Meeting Notes from March 14, 2025

This was our 89th meeting. Keith, Hank, Phil, Harry, Beth, Don and I were in attendance. It has been a long 4 months since our last meeting and we had a lot of catching up to do on people’s activities. Don shared that he had a wonderful trip to Costa Rica. My notes are a little sketchy, but I think he said he saw a lot of monkeys but the cloudy skies didn’t help with any star-gazing. Carol and my travels are only to the two adjacent suburbs of Elmhurst and Lombard. But my younger son, Curt, had another work conference on Guam and he took the opportunity to spend a week on the even smaller Pacific island of Palau. There he snorkeled with some sharks and ate a bowl of fruit bat soup. He sent us a picture of it, but it was gross. There was a entire bat, hair, teeth and all in it. He said it tasted like pork. Curt, and my other son, Jay, got to visit the gravestone of Carol’s uncle who died during the battle of Normandy while they were on a side trip from watching the Chicago Bears play in London. They stayed a night at an older lady’s farm house in France and she didn’t speak English and my sons don’t speak French. Jay was offered some raw milk after the lady milked her cow in the morning and out of courtesy drank it. Fortunately no harmful effects. I’ve heard our new head of the CDC, RFK Jr. is a big fan of the beverage. I’m digressing close to politics, so back to observing the sky.

Carol and I were out looking at the bright planets across the sky, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn when she noticed a train of Starlink satellites. Over a 4 minutes period she saw 20+ satellites which is always a cool event. I didn’t have my shoes on and my eyes weren’t dark adapted, so I missed them. Darn it! Here is a good website to see if there are sighting opportunities. Recently launched Starlink satellites are brighter and closer together and there are over 8000 in orbit now. Carol also got up in the middle of the night on March 13, to check out the lunar eclipse. I took a quick peek at the dim brownish-red moon too. Later in the notes I’ll show you a picture taken from the Blue Ghost lander on the moon of the eclipse. I was glad to hear that two of my grandsons also woke up to check out the event.

Beth mentioned that she will be embarking on a 3-day underwater adventure off the Florida Keys with her husband, Chad, and two other guys on July 10-13. Apparently space is limited and she was asking us about mitigating the noise from snoring. We had a few suggestions. She also said she will have to get SCUBA certified. Harry said he was and shared some local resources for accomplishing the task. There might be an opportunity to Zoom with her while she is under the sea, we’ll see what develops.

I’ve been enjoying the “This Week in Space” podcast on YouTube with Rod Pyle, the editor of NSSS magazine Ad Astra, and Tariq Malik editor-in-chief of Space.Com. They always start with a joke of the week, so I thought I’d try it on the group. Here goes. A little boy runs up to a priest and asks if God invented gravity, and the priest responds of course, that’s why we celebrate MASS!! The joke is even more appropriate because we are called MASS but I only got a few groans from the room. My aspirations as a stand-up comedian are over. Here is the most recent “This Week in Space” podcast from Friday March 14, 2024 for anyone who would like to check it out.

Below is our main topic robotic lunar landers. Blue Ghost was the successful one. Many of the topics in the notes were not discussed at the meeting but I thought they may be of interest. I was way over subscribed for the 3 hours of time. It’s tough to cover 4 months of space and astronomy in that short amount of time.

We started the meeting with the NASASpaceFlight weekly summary video. The video blasts out the following topics, lunar landers of Blue Ghost, Hakuto R2, and Athena, then SpaceX’s IFT8 mission, Cygnus capsule damage, Chinese space station visit from a Pakistani astronaut, Voyager instrument shutdown, Integral gamma ray telescope shutdown, Chinese rocket explosion, Europa Clipper flyby of Mars, Falcon 9 loss of booster with Starlink satellite count, Ariane 6 rocket first operational launch, NASA’s SphereX and PUNCH launch from Vandenberg, other expected launches with Hera flyby of Mars and finally the Crew10 mission. Watching so many topics at once helped make for a expeditious use of time.

We circled back to explore each topic in more detail after the video. What a week! Two lunar landings and a Starship launch, Blue Ghost on March 2 and Athena on March 6 and IFT8 on March 6 also. Blue Ghost’s landing was in the middle of the night but I watched. It was a little disappointing because they conserved bandwidth and didn’t stream video of the landing. Athena’s landing was at mid-day but I was at a lunch appointment, IFT8 was at 5:30 PM and I watched that live.

