. Apollo 11 — and indeed the entire early space program including projects Mercury and Gemini prior to Apollo — exemplify both the American spirit for boldness and the magic that can occur when our forces of industry, innovation and free thought are synched together for a noble purpose. The goal was ambitious and the timeline was tight, but the drive to demonstrate to the world that we could put a human on the moon allowed America to perform at her best.

In a very real sense, we've never equaled our accomplishments of the Apollo era. The silly "we never went to the moon" arguments are another symptom of that. It's singularly illogical to think because we haven't duplicated a prior mission that the prior mission didn't happen, but here we are. 

Apollo 11 Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin’s bootprint. Image Credit: NASA

A short article worth your time to read. 

My Favorite Headline from the Weekend

My favorite story is from ZeroHedge, and is only tangentially related to the big story of the weekend, the attempt to murder President Trump. This story focuses on Elon Musk who says, "I have had two cases in the last six months where two people, unfortunately very mentally ill, came to try to kill me in Austin with guns." The lead-in is that people on X were telling Musk that if they'll come for Trump, they'll come for him, too, so double and triple your security.

The headline that got my attention, though, was, "Elon Musk Reveals Multiple Assassination Attempts, Says Time "To Build Flying Metal Suit Of Armor". An Iron Man suit? For real?  

This is a dream story. See, when actor Robert Downey Jr. was trying to find someone to pattern Tony Stark after, someone suggested Elon Musk and stories I've read are that he spent hours daily observing Musk in the earlier, crazier days of SpaceX at their facility in Hawthorne, California. Scenes in Iron Man 2 in 2010 were shot in Hawthorne.  Musk was given a speaking cameo role in the movie and they asked if they could use the facility as a set for the movie. He said, "sure!" - presumably after getting things out of camera range they didn't want everyone to see. 

(I'm not sure who the actor on the left is. Second to right is Mickey Rourke as Vanko and then Sam Rockwell as Justin Hammer - the two main anti Iron Man characters in the movie) Those are Falcon parts. 

This patterning of Tony Stark after Elon Musk tells me that in a sense, Tony Stark is Elon Musk. Besides, if you were going to bet that some solitary genius was going to come up with a flying suit of armor, who would you bet real money on to do it besides Elon Musk? Jeff Bezos? Please.

Voyager 1 is Awake and Communicating!

This past Saturday, April 20, Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status with a coherent message for the first time in 5 months. While she still isn't fully operational and sending science data back to Earth, Voyager 1 is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard systems. 

If you're a regular reader, you'll recall that back in November, Voyager suddenly started acting like something was seriously wrong. I likened it to the probe having had a stroke, although that's too anthropomorphic. The probe seemed to take commands and respond, it still kept its position and kept the data link back to Earth running, it's just that the replies it sent back were more like incoherent ramblings. Something about its uncle having been eaten by cannibals before the mission started. No, sorry. I made that up. 

In the months since that first post on December 12, we've gotten a few updates. The last things we heard were in mid-March, that they had run a memory "poke" and had a pretty good idea of what the problem was. 

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the "glitch" is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1's science and engineering data unusable.

With a light travel time of 22-1/2 hours, it takes a couple of days to do an experiment, so it's a good practice, perhaps even more than usual, to be pretty darn sure it's going to work. The software was sent to Voyager over the Deep Space Network on Thursday, the 18th. On Saturday, several dozen scientists and engineers gathered in a conference room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or connected virtually, to wait for a new signal from Voyager 1.

“In the minutes leading up to when we were going to see a signal, you could have heard a pin drop in the room," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's two Voyager spacecraft at JPL. "It was quiet. People were looking very serious. They were looking at their computer screens. Each of the subsystem (engineers) had pages up that they were looking at, to watch as they would be populated."

And then the celebrations began.

After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Of course, with the Voyagers being over 22 hours away at the speed of light, and it having taken them 46 years to get that far away, nobody's going out to Voyager 1 to replace a memory chip. No single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely. The team can slice it into sections and store the slices separately. There are more details, as always, which come down to essentially recreating a storage system and ensuring that will work. Redesigning the computer on the fly. As it approaches its 50th birthday in 2027. And "document, document, document" what you've done - like every space job.

