Tune in tonight for back-to-back launches from SpaceX.
Up first is the Astranis: "From One to Many"
mission from Cape Canaveral, lifting off at 05:00 UTC (midnight EST) as of posting — I assume weather is a factor in the delay. It will carry four MicroGEO satellites, which are much smaller than typical GEO sats and thus can get a higher boost towards their final orbits from the rocket. Booster B1077 will make its seventeenth flight and will land downrange on A Shortfall of Gravitas. Watch here on X
.
Second is the Bandwagon 2
mission from Vandenberg, carrying a batch of rideshare satellites into a low Earth orbit. Liftoff is scheduled for 11:34 UTC aboard Falcon 9 booster B1071, which is on its twenty-first flight and will perform a return to launch site. Watch here on X
.
Rocket Lab's "Owl The Way Up" mission was scrubbed for sensor readings on the vehicle and is now planned for 14:00 UTC tomorrow. A livestream has not been scheduled.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 20th 2024 at 11:11:13 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The Astranis mission aborted at T-0 last night and will be attempted again tonight. The Bandwagon-2 mission was successful.
Watch Rocket Lab attempt the "Owl The Way Up" launch again here
.
Edit: The mission was successful.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 21st 2024 at 3:07:08 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Might have been linked already, but this paper
which discusses space travel on planets heavier than Earth. On Kepler-20b (almost 10 times more massive than Earth) you'd need a Egyptian pyramid sized rocket to get the Apollo program. One wonders how this math works for TRAPPIST-1d and e.
We've had this discussion several times with respect to how heavy a planet's surface gravity can be before it's impossible to get to orbit. The cap with chemical rockets seems to be around 1.5 G.
Blue Origin may finally be hot-firing New Glenn today. NASA Spaceflight is covering the event
.
Baby news dump:
- New Glenn did not hot fire yesterday. I'm probably going to stop announcing livestreams to avoid clutter and instead post after the fact.
- SpaceX has delayed the Astranis mission for troubleshooting of the Falcon 9 rocket. The payloads remain healthy.
- For your holiday entertainment, SpaceX dropped a video
of the Super Heavy booster's Raptor engines gimbaling, set to "Carol of the Bells". Stick around for the fiery coda.
Check out NASA Spaceflight's This Week in Spaceflight
video for a further recap of news items:
- The Crew-10 mission is being delayed until March 2025 to give SpaceX additional time to finish integration of a brand-new Crew Dragon. The media has made a bit of a fuss about Butch and Suni having their return trip postponed yet again, but no astronaut would ever publicly complain about getting to spend more time on the ISS.
- NASA has solidified its plans for the Commercial LEO Destinations program, stating that contractors must adopt standardized docking mechanisms and provide for stays of at least six months to a year per astronaut.
- Axiom is simplifying its space station plans, launching its power and propulsion module second rather than third. This will let it undock and free-fly its station sooner.
- Firefly and iSpace will share a ride to the Moon for their Blue Ghost 1 and HAKUTO-R M2 lunar landers, respectively. They will launch in January on a Falcon 9 rocket.
- Ariane Group is preparing its Themis demonstrator for vertical takeoff and landing flight tests next year.
- Stéphane Israël will leave his position as CEO of Arianespace at the end of 2024, a year that saw only three launches from Europe, but that included Ariane 6's maiden flight and Vega C's return to flight.
- SpaceX has completed its initial Starlink Direct-to-Cell constellation and service is beginning to roll out as a beta test for customers in the US and New Zealand.
- Rocket Lab has completed the upper deck of its Neutron launch mount as well as the flame deflector at Wallops Island, Virginia. It expects to make its first launch in 2025.
- NASA's Parker Solar Probe will make its closest ever flyby of the Sun on December 24, at 6.16 million km. While the northern hemisphere of our planet experiences the cold of winter, Parker will be exposed to the most heat of any spacecraft in history. Communications will be suspended for the flyby and will resume later in the week.
For something more lighthearted, Everyday Astronaut asked generative AI to come up with rocket concepts and then tried to build them in Kerbal Space Program
. Some worked... better than others.
Parker Solar Probe Perihelion
The launch schedule is taking a break for Christmas (at least in Western nations) but we can all still get some holiday cheer from watching the Parker Solar Probe
make its closest approach to the Sun yet.
