Jared Isaacman thinks that NASA can simultaneously run missions to return to the moon and go to Mars, while also supporting current science programs and launching new telescopes, robots, and probes. How he thinks NASA can pay for this, when the agency is currently in something of a budget crisis, remains to be seen.

Here’s my breakdown of what happened during Jared Isaacman’s confirmation hearing, which began on April 9 at 10 AM ET and ran about three hours. You can watch the whole thing at the link below.

My main questions going into the hearing

Like so many others, I have a lot of questions about the future of NASA. The agency is stagnant, and I very much think it needs to change. Jared Isaacman clearly agrees, but whether he brings the kind of change NASA needs is questionable.

Going in, my main questions were:

(1) What will happen to Orion, SLS, and more broadly to Artemis, the plan to return to the moon? Trump has made it clear he wants to focus on Mars. Does this mean that Artemis will be cancelled? Or that Isaacman would cancel SLS, NASA’s boondoggle of a megarocket, in favor of SpaceX’s Starship, which keeps blowing up and hasn’t made it to orbit yet?

(2) Could there be a reorganization of NASA under Isaacman? What does he think about workforce cuts?

The Vehicle Assembly Building, credit: NASA

(3) Will Isaacman support NASA’s science programs, especially with the rumors looming of drastic cuts to the science budget?

(4) Will Jared Isaacman allow Elon Musk undue influence at NASA, or will he show a marked preference for SpaceX? I’ve given a rundown previously of Isaacman’s close ties to SpaceX and the company’s CEO.

Despite Isaacman’s refusal to answer many direct questions, I did feel like I got a sense of where he stood on some of these issues. Keep in mind, though, that this assumes he’s telling the truth, which you never can be sure of. There’s at least one situation from the hearing where he came dangerously close to lying in front of the Senate (in regards to his ties to Elon Musk, which I’ll go over later.)

The fate of Artemis

It looks like, at least for now, the Artemis program will move forward full steam ahead. Isaacman fully supported sending the Artemis II astronauts around the moon, and even agreed that Orion and SLS were the quickest way to beat China to the moon. (There was a lot of China talk.) However, he did also say that he wasn’t committed to SLS and Orion for the long term.

Stacking the rocket for Artemis II, credit: NASA

Reading between the lines, I’d say this means Artemis II and III will fly on SLS as planned, but starting with Artemis IV, NASA will look at other options (yes, probably Starship but there are other options here, Blue Origin’s New Glenn for one, which is actually an operational rocket.)

Isaacman did not state a commitment to Gateway, which is the space station NASA is planning on putting into lunar orbit (he said he’d love to have multiple lunar outposts, but that would require an unlimited budget — one of his few concessions to the fact that NASA needs money to do things). There was a lot of hedging here, with the end result being that he’s keeping his options open. According to Isaacman, nothing is immediately on the chopping block but he is willing to cut programs once he gets a full picture of NASA’s situation.

The HALO module of Gateway arrives in the U.S., credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel

One of the main thrusts of Isaacman’s arguments is that he thinks it’s possible to return to the moon while also planning a longer term crewed mission to Mars. It’s clear that to do both with NASA’s current budget would require significant cuts elsewhere, but Isaacman didn’t make it clear where that money would come from.

One of his main questions was why it was taking so long, and costing so much money, to return to the moon (a question I think a lot of people share.) But what is less clear is how he’s going to magically make it cost less in the short term when that money is tied up in contracts and existing programs.

Budget cuts and NASA science

Isaacman made it clear from the beginning that he supports NASA’s science programs, and pointed out that he’s been a vocal supporter of the Chandra X-Ray telescope and offered to service and boost Hubble for free (an offer NASA declined). He also said he wants to launch more telescopes, more probes, more rovers. This is great.

But. Again. Where is the money going to come from?

There’s an excellent report from the National Academy of Sciences about how NASA’s infrastructure is aging, and the agency is at a dangerous crossroads. The recommendation from this report is that, basically, without any budget increases on the horizon, NASA needs to stop investing so much in new missions and put more money in the people and missions it currently has, as well as putting some money into maintaining its facilities.

Artemis I, credit: NASA

It’s unclear how Isaacman is going to pay for all his grand ideas. I want to go to the moon and go to Mars and launch new telescopes and robots and rovers. But I also recognize that prioritization is important because NASA can’t do all these things at once. I’m not saying the agency can’t do more with the budget is has — inefficiency is rampant at NASA (remember how long it took to figure out what was wrong with Orion’s heat shield? If the agency moved more quickly, they could have shaved a year off that time.) But the turnaround required for a fundamental shift like this would be decades rather than just a few years. I just don’t see how it’s going to happen, and Isaacman avoided giving any specifics on how he would accomplish this feat.

That being said, Isaacman did say again and again that he wants to use whatever we have now, until it’s basically unusable, because we paid to build it and get it up there and we shouldn’t abandon it. While this was specifically said in relation to the ISS (which he supports keeping in orbit until at least 2030), I think it’s safe to extrapolate here to observatories like Chandra and Hubble, both of which are facing significant cuts.

The International Space Station, credit: ESA

Isaacman also was ambivalent about workforce cuts and didn’t commit to keeping all NASA centers open. Basically, from what he’s saying, he wants to fundamentally change the agency and cut personnel, all while running more science and human spaceflight programs. Oh, and he wants to purse nuclear propulsion and also put NASA on the road to being self-funded (which, what? Didn’t see that one coming.)

SpaceX: The elephant in the room

Multiple senators were concerned, as I am, about influence Elon Musk will have on the agency. Isaacman very deliberately and carefully tried to distance himself from the man and company, saying that SpaceX is a contractor and while he would take their input as with any other contractor, he would not be doing what they told him to do (I’m paraphrasing here.)

But Isaacman also said that he hadn’t had any communication with Elon Musk about how to run NASA, but would not deny that Elon Musk was in the room when he went to meet with President Trump in late 2024. (This was by far the most awkward part of the hearing, and a crucial one, when Senator Markey hammered away at Isaacman, asking whether Musk was in the room. All Isaacman would repeat was that he’d gone to Mar a Lago to meet with the president. The implication is that Musk was indeed in the room, but Isaacman wouldn’t confirm or deny it.)

A SpaceX Falcon 9 with a Crew Dragon, credit: SpaceX

For me, this is the biggest question mark.

The problem is that SpaceX is the dominant launch provider in the world right now. It’d be very easy to say that Isaacman is just going with the “best” company that can provide the cheapest services and favor SpaceX that way. But NASA has a remarkable history in awarding contracts to different companies that are at various stages in their development to ensure that there’s a robust commercial sector for space.

Even SpaceX has directly benefitted from this policy, and wouldn’t be where they are now without that distribution of resources from NASA.

I think it’s safe to say that Jared Isaacman will be the next leader of NASA. I just hope he goes into the job with an open mind and a desire to learn from the agency, rather than approaching it with a strong agenda of what he thinks needs doing.

