The Silicon Graybeard

On Sunday afternoon, Jan. 18th, UTC, a moderately strong solar flare and Coronal Mass Ejection erupted on the directly Earth-facing portion of the sun. The flare was an X class (X-ray flare) that sent the CME in our direction, but not a particularly strong flare. Originally predicted to affect Earth well into the day (in UTC) on the 20th, it ended up being rather fast moving and stronger than the typical CME. 

Arriving earlier than expected, a CME struck Earth's magnetic field on Jan. 19th (1930 UT). The impact sparked a severe G4-class geomagnetic storm. The timing of the impact favored Europe, where widespread auroras are now being reported. It remains to be seen whether the storm will persist long enough for a similar display in North America. 

The CME that struck Earth today crossed the sun-Earth divide in only ~25 hours. That's fast. For comparison, most CMEs take 3 or 4 days to get here. The high speed of this CME (~1660 km/s) places it in the top few percent of all CMEs observed in the past 30 years.

The NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center posted this summary of planetary K-index (Kp) values as the last update for Jan. 19:

The two red "towers" Kp at 8.33 and then 8.67 (or 8-1/3 and 8-2/3) are obvious signs of CME impacts. The two yellow boxes at the top right labelled S2 and G2 are Solar Radiation Storm and Geomagnetic storm cautions.

S2 (Moderate) Solar Radiation Storm Impacts

Biological: Passengers and crew in high-flying aircraft at high latitudes may be exposed to elevated radiation risk.
Satellite operations: Infrequent single-event upsets possible.
Other systems: Small effects on HF propagation through the polar regions and navigation at polar cap locations possibly affected.

G2 (Moderate) Geomagnetic Storm Impacts

Power systems: High-latitude power systems may experience voltage alarms, long-duration storms may cause transformer damage.
Spacecraft operations: Corrective actions to orientation may be required by ground control; possible changes in drag affect orbit predictions.
Other systems: HF radio propagation can fade at higher latitudes, and aurora has been seen as low as New York and Idaho (typically 55° geomagnetic lat.).

At the top level of the website with that Planetary K index graphic, lies this one:

Across the top of the graphic under SPACE WEATHER CONDITIONS it shows that earlier today S4 and G4 conditions were observed. I was doing some paperwork in the shack today, closer to 5PM or 2200 UTC, and the G4 condition was displayed. Note that the prediction for the next 24 hours at the right edge of this graphic also includes severe G4 storms. I have to add my usual summary: if you think plain old NOAA weather forecasts for your city are bad, they're generations of progress better than solar-terrestrial storm forecasts.

The usual thing people ask about is if auroras will be visible. The aurora forecasters seem more inclined to be cautious than plain old weather forecasters. They say tonight will be more active than last night and more active than tomorrow night, but they don't say something specific like they'll be visible from northern Illinois but not southern Indiana, for example. This plot, from the NOAA SWPC, was generated 0223 UTC, and I happen to typing at 0226 UTC. It's hard to get a much fresher forecast than that. That thin red line is marked as the view line, meaning that from around that line, the auroras might be visible as color on the horizon. 

 

Yesterday, Jan. 17, the Artemis II hardware was rolled to launch pad 39B of the Kennedy Space Center side of the Cape. Breaking Space (NASA Spaceflight's) video here, but let me caution that it doesn't show the whole move and doesn't show the final position.  

The thing that's most important here is that preparations for the Artemis II mission have stepped to the next level. There will be tests performed out on the pad that can't be done in the more restrictive environments that they've been working in up to now. For the crews that work well away from the headlines and get things done, it's exciting.

“These are the kinds of days that we live for when you do the kind of work that we do,” said John Honeycutt, chair of NASA’s Mission Management Team for the Artemis II mission. “The rocket and the spacecraft, Orion Integrity, are getting ready to roll to the pad … It really doesn’t get much better than this, and we’re making history.”

A topic that doesn't get talked about widely is that the farther they advance toward the scheduled February 6th launch, a mindset called "launch fever" begins to affect the entire chain of command. Although the phrase isn't widely used, it doesn't take much reading of the fatal accidents in the past to encounter talk about it without using those two words. Shuttles Challenger, and Columbia as well as the Apollo 1 fire during a test on the pad - anything that resulted in the loss of vehicle and crew.

Artemis I back in November of '22 was an unmanned mission, so vitally important systems like the crew compartment's air system, weren't flight tested. I've read that before they leave for their translunar injection that this will be fully tested while in Earth orbit. NASA named the program Artemis back in 2019, but pieces have been around for 20 years.

NASA selected Orion contractor Lockheed Martin to oversee the development of a deep space capsule in 2006 as part of the George W. Bush administration’s soon-to-be canceled Constellation program. In 2011, a political bargain between the Obama administration and Congress revived the Orion program and kicked off development of the Space Launch System. The announcement of the Artemis program in 2019 leaned on work already underway on Orion and the SLS rocket as the centerpieces of an architecture to return US astronauts to the Moon.

The Orion capsule flew on a test flight called ARES 1-X on October 28, 2009, a decade before the Artemis name was chosen. There are good photos available at that Wikipedia link. 

There's still much to be done before launch, and much to be implemented from Artemis I. They had lots of trouble with the liquid hydrogen fuel that the SLS uses. 

Assuming the countdown rehearsal goes according to plan, NASA could be in a position to launch the Artemis II mission as soon as February 6. But the schedule for February 6 is tight, with no margin for error. Officials typically have about five days per month when they can launch Artemis II, when the Moon is in the right position relative to Earth, and the Orion spacecraft can follow the proper trajectory toward reentry and splashdown to limit stress on the capsule’s heat shield.

