Hungry Hippo is ready to fly

Rocket Lab announced Monday that the Neutron rocket’s innovative “Hungry Hippo” captive fairing has successfully completed qualification testing and is en route to Virginia's Wallops Island Flight Facility launch complex LC-3 in preparation for Neutron’s first launch. Neutron is Rocket Lab's entry into the Falcon 9 class of rockets and will be reusable. 

Neutron, though, operates rather differently from the Falcon 9. As you know, Falcon 9 drops its fairings, and after some time trying to catch the fairings with huge nets on offshore fishing-style boats, settled on dropping them into the ocean near a recovery vessel that then goes and pulls them out of the water. 

Neutron's first stage, by contrast, will open its top like a giant mouth to spit out the vehicle's entire second stage and payload, and will then close the two halves back together before descending back through Earth's atmosphere to land and fly again.

Video here, but it's tests of the opening and closing of the fairing, not an animation of a mission. 

Before departing Rocket Lab's California-based test facility, the fairing was exposed to 275,000 pounds of external force to simulate dynamic pressures during launch, rapid cycling of the open and close mechanisms to ensure faster-than-necessary operations, software integration and load forces exceeding 125% design requirements.

Once the fairing is incorporated with Neutron's first stage, Rocket Lab will perform a series of prelaunch tests, including a static hotfire of the nine Archimedes engines that power the reusable booster. Neutron will stand 141 feet (43 meters) tall with a 23-foot (7 m) diameter, and is expected to deliver up to 28,700 pounds (13,000 kilograms) of payload to low Earth orbit.

It has been a few years since Rocket Lab first started talking about developing Neutron. While Rocket Lab's main income source is the Electron, they seem to be a "Space 2.0" company. They have flown some reused boosters and engines, but don't seem to have made all the effort on reuse SpaceX has, which makes me assume it's probably less of an economic incentive for them. The Electron is a small satellite launch vehicle, just under 60 feet tall and putting a payload of 660 pounds to LEO. Neutron will be a big step up for them. Like Electron, Neutron has a graphite body. 

Rocket Lab has had 18 Electron launches in 2025 with 100% mission success. NextSpaceflight.com shows more launches: Saturday and next Thursday followed by a much larger bunch (seven) labelled No Earlier Than 2025. That puts them in a niche that features far more launches than United Launch Alliance, an even larger multiple of Blue Origin's launches than ULA's, but still a tiny fraction of SpaceX's. 

Illustration of Rocket Lab's Neutron with the "Hungry Hungry Hippo" system delivering an upper stage with payload. Image credit: Rocket Lab

In the wake of the Russian damaged pad

You'll recall that the story broke on Black Friday (last Friday in November) that in the aftermath of the successful launch of the Crewed Soyuz flight to the International Space Station, Roscosmos discovered some substantial damage to the launch pad. Briefly, a large platform under the rocket, with a mass of about 20 metric tons was apparently not secured prior to launch, and the launch vehicle's thrust knocked it into the flame trench.

Word broke today that NASA is moving up launches of SpaceX Cargo Dragons scheduled for later in '26 due to the uncertainties of not knowing when the Soyuz pad will be usable again.

According to the space agency’s internal schedule, the next Dragon supply mission, CRS-34, is moving forward one month from June 2026 to May. And the next Dragon supply mission after this, CRS-35, has been advanced three months from November to August.

To grab a paragraph from my original piece on this accident, Russia has "plenty of launch pads" in Russia, Kazkhstan and former republics of the USSR; the issue is that Site 31 at Baikonur is the country’s only pad presently configured to handle launches of the Soyuz rocket and the two spacecraft critical to space station operations: their manned Soyuz vehicle and their unmanned Progress cargo drones. 

NASA has more options than Russia, by far. It's probably fair to say that SpaceX doesn't need mentioning, since they do more launches than any other launch service in the world - and more than most of them combined. NASA has Northrop Grumman, and their Progress cargo vehicle. Progress has been out of service for a while and SpaceX has been launching Grumman's Cygnus cargo ships until the replacement for the rocket that Grumman has contracted for is delivered. Cygnus could fly on that booster as early as April '26. Don't forget Japan has a new cargo ship as well, HTV-X, which could deliver supplies in the summer of '26.

It is by no means certain that Russia will be able to fix the Site 31 launch infrastructure during the next four months. The average temperature during winter months is typically well below 0 degrees Celsius, and the country’s economic and industrial resources have largely been devoted to a war against Ukraine, rather than civil activities such as human spaceflight.
...
So for NASA and the international partnership that operates the space station, the damage at Site 31 is unlikely to become acute unless work is delayed into next fall—when Progress vehicles will be needed for propellant delivery and Soyuz spacecraft to relieve the crew in orbit.

Technicians work on the pad in Baikonur with the fully fueled Soyuz rocket. Credit: NASA TV

A Martian Coincidence

Since the topic of moving toward more emphasis on going to Mars than to the moon, a follow-on story today underlines the reality that current satellites observing the Red Planet are not just the rovers on the surface, but others in orbit. An issue with all of them is that they're not recent launches and so they're getting older. Those satellites always have a rated lifetime and while many of those have operated far beyond the specified life, they all eventually wear out or fail in some other way. We need more of them.

NASA has lost contact with one its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission is running well past its warranty. 

Ground teams last heard from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft on Saturday, December 6. “Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the red planet,” NASA said in a short statement. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.”

The oddity that jumps off the page at me is that MAVEN is said to be the newest of NASA’s three operational Mars orbiters - and it arrived at Mars 11 years ago: 2014. It launched 10 months before that in 2013 so it has been operational for more like 12 years than 11. When the newest probe is 11 years old, that doesn't sound like they have much of a chance to be useful to missions another 11 years into the future - or more.  

Built by Lockheed Martin, MAVEN has far outlived its original design life. More recently, MAVEN became an important node in NASA’s Mars relay network, passing signals between rovers on the Martian surface and controllers on Earth. If NASA is unable to revive the MAVEN spacecraft, the agency has two other orbiters that can pick up the slack. 

MAVEN is a child compared to other satellites observing Mars.

But NASA’s two other Mars orbiters have been in space for more than 20 years. The older of the two, named Mars Odyssey, has been at Mars since 2001 and will soon run out of fuel, probably some time in the next couple of years. NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched in 2005, is healthy for its age, with enough fuel to last into the 2030s. MRO is also important to NASA because it has the best camera at Mars, with the ability to map landing sites for future missions.

