November 14, 2025 MASS Meeting

This was our 91st meeting and we had a tremendous turn-out with Dean, Laura, Don, Dave, Keith, Hank, Harry, Phil, Beth and myself. We could give Chad a pass because he was in Arizona playing guitar with Alice Cooper. That sounds like an acceptable excuse.

Pluto Trivia

Since it was Beth’s birthday and our last meeting was titled, “Mund-apalooza”, where we zoomed with her and Chad under the sea, I decided to start out the meeting reminiscing about our “Pluto-palooza” meeting of 7/17/15. It has been a long 10 years since the New Horizon probe flew past Pluto on 7/14/15. That was our 39th meeting. I asked the group if anyone remembered what the heart shaped feature on Pluto was called. With a little help from Wikipedia, we learned it is called, Tombaugh Regio (990 miles across). Named after Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, who discovered the ex-planet on February 18, 1930. Which is 19 years before my birthday. The left lobe of the heart is called Sputnik Planitia. It is smoother than the right side of the heart and is thought to be a large impact crater that filled with nitrogen snow.

Being discovered on my birthday and being the only planet discovered by someone from the United States, Pluto has always been one of my favorite planets. I still hold a grudge against the IAU who demoted it to a dwarf planet in 2006. It orbits the Sun and is large enough to take a spherical shape, but couldn’t meet the third criterion of clearing its orbit of other objects. There are 5 dwarf planets in the solar system. Pluto, the largest at 2377 km (1477 mi), Eris 2330 km (1448 mi), Haumea 2322 km (1442 m) (egg shaped due to its quick rotation), Makemake 1426 km (886 mi) and Ceres, located in the asteroid belt and the first asteroid discovered in 1801. It is the smallest dwarf planet at 952 km (592 mi).

—–Intro Items—–

Northern Lights

We then moved on to the Northern Lights sighting on Tuesday just before the meeting. Most people saw them and here are some of our pictures.

Oxygen lower in the atmosphere (60-120 mi high) glows green and higher up (over 120 mi), it glows red. Nitrogen can also glow pink (below 60 mi). This is the first time I’ve ever seen a red/pink aurora. In the past, it was always greenish or just gray. The Sun is winding done from its maximum last year, 2024, according to the sunspot number from NOAA. The sun follows an 11 year cycle of max and min in one polarity of its magnetic field and then does another 11 years cycle with a reversed magnetic field.

New Glenn Rocket

Blue Origin, on its second launch, managed to land the booster from the New Glenn rocket on their ship. This is a tremendous leap forward for Blue Origin. They are criticized for being very slow and secretive but this progress makes them a major player in the new Commercial Space arena. The New Glenn rocket can lift 45 mt to LEO. The rocket is more powerful than a Falcon Heavy (although in fully expendable mode SpaceX lists the rocket as capable of lifting 64 mt to LEO and 57mt with only the 2 side boosters recovered and less than 50 mt if all 3 boosters are recovered). The SpaceBucket video at least doesn’t have all the shouting and cheering by Blue Origin employees, but it does have an irritating AI sounding voice.

Apollo Astronauts

It has been 56  years since the first Apollo 11 moon landing. All the astronauts from Apollo are in their 90s. Five are still alive, Buzz Aldrin from Apollo 11 is 95, Fred Haise (only orbited the moon) on Apollo 13 is 92, David Scott from Apollo 15 is 93, Charlie Duke from Apollo 16 is 90 and Harrison Schmitt from Apollo 17 is also 90. Four of the 5 walked on moon.  Sadly, Jim Lovell died Thursday August 7, 2025. He was 97. He orbited the moon twice on Apollo 8 and 13. I never heard him express regret on being so close to the moon and never getting the chance to set foot on it. He was a class act. Dean had personal memories of him from Adler Planetarium and Jim’s restaurant in the Chicago northern suburbs. NASA had a short tribute video of him.

Beth recently got to hear Charlie Duke speak at Judson University Chapel in Elgin, IL. She said his talk had a mainly religious message but was very uplifting.