Moon Landers from CLPS

CLPS is the Commercial Lunar Payload System from NASA. They are using commercial companies to create numerous higher risk lunar missions. Up to March this year. there were 2 attempts, the Peregrine lander from Astrobotic which launched on Jan 8, 2024 and never got out of Earth orbit due to thruster problems and the Odysseus lander from Intuitive Machines (IM) which tried to soft land on Feb 22, 2024 after a 7 day trip but came down hard and broke a leg. IM had forgotten to take a lens cover off their primary landing system and were relatively blind as they attempted the landing. The lander wasn’t able to deploy its payloads and quickly froze due to a lack of power generation. Blue Ghost from Firefly is the third CLPS mission and Athena is another attempt from IM. At least 6 more missions are upcoming. The Griffin1 mission from Astrobotic again is scheduled for September 2025 and IM3 will be trying in October 2025. Not part of CLPS, is the Israeli company, SpaceIL, planning to try a landing with Beresheet 2 this year. I remember their first attempt crashed and might have splashed a bunch of tardigrades on the lunar surface. Probably not a big contamination issue. Also in the future Hakuto-R2 from Japan will try to land June 6 after its several month travel to the moon. Scott Manley had a nice summary of CLPS.

PBS and Miles O’Brien did a nice summary too and also weighed in on SLS’s future. I shared with the group that Blue Ghost’s successful landing was the first one from the US since Apollo 17 on Dec 11, 1972 only a few 18,700 days ago or 51 years. Elon Musk had been quoted that the moon is a distraction and we should concentrate on going to Mars. Our group disagrees. Everyone seems to feel that we need to practice on the moon where we are only a few days of travel away and have only a 1.3 second communication delay. We don’t think we are ready for 8 month travel times to Mars and 20 minute communication delays. Our radiation mitigation and development of failure-proof life support systems are not ready yet.

Those that criticize CLPS for its success record of 1 out of 4 have to remember that we are trying to do it on a fraction of the cost of what we were spending in the 1960’s. The Surveyor program that preceded the Apollo landings was 5 for 7 but they had the equivalent of $4.2 billion in expenditures. These commercial companies are getting about $100 million for a mission. Hats off to Firefly for doing it on their first try and hopefully IM will recover from their 2 failures. They have been criticized for their lander being too tall and unstable, but they say that their landing craft has all the weight at the bottom and their tall probes enable long drills that can probe the lunar soil up to 3 meters in depth. We’ll see how IM3 does this October.

Blue Ghost’s drill, LISTER (Lunar Instrumentation for Subsurface Thermal Exploration with Rapidity), will penetrate up to 9 ft down. It also carries a penetrating radar called LMS which will probe the moon to depths of 700 miles by ejecting cables up to 60 feet long. NASA is paying Firefly $101 million for the landing, plus another $44 million for developing the payload instruments. Other Instruments include an x-ray imager and an electrodynamic dust shield to repel troublesome lunar dust.

People also ask why Blue Ghost took 45 days to land whereas Athena took only 7 days to attempt a landing. Blue Ghost uses hypergolic fuels that when combined immediately combust, but Athena uses cryogenic fuels that boil off as they warm up in space. So Athena needed a much quicker trip to the moon. Apollo used all hyperbolic fuels, but cryogenics are more efficient.

I asked the group if they knew where the Blue Ghost name came from. No one got it. Blue Ghost is a firefly from the Southeastern part of the US and the development company is named Firefly. My grandkids could have told you that. Blue Ghost can be confusing with Bezos’s company having the name, Blue Origin (BO) and they are developing the second HLS for NASA, called Blue Moon. BO also puts a Blue Ring on their New Glenn launched satellites. There are a lot of “Blues” in space.

This video from Space Race does a nice job explaining the 10 payloads on Blue Ghost and the 11 payloads on Athena. It would have been so cool if the rover from Athena and the little micro rover that would roll around on the bigger rover could have been deployed. I also was excited about the hopping rover that would hop into a permanently shadowed crater and then hop back out. That hopper rover was called Grace after Grace Hopper, a naval admiral who invented the computer language, COBOL. Too bad none of these devices were able to deploy.

But all the payloads on Blue Ghost have been successful. Here is a video of its drill (scroll down to the LISTER video). Here is a video of the PlanetVac that will take future sample of regolith. And here is its picture of the lunar eclipse showing the earth and its rink of sunsets making the moon go red. Blue Ghost will only last 1 lunar day, 14 earth days. The hope to take a picture at lunar sunset and see if they can capture lunar dust levitating of the moon’s surface. An effect that Apollo astronauts observed. Several hours after lunar night it will freeze and stop to function.

Blue Ghost landed on Mons Latreille in Mare Crisium. The Mare is the puffy tail of the “poodle on the moon”. Athena attempted its landing at the much more difficult and rugged Mons Mouton near the south pole of the moon near the Malapert and Nobile craters at 85 degrees south latitude. If you want to check out the locations you can use this link from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Just type in the name of the landing area. For Mons Mouton, switch to one of the South Pole projections.

