Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below. Axiom signs deal to establish an astronaut training program with the Maldives The deal also includes working with the Maldives’s space agency on other space-related| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
NASA’s failed Moon spacesuits A new NASA inspector report issued today [pdf] has found that the single contractor NASA uses to maintain the spacesuits on ISS, Collins Aerospace, has increasingly been unable to do the job, and NASA has no alternative contractor to turn to. From the report’s executive summary: We previously reported on NASA’s spacesuit management in 2017 and| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
The planned return trajectories for both Superheavy and Starship on future tests In an update posted yesterday on SpaceX’s website, the company revealed that it is targeting October 13, 2025 for the eleventh orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket. The update also provided details about the company will test during this flight, including the reuse of a second Superheavy| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
During a static fire engine test yesterday in preparation for launch, the rocket startup Firefly lost the first stage when an explosion occurred at what appeared to be the base of the rocket. From the company’s update: During testing at Firefly’s facility in Briggs, Texas, the first stage of Firefly’s Alpha Flight 7 rocket experienced an event that resulted in| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
China earlier today successfully launched two test satellites for “experimental verification of Earth observation technologies, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Xichang space port in southwest China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. The two satellites are part of the Shiyan family of satellites that have done| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
An evening pause: Performed live 1985. Hat tip Rex Ridenoure.| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below. Northrop Grumman successfully tests autonomous rendezvous and docking using planned Starlab port It used a Cygnus docking interface to do this, demonstrating that when Starlab| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
A new study suggests that exposing patients with advanced osteoarthritis (OA) to low doses of radiation reduced their pain significantly. The trial included 114 people with primary knee OA, diagnosed by moderate damage visible on X-rays, and significant pain with walking. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups: very low-dose radiation (0.3 Gy total, spread over six sessions| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Ariel as seen by Voyager-2 in 1986. Click for original image. The uncertainty of science: Using computer modeling based on our scant data of the surface features of the Uranus moon Ariel, scientists now posit that underground oceans, some of gigantic depth as much as 100 miles deep, were required to shape those features. “First, we mapped out the larger| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have detected a host of carbon molecules inside an accretion disk that surrounds an exoplanet circling a baby star 625 light years away. Infrared observations of CT Cha b were made with Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) using its medium resolution spectrograph. An initial look into Webb’s archival data revealed signs of molecules within the| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Two Japanese startups, the lunar landing company Ispace and the orbital capsule startup ElevationSpace, have signed an agreement to develop the first private mission to bring samples back to Earth from the Moon. Based on the agreement, Ispace and ElevationSpace will jointly pursue development to undertake a lunar return mission. Ispace has already demonstrated the technology to deploy a lander| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
In a result that could have a direct bearing on trying to understand the inexplicable geology of Mars, a new study has found that ice actually does a better job at releasing iron from mineral deposits than liquid water. It was once believed that when iron-rich mineral deposits were locked in ice, the iron would stay put, but a new| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Click for original. The Italian rocket company Avio has won $47 million study contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to begin design work on a reusable upper stage rocket. The contract runs for two years, with a goal to “assess and prepare the requirements, the design and the technologies for both the ground and flight segments required for an| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
SpaceX this evening successfully placed another 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage, B1063, completed its 28th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific. (This booster had been listed as the first stage on a launch two days ago, but it turns out the| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Since yesterday China successfully completed two launches from two of its interior spaceports. First, it successfully launched what its state-run press described as a satellite that will “primarily support monitoring and research activities in weather forecasting, atmospheric chemistry and climate change”, its Long March 4C rocket lifting off yesterday from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China. Then today China’s Long| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Embedded below the fold in two parts. To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
An evening pause: No visuals, no instruments, just their voices singing to heaven. Hat tip Mike Nelson.| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below. Rocket Lab touts its proposed Mars Telecommunications orbiter The company is one of several bidding for this contract. Hence the repeated X tweets plugging it.| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Click for full video If you think the left is tamping down its violent rhetoric and terrorist murder attempts of conservatives, think again. Earlier this week an independent group of conservatives wearing MAGA hats decided to set up a table at Tennessee State University (TSU), inviting anyone to debate the merits or failures of DEI. Very quickly a mob formed,| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Click for movie. A team of Japanese astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile to detect for the first time the rotation of the spiral accretion disk that surrounds a young star, rotation that showed the spiral was in the process of forming new planets. Observations have revealed a spiral pattern in the disk of gas| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Proposed Canadian spaceports After trying twice earlier this week to launch its first suborbital test rocket from its Atlantic Spaceport in Newfoundland, the rocket startup Nordspace has decided to postpone that launch for at least several weeks, while it investigates the fuel leaks on the launchpad that caused fires during both launch attempts. From the company’s website: After detailed review| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