In February, the available launch dates are February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11, with launch windows in the overnight hours in Florida. If the mission isn’t off the ground by February 11, NASA will have to stand down until a new series of launch opportunities beginning March 6. The space agency has posted a document showing all available launch dates and times through the end of April.

The guy in the hot seat for this mission is John Honeycutt mentioned in that first indented quote above.

One of Honeycutt’s jobs as chair of the Mission Management Team (MMT) is ensuring all the Is are dotted and Ts are crossed amid the frenzy of final launch preparations. While the hardware for Artemis II is on the move in Florida, the astronauts and flight controllers are wrapping up their final training and simulations at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“I think I’ve got a good eye for launch fever,” he said Friday.

“As chair of the MMT, I’ve got one job, and it’s the safe return of Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy. I consider that a duty and a trust, and it’s one I intend to see through.”

NASA’s 322-foot-tall (98-meter) SLS rocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building on the eve of rollout to Launch Complex 39B. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

Or how to tell you've had a bad weekend without going into more details. 

I'm sure most people are saying something along the lines of "what??" Let me back up a bit and start over. 

Something I talk regularly about is my ham radio hobby, and the annual VHF contests I play in a few times a year. There are several of these contests over the course of the year, where the goal is to exchange a piece of information, sometimes two small pieces, and call signs, of course. Well, the real goal depends on why you're playing in the contest. If you're trying to win the contest, it's different than if you're trying to contact places you've never confirmed contact with. 

While there are more than these three, the USA's national ham radio organization, the American Radio Relay League, puts on three contests per year, June, September and January - around the second weekend of the month. Without a doubt, I consider the June contest the best of the year; my results have always been worse than June's in the other two. The reason June is better is purely that the radio propagation is regularly among the best of the year. Another group/company - ISTRC it's CQ Magazine - puts on a July contest and that one is also good. 

Long introduction out of the way, the title is my summary of the contest so far. "I've had worse." At 2PM Eastern (1900 UTC), when the contest started, the band was better than usual, with stations in New England coming in strong and steady. As is often the case, the openings weren't to all of New England, but to a small stripe of the grid squares. I clipped this image of the grid squares in the area from a US Map that Icom America gives away at hamfests. 

The exact spots I was hearing varied a bit. Most often I heard the stripe of FN31 and FN41 north to FN35/FN46. At other times I heard FN00 and 01 in western Pennsylvania, and FN13 quite often. In my quest to contact every grid square in the continental US, the four I'm really hoping for in FN are 57 and 65 to 67.

In and out of the shack for a while (making a jar of Mayonnaise to turn into Caesar salad dressing) and a few other things didn't change the overall picture of being open to a few of these grid squares, the squares I could hear just moved down into the SE states, until this evening when the only grids I heard were peninsular Florida. EL96, 97, 98, 99, EL 87, 88, 89, and EM 00, which is as far into the NE of Florida as we can get, and includes some of SE Georgia. 

The contest continues until tomorrow night at 0359Z (which is actually early Monday morning UTC, not Sunday night). That's 10:59 PM Eastern time. I'll keep the station on and keep trying "asbestos" possible.

Not the first ever Amazon sats but Arianespace's first batch of 32 of Amazon's LEO satellites (formerly called the Kuiper constellation).  The reason this gets a story and not just mention is that this will be the first launch of what they're calling the Ariane 64, which is an Ariane 6 with four strap on solid rocket boosters. 

The Ariane 6 is fairly well-established for a new launch vehicle, with five launches, including its debut flight in July 2024. All of the launches were considered a success, although the first flight failed to relight the upper stage in order to make a controlled reentry. I'm guessing declaring it a success was the payload achieved the desired orbit.  Given that they had a full year instead of roughly half a year (first launch in July '24), Arianespace went from one/year to four launches last year and has set the goal to eight for this year.

Arianespace has sold 18 Ariane 6 launches to Amazon; this mission, called VA267, will be the first of them. The launch has a preliminary date of NET February 12th, three weeks from yesterday, January 15, with no time assigned. The launch will be from Arianespace's launch facility in French Guiana. 

Artist's rendering of Ariane 64 in operation. Image credit: Arianespace

VA267 will be the first flight of Ariane 6 in its full-power Ariane 64 configuration, capable of carrying payloads of more than 20 metric tons to orbit. The 32 Amazon Leo satellites will be accommodated under a 20-meter-long fairing and delivered by the Ariane 64 rocket to a Low Earth Orbit.

The Arianespace website adds:

The VA267 launch at a glance:

• 359th launch by Arianespace, 1st Arianespace launch in 2026
• 6th Ariane 6 launch and 1st launch of Ariane 64, its most powerful configuration, and 1st use of Ariane 6's long fairing configuration
• 1st Arianespace launch for Amazon Leo, within a series of 18
• 1st Ariane 6 launch for a commercial customer

Nothing says "State Of The Art" quite like a graphic of a 50-ish year old design that was mothballed 15 years ago. I was rather surprised to see this image from a company like Viasat in a Payload daily email. The only reason I can think of for such an image rather than something that's actually modern boils down the current designs that are flying might involve royalty payments to the company flying them. 

Awkward introduction aside, it does sound like something that might be useful.

For decades, space launch providers have faced the same persistent challenge: intermittent loss of telemetry data when rockets travel out of range of ground stations. These “blackouts” can last for minutes—leaving long and critical periods when vehicle health, performance, and safety information go dark. Viasat’s HaloNet Launch Telemetry Data Relay Service (DRS)aims to change that, by providing continuous, global coverage from ascent through early orbit.