In fact, it's already done so as I type this. The perihelion of 6.1 million km was achieved at 11:52 UTC today (December 24, 2024), at a velocity of 692,017 km/h, extending its record as the fastest human-built object in space. It should have reached an external temperature of up to 982 C as it flew through the Sun's corona, its outer atmosphere.
It cannot send signals that close to the Sun, so contact will resume on December 27. We'll get a vehicle health report and begin receiving data.
I'm not even fully aware of all the discoveries that Parker has made. I'm sure there will be many recap videos discussing that soon enough. One of its primary objectives is to understand the dynamics of the corona: in particular, why it's so hot. Scientists believe it's because of the Sun's magnetic field, but direct observation is needed to confirm those hypotheses.
Annual Recap
Speaking of the end of the year, does anyone have a particular favorite event they'd like to recap — or for me to do it? At least where space was concerned, this was a fantastic one, so much so that it's hard to rank things.
Contenders for my favorites include Polaris Dawn, Starship Flight 5, and the Europa Clipper launch, but those are literally just off the top of my head.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 24th 2024 at 9:56:03 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Starship Flight 7
An FAA advisory
has been issued for Starship Flight 7 on January 10, with the window opening at 4 PM CST (22:00 UTC). This tells us that they want to do another daylight reentry for Starship over the Indian Ocean.
New Glenn Maiden Flight
The FAA has issued a launch license for New Glenn
. We still don't have an official date for it, but that means it's good to go from a regulatory standpoint.
It looks like Blue Origin is continuing to press towards a hot-fire test of the booster today.
Edit: After a day of false starts, and well after NASA Spaceflight ended its commentary, New Glenn finally static fired
! Now to see if it looked good.
Edit: Blue Origin confirmed the successful 24-second hot fire test
. Now we wait for data review and a launch date to be set.
Parker Solar Probe Survives
Oh yeah, forgot this one. NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Reports Successful Closest Approach to Sun
Parker made initial contact once outside of the Sun's harshest interference and reports that it is healthy and nominal. We'll get detailed telemetry and data feeds after January 1.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 27th 2024 at 9:41:21 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"SpaceX is preparing to launch the Astranis mission
again tonight, with liftoff scheduled for 05:00 UTC. Watch live here.
The previous launch attempt aborted at engine ignition and the company took the rare step of swapping the booster. The new one is B1083-7.
This is the second of three launches this weekend, bookended by Starlink missions.
Edit: The mission was successful.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 29th 2024 at 9:34:18 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Everyday Astronaut: How'd we do predicting 2024's spaceflight milestones?
While I formulate a megapost to look back at 2024, Tim Dodd continues his annual tradition of seeing how the community's predictions looked like for the year.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Although I can't find the original article, Reuters is reporting
that a mysterious metal ring crashed in a Kenyan village earlier in the week.
Many people were saying that the object was part of a rocket and reentered as space debris, some even claiming that it was a component of a Space Shuttle solid-rocket booster. This is of course impossible, since those boosters never became orbital.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, an authority on space tracking, posted
that there is no candidate object from which the debris could have come. It is also missing markings consistent with reentry, causing people to suggest that it might be an airplane part instead.
The next launch on the books is Thuraya 4-NGS
aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, with liftoff currently scheduled for January 4 at 03:27 UTC. It is a geostationary communications satellite built by Airbus for the United Arab Emirates and will be sent to geostationary transfer orbit.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 2nd 2025 at 11:26:19 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Starship Flight 7
SpaceX has released a recap video
of Starship Flight 6 along with a mission preview
of Starship Flight 7.
That next launch remains targeted for January 10 at 22:00 UTC. There are several notable changes involved as well as upgrades to the vehicles themselves:
- This is the first flight of Starship version 2, or "block 2".
- It has been stretched in length and its tank geometry updated to hold 25% more propellant.
- It has redesigned forward flaps that are smaller, farther forward, and farther leeward. This should reduce passive drag from the flaps, make them easier to build, and keep them from suffering burn-through.
- Similar to Flight 5, it has an upgraded heat shield with secondary layers beneath the primary tiles.
- It has new fuel feed systems including vacuum jacketed lines for longer endurance in space.
- It has upgraded avionics and electrical systems, including 2.7 MW of internal power.
