SpaceX Launches SPHEREx and PUNCH for NASA

Last night, March 11 local, SpaceX launched a pair of NASA science missions that will explore the infrared universe and study the solar wind.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 11:10 p.m. Eastern. It placed into sun-synchronous orbits the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) spacecraft and the four satellites of the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH) mission. All five spacecraft were in contact with controllers and functioning as expected after launch, the agency stated.

SPHEREx may sound familiar because I did a post about this mission at the end of January, about six weeks ago, and used this picture. 

NASA’s SPHEREx space observatory was photographed at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in November 2024 after completing environmental testing. The spacecraft’s three concentric cones help direct heat and light away from the telescope and other components, keeping them cool. Credit: BAE Systems

SPHEREx is what's called a NASA medium Explorer-class mission that will perform an all-sky infrared spectroscopic survey imaging the sky in 102 wavelength bands from 0.75 to 5 microns.  The unique-looking telescope with the three cones create a wide-field telescope with a diameter of 20 centimeters.  The spacecraft will be able to complete a single scan of the entire sky in six months.  The overall cost was $488 million.

“Even though SPHEREx uses a small telescope, it looks at the universe in a new way,” said Jaime Bock, principal investigator for the mission at Caltech, during a briefing in January about the mission. “This new capability allows us to address some of the most compelling questions in astronomy.”

Those questions fall into three key themes: studying the early universe, including the era of cosmic inflation immediately after the Big Bang; the formation and evolution of galaxies through the history of the universe; and measurements of water and organic materials in the Milky Way galaxy.

PUNCH, the other mission, has had virtually zero coverage here.  As the first quoted paragraph mentioned, PUNCH is a constellation of four small (64-kg or 141 lb) satellites meant to study the sun.  Three of the four carry wide-field imagers to observe the sun while the fourth has a narrow-field imager.  The mission's goal is to conduct the first three dimensional models of the sun's corona.  

The four spacecraft will work in conjunction, taking images of the sun using different polarizing filters as well as unpolarized images. Scientists will use the images to construct three-dimensional maps of the corona to study how it transitions into the solar wind and the effects of events like coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, from the sun that can create space weather events at Earth.

“The PUNCH scientists hope to better understand the entire inner solar system from the sun, through the corona, out into the inner solar system, and how that material impacts Earth,” said Nicholeen Viall, PUNCH mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, at that briefing.

The four PUNCH smallsats will orbit the Earth to perform three-dimensional mapping of the solar corona.  Reminder of the standard disclaimers: not to scale, artist's concept and all that.  Image Credit: NASA

Dr. Viall says that “The sun is never quiet.  It’s constantly having little explosions. So, even when there’s not a big space weather event, even when there’s not a big CME, there’s still little events that constantly bombard our Earth. PUNCH is the first instrument to have the sensitivity and the resolution to be able to see that daily space weather.”

It has long been my belief from my ham radio experiences that the big events don't always have the same effects, so we must be missing something else going on around the same times.  One day with a planetary geomagnetic index Kp=3 can be different from another with all the indices the same - or so it seems.  Watching the space weather forecasts can make you realize just how good the terrestrial weather forecasts are.  I'm looking forward to seeing if they get better. 

There's more coming this weekend.   Another heliophysics mission, a trio of smallsats called Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) to study the aurora, will launch on the SpaceX Transporter-13 rideshare mission scheduled for as soon as March 15 at 2:39 AM EDT, also from Vandenberg SFB.

Space Station Crew 10 Mission Launches Wednesday Evening

The ISS Crew 10 mission is preparing to launch Wednesday in the early evening, 7:48 PM EDT, from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral.  Lately the mission has been most often mentioned as replacing Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams' and enabling their ride home from their eight-day turned eight-month Starliner mission.  That's not quite right; they won't return home in the Dragon capsule Endurance launching Crew 10; they're returning with the other two astronauts from the Crew-9 Dragon Freedom launched last summer.

The Dragon spacecraft supporting this mission previously flew NASA’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 missions to and from the space station. Following stage separation, Falcon 9’s first stage will land on Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  

The crew consists of NASA astronauts Crew-10 Commander Anne McClain, Pilot Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov.  For an on-time launch, the Crew-10 foursome would dock to the orbital outpost at 6 a.m. on Thursday and begin their long-duration mission as Expedition 72 flight engineers. 

Image assembled from individual images on the SpaceX mission page. Image credit: NASA

NASA does these crew swaps roughly every six months, and one of the routine steps is that the new Expedition crew overlaps with the old crew for around a week to make a smoother fransfer to the new expedition.  We'll know more about when and where the reentry will take place over the coming week.  The NASA ISS Blog gives more info on exactly what the crew has been doing.

EDIT TO ADD (3/12 @ 7:30 PM EDT - 0030 UTC on 3/13):  And... scrubbed tonight due to ground hydraulic issue with one of the clamp arms.

 

Blue Ghost's using GPS on the moon due to radio hams

An interesting little story showed up today on QRZ.com, a ham radio site.  It references one of the ham radio satellites called Amsat Oscar-40 or AO-40 and how radio amateurs determined how to use GPS from the moon.

Breaking down that bunch of new terms, Amsat is the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, a group of volunteers who have been helping get amateur radio satellites into orbit since the 1960s.  Amsat was formed in the District of Columbia in 1969 as an educational organization.  Oscar is the acronym from "orbiting satellite carrying amateur radio." Project Oscar launched the first ham satellite on December 12, 1961, barely four years after the launch of Russia’s first Sputnik.

American ham Frank Bauer, KA3HDO, convinced NASA to sponsor the first experiment on the AO-40 mission.  There is documentation of those results (pdf alert) searchable online.  You'll see that the document linked to there is dated October of 2001.  AO-40 was in a group of satellites that Amsat was developing to fly in orbits that took them farther from Earth than earlier satellites, but was retired in 2003, due to some hardware failure. 

For his work Frank Bauer was awarded the Dayton Hamvention's Amateur of the Year in 2017. 

Amateur Radio on the International Space Station International Chair Frank Bauer, KA3HDO, is Hamvention’s 2017 Amateur of the Year. Bauer has been a driving force behind the program since its inception. He also serves as AMSAT-NA Vice President for Human Spaceflight.

In the mid-1990s, Bauer proposed an experiment to have the high-Earth orbit (HEO) AMSAT Phase 3D satellite (AO-40) measure the signal strength of the GPS satellite constellation. The AO-40 experiment subsequently has been cited often in aerospace literature, as it remained the most comprehensive above-the-constellation data source for nearly a decade and led to changes in the system’s specifications and applications. The results of the AO-40 experiment jump started a game-changing transformation in navigation at HEO/GEO altitudes, enabling new and exciting missions in these orbits.