What the groups behind a story like this are most concerned about is losing high speed data links back to Earth. Both of NASA's newer Mars rovers, Curiosity and Perseverance, have the capability for direct-to-Earth radio communication, but the orbiting relay network can support vastly higher data throughput. They're concerned that if those overhead satellites fail, much of the science data and spectacular images collected by NASA’s rovers might never make it off the planet. 

Technicians work on the MAVEN spacecraft at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida ahead of its launch in 2013. Image Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

NASA began planning for a dedicated Mars Telecommunications satellite more than 20 years ago, but cancelled the project in 2005. That's one of the reasons the rovers that can communicate with Earth directly; they have that hardware (or close to it) built on. The orbiting communications satellite concept appeared again this year in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed this July. 

The space agency has investigated using commercial relay services to replace the government-owned network currently in place at Mars. NASA awarded study contracts to Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, and SpaceX in 2024 to examine possible data relay architectures.

... Lawmakers included $700 million for a “high-performance” telecom relay station in Mars orbit to be developed through a fixed-price contract. ...

The agency hasn't released any formal request for bids for such a Communications Satellite, but Blue Origin and Rocket Lab have let out some design concepts for a Mars telecom orbiter. 

Early signs that Mars is becoming the Next Big Goal

There has been a quiet, background story centered on making the moon less of a target with Mars the bigger goal. It's not like the idea of a lunar colony is going away, it seems to be that more and more people are seeing Mars as a more interesting goal. A major new report on the topic was released today (Tuesday Dec. 9) on the subject. It starts by addressing the major question: if we look at Artemis, years late and billions of dollars over budget, why would any country want to take on such a mission?

A new report published Tuesday, titled “A Science Strategy for the Human Exploration of Mars,” represents the answer from leading scientists and engineers in the United States: finding whether life exists, or once did, beyond Earth.

“We’re searching for life on Mars,” said Dava Newman, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the committee that wrote the report, in an interview with Ars. “The answer to the question ‘are we alone‘ is always going to be ‘maybe,’ unless it becomes yes.”

If you go to that "report published Tuesday" link you'll find that it offers you a chance to buy a preprint of the report, or a paperback version (presumably later - after publication) but also has options of "Read Online" or "Download PDF." The report was researched and put together over the last two years, then published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In addition to Dava Newman named in that second quoted paragraph, the committee was co-chaired by Linda T. Elkins-Tanton, director of the University of California, Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory.

“There’s no turning back,” Newman said. “Everyone is inspired by this because it’s becoming real. We can get there. Decades ago, we didn’t have the technologies. This would have been a study report.”

The goal of the report is to help build a case for meaningful science to be done on Mars alongside human exploration. The report outlines 11 top-priority science objectives. In order of priority, they are:

• Search for Life: Is there evidence of life, past or present, on Mars?
• Water and carbon dioxide: Understand how water and carbon cycles changed over time
• Mars geology: Better understand the geological history of the planet
• Crew health: How do humans fare psychologically, cognitively, and physically in the Martian environment?
• Dust storms: Understand the origin and nature of large dust storms on the planet
• Search for resources: Develop in situ resource utilization, focusing initially on water and propellant
• Mars and genomes: Determine whether Mars changes reproduction and genome function in plant and animal species
• Understand microbes: Are microbial populations stable on Mars?
• Martian dust: How harmful and invasive is dust on humans and their hardware?
• Plants and animals: Does Mars affect plant and animal physiology and development across generations?
• Radiation sampling: Better understand the level and impact of radiation on the surface of Mars

That strikes me as a rather thorough list and something that won't be solved on the first mission or the the first several missions put together. So how? Without a massive improvement in rocket performance, remember that missions to Mars need to launch near closest approach of Mars to Earth, the typical Hohmann transfer windows, which occur every 25 or 26 months. Returns typically seem to be thought of as, "they'll take however long it takes to get back to Earth." 

The committee also looked at different types of campaigns to determine which would be most effective for completing the science objectives noted above. The campaign most likely to be successful, they found, was an initial human landing that lasts 30 days, followed by an uncrewed cargo delivery to facilitate a longer 300-day crewed mission on the surface of Mars. All of these missions would take place in a single exploration zone, about 100 km in diameter, that featured ancient lava flows and dust storms. 

There seem to me to be issues that aren't addressed in that list, and potentially even bigger problems. Imagine sending a crew of astronauts to Mars and finding something in the environment is deadly. At first they don't know what killed off the crew member(s). Is it something toxic on Mars or a microorganism that killed them? Not knowing the answers to what it was, do you bring the survivors back to Earth and risk the entire population on Earth? 

Since the first missions sending robots to Mars, a principle our missions complied with was "planetary protection," which aims to protect both the bodies being studied (i.e., the surface of Mars) and visitors doing the studying (i.e., astronauts) from biological contamination. "Don't bring nothing, don't take nothing home." There are scientists that say people from Earth should not visit any other planet known to contain life. That could eliminate Mars missions before they ever take place. 

In response, there have been talks about leaving some areas alone, "pristine" and untouched by Earth. Considering how many places on Earth that were thought to be sterile have turned out to have "extremophiles" - organisms that live in environments that were thought to be so severe, life would never settle there, can there truly be pristine areas that something won't settle in?  Other than things like active volcanoes.

The Curiosity rover near the site of Mont Mercou on Mars. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

If NASA is going to get serious about pressing policymakers and saying it is time to fund a human mission to Mars, the new report is important because it provides the justification for sending people—and not just robots—to the surface of Mars. It methodically goes through all the things that humans can and should do on Mars and lays out how NASA’s human spaceflight and science exploration programs can work together.

“The report says here are the top science priorities that can be accomplished by humans on the surface of Mars,” Elkins-Tanton said. “There are thousands of scientific measurements that could be taken, but we believe these are the highest priorities. We’ve been on Mars for 50 years. With humans there, we have a huge opportunity.”

SpaceX's Latest Double Record Launch

This evening, SpaceX conducted the Starlink 6-92 mission at 5:26PM ET, which set two new records. Now one of them is almost a formality: it was the latest launch record on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and every launch from CCSFS since the start of November has been a new record.  

The more interesting record is that Booster 1067 flew for a new record: flight 32. From our detached observing position (sitting here in front of the computer) it's hard to tell how smoothly the flight went but the landing looked to be inside the 10-ring. The last flight of B1067 was just short of two months ago, October 19th, and that's far from a record for turnaround time between flights, but we don't know if it was just the "next in line" or if there was something that had to be repaired. 

But as I've said many times, just use your best Grandpa Simpson / old man voice to say, "I remember when they weren't sure they could get 10 flights out of a booster and now they're going for 40." 