Athena was the second lunar landing attempt on March 6. Coverage was a little disappointing with all the confusion in Intuitive Machines’ control room. They couldn’t seem to tell whether the lander had touched down successfully or not. Some controllers were reporting that the engine had not shut off and no one could tell what Athena’s orientation was. Because Athena landed on its side within a crater, it couldn’t generate power and froze within a half of a day with no payloads deployed.

The third lunar lander that launched with Blue Moon is from Japan and is taking a longer lower energy path to the moon. It plans to land on June 6. It is called Resilience and carries the Tenacious rover. Their first attempt crashed in 2023. Ispace is a commercial Japanese company and was one of the Lunar-X Prize companies. I wish them luck. Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines were also in the X Prize competition.

NASA

We then changed our conversation to what is coming for NASA. My notes from last November included that Trump will embrace Starship, Musk even if not in the government will have Trump’s ear to boost Starship and he will ask for the FAA oversight of SpaceX to be minimized. Musk might also push for Mars Sample Return (MSR) to get cancelled because humans will be there soon on Starship missions. Here is Casey Drier’s early comments about the new administration.

In his inaugural address, Trump talked about “planting a flag on Mars” and that it was our “manifest destiny” to perform this task without any mention of international cooperation. I’ve never been less excited about these “showboat” goals. I’m a fan of a more measured and methodical program like the Artemis moon. With Artemis we are attempting to establish a more permanent presence and making sure science is a foundational part of the effort. Trump has also been quoted that, “We have to protect our geniuses like Musk.” It is amazing the amount of government influence you can buy with $300 million. You can even sell Tesla’s on the White House lawn! Now that DOGE and Musk seem to be indiscriminately cutting federal workers without any basis for the work they do, my opinion of him has sunk to a new low.

Musk has been also calling for the deorbit of the ISS in 2027 rather than 2030. SpaceX has the contract to perform the task, but no one except him thinks it is a good idea. I put the question to the group and they all agreed that deorbiting ISS before there is an established commercial space station is bad. There would be a tremendous disruption to the science that is helping us get to farther destinations like the moon and Mars. Phil asked whether NASA shares the results from science on the ISS. I said that it is a national lab and they do share the results but not in a manner that would be easily consumed by the general public. Beth also suggested a couple of sources to better comprehend what is happening on the ISS. She shared that Artemis 2 astronaut Reid Wiseman posts many informative Instagram videos. and the official ISS National Lab website has a lot of information. I saw that they had a press release for the science investigations that the CREW10 mission will be performing. I think that NASA’s annual Economic Impact Report would be helpful. The Fiscal Year 2023 Report claimed a $76 billion positive impact for the US economy.

We’ve also been waiting for a formal nomination of Jared Issacman for NASA Administrator. Issacman had a company that trained US military pilots but sold it to Blackstone. He seems to not be overly political and as much for science as manned space. Last year, he asked NASA if he could perform a servicing mission for the Hubble Telescope from a Dragon capsule. NASA told him he couldn’t. I think this is one of the better potential nominations from Trump, although his closeness to SpaceX after funding two private missions, Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn on Dragon capsules, would increase concerns from other companies like Blue Origin and ULA of SpaceX having too much influence. Another indication of the recent chaos at NASA, is that Jim Free, head of the Exploration Directorate, was expected to become the acting NASA Administrator and then Janet Petro, the Kennedy Space Center director was given the role at the last minute. Free retired almost immediately after the snub. I do know that the Office of Technology, Policy and Strategy, Office of the Chief Scientist, and the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Branch have been eliminated. Another rumor is that the administration will be consolidating Goddard Space Flight Center and Ames Research Center to the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama (of course Goddard is in Maryland & Ames is in California) and also retaining only a small administration presence in Washington, DC, but otherwise moving NASA headquarters to a field center. Finally, it is also rumored by good sources that the science part of NASA’s budget will be cut in half to the lowest level since 1984. Casey Drier has written that would be an extinction-level event for NASA science.

Eric Berger thinks there is a 50% chance SLS will be canceled after we have over the years 2012-2025 spent $93 billion on Artemis and over $26 billion ($32 billion adjusted for inflation) on SLS development. Gateway would get cut too.