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I was only in India for a week (and have had a week of recovering from jet lag), but it feels like I missed months of space news, judging by how much happened while I was gone. I’m not going to recap everything, but here are some quick highlights and (more importantly) why I think they’re significant.

(If you’re here to see my thoughts on the instrument shutdowns on the twin Voyager probes, you’ll have to wait until the Friday edition.)

My grandmother’s 94th birthday party

Table of Contents

• Starship broke apart in flight…again

• The blood moon is coming March 13-14

• Intuitive Machines’ moon lander tipped over…again

• But Firefly landed on the moon successfully!

• Boeing Starliner astronauts to return March 16

Starship broke apart in flight…again

What happened: For the second time in two months, the upper stage of SpaceX’s Starship—also called Starship—broke apart in flight. This time, the debris rained down around Florida and the Caribbean, causing ground stops for up to two hours at airports in the area (including Miami and Fort Lauderdale airports).

The Super Heavy booster, however, successfully docked back at the launch site in Boca Chica, Texas. This is a huge win, as they’re clearly doing well at developing this technology, but it’s important to note that this is very much a secondary objective.

Booster “catch from Flight 7, credit: SpaceX

Landing the booster is very cool and complex, and it’s an absolutely stunning visual (I’m personally a sucker for watching any booster landing). But it’s not the primary objective of these flights, and it’s not what SpaceX really needs to be making progress on at this point in testing.

Why it matters: Given how influential the CEO has become in the federal government, 2025 should have been the year of SpaceX: less regulation, an incoming NASA administrator who’s very friendly to SpaceX, reducing NASA’s science operations while, presumably, shunting that money towards human spaceflight (that NASA will then pay SpaceX to accomplish). But things aren’t exactly going to plan.

SpaceX is the provider for the vehicle which will land humans on the moon with Artemis III — if we get to Artemis III, credit: NASA

This failure is especially interesting for a few reasons. First, SpaceX has an iterative design approach. They test and then fix what doesn’t work and then test again.

This is why every space reporter was telling the public that Starship and the Super Heavy not achieving stage separation on the first flight was not a big deal — because it wasn’t. The fact that it lifted off at all on that first flight, and didn’t blow up on the launch pad, was a great success. The point is, though, that we expected more progress from the second flight, and even more from the third, and we got it. That is, until now.

It’s not clear right now what went wrong on this flight, but the fact that it occurred at about the same point in the flight as the previous failure, and also appeared to come from the same part of the ship (the second stage engines) is telling. SpaceX diagnosed the issue in the previous flight as a propellant leak, but this might be an oversimplification of the issue, considering it was supposed to have been resolved before this flight.

This also means that SpaceX’s newly redesigned Starship upper stage has failed on both its flights, and what’s more, the FAA allowed SpaceX to fly this latest Starship flight without closing the mishap investigation into Flight 7. It’s unclear at this point whether grounding Starship will mean anything given the current environment, but I certainly hope the agency will be more rigorous this time around.

It’s easy to see the upper stage of Starship in this photo — it’s black, credit: SpaceX

It’s also worth mentioning that SpaceX has had a rash of problems over the past year — Falcon 9 second stage problems, booster landing failures (the most recent one on March 2 was the result of a propellant leak). For a reliable rocket that is the workhorse of the global launch industry, these are increasingly concerning and I know I’m not the only one wondering whether SpaceX has been pushed to its limit and build quality is suffering as a result. We will see what happens.

The blood moon is coming March 13-14

What will happen: There will be a total lunar eclipse March 13-14, visible in the western hemisphere. Check out NASA’s post on the eclipse for details, but totality will begin at 2:26 AM ET/11:26 PM PT and last for 65 minutes. During totality, the moon will turn a rusty red, hence why this type of eclipse is called a blood moon.

Credit: NASa Goddard

Why it matters: Come on, it’s a lunar eclipse! I don’t think I have to explain why this is cool. If you’re willing to stay up for it, then it’s worth doing. (Between my jet lag, daylight saving time wreaking havoc, and my six year old being really concerned I’m going to leave again and waking me up in the middle of the night, I will not be staying up for this one.)

Intuitive Machines’ moon lander tipped over…again

What happened: Intuitive Machines, the first private company to successfully land a spacecraft on the moon, sent its second lander to the lunar surface. However, upon landing on March 6, Athena (the name of the Nova-C lander) tipped over — again.

Athena on its side on the moon, credit: Intuitive Machines

Why it matters: When I called the last mission a success, despite the fact that the Odysseus lander was leaning on its side, people criticized me, calling me an apologist for Intuitive Machines (haha yeah right). But the fact is landing on the moon is hard, and they were able to eke some science out of the lander. The fact is they did soft land on the moon. For the first mission, anything more than that was just really a bonus.

So, why was I so eager to call that landing a success, while saying this one is mostly a failure? It’s for the same reason I’m willing to call Starship Flight 7 a partial success, while saying Flight 8 really was a failure: In space, failing is the name of the game. But the expectation is that people, organizations, and companies will learn from those failures and do better next time. When, seemingly, the exact same thing happens twice in a row? That to me is a failure.

IM-1 was less on its side than IM-2, credit: Intuitive Machines

It doesn’t matter what Intuitive Machines calls it (during press conferences, they reiterated again and again that the mission was a success.) The spacecraft did soft land near the South Pole of the moon, and that is an achievement. But it tipped over in such a way that this time, they couldn’t even really eke much science out of it.

Intuitive Machines declared an end to the IM-2 mission on March 7. Being able to do less than you did on the first mission is, to me, a failure.

The fact that Intuitive Machines is a private company is significant here. NASA doesn’t really have a problem calling a failure a failure — they’re usually pretty straightforward when things don’t go the way they’d hoped, even as they usually try to find the silver lining. But Intuitive Machines has to think about shareholder value as a publicly traded company, not to mention their executive compensation is almost certainly tied to the company’s stock performance — which, unsurprisingly, is not doing well. They had every incentive to spin this as a success, which to me is a larger problem with commercial spaceflight.

This is not what you want happening to your stock price, credit: Google

But Firefly landed on the moon successfully!

What happened: Some good news — Firefly landed its first lunar lander on the moon on March 2, the second private company to do so after Intuitive Machines. This lander, called Blue Ghost, did not tip over. It’s upright and stable.

Why it matters: For those of you who considered Intuitive Machines’ first landing a failure, then this would be the first successful private landing of a moon lander. Even if you do consider Intuitive Machines’ first landing a success (they did soft land on the moon, after all), this is the first fully successful, upright private lander on the moon. It’s a huge accomplishment.

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander seeing its own (upright) shadow on the moon, credit: Firefly

The mission is scheduled to last until the next lunar sunset, which is March 16. It is expected to survive the total lunar eclipse’s 65 minutes of totality; Firefly is planning on taking pictures of the event from the moon.