In another sign that the member nations of the European Space Agency (ESA) are increasingly going their own way, Germany’s defense minister announced yesterday that his agency plans to spend $41 billion on space through 2030. According to a 25 September Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) release published following the minister’s address, the €35 billion investment will cover five main priorities:| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Tenacity grounded in a warehouse, with the Shooting Star small cargo capsule attached to its aft port. NASA today announced it has modified its fixed-price cargo contract with Sierra Space, canceling the planned seven cargo missions as well as a demo docking mission, replacing this with one test flight that will simply go into orbit and then return to Earth.| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
SpaceX this evening successfully placed 24 additional Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage completed its 28th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific, moving it up into the top rankings for the most reuse by a rocket: 39 Discovery space shuttle 33 Atlantis space| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
An evening pause: Taken from the album Viva Elvis, which is the soundtrack remix of Presley’s Cirque du Soleil show. From the youtube webpage: Viva Elvis features new backing instrumentation on each track in an attempt to modernize the arrangements. This has met with a mixed critical response, with some reviewers praising the production quality and others opining that Elvis’s| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
For those interested in hearing Robert Pratt and I discuss the non-stop ugliness we are presently seeing from the left side of the political spectrum, I will be on his show, Pratt on Texas, starting tomorrow at 5 pm (Central). We taped the show today. Three out of the four segments focused on that tragic and very horrible madness that| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below. CEO Chris Kent of rocket startup Astra calls Firefly’s engines garbage during presentation Firefly has put an unmanned lander on the Moon. It also has| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Click for original image. Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and downloaded on August 3, 2025. Labeled as a “terrain sample,” such images are usually taken not as part of any specific research request but because the camera team| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Tumbleweed being tested on sandy ground. Click for video. European engineers at Aarhus University in Denmark have now developed and tested a tumbling rover design that is propelled solely by the Martian wind. You can read their most recent paper here. Not surprisingly, they call it “Tumbleweed.” The screen capture to the right comes from a video of a wind| Behind The Black – Robert Zimmerman
Axiom hires Redwire to build the solar panels for its first station module| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
Cool image time! On December 24, 2021 the seismometer of the Mars lander InSight detected a four magnitude earthquake, the largest detected up until then. Because its nature suggested that it had been caused by an impact, not an internal shifting, the science team for Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) immediately started searching for new impact craters in the area of Mars where the data suggested the quake came from.| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
SpaceX launches Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter to ISS| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
Two launches in the past day| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
Laughter at learning Charlie Kirk had been shot| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
Italian rocket company Avio commits $469 million to expand operations| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
The left’s response to this murder| behindtheblack.com
The left’s response to this murder| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
September 11, 2025 Quick space links| behindtheblack.com
A new fad has sprung up among our power-hungry and very ignorant politicians and leftist press who are panicking over the Wuhan flu. It apparently has not been enough that they have successfully destroyed a thriving economy, put millions out of work, destroyed the airline, entertainment, sports, and restaurant industries, over a disease that, at best is nothing more than a slight blip in the overall death rate, and at worst will be comparable to similar past epidemics that we lived through wi...| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
As part of the panic that has been overwhelming the world because of COVID-19, one of the typical lies that is being spread is that the epidemic is going to overwhelm the world’s healthcare systems. This CNN article from yesterday, entitled “‘That’s when all hell broke loose’: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals”, is typical:| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
Let’s all go bankrupt! A bill introduced today by Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, rejects the Trump budget plan to phase out NASA’s failed SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway programs that have cost so far tens of billions for decades without accomplishing anything, and instead expands funding over the next decade to these and many other projects and agencies at NASA.| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
While many state governors across the United States dawdle and hesitate about lifting their panic-induced lock downs on their states out of fear it might cause a few more Wuhan virus deaths, the real devastation from their panic is propagating uncontrolled across the landscape, and will in the end kill far far more people.| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
Our new dictators in government and its bureaucracies are now attempting to impose a new “normal” on society, demanding that everyone where a mask wherever they go in public. They claim this is to “slow the spread of COVID-19”, but if you try to pin down the actual science that supports this claim, you will routinely have trouble finding it.| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
First we were told that it was necessary to impose “social distancing rules” and shut down the economy for a few weeks in order to prevent the healthcare system from being overwhelmed by a sudden influx of COVID-19 cases, predicted to possibly be in the millions. From a typical panicked news report on March 16:| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
Four more stories today indicate once again that the worldwide panic over the corona/COVID-19/Wuhan virus is strongly unwarranted:| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
Yesterday I got a bit of frustrating and disappointing news. The 51st Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC-51) to be held in the Houston suburbs beginning on March 15 (to which I was planning to attend) had been canceled due to coronavirus/COVID-19 fears. From the organizers’ email:| Behind The Black - Robert Zimmerman
Author: Robert Zimmerman| behindtheblack.com
Anonymous sources: Starship will need a major rebuild after two consecutive failures| behindtheblack.com