- It has upgraded communications systems, including integrated Starlink/RF/GNSS antennas.
- It has dummy catch hardware to test how well it will survive reentry.
- The booster is reusing a Raptor engine recovered from the Flight 5 booster.
- The catch arms have been upgraded with radar systems and better shielding to prevent damage to communications equipment during liftoff, which was responsible for the offshore divert on Flight 6.
- The ship will deploy "dummy" Starlink satellites during its coast phase to demonstrate the functionality of the payload dispenser. These payloads will reenter along with it and will be burned up or sink into the ocean.
- The ship will attempt another on-orbit relight of its engines to simulate a deorbit burn.
- The ship has had some of its tiles deliberately removed and/or replaced with different technologies, such as regenerative cooling.
- The ship will use an aggressive reentry profile to stress-test the aerodynamic control regime.
If all of these tests are successful or return positive data (i.e., fail in predictable ways), it is likely that SpaceX will attempt a ship catch as soon as Flight 8, assuming the tower hardware can support it.
It also seems clear that SpaceX wants to begin launching real Starlink satellites as soon as possible. The company posted on X
that the third generation Starlinks will add 60 Tbps of capacity to the network per launch, an amount that would require 20 Falcon 9 launches of v2 satellites. This is why it's so eager to get that started.
To successfully operate Starlink missions, Starship must be able to reach a useful orbit and be able to deorbit itself to prevent the risk of an uncontrolled reentry.
New Glenn Demo Flight
Blue Origin's recovery vessel, Jacklyn, has departed Port Canaveral
to support the maiden launch of New Glenn. That launch is now scheduled no earlier than January 8
at 06:00 UTC.
We do not yet have a livestream link for the mission. I saw somewhere, although I can't seem to find it, that it'll be streamed on Amazon Prime, because of course it would. (Blue Origin is owned by Jeff Bezos, former CEO of Amazon.) I would also expect Blue Origin's YouTube channel
to carry it, so keep an eye out.
Elon Musk and Artemis
Ars Technica: Elon Musk: “We’re going straight to Mars. The Moon is a distraction.”
In a series of posts on X, Elon Musk reasserted his desire to go to Mars as quickly as possible, viewing the Moon as a dead-end. This sparked a renewed debate over which idea is better for humanity: exploiting the solar system's resources to build a cislunar or near-Earth economy, or colonizing other planets. (Not that we couldn't do both.)
More immediately, it calls into question whether the incoming Presidential administration will attempt a hard pivot: shut down Artemis, cancel SLS, Orion, and Gateway, and put all of its eggs into the commercial Earth-Mars basket; pursue both efforts simultaneously (for example, letting Blue Origin go to the Moon while SpaceX goes to Mars); or make no significant changes in the near term.
Realistically, shifting all of those priorities would likely find a cold reception in Congress, which must approve any change to NASA's budget and has enormous, vested interests in the status quo. Presumptive NASA Administrator nominee Jared Isaacman has been adamantly quiet about radical changes and has openly expressed support for all of NASA's current and future commercial partners.
Mars Sample Return Update
NASA: NASA to Host Media Call Highlighting Mars Sample Return Update
We're going to get an update on January 7 on the Mars Sample Return project. This is the one that would land on Mars, collect the sample capsules prepared by Perseverance, and send them back to Earth. As we may recall, NASA leadership canned the original concept for being ridiculously expensive: estimated at over $10 billion. It then solicited proposals from private industry to do the job cheaper and more efficiently. We will hopefully learn more next week.
One of the unspoken but very real issues is that China is planning a sample return mission to Mars in the 2028 window, and it would be really embarrassing to be beaten by them. Another open question is whether SpaceX will already be sending humans there by that time.
Thuraya 4-NGS
Tune in here (X)
tonight to watch the Thuraya 4-NGS mission, with liftoff scheduled for 01:27 UTC.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2025 at 5:34:26 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"To be clear, NASA isn't afraid of SpaceX getting to Mars. But if it is able to send humans in the 2028 window, it would make Mars Sample Return more or less redundant. Even the original MSR plan wouldn't launch until then, so it's a very open question how all these ideas will converge.
Do I personally think Starship will launch people to Mars in 2028? I am highly skeptical. But I wouldn't feel confident betting against it.