Boeing Starliner astronauts to return March 16

What happened: Crew-9, which includes Boeing Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, will return on March 16, according to NASA. The launch for Crew-10 is currently scheduled for March 12. This assumes that everything goes nominally with both the Crew-10 launch as well as the weather for return.

Suni Williams, spacewalking — credit: NASA

Why it matters: At this point I could write an entire book on the saga of Boeing Starliner (worth noting: we still do not know what’s going to happen with the Starliner program). But at this point, it’s just good to know the astronauts are coming home and we can close the chapter on this troubled mission, which has become the subject of infuriating political stunts.

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This week, NASA announced that Boeing Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who are not stranded in space, will return early.

Credit: NASA

This comes after a post by the president accusing the previous administration of, basically, abandoning the astronauts to their fate and directing the CEO of SpaceX to bring them home.

To be clear, I am pretty certain that NASA did not accelerate Butch and Suni’s return because of this post.

Let’s discuss the long, sad tale of Boeing Starliner. If you’ve been following along this whole time, feel free to skip to the final update at the end of the newsletter.

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I was rooting for you, Boeing!

I’ve been following Boeing Starliner for almost a decade at this point, through the ups and downs of the tumultuous Commercial Crew program. This sought to return human spaceflight capability to the United States after the retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011. It’s been a long ride, and through much of it, I was hoping Boeing would pull through with a successful flight.

Credit: Boeing/NASA

Competition in spaceflight providers is a good thing, and while it’s pretty unambiguous that SpaceX has won, I was still rooting for Boeing to succeed. When Starliner finally launched with its first astronauts on board last June, I was so relieved that I had tears in my eyes. Surely, after all this, the test flight would go well and NASA would have a second provider to ferry astronauts to and from the ISS.

I can only laugh at my naïveté. And over the past eight months, this mission has transcended its small test flight status and become fodder for clickbait headlines and political stunts.

Here’s what went wrong with Boeing Starliner

Boeing’s history with spaceflight has been long — they were (and still are) NASA’s prime contractor for the International Space Station and built the bulk of the U.S. modules. In 2014, when NASA awarded the two Commercial Crew contracts, the lion’s share ($4.6 billion) went to Boeing, while SpaceX received significantly less ($2.6 billion).

International Space Station, credit: ESA

At the time, the justification for the higher award for Boeing from NASA’s human spaceflight head William Gerstenmaier was that Boeing’s approach was better. They also had significant spaceflight experience, while SpaceX was still new to the game: The first successful Falcon 9 launch was in 2010, and the Dragon cargo spacecraft docked with the ISS for the first time in 2012. (Funnily enough, Gerst now works for SpaceX.)

A report from NASA’s Office of the Inspector General on the state of the International Space Station last year noted that it takes, on average, eight and a half years from contract award to the first operational flight of a new spacecraft. Both these vehicles were delayed, but SpaceX’s first crewed demonstration flight was in 2020, and the first operational flight was later that year. All eyes were on Boeing to see what they’d do.

Credit: Boeing

The answer is….not much. Boeing’s first uncrewed demonstration flight was in December 2019 (SpaceX’s uncrewed test was earlier in 2019). It went so poorly — to the point where software errors meant that the capsule couldn’t even dock with the ISS — that the company had to fly a second uncrewed flight. That occurred in May 2022, and it was successful, setting the stage for the crewed flight test. But that took over two years to launch.

Three launch attempts for Starliner CFT

SpaceX took just over a year between their uncrewed demonstration flight and their crewed test, so it was safe to assume Boeing would be similar, especially considering they had two uncrewed tests to work out all the kinks. But in August 2023, the company announced that the crewed test would be delayed until at least March 2024 for a few reasons — mainly problems with the parachute system and over a mile (yes a mile) of flammable tape used around wiring within the capsule that had to be removed and replaced.

Boeing Starliner January 2024 parachute drop test, credit: U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground

We were all ready for this flight to take off, then, in March or April of 2024. But scheduling conflicts on the ISS meant that it was delayed further, to May. But the May 6 launch attempt was scrubbed due to an off-seat oxygen pressure valve on the Atlas V launch vehicle. The entire thing had to be rolled back to the Vertical Integration Facility, where they replaced the valve.

While this was happening, engineers also noticed a helium leak in Starliner’s thruster system. They monitored it and decided it was a small enough leak so as not to be a concern. Engineers chose not to fix it before proceeding with the flight because they assumed it was the result of a defective seal.

Credit: Boeing

(It’s important to note two things about this leak: First, helium is notoriously tricky to work with, so it’s not surprising it was leaky. Second, helium isn’t used as a propellant, but instead to maintain pressure in the thruster system, so what they interpreted as a small one-off leak wasn’t a big concern here.)

Well, they got the launch vehicle fixed up and rolled it back out to the pad, but there was another scrub on June 1 because of a faulty power supply unit on the ground systems of the launch pad. They got that fixed, and then finally, on June 5, 2024, Starliner launched, and we all breathed a collective sigh of relief because surely, surely, things were going to go well from here.

Right?

LOL.

I don’t ever want to talk about doghouses again

It’s hard to characterize the Boeing Starliner flight as anything but a PR disaster for NASA at this point. There was a lot of complex stuff at play during this flight, and it came at a time when Boeing was in the spotlight for its shoddy practices in its aviation business. In my opinion it’s extremely unlikely that CFT would have gotten the kind of attention it did if that hadn’t been the case.

The real problems started after launch, just before the crew went to sleep: controllers on the ground detected two additional helium leaks in Starliner’s thrusters. What’s more, on approach to the International Space Station, five of the reaction control system thrusters failed. It quickly became clear that the problems within Starliner’s thruster system were myriad and complicated, and were not in fact, the result of a simple defective seal.

More about Starliner’s engines, credit: L3Harris

Once Butch and Suni were safely onboard the ISS, the crew and ground teams went to work trying to troubleshoot the problem and find the root cause of the issue. And that took months, during which the media was met with mostly silence from NASA in terms of what was going wrong and whether the crew could safely come back on Starliner.

As the eight day mission stretched on and on, the chatter around Starliner started to change in tone. It went from “we’re certain the crew will return on Starliner” to “we’re keeping our options open.” Rumors started to swirl that many at NASA were seriously concerned about the failure of the thrusters, and as a result whether it was actually safe to bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner. And they still weren’t finding a root cause for the problem.

Thruster tests on orbit, credit: NASA

Finally, in August 2024, NASA announced that they had discovered the root cause of the problem: the thruster doghouses (there are four total on Starliner) were overheating. Basically, a Teflon seal was expanding due to heat, and that restricted the flow of propellant, which cut off the thrusters. While the helium leaks had been stable, there was still a concern that a combination of failing RCS thrusters and increased helium leaks during the deorbit burn could make for a catastrophe.