“Whenever anyone launches a multimillion-dollar rocket or a billion-dollar payload, they need to know the continuous health of that rocket,” said Arnie Christianson, Senior Director, Program Management, Viasat Government, Space and Mission Systems. Launch telemetry to ground controllers provides the equivalent of a car’s dashboard, he explained. “Engine temperature, trajectory, pressure, performance—it’s how you know everything is working as intended.”

Again, it might well be useful, but I'm kind of focused on the use of the word "need" in that first sentence of the second paragraph. I'm sure the responsible people would like to "know the continuous health of that rocket," but the thousands of launches that didn't have that continuous knowledge argues it's a "nice to have" thing but not a "need." 

The rest of the short article on Payload gives lots of details justifying their project, including that gathering this information currently depends on TDRSS,the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System, that has been in use since the 1980s. The first TDRSS satellite was lifted to orbit on Space Shuttle Challenger. The TDRSS system is aging out and will be retired over the next decade.

It has nothing to do with the Crew-11 return, the number of flights on one booster, or the number of launches in the year (it's a new year - last year's 165 launches probably won't be a target until the fourth quarter of the year). No, this one is setting a new record for the speed of turning around a launch pad, between Monday's and Today's Starlink missions from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40 or "slick 40").

SpaceX’s launch of its Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday afternoon broke the turnaround record at its launchpad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station by more than five hours.

The Starlink 6-98 mission lifted off at 1:08 p.m. EST (1808 UTC), just 45 hours after the launch of the Starlink 6-97 mission at 4:08 p.m. EST (2108 UTC) on Monday.

The previous record, set in December 2025, was 50 hours and 44 between the launches of NROL-77 and Starlink 6-90. 

We've met Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX Vice President of Launch before, a guy with an interesting job. He wrote on social media that, “The rocket was actually ready to fly at roughly 40 hours, but we needed to wait for the optimal deployment t-zero. Love seeing us continue to improve on our speed, efficiency, safety and reliability!” Dontchev went on to summarize something we constantly see about SpaceX:  “We once thought it was crazy town to launch from the same pad in two days. Now it feels crazy not to be launching from the same pad multiple times a day. Physics is the only constraint. Everything else is just an engineering challenge waiting to be solved.” 

That comparison from thinking it was "crazy town to launch in two days" to not launching multiple times a day is this week's version of my old observation that, "remember when we used to wonder if they could make 10 launches on the same booster?" Now the Fleet Leader, B1067, is at 32 flights and they're going for 40. A Falcon 9 booster with the one-time crazy goal of 10 launches is now considered "like new". Today's booster, B1085, was on its 13th flight.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin the Starlink 6-98 mission on Jan. 14, 2026. The flight, which lifted off at 1:08 p.m. EST (1808 UTC) marked the fastest turnaround of SLC-40 to date with liftoff occurring just 45 hours after the launch of Starlink 6-97 on Jan. 12. This broke the previous record by more than five hours. Image: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

It's not really visible in that photo, but my only issue with the launch was that our cloud cover was too thick to get a glimpse of the vehicle and the cold front overhead kept us from hearing the launch rumble.

At 0215 UTC on January 15th, the Crew-11 Dragon is safely in orbit and heading toward its early morning deorbit burn. 

A departure from the normal here due to Scott Adams' passing away sometime between Monday night and this morning. I've known since it became public that he had aggressive stage 4 prostate cancer and that it looked like he wasn't going to make it to the end of 2025. It looks like he got a longer extension than many. Some of that was undoubtedly personal; perhaps genetics, perhaps attitudes and we heard several times in his last year that he was familiar enough with and to people in high places that could help. 

Like most, I got to know Scott Adams through Dilbert when the comic first started making papers and magazines. We have some Dilbert cartoon collections around the house but I'm not sure about his "real" books. By the time the TV series came out in 1999, I was a regular who watched every episode.  This clip is one of my all time favorites from Dilbert's world.  

Over the years, I've run many Dilbert cartoons.

I posted this on September 8, 2015.

This one was November 25, 2012.

This may be the oldest one I have. It says: Dilbert for September 30, 1995. Amazingly, I remembered it almost word-for-word.

Of course, this next one spoke to me. Alright, they all did, but this one in a different sense. 

This one affected me for life:

Yes, I have bike shorts and always refer to them as my dorky pants. I used to have a printed version of this cartoon on my office wall. 

Related to companies that patent minor things but sue any company that gets close to their turf.

When talk turned to grade inflation in college, this one had to show up:

I believe that's every Dilbert cartoon I've ever run, and it's a bit of guaranteed outcome that when I'm looking for some humorous thing to include, I'll go to cartoons I remember, but it's going to be tough for a while.  I can't claim to have any tremendous insights into Scott as a person. His last interviews bring some things I can relate to, along with things we'll all face someday.  One of my first quotes from Scott was in a post in the fourth month of the blog: 

Like Scott Adams says on risk vs reward:

For a manager: Success: you get tons of money. Fail: someone under you gets laid off.

For an engineer: Success: you get a handsome certificate, suitable for framing. Fail: think Space Shuttle Challenger, Columbia, Hyatt Regency walkway. Money lost, possibly large numbers of people die.

Perhaps the most recent risk/reward quote of his will live much longer. From his final post to X about becoming Christian:

"I'm not a believer but I have to admit the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks attractive. So here I go," according to the statement by Adams.

"I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior and I look forward to spending an eternity with him. The part about me being a believer should be quickly resolved if I wake up in heaven."

So long, Scott. I hope we meet on the other side some day.