The first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands on the ocean-based droneship "Just Read the Instructions" after performing its record 32nd propulsive landing on Monday, Dec. 8, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX - with minor edits to exposure - SiG) 

Monday's launch from Florida was SpaceX's 158th Falcon 9 launch of the year and 510th reflight of a first stage since 2017. The company launched another set of 29 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sunday (Dec. 7).

If you look at the SpaceX page on NextSpaceflight, you'll see eight launches of Falcon 9 missions with assigned dates and times up to December 28 and three more launches that just say NET (no earlier than) 2025. Eight launches would get them to 166 Falcon 9 launches in one year. Like today, a new world record, but any launch would be. Every launch is some sort of record. 

Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day musings

This is just a simple suggestion to take a few seconds to remember it.  Pay respect to the WWII vets who fought and died there 84 years ago this morning. There were 2,403 Americans killed and 1,178 wounded. If you're a praying person, send some thanks and gratitude to them.

Looking back I find I don't mention Pearl Harbor as often as other important days to remember. I'm going to guess it's because of it being a remote memory all my life. I was born after WWII. Dad suffered from injuries during training which kept him from deploying to Europe and left him impaired for life. 

Those of you of a certain age will remember how all sorts of special celebrations and special events in 1976 centered around it being the bicentennial. 2026 will be the 250th birthday of the Republic. The 250th anniversary is referred to as the Semiquincentennial, the Bisesquicentennial, or the Sestercentennial. I haven't heard or seen any of those words used yet, but I suspect once the calendar says 2026, we'll start to hear them. I'm guessing anyone who was older than about six years old in 1976 will have some memories of the bicentennial year. 

We're having a cool front come through and it's raining at the moment. It's not going to get cold, even by our rather warm standards; it's just going to be better than the last week or so and will be a couple to a few degrees under the averages instead of five or so above them. (Average high is 77 and average low is 58.) Tomorrow's forecast high is 75 and low 59. 

Hams Are Never Really Unified on New Technologies

While I tend to try new things and communications modes there are many hams who don't really pay attention to that. Whatever aspect of the hobby they started out with is what they continue with.  There's nothing wrong with that, "to each his own" as the ancient saying goes. When I was starting out, our radios tended to have vacuum tubes. More so transmitters than receivers, but the first radio I ever had in my shack was a vacuum tube-based transceiver that I built from a kit, a Heathkit HW-16. 

Today, I still have vacuum tube radios in the shack, but I rarely even turn the Collins KWM-2 on.  

For most of my career, I worked in receiver design and I probably spend more time paying attention to receiver design and how they perform than most hams. While I never worked on the software side, I had to take the classes on communications theory that those software guys took. The concepts behind optimizing a communications receiver in analog parts (transistors and ICs) are the same as doing it mathematically in processor. 

I posted a longer description of my station with some explanations back in June of '23 but that's not really what I'm here about. What this is about is what's behind a meme that I've run into online. 

CW is an abbreviation for Continuous Wave, which is ham talk for communicating by Morse code - as you can see the guy's hand on a Morse code key (in front of that are two other keys). FT8 is a digital communications mode that has become exceptionally popular in the few years since it was introduced into the ham world. It was developed by a small group of hams with advanced degrees and experiences in communications (comm) theory, led by Joe Taylor K1JT, a professor at Princeton University. The software used is called WSJT-X, and while there are other programs that tweak little things in the user experience the most important things are the details in how the software sends and receives. 

The translation of the meme is brutally simple: if you don't operate CW instead of things on your (ewww!) computer, you're a pussy. You're a girlie-man not a real man.

For the last several years, I've operated FT8 far more than any other mode: CW, voice (called phone) or any of the other dozens of digital modes. Over seven years ago, I posted the first mention of FT8 I ever posted, and at the bottom of that post is a graph that shows the growth of FT8 in the first year it became available, going from zero usage to over 50% of the traffic through a service called Club Log (that helps coordinate getting confirmation cards for hams). 

Let's talk about the communications theory here. Morse code or CW is a single tone, with information added by on/off keying - the familiar "beep-beep" sound of code. The bandwidth (BW) is determined by the on/off keying and the faster the keying (Words Per Minute), the more bandwidth the message takes. This is an iron law of Comm Theory - the more information you send in a given time, the more BW it requires. Morse code at 20 words/minute takes far less BW than talking, but transmits far less information per second. Video takes more BW than voice because it sends more information.  

The digital modes in WSJT are designed to be sent by modulating different tones that create a Single Sideband signal. Everyone operating FT8 on the same band uses a common frequency designated for users to meet. Let's say we're meeting somewhere in HF with an SSB rig. We send the audio tones from the computer's audio output to the transmitter and choose where in the transmit BW the output will be. My transmitter is set to allow a 3.0 kHz wide transmission, but the signal from WSJT is a tiny fraction of that width - on the order of 50 Hz. The signal is converted from the text on the computer to audio tones that are encoded with error correction information. In FT8, both stations in the contact take turns transmitting and receiving, 15 seconds each way, and a complete contact is about 75 seconds. 

CW wins in speed. A contact at 25 WPM or so (common in contests) can be under 15 seconds. The difference is that CW has problems with interference and interruptions that the signal coding and decoding from WSJT handles easily. 

There's a saying that goes engineering is the art of compromise because no solution is perfect everywhere. That's the case here. I've barely gotten into enough details about how the software works, what actual contacts are like and more. I have nothing against CW - until I started playing with WSJT, it was my favorite mode: I have Worked All States and DX Century Club with CW.

Small Space News Story Roundup 73

It has been several weeks since I ran one of these, but this weekend's stories are lining up well.

South Korea's space efforts are ramping up

There are three stories pointing this way in this week's Rocket Report from Ars Technica. 

The first story is about a satellite that was launched for Korea on a Vega C rocket by Arianespace. 

The Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite-7 (Kompsat-7) mission launched from Europe’s spaceport in French Guiana. About 44 minutes after liftoff, the Kompsat-7 satellite was deployed into SSO at an altitude of 358 miles (576 kilometers). “By launching the Kompsat-7 satellite, set to significantly enhance South Korea’s Earth observation capabilities, Arianespace is proud to support an ambitious national space program,” said David Cavaillolès, CEO of Arianespace, in a statement. (SSO = Sun-Synchronous Orbit)  

The story is novel for a couple of reasons, the first is that it’s the first time in more than two years that a satellite for a customer outside Europe has been launched by Arianespace. The backlog for the Vega C is almost entirely for European customers, private interests or governments. The Ariane 6, the heavier lift vehicle in the Arianespace’s inventory, has 18 launches reserved for the US-based Amazon Leo broadband network.  

The second story is that Korea has a homegrown launch vehicle called Nuri. 