One of the first references I found to this story started out with a line that I think I'll finish with. I can't find the article but it was something like, "the miracle workers at the JPL have done it again." Well done, everyone. Well done, and good luck with the work left to be done.

Not One Thing Happened Today Besides the Eclipse

As fur as I can tell, not one single thing happened in the world of space, the businesses, or even all of science. Just the eclipse. 

Which is not to say nothing happened to billions of people, going through their everyday lives. People went to work, went shopping, and did lots of different things, it's just that in the array of places I go to look for space-related news the story was the eclipse. Along with the stories I ran over the weekend.

I worked on troubleshooting parts of my sprinkler system that aren't working quite right. Got some household business taken care of. Stuff like that. Sure, I took a picture of the eclipse. We had about 50% coverage, so not very photogenic. Go look at McThag's picture. His is better. Mine had too much cloud in the area when I grabbed the shot.

This picture graced the top of the article on Ars Technica about how members of their staff traveled to see it.

Baily's Beads are visible in this shot taken in Athens, Texas. Image credit to Stephen Clark.

A Commercial Space Story I Haven't Been Covering

I've been remiss in providing details on the Varda orbital experiments that recently concluded with a successful recovery of their payload that - much like OSIRIS-REx's samples - parachuted into the Utah desert in February. It's an important milestone and mission.

This story has been going on, quietly and in the background, for years. Varda Space launched their small satellite on the Falcon 9 Transporter-8 rideshare mission on June 12, 2023. They had actually thought they could return their payload by mid July of '23, but had to wait for government approval - which is what delayed them until this past February. 

Considering the time it takes to design a mission, design and build the satellite and acquire a ride into space, you'd think the FAA had time to think about this mission and clear the reentry, but they were apparently afraid. You see, the Varda W-1 capsule was autonomously manufacturing complex pharmaceutical molecules that are hard to create on Earth because of gravity. Doing the manufacturing in space should allow chemicals like this to be manufactured efficiently and at lower costs than on the ground.

In a July 24 interview, Delian Asparouhov, co-founder of Varda, said the company was still working with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation for a reentry license for the spacecraft. That office, best known for licensing commercial launches, is also responsible for overseeing reentries by commercial spacecraft.

A key issue, he said, is that Varda is the first to seek a reentry license under new FAA regulations known as Part 450. Those regulations were enacted by the FAA more than two years ago to streamline the launch and reentry licensing process.

“I think a lot of the collaborations that we’ve had with the FAA have been trailblazing, and we recognize that, given we’re the first, we set the standard for what future Part 450 reentry looks like,” he said. Varda started discussions with the FAA in early 2021, shortly after the company’s founding.

They received the license in early February and performed the re-entry and recovery on February 21. By March 20, the company revealed that everything worked and released a preprint paper (pdf alert) of their results.

The W-1 mission sought to test the feasibility of making therapeutics in space, testing Varda's hardware off Earth for the first time. During its time in orbit, the W-1 capsule successfully crystalized the metastable Form III of the antiviral drug ritonavir, which then survived its return to Earth. The space-processed ritonavir has since been analyzed, and per an X post by Varda Space cofounder Delian Asparouhov, "[t]hem space drugs cooked real good."

While pharmaceuticals have been processed in microgravity on parabolic flights and the International Space Station, Varda Space's method aims to be more efficient and cost-effective, using uncrewed capsules that serve dual purposes as a mini-factory and a reentry vehicle.

I bet when more Fed Bois read that line starting with, "Them space drugs..." they might want to have Varda followed a little more closely. Wish I was kidding.

Varda Space's manufacturing capsule is examined by recovery personnel as it sits on the desert floor of the Utah Test and Training Range on Feb. 21, 2024. (Image credit: Varda Space/John Kraus)

Grading IFT-3

Not perfect.  Not an "A plus plus." Maybe an A minus or a B plus.  Merely my opinion.  As everyone knows, Starship 28 and SuperHeavy booster 10 were launched on Integrated Flight Test 3 this morning. 

SpaceX's third towering Starship rocket, standing some 397 feet (121 meters) tall and wider than the fuselage of a 747 jumbo jet, lifted off at 8:25 am CDT (13:25 UTC) Thursday from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast east of Brownsville. SpaceX delayed the liftoff time by nearly an hour and a half to wait for boats to clear out of restricted waters near the launch base.