Crew-11 and NASA astronaut Mike Fincke wrapped up his time as commander of the International Space Station on Monday, Jan. 12, after just over a month in the position, and around the same amount of time sooner than he expected to give up the position. 

During a change of command ceremony broadcast from the ISS, Fincke, 58, handed over the symbolic key to the space station to Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, 42. He called the early departure “bittersweet.”

Naturally, the next few days on the ISS are going to be relatively news-intensive, and we just gotta know that they're not going to have a crew on the ISS - even a 3 man crew as there will be - without a commanding officer. Choosing a CO and passing on the chain of command seems essential.

“I just want to say thank you for the first part of Expedition 74, but also the last part of Expedition 73. It’s been really amazing,” Fincke said. “My friend Scott Kelly says that spaceflight is the biggest team sport and it’s true. We got a great time.

“Everybody really rose to the occasion for our expeditions and it’s been really a pleasure to be here.”

Fincke thanked his crew mates individually, wrapping up his comments by calling fellow NASA astronaut and fellow member of Crew-11, Zena Cardman, 38, “a rock star, superstar, awesome star.”

The crew-11 team again: in the front row, Mike Fincke, and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui. Back row is Russia's Oleg Platonov, and NASA's Zena Cardman.

The schedule for the departure and return is essentially as we published Saturday. Crew-11 will undock from the space-facing port of the Harmony module at approximately 5:00 p.m. EST (2200 UTC) on Wednesday, Jan. 14, and splash down off the coast of California around 3:40 a.m. EST (0840 UTC) on Thursday, Jan. 15.

The early departure of CREW-11 will leave the ISS with only three people on board,Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov, 42, the new commander, NASA astronaut Chris Williams, 42, a Harvard-educated physician, and another cosmonaut: Sergey Mikayev, 39. Crew-12's launch date hasn't been officially announced but NextSpaceflight has moved the date from NET February 12 to February 15th. 

Ride sharing into orbit is one the best ways to come along to "spread the wealth" of the lower costs to orbit that are available to colleges, small businesses, and those who used to have a hard time getting an idea into space to test. SpaceX already had two ride sharing mission profiles, Transporter and Bandwagon, that vary in the specifics of the orbits they're intended for. To date, the company has launched 15 ride sharing flights in its Transporter series and four via Bandwagon.

Today marked the first launch of a third profile, called "Twilight," because it delivers the satellites to a dusk-dawn sun-synchronous orbit, a path that straddles the line between night and day on our planet. The mission launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 5:44 AM local time. The primary payload of the mission is a NASA satellite called Pandora, intended for a yearlong mission to study planets outside of our solar system, referred to as exoplanets. 

During its yearlong orbital mission, the 716-pound (325 kilograms) Pandora will study at least 20 known exoplanets using a 17-inch-wide (45 centimeters) telescope, which it will train on the worlds as they "transit," or cross the face of, their host stars from the satellite's perspective.

(Unless there's something really unusual about this telescope, astronomers refer to a "17-inch-wide" telescope as 17-inch aperture.) Like virtually all observational studies of exoplanets, the Pandora telescope will image these stars to look for planets passing in front of their star from our viewpoint. Not only do these occultations provide an observable small dimming of the star's light proportional to the diameter of the planet compared to the star's, they also allow astronomers to analyze the exoplanets' atmospheres. Different elements and molecules absorb light at specific wavelengths, so studying the spectrum of the star's light before and during the time when the planet passes in front of the star can reveal a great deal about that atmosphere's composition.

Part of the complexity of the mission is that the star itself contributes data, so they need to analyze that to correct for the star's contribution. A common source of more information is sunspots. 

"Pandora aims to disentangle the star and planet spectra by monitoring the brightness of the exoplanet's host star in visible light while simultaneously collecting infrared data," NASA officials wrote in a mission description. "Together, these multiwavelength observations will provide constraints on the star's spot coverage to separate the star's spectrum from the planet's."

Pandora will focus on planets with atmospheres that are dominated by water or hydrogen, agency officials added.

There were 40 satellites onboard the ride sharing mission, a mixture of 10 of Kepler Communications' Aether spacecraft and two of Capella Space's advanced new Acadia Earth-imaging radar satellites. That still leaves 28 satellites we have no information on.

This booster flew on its fifth mission, and landed back at Vandenberg successfully a bit over eight minutes after launch. 

Artist's concept of the Pandora satellite. Image credit: NASA's Pandora Mission website

Space.com has a post they've been updating as the day goes by with the latest news on the ISS astronaut medical evacuation. The preparations for the Crew Dragon have begun, and everything takes place between this Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning or Jan. 14 and 15.  For convenience (or laziness), I copied the schedule they've printed and just posted it as graphic.

"Mission managers continue monitoring conditions in the recovery area, as undocking of the SpaceX Dragon depends on spacecraft readiness, recovery team readiness, weather, sea states, and other factors," NASA wrote in an update. "NASA and SpaceX will select a specific splashdown time and location closer to the Crew-11 spacecraft undocking."

The return will be livestreamed - as it generally is - but not continually through the 5PM undocking and departure until 2:15 AM beginning of coverage. 

Crew-11: left to right: Russia's Oleg Platonov, NASA's Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman, and Japan's Kimiya Yui on the right. (Image: © SpaceX)

Mike Fincke and Zena Cardman are the two who were scheduled for the Jan. 8 Spacewalk that was cancelled and led to the station evacuation, so one of those two is the one with the condition that caused the mission evacuation.