Nuri took off from Naro Space Center on November 27 with the CAS500-3 technology demonstration and Earth observation satellite, along with 12 smaller CubeSat rideshare payloads, Yonhap News Agency reports. The 200-ton Nuri rocket debuted in 2021, when it failed to reach orbit on a test flight. Since then, the rocket has successfully reached orbit three times. This mission marked the first time for Hanwha Aerospace to oversee the entire assembly process as part of the government’s long-term plan to hand over space technologies to the private sector. The fifth and sixth launches of the Nuri rocket are planned in 2026 and 2027. 

I would have to assume the Nuri has so small a payload capacity that the Kompsat-7 was too big for it, or lifting it on their own launch vehicle wasn't a high priority.  

An interesting side note about Nuri is that it doesn't use methane or kerosene for fuel, as so many vehicles do. It uses a special form of kerosene called by several names: among them Jet fuel, aviation turbine fuel, or avtur, and Jet A-1.

The Nuri rocket has three stages, each with engines burning Jet A-1 fuel and liquid oxygen. The fuel choice is unusual for rockets, with highly refined RP-1 kerosene or methane being more popular among hydrocarbon fuels. The engines are manufactured by Hanwha Aerospace. The fully assembled rocket stands about 155 feet (47.2 meters) tall and can deliver up to 3,300 pounds (1.5 metric tons) of payload into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit. 

South Korea's Nuri 1 rocket is lifted into its vertical position on its launch pad in this multi-exposure photo. Credit: Korea Aerospace Research Institute

Meanwhile, much like Honda, there's Hyundai

Back in June, Japanese automaker Honda made headlines launching a small, single stage test vehicle that returned to the launch site and performed a controlled landing.  

Now Korea's Hyundai has entered the space business - at least to develop the engines.

Meanwhile, South Korea’s space sector is looking to the future. Another company best known for making cars has started a venture in the rocket business. Hyundai Rotem, a member of Hyundai Motor Group, announced a joint program with Korean Air’s Aerospace Division (KAL-ASD) to develop a 35-ton-class reusable methane rocket engine for future launch vehicles. The effort is funded with KRW49 billion ($33 million) from the Korea Research Institute for Defense Technology Planning and Advancement (KRIT).

By the end of the decade … The government-backed program aims to develop the engine by the end of 2030. Hyundai Rotem will lead the engine’s planning and design, while Korean Air, the nation’s largest air carrier, will lead development of the engine’s turbopump. “Hyundai Rotem began developing methane engines in 1994 and has steadily advanced its methane engine technology, achieving Korea’s first successful combustion test in 2006,” Hyundai Rotem said in a statement. “Furthermore, this project is expected to secure the technological foundation for the commercialization of methane engines for reusable space launch vehicles and lay the groundwork for targeting the global space launch vehicle market.”

I should re-emphasize that the joint program is to develop a 35-ton-class engine, not a complete launch vehicle. Those two paragraphs are exactly everything the source had so there's no mention about a vehicle's size, number of stages, engines - or any of those important words. 

Still, all of the increased activity in the space sector from Korea that we've seen in just this one newsletter is great to see.

Congress warned Artemis “cannot work”

A really rare thing took place in front of a congressional subcommittee today. An expert witness, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, told them China is going to beat us to the moon and the plans to get there cannot work. More surprising was someone saying out loud that the reason the Artemis program is in such a deep hole is because of the perpetually late and over budget Space Launch System (SLS) and the recognition that the cost plus contracts they've been working under are a big problem. 

Let's back up a minute. 

Remember back in October when acting NASA adminstrator Sean Duffy did a review of the situation, partly to shake up everything? He got some things right but also got others wrong - in particular no focus on the cost plus contracts. But a month or six weeks before that, in the wake of Senator Ted Cruz hosting a "save the SLS" meeting in the Senate, Duffy was arguing we need to make Artemis III's mission the last SLS launch because we simply can't afford to use the SLS. In particular what Duffy said was:

If Artemis I, Artemis II, and Artemis III are all $4 billion a launch, $4 billion a launch. At $4 billion a launch, you don’t have a Moon program. It just, I don’t think that exists.

If I may be allowed to pirate that a little, I read that as, "$4 billion here, 4 billion there, pretty soon you're talking real money." 

As for what to do about it, Griffin said legislators should end the present plan.

“The Artemis III mission and those beyond should be canceled and we should start over, proceeding with all deliberate speed,” Griffin said. He included a link to his plan, which is not dissimilar from the “Apollo on Steroids” architecture he championed two decades ago, but was later found to be unaffordable within NASA’s existing budget.

That says the Artemis II SLS and Orion Capsule they just stacked for its February 5 mission will be the last SLS ever launched. I don't see how that could be relevant to whatever program replaces this, and if it's not relevant to whatever the program becomes, I say scrap it.

As I'm sure you're all aware, while there has always been a few percent of people who say we've never been to the moon, an argument I've noticed lately that I hadn't heard in the 1990s is along the lines of "things were so primitive in the 1960s, we barely had computers, how did we go then when technology today is so much better?" One of the reasons is people designing the Artemis programs thought it would be a waste to recreate the Apollo missions - send two guys to the moon for a day or two and come right back? That's silly. 

The idea was to build out a way to stay on the moon longer.  So they built the SLS rocket and capsule system (SLS = Shuttles' Leftover Shit) that falls short of the Apollo-Saturn V combination and kept band-aiding things onto that. A Lunar Space Station, um, "Lunar Gateway" that Apollo didn't need because they could get there for a couple of days, for example. Near Rectilinear Halo Orbits and more.

The most stringent criticism of the Artemis Program was offered by former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin. He has long been a critic of NASA’s approach toward establishing what the space agency views as a “sustainable” path back to the Moon, which relies on reusable lunar landers that are refueled in space.

Griffin reiterated that criticism on Thursday, without naming SpaceX or Blue Origin, and their Starship and Blue Moon Mk 2 landers.

“The bottom line is that an architecture which requires a high number of refueling flights in low-Earth orbit, no one really knows how many, uses a technology that has not yet ever been demonstrated in space, is very unlikely to work—unlikely to the point where I will say it cannot work,” Griffin said.
...
“Sticking to a plan is important when the plan makes sense,” Griffin said. “China is sticking to a plan that makes sense. It looks a lot, in fact, like what the United States did for Apollo. Provably, that worked. Sticking to a plan that will not work for Artemis III and beyond makes no sense.”

Aside from recognition and credit to the Commercial Lunar Payload Services, CLPS, which has been behind many of the small budget missions to the moon over the last several years, the other positive things to come out of the meeting came from Dean Cheng of the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, who said NASA and Congress must do a better job of holding itself and its contractors accountable.