This is likely behind Musk's social media posturing about shifting NASA's priorities. He desperately wants to launch a demo mission to Mars in 2026, and that would be very challenging to do in the same time frame as the HLS Demo and Artemis III missions, all of which will require multiple on-orbit refillings.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2025 at 6:25:16 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Well, it would have made sample return redundant if we hadn't stopped going. The idea is to maintain a permanent presence, not drop by for a few weeks every year or so.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"We don't yet know the planned architecture of this hypothetical crewed mission to Mars. Without carrying an absurd amount of additional propellant (or having it pre-staged), it would need to remain on the surface for around a year and a half in order to meet the next transfer window home. Whether we label that a "permanent presence" or not would depend on whether we establish a regular rotation, but it's certainly a lot more than a week or two on the Moon.
Even if Starship were capable of the required delta-V, attempting to return home any sooner would trade surface time for a longer transfer orbit. An uncrewed sample return mission could handle that because it doesn't have to keep humans alive. So, there is still room for something like MSR if we really, really want to get those capsules back as quickly as possible.
There's a related question of where astronauts would land on Mars. If it isn't near Perseverance, then the question of collecting its samples becomes moot, but obviously they would have the ability to do it wherever they land and pack as much mass into Starship as it could hold for the return flight.
Would you rather have a kilogram of surface material for $10 billion or a metric ton for ~$2 billion? (Not that these are mutually exclusive options.)
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2025 at 7:08:46 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"That would be a valid point if we didn't know for a fact that NASA is planning to send humans to Mars, and obviously it's going to send them to the Moon as well unless political shenanigans intervene.
If people will be there anyway, having them bring rocks back is obvious to the point of ridiculousness. If that is going to happen, robotic sample return missions seem redundant.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"The question I think is, how viable is a Crewed Mars landing in the next couple decades really.
There's a lot of ideas, some preliminary research, a launch vehicle that can make it there and back in theory but that's still very far away from actually putting a boot on the ground. Building an actual base that can support a crew for months-years is a whole different endeavor.
If they are going to stick around for any length of time, there's tons of additional R&D that needs to happen. To name an obvious example, we'd probably have to actually send at least a small version of their future habitat to Mars ahead of the crew just to see how it can potentially fail when it's in the field.
More to the point, without an actual authorized mission plan with an explicit schedule, I'm not going to believe any estimated time table as being anything other than wishful thinking. And even if we do have that, history has shown that the chances of it actually hitting it's initial timetable are going to be slim at best.
This feeling, which is shared by many, fails to appreciate the personalities and motivations involved. Elon Musk will send humans to Mars unless he dies or goes broke first. He doesn't need NASA's permission or cooperation, although it's easier with both.
Consider, for example, that NASA is already paying SpaceX to develop a crewed version of Starship for use on the Moon, and that this vehicle will need to solve a large majority of the challenges that would face a Mars mission. While Artemis HLS is not necessary to the goal of colonizing Mars, it's an accelerant.
SpaceX will fly humans on Starship sooner or later; that's fundamental to its purpose. With a pressurized volume larger than that of the International Space Station, keeping five to ten people supplied for three years is relatively straightforward. NASA has been developing the expertise for decades. SpaceX's ambitions represent an acceleration in time and scale, but not in kind.
Radiation exposure is greatly exaggerated among the online community, but it is a largely understood problem, and it would have to be solved to get to Mars anyway whether done by SpaceX, NASA, ESA, or Timbuktu. Other problems that would need to be solved include dust management (also a Moon problem), in-situ resource utilization (actively being worked on), and vehicle reliability (something SpaceX intends to tackle by sheer volume).
Further, if we assume that Starship reaches the necessary level of technical maturity to send humans to Mars in the 2028-2029 window, and that mission starts being seriously developed, NASA (and every other space agency that isn't China or Russia) will want to jump aboard. If you think they won't jump on board out of some kind of spite, you're hallucinating.
If 2028 is too soon, there's always the 2031 window, or 2033. This is not a question of "if", but "when", and who gets there first. One thing that I can absolutely guarantee is that if it looks like China will beat us, people will be knocking down SpaceX's doors to get things moving faster on this side of the world.