Frank KA3HDO is also named as a consultant on the international team that developed the current Moon lander package named LuGRE.

LuGRE (from "Lunar GNSS Receiver Experiment" and pronounced like luger) has been credited with getting GNSS navigation to Blue Ghost on the moon. GNSS refers to the Global Navigation Satellite System, and LuGRE is only working with the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS) and European Union’s Galileo.  The receiver on blue ghost was developed by Qascom, an Italian aerospace company.

The goal of the experiment is to access this extensive system from the moon for position, navigation and timing (PNT).  The issue of timing on the moon is something we talked about almost a year ago, April of '24. 

The joint NASA, Italian Space Agency, Qascom, and PoliTO LuGRE team at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Image uncredited on QRZ.

Much like Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander itself, LuGRE is part of NASA's CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) program.  A short (1-1/2 minute) video about the concept has been posted for a couple of months.

Personally, ham radio satellites have been "up there" for my entire life as a ham, and while I've listened to the downlinks a few times, including from hams on the Space Shuttles long before the ISS and its permanent ham station, I've never had a contact through the satellites.  Whatever you're into.

Going After the Junk Science

Tonight’s ramble is going to be my take on the MAHA movement.  My view is heavily influenced by the years (in the early 1970s) when I studied biochemistry through my junior year of college.  I imagine some people will throw that out as being too “establishment,” but I think there are good things to talk about and ideas to spread around down this road.

The first thing I stumbled across that made me pay attention to RFK Jr. was him saying that in the past, autism struck something like 1 in 10,000 kids while today it’s 1 in 34.  Put another way, it has gone from a 0.0001 portion (0.01% of kids) to (1/34 or 0.0294 (2.94%)  At almost 300 times the previous percentage, that’s a monstrous increase and it really needs to be investigated.  

The problem is that we don’t know, as proven by any real science, why this has happened.  Some people will say vaccinations, but we have just as much proof of that as we do that it was chem trails or that chem trails are simply jet engine exhaust, or anything else.  So how do we establish a cause with as little doubt as we can?  How do we prove if one specific thing causes an effect? 

As I quipped the other day, junk science is a favorite topic of mine, but we have enough now.  We don't need to add volumes more junk in the effort to improve the many widely quoted statistics. 

The gold standard way to really prove causation is double-blinded, randomized, controlled trials (I’ll just call them RCTs because that seems to be common) – and potentially a LOT of those RCTs.  The golden rule here is the bigger the population being experimented on the better.  That makes these sorts of studies hard to do, take a long time, and burn dumpsters full of money.

So what are RCTs?  A controlled trial is an experiment with two groups: the experimental group that gets the thing being tested and a second group called the control that gets something expected to have no effect at all, usually called a placebo.  (While many people envision something like a sugar pill, sugar clearly has effects on some things so the placebo has to carefully chosen – a placebo for an injection might be “normal saline” or saltwater.)  Randomized means that a group chosen to be used in the study is chosen to be as identical as possible, and exactly which group a subject goes into (experimental or control) is chosen randomly.  Blinding a study means either the subject or the experimenter that gives them their treatment knows which group they’re in; double-blinding means that neither the subject getting the treatment or the person giving them the treatment can know if it’s the real treatment or the placebo. 

I hope you’re seeing a big problem here.  Let’s say we want to find if giving a particular vaccination causes autism.  We need two big groups – the bigger the better – to experiment on.  Then we have to monitor them for however long we think it takes to be able to say “if they haven’t gone autistic by now, they’re not going to.”  How long?  Here’s where the question might not be as long as it could be for other things.  Maybe there’s evidence that if they don’t start showing signs in the first couple months they never do; maybe it’s more like if they don’t show signs in five years they won’t, and maybe it’s 10 years or fully adults.

Now it gets harder to run the tests.  Nobody gets one vaccination; today’s kids get larger numbers than even 30 years ago.  In the RCTs, we can test whether getting two specific vaccines staggered in time however the protocols assign them can cause the autism.  They can’t get any other vaccines or anything the control group doesn’t get.  We need more huge groups to experiment on.  

And it gets even harder; astronomically harder.  In probability and statistics classes they cover how to compute how many possible combinations there are.  It’s worse than this, but let’s assume kids get 15 vaccines and we want to test every combination of two out of the 15 in an RCT.  How many RCTs does it take?

That shows that to test 15 vaccines 2 at a time, takes 105 RCTs.  That would be like 1 vs 2, 1 v 3, up to 1 vs 15 then 2 vs every other, 3 vs every other and so on.  If it’s 30 vaccines, twice that “N” in the calculated number, that 105 jumps to 435.  The last time I did any research on this question, the results were that there have never been any tests like even one of these about interactions between combinations of vaccines, but it has been some years since I looked. 

The shear number and cost of those tests could be one of the reasons it has never been done, however just vaccinating everyone instead of testing it rigorously and carefully should not be the way to approach this.  

This is one of the reasons why science is in such deep trouble these days.  Now think of a harder thing to do an RCT on: dietary guidance.  An example some people might be interested in would be something along the lines of “if I eat something they say is bad for me once a week, let’s say bacon, is that going to shorten my life compared to never eating it.”  To do a rigorous RCT, you’d need to get a couple of groups of lots of people that are genetically similar (to rule out effects from that) and study them from childhood throughout their entire lives.  These two groups would need to eat exactly the same thing as each other at every meal for their entire lives before a conclusion could be reached.  How could they be sure it was that one food unless a number in the test group (that ate the food being tested) died that was statistically higher than the number in the control group? 

This experiment is unethical, to say the least.  The experimenters would have to commit a group of children to being experimented on for their entire lives – long before they could make that decision.  Whoever is paying for the test would have to pay for every single meal for both groups for up to a hundred years.  Kids growing up in either group would have to be isolated.  No going out to meals with friends, no just going out for a late night pizza or any sort of “social eating.”  Not to mention not having a conclusion until long past everyone associated with starting the experiment has passed away.

So what are the alternatives to doing a lifelong RCT?  The approach appears to be to study some number of people who get the treatment and then see if the number is close enough to the general population’s incidence of early death (or whatever they’re interested in).  This is relatively easy; the numbers of people are smaller, they aren’t really subjected to getting a test substance, and they don’t need to be housed separately or cared for differently.  In the case of eating the bacon, we’ll give a group of people forms to record what they eat and when.  The typical way of doing this a questionnaire that’s filled out in retrospect, called a Food-Frequency Questionnaire or FFQ.   It’s not quite the same as someone asking, “what did you have for lunch on March 10, 2023?” two years after the fact, but it’s close.  In processing data from the FFQs, the software could separate out those who claimed to have eaten bacon from those who didn’t claim to and see if their rates of death correlated with the general population. 