Other November comments from Casey Drier of the Planetary Society, are that the second Trump administration would be good for space, but bad for NASA. I still remember when Trump during his first term, forced NASA to change the timeline for the first Artemis manned landing from 2028 to 2024. We all see how well that went. The schedule date for Artemis 2, the first manned mission for SLS/Orion during which the astronauts will do an orbit around the moon, is now April 2026. Artemis 3, which would be the first manned landing on the moon, is scheduled for 2027. Both mission dates are optimistic and I don’t think NASA will make them on time. Tax cuts could add trillions to the national debt. Even modest 2% budget cuts in the last 2 years have led to major layoffs at JPL and other NASA centers. Artemis funding is centered on Republican states like Texas, Florida and Alabama. Science focused centers are in Democratic states like California and Maryland. When Biden kept Artemis it was the first time the current moon program survived a presidential transition since the Apollo Era. But Artemis appears to be collapsing under its own complexity. SLS and Lunar Gateway are problematic. Casey thinks that the Moon will remain the destination for NASA’s human spaceflight program but China’s ambitions will drive the funding priorities. Musk has a unique position to propose the implementation of a national policy to commit the US to a crash program of sending humans to Mars using Starship. Under Trump the FAA will be a more supportive partner. Most experts say a human mission to Mars in 2028 is impossible. JD Vance shows no proclivity for space. The rapid maturation of commercial space has made NASA less important for space. I asked the group if we should keep funding SLS/Orion and the Gateway. There wasn’t much support but I added that hardware for as many as 8 SLS rockets is already in the work. And to shift gears now when our international partners have investing in the Service Module for Orion and the modules for the Lunar Gateway, would make us a risky country to cooperate with in the future. And if we change our program now, we will be conceding that China will beat us back to the moon with people. I’m don’t think Congress will be to open to that, but they also haven’t pushed back on the statement that Ukraine started the war. But enough extraneous politics, I want a moon program that is more robust with plenty of science and infrastructure building, not a 3-day, “flag planting”, publicity stunt. I was surprised that Beth feels we should stop funding SLS and go with the SpaceX plan of just using Starship to get back to the moon.

Lunar Gateway – good review video of Gateway – Habitation and Logistics Output (HALO) and Power and Propulsion Element (PPE) are scheduled to launch on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket in 2027. The European System Providing Refueling, Infrastructure and Telecommunication (ESPRIT) module and the habitation module (I-HAB) both from ESA will launch on an upgraded SLS rocket with Orion beginning with Artemis 4. When fully built Gateway will be 1/5 the mass of ISS and support a crew of 4.

Artemis Accords reaches 50 signatories with Panama, Austria and Denmark. On the other hand, Senegal was the 13^th country to sign the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) effort of China. ILRS includes a set of principles, which haven’t been released. It is believed the principles are similar to those in the Artemis Accords. How can you sign something that hasn’t been released?

NASA launched on March 11 a new observatory to map 450 million galaxies. SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the universe, Epoch of Reionization and ices Explorer) will map the entire sky 4 times over a 2 year period. It launched on a Falcon 9 from California. The $488 million mission has been in development for about a decade and will map the sky in 102 infrared colors or wavelengths. It will use spectroscopy to reveal composition, density, temperature, distance and motion of the objects. It should help to reveal cosmic inflation which occurred a fraction of a second after the Big Bang by studying the distribution of the galaxies. This site has better pictures and animations. The telescope consists of 3 concentric cones to shield the cold infra-red sensors from sunlight. While in its 404 mile (650 km) high, sun-synchronous orbit, it will also study more than 100 million stars in our galaxy and help identify objects for more detailed follow-up from JWST. A second mission, PUNCH (Polarimeter of Unify the Corona and Heliosphere), is a rideshare with 4 suitcase sized probes to study in 3-D how the sun affects the solar system thru its solar wind and corona mass ejections.

Because of the high cost, NASA has gone back to the drawing board and chosen 2 routes for Mars Sample Return (MSR). They think they will either use the sky-crane ($6.6-7.7 billion estimate) or a heavy lift vehicle (Starship?) from a commercial company ($5.8-7.1 billion). The old estimate for MSR was $11 billion and would not launch before 2040. That was too expensive and too late for NASA. NASA says they need $300 million in the budget for fiscal year 2025 to keep on the timeline estimates. MSR will return all 30 samples of the Perseverance rover which has already obtained 28 samples that include 22 rock cores, 3 witness samples, 1 atmospheric sample and 2 red alert samples. 13 samples remain for future sampling. The numbers don’t add up because Perseverance left some duplicate sample tubes on the surface of Mars. The 30 samples retrieved will only be ones stored within Perseverance. To simplify the mission, NASA will use nuclear power in the lander rather than solar polar. That way they can work thru the dust seasons and clean the samples on Mars to simplify the return capsule. That will make the Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) lighter and allow use of the sky-crane which needs to be 20% bigger than the one used to land Perseverance. MAV will be on both options and ESA will provide the Mars orbiter for docking with MAV to do a direct return to Earth of the samples. The landing mission with MAV would launch in 2031 and ESA’s Mars orbiter would launch in 2030. NASA will begin engineering work but decision needs to be made in mid 2026 on what landing vehicle to use. Direct to earth is simpler than sending the samples to CIS-lunar space. With Musk having the ear of the administration, some think that a manned Starship will be sent to Mars and the astronauts will just grab the samples from the Perseverance rover. We all know about “Musk time”, so I don’t think a manned mission would happen in the 2030s. Anyway it makes more sense to return and analyze the samples before sending humans there.