Many of NASA’s major exploration programs, including the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System rocket, and their ground systems, have run years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget in the last 15 years. NASA has funded these programs with cost-plus contracts, so it has had limited ability to enforce deadlines with contractors. Moreover, Congress has more or less meekly gone along with the delays and continued funding the programs.

Cheng said that whatever priorities policymakers decide for NASA,  failing to achieve objectives should come with consequences.

“One, it needs to be bipartisan, to make very clear throughout our system that this is something that everyone is pushing for,” Cheng said of establishing priorities for NASA. “And two, that there are consequences, budgetary, legal, and otherwise, to the agency, to supplying companies. If they fail to deliver on time and on budget, that it will not be a ‘Well, okay, let’s try again next year.’ There need to be consequences.”

“There need to be consequences?” This needs to apply to everything DC regulates/rules over and every agency doing it. 

The Artemis II vehicle inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, this November. Image credit: NASA

Chinese company's first launch goes well, but booster landing fails

China's first attempt to launch a reusable, orbital class rocket, had a lot to celebrate after the mission as the rocket successfully delivered the payload to orbit, but like the first launch of New Glenn, it was successful except for landing the booster. 

LandSpace, a decade-old company based in Beijing, launched its new Zhuque-3 rocket for the first time at 11 pm EST Tuesday (04:0 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan launch site in northwestern China. 

It's widely being reported that the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) was based on the Falcon 9, and it would be believable in any case, whether or not the rocket was being built in China, but let me give you a view of the "business end" of the system during initial liftoff and the start of climbing into orbit.

Nine TQ-12A engines, burning methane and liquid oxygen, power the first Zhuque-3 rocket off the launch pad. Credit: LandSpace

Notice the black triangular shapes? Those are the landing legs. Now the methane/lox combination is different from the F9's kerosene/lox combination, but a relatively minor change. That is, they probably didn't copy the F9's Merlin engines but either used an existing engine from elsewhere in China or they developed their own. The nine engines develop 1.7 million pounds of thrust, similar to but slightly less than the Falcon 9. The payload capacity is therefore a bit less than Falcon 9's as well. Zhuque-3 is able to lift 40,350 pounds to low Earth orbit (LEO), around 80% of the 50,265 pounds Falcon 9 can send to LEO. 

That view simply has "Falcon 9 copy" written all over it to my eyes. 

The rocket’s upper stage fired a single engine to continue accelerating into orbit. LandSpace confirmed the upper stage “achieved the target orbit” and declared success for the rocket’s “orbital launch mission.” This alone is a remarkable accomplishment for a brand new rocket.

But LandSpace had other goals for this launch. The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, booster stage is architected for recovery and reuse, the first rocket in China with such a design. Made of stainless steel, the first stage arced to the edge of space before gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere. After making it through reentry, the booster was supposed to relight a subset of its engines for a final braking burn before a vertical landing at a prepared location about 240 miles (390 kilometers) downrange from the launch pad.
...
Videos shared on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, showed the final moments of the booster’s supersonic descent. A fireball enveloped the rocket at the start of the landing burn, and it impacted the recovery pad at high speed. But the rocket appeared to survive the most extreme aerodynamic forces of reentry, and it nearly hit a bullseye at the landing pad, situated in a remote dune field in the Gobi Desert.

Video of the last ~25 seconds of the flight here. 

“According to telemetry data, an anomaly occurred after the first stage initiated its landing burn, preventing a soft landing on the designated recovery pad,” LandSpace wrote on X. “The stage debris came down near the edge of the recovery pad, and the recovery test was unsuccessful. The specific cause is under further investigation.”

Those of us following new rocket developments would probably have been truly shocked if this vehicle had made the landing on its first try. New Glenn, of course, completely missed its first landing attempt and had to try again on its second flight just weeks ago. SpaceX, once they successfully landed a booster on land at the KSC and then landed on a drone ship offshore, put out a light-hearted video called "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" which showed many attempts to land a Falcon 9 before finally accomplishing that. The current count of successful F9 landings is over 500. That has to make the next systems being developed easier to succeed with. 

China needs reusable rockets to keep up with the US launch industry, which is dominated by SpaceX, a company that flies more often and hauls heavier cargo to orbit than all Chinese rockets combined. There are at least two Chinese megaconstellations now being deployed in low-Earth orbit, each with architectures requiring thousands of satellites to relay data and Internet signals around the world. Without scaling up satellite production and reusing rockets, China will have difficulty matching the capacities of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other emerging US launch companies. 

Without reusable rockets, China has turned to a wide variety of expendable boosters this year to launch less than half as often as the United States. China has made 78 orbital launch attempts so far this year, but no single rocket type has flown more than 13 times. In contrast, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is responsible for 153 of 182 launches by US rockets.

Artemis II is fully stacked for launch

The SLS rocket and Orion capsule for the Artemis II mission to loop around the moon are stacked in the Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center. Depending on where I look, the date can move around, and while being stacked doesn't necessarily mean it's ready to roll to the pad (39B) or that it's going to remain fully stacked, my guess is the funny date disagreement is probably due to a typo or "write-o" on somebody's notes. 

The important part is that the launch window for this mission opens No Earlier Than Feb. 5, 2026 at 8:09 PM which is just over two months from now.  NASA's news on that adds "no later than April" of next year.  

NASA’s Orion spacecraft, complete with its launch abort system escape tower, is now integrated with the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Following Orion stacking, teams completed testing critical communications systems between SLS and Orion, and confirmed the interfaces function properly between the rocket, Orion, and the ground systems, including end-to-end testing with the Near Space Network and Deep Space Network, which aid in communications and navigation.

“NASA remains focused on getting ready to safely fly four astronauts around the Moon and back,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “Our mission will lay the groundwork for future missions to the lunar surface and to Mars.”

Naturally, there are many tests coming between now and its launch to the moon. The vehicle will have to be rolled out to the pad, so they point out many of these tests can be done with the SLS/Orion stack still inside the VAB. This list from Exploration Ground Systems is a good starting point. 

A matrix of tests to be completed before launch in February.

In the big picture sense, this is another milestone on the way to launch. In one sense, it's "just another" milestone; from another viewpoint, it's important but they're all important.

Yet Another Slow to Zero News Day

So some old memes! 

Um... dude?  You might want to check your six.

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving

It was a day to feel like things are pleasantly normal, rather than appearing to be in the opening moves of the Crusades 2.0. Thursday, we enjoyed what has become our traditional Thanksgiving celebration at my brother's house in south Florida. There and back combine into five hours of driving, but it's mostly the Florida Turnpike and I-95 so it's easier than driving in stop and go traffic. We spent from about 1:00 to about 6:00 PM with my extended family. We had a different day than last year's, which was at my nephew's over on the west side of the state. Both were nice, but the meeting at my brother's has been going on since that nephew was a teenager. 