As I’ve said over and over, it then becomes a matter of correlations, what I call “he-who” studies: he-who eats 3 ounces of bacon/day correlates with the group that lived the expected lifespan, or lived longer or shorter.  To stretch the example to absurdity, let’s say in the past 50 years, life expectancy in the US has gone up.  Anything that has also increased, or has become more common in the same time range can be correlated; we could say that since global temperature has gone up, global warming is extending lifespans.  The standard method of testing whether that correlation is good enough to claim possible causation is to compare the rate of change (slopes) of the two things.  If they’re within a certain range (typically 5%) the correlation is considered good enough to rule out agreement by random chance.  It’s simply not robust enough, IMO. 

Do you see the immediate problem here?  If autism had increased dramatically at the same time that the number of vaccines increased dramatically, as it did, that's automatically a correlation.  One which could mean exactly nothing.

I've mentioned John P. A. Ioannidis on my pages many times before.  He's the author of what’s widely quoted as one of the most downloaded papers in history, “Why Most Published Research Findings are False,” in which he presents data that as much as 70% of published science is wrong.  One of the features of that document is a list of his ROTs (Rules of Thumb) for what makes papers more likely to be good or bad.  Allow me to post two of them here; I think they're relevant:

Corollary 5: The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. 

Corollary 6: The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.

Both of those seem to explain a lot of "newspaper reported science" perfectly.

Guess What? Another Gotaway Day

I got started on a long piece and just didn't get to the point that I feel comfortable putting it up.  It's not like as bad as last Saturday.  Not much is.

The basic idea is the MAHA movement going on and how I'm good with the concept but my concern is that I'd really like to not see them replace all the bad science we're forced to live with now with worse science.  Junk science is a favorite topic of mine, but we have enough now.  We don't need to add volumes more in the effort to improve the many widely quoted statistics.

I've mentioned John P.A. Ioannidis on my pages many times before.  He's the author of what’s widely cited as one of the most downloaded papers in history, “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”, in which he presents data that as much as 70% of published science is wrong.  That's a good number to reduce to as close to zero as we can get, like the national debt.  

So I'll tease that I'm going to work on polishing it up tomorrow.

To be brutally honest, part of the reason for this post is to make sure I can link to this video.  It's a good intro to this subject. 

 

Edit Mar. 9 at 2345 UTC (7:45 PM EDT): in the case of the first link to John P.A. Ioannidis's paper, the host site, PLOS Medicine, changed the URL, so I changed this link to match it.  

And the bad news just keeps on coming...

Last Friday, Feb. 28, was the only time I mentioned an interesting sounding mission from a company called AstroForge a company who plainly says on the front page of that website, “We Mine Asteroids.”  It was the world's first private mission to an asteroid to investigate some ideas for autonomous mining in deep space.

That first link has one that goes to their website and talks about troubles with the probe.  Today we learned it's as good as dead.  

California startup AstroForge launched its Odin spacecraft on Feb. 26, on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that sent Intuitive Machines' IM-2 mission toward the moon. Odin ran into trouble just a few hours later, however, and AstroForge has pretty much given up hope of recovering the 265-pound (120-kilogram) probe.

"The chance of talking with Odin is minimal, as at this point, the accuracy of its position is becoming an issue," the company wrote in an update today (March 6).

AstroForge built Odin in less than 10 months, spending just $3.5 million to do so.  That's not just a tiny fraction of what a similar government-funded space probe would cost, it's a small fraction of what just about every deep space probe costs. 

AstroForge did something the majority of other small startups don't, and put up  a summary page of the mission, "Odin't: A Complete Debrief of Our Deep Space Mission."  It's not your typical small company posting.  As I often do, I include an excerpt to whet your interest. 

TL;DR

• We contacted Odin multiple times on its way to deep space.
• We learned a lot, and many of those changes will be implemented in our next mission, Vestri.
• The chance of talking with Odin is minimal, as at this point, the accuracy of its position is becoming an issue.

Mission Purpose & The Big Picture

We embarked on the Odin mission with a simple yet audacious goal: to push the boundaries of what a privately funded space company can achieve in deep space exploration. The primary objective was to identify whether our models had correctly located a metallic asteroid—one rich in platinum group metals.

But internally, this mission represented something more fundamental: a critical step in our roadmap toward building an actual asteroid mining vehicle.

As our CEO Matt Gialich put it: "We know how to build these craft. These have been built before. They just cost a billion fucking dollars. How do we do it for a fraction of the cost?"

What many don't realize is that 99% of our learnings happened before Odin ever reached the rocket. We learned invaluable lessons about spacecraft construction, wiring, and testing. And while we knew about some of the issues before launch, we made the bold decision to launch anyway—and that made all the difference.

"At the end of the day, like, you got to fucking show up and take a shot, right? You have to try."

Odin Post Separation.  There's a tiny light-colored dot in that green circle; that seems to be Odin  (Credit: Intuitive Machines)

It's an unfortunate conclusion to the February 26 mission that launched Odin, Athena, and Lunar TrailBlazer.  

It's Almost Replay Day

It was a day with a pair of important missions to follow.  First, was the attempt to land the second US-built lander on the moon, Intuitive Machines IM-2 or Athena.  It's worth pointing out this is the second lunar landing in this week alone.  (It's also trivia worth mentioning that both Firefly Aerospace, the makers of Blue Ghost, and Intuitive Machines are located in Texas).  Second was SpaceX's Starship Test Flight, TF-8.  

In the overall big picture sense, both of them were better than their previous milestones but neither one was perfect or even far better than the previous.  More like a replay than a big improvement.  In the first case, that would be Intuitive Machines' IM-1 last year.  In the second, the comparison would be to January's Test Flight 7. 

To borrow a phrase, today's missions weren't exactly the same as the comparison missions but they rhymed.  

In the first case, IM-2, like IM-1 (Odysseus) last year, apparently landed awkwardly.  Watching the NASA/IM video coverage in real time, the mission controllers didn't seem to know that the probe had landed when it was supposed to have.  By the time they terminated the coverage, a half hour after the scheduled landing time, we had a mixed bag of information.  Things like the engine is running (after it was supposed to have landed) then it wasn't running.  The fuel wasn't where they expected it in the tank.  