Thruster testing at White Sands, credit: Boeing

In the end, NASA decided that while the possibility of both these occurring at once was incredibly remote, it wasn’t worth the risk. (As an aside, in the midst of this situation, I wrote a whole newsletter about how NASA quantifies risk when everything they do with human spaceflight is inherently risky.) They announced in late August that Butch and Suni would return home on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. Boeing Starliner would return home uncrewed, and the fate of the program is still uncertain at this point.

The SpaceX rescue becomes political

Now, this is where the politics comes into the situation. There’s the whole scenario of SpaceX rescuing astronauts that Boeing “stranded” at the ISS, which has its own optics I’m not going to even get into. NASA decided to make Butch and Suni a part of the Crew-9 mission (pulling two astronauts off that flight at the last minute), and having the two Starliner astronauts remain on the ISS until that mission was scheduled to return in February.

This is the part that gets really complicated and hard to explain without context of how NASA normally operates. It’s the part that people who love clickbait headlines focus on because if you just look at the basic facts without any understanding, it seems like NASA stranded those astronauts in space. But really, this is just how NASA operates.

First, astronauts understand that missions get extended. Frank Rubio’s ISS stay was extended from six months to over a year because of problems with a leaky Soyuz capsule.

The leaky Soyuz, credit: NASA

This kind of thing happens all the time, but that didn’t have Boeing and SpaceX involved at a time everyone wanted to hate on Boeing, so it got very little notice. This is part of the job they sign up for. On top of that, Butch and Suni are both retired military. They understand very well what is involved here.

Second, NASA doesn’t have the resources to have extra spacecraft lying around waiting at the ISS or on the ground for rescues. That isn’t how it works. Every person on the ISS has to have a way off Space Station in an emergency, which means Suni and Butch can’t just take someone else’s spacecraft and let them wait until a new one can be sent up. That’s why NASA opted to integrate them into another crew.

Suni Williams on the ISS, credit: NASA

What’s more, it’s very important to NASA to do in-person handovers of crews, which means there’s some overlap on the ISS between crews. In an emergency, this isn’t strictly necessary, but the Starliner situation wasn’t an emergency. The decision they made makes sense in context, but again, not a lot of people have this context, so it quickly became overblown.

More delays, because nothing in space is simple

Well, after all of this, it wasn’t great when NASA announced that the Crew-9 return would be further delayed because of the processing involved for a new Crew Dragon spacecraft. Basically they needed more time to get this capsule ready in order to ensure an in-person handover between Crew-9 and Crew-10, so launch of Crew-10 was delayed until late March…which meant that Butch and Suni wouldn’t be coming home before late March. This happened pretty quietly in December, but it produced an audible groan from me personally because dear god, just get these poor people home so we can be done with this story.

Then the president got involved in the situation and made everything worse.

NASA sent a pretty basic statement to space reporters in response, saying, “NASA and SpaceX are expeditiously working to safely return the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore as soon as practical, while also preparing for the launch of Crew-10 to complete a handover between expeditions.” This made it clear that they were still prioritizing an in-person handover and were not in a rush to accelerate the return of Butch and Suni.

Suni Williams conducting a spacewalk (she’s above the Crew Dragon), credit: NASA

Where we are now: The return date

Well, this week, NASA announced that they would be bringing home Butch and Suni earlier than planned. This, in my opinion, is not a response to the president’s post, though honestly it can’t hurt in terms of trying to secure funding in the agency’s next budget.

NASA will attempt to launch Crew-10 on March 12 on a previously flown Crew Dragon capsule instead of the new one. That means that, weather permitting, Crew-9 (with Butch and Suni on board) will likely return home as soon as late March.

Falcon 9 rocket, credit: SpaceX

The reason for this is basically, it’s taking longer than NASA would like to complete processing of a brand new Crew Dragon spacecraft, originally intended for the Crew-10 launch. My guess is they learned that even a late March target launch date might not be feasible for this new spacecraft. Rather than further delay return of the Crew-9 astronauts, they opted instead to switch the capsules.

(NASA noted in its release about this latest turn of events that:

“The change also will allow SpaceX, which owns and operates the Dragon fleet, to complete the new spacecraft’s interior build and perform final integration activities, while simultaneously launching Crew-10 and returning Crew-9 sooner.”

I feel like this is a pointed response to the SpaceX CEO claiming that the previous administration “left” the Starliner astronauts in space, when in reality, the reason that the Crew-9 return has been pushed from February is because SpaceX is running late on processing the new spacecraft).

Whew. That’s about all I have to say here.

I really, really hope that this is the last update I send out on this Boeing Starliner flight, except to tell you that the astronauts have returned safely.

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The odds of that asteroid hitting us may have risen

What happened: Last week, I told you all about the asteroid 2024 YR4 (side note: I have never gotten as many texts and DMs about an email as I did about that one. Looks like we all share the same mood right now.)

Well, the odds that it may hit Earth in 2022 have been fluctuating, and they may be as high as 2.3 percent. In March, scientists are going to point JWST at it to get more information.

Asteroid 2024 YR4 discovery images, credit: NASA

Why it matters: I mean why it matters is pretty self-explanatory: This asteroid isn’t big enough to be a planet killer (is that a technical term or am I stealing it from the movie Armageddon, who’s to say?) but it could do significant damage if it hit the Earth in a populated area.

The reason scientists are pointing JWST at it and the reason that the odds that it might hit us keep shifting are one in the same: This is a newly discovered asteroid, and as a result, scientists aren’t quite sure about its orbit. This article from the New York Times outlines exactly which groups are involved in calculating these kinds of odds, and I definitely recommend reading it if you want to know more about this process.

The heroes who will save us from 2024 YR4

The bottom line, though, is that more information on 2024 YR4’s orbit will lead to better models and predictions, which is why scientists are using JWST to study it. Using the telescope, scientists will get a more accurate picture of the asteroid’s size, as well as its position once it travels outside the range of Earth-based telescopes.

To be clear, because I’ve seen a lot of clickbait headlines: This is not an emergency observation. It’s not such a clear and present threat that the Space Telescope Science Institute has wiped the slate of JWST observations in order to look at this asteroid. There is discretionary time built into JWST’s schedule to allow for observations of new discoveries and other last minute things, and that’s what is being used here. The observatory will look at the asteroid for about four hours, and the results will be made publicly available.

Is Artemis III too dangerous?

What happened: The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) released its 2024 annual report that looks at NASA’s risk management, safety culture, and technical execution of its programs — and most of the news is good. But they highlight a few worrisome aspects of NASA’s portfolio, specifically: “Of particular concern are the risks surrounding the development, integration, and execution of the Artemis campaign.”

All the firsts from Artemis III, credit: ASAP 2024 report

Why it matters: I’ve talked a lot about the mess that is the Artemis program (to be clear, I support NASA and this program, I want astronauts back on the moon but I don’t think Artemis is being executed particularly well.) I have discussed in depth my concerns about Artemis III and the number of firsts that will happen on that mission. The panel, it seems, shares those concerns.