In the last bit of Apollo astronaut news, Kim Kardashian, with her millions of social media followers, thinks the 1969 moon landing was a fake. Sean Duffy, the acting NASA Administrator, felt compelled to respond to her, “we’ve been to the moon six times”. She bases her disbelief on Buzz Aldrin’s comment in 2015, when responding to a reporter’s question as to whether he was scared during the landing on the moon, he irritatingly said “that there wasn’t anything scary” in the mission. Either Kim isn’t very good on interpreting people comments or she just wants to increase her weekly “click” count. It is even a little sadder that a NASA Administrator has to respond to the issue. But I’m sure the bigger issue is where the younger generation gets their news and we don’t want a new generation growing up that doesn’t believe we landed there in the 1960s.

25 years of ISS Habitation

On November 2, 2025 the International Space Station celebrated 25 years of continuous occupation. To put it in perspective, Bill Clinton was in his final year in the White House, Vladimir Putin was in first year of his quarter-century reign, the New England Patriots had yet to win any of their six Super Bowl titles and Taylor Swift was turning 11. The Space Shuttle was between missions and a Russian Soyuz spacecraft blasted off on Oct. 31, 2000 carrying American William Shepherd and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev. They arrived at the ISS on Nov. 2. Since then, 290 people from 26 countries have lived and worked there continuously. They have conducted more than 4000 scientific investigations resulting in 4400 published papers including 361 papers in 2024 alone. The zero-G environment has allowed better protein crystal growth for drug development, 3D printing of living tissue that could be used for transplants, and studying the effect of chemotherapy drugs on cancer cells because they grow more aggressively in weightlessness. The station has grown into 16 modules with more living space than a 6 bedroom home. It has 2 bathrooms, a gym, 6 sleeping pods and a cupola that provides a 360 degree view of Earth. The first module put in orbit was the Russian Zarya module in November 20, 1998. With 1 million pounds of mass and solar wings that would more than cover a football field. The station has cost $150 billion to build and NASA spends $3 billion a year supporting it. This price doesn’t include the cost of our Russian and 13 other partner countries. Terry Virts, an astronaut running for Texas Senator, estimates the total cost at $200-250 billion. Building it required 42 assembly missions from 1998 to 2011. Modules were built in the US, Russia, Europe and Japan. One of the notable missions on the ISS was Scott Kelly’s one-year mission where NASA compared the effects of zero-gravity on him compared to his twin brother, Mark, now a Senator from Arizona. With some support funding from NASA, companies like Vast, Blue Origin and Axiom are working on commercial space station replacements for when ISS is to be de-orbited in 2030. The Orbital Reef station is a Blue Origin and Sierra Space project. It has been relatively quiet for the last year, maybe if the New Glenn rocket gets going they will announce more progress. Starlab from Voyager Space and Airbus, has built some Gateway modules. Lastly Axiom is the most developed project. They have some hardware being built, have a plan to attach a module to the ISS in 2027, and have practiced sending astronauts to the ISS.

The ISS is the third brightest object in the night sky, after the moon and Venus. There are quite a few sites that will predict its path across the sky, usually at just after dusk or just before sunrise. You can’t miss it in clear skies. It is amazing that 7 people are on that bright dot streaking across the sky.

I’ve followed the build up of the ISS for the last 27 years. There are Word and Excell documents on my computer that are that old. From my statistics, there have been 294 rocket launches in support of ISS since November 1998. My proudest moment was when I corrected NASA on the number of Progress supply missions from Russia. Other stats include, 37 Shuttles flights, 69 from Soyuz, 81 Progress supply flights, 22 cargo Dragons, 21 Cygnus supply missions, 28 crew Dragon and 2 Starliner capsule visits. There has been 512 person visits by 290 different people. As of Wednesday, November 12, 2025, there have been 46,392 person-days of habitation on the ISS.