Much better than IFT-2 in November, Ship 28 achieved orbital altitudes and traveled across the Indian Ocean toward the western shores of Australia, exactly as planned.  The booster didn't RUD after MECO and stage separation. S28 didn't vent oxygen onto hot engines and RUD. S28 tested transfer of liquid oxygen in zero G, tested the gross operation of the "Pez dispenser" they plan to use to deploy Starlink satellites Really Soon Now (and sooner than it seemed to be yesterday), and more, but somewhere along the way, they decided not to reignite one or more of S28's Raptor engines in orbit to reduce velocity.   

Starship and its Super Heavy booster climb off the launch pad at Starbase, Texas. Part of the Orbital Launch Mount visible at the left. That massive Mach diamond gets repeated once the booster is far enough up. Image Credit: SpaceX. 

The bad point is that they lost both halves - like both flight tests before this one.  They just achieved much more.

"Starship reached orbital velocity!" wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, on his social media platform X. "Congratulations SpaceX team!!"

While the Starship and booster platforms are intended to be rapidly reusable, Booster 10 made it closer to splashdown than the previous two missions, it plunged into the Gulf of Mexico uncontrolled. It was supposed to have reignited some number of engines and softly dropped into the Gulf of Mexico. I was captivated watching the video of the grid fins gyrating and didn't look at the lower left of the video screen until after it was said the booster was lost.  At that point, one of the 33 engines showed as being on by their telemetry.  I don't know if more engines were ever on, if they were on at the right times and so on. 

My suspicion is that booster landing and recovery are going to take a while to perfect.  After all, they're the only company in the world doing it consistently and perfecting it. To every other entity in the world, a booster is garbage once it's dropped. It can be forgiven if they throw a few away getting it to work; I mean, they lost a bunch of Falcon 9s and now they're at something like 280 consecutive successful landings.

Beginning around 46 minutes after launch, Starship beamed down what might have been the most spectacular imagery from the flight. At this point in the mission, the 165-foot-long (50-meter) ship was speeding across the Indian Ocean and rapidly falling as Earth's gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

Starship's flaps, there to provide aerodynamic control during the final phase of descent, folded up against the ship's main body. Then, black ceramic tiles attached to the ship started glowing orange as a sheath of plasma enveloped the vehicle. Temperatures outside Starship climbed higher than 2,500° Fahrenheit, and the ship appeared to be under control during the first moments of reentry.

This was absolutely riveting to watch. I'm not going to say nobody alive has ever seen the plasma forming on surfaces during re-entry, but I bet the number people that have seen it went up a million-fold today.

Beginning around 46 minutes after launch, Starship beamed down what might have been the most spectacular imagery from the flight. At this point in the mission, the 165-foot-long (50-meter) ship was speeding across the Indian Ocean and rapidly falling as Earth's gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

Starship's flaps, there to provide aerodynamic control during the final phase of descent, folded up against the ship's main body. Then, black ceramic tiles attached to the ship started glowing orange as a sheath of plasma enveloped the vehicle. Temperatures outside Starship climbed higher than 2,500° Fahrenheit, and the ship appeared to be under control during the first moments of reentry.

This rear-facing camera, mounted inside one of the forward flaps on Starship, shows plasma building up around the underside and rear flaps during reentry over the Indian Ocean.  Image credit: SpaceX 

Not too long after pictures like this started getting interrupted and interfered with, the Starship went into a radio blackout.  Not a surprise, re-entry is known for that.  The excellent downlink of video they got was because of using their own Starlink system and antennas on the cooler side of S28.  At some point, that video went away and the onscreen telemetry stopped updating.  Around five minutes later, they announced that they had lost all telemetry from the ship; both Starlink and NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) at the same time.  They had to conclude they had lost the ship. 

What's next?  I don't think they're ready to start flying Starlink satellites in Starships or any other operational things; more test flights are definitely in the offering.  They most likely will focus on the things like the cryogenic fueling experiments, although a transfer between Starships can't happen until there's a second Starship launch pad, whether there in Boca Chica or here at the Kennedy Space Center. 

Bear in mind that Musk set the target for six Starship flights by the end of this year in a post to X.