Beyond that, Crain and the rest of the company, including its chief executive Steve Altemus, could not precisely say what happened. After Athena landed, the engineers in mission control could talk to the spacecraft, and they were able to generate some power from its solar arrays. But precisely where it was, or how it lay on the ground, they could not say a few hours later.

Mission controllers could communicate with the payloads and it sounded like it was all working pretty well, they just didn't know if it was standing up closer to vertical or if it was like Odysseus last year.  Something never explained was keeping them from taking photos and sending them back to Earth.  That can affect all operations, especially big payloads like NASA’s Polar Resource Ice Mining Experiment (PRIME) and the drill from Honeybee Robotics.

In the second case, today's Starship TF-8 started out like January's TF-7.  In that mission, we saw the booster return to Boca Chica and be captured in mid-air, but at about the time that was happening, the Ship was exploding.  Today we saw the booster return to the launch tower and be captured by the chopsticks, and I made note of the display of the status of the six engines on Starship.  This was almost exactly seven minutes after liftoff.  All six of them were in great shape while by that time in TF-7 they were shutting down. 

Note the time in the bottom right panel 8:08, so essentially one minute after the booster capture.  You can see the two vacuum Raptors (big circles) on the left side of the engine pattern are still on but the three, smaller diameter, ground Raptors have shut down.  A few seconds after this screen capture, they were all off.

As the NASASpaceflight guys were going through the video, one of the guys noticed this. Look at the time in this view, 19 seconds before the one above. 

There are more signs of things going seriously wrong in this view.  Now look at the red circle just left of the time.  That bright spot isn't there seconds before this.  The NASA Spaceflight techy guy thinks this the engine getting burned through from the inside.

There's more.  It's hard to see well in this photo but there's an orange mist above the engine on the right with a light blueish-gray mist above that and above the curve that marks the edge of the Starship's body.  He thinks this is raw open fire in the engine compartment.  Which is pretty much what caused FT-7's RUD.  Clearly, the work that SpaceX did to fix Starship wasn't enough.  It delayed the RUD from around the same time as the booster capture, which is close to seven minutes, for around one more minute.  Delaying it two or three minutes instead of one might have saved the mission.

Two missions like these in one day is unusual. They mostly underline the old cliche that space is hard.

 

UPDATE 3/7 at 10:00 AM to add:

Intuitive Machines updated this morning to add that the mission is over:

Images downlinked from Athena on the lunar surface confirmed that Athena was on her side. After landing, mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted.

With the direction of the sun, the orientation of the solar panels, and extreme cold temperatures in the crater, Intuitive Machines does not expect Athena to recharge. The mission has concluded and teams are continuing to assess the data collected throughout the mission.

It's looking like NASA lost another mission

As we relayed in last Friday's post, Lunar Trailblazer had run into trouble soon after starting on its way to the moon.  "The probe powered up and began transmitting data after launch, but its operators began noticing power issues and then lost communication with it some 12 hours after launch." 

Today's news hasn't gotten any better.   Probably worse.

In an update published on Tuesday evening, the space agency acknowledged that a mission operations team at the California Institute of Technology is continuing its efforts to reestablish contact with the 200-kg spacecraft intended to orbit the Moon.

"Based on telemetry before the loss of signal last week and ground-based radar data collected March 2, the team believes the spacecraft is spinning slowly in a low-power state," the space agency said. "They will continue to monitor for signals should the spacecraft orientation change to where the solar panels receive more sunlight, increasing their output to support higher-power operations and communication."

As a result of this, mission controllers were unable to command thrusters on the satellite to do a course correction that would enable it to attain its planned orbit around the Moon, a polar orbit 100 km above the surface.  If communication could be restored, it's possible that the probe could do some sort of mission, but not the originally intended one to study the form, amount, and location of lunar ice in permanently shadowed craters. 

Pulling a paragraph from last Friday's post:

Lunar Trailblazer was a selection of NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) competition, which provides opportunities for low-cost science spacecraft to ride-share with selected primary missions. To maintain the lower overall cost, SIMPLEx missions have a higher risk posture and less-stringent requirements for oversight and management. This higher risk acceptance bolsters NASA’s portfolio of targeted science missions designed to test pioneering technologies.   

Today's reference link paints a fairly awful picture about these missions.  They list five of these low-cost science missions showing that not one of them succeeded and offered any science return on investment.  Of the five, Trailblazer was a standout.  

It was significantly larger than most of the other SIMPLEx spacecraft, and its cost exceeded the $55 million cap for such missions. Its cost as of late 2022 was $72 million. Due to this higher value, NASA allocated additional resources to ensure its success. Trailblazer's primary contractor was also swapped from Ball Aerospace to Lockheed Martin.

"Lock-mart?"  I might just see your problem.  Another Old Space / Space 1.0 company that needs to answer "so what have you done lately?"  (Editor's note: That link is absolutely not a serious thing.)

In 2022, the Planetary Society did a survey of members to come up with priorities.  They said NASA should increase the cost cap of these missions to $80 million - 45% - to get a higher chance of success. 

Artist's depiction of Lunar Trailblazer at work around the moon. (Image credit: Lockheed Martin Space/Lunar Trailblazer)

Next up to bat, Intuitive Machines' Athena

With the landing of Blue Ghost and beginning of operations in the Sea of Crises (Mare Crisium), the next landing attempt on the moon moves to Intuitive Machine's IM-2 or Athena lander.  Athena, entered her circular lunar orbit on Monday, March 3rd after an engine burn lasting over eight minutes:

The main task in the interval between Monday and Thursday is to verify the orbit's parameters and the probe's health in preparation for the landing.  The "lunar orbit selfies over the next two days" are a bonus, but they're interesting to watch, too.  This link should take you to a video that Athena captured over the Moon's south pole region near her intended landing site, Mons Mouton, which is one of NASA's designated human landing sites for the Artemis campaign.

Intuitive Machines expects a landing opportunity on March 6 at 11:32 a.m. CST. Live landing coverage is scheduled to start at 10:30 a.m. CT / 11:30 a.m. ET on the Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission page and NASA+.  The content on both streams is identical.

After Thursday, the next lander is  looking to be ispace's Resilience, launched alongside Blue Ghost in January.  ispace announced today that they're planning their lunar landing for June 6 at 1924 UTC or 3:24 PM EDT in the US.  However, at almost three months to the day in the future, no telling what could launch by then.

Weekend Score Through Today...