ISS has also had 277 EVAs (Extra-Vehicle Activity) performed to support ISS. An EVA can be risky, there is only your suit to protect you from the hazards of space. I remember that ESA astronaut, Luca Parmitano, had an emergency where he had over a liter of water in his helmet. In zero-gravity an astronaut could easily drown if the water covered his nose and mouth. Fortunately, NASA called off the EVA and after some harrowing minutes got him safely inside the station and out of his space suit.

Another harrowing event was in July 2021 when the newly docked Russian Nauka module began continuously firing its thrusters, sending the ISS on a wild back flip that could have broken up the station if the rotation wasn’t halted. Russia couldn’t contact the Nauka until it was over one of the ground stations and that wouldn’t occur for 90 minutes. Fortunately, the thruster’s fuel tank went dry and the spin was halted. The ISS build was completed in 2011.

In other space station news, China launched the Shenzhou 21 capsule on October 31 with another 3 taikonauts. China has sent 10 manned missions with a total of 30 taikonauts to its Tiangong-3 space station. Recently China says the Shenzhou 20 capsule from the previous crew has had its window cracked by a piece of space debris. The older crew came down on the new Shenzhou 21 capsule on MASS meeting day, leaving the new crew without a safe way of returning to Earth. Their plan is send another Shenzhou capsule without a crew. The new capsule will provide the method for the remaining 3 taikonauts to return safely to Earth in about 6 months.

In a more positive note, the 6 taikonauts seemed to be enjoying themselves with BBQ in space. I think we can count that as another Chinese first in space. This video shows their enjoyment.

Starliner Capsule

There are a couple of events I’d like to see happen on the ISS before it gets de-orbited. One is a successful Starliner capsule mission and the other is a visit from the DreamChaser space plane. After two less that successful attempts NASA still seems like they want Starliner to succeed. Why is NASA still gung-ho on Starliner? Steve Stich of NASA said Boeing and propulsion supplier Aerojet Rocketdyne are moving forward with changes to resolve problems with the helium leaks and thermal issues which made the spacecraft’s thrusters overheat. Boeing is now $2 billion in the hole paying for Starliner delays and is still more than a year away from executing its multi-billion dollar NASA contract with crew rotation flights to the ISS. By early 2026, NASA hopes to perform a cargo Starliner flight, followed by crew rotation flight in late 2026. That is 11 years later than the anticipated timeline when Starliner program was announced in 2010. A Starliner cargo mission would use up one of the few remaining Atlas-V rockets and Boeing would have to find another rocket to finish its contract of 6 operational flights. Certifying Starliner to launch on the new Vulcan rocket would be another unanticipated cost. Initially a NASA budget crunch in the early 2010s pushed the program back about 2 years but the other schedule slips are due to Boeing. Setbacks include a fuel leak and fire during a critical ground test, parachute problems, a redesign to accommodate unanticipated aerodynamic forces and a computer timing error that cut short Starliner’s first attempt to reach the ISS in 2019. Last summer the Starliner CFT-1 mission launched with Butch and Sunni but the helium leaks and overheating thrusters had the spacecraft return empty and the astronauts to return on a Dragon capsule. The threats from Musk about Dragon being shut down after he parted ways with Trump has concerned NASA with their single source situation for manned flights to ISS. The linked article shows a picture of Starliner docked to ISS. It shows the relative size of the capsule compared to ISS. Starliner could get business from new Commercial Space Stations after ISS is retired in 2031. Dragon could also be threatened by StarShip if it is ever certified to carry people. Current White House funding for ISS would probably mean a smaller crew than 7 and a reduction in science. Currently NASA has only given Boeing 3 of the 6 operational missions they were originally contracted to perform. If crew rotations are extended from 6 to 8 months long, ISS lifetime would be satisfied with 3 missions from Boeing and the 4 already contracted from SpaceX. NASA has contracts with Axiom, Blue Origin and Voyager Technologies for a commercial space station. It costs NASA 40% more to ferry astronauts and supplies to the ISS than to operate it. Boeing is going to charge NASA $90 million per seat for a ride to the ISS. SpaceX only charges about $45 million per seat on Dragon. A typical crew rotation mission has 4 seats/astronauts in it. A few prepaid flights from Starliner could be a great incentive for future space station developers if NASA or Boeing throws in that carrot.

