Alas, that they meet this qualifier is doubtful.
Things get weirder:
So, uh, some kind of weird back-handed lobbying effort? Or maybe a cigar is just a cigar: Boeing is correctly realizing that SLS may be on the chopping block (or at least being downsized), and the internal announcement is just giving fair warning to the employees.
Apparently, T-Mobile is now offering free Starlink text messaging for anyone on any carrier in the US (if you sign up):
Interestingly, they’re using Starlink trains in their advertising:
Similar to this and many other shots:
The satellites are not predominantly lined up like that–but the “Starlink trains” are commonly seen because the launches are so frequent, and it takes time for the latest batch of satellites to spread out. So they’ve become almost a representation of Starlink itself, which T-Mobile decided to abstract into their advertising copy.
Well, it’s not quite as intrusive as painting “Coca-Cola” across the face of the moon.
I’ll bet that with just a little effort, they could spell out a message in dot-matrix letting.
It may be the realization that the political appointee charged with hunting down and rapidly eliminating everything he consders to be wasteful government spending is the same person as the CEO of the spaceflight company offering the only alternative to what your project is supposed to deliver.
I doubt there would be any proposed lunar program at all, if the appropriations pork weren’t being spread throughout multiple congressional districts. I don’t think an alternative program based on Starship would even get approved.
The political winds were obvious even before the current administration. They must have been preparing for it at some level. Richard Shelby is gone, Boeing’s reputation is in tatters, the rocket has proven incapable of even launching the things it was designed for (Europa Clipper), and so on.
Arguably, Blue Origin is the more relevant force here. One could claim that the government shouldn’t be dependent on a single outside provider for heavy-lift launch. But now that Blue Origin is flying, we have another vehicle that’s roughly Falcon Heavy level, if not Starship. Sure, SLS is a lot bigger than New Glenn, but the latter is still capable enough to play a useful role in lunar missions.
Another spacecraft about to try landing on the moon:
Landings are as tricky as ever, but the lunar orbit shots are great.
An exchange between an astronaut and an asshole nut:
Yesterday I was reading:
The team overseeing NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has been directed to prepare for up to 20% in budget cuts that would touch on every aspect of the flagship observatory’s operations, which are managed by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Maryland. The potential cut comes even as the space observatory is more in demand than ever before, with astronomers requesting the equivalent of nine years’ worth of Webb observing time in one operational year.
While today I was reading:
China’s space agency is building a new space telescope that will rival current top-tier observatories. Known as the China Space Station Telescope (CSST), it will not only be as powerful as the cutting-edge James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), but will also be fully repairable and upgradable from space.
It’s clear that one political party is quite willing for the the U.S. to become a second tier country in science, while China forges ahead.
That Chinese scope is in no way a rival for the JWST, or even the Hubble. It’s a wide-angle survey scope with a 2 meter mirror and only near-infrared capability. The JWST has a 6.5 meter mirror (10x the area) and goes far deeper into the infrared (which means that, due to redshift, it can see farther away).
I’m sure it’ll be a perfectly fine scope, but it doesn’t even occupy the same category of instrument.
How do budget cuts to the JWT work considering that the telescope is not exclusively an American project? I’ve no doubt the US puts in the lion’s share of the budget so is this another shakedown or will this actually reduce the amount of science that scientists from around the world get on JWT, regardless of the amount of money that other countries put in?
Have we found a Strange Star? (A star between a neutron star and a black hole in density…neutrons break down into quarks and they support the star from becoming a black hole.)
They have been speculated but some think we might have evidence of one recently. Which is really cool but I do not know if this is enough evidence or a fake or a misreading of data. Any opinions?
There are currently three private missions on their way to the moon, all landers:
Two of them from the US, one from Japan.
The ESA is such a disappointment. Here is the current list of lunar missions, which does not include the ones en route:
The ESA has one. The US has missions from six different private companies alone, not to mention NASA or the USAF. Oh, those ones from Italy and Luxembourg? The Italian one was a cubesat launched with a bunch of others on Artemis I and the Luxembourg one was not much more than a radio beacon permanently bolted to an upper stage of a Chinese rocket.
How is it that Europe is such an also-ran when it comes to space? They aren’t poor, stupid, or anti-science. Even Japan is kicking their butt. Is it that everyone in Europe that didn’t migrate to the New World had such deep seated anti-exploration tendencies that they’ve passed it on through dozens of generations?
My guess (only a guess) is it is difficult to convince 27 countries to chip in money for very expensive space programs that probably will not net any one country an advantage worth investing in.
Elon announced via X/Twitter, that the Starship refueling demo needed for HLS, and that the Artemis program has been waiting years for, has been deferred until next year.
Although Elon won’t talk about the reasons, it’s widely known within NASA that there are significant delays with the Raptor 3 engine.
For Starships and boosters using the Raptor 2 engine, it was necessary for weight and space savings, to delete the heat exchanger that removes water vapor from the preburner exhaust streams. Those streams are used to pressurize the propellant tanks.
When water vapor is injected into the tanks, it solidifies into ice when mixed with the cryogenic liquid propellant. Elon’s solution to this is to use big strainers, but they’re not completely effective, and several Raptors have failed after ingesting ice.
The ice makes orbital refueling impossible, so it can’t be attempted until the heat exchangers are restored. But that can’t happen until the lighter and smaller Raptor 3’s are available for mass production.
Granted, although it hardly seems as if it’s Starship that’s holding up the Artemis program. SLS and Orion aren’t exactly sitting there ready and waiting. For Starship, I would guess that the most critical problem has been heat shielding. Starship upper stages have been making it back to the ground, but too damaged to possibly be reused. I’ve remarked multiple times that the entire Starship concept lives or dies on whether they can get reentry to work well enough that the stages won’t be hanger queens needing weeks of refurbishment.
They don’t care as much?
We can scratch one asteroid probe.