NASA Knows why Ingenuity Mars helicopter crashed. Ingenuity had a horizontal velocity, which caused it to pitch and roll and cause its blades to break, Scott Manley has a more in depth analysis with maps of the last trips before flight 72.

Dreamchaser closer to a 2025 maiden flight. The space plane is scheduled for more acoustic testing in March. Launch will be on new Vulcan rocket. Vulcan has launched once with only a mass simulator and ULA wants to use the rocket for some Defense Department missions before launching Dreamchaser (maybe 3rd quarter of 2025). Tenacity, the first Dreamchaser vehicle, will be grappled by the Canadarm2 on ISS and docked to an earth facing port of ISS. No mention if it will carry cargo supplies on its first trip. NASA has selected Dreamchaser to fly 6 supply missions to the ISS, joining cargo Dragon, Cygnus capsules from Northrop Grumman and Progress spacecraft from Russia.

Boeing has lost $2 billion on Starliner but is silent on what is next. Boeing announced it lost $523 million on Starliner last year, making a total of $2 billion since late 2019. In 2014 NASA picked Boeing and SpaceX to develop crew capsules. Boeing got $4.6 billion for the fixed-price deal and SpaceX got $2.6 billion. The latest launch Starliner, the first manned mission on an Atlas V rocket, with Butch and Suni suffered from overheated thrusters and helium leaks. Eventually the capsule landed, unmanned, in the New Mexico desert in September. Boeing’s contract calls for six operational flights to the ISS once it is certified. So far, NASA has given the go-ahead for only 3 missions. NASA plans to have 1 Starliner and 1 Dragon mission per year. With ISS scheduled for deorbit in 2030, that leaves only 4 more years of missions. SpaceX has had their contract extended thru Crew-14. John Mulholland is taking over Boeing’s program again. He led it from 2011 to 2020. CREW10, SpaceX’s 10th operational flight, launched earlier on our meeting date, March 14, 2025. Beside the 10 operational flights, SpaceX has launched DM-2, Inspiration4, Polaris Dawn, and 3 Axiom missions, for a total of 16 manned missions on Dragon.

Parker Solar Probe survives its closest approach to Sun. The probe has made 21 prior passes of the Sun but on Dec 24, 2024 it was the closest so far at 3.8 million miles. The Sun’s radiation is 625 times higher at the close approach than at the Earth’s distance. The solar shield heated to 2500 F degrees. Even though the solar corona is a million degrees, it is so rarefied that it doesn’t contribute to the heat load on the spacecraft. The important factor is to keep the instruments in the shade behind the shield. The probe was the fastest man-made object traveling at 430,000 mph during the close encounter.

SpaceX

The other big story for the night was the IFT8 launch of the Starship rocket. As a quick summary, here are the other Starship launches that occurred since our last meeting.

On 11/19/24 IFT6 launched at 4PM on Tuesday. This mission wasn’t as dramatic without the catch of the SuperHeavy booster, which soft landed in the Gulf of Mexico. But the re-light of Raptor engine in space was important and the StarShip second stage also soft landed in the Indian ocean but with a fire. Trump was watching this mission from Texas.

On 1/16/25 IFT7 launched and SpaceX caught the booster for the second time. This time the catch seemed cleaner without the side being on fire. But the loss of Starship before it completed its full engine burn prevented a lot of milestones to be accomplished. This maybe problematical for future launches because of all the debris coming back down thru the atmosphere.

On Thursday, 3/6/25, IFT8 launched and it seemed to be the same failure as with IFT7. The booster was caught for the third time which is always exciting. Two missions in a row with the same type of failure seems to point to a generic problem with version 2 of the Starship. I always thought that catching the booster was a tougher task than having the second stage Starship burn thru its fuel on a sub-orbital trip to the Indian Ocean. We got to see the mission in the NASASpaceFlight weekly summary at the beginning of the meeting.

Here we circled back to show what the difference is between the original version of Starship, Version 2 and the soon to be Version3. At the 6:00 mark of the video is a good graphic explaining the various versions. Some people think SpaceX should drop version 2 after its only two flights have lead to similar failures during IFT8 and IFT7, but SpaceX thinks they have to demonstrate, deploying simulated Starlink satellites from its “Pez” dispenser, re-lighting its Raptor engines in space, and safely navigating thru the atmosphere without damage and soft landing in the ocean before moving on to version 3. SpaceX hasn’t released a lot of information but sources think that “pogo-ing” of the second stage after it has exhausted most of its fuel, damages the fuel lines and leads to fires and explosions.