The extended weekend score through today, Monday, March 3 is Firefly 1, SpaceX 0.  We have to restrict this to Firefly's Blue Ghost lander and SpaceX's Starship flight test 8 and ignore things like last night's Falcon 9-carried Starlink 12-20 mission because it was a Falcon 9 launch and not a Starship. Not to mention that it was another Falcon 9 that lifted Blue Ghost into its translunar orbit injection.

That said, congratulations to Firefly's team for successfully landing their Blue Ghost lander on the moon at 3:34 AM EST Sunday morning, making Firefly Aerospace the first private company in world history to achieve that.  The first private lander was Intuitive Machine's IM-1, but although all the paying customers were happy with what they got from their landing on the moon, Odysseus - quickly nicknamed Odie, wasn't considered a successful landing.  During final approach, a leg on the lander broke and after engine cutoff Odie quickly face-planted on the moon. 

Blue Ghost apparently had better software and quite possibly its overall design as well.  In coverage of the landing, there is mention of obstacle avoidance being invoked in the autonomous landing software. 

A camera on Firefly's Blue Ghost lander captured a view of its shadow after touching down on the Moon just after sunrise. Earth looms over the horizon. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

"They’re just fired up right now in the mission control room," said Jason Kim, Firefly's CEO. "They were all just pent up, holding it all in because they were calm, collected, and cool the whole time. Every single thing was clockwork, even when we landed. After we saw everything was stable and upright, they were fired up."

Before IM-1 last year, it had been more than 50 years since an American spacecraft made a controlled landing on the Moon and all of those were government-run projects.  Similarly, China has landed four robotic missions on the Moon since 2013, including two landings on the Moon's far side and two sample return missions. India became the fourth country to land on the Moon in 2023, then Japan became the fifth in January 2024.  Sunday morning's Blue Ghost landing marked the first exception to that government-run predominance in landers. 

Intuitive Machines IM-2, or Athena, entered her circular lunar orbit today, March 3rd.  The the landing will be closer to the lunar South Pole than any other mission to date. 

Flight controllers expect Athena to complete 39 lunar orbits until her south pole region landing site has adequate sunlight to power surface operations.

Intuitive Machines expects a landing opportunity on March 6 at 11:32 a.m. CST. Live landing coverage is scheduled to start at 10:30 a.m. CT / 11:30 a.m. ET on the Intuitive Machines IM-2 mission page and NASA+. The content on both streams is identical.

As for Starship Flight Test 8, SpaceX's Missions Page hasn't posted a date for the next attempt yet.

The Rest of the Story

Twice in the past week (last night and last Monday (2/24) for the curious) I had to cover for the events in the previous day or two getting away from me, sucking up all my time, or more honestly leaving me in a state where I couldn't think clearly enough to write.  Now that it's over with, I can tell the story.  This is entirely a "me, me, me" story - more accurately "us, us, us" for Mrs. Graybeard and I, and for me to write this is going to be horribly, gut-wrenchingly sad so this is your chance to close the page and bail out.  

Last chance. 

For the last three years, our old man-cat, Mojo (his name when we adopted him at the rescue center in 2010 - my post about that in August '10) has been slowly sliding downhill, requiring more attention, differing medication doses and more veterinarian visits.  Both emergency and routine visits, sometimes monthly for blood tests.  

This past week the downhill slide turned into outright collapse.  Last weekend he had stopped eating and was having trouble walking.  Petting him by just bending over and gently petting him as he was walking by seemed to almost knock him over.  Over the preceding few weeks, he seemed to realize he couldn't hop onto our bed, and would ask me (seriously!) to pick him up and place him on the bed.  He could still hop onto our sofa - it's a bit lower - and would sleep there most of the day.  By Sunday (2/23) he was sleeping almost constantly, hardly eating or drinking.

The situation Monday 2/24 was we called the vet first thing and asked if he could be seen.  That appointment was 5PM.  The vet gave him a couple of new medications, one in case he had nausea and one to stimulate his appetite.  Tuesday he noticeably improved, eating more of his cat food than we'd seen in maybe a full week.  Wednesday, that decreased a bit, and Thursday, the collapse resumed.  Friday midday, he suddenly lost the ability to put weight on his forelimbs.  By the evening he was too weak to walk.  He had his first episodes of urinary incontinence, first wetting the floor by his litter box, and later losing control in our bed.  In the first case, nothing that a couple of paper towels and a grocery store plastic bag can't take care of; in the second, nothing our washing machine can't.

I awoke Saturday morning to find he had died in his sleep, in my arms.

His favorite sleeping position for the last several weeks has been for me to lie on my right side, facing him and beyond him Mrs. SiG, while he stuck his hindquarters up against my right armpit and facing toward her, my right arm straight, pointing perpendicular to my body.  He couldn't get himself into that sleeping position before I conked out.  I woke up at 4:30 AM and found he was there in that position and realized quickly he felt cool to the touch and wasn't reacting.  I was up for another hour, maybe 1-1/2 hours, thinking about times past and fell back asleep.  By mid morning we had taken his body up to be cremated. 

Pets are in a different world than any of our human interactions and we don't really have a good word for it.  I'm not talking about working dogs, or working animals, which don't share that sort of relationship with us.  I'm talking about house pets.  They're not kids, although many people refer to their dogs or cats as their kids.  We're not among those folks.  We think of them more as a friends, but that's not a good word either.  They're closer and more intimate in many ways than any friend.  They see us as we are all the time we're home.  We are completely ourselves with them - and they with us.  They love, or they don't, in a more pure way than many of us can.  Gun people seem to be a bit more dog people than cat people.  While I have nothing against dogs, I've always preferred cats around the house. 

Mojo was a remarkably sweet little person and was always coming up with fun things to do or just doing something like coming into the ham radio shack to spend some time with me.  Just to be together.  I remember mentioning to his vet that she could do just about anything she'd like to him if she petted him a little first.  Saturday she told me the staff there had thought he was one of the sweetest cats they have in their practice.  There's a handful of places around the house that I simply can't walk past without looking for him.  The papers from the rescue center where we adopted him say he was three years old in June of 2010; his papers from this veterinarian says his birthday was 11/1/2005.  If Nov. 1, 2005 is true, he's 19 and 4 months old.  If the papers from the rescue center are right, he could be closer to 18-1/2.  Both of those are on the long side of average cat length of life.

Over our 43+ years together, we've had seven different cats - always two at a time, with two exceptions.  The first was for one who was our only cat for five years.  Mojo is the second, and was our only cat since Aurora who we adopted a week before him had cancer in December of '22.  Losing them doesn't get any easier. 