We've entered into the mental landmark that we're within four weeks of the start of the Artemis II mission to loop around the moon and, as every story says, the first time astronauts have gone beyond Earth Orbit since the end of the Apollo 17 mission in December 1972. Launch is currently scheduled for NET Friday, February 6, at 9:45 PM EST. That is one day later than I've been listing for months. 

Something that was going on without mention in the emails I get or sites I check regularly is that NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, called together a review of the Orion heat shield issues that showed up after the first Artemis mission. Afterward, Isaacman said he has “full confidence” in the space agency’s plans to use the existing heat shield to protect the Orion spacecraft during its upcoming lunar mission.

“We have full confidence in the Orion spacecraft and its heat shield, grounded in rigorous analysis and the work of exceptional engineers who followed the data throughout the process,” Isaacman said Thursday.

The Artemis I mission was in November of 2022, so just over 3 years ago, and the agency was roundly criticized for how it handled the heat shield issues. The pictures of the heat shield with chunks of ablative material blasted out of it didn't surface until nearly a year and a half after the mission.

The inspector general’s report, released on May 1, 2024, included new images of Orion’s heat shield. Credit: NASA Inspector General

After taking the job in Washington, DC, Isaacman asked the engineers who investigated the heat shield issue for NASA, as well as the chair of the independent review team and senior human spaceflight officials, to meet with a handful of outside experts. These included former NASA astronauts Charles Camarda and Danny Olivas, both of whom have expertise in heat shields and had expressed concerns about the agency’s decision-making.

...

Convened in a ninth-floor conference room at NASA Headquarters known as the Program Review Center, the meeting lasted for more than three hours. Isaacman attended much of it, though he stepped out from time to time to handle an ongoing crisis involving an unwell astronaut on orbit. He was flanked by the agency’s associate administrator, Amit Kshatriya; the agency’s chief of staff, Jackie Jester; and Lori Glaze, the acting associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate. The heat shield experts joined virtually from Houston, along with Orion Program Manager Howard Hu.

Isaacman made it clear at the outset that, after reviewing the data and discussing the matter with NASA engineers, he accepted the agency’s decision to fly Artemis II as planned. The team had his full confidence, and he hoped that by making the same experts available to Camarda and Olivas, it would ease some of their concerns.

To help ensure transparency, Isaacman added two independent reporters to the mix, Eric Berger of Ars Technica and Micah Maidenberg of The Wall Street Journal. They were allowed to report on the discussions but required to not quote participants directly by name to encourage a full and open discussion.

Perhaps the most striking revelation was what the NASA engineers called “what if we’re wrong” testing.

At the base of Orion, there are 186 blocks of a material called Avcoat, individually attached to provide a protective layer that allows the spacecraft to survive the heating of atmospheric reentry. Returning from the Moon, Orion encounters temperatures of up to 5,000° Fahrenheit (2,760° Celsius). A char layer that builds up on the outer skin of the Avcoat material is supposed to ablate, or erode, in a predictable manner during reentry. Instead, during Artemis I, fragments fell off the heat shield and left cavities in the Avcoat material.

Work by Saucedo and others—including substantial testing in ground facilities, wind tunnels, and high-temperature arc jet chambers—allowed engineers to find the cause of gases becoming trapped in the heat shield, leading to cracking. This was due to the Avcoat material being “impermeable,” essentially meaning it could not breathe.

After considering several options, including swapping the heat shield out for a newer one with more permeable Avcoat, NASA decided instead to change Orion’s reentry profile. For Artemis II, it would return through Earth’s atmosphere at a steeper angle, spending fewer minutes in the environment where this outgassing occurred during Artemis I. Much of Thursday’s meeting involved details about how the agency reached this conclusion and why the engineers deemed the approach safe.

A test block of Avcoat undergoes heat pulse testing inside an arc jet test chamber at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. The test article, configured with both permeable (upper) and non-permeable (lower) Avcoat sections for comparison, helped to confirm an understanding of the root cause of the loss of charred Avcoat material on Artemis I. Credit: NASA

The Avcoat blocks, which are about 1.5 inches thick, are laminated onto a thick composite base of the Orion spacecraft. Inside this is a titanium framework that carries the load of the vehicle. The NASA engineers wanted to understand what would happen if large chunks of the heat shield were stripped away entirely from the composite base of Orion. So they subjected this base material to high energies for periods of 10 seconds up to 10 minutes, which is longer than the period of heating Artemis II will experience during reentry.

What they found is that, in the event of such a failure, the structure of Orion would remain solid, the crew would be safe within, and the vehicle could still land in a water-tight manner in the Pacific Ocean.

“We have the data to say, on our worst day, we’re able to deal with that if we got to that point,” one of the NASA engineers said.

After more than two years of testing and analysis of the char loss issue, the NASA engineers are convinced that, by increasing the angle of Orion’s descent during Artemis II, they can minimize damage to the heat shield. During Artemis I, as the vehicle descended from about 400,000 to 100,000 feet, it was under a “heat load” of various levels for 14 minutes. With Artemis II, this time will be reduced to eight minutes.

This may seem contradictory, but despite all this testing, the heat shield being accepted, and everyone feeling it's not exceptionally risky to ride it for reentry, there also seems to be a widespread feeling that they would rather not fly on it. I read that as saying there's nothing that shows extreme danger, but they're just not comfortable that they've tested every condition they should test. What if there were conditions that were encountered in Artemis I that didn't show up in the tests they've done? Nature isn't that cooperative - maybe there's noise, some sort of random fluctuations, and testing with the systems they're using doesn't exactly match what the heat shield might encounter on its flight? 