DreamChaser

Will the DreamChaser ever fly? The latest delay is to late 2026 and NASA is dropping their re-supply contract. Now NASA will consider missions to ISS only after Sierra Space performs a successful demo stand-alone mission with the space plane. First flight for DreamChaser won’t dock to ISS. The space plane has been under development for 2 decades. It almost certainly won’t fly in 2025. After Starliner issues, NASA is requiring an end-to-end test of spacecraft software prior to an ISS visit. Sierra is also working on certification of the propulsion system. The spacecraft is powered by more than 2 dozen small rocket engines that use kerosene and hydrogen peroxide rather than the more common and toxic hypergolic propellants that ignite on contact with one another. This facilitates simple handling of DreamChaser on its return from orbit. The ground crew doesn’t have to wear hazmat suits when the DreamChaser lands. When operational, DreamChaser will berth to the ISS rather than dock. Berthing involves the robotic arm of ISS. The arm grabs the space craft and then moves it to a berthing port on ISS. Another delay is the availability of the Vulcan rocket from ULA. The rocket has only launched twice and Space Force missions have the priority for upcoming launches. Dreamchaser was not ready for the second launch and Vulcan launched with only a mass simulator instead of the space plane.

JAXA HTV-X Cargo Supply Capsule

It berthed to the ISS on October 29. It is a beautiful gold colored spacecraft. It can carry up to 13,200 pounds (6 mt) of supplies. It launches on Japan’s H3 rocket. Because there might not be that many ISS supply missions, it will likely will be used on new commercial space stations. It joins Progress, Dragon and Northrop Grumman Cygnus as ISS supply spacecraft. This video shows the berthing process, fast forward to when it is close to ISS to see it best.

Red Spider Nebula

Two nice contrasting pictures of the Red Spider Nebula. The nebula is 3000-5000 light years away. Hubble shows it without much detail. But some at the meeting prefer its picture. The JWST picture of NGC 6537, a planetary nebula in Sagittarius, with much more detail. The nebula shows much more chaos that a typical spherical planetary nebula because the emitting star has a hidden companion star that distorts the gas outflow.

—–NASA Funding Woes—–

I thanked everyone who supported the Planetary Society effort to contact Congress and support the restoration of science at NASA. It is a “bizzarro world” with the OMB setting NASA’s funding. NASA is in a shambles. Frazer Cain weighed in on the situation in the Q&A video (be sure to start the video from the beginning if the link doesn’t do it) The video show start with the defunding of the Lunar Gateway.

There is hope in NASA’s funding if only we can get the White House to listen to Congress. The House budget writing panel passed a $24.8 billion NASA budget, joining a similar Senate subcommittee’s $24.9 billion budget. The House plan is $6 billion more than the White House (WH) proposed budget. The Senate proposal funds NASA Science at $7.3 billion, the same as 2025, while the House reduces it to $6 billion. Both are much more than the WH amount of $3.9 billion. But with the government shutdown, I’m not sure if NASA is listening to Congress. NASA has already directed teams to submit “closeout plans” for dozens of mission planned for cancellation in Trump’s budget. Some view this as a way to remove the projects before Congress can re-instate them. There will still be cuts but not the irresponsible axing of missions still providing good science. The House also provides $4.1 billion for Space Operations that can keep the ISS staffed and supplied as well as funding private space stations to replace it. The Goddard NASA center in Maryland is being gutted. Its problem is that it is in a blue state and does climate research among other things. Duffy’s first days at NASA show budget uncertainty. But the 64 members of Congress told him to hold any cancellations until they get a chance to react. Congress plans to fund NASA at $24.9 billion far exceeding the White House $18.8 billion. LISA space gravity wave detector $80.5 million, Rosalind Franklin ExoMars rover, $73.9 million Juno $27.2 million, OSIRIS-APEX to Apophis $19.9 million, New Horizons $15 million, an Uranus orbiter and probe $10 million, Nancy Grace Roman Telescope $300 million, Habitable Worlds Observatory $150 million and Chandra X-ray Observatory $63 million are all are getting money. SLS gets $1.3 billion, $1.4 billion for Orion and $100 million for Gateway also get more money. Senators also gave $60 million for the Traffic Coordination System for Space. Mars Sample Return is still dead. Scroll down to the nice table contrasting the FY2025, FY2026, House approp and Senate approp. New House proposal does give $300 million to MSR. The Senate funds the NASA Science Mission Directorate at current $7.3 billion but House cuts it down to $6 billion but both are much larger than the WH $3.9 billion. NASA Science is getting $6 billion from House and $7.3 billion from Senate much more than the $3.9 billion proposal of the WH and near the $7.3 billion in last year’s budget. Overall, the House gave NASA the same total budget as last year and the Senate was just a little more, rejecting the WH $6 billion cut. New Horizons, Juno, Chandra x-ray observatory are supported. Representatives from New York added an amendment to eliminate the $85 million allocated to move the Shuttle to Texas from the Smithsonia Museum in Washington DC, but it was struck down. Sources say that NASA Administrator, Duffy, has directed the agency to work toward the House version of the funding.