It’s important to note that the challenges aren’t just technical, though those are considerable. As the report points out, the problems range from geopolitical to medical to budget to industrial, basically everything you can think of is a problem for Artemis III and beyond. I’m going to wait until we find out what’s going on with the Artemis program before I do another deep dive into the program, but I’m very curious to see what happens.

Will SLS be cancelled?

What happened: Bloomberg reported that Boeing is preparing for the possible cancellation of SLS, NASA’s boondoggle of a moon rocket. The company is preparing for layoffs amounting to about 1/3 of the SLS workforce at Boeing (around 400 people) in case NASA does not renew its SLS contracts.

Why it matters: Right now, nothing is certain for NASA (or anywhere else in the federal government), and many of us have speculated that the new administration will cancel SLS (which, I should add, is a darling of the Senate) in favor of SpaceX’s Starship (which is not operational and also is currently grounded thanks to a mishap investigation from the FAA.)

Starship booster landing, credit: SpaceX

This honestly could mean absolutely nothing. The WARN Act requires U.S. companies with 100 or more employees to notify workers in advance about mass layoffs. That doesn’t mean the layoffs will actually happen, just that Boeing is making required notifications in case they start laying off SLS workers in April.

We still have no idea what will happen with SLS or Artemis. It would make sense for Artemis II and III to fly on SLS because it’s an operational rocket that has had a successful flight (unlike Starship), and Boeing has already done the work on these. Stacking for the Artemis II is underway.

SLS stacking, credit: NASA

But just because it makes sense doesn’t mean that’s what will happen, so we’ll see. For now, this means nothing until the contracts are actually cancelled and the layoffs occur.

An Einstein Ring in our backyard

Euclid discovers an Einstein ring, credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi, T. Li

What happened: The Euclid Space Telescope from the European Space Agency (ESA) discovered an Einstein Ring around NGC 6505, which is an elliptical galaxy around 590 million light years away.

Why it matters: An Einstein ring occurs when light from a different, more distant galaxy bends around a closer galaxy to form a sort of ring or halo around that closer object. It’s named after Albert Einstein because he posited that light could bend around objects in space, thanks to his theory of relativity. You can really see the Einstein ring in the magnified image below.

Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, G. Anselmi, T. Li

In this case, the more distant galaxy is around 4.42 billion light years away. We can see it thanks to a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, which is when an massive object in the foreground bends and magnifies the light of an object much further away.

JWST has taken some excellent shots featuring gravitational lensing. Below, you can see the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723. The arcs within it are the product of gravitational lensing, magnifying much more distant objects behind it.

JWST’s first deep field image, credit: NASA/ESA/STScI

Blue Ghost is headed for the moon

What happened: Blue Ghost is Firefly’s lunar lander, and it’s finally on its way to the moon. The little lander has been in Earth orbit since its launch on January 15, but yesterday it conducted a translunar injection burn, which means it has left Earth orbit and is on the way to the moon. The transit will take around four days.

Credit: Firefly

Why it matters: This is Firefly’s first lunar landing attempt, as part of NASA’s CLPS initiative, which pays private companies to develop lunar landers in order to deliver payloads to the surface of the moon. Intuitive Machines, which was the first private company to land successfully on the moon, will launch another lunar lander later in February as a part of this program.

Blue Ghost, meanwhile, will spend around 16 days in orbit of the moon preparing for landing, which will likely happen in early March.

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No, Biden did not “abandon” Starliner astronauts

In genuinely bizarre news, the president asked Elon Musk and SpaceX to “rescue” the “abandoned” Boeing Starliner astronauts on the International Space Station. To be clear, that’s not what’s happening.

A pretty cool shot of Boeing Starliner atop an Atlas V, credit: Boeing

If you followed my extensive coverage of this mission, you know that last June, Boeing Starliner launched on its crewed test flight with two astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, aboard. It was supposed to be a minimum of about 8 days.

Well, problems with the thrusters and helium leaks meant that after extensive tests, NASA decided not to bring Butch and Suni home on Starliner. Instead, they became a part of Crew-9, which launched on a SpaceX Crew Dragon in September 2024 with two crew members. The plan was that Butch and Suni would remain on the ISS as part of this crew until the mission was over, which was originally scheduled for February 2024. This was decided back in August.

Suni Williams on the ISS, credit: NASA

NASA did have to extend their mission further because processing for the vehicle for Crew-10 (note that it’s a SpaceX Crew Dragon) isn’t quite ready. NASA likes to do an in-person handover between crews. That means that Crew-9 wouldn’t return until the end of March, after Crew-10’s launch.

So now we get to this lovely turn of events. The president posted that he wanted Elon to go get the Boeing Starliner astronauts (apparently he wanted Musk to personally go to space to retrieve them??)

NASA sent reporters a statement as follows:

This may seem like it says nothing, but what it really says, without contradicting anything the president has said, is that the plan is exactly the same as it always was. Crew-9 will come home after a handover with Crew-10, and since they can’t really launch Crew-10 before late March, Butch and Suni will come home in late March.

This has been your breaking news bulletin to let you know that absolutely nothing has changed.

Boeing has lost $2 billion on Starliner

If you’ve been patiently waiting for an update on Boeing Starliner the spacecraft, well you’re not alone. This week, Boeing filed an annual report with the SEC, and apparently they incurred an additional $523 million in losses on the Starliner program. The total that Boeing has lost on the Starliner program is now $2 billion.

Credit: NASA

And we still don’t know what’s going on with the spacecraft and when it will fly again. My guess is that Starliner will fly again in some form; my bet is on Boeing performing another uncrewed test with Starliner, but NASA paying for it as a cargo mission, to ensure the thruster fixes have worked and to get it certified for human spaceflight. But we will see what happens, especially with this new administration.

JWST shows us the light echo in a supernova

We’ve seen the structures within a light echo of a supernova for the first time, thanks to JWST.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

This is Cassiopeia A and it’s located about 11,000 light years away. JWST took a really cool photo of this supernova remnant back in 2023.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Danny Milisavljevic (Purdue University), Ilse De Looze (UGent), Tea Temim (Princeton University)

You can see the inner shell of the supernova remnant slamming into the gas that the star released before it violently exploded. Basically the core of the star collapsed, which released a shockwave that blasted outward with such force that it ripped apart the star.

We’re seeing now the results of this explosion.

From our point of view, Cassiopeia A exploded about 350 years ago. Now, as the gas has had that amount of time to travel, it’s reached interstellar material and warmed it up. What we’re seeing in below is the light echo from the supernova, which causes surrounding clumps of dust to shine.

Credit: Jacob Jencson; Infrared Processing and Analysis Center and Joseph DePasquale; Space Telescope Science Institute/NASA/ESA/CSA

What’s really cool here is the structures within the light echo, but also because JWST is so sensitive, we can actually monitor how it moves and changes over just a few weeks. We’re seeing the light echo in infrared moving at the speed of light through the supernova remnant.

Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

In the above photo, you can see the larger supernova remnant, and what exactly we’re looking at in these different photos I’ve shown you. The bigger photo is from NASA’s now-retired Spitzer space telescope.

This is the dumbest space thing I have seen in awhile

You may remember that, back in 2018, SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time. This is its heavy lift rocket, and it felt like there was a 50/50 chance of whether the rocket would explode on this demonstration flight. I was there, and I remember texting with my editor, Nathan Ingraham at Engadget, on the odds that the rocket would just explode on the launch pad. They weren’t low.

SpaceX wasn’t taking any chances with a payload on this flight, because they weren’t sure what would happen either. They ended up putting Elon Musk’s red Tesla roadster into the rocket as a test, because what we absolutely needed for this flight was more trash in space!

Well, surprisingly, the launch went off beautifully. It was a sight to see for sure (if you have followed me for awhile, you know how much I love a rocket launch).

Credit: SpaceX

But even cooler was the synchronized return and landing of two boosters. It was jaw dropping. Falcon Heavy successfully deployed the Tesla into space, and I hoped that was the last we’d ever hear of this story.

Credit: SpaceX

But because the things that irritate you to no end always come back to haunt you, that was not to be. Apparently on January 2, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced they’d discovered a strange asteroid. They called it 2018 CN41, and it was unusual because its orbit brought it closer to Earth than the orbit of the moon. They were concerned about its potential to one day slam into the Earth.

Well, you guessed it: that asteroid is actually the Tesla roadster launched in 2018. They figured it out less than 24 hours after the announcement and deleted the new asteroid from the records. It’s a funny story, but it also brings attention to a larger issue: the increasing amounts of space junk and the need to be more transparent and responsible about what is being launched into space.

Will this asteroid slam into the Earth and put us all out of our misery?

Speaking of asteroids, there is actually a new asteroid that has the potential to slam into the Earth at some point soon. It’s possible that there are six different times the asteroid 2024 YR4 could impact the Earth between 2032 and 2071. The greatest chance is 1 in 63 on December 22, 2032.

Discovery images of 2024 YR4, credit: NASA/ATLAS telescope

This asteroid is between 130 and 300 feet wide (40 to 90 meters). For an idea of what that impact could do to our planet, we can look at the Tunguska, Siberia asteroid impact from 1908. This was from an asteroid believed to be 160 to 190 feet wide (50 to 60 m), and it flattened basically 830 square miles (2,150 square kilometers) of wilderness. If that were to happen in a populated area, it would be catastrophic.

This size asteroid, however, is not large enough to kill us all and put us out of our misery. It’s also very possible that if NASA did determine this asteroid was going to impact the Earth, we could redirect it. That’s what the DART mission (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) was all about.

DART impact, credit: NASA

Back in 2022, NASA slammed a spacecraft into an asteroid to see if they could change its trajectory. The target was a binary asteroid called Didymos, and NASA determined that they significantly changed the orbit of the smaller asteroid Dimorphos around Didymos as a result of this test.

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This week, NASA had a huge announcement — scientists studying a sample of the asteroid Bennu, retrieved by the mission OSIRIS-Rex, found the ingredients for life within the sample.

They did not find actual alien life.

Let’s break down this discovery, what it means exactly, whether it could be the product of Earth contamination, and take a look at the bigger picture here.

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What exactly did scientists discover?

Scientists studying samples of a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu were surprised to find within the dust grains the building blocks of life, as well as evidence of a saltwater environment. The question is, what’s the difference between finding the building blocks of life and finding life itself?

A series of images taken of Bennu by OSIRIS-REx at 50 miles/80 km out, Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

All life on Earth is carbon based. As far as we know, carbon is necessary for any life to form. But there are other things we think are necessary for life to form as well. That includes organic compounds, such as amino acids (which create proteins when they link up into long chains). Proteins are key to powering biological functions, and we have genetic instructions on how to arrange amino acids into proteins, thanks to the nucleobases in RNA and DNA.

Well, scientists studying these asteroid samples found 14 of the 20 amino acids used by life on Earth to create proteins. They also found all five nucleobases used by Earth-based life, which are the genetic components of RNA and DNA. Additionally elements and minerals necessary for life, some expected and some unexpected, were present in the sample.

Credit: NASA Goddard/OSIRIS-REx/Dan Gallagher

They didn’t find that life had developed on Bennu (more on that later.) The bottom line is that what they discovered gives us hints to the origin of life here on Earth. Let’s dive in.

The chirality of amino acids

There was something very interesting about the amino acids detected within these samples. In very basic terms, amino acids come on two forms that mirror one another, but aren’t identical. Danny Glavin from NASA’s Goddard, who’s leading the sample organics analysis team, used the analogy that it’s like your hands. You have your right hand and left hand and they’re mirror images, but if you try to stack them on top of one another, your thumbs will stick out. As a result, the types of amino acids are called right-handed and left-handed forms.

Left- and right-handed amino acids, credit: Credit: NASA Goddard/OSIRIS-REx

Life on Earth — all of it — is based on the left-handed amino acid form. We don’t know why, but this is how it is. The hypothesis, then, was that the solar system was biased in favor of this. It’s what scientists have found studying other meteorites as well.

But Bennu showed us something different: an equal mixture of left-handed and right-handed forms. One thought might be many of the meteorites that showed more left-handedness were subject to the stresses of entry into Earth’s atmosphere and were found on Earth. Bennu is an asteroid that’s much too fragile to survive that process, so maybe that plays a role in this difference.

The origin of Bennu, the origin of life?

But there’s more. They also found a large quantity of ammonia, about 100 times the natural level of ammonia in Earth soil. Now, ammonia is an important part of the nitrogen cycle (and biology relies on nitrogen and nitrogen-based compounds). Ammonia can react with formaldehyde, which scientists also found in the Bennu sample. Scientists think that this ammonia was used to form amino acids in the nucleobases.

Ammonia is volatile, which means it evaporates at relatively low temperatures. This high level of ammonia likely means that Bennu, and whatever larger asteroid it likely broke off of, formed near the edges of the solar system, where it was much colder. That’s really the only way the ammonia ice they found would have remained stable, so this gives us a hint of where Bennu originated. This is outlined in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Scientists also discovered traces of 11 different minerals in this sample.

False color image. Green: Phosphorous (the center is magnesium sodium phosphate), red: calcium, yellow: iron, and blue: magnesium. Credit: Natural History Museum, London/Tobias Salge

As far as we know, these minerals form when salt water slowly evaporates, leaving salt crystals.

In this false color image, you can see the hydrated sodium bicarbonate in purple, credit: Rob Wardell/Tim McCoy/Smithsonian Institution; colorization: Heather Roper/University of Arizona

We’ve detected some of these minerals before; sodium carbonates, which are commonly found in dried-up lake beds on Earth, have been detected on Ceres and in the plumes of Enceladus, Saturn’s moon.