The Orion heat shield as seen after the Artemis I flight. Credit: NASA

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

For those who don't remember, Crew-11 was the replacement mission for Crew-9 which was the rescue mission for the Starliner astronauts,  Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. This was done by taking two astronauts off the Crew-9, mission commander Zena Cardman and mission specialist Stephanie Wilson to allow two seats for the stranded astronauts.  Zena Cardman was soon assigned to Crew-11; Stephanie Wilson was not.

The crew of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-11 on the International Space Station. Clockwise from top left are: NASA's Mike Fincke, Zena Cardman, Russia's Oleg Platonov and Japan's Kimiya Yui. (Image credit: NASA)

Cardman and Mike Fincke were the two scheduled for the spacewalk that has been postponed, so the medically affected crew member is one of those two, but out of respect for privacy, NASA has not officially named the crew member. They officially emphasize that the patient is stable, but that's all we know.

'"It is not an emergency de-orbit, even though we always retain that capability, and NASA and our partners train for that routinely," recently confirmed NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters during a press conference on Thursday.

"The capability to diagnose and treat this properly does not live on the International Space Station," Isaacman added, explaining why he ultimately decided to speed up the departure timeline.

Crew-11 launched August 1st, and was scheduled to be replaced around February 20th, so cutting the mission short by around six weeks isn't a big impact and may have helped the decision. Crew-12 is reported to be launching NET February 12. 

There is no word yet on when Crew-11 will return or if 12 will be moved forward.  

Dr. James Polk, NASA's chief health and medical officer, said that the issue had nothing to do with the spacewalk or preparations for it, apparently alluding to the incident in 2021 when a crew member was unable to start a spacewalk due to a pinched nerve.

"This is not an operational issue. This was not an injury that occurred in the pursuit of operations," Polk said. "It's mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity, and with the suite of hardware that we have at our avail to complete a diagnosis."

In retrospect, the fact that there hasn't been a medical evacuation in the history of the ISS is really remarkable. The ISS has been continuously inhabited since November of 2000. Dr. Polk says that statistical analysis says they'd have one around every 3 years.  Or so. 

Just a couple of stories that standout above the noise to me 

Remember Rocketdyne?  

It's sort of a trick question, but with a point. Rocketdyne was one of the big names in the Space 1.0 days. They were founded in 1955 - over 70 years ago. They aren't quite gone now, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them gone by 2030. 

A half-century ago, Rocketdyne manufactured almost all of the large liquid-fueled rocket engines in the United States. The Saturn V rocket that boosted astronauts toward the Moon relied on powerful engines developed by Rocketdyne, as did the Space Shuttle, the Atlas, Thor, and Delta rockets, and the US military’s earliest ballistic missiles.

Rocketdyne’s dominance began to erode after the end of the Cold War. The company started in 1955 as a division of North American Aviation, then became part of Rockwell International until Boeing acquired Rockwell’s aerospace division in 1996. Rocketdyne continually designed and tested large new rocket engines from the 1950s through the 1980s. Since then, Rocketdyne has developed and qualified just one large engine design from scratch—the RS-68—and it retired from service in 2024. 

The company was first sold by ULA in 2005 for $700 million (about $1.2 billion today). This was about six years before the end of the Space Shuttle program and around the startup of SpaceX - launching their first experimental launches. 

There are at least nine medium to large liquid-fueled rocket engines in production or in advanced development in the United States today, and just one of them is from the enterprise once known as Rocketdyne: the RS-25 engine used to power the core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.

The RS-25 is often referred to as the SSME - Space Shuttle Main Engine - and all of the engines set to fly on the Space Launch System are not just the same model, they are all "used" engines that have previously flown on Shuttle missions. 

It's interesting that United Launch Alliance, Rocketdyne's big customer after the end of the shuttle program, abandoned them in favor of Blue Origin's engines for their Vulcan rocket. 

The parent company of Aerojet purchased Rocketdyne in 2013 to form Aerojet Rocketdyne. L3Harris closed its acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne in 2023, creating a space propulsion and power systems business unit and retiring the historic Rocketdyne name. Now, just two-and-a-half years later, L3Harris announced Monday it is selling a 60 percent stake in its newly created propulsion and power business to AE Industrial Partners, a Florida-based private equity firm. L3Harris will retain 40 percent ownership. 

The RS-25 is not part of this sale. Apparently, Rocketdyne is holding onto a dream of an SLS add-on contract to build the RS-25s as "Cost Plus." 

There is another big portion of the Rocketdyne market that hasn't been mentioned, the RL10 upper stage engine used on ULA's Vulcan. AE Industrial Partners has talked up the idea of modernizing the engine in the West Palm Beach (Florida) plant that builds them. It sounds like they need to modernize the way the engines are built.

RL10s have flown on rockets since the 1960s and historically required significant touch labor and manual fabrication, driving up their cost. 

3I/ATLAS isn't an alien spacecraft, astronomers confirm

Space.com entitles their story, "Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS isn't an alien spacecraft, astronomers confirm. 'In the end, there were no surprises.' "

The amount of silly stuff floating around about this comet surprised me - and not just the amount, but some of the sources surprised me, too. While it would have been far more interesting to me to be evidence of an advanced civilization sending out probes than to just be another rock passing in the night, there were just too many issues with the evidence for that. 

Astronomers used the Green Bank Telescope, employed in the Breakthrough Listen extraterrestrial signal-hunting astronomy project, to search 3I/ATLAS for measurable signs of technology from extraterrestrial civilizations, or "technosignatures." 

"We all would have been thrilled to find technosignatures coming from 3I/ATLAS, but they're just not there," lead researcher Benjamin Jacobson-Bell from the University of California, Berkeley, told Space.com. "Finding no signals was the result we expected, due to the significant evidence for 3I/ATLAS being a comet with only natural features.