Now Mrs. SiG and I have a gaping hole in our lives.  I've choked up nearly to tears several times writing this and all I know from my experience is that the pain doesn't go away, at least for years. Keeping yourself busy is the only thing that seems to help. 

Yeah, I virtually always include a picture. It just doesn't feel right to do that with this subject. If you just have to see what this little guy looked like, I don't have any recent pictures in the blog, but you can search on his name in the search box in the upper left hand corner of the frame.

Sorry, I Can't Do This Tonight

I'm running on empty, so this will be shorter than usual.  

Firefly Aerospace's attempt to land Blue Ghost is still scheduled to land at 0334 EST Sunday morning or 0834 UTC.  Thanks to an anonymous comment to last night's post we find out from Spaceflight Now that NASA and Firefly will join for live coverage starting at 2:30 AM EST.

Besides the official NASA broadcast, the independent space watchers will be adding their own coverages.

• NASA Spaceflight (.com) will start their coverage at the same time.
• Firefly Aerospace announces coverage that probably won't be the same as the first paragraph, since it doesn't mention NASA by name.  It also starts at 2:30 AM EST. 

That's a few examples, but I'm pretty sure they'll all be watchable. 

Screen capture of the "Notify me" YouTube page (not yet set to notify me) 

Other Payloads on the Way to the moon or Beyond...

Wednesday night's Falcon 9 rideshare mission that launched Intuitive Machines' Athena had a group of other satellites on board, all of which aren't looking as healthy as Athena is.  One of those was headed to the moon while a second was headed to an asteroid named 2022 OB5.  I'll get to that one in a minute.

The first one is a NASA satellite called Trailblazer.  Trailblazer is a 11.5-foot wide (across its solar panels), 440-pound probe designed to orbit low over the lunar surface to hunt for and map where water might be found in permanently shadowed regions on the moon.  While the mission from launch through translunar orbit injection went well, things do not appear to be going well for the spacecraft, according to a NASA update.  From that NASA post:

Lunar Trailblazer was a selection of NASA’s SIMPLEx (Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration) competition, which provides opportunities for low-cost science spacecraft to ride-share with selected primary missions. To maintain the lower overall cost, SIMPLEx missions have a higher risk posture and less-stringent requirements for oversight and management. This higher risk acceptance bolsters NASA’s portfolio of targeted science missions designed to test pioneering technologies.

The probe powered up and began transmitting data after launch, but its operators began noticing power issues and then lost communication with it some 12 hours after launch. Mission operators at Caltech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were able to reestablish contact with the spacecraft hours later, but are still "working with NASA ground stations to reestablish telemetry and commanding to better assess the power system issues and develop potential solutions," NASA wrote in the update.

Lunar Trailblazer was built by Lockheed Martin and carries two sophisticated instruments to help it hunt for lunar water. One, the Lunar Thermal Mapper (LTM), was designed to map the surface temperature of the moon using infrared light, which could help it map mineral distribution on the lunar surface.

Another instrument aboard the probe, the High-resolution Volatiles and Minerals Moon Mapper (HVM3), built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was designed to measure how much sunlight reflects off the surface of the moon to help it hunt for the chemical "fingerprints" of any water hiding on the lunar surface.

Artist's depiction of Lunar Trailblazer at work around the moon. (Image credit: Lockheed Martin Space/Lunar Trailblazer) 

Finally, the third probe mentioned in the opening paragraph is from Astroforge, a private company that hopes to one day mine asteroids for precious resources.  Astroforge's Odin probe launched on the mission Wednesday, but on a different trajectory to study asteroid 2022 OB5.  The company is already planning a follow-up mission that will land on it.  

Astroforge posted a video to X that attempts to summarize the situation - time tagged in the early morning today (4:23 AM - I assume that's in EST).  It's a six minute video, and it seems to have low audio since I had to crank the volume on this computer to its maximum.  A short summary is that they're having issues but don't understand everything, yet.  The mission isn't lost, it's just not going as they'd prefer.

Small Space News Story Roundup 54

Everyone's going to the moon edition

Blue Ghost is preparing for March 2nd

Another nifty video from Firefly's Blue Ghost lander (first one here).  All of this from 62 miles altitude, and over the far side.  

When I look at the story this is video comes from I think there's nothing in there we haven't talked about several times here.  

Intuitive Machines IM-3 Athena Progress 

Everything I can find documents that Athena is in good health, and heading toward the moon for next Thursday's planned landing (March 6th).  Along the way, Athena has taken some fine photos of home as Earth recedes into the distance.  

Image credit: Intuitive Machines

"Athena established a stable attitude, solar charging and radio communications contact with the Company's mission operations center in Houston after liftoff on February 26," Intuitive Machines wrote in an update this morning (Feb. 27).

"The lander is in excellent health and preparing for a series of planned main engine firings to refine her trajectory ahead of lunar orbit insertion, which is planned for March 3. Intuitive Machines expects a lunar landing opportunity on March 6."

Starship Test Flight 8 Bumps Out Again

 Currently set to Monday, March 3, still at 6:30 PM EST. 

The Hunt for Lunar Water

Just over a half hour ago, as I sit to start writing, Mrs. Graybeard and I stepped outside to watch the night's launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 from complex 39A on the Kennedy Space Center.  Among a variety of rideshare payloads, the highlight of the mission was Intuitive Machines IM-2 Lunar Lander, also named Athena.  

With Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander already in orbit around the moon, and ispace's Resilience lander finalizing its lunar orbit, this marks the third lander currently on the way to the moon.  Blue Ghost is currently planned to land on the moon Sunday, March 2, NET 2:34 AM. CST.  (NET = No Earlier Than).  YouTube video coverage here is expected to go live March 2nd at 1:20 AM CST.   Next will be tonight's launch, Intuitive Machine's Athena lander.  Athena is on a much faster trajectory than the Blue Ghost and Resilience landers, and will reach the moon on March 6th landing "around lunchtime".  ispace's Resilience simply says, "May."  

There's another satellite on tonight's ridesharing mission, NASA’s JPL Lunar Trailblazer satellite, on a similar trajectory as Athena.  

Lunar Trailblazer is expected to begin orbiting the Moon, mapping the quantity and location of water ice on the surface, while Athena descends to its landing site in the Mons Mouton region ~100 miles from the lunar South Pole.

During its 10 day mission closer to the south pole than any lunar lander ever, Athena will release two more payloads focused on the search for water: PRIME-1 and PLWS.