Friday was our Thanksgiving here with just us. I smoked a turkey using a method I found years ago on Serious Eats; a combination of spatchcocking the turkey together with a dry brine and then smoking in my Weber kettle grill. It gives such a nice pink smoke ring in the meat that you just don't get with the electric smokers. I've done this basic recipe several times and it does produce a good turkey. I have fooled around with what I do a bit but I never know if the main difference is what I've done or how the turkeys are being raised. An aspect of this guy's recipe I never made the effort to follow is to add a tablespoon of baking powder into the dry rub. It's supposed to make the skin crisper and I didn't notice that at all.

Disclaimer: not this year's turkey. This picture is from 2021. 

The rest of my "usual activities" have been a bit on Abby's side of normal (Abby Normal...). Solar activity has been low and radio propagation has pretty low activity. I haven't bothered to turn the station on in days. I have a sale offer from the station software I use most (Ham Radio Deluxe) and I really need to spend a few hours working on that, trying to fix some odd issues I see when it automagically logs a contact for me. First step is to get the latest update installed - which I downloaded last weekend. 

We do have the potential for some improvement in propagation. A large sunspot group just rotated across the solar limb and started its one week voyage of pointing more directly at us each day until it's in the middle longitudes of the sun's face. Top story at SpaceWeather.com. In the last 24 hours, the Solar Flux has gone up from 120 to 160 and the planetary K index has increased from 2 to 3. 

It's worth watching a bit more closely.

Other than that, it has been fixing odds and ends around the house. We've been in this house 41 years. I don't think there's anything beyond big pipes in the slab that hasn't been replaced by now.

A typical Friday - in the world of the space industry

Today, of course, is the long-awaited and much-ballyhooed Black Friday - subject of at least a billion ads. In the corner of the world I like to keep track of, there were two things of note.  

• SpaceX launched the Transporter-15 Ride Share mission from Vandenberg this morning at 10:44 AM PT. SpaceX reports this was the 30th flight of Booster B1071. At 2345 UTC, SpaceX reports it had deployed all 140 payloads designed to separate from the rocket.
• In the aftermath of Thursday's Crewed Soyuz launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, which successfully carried Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikayev, as well as NASA astronaut Christopher Williams, to the orbiting laboratory without incident, Roscosmos discovered some substantial damage to the launch pad. 

In a terse statement issued Thursday night on the social media site Telegram, the Russian space corporation that operates Soyuz appeared to downplay the incident: “The launch pad was inspected, as is done every time a rocket is launched. Damage to several launch pad components was identified. Damage can occur after launch, so such inspections are mandatory worldwide. The launch pad’s condition is currently being assessed.” 

Ars Technica is passing on additional reports to that quoted paragraph. 

However video imagery of the launch site after liftoff showed substantial damage, with a large service platform appearing to have fallen into the flame trench below the launch table. According to one source, this is a platform located beneath the rocket, where workers can access the vehicle before liftoff. It has a mass of about 20 metric tons and was apparently not secured prior to launch, and the thrust of the vehicle ejected it into the flame trench. “There is significant damage to the pad,” said this source.

While Russia has "plenty of launch pads" in Russia, Kazkhstan and former republics of the USSR; the issue is that Site 31 at Baikonur is the country’s only pad presently configured to handle launches of the Soyuz rocket and the two spacecraft critical to space station operations: their manned Soyuz vehicle and their unmanned Progress cargo drones.  

I get the feeling from reading what I can find is that I don't particularly doubt Roscomos' ability to fix the pad, and they say they have adequate spare parts to do it all. The issue is more along the lines of anything that might require more support from the government, which is rather tied up with their Ukraine issues. Much of that centers around the Progress cargo drones' trips to the ISS. Progress remains the only cargo vehicle to the ISS that seems rated to correct the ISS' orbit. SpaceX did that minor experiment recently that lifted the ISS but nobody that I saw would say they could take over for the Russians.  

Technicians work on the pad in Baikonur with the fully fueled Soyuz rocket. Credit: NASA TV

When I first ran into these stories I thought, SpaceX launched 140 ride sharing satellites, on the 30th flight of that booster, and it seemed impossibly easy, while Roscosmos almost lost the launch pad because someone didn't attach a 44 thousand pound (20 metric tons) service platform properly.  

Final words to Eric Berger at Ars Technica - as I often do:

The at least temporary loss of Site 31 will only place further pressure on SpaceX. The company currently flies NASA’s only operational crewed vehicle capable of reaching the space station, and the space agency recently announced that Boeing’s Starliner vehicle needs to fly an uncrewed mission before potentially carrying crew again. Moreover, due to rocket issues, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 vehicle is the only rocket currently available to launch both Dragon and Cygnus supply missions to the space station. For a time, SpaceX may also now be called upon to backstop Russia as well. 

 

EDIT 11/19 0815 ET:  The random brain fart generator threw one in that I didn't notice last night. Turned the original "44 thousand ton (20 metric tons)" to the correct 44 thousand pounds. 

Remember ULA saying they'll do up to 10 Vulcan missions?

It's looking like they'll finish 2025 with one. 

Around this time last year, officials at United Launch Alliance projected 2025 would be their busiest year ever. Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, told reporters the company would launch as many as 20 missions this year, with roughly an even split between the legacy Atlas V launcher and its replacement—the Vulcan rocket.

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 the company is so eager accelerate into service. Six flights would make 2025 the busiest launch year for ULA since 2022, but it falls well short of the company’s forecast.

Last week, ULA announced their final launch of 2025 will be December 15th, now set for 3:15AM at SLC-41. Amazon just renamed their Kuiper internet constellation as Amazon LEO, and this mission is LA-04. This will be an Atlas V. Their one and only Vulcan launch was August 12th - three months ago.

...The rocket deployed an experimental military navigation satellite and at least one additional classified payload into orbit. This mission was the third flight of the Vulcan rocket, and its first national security mission after the Space Force formally certified ULA’s new launch vehicle.

United Launch Alliance is one of the Space Force’s two certified launch providers for the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program and the military’s most critical space missions, delivering satellites to orbit for reconnaissance, navigation, communications, and early warning. SpaceX, the other provider, has launched its Falcon 9 rocket fleet 151 times so far this year, including six times for the Space Force’s NSSL program.

Read that last sentence again. ULA launched one Vulcan for an NSSL launch; SpaceX launched six NSSL missions - out of 151 Falcon 9 launches. So far. The next Falcon 9 will be Friday afternoon (1:18 EST but from Vandenberg) - a Transporter ride share mission.  