The plumes of Enceladus, as taken by Cassini, credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

They also found elements essential to biology such as phosphorous and sulfur within these briny areas, and these salts may help synthesize organic molecules on the asteroid. These findings are discussed in the journal Nature.

We think that Bennu broke off of a larger asteroid somewhere around 700 million to two billion years ago, and that larger asteroid may have had pockets of liquid water.

Where did this sample come from?

If you are unfamiliar with this asteroid sample, let me give you a quick summary of the OSIRIS-REx mission which returned a pristine sample of the asteroid Bennu to Earth in September 2023.

The mission launched on September 28, 2016 to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, which makes its closest pass with the Earth every six years (around 186,000 miles or 299,000 kilometers). OSIRIS-REx arrived at Bennu in December 2018 and spent two years studying the asteroid and mapping its surface to find an optimal sample collection site.

On October 20, 2020, the spacecraft briefly touched down on Bennu and collected its sample.

Touchdown on Bennu, credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona

If you’re curious about how the spacecraft returned to Earth, I wrote about it in depth over at The Planetary Society. But on September 24, 2023, the sample return capsule separated from the spacecraft and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. (The larger spacecraft is continuing onto the asteroid Apophis.)

The container touched down safely at the Utah Test and Training Range, where it was retrieved by scientists and immediately put under a nitrogen purge to ensure the sample contents remained pristine.

The sample container after landing, credit: NASA

It was transferred to a clean room area built specifically for these samples at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The clean room at JSC, credit: James Blair/NASA

It took awhile to get the sample container open because it was stuck.

The sample canister open with the head of the TAGSAM visible. You can see the screws around the head. Credit: Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebers/NASA

Basically two of the fasteners that held the sample container closed were stuck, and scientists couldn’t remove them with approved tools. All work on the OSIRIS-REx sample container was done in a sealed box under a flow of nitrogen. That’s not the easiest situation to work with.

Credit: NASA

They finally got the sample container open in January 2024.

Top-down view of the TAGSAM head with the lid removed, credit: NASA/Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebersold

The goal was to get 60 grams of sample material. The team ended up with 121.6 grams, over twice what they’d wanted.

Is it possible that this sample was contaminated — like Japan’s Ryugu sample?

Contamination is a very real possibility with samples like this — basically, there’s always the question of whether any organics or materials found in the samples could be the result of terrestrial contamination.

It’s especially relevant because scientists working with samples of the asteroid Ryugu from Japan’s Hayabusa2 sample return mission. Basically a lab revealed that they’d found micro-organisms inside a sample from the asteroid. But these weren’t from Ryugu: the lab found that these organisms colonized the sample after it was exposed to the Earth’s atmosphere.

Hubble in the clean room at NASA Goddard, credit: NASA

Life is a lot more persistent than you think it is, and it’s incredibly hard to kill all of it. There are bacteria that survive in NASA clean rooms because they’ve adapted to eating the cleaning products. Microorganisms have survived on the outside of the International Space Station since the core module Unity launched in 1998.

So the question is whether the same could be said for OSIRIS-REx’s sample, could what we’re finding be the result of contamination?

It’s unlikely, but we can’t say it’s impossible. OSIRIS-REx samples have been very carefully handled since the sample container touched down. It’s been under a nitrogen purge constantly (nitrogen doesn’t interact with most other things, so it keeps the sample pristine), and samples have been sent to multiple different labs (under nitrogen) that are all having similar findings.

Part of the OSIRIS- REx sample, credit: NASA/Molly Wasser

The team went as far as obtaining hydrazine propellant that was used on the spacecraft to ensure that the ammonia that they found in the samples was chemically distinct from rocket and thruster fuel, so they are doing their homework here.

It’s also worth noting that JAXA, the Japanese Space Agency, put out a statement saying that the Ryugu sample was delivered to the lab in a container under a nitrogen purge, similar to the OSIRIS-REx samples. This means that, in their opinion, the sample was likely contaminated in the lab, after the container was opened, and was not sent to the lab with contamination. It’s a bit of pointing fingers in this case, but it’s worth noting that there are no other reports of Ryugu sample contamination as far as I know.

Ok, but I still don’t understand why I should care!

It’s important to note that scientists have found these building blocks for life before on meteorites and in other asteroid sample return missions, like the afore-mentioned Ryugu mission. This is not the first time we’re discovering these.

So then, why is it significant?

The nucleobases detected on Bennu, credit: NASA Goddard/OSIRIS-REx

Bennu formed around 4.5 billion years ago, as a part of a larger asteroid. If that figure sounds familiar, that’s because scientists think that’s around when our solar system formed. That means that it might be able to give us answers to the big questions: Why are we here? How did life form on the planet Earth?

What we’ve found on Bennu indicates that the building blocks for life on Earth could have come from asteroids similar to Bennu’s parent asteroid. Impacts from asteroids like this could have seeded life on Earth. While material would be burned off the outer surface of a meteorite through the process of entering Earth’s atmosphere, these internal materials would remain intact.

And that’s the key with the Bennu sample — while the Ryugu sample was very much from the surface of the asteroid, the Bennu sample is from further down, from about a half meter under the asteroid’s visible surface. Part of the reason Bennu was such an intriguing asteroid to visit was because it’s a loose rubble-rich asteroid, which means that its surface is basically rocks and pebbles that are barely held together by gravity. Choosing an asteroid like Bennu to sample ensured that we’d be able to dig down deep for the sample without having to drill.

What we think happened when OSIRIS-REx touched down, credit: NASA Goddard

While a loose asteroid like Bennu would never have survived Earth atmosphere entry (due to size and composition), it’s possible the larger asteroid Bennu came from would have been able to.

What’s more, the abundance of these materials in this tiny sample from Bennu indicates that these elements might be abundant throughout the solar system (and possibly other solar systems), and through these asteroids, life may have been seeded on other worlds as well. The analysis of the Bennu sample helps us with our search for life on other worlds.

What’s next?

As scientists continue to study this sample over the next few decades, one question that comes front and center is that if Bennu has the building blocks of life, then why didn’t life form on this asteroid?

It’s a small sample of the asteroid to be sure, but scientists studying the material are confident in saying that Bennu does not support life. It never formed on the asteroid. There are no structural fossils or chemical fossils within the sample. That being said, it is impossible to prove a negative, that Bennu does not support life, but scientists are comfortable saying definitively that it did not form on Bennu.

The fourteen (of 20) amino acids necessary for life found on Bennu, credit: NASA Goddard/OSIRIS-REx

We don’t know why that is, and scientists are hoping to figure it out with further study.

We’re just getting started with this sample from Bennu. This certainly won’t be the last press conference about this sample. There are multiple labs studying the Bennu sample, but also there’s a lot of the sample left.