The funding situation is confusing and I hope the placement of Jared Issacman as the NASA Administrator will lessen the amount of political theater going on in the funding of NASA.

Jared Issacman re-nominated as NASA Administrator

Jared Issacman is back as the nomination for NASA Administrator. He prepared a large document to support during his original nomination. When that was retracted, he condense his plan down to a 62 page document called Project Athena and submitted it to acting administrator Sean Duffy. Lori Garver said the document offers plenty of “grist for the mill”, it is very similar to what we had in our own transition plan for NASA after the 2008 presidential election. It would break the big contractors who are sucking too much money out of NASA. Planetary Society, Jack Kiraly, says Issacman would outsource more work to commercial or academic partners, allowing NASA to focus on riskier, more ambitious activities. But NASA is already very commercialized, 85% of current work is done with industry. The document’s leakage is portrayed as a plan for Sean Duffy to keep his temp job or poison the nomination process for Issacman. It reportedly dates back to Issacman’s original nomination. It seeks to focus on leading the world in human space exploration, igniting the space economy and becoming a force multiplier for science. His nomination was pulled in late May for political reasons. Duffy was placed in charge in early July. After the Alabama delegation saw the plan, their support for Jared waned. They want to push SLS/Orion and minimize commercial space companies. His effort to lean into commercial contractors was seen as the threat to traditional space contractors who are now leaking the document. Duffy is trying to paint Issacman as a stooge for Elon Musk. It also seeks to transition away from cost-plus contracts like SLS and Orion and repurposing elements of the Gateway for a nuclear powered tug vehicle.

Issacman’s re-nomination is scheduled for the first week in December. Hopefully Senators like Ted Cruz from Texas don’t amp up the political theater even higher.

—–Moon Race?—–

China is developing the Long March 10 rocket for moon missions and a Mengzhou spacecraft for carrying taikanauts to the moon. A recent poll says 67% of Americans support sending humans back to the moon, 65% support humans to Mars, 77% feel the Apollo program was worth it. I’m not sure who performed this poll but the numbers seem unbelievably positive toward human space programs.

“Is it worth going back to the Moon?” article by Paul Sutter. Crewed missions are more expensive (at least by a factor of 10), more difficult with the inclusion of life support systems, and more dangerous with the potential loss of life. A typical robotic rover has a speed of .1 mph. Humans are better in almost every aspect.  Typical benchmark is what a robot can do in a day, a human can accomplish in a minute. Productivity of humans totally eclipses that of robotic missions. Apollo missions spent a total of 12.5 contact days on the Moon which resulted in 3000 scientific papers. Decades of Mars rovers have resulted in about 1000 papers. The moon has a lot of easily accessible resources that could provide a basis for space-based industry. Mining and manufacturing on the moon could use rich deposits of methane, ammonia and atomic oxygen in the regolith. With its shallower gravity well and lack of atmosphere, you could sling the products to other orbiting locations. Lastly, it’s just fun to have humans as explorers. Remember NASA has been getting only a half percent of the GNP, so it is a small price to pay for the effort.