"The evidence was against 3I/ATLAS being one such probe, but we would have been remiss not to check."

Here on the blog, we've had little discussion about this, but I'll borrow something I wrote in a comment back around the start of the controversy:

Why do I think it's basically just another rock? Because it's acting like a rock. It's on a purely ballistic trajectory. It's moving fast compared to things we're used to observing - which is, after all, the last few years of human history - but it's not moving fast compared to the speeds required for living beings to cover the distances it has come. Good old Wikipedia says it's moving at 58km/sec or 0.000193c. We don't know where it came from, but even if it came from the closest stars at 4 light years away, that means more than 20,000 years to get here. Who's going to launch a system that slow, and why? What kind of system could work over 20,000 years without failing? If they wanted to take over our solar system or take our planet, if they have lifespans similar to ours, 20,000 years makes coming here to take over pretty much impossible. 

Comet 3I/ATLAS streaks across a dense star field in this image captured by the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS) on Gemini South at Cerro Pachón in Chile. The multicolored streaks are stars in the background of the image.

(Image credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/Shadow the ScientistImage Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab))

3i/Atlas was fun, and moderately interesting. I never looked at it myself, but that's true of almost all of the barely visible comets that come through the solar system in any given year. 

The annual lists are starting to show up; at least the one at Ars Technica. 

In other years, I've started off with "we know who #1 is; let's look at the rest." That still applies, but if you'll remember New Year's day's post about SpaceX setting yet another world record for successful launches in a year, you might appreciate a little extra. I get the independent daily newsletter Payload, and they included a year by year graphic showing orbital launches for the world since '22. It's on their website. I added a little detail for 2025 that I'm pretty sure is larger in numbers than in prior years, but similar in overall look. I added lines for SpaceX's portion of US launches and a total for China and the rest of the world. 

So let's look at the rest. Ars Technica / Eric Berger Rank them this way:

1. SpaceX
2. Blue Origin
3. Rocket Lab
4. ULA
5. Northrop Grumman
6. Firefly 
7. Stoke Space 
8. Relativity Space 
9. Astra
10. Phantom Space and Vaya Space 

The source piece also shows their status vs. last year. For example, Blue Origin is up two, switching places with ULA. Instead of just copying what Eric Berger thought, I'm going to inject my own opinions. After all, Top 10 ratings of anything are nothing but an opinion topic.

Rocket Lab (higher than Ars)

My first disagreement with Berger is I make Rocket Lab #2 instead of Blue,  Rocket lab seems to me to have had a better year, with the only drawback to them compared to Blue is that their Electron rocket is for smaller payloads than New Glenn.  Bigger is fine, but New Glenn had two flights and Rocket Lab had 18 missions that were completely successful. Not quite "every other week" (26) but better than New Glenn.  

Rocket Lab has now gone nearly three dozen launches without a failure. The company also continued to make progress on its medium-lift Neutron vehicle, although its debut was ultimately delayed to mid-2026, at least.

Additionally, Rocket Lab continued its ascendance as a spacecraft company. It played a key role in supporting Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander at the beginning of this year, and in November, its two ESCAPADE vehicles were safely switched on after launch, beginning their journey to Mars.

Blue Origin (same as Ars)

Blue Origin had a very good year. They finally got New Glenn off the ground with two successful test flights. Suddenly making the list of "contenders" that they've never been on. The bigger success is probably the second flight that not only successfully made orbit, like the first, but recovered the booster on their recovery drone ship. 

This section would not be complete without copying the joke that Eric Berger stuck in his first paragraph:

This is the biggest mover on the list, leaping from No. 4 on the list to No. 2, and this is, of course, because Jeff Bezos’ company sent Katy Perry into space. (They could have achieved No. 1 had they not brought her back). 

Northrop Grumman (higher than Ars)

This puts Northrop Grumman higher than ULA in my rankings because I think they had a better year. 

Only one other US company had a successful orbital launch in 2025, and it was Northrop Grumman. In April, the company’s Minotaur IV rocket carried a payload into orbit for the National Reconnaissance Office. 

The ding against them is that they're still depending on SpaceX for launches of their Cygnus cargo missions to the ISS because although they're committed to and working on their Antares 330 rocket, it's behind schedule.  Meanwhile, they increased the size of the Cygnus to what they're calling Cygnus XL. 

As an interesting side note, Northrop also provides solid rocket boosters for ULA’s Vulcan rocket and NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) vehicle.

United Launch Alliance (lower than Ars)

I think that ULA had a disappointing year. They were saying they'd get up to 10 Vulcan missions and had one. 

In late 2024, the company’s CEO, Tory Bruno, told reporters that ULA aimed to launch as many as 20 missions in 2025, with roughly an even split between the legacy Atlas V launcher and Vulcan. Now, it’s likely that ULA will close out 2025 with six flights—five with the Atlas V and just one with the Vulcan rocket that the company is so eager to accelerate into service.

On the one Vulcan flight there was a problem with a solid rocket booster. There's persistent speculation that investigation is what grounded the Vulcan.  

Firefly (same as Ars)

Firefly had a wonderful start to the year. 

The year 2025 started out with a bang—a good one—for Firefly. In January, the company’s Blue Ghost lander launched on a Falcon 9 rocket and subsequently landed on the Moon. This was an extremely impressive achievement, as Firefly became the first private company to complete a fully successful soft landing on the Moon. 