Concerns about the Vulcan rocket are nothing new at the Pentagon. In May 2024, the defense official then in charge of procuring space hardware wrote a letter to Boeing and Lockheed Martin—ULA’s corporate parents—outlining his concerns about the Vulcan rocket’s entry into service. “Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays,” wrote Frank Calvelli, the assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition under the Biden administration.

The low launch rate and issues they've had all sound relatively typical for a new rocket, but that only raises the question of why Tory Bruno thought they would be different and get to 10 this year.

In October of 2024, the first stage of ULA's third Vulcan rocket sports a different paint scheme than the first two missions, with solid red replacing a red flame pattern. Image credit: United Launch Alliance

ULA’s outfitting of a new rocket assembly hangar and a second mobile launch platform for the Vulcan rocket at Cape Canaveral has also seen delays. With so many launches in its backlog, ULA needs capacity to stack and prepare at least two rockets in different buildings at the same time. Eventually, the company’s goal is to launch at an average clip of twice per month.

On Monday, ground crews at Cape Canaveral moved the second Vulcan launch platform to the company’s launch pad for fit checks and “initial technical testing.” This is a good sign that the company is moving closer to ramping up the Vulcan launch cadence, but it’s now clear it won’t happen this year.

All we can conclude is that they're moving in the right direction, just not fast enough.

Time for my annual Black Friday post

Think it's early for that?  Black Friday is still the day after Thanksgiving? You must not get much junk email.  I swear I've been getting ads proclaiming Black Friday sales since last July.  Just to put a rough boundary on the question, in an average day, I get in the vicinity of 100 emails addressed to my normal home email address and the account associated with the blog gets the (usually) couple of comments to a posting and another 10 to 15 junk mails. That said, the whole point of using the term "Black Friday Sale" is to make you think it's a better sale than any other sale all year long.

Yeah, I know.  For all the good complaining about Black Friday Sale junk mail going on all year is gonna do, I may as well do another "Old Man Yells at Cloud" kind of post.

What they've done, instead of making shoppers (at least, this shopper) think that some special sales are going on, is to convince us that there's no such thing as Black Friday anymore.  As I've said before, when every day is Black Friday, no day can be Black Friday - in the usual sense of a special day that kicks off the Christmas shopping season.  It has just become another way of saying "SALE" in every retail place that pushes it. Saying it's a Black Friday sale adds no more information than simply saying "SALE." 

It always pays to know what going prices are.  I've heard that generally speaking, the best time for deals is closer to Christmas, especially right before Christmas.  You'll get better prices than this week, but it's a gamble.  You're betting that the stores will be stuck with something you want and they would rather discount it than not sell it.  If they sell out first you lose.  If they don't sell out but still won't or can't cut the price, again you lose.  That said, it has worked out for me in the past.  It's sort of like calling a bluff in poker.    

Retail is a rough way to make a living. I'm sure you've heard how airline reservation systems base the seat price on the apparent interest in a flight.  If you go back and check on the price of that seat every week, the system says there must be more demand for that flight and raises the price.  What if stores could measure real time demand and adjust the price.  Say you're looking for a new tool or other gadget; what if they see someone checking the web site regularly and interpret that as several people interested in that item and raised its price?  Would you be upset or offended?  What if they dropped the price to see at what level you can't resist pushing the Glistening, Candy-like, "BUY" button?  I don't have any hard evidence that anyone does that, but it seems trivial for an online store to track interest in something.  Their biggest risk is scaring away or alienating customers. 

To me the Golden Rule is the willing seller/willing buyer.  If people are happy with what they paid, regardless of whether or not it really is "the best price of the year," and the seller is happy with the price they got for it, that's definition of a fair price.  I'm sure not gonna poop in someone's Post Toasties by telling them they didn't get the best price ever.  

Over the years, this seems to have become my default cartoon for my Black Friday post. Note that it says "Joe Heller 2010" in the top left corner! 2010 was my first year of the blog and I looked up the month of November to see if I used it then, but I didn't. I used one with a white cat walking on his hind legs and captioned "Invisible Shopping Cart."

NASA forbids Boeing's Starliner from carrying a crew - at least for now

A year ago this week, the Starliner crew stranded in space of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were settling in for Thanksgiving on the ISS - their 2 week mission to the Space Station having been shut down over the preceding summer and made into a much longer mission - returning in March of this year instead of late June of '24. The reason was some pretty frightening things that happened in their Starliner capsule on the way to the ISS in June. 

There has been talk since their flight that it would be better to fly Starliner uncrewed as a cargo drone to the ISS.  Only cargo, no people. Today, NASA made it official. 

NASA and Boeing are now targeting no earlier than April 2026 to fly the uncrewed Starliner-1 mission, the space agency said. Launching by next April will require completion of rigorous test, certification, and mission readiness activities, NASA added in a statement.

“NASA and Boeing are continuing to rigorously test the Starliner propulsion system in preparation for two potential flights next year,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, in a statement.

That link in the first paragraph describes some conversations between Butch and Eric Berger of Ars Technica. I remember being shocked when I read of some of the stuff Butch and Suni went through. Admittedly, they're functionally test pilots so they routinely go through things - and do things - that are way beyond my world, but there were several places in that story where Really Bad Things seemed like they could have happened.  

NASA also said it has reached an agreement with Boeing to modify the Commercial Crew contract, signed in 2014, that called for six crewed flights to the space station following certification of the spacecraft. Now the plan is to fly Starliner-1 carrying cargo, and then up to three additional missions before the space station is retired.

“This modification allows NASA and Boeing to focus on safely certifying the system in 2026, execute Starliner’s first crew rotation when ready, and align our ongoing flight planning for future Starliner missions based on station’s operational needs through 2030,” Stich said.

My gut feel in reading about Starliner has been that it may not make financial sense for Boeing to permanently fix all the problems. As a reminder, Starliner's first flight was in December 2019, without a crew and the mission had to be cut short because software problems plagued the spacecraft. It was nearly lost shortly after launch as well as before atmospheric reentry. It did not achieve its planned rendezvous with the space station.  The second orbital test flight took place in May 2022. Because of problems on the previous mission, this spacecraft also flew uncrewed. This flight was more successful, reaching the space station despite some thruster issues. 

NASA then spent more than two years testing Starliner on the ground before its first crewed flight in 2024, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. During its approach to the space station, the Starliner spacecraft once again experienced serious thruster issues. (However, the life-and-death nature of this flight was not revealed until nearly a year later.) Starliner ultimately docked with the station, but after heated deliberations, NASA informed Boeing that the vehicle would return to Earth uncrewed.