There’s well over 100 grams of it still at the lab at Johnston Space Center that can still be requested. Around 7.5 grams are still hermetically sealed, and around 7.5 grams are still in deep freeze, for future generations to request and study.

Welcome to Ad Astra’s weekly space news! Each Tuesday, I’ll focus on a few important news stories that I’m not ready to cover in depth, but are relevant. I will sometimes write about developing stories; other times I may wait a week or two so I can cover something with a little more context and information (such as the SpaceX/Blue Origin story below.) These are all spaceflight and space policy related, but I will also cover science here — it’s just been a nonstop year so far.

While this Tuesday newsletter is currently free, it will go behind a paywall later this year. If you’d like to support my work before then, feel free to visit my Patreon.

Two big launches, two mishap investigations

There were two big launches on January 16: Blue Origin and SpaceX. Both ended up with mishap investigations from the FAA.

What happened: Blue Origin launched their New Glenn rocket for the first time on January 16, successfully reaching orbit and deploying their test payload. The first stage, intended to be reusable, successfully performed a re-entry burn, but the company lost telemetry and was unable to land the booster on their waiting ship. Despite this problem, the primary goal was to reach orbit and the launch was considered a success.

New Glenn’s gorgeous methalox flame, credit: Blue Origin

(That being said, considering they delayed the launch twice due to weather for the recovery vessel, I think they really wanted to land that booster on the first try.)

Meanwhile, SpaceX launched the seventh test flight of their Starship vehicle and megarocket, also on January 16. While these test flights have become somewhat routine, this one was anything but.

Credit: SpaceX

They did once again successfully dock the Super Heavy booster back at the launch site, but the vehicle Starship broke apart at about 146 km up. It was quite the shock, and definitely not expected.

What we’ve learned: We’re not currently sure why Blue Origin wasn’t able to land the New Glenn booster. The company is well known for being tight lipped about everything (Bloomberg space reporter Loren Grush was at the launch and said that they didn’t even provide the media a viewing location for the launch, opting instead to put them inside a windowless conference room with a livestream playing, which is truly bewildering.) Blue Origin hasn’t released any information about what might have happened.

SpaceX is much more forthcoming with information than Blue Origin (but is often still frustrating, it’s all relative). The suspicion here, according to the CEO, is that it was a propellant and oxidizer leak on Starship that led to the breakup of the ship.

The FAA is requiring a mishap investigation for both flights. The traditional way that mishap investigations work is that basically, when anything goes awry during a launch or landing, the FAA automatically opens a mishap investigation. It’s not necessarily a huge deal. The FAA requires the company to basically investigate itself (which sounds bad, but if you think about it, a company can figure out what went wrong a lot more quickly, easily, and cheaply than the FAA can, coming in and doing a separate investigation.)

The companies will submit their reports to the FAA on what went wrong and the fix — if the FAA agrees, and determines there is no threat to the public, then both will be allowed to fly again. But until this happens, both rockets are grounded.

It’s important to note that the FAA is also investigating reports that debris fell outside the designated areas for the Starship flight. The FAA sent me this statement:

A debris response area is only activated if debris falls outside of the closed hazard aircraft areas.

Starship IFT-7 launch, credit: SpaceX

SpaceX unsurprisingly disagrees, claiming on their website:

“Starship flew within its designated launch corridor – as all U.S. launches do to safeguard the public both on the ground, on water and in the air. Any surviving pieces of debris would have fallen into the designated hazard area.”

Meanwhile, there are ongoing investigations on Turks and Caicos of property damage due to falling Starship debris. As of right now, there are no reports of injuries.

Why it matters: Blue Origin has long been poised to be the big competition for SpaceX, and it’s badly needed. SpaceX dominates the launch market globally, and it would be great for the industry to have a viable alternative to their services. But Blue Origin has constantly underwhelmed and underperformed over the years. This launch may signal that the company is ready to make an impact in the orbital launch market.

New Glenn as seen from the ISS (it’s the line across the other star trails), credit: Don Pettit

The destruction of Starship is certainly a setback for SpaceX, but not a significant one. The areas this will matter most are in public perception of the company (which, let’s face it, is probably at a well-deserved all-time low considering the CEO’s recent actions), as well as in debris impacts and the brief impact to air traffic. There’s generally a sense that SpaceX thinks it can do whatever it wants, with minimal repercussions, and that’s not entirely inaccurate, especially given the political environment.

Additionally, considering that this was a much bigger problem than SpaceX having to drop a booster in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to the launch site, it’s very possible the mishap investigation might awhile and SpaceX will have to wait until it’s completed to fly their next test flight.

But also, given the current administration’s stance on regulation, it’s also very possible they will be flying again very soon. With current events the way they are, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to predict what’s going to happen.

Jonathan McDowell, astrophysicist and launch king

If you’re feeling powerless right now, and you want to do something that will make an impact, I have a GoFundMe for you.

What happened: If you love space and are at all active online, you are probably familiar with Jonathan McDowell. Well, he’s retiring and needs to move his extensive library of books, binders, and the stuff of space nerd dreams to a new home in the UK. To do that, he needs about $100,000 — and he’s 3/4 of the way there at the time of this writing. Jonathan’s work is so important, and I want to make sure to support him in any way I can.

Why it matters: Jonathan is an astrophysicist by day, but by night he writes Jonathan’s Space Report, which tracks all launches. He also maintains a catalog of Starlink satellites and all kinds of other space objects. When something from space burns up in the atmosphere, or worse, lands somewhere on Earth, every space reporter turns to Jonathan to ask, “What the hell was that?”

He does this for free in his spare time, and as a space journalist, I can’t overstate how incredible his work is, nor how genuinely kind he is. This is a project I want to support, both for professional reasons (he makes my job easier) and personal ones (he’s just the best.) And as someone who does a lot of work for free, like this newsletter, I have a deep understanding of how much love must go into a project like this.

Dr. Philip Metzger, moon dirt specialist

Over at New Scientist, I interviewed Dr. Philip Metzger, who’s one of the foremost experts on lunar regolith (better known as moon dirt!)

Astrobotic’s CubeRover being tested on lunar regolith simulant, credit: NASA/Glenn Benson

Getting the Artemis II rocket ready

All kinds of disruptions are happening right now in the federal government, thanks to the wave of executive orders from the past week+, but one thing that has continued is the stacking of SLS for Artemis II.

What happened: This week, NASA completed stacking six of the 10 segments of the solid rocket boosters, which are the white boosters flanking the orange rocket core.

Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Artemis II is the second flight of the Artemis program to return humans to the moon, and it will be the first flight with crew, but they will not land on the moon. It’s currently scheduled for April 2026; it was previously scheduled for September 2025, but in December NASA delayed the flight because of the investigation into the problems with Orion’s heat shield.

Why it matters: There’s been a lot of speculation about whether the incoming NASA administrator Jared Isaacman will cancel SLS (I’ve absolutely been contributing to this