SpaceX now has a valuation of $350 billion. Quite a comeback, 17 years ago after they finally were successful with their Falcon 1 rocket on September 28, 2008 after 3 failures. Another failure of Falcon 1 could have bankrupted them.

SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster for a record 26^th time. For a review of 2024 rocket launches, the world had 259 orbital launch attempts of which 6 were failures. That was a 17% increase over 2023. Of those 259 launches, SpaceX had 134 successful launches more than the rest of the world combined. China came in second with 68 launches, Russia 17, Japan 7, India 5 and Europe 3. It’s hard to compete with a company that can use its rocket 26 or more times and is its own customer with Starlink launches.

In a humorous story, astronomers had to retract the designation of a new asteroid because it turned out to be Elon Musk’s Tesla from 2018 inaugural launch of the Falcon Heavy. On January 2, it was announced that an unusual asteroid, designated 2018 CN41 (when it was first noticed by amateur astronomer), that comes within 150,000 miles of earth. But less than 17 hours later, the object was deleted from its records. I’m a little unsure on the timeline for this story because the designation 2018 CN41 means it was discovered in 2018, the first letter indicates the half-month (A & B are Jan, C & D are Feb, until X & Y are Dec, the letter I is not used). C therefore means it was reported in the first half of February, Feb 1-15), and the rest of the designation N41 means that the 25 letters (I not used) were cycled thru 41 times (25 x 41= 1025) and the letter N means it was the 13th object in the 26th cycle. So N41 means the (1025+13= 1038) 1038th object discovered during the first half of February in 2018. If my explanation is muddled, this video might help. Don’t you love astronomer designations. This is right up there with magnitudes, where smaller numbers indicate brighter objects.

SpaceX gets another launch with DragonFly mission in July 2028. On 11/26/24 NASA awarded the DragonFly launch on Falcon Heavy to SpaceX for the fixed price of $257 million. The launch window is July 5 thru July 25, 2028. The Europa Clipper launch cost only $178 million and the Psyche before that cost $117 million. Extra costs are justified for handling DragonFly’s radioactive RTG. It is a New Frontiers mission with a cap cost of $850 million excluding launch and operations costs. The target will be Saturn’s moon, Titan, which has 1.5 times our atmosphere density and 13% of our gravity. This makes it 40 times easier to fly in its atmosphere. The landing zone is named Shangri-la. DragonFly can fly 16 km. Titan is bigger than our moon. Entry., Decent and Landing (EDL) will take over an hour. Remember on Mars it only lasted 7 minutes. DragonFly is the size of the Perseverance rover on Mars, equivalent to a mini-Cooper car.

People In Space

At the last minute, Keith and Hank suggested they come a little early to MASS so we could watch the launch of CREW10. Launch was counting down to 6:05 PM and I said sure. Keith walked in the door with 3 minutes to spare and Hank was just behind him taking a slightly different route. Hank made it for “Max-Q”, a couple of minutes after launch. SpaceX launches always are exciting. This time the booster came back to land at the Kennedy Space Center. Anne McCain, Nicole Ayers, Takuya Onishi, and Kirill Peskov, all made it into space and onto their docking with the ISS. An earlier launch attempt on March 12 was aborted because the clamp arm on the strong-back was not working properly. This is SpaceX 10th operational launch to the ISS. The mission sets up the return of Butch and Sunni from their extended mission on ISS. NASA anticipates a 2 day hand-over from the current crew and a landing of CREW9 on Tuesday, March 18 off the coast of Florida. It is interesting that this is the last manned Dragon landing off Florida. CREW10 will land off the California coast because the trunk from the Dragon missions could come down over populated areas. It hasn’t been melting in the atmosphere like anticipated. With west coast landings, the trunk will splash safely in the Pacific Ocean.

On March 18, it will be their 286^th day in space for the Starliner astronauts. Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams went up on a 7 day mission which got expanded to 286 days. They were not “stranded” and I’m sure they enjoyed the opportunity to spend so much time in space. They performed numerous experiments on ISS and had a 5 hour 26 minutes spacewalk. On the EVA, they tested for microbes on the outside of ISS and removed some bad radio communications gear. Trump and Musk has made a big deal about bringing them back quickly but I think it is all political theater.