Unfortunately that was their end of success in 2025. They have been working on their Alpha rocket and had one launch that failed to put its payload in orbit. That was in April. In September they were working toward a second launch when the vehicle blew up on the launch pad. Perhaps the fact that Firefly is the contractor working on the Antares 330 launch vehicle for Northrop Grumman is why that vehicle is late.

In the next few places, we're dealing with companies that have no history that I'm familiar with so I'll just leave this section to Eric Berger at Ars. 

Stoke Space 

All I really know about Stoke is some things published about their concepts of a launch vehicle and some neat pictures. They seem well-funded and will probably have a real launch within a year or two.

Relativity Space 

All I really know about them has probably been superceded by now. They were bought by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and it seemed he was intent on building power stations in space to run AI systems in space.

Astra

They're said to be working on a rocket in the payload range of Rocket Lab's electron, 600kg to LEO.

Phantom Space and Vaya Space 

Unlike the previous two, I've never heard of either one of these. Eric said they're here for only two minor reasons: To do a "Top 10" list, he needed two more, and the two of them are sharing a launch complex, SLC-13, at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

Hey, if it's good enough for the big guys in the business, it's good enough for us.

Stoke Space's novel rocket engines for steering thrust without gimballing engines. More info here. Image credit: Stoke Space

Space.com reports today that there are five lunar landers attempting to land being sent from the US and one from China. Companies that have both tried landers with varying success and those that have never tried are looking to try this year.  

The Big Name Player Tries First 

I'll give the big name top billing because NextSpaceflight shows the launch as being this month: "NET January," but doesn't give a likely date. The launch will be on their New Glenn rocket, making it the third flight of this system. The company announced the mission soon after their November launch of ESCAPADE satellites bound for Mars but which are temporarily stationed at the L2 (Lagrange point 2) of the Earth/moon system. Sketch of the mission at L2 here. 

As expected for a first launch of a payload like the Blue Moon Mark 1 pathfinder, this flight is intended to be a technology demonstration of the Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander design, including its precision landing systems and propulsion tech. The lander will support later commercial and NASA payload deliveries to the lunar surface, with a capacity of up to 6,600 pounds

The lander will target the lunar south pole and will carry a NASA SCALPSS payload that will study how the lander's exhaust interacts with the moon's surface during the landing. There's a lot at stake: Blue Origin is a prime contractor for NASA's Human Landing System (HLS) with its Blue Moon lander, which is intended to land astronauts on the moon later this decade, making Mark 1 pathfinder a key rehearsal.

Firefly goes again with their Blue Ghost 2  

Last March, Firefly successfully landed their first Blue Ghost lander in Mare Crisium (the Sea of Crises) on the near side, and they're looking to try the second launch in the second quarter of this year.  

Blue Ghost M2 will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than the second quarter of 2026, aiming to land on the far side of the moon — a feat that only China has achieved to date, with Chang'e 4 in 2019 and Chang'e 6 in 2024. Among six government and commercial payloads will be the Rashid Rover 2 for the United Arab Emirates and a wireless power receiver for Volta Space. 

The mission also carries the European Space Agency's Lunar Pathfinder orbiter, which will be deployed into lunar orbit by Firefly's Elytra orbital transfer vehicle. Elytra will also act as a communications relay for Blue Ghost M2 during its 10 days of operations. A comms relay is a necessity, because the far side of the moon is not visible from Earth.

Intuitive Machines joins with their IM-3

Intuitive Machines looks to fly their IM-3 in the second half of the year. For a company that has gotten as close to successful missions as they could with both IM-1 and IM-2 without everyone acknowledging success, I see this as an important mission for them. 

Both the the IM-1 Odysseus spacecraft in February 2024 and last year's IM-2 Athena, toppled onto their side shortly after touching down on the lunar surface. Last year, they did a good public display of their failure analysis of Athena, but a little less for Odysseus the year before.  

IM-3, again using the NOVA-C lander, will launch on a Falcon 9 rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida and target a landing in the Reiner Gamma region on the near side, which features a mysterious lunar swirl with an associated local magnetic field. The lander will be packed with science payloads, including magnetometers and plasma instruments, as part of the CLPS program.

Astrobotics next lander mission fills out the schedule

You might remember Astrobotics first attempt to land their Peregrine lunar lander in January of '24. Shortly after liftoff and deployment, it had a propulsion anomaly due to a faulty valve and eventually ended up in the Pacific. 

The last update I had for the replacement lander, named Griffin, was that it was looking to be this summer on a Falcon Heavy. 

Griffin-1 will target the south pole of the moon. It was initially planned to carry NASA's VIPER rover to seek out volatiles, but the rover has moved to a later mission, following its cancellation and subsequent revival. Instead, Astrolab's four-wheeled, 1,000-pound (450 kg) FLIP moon rover will join Griffin-1 for the ride, along with Astrobotic's own, much smaller CubeRover. The lander will also carry further small commercial and cultural payloads. 

The last of the lunar lander missions is quite a bit harder to get info about

The last of landers likely to fly this year is Chinese, the Chang'e 7 mission. 

The Chang'e 7 mission will consist of a lander, a rover and a mobile hopper, according to Chinese state media outlet Xinhua, and will launch sometime in 2026.

The hopper is a "first-of-its-kind lunar explorer," according to the report. It will jump from sunlit areas and into shadowed craters to look for water using a molecule analyzer.

"The lander will deploy China's inaugural deep-space 'landmark image navigation' system to ensure precision, while the hopper utilizes active shock-absorption technology to safely land on slopes," the report read.

The value of recovering water on the moon probably speaks for itself. It seems essential to any plans to station a human crew and have a chance to survive there. 

Rendering of the Mark 1 Blue Moon lander. Image credit: Blue Origin