Incidentally, it seems that pundits may have been jumping to conclusions when they said that Elon Musk was calling for the termination of Artemis. Taken in context, he was contesting the use of the Moon as a staging/refilling point for Mars. This is another "long debated" question that has reasonable proponents on different sides. Arguing against is that it takes similar delta-V to get to Mars as it does to the Moon, so you're wasting a ton of propellant to refill your propellant. Also, you can refill on Mars.
The "Moon to Mars" approach suggests that we would develop the technologies to survive on Mars closer to home, where it's easier to rescue astronauts if bad stuff happens. This isn't an inherently wrong way to look at the problem, but it does rankle those who think that we don't need it, and especially that it would slow things down for no obvious benefit.
There's also no reason why we can't work on cislunar development and Mars colonization at the same time, save for political will.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2025 at 9:57:46 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"A serious question that I have is mostly whether Elon Musk is literally able to go to Mars. I think he wants to, I think he'll keep pursuing that goal...I'm not sure if it's literally possible to send a human to Mars with the resources available to Elon Musk at this point, and if it will become possible to do so within his lifetime, that's the thing I'd be questioning.
Leviticus 19:34
Before I attempt to answer this question, I would like to remind everyone that Elon Musk's political views (outside of the narrow topic of spaceflight) and the ethics of capitalism are off topic.
Elon Musk is currently the richest individual in the world by net worth. I'm not sure what his SpaceX stock is worth, but his Tesla stock alone is worth hundreds of billions of dollars. He has stated his intention to use the entirety of his personal fortune to bankroll Mars colonization if necessary. Whether we believe him is irrelevant to this analysis.
SpaceX is a privately owned company and does not make public disclosures but based on its lack of primary fundraising over the past few years, observers believe that it is cash stable. Its launch services business is highly profitable (unique among such businesses, I might add) and Starlink is reported to be cash-flow positive, although again this cannot be independently verified.
Let's say that the company reinvests all of its profit into Starship development (we don't have to guess at this; it's public information). If it hits its goals for the marginal cost of that vehicle, individual launches could become as cheap as $2 million, although $10 million is probably more realistic in the medium term.
Assuming that it takes ten launches (probably conservative) to get one shipload of astronauts to Mars with all necessary equipment to survive, that's $100 million in marginal cost per trip. If SpaceX is otherwise cash stable and Elon pays the cost of each trip out of his own pocket, he could send up to 4,000 Starships to Mars before running out of cash. If each Starship can hold fifty colonists, that's 200,000 people.
Note that I am excluding a lot of variables, such as fares, government support, development and supply of all of the materiél and technology to survive on Mars, etc. This is a very abstract calculation, but it's not hard to adjust to any particular set of inputs.
For bonus fun, let's compare this with the approach currently favored by Congress: SLS, which costs $4-8 billion per launch. Assuming it could send the same total payload capacity, which it can't, Musk's fortune would fund between 50 and 100 flights. It becomes easy to see why large portions of the space community hate SLS with a passion.
Note that if you don't think we should go to Mars, Starship could instead be the backbone for setting up manufacturing and resource extraction from the Moon, asteroid mining, orbital habitat construction, etc. If you have a visceral emotional response to anything associated with Elon Musk, replace Starship with any other hypothetical launch vehicle with similar characteristics.
Also note that any hypothetical "competitors" to SpaceX would not in fact be competing against Starship for interplanetary or cislunar transport. Instead, they would be working in parallel, increasing overall capacity. As ironic as it might seem, Jeff Bezos will not "save us from the tyranny of Elon Musk".
ETA: While I am modestly skeptical that we'll make it by 2030, I would be extremely surprised if we have not sent people to Mars by 2040.
Edit 2: When I asked Grok to give me an estimate of the marginal launch cost to Mars, it gave me the exact same number: $100 million. I'm starting to like this.
Edited by Fighteer on Jan 3rd 2025 at 12:08:31 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

I think we've talked about this before, but in an absolute sense Earth's magnetic field is relatively weak: around 30 microTesla
. A refrigerator magnet is over a hundred times stronger. What makes it effective is that it covers such a large volume... and it is operating mostly on subatomic particles in its role of protecting us from the solar wind.
You can't really do anything with it at the scale of even a gram of orbital debris. Atmospheric drag is orders of magnitude stronger as a "force", even in the higher reaches of LEO.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 20th 2024 at 10:45:34 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"