Blue Origin mission is planning an all female mission, NS-31, on their sub-orbital New Shepard spacecraft at the end of March. The 6 women include Katy Perry, Gayle King and Bezos’s girlfriend, Lauren Sanchez. It will be the first all-female crew since the Russians launched Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, 62 years ago. Last November on NS-28, Emily Calandrelli became the 100^th woman to travel into space. With the launch of CREW10, 102 women are among the 724 people that have passed the Karmen line, 100 km or 62 miles high.

Politics with Starliner crew return. They had to wait for launch of CREW10 on Mar 14 and handover on ISS before coming down on the CREW9 Dragon which launched with only 2 astronauts. There will only be a 2 day rather than a 5 day hand-over because of reduced stockpiles of food. The next Cygnus supply capsule might have been damaged when it was shipped from Italy to Florida. That makes the Northrup Grumman mission is in jeopardy. CREW9 is scheduled to land on March 18. There has been a lot of mis-information and mis-characterization that Butch and Sunni were “stranded” when the Boeing Starliner returned without crew. Musk even said that they were left there for political reasons and said he offered a quicker return which the astronauts had no knowledge of. SpaceX was responsible for a month extra delay because their new Dragon capsule was not ready and they had to switch the CREW10 to the capsule intended for the upcoming Axiom 4 mission.

Mankind set record for man-days in space during year 2024, a total of 4223.23 days for the year. This broke the previous record by almost 400 days.  Converted to man-years is was over 11.5 years. The US astronauts led all countries with 4 2/3 years or 1704 days in space.  Russia was second with 1170 days and China was third with 1127 days. These are all statistics from my own personal database. I haven’t seen these statistics in any Internet stories.

Misc

I found this video interesting from Neil DeGrasse Tyson concerning what is a “knot” of speed. He explains that an arcminute is 1/60 of a degree. A knot is 1 arcminute per hour. It equates to 1.15 mph. A nautical mile is slightly larger than a standard mile being 1.151 miles or 6076 feet. Knots were placed every 47 ft  3 in apart on a rope and ships used a 28 second timer and counted the number of knots played out. 28 seconds is 28/3600 or .777777… % of an hour and 47 ft 3 in is .778966… % of a nautical mile. The practice goes back to the 1600’s. Divide circumference of earth by 360 equals 69.17 miles for each degree of latitude, divide again by 60 yields an arcminute equals 1 nautical mile or 1.15 standard miles.

The first heavy-lift New Glenn rocket launch from Blue Origin launched on Jan 16, Thursday was an important milestone. I stayed up to 1AM to see it. New Glenn is listed as 45 mt to LEO compared to the Falcon 9 17.5 mt, Falcon Heavy 64 mt and Rocket Lab’s new Neutron rocket 13 mt. Blue Origin coverage was a little sketchy and there was no indication of what went wrong with the booster’s ship landing. The first stage is powered by 7 BE-4 methane burning engines, the same ones used on the Vulcan rocket but Vulcan only uses 2 of them. The second stage has 2 hydrogen fueled BE-3U engines, which are very efficient and give New Glenn better lift to lunar and planetary orbits. Thrust is 3.8 million lbs which is about half of a Saturn V. Payload to LEO is 100,000 lbs (45 mt is 50 English tons or 100,000 lbs). This payload is 50% more than Space Shuttle’s capability. The rocket launched from pad LC-36 at the Kennedy Space Center. Its height of 320 ft is similar to Saturn V and SLS. It was slow to rise off the pad. This was surprising since it was carrying only a dummy payload. It has 7m diameter fairing. Starship is 9m. Falcon 9 and Heavy are only 3.7m. New Glenn features a reusable first stage booster and stands 270 ft( 82m) tall in its 2 stage version and 313 ft (95m) tall in its 3 stage version. Blue Ring has unprecedented capabilities to maneuver satellites through multiple orbits.

XB-37 returns from space. This wasn’t on my agenda but since the group asked about it, I included it in the notes. The secretive space plane touched down at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California March 7 after a 434 day mission. It was the 7th flight for the program and the first time it was launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

Astronomy

I planned to watch only the first story in this Fraiser Cain Q&A show. Early crude redshifts from JWST seemed to show that the universe must be older than we thought. The story just demonstrated that when preliminary data gives you unusual results, the best course is to get better data. But the Internet has never been known for its patience.

A temporary moon around earth was named after the goddess of door hinges, Cardea (was 2004 GU9). I think we are running out of god and goddess names.

Meteor caught on Ring Doorbell camera on from Prince Edward Island. 95 grams of meteorite bits were gathered and found to be ordinary chondrites, the most common type of stony meteorite which account for 86% of space rocks.