I don't know how long this will be there, but if you didn't watch the flight and want to, SpaceX still has the video of this morning's launch here on their Launches website. It's the full 1 hour 43 minute video stream.  The lift off isn't until about 34 minutes on the timer.  The booster separation about 3 minutes later and booster loss about T+7 minutes.  Starship engine cutoff at T+8:25 and 8:35.  The really dramatic re-entry video starts around T+45 minutes. 

The IM-1 Story You Haven't Heard

Everyone has heard that Intuitive Machines Odysseus lunar lander and IM-1 mission has successfully landed on the moon.  Unless you've been digging, you probably haven't heard that the mission went through a phase of being doomed, then a MacGyver-like last minute fix that restored the mission and achieved the landing.  Eric Berger at Ars Technica has the story, and as I've often done, I'll pull a couple of paragraphs and recommend you Read The Whole Thing.

There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus spacecraft in a small crater not all that far from the south pole of the Moon. About 20 minutes after touchdown, NASA declared success, but some questions remained about the health of the lander and its orientation. Why? Because while Odysseus was phoning home, its signal was weak.

But after what the spacecraft and its developer, Houston-based Intuitive Machines, went through earlier on Thursday, it was a miracle that Odysseus made it at all.

The landing attempt was delayed by about two hours after mission controllers had to send a hastily cobbled together, last-minute software patch up to the lander while it was still in orbit around the Moon. Patching your spacecraft's software shortly before it makes its most critical move is just about the last thing a vehicle operator wants to do. But Intuitive Machines was desperate.

Desperate and with no alternatives designed for just this sort of situation.

Earlier on Thursday, the company realized that its navigation lasers and cameras were not operational.  As an autonomous probe, Odysseus was designed by Intuitive Machines to use cameras onboard for two purposes.  First, to compare terrain images to a stored database, to help the lander decide where it is and second to look for smaller things like boulders or unknown things to avoid when it came time to land.  The lasers were used as altimeters.  The combination provided what IM refers to as terrain-relative and hazard-relative navigation.

Without those sensors, Odysseus was blind.  Not just blind, but hopelessly blind without a seeing eye dog or cane.

Without these rangefinders, Odysseus was going to faceplant into the Moon. Fortunately, this mission carried a bunch of science payloads. As part of its commercial lunar program, NASA is paying about $118 million for the delivery of six scientific payloads to the lunar surface.

One of these payloads just happened to be the Navigation Doppler Lidar experiment, a 15-kg package that contains three small cameras. With this NDL payload, NASA sought to test out technologies that might be used to improve navigation systems in future landing attempts on the Moon.

The only chance Odysseus had was if it could somehow tap into two of the NDL experiment's three cameras and use one for terrain-relative navigation and the other for hazard-relative navigation. So, some software was hastily written and shipped up to the lander. This was some true MacGyver stuff. But would it work?

You know the answer to that big question now, but watching the landing was a bit different.  Earlier in the day, I'd watched some videos from IM and knew that they expected the software to take 15 seconds to radio back that it had landed, and Tim Crain - mission director and co-founder of the company - had said, "those are the longest 15 seconds of your life."  It was more like 15 minutes.  Alright, 10 minutes that felt like 15 when Crain said the lander was sending a faint signal back to Earth, adding, “we’re not dead yet.”

This morning, IM updated the mission webpage at 8:18 CST, saying:

Odysseus is alive and well. Flight controllers are communicating and commanding the vehicle to download science data. The lander has good telemetry and solar charging. We continue to learn more about the vehicle’s specific information (Lat/Lon), overall health, and attitude (orientation).

Odysseus took this selfie while passing over the near side of the Moon, after lunar orbit insertion on February 21.  Image credit: Intuitive Machines 

In this morning's update to the mission web page, they also added, “Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus will participate in a press conference later today to discuss this historic moment.” So far, that page hasn't been updated but I expect there will be a press conference as described. Note that it said NASA paid $118 million to send six experiments to the moon as part of its CLPS program (Commercial Lunar Payload Services).  NASA also paid Astrobotics for a ride to the moon on their Peregrine lander that didn't make it also as a part of CLPS. 

Final words to Eric Berger:

So why is NASA supporting such risky ventures?

The space agency believes that private companies will eventually get the hang of flying vehicles to the Moon. And once the service becomes more routine, it will cost NASA a fraction of the price it would pay for traditionally developed lunar services. In essence, then, NASA is taking some short-term risks for some long-term gains. It looks like one of those risks paid off Thursday.