PRIME-1: NASA’s Polar Resource Ice Mining Experiment contains two instruments:

• A drill from Honeybee Robotics (The Regolith Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain, or TRIDENT)
• A mass spectrometer from NASA (Mass Spectrometer Observing Lunar Operations, or MSolo). 

The meter-long drill will bore into the lunar surface in 10-cm increments, depositing the soil on the surface for MSolo to analyze. MSolo will also examine the gasses emitted during the drilling process to better understand the lunar subsurface and detect possible contamination from the Nova-C lander.

PLWS: The Puli Lunar Water Snooper from Hungary-based Puli Space Technologies is a 400-g dowsing instrument attached to Intuitive Machines’ Micro Nova Hopper that will attempt to identify and measure the concentration of water in lunar soil—both near the landing site and in a permanently shaded crater nearby.

ispace's Resilience lander is bringing water electrolyzing equipment to demonstrate the production of oxygen and hydrogen on the Moon for the first time.  Of course, electrolysis equipment isn't going to do much good if Resilience doesn't have any water to electrolyze.

It's important to note that while previous sensing missions reported the presence of water, NASA’s SOFIA and China's Chang’e-5 mission say the water is "unevenly distributed" and finding it will be a challenge. 

Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 Athena lander. Image: Intuitive Machines

Another NASA Associate Administrator is Retiring

Fresh after the retirement of Associate Administrator Jim Free on Wednesday, Feb. 19, NASA announced Monday, Feb. 24, that Associate Administrator for Exploration Systems Development Cathy Koerner will retire from the agency at the end of this week.  Koerner has served in that role since the end of 2023.  

This isn't the first time a career move by Jim Free has led to a move by Cathy Koerner.

Koerner spent 34 years at NASA in various roles, including Orion program manager and deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development. She took the position of associate administrator for exploration systems development when Jim Free, the previous person in that role, became associate administrator, the highest civil-service position at the agency.

As pointed out in the first link in this piece, Free retired apparently after Trump selected Janet Petro to lead the agency on an interim basis, awaiting the senate confirmation of Trump's appointment of Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator. 

“Cathy’s legacy is one of unwavering dedication to human spaceflight, and we are grateful for her years of service,” Petro said in a statement.
...
Replacing Koerner on an acting basis will be Lori Glaze, the deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development. Glaze is a planetary scientist who for several years was director of the agency’s planetary science division. She took a detail in the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD) last spring and, several months later, elected to stay in that directorate as deputy associate administrator.

Since both Free and Koerner have been associated with the Artemis moon missions, this has raised concerns about the future of Artemis - the main mission of the ESDMD that they led over the last several years.  There has been talk about killing off SLS, the Lunar Gateway, and other aspects of the Artemis program, including mentions by Jared Isaacman. 

There have been other moves. 

• Replacing Koerner on an acting basis will be Lori Glaze, her Deputy Assistant  Administrator.  Glaze is a planetary scientist who for several years was director of the agency’s planetary science division.
• Vanessa Wyche, director of the Johnson Space Center, has become acting associate administrator, replacing Free. She has been at NASA for 35 years, including nearly four years as director of the JSC.
• NASA hired Jackie Jester as associate administrator for the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs.  She had been senior director for government affairs at launch vehicle developer Relativity Space and had previously worked at NASA as a policy advisor.  
  

Finally: an important but unrelated footnote: 

Starship Flight Test 8 has been moved to Friday, Feb. 28 according to that post to X by Elon Musk.  Musk simply posted, “Starship Flight 8 flies Friday” and a quick check of NextSpaceflight shows the same time originally listed for Wednesday, 6:30 PM EST, 2330 UTC. 

Cathy Koerner, seen here at a NASA exploration workshop Feb. 12, will retire as associate administrator of exploration systems development Feb. 28. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

A Get Away Day

As in the saying that the day got away from me, with a visit to an "urgent care" place - not an ER, but not a "put it off for later or next week" thing, either.  Not Mrs. Graybeard or me, thankfully, but sucking up lots of time nonetheless.  Dinner was about two hours later than usual and the evening still had things to do to help out.  

So to put up something that people around here might want to read, as an anonymous commenter posted today at 2:23PM posted, today SpaceX uploaded a concise summary of their failure investigation of the RUD of Ship 33 which caused the end of Flight Test 7.  Here are what seem to be the most important four paragraphs:

After vehicle separation, Starship's six second stage Raptor engines powered the vehicle along its expected trajectory. Approximately two minutes into its burn, a flash was observed in the aft section of the vehicle near one of the Raptor vacuum engines. This aft section, commonly referred to as the attic, is an unpressurized area between the bottom of the liquid oxygen tank and the aft heatshield. Sensors in the attic detected a pressure rise indicative of a leak after the flash was seen.

Roughly two minutes later, another flash was observed followed by sustained fires in the attic. These eventually caused all but one of Starship’s engines to execute controlled shut down sequences and ultimately led to a loss of communication with the ship. Telemetry from the vehicle was last received just over eight minutes and 20 seconds into flight.

Contact with Starship was lost prior to triggering any destruct rules for its Autonomous Flight Safety System, which was fully healthy when communication was lost. The vehicle was observed to break apart approximately three minutes after loss of contact during descent. Post-flight analysis indicates that the safety system did trigger autonomously, and breakup occurred within Flight Termination System expectations.

The most probable root cause for the loss of ship was identified as a harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing, which led to increased stress on hardware in the propulsion system. The subsequent propellant leaks exceeded the venting capability of the ship’s attic area and resulted in sustained fires.

 Ship 33 from an onboard camera used to monitor it during the flight test.  Image credit: SpaceX

If you follow any of the good sources working to keep us updated (e.g., Lab Padre, NASASpaceflight, and others) you will have seen that SpaceX has been working at a high pace to make this Wednesday's projected launch of Flight Test 8.  The 60 second static fire mentioned in that linked post was part of testing out the ability to handle incidents like the ones that took out Ship 33.  A check of the FAA site linked to in that post still shows the start of the launch window to be Wednesday afternoon at 2330 UTC or 5:30 PM CST.

NASA's Associate Adminstrator Has Retired

In a statement late in the day on Wednesday, Feb. 19, NASA reported that associate administrator Jim Free was retiring effective yesterday, Feb. 22.  Free had been associate administrator, the top civil-service position in the agency, since the retirement of Bob Cabana at the end of 2023.  

Free was previously associate administrator for exploration systems development, a position NASA created in 2021 when it split the former Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate into two directorates, one overseeing exploration programs and the other the International Space Station and related operations. Earlier in his 30-year NASA career, he was director of the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.