An asteroid initially had a decent chance of hitting Earth in 2032. Early odds were put at a little over 1%, 1 in 83 to be precise. First spotted by a telescope in Chile, 2024 YR4 is estimated to be 130-300 ft (40-100 meters) in size. An asteroid this size could easily take out an entire city. It will fade from view in a few months and return again in 2028. It came closest to us on Christmas Day 2024 at 500,000 miles (800,000 km), about twice the moon’s distance. It was discovered 2 days later. Potential future impact was December 22, 2032. For a while it was the only large asteroid with a probability of impact of about 1%. Later calculations have reduced the probability to effectively zero. NASA JPL says the odds are now .005% or 1 in 20,000 of an impact in 2032.

Astronomers discover another 128 moons around Saturn. This brings Saturn’s total to 274, twice as many as all the other planets. Astronomers used the Canada France Hawaii telescope for the discovery. Jupiter has the second most moons with 95. The moons will eventually get names from Gallic, Norse and Canadian Inuit gods. The discovery of these many moon may cause us to reconsider what is classified as a moon because all the new moons are “irregular”, potato shaped objects just a few kilometers across.

Record breaking neutrino discovered. A detector under construction under the Mediterranean Sea found the most energetic neutrino ever observed. The tiny particle dubbed KM3-230213A carried 30 times more energy than the previous record holder. A light-year of lead has only has a 50/50 shot of stopping a neutrino. The detector is called the Kilometer Cubic Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) and has dozens of photomultipliers dangling from hundreds of strings anchored to the seabed. On February 13, 2023 they picked up a single muon (a muon is a heavy electron) that triggered more than a third of the site’s sensors. The trajectory of the muon coupled with its extremely high energy led researchers to conclude that a 220 peta (peta is 10^15 or a quintillion) electron volt (PeV) neutrino hit the Earth’s atmosphere. The exact source remains unclear. It could have come from any cosmic accelerator such as a supernova, gamma ray burst or a feeding black hole. When complete the detector will be a cubic kilometer in size with 200,000 sensors.

This comes from a 2/21/25 podcast titled Dark Stars on the “Ask A Spaceman” with Paul Sutter. Axions which are are bosons can be packed as densely as desired versus fermions which are like electrons and protons can’t. WIMPs which were the early candidate for dark matter are theorized to be a fermion. This means axion wave patterns can be superimposed indefinitely yielding smeared out dark stars light years in extent. The wavelength of axions can be 10,000 light years long. They are 10^-24 as massive as an electron and would be hard to detect individually. WIMPs would make galaxy cores too dense. Axions would create smeared out gravity fields. I’m not sure I would call an object light years in extent with a smeared out gravity field a star. Axions seem to be the new darling particle for dark matter.

The largest known structure in the cosmos is called Quipu (kee poo), a Quechua word meaning “knot”. The Milky Way is part of the Local Group of galaxies, which is part of the Virgo Cluster, which is part of the Virgo super Cluster, which is part of the Laniakea Super Cluster, which is part of the Shapley Super Cluster, which is part of the Quipu superstructure. Quipu is 1.3 billion light years across and contains 200 quadrillion times the Sun’s mass. It contains 70 galactic super clusters. Now you know our cosmic address.

The Vera Rubin Telescope captures its first image. The telescope has a 8.4 meter (331 inches or 27.5 ft) diameter and is under construction for 10 years and costs $571 million. Astronomers used an engineering test camera. The final camera is to be installed in March is 3200 megapixels and has a field of view 45 times the size of the full moon. First light expected in June or July of 2025. You can use your browsers zoom feature to increase the detail in the picture. With the wide field of view Vera Rubin hopes to capture the entire sky every few nights and do it for 10 years, effectively making movies of the cosmos.

I learned what a Kilonova is from this Paul Sutter video. In August 2017 an event was detected by LIGO and VIRGO, for over 2 minutes they experienced a long gravitational wave event. The Fermi gamma ray telescope also observed a short gamma ray burst. This was the first observation of kilonova. After the notification went out yo telescopes all around the earth, they observed the event within 11 hours of its occurrence and continued to monitor it for months. Up to one third of astronomical community was involved. The event came from a collision of two neutron stars. Neutron stars have their entire iron core converted to neutrons due to extreme gravity. Most of the light comes from radioactive decay of elements. A kilonova is 1000 times brighter than a nova but dimmer than a supernova. It is a rare event only occurring once per 100,000 years in a galaxy. But they contribute a majority of the universe’s elements heavier than iron. This event created 100’s of times the earth’s mass of heavy elements. Because the gravitational waves and the gamma rays arrived within 1.3 second of each other, it proved they all travel at speed of light to 1 part in a million billion. This disproved many modified gravity theories. The event happened 140 million years ago. This is a great example of multi-messenger astronomy.

I love spiral galaxies and Dr. Becky Smethurst does a great job explaining all the different varieties.