I think it is worth going back to the moon and with people. People in the mission encourage support and simulate interest within the American populace. Technically, the moon program is a great test bed for longer missions.

Will China Beat Us?

Ars Technica thinks China will beat us back to the moon. And former NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine testifies before Congress that China will beat us back to the moon but that angers Sean Duffy. Bridenstine’s negative comments on the SpaceX HLS are colored with the fact that he works for ULA now. He also blamed NASA for picking the HLS SpaceX solution when they didn’t have an administrator. But history shows that he was in charge when the HLS candidate companies were named. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has a good summary of the Space Race to the Moon. One issue is if China lands first, they might exclude prime parts of the moon from us. But we can play that game too, the recent Sean Duffy announcement that we might place nuclear reactors on the South Pole of the moon makes it seem like we are trying to establish a “keep out” zone too. The South Pole terrain is especially important because of the potential of water ice.

After working with nuclear power plants for 30 years, I’m a big proponent of using nuclear power but the administration is sending mixed signals. You don’t cut NASA science by 50% and then try to accelerate putting a nuclear power station on the moon. You also have to develop the capability of landing humans before you need that much power there. Neal Degrasse Tyson weighed in on the subject too. Duffy went on to say we are in a race with China to the moon. Planting reactors is more effective than planting a flag. Duffy referenced the idea of a “keep-out zone” around the reactor that would lay claim to a desirable area, like craters holding frozen water. 5 years seems too aggressive but a 40 kw project has already been funded. We’ve put nuclear power devices on the moon and Mars before but they were devices that only put out 100 watts or less. The 14 day long lunar night makes solar power generation difficult. $5 million grants to 3 companies in 2022 asked for a 40kw design. The Fission Surface Power Project called for a system that weighs 6 tons and can fit into a cylinder 13 feet in diameter and 20 feet long and can work for 10 years, self-regulated with no maintenance or refueling required. Solution might be a Stirling engine that uses a meltdown-proof liquid sodium circulation. The link has 3 minute Duffy video talking about it. Duffy mixed up his kw-hr and kw units. A typical house uses 900 kw-hr in a month but the reactor puts out 100 kw continuously. Kw-hr is energy but kw is power. The reactor would be able to supply 80 homes not just 1 home for 3 days. Duffy’s hypothetical home would have a $10,000 electric bill each month if it used 100kw continuously.

Does it matter if China is first?

Charlie Bolden, another NASA Administrator, says “so what if China does a “Boots & Flag” lunar landing first, the United States is doing a much more robust and long-lasting mission to the South Pole with international partners.” We’ve done 6 Apollo landings, now is the time for us to do something even more substantial.

SpaceX releases that they have made progress on 49 milestones on their HLS lander but they keep showing only Starlink deployment on their starship tests.

The first 12 minutes of this GreatSpaceX video has a good summary of Artemis status, Starship and HLS; Blue Origin announced their Transporter Tug that will refuel Blue Moon MK2 HLS lander. It also proposes a new idea of a consortium of SpaceX, ULA and Blue Origin that would make Artemis 3 moon landing possible in a shorter timeframe, use SpaceX Booster from starship to launch ULA Centaur rocket with MK2 attached, ULA Centaur upper stage would take it to the moon where it would dock with Orion and descend to landing. Is that better than the unstable and unproven Starship HLS solution? Second half of video talks about Starship launch from Florida in 2025, Blue Origin Transporter which will fuel and take MK2 lander to the moon.

Our bizzarro world with Texas senators trying to spend $85 million to cut up the shuttle in the Smithsonian and ship it to Houston, Musk calling Sean Duffy, “Sean Dummy”, JPL losing a quarter of its work force, the Goddard NASA center being gutted and tens of thousands leaving NASA, yet Trump wants to beat China during his term in office with another “flags and footprints” lunar mission. This plan just doesn’t make sense to me.