So three orbital test flights, two uncrewed and one half of a crewed test flight with little to show for it. If someone were to ask you how your flight was, whether business or pleasure trip, saying, "well, I'm alive - it didn't blow up" is better than not surviving it but still not a ringing endorsement. This fourth test flight, at some time in 2026, will be a big test. It's difficult to think they can get enough systems to pass that there are no questions, but it's certainly a goal to strive for. 

NASA has remained largely mum about the changes made to Boeing’s propulsion system and the tests it has undergone on the ground. Part of the problem with diagnosing the thruster issues is that the problems occurred in the “service module” portion of the spacecraft, which is jettisoned before the vehicle reenters Earth’s atmosphere and returns to Earth.

Third test flight's Starliner capsule docked to the ISS in June '24, before the mission was aborted. Image credit: NASA

Good Preliminary analysis on the Booster 18 test failure

YouTube analyst Scott Manley put up a pretty interesting YouTube short on the explosion that happened to Booster 18 early Friday morning. The short is extracted from a 31 minute video that covers the New Glenn launch and this Booster 18 RUD. 

Scott shows some pretty impressive photos in that short video, but leaves us with a pretty familiar conclusion. It looks like a COPV (Composite Overlaid Pressure Vessel) was either the root cause or else a major contributor to the incident, much like last June's accident that destroyed Booster 36 and the test stand. 

In the video, Scott shows this photo from Jordan Guidry at What About It? The area on the right where the worst damage is would have been where the COPVs were mounted. As the transcribed text in the upper middle says, "No covers and no pressure vessels are visible." Did the pressure vessels disassemble themselves?

If you look near the bottom of the downcomer tube, essentially in the middle of blown out area, you'll see a hole and can see that metal from the tube is pushed and bent into the tube. Scott posits that a COPV exploded and debris shot through the downcomer, causing the RUD. 

What About It also has a video on this incident. 

At this point, if it really is a recurrent problem with COPVs, it's either the tanks they're buying or SpaceX's own procedures for handling them.  Either way, the sooner they get back to testing SuperHeavy boosters and flying Starships, the better.  

SpaceX launches 150th Falcon 9 mission of the year

I fell asleep and missed the 2:53 AM launch this morning, but it was the 150th Falcon 9 launch of the year. It was a regular Starlink launch, Group 6-79, and the 9th mission of booster B1090. B1090 landed successfully on A Shortfall Of Gravitas to be prepared for its next mission and all 29 satellites were said to be operating as expected an hour after launch. 

I think of a booster with nine flights as "practically new" although I remember when they were openly concerned if they could get 10 missions out of a booster, and the current target is 40 launches. I don't think I'll be terribly surprised if they do the 40th flight and reset to 50 as their goal.

It's a totally new way of thinking of spaceflight. If you were going up on that rocket, would you rather be on completely new hardware like the early astronauts or would "a couple" of previous flights give you a bit more confidence the hardware will work for you. Sure the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, as well as their Atlas, Titan and Saturn launch vehicles had several tests that never left the ground. Compare that to flying a Crew Dragon that has flown a couple of missions on a Falcon 9 that has flown 10. I think I prefer the second case.

Falcon 9 rocket B1090 carrying 29 Starlink satellites lifts off from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Saturday morning, Nov. 22, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX)

There are 5 weeks left in the year, with a couple of extra days that will be taken off for holidays, and the average pace has been 150 launches/47 weeks or 3.19 launches/week. If they can make that pace which has alternated between east and west coasts, that's pretty much 16 more launches in 2025.  If they made that pace, it would mean 166 launches in 2025. Of course the actual total could be more or less than 166.

1st 3rd Gen Starship booster has RUD on test stand

After the success of the Flight Test 11 back in early October, SpaceX had said they were done with the version 2 Starship and would move on to version 3 for the next flight test, with a target date of mid-January. That came to a halt last night as the first version 3 Starship, ship number 18, had a "Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly" early this morning on the test stand at the Massey’s Test Site at Boca Chica. It was reported as 4:04 AM Central Time, or 10:04 UTC Friday.

The company had only rolled the massive rocket out of the factory a day earlier, noting the beginning of its test campaign, it said on the social media site X: “The first operations will test the booster’s redesigned propellant systems and its structural strength.”

That testing commenced on Thursday night at the Massey’s Test Site a couple of miles down the road from the company’s main production site at Starbase Texas. However an independent video showed the rocket’s lower half undergo an explosive (or possibly implosive) event at 4:04 am CT (10:04 UTC) Friday.

I first heard of this late in the afternoon here, close to 12 hours after it happened, with a video that did a pretty deep dive into what seemed to have happened, along with their own analysis. There are photographs of all the parts that make up that part of the booster with some speculation on what may have happened, with what seemed to be solid reasoning behind it. 

The bottom line on Booster 18 is that it might be usable if they didn't plan on taking it apart to do more extensive failure analysis. 

Although the company is hardware-rich—it has built a massive factory in South Texas to churn out such vehicles—it nonetheless had a lot riding on this rocket. This is the first Starship Version 3, which was intended to have many design fixes and upgrades from the previous iterations of Starship vehicles to improve the reliability and performance of the massive rocket.

Overall, it could be relatively minor damage. The ship wasn't fully built and doesn't have even one of its 33 Raptor engines installed. The only major damage appears to be on the outside of the ship.  It's a bit difficult to see in this picture from Starship Gazer on X, but on the right side, below where the lights hit the side, you can see what appears to be a rectangular fixture bent into a large arc. You can see damage to the body of the ship above that (sort of) visible area where the lights hit the booster.

Nevertheless, this is the point in the rocket development program at which SpaceX sought to be accelerating with development of Starship and reaching a healthy flight cadence in 2026. Many of the company’s near-term goals rely on getting Starship flying regularly and reliably.

With this upgraded vehicle, SpaceX wants to demonstrate booster landing and reuse, an upper stage tower catch next year, the beginning of operational Starlink deployment missions, and a test campaign for NASA’s Artemis Program. To keep this Moon landing program on track, it is critical that SpaceX and NASA conduct an on-orbit refueling test of Starship, which nominally was slated for the second half of 2026.

One of the most obvious things one learns about SpaceX when you start watching them is that they work very quickly. No doubt their engineers are already poring over the data captured this morning and probably had started going over data before they could safely go look at the booster.  I wouldn't be surprised to learn they've already diagnosed the problem. The company is resilient. As Musk himself said in response to Acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy's interest in getting other companies to bid against SpaceX, “SpaceX is moving like lightning compared to the rest of the space industry.”