I know that I've mentioned Jim Free by name here in the blog many times, and while I don't claim any sort of insider knowledge of life inside NASA, I think the first mention that I remember by name was June 16, 2023 when I reported that he was arguing NASA should drop fixed price contracts and use only cost-plus.  It's simply hard to sum up how much I differ from Free on that.  His argument is that if a fixed cost contract doesn't deliver on time, the buyers are stuck; the problem is he completely ignores that big, cost-plus contracts (think SLS) are also late and you pay more for them to be delivered late. There's simply no evidence that cost-plus contracts deliver better results sooner.

Primarily based on his position, when Bill Nelson and Pam Melroy stepped down as NASA administrator and deputy administrator at the end of Biden's administration, Free was expected to take the top spot.  In fact, SpaceNews reports that on inauguration day, NASA's website listed Free as acting administrator.

However, several hours later the White House announced it had selected Janet Petro, director of the Kennedy Space Center, as acting administrator. The decision reportedly even took top agency officials by surprise.

There has been puzzlement over appointing Janet Petro so it's worth pointing out that back before the election, Free had voiced concern that a new administration might drop the priority on Artemis, saying, “We need that consistency in purpose. That has not happened since Apollo.  If we lose that, I believe we will fall apart and we will wander, and other people in this world will pass us by.”  Contrast that view of Artemis, which necessarily includes SLS, with the talk of going to Mars instead of the moon (and rather than both).  If you're a fan of SLS with its absurd cost overruns and schedule slips, it seems out of line with the current administration. 

NASA Associate Administrator Jim Free at an agency "all hands" event in December 2024. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

German Startup Isar Aerospace Closing in on a Big First

Isar Aerospace is closing in on two firsts, one is big for them, the other is big for all of Europe.  The big one for the seven year old startup company is launching the first test flight of their Spectrum orbital launch vehicle.  The really big one is they're on track to be the first orbital launch from Europe - as well as the first by a European company.  

"We are almost ready for the test flight. All we need is the license," said Daniel Metzler, co-founder and CEO of Isar Aerospace. "By enabling space access from mainland Europe, we provide a critical resource for ensuring sovereignty and resilience."

Isar announced Friday (Feb. 21) that they had completed a 30 second static test firing of the first stage of Spectrum. The nine-engine booster was test-fired at Andøya Spaceport in Norway the previous Friday, Feb. 14.

The second stage had been static fired last year. With both stages passing their tests, Isar says its launch verhicle is qualified for its first flight.

Aside from the normal preparations for a rocket launch—such as mating the two stages of the launcher together and integrating its payload fairing—the primary hurdle remaining for Isar is regulatory in nature. In a statement, Isar said the first flight of the Spectrum rocket will take place "as soon as possible" following approval and licensing from the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority.

The Aviation Authority will establish the launch window and allowable times, as the FAA does for US launches.   

A couple of years ago there was buzz about who was going to emerge as the winner in a race of small launch vehicles; those that can carry one ton to low Earth orbit.  Isar Aerospace's Spectrum is a member of this class. 

The fully assembled Spectrum rocket will stand about 92 feet (28 meters) tall and measure more than 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter. The expendable launcher is designed to haul payloads up to 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) into low-Earth orbit. Spectrum is powered by nine Aquila engines on its first stage, and one engine on the second stage, burning a mixture of propane and liquid oxygen propellants.

Isar is headquartered near Munich, Germany, a central hub of European Space efforts. The company says it has raised more than 400 million euros (about $420 million), more than any other European launch startup.  They build Spectrum in house, including all their Aquila engines. 

"The flight will be the first integrated test of tens of thousands of components," said Josef Fleischmann, Isar's co-founder and chief technical officer. "Regardless of how far we get, this first test flight will hopefully generate an enormous amount of data and experience which we can apply to future missions."
...
The first flight of the Spectrum rocket will attempt to reach a polar orbit, flying north from Andøya Spaceport. Located at approximately 69 degrees north latitude, the spaceport is poised to become the world's northernmost orbital launch site.

Because it's an experimental mission, the test flight won't carry any customer payloads. 

The nine-engine first stage for Isar Aerospace's Spectrum rocket lights up on the launch pad on February 14. Credit: Isar Aerospace

A Couple of Strange News Reports

There have been a couple of stories going around that are on that line between sorta-makes sense and WTF are they talking about?  

The one that sorta makes sense is the story that Thursday (yesterday) Elon Musk said NASA should start working on taking the International Space Station out of service.  It sorta makes sense because NASA is already working on deorbiting the ISS.  After all, they gave SpaceX an $843 million contract to develop the deorbit vehicle last June. Musk's quote seems pretty reasonable; I mean, it might be wrong or it might be right but what he said makes sense.   

“It is time to begin preparations for deorbiting the @Space_Station.
It has served its purpose. There is very little incremental utility.
Let’s go to Mars.”

When pressed for an answer to "when" Musk replied that it's the president's call but he recommends two years, or 2027.  Instead of the five years to 2030?  How much does that save?  Or what does it buy you?

The question of whether it's wrong or right applies to the middle line in that tweet (Xeet? What do we call these things, anyway?)  There are several sides to this: from the purely political; that is, can it be done in congress as it now sits to whether or not there are worthwhile things that need to be done with the ISS.  

In reality, NASA has only been fully utilizing the space station since late 2020, when it began to fly a full complement of astronauts thanks to SpaceX's Crew Dragon coming online. The agency says it has a lot of worthwhile scientific and human performance research to conduct over the next five years.

Don't forget that NASA has had problems with Russian modules on the ISS leaking precious air out of the station. This isn't the first case.  While Boeing has a contract to keep the ISS working through the 2030 deorbit date, structural elements of the station have been in space for more than a quarter of a century and there are valid concerns about parts possibly failing.  Neither of these is a pleasant thought.

NASA has already voiced support for not just one, but a population of privately developed and run space stations.  None of those is in orbit and ready now, so we can't know that one or more private space stations could be working in Musk's "two years."  

The other story is referring to Starliner-then-Crew-9 astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams as being stranded in space.  Stranded might have been an acceptable adjective last summer, before their long term solution to getting back down was arrived at, but now they're just ISS astronauts at the end of their mission; a mission that happened to last longer than originally planned - as they sometimes do.  Maybe it's just my perception, but I think that people in the astronaut corps have the mindset that doing their job might entail serious disruptions to everyday life - and might even end their life.  While I'm sure they miss their families, I'm equally sure they consider being in space for eight or nine months to be a privilege. 

This photo of the International Space Station was captured by a crew member on a Soyuz spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Roscosmos