Artemis Timeline

Artemis 2 – a repeat of the figure 8 orbit around the moon of Apollo 8 in 1968. It is a 10 day 4 crew mission planned for April 2026. In the linked site look for the Artemis II Map toward end for a diagram of the mission. The Orion capsule with get no closer than 6000 miles to the surface but astronauts would get the best view of the far side because it would be in daylight. During the Apollo missions, the near side of the moon was in daylight and the far side was in darkness. I wanted to ask the group how intense will the public interest be in the mission? We didn’t get around to discussing the question.

Artemis 3 – first landing with Starship at the South Pole of the moon in 2027. Planned to be a 30 day mission with 1 week on the surface by 2 astronauts and a total crew of 4.

—–Comet 3I ATLAS—–

I showed a Chicago Tribune article that was in the paper the day of the meeting. It talked about another Kardashian- Sean Duffy interaction on the subject of the comet. Avi Loeb, Harvard astrophysicist, was saying on Rogan and other podcasts that he is 30-40% sure the comet is alien. The comet’s closest approach to Earth will be 170 million miles on Dec 19, 6 days before Christmas, Loeb says maybe they will send us some mini probes as presents. He also says that it is odd than it is coming in on the ecliptic when the solar system is 60 degrees off with the Milky Way’s plane. In my mind, that is a coincidence, not evidence of alien origin. The comet is high in carbon dioxide and nickel. And low in iron. This unusual concentration of elements hints that the comet is much older than the solar system (maybe 3-11 billion years old, compared to the Solar System 4.5 billion year age) and has an unusual 8 to 1 ratio of CO2 to water. Astrum had a good summary of info up to the end of September cut it off at the 24 minute mark because it gets a little redundant. Comet 3I ATLAS was discovered in early July 2025. It is believed to be the third interstellar object after Oumuamua in 2017 and Borisov in 2019. It has been 6 years since the last one. It is expected to be at perihelion, or closest point to the Sun, of 1.4 AU or 125 million miles on October 29 and it will be on the other side of the Sun than the Earth. Size is estimated to be 440m to 5.6 km much smaller than the original 10km size that Avi Loeb is still quoting when he talks about it being alien technology. They discuss the “Dark Forest” hypothesis where aliens stay quiet to avoid being attacked by more powerful civilizations. At end of September, it was lost in the sun’s glare. Currently the comet is on other side of the sun, it won’t emerge until toward end of November. Mars probes have a ring side seat because they will be only .19 AU or 17.6 million miles away. Psyche, Lucy and JUICE all may observe it. (there is a diagram of orbit thru solar system on the linked site). Fraser Cain Q&A the first 9:30 minutes talks about the comet. The new Vera Rubin telescope will find 10 of these interstellar objects each year when it becomes operational. The naming scheme for comets is: put a P at the beginning for periodic, a C for non-periodic comets, and I for interstellar. The rest of the name is for the discoverer 3I ATLAS was found by the ATLAS telescope (Asteroid Terrestial impact Last Alert System) in Hawaii. Another famous comet was 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The name shows that it was the 67th periodic comet and the following 20 letters credit the 2 discoverers of it.

StarShip IFT11

IFT11 was a success. This 16 minute Marcus House video is a good summary. This mission had a re-flight of booster from IFT8, 24 of 33 Raptor engines were flying again. There was good soft ocean landings, by both the Starship and the Super Heavy Booster. Starship looked much more controlled and had no melting apparent. It relit its single engine in orbit and deployed the dummy Starlink satellites. Version 2 of StarShip has twice the launch thrust of the Saturn 5. Keith, Dean and I were texting each other during the 6:30 PM launch on Monday, Columbus Day, October 13, 2025. This was the fifth mission for StarShip in 2025. Falcon Heavy rocket currently also has 11 launches, but it has been placing objects in orbit since the first launch when it put Elon Musk’s red Tesla car on a orbit to Mars. SpaceX plans to launch Starship 25 times in 2026. IFT12 will be a cautious flight just duplicating the sub-orbital mission but with a version 3 Starship. On flight #13 SpaceX may try to catch of both stages. Flight #14 will refine the catch procedure. Flight #15 will be the first to have orbital payloads. Flights #16-17 will attempt orbital refueling. Flight #18 will start the orbital propellant depot, with 16 refueling flights to fully fill the 1600 mt prop capacity of Starship. Flights #19 to # 34 could be those refueling flights to send a Starship to Mars in 2026 . On flight #35, SpaceX might perform an unmanned Starship landing on the moon. Marcus House new video from IFT11, it shows pad1 demolition and pad2 construction, the plan to launch 60 larger Starlink satellites on each Starship launch. These larger Starlink satellites will be 20 times more powerful than the ones on a Falcon 9 launch. That means one Starship launch will provide as much Starlink capacity as 20 Falcon 9 launches. SpaceX is poised to make more money than the NASA budget on Starlink services. SpaceX should be considered a communications company not a launch company because it makes more money from Starlink than it does from Falcon rocket launches. Version 3 of Starship shows the docking ports for refueling.

Version 3 of Starship

Version 3 of Starship won’t launch until 2026. It needs the new Pad 2 at Boca Chica. It will feature the version 3 Raptor engines, 33 of them will yield 9000 mt of thrust which is 2.7 times that of a Saturn 5. Version 3 also includes an integrated hot stage ring that isn’t discarded.

Version 2 of Starship is 403 ft tall or 123 meters (232 ft of Super Heavy and 171 ft Starship). Version 3 will be 492 ft or 150 meters tall.

There already a version 4 on the drawing board that will increase the payload capacity to LEO from 100 mt to 200 mt.

—–Misc—–

Leopard Spots on Mars Rock

Sean Duffy, acting NASA Administrator announces new paper saying the “Leopard Spots” rock is the best bio-signature so far. Scott Manley 19 minute video, shows the press conference, leopard spots (1mm) and poppy seeds (.1mm). Dean had sent me the link and I watched the full conference and surprised that Duffy stayed at the podium thru the full conference. He also mentioned that Perseverance launched during Trump’s first term but not that Obama created the program. During our discussion it would be interesting to go into earlier announcements like Viking’s experiments before we knew of perchlorate, the Allan Hills meteor with virus looking objects. We talked about this discovery last year but the new paper says that they have not been able to come up with a plausible abiotic method to create the spots. It would require high temperatures like 120 degrees Celsius and there is no evidence for this. China is more likely to perform a Mars sample return because the US effort is in limbo.

VIPER Lunar Rover Gets a Reprieve

Volatiles Investigating Polar Explorer Rover (VIPER) will hitch a ride with Blue Origin in late 2027. It was to be a key piece of the Artemis program and search for ice on the moon’s south polar region. It was to land in late 2023 aboard the Griffin lander from Astrobotic in one of the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload System) missions. But delays in both programs pushed the date back and NASA decided to cancel it in July 2024 due to budget issues, even though the car-sized rover was already fully assembled. Doing so would save $84 million but the agency had already spent $450 million up to that point. It is a new CLPS deal with Blue Origin with a value of $190 million to send it on the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander which is slated to debut early in 2026 on another CLPS mission. The mission plans to last 100 days and the cost does not cover the launch.

Little Red Dots (LRDs)

LRDs (Little Red Dots) discussion on Astronomy Cast video. You can see the section about LRDs by going 31 minutes into video. They say that the LRDs are as bright as the Triangulum Galaxy in the Local Group but only 3% of its size. They look like a naked Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) and maybe a direct collapse black hole. They seem to be very hot objects in dust clouds during the first 300 million to 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Even though they look similar to an AGN, the ultra-violet radiation is missing. Astronomers posit that they may be feeding quicker than the Eddington limit (a factor that says how efficiently a black hole can accumulate matter), due to turbulence in the gas cloud. They could also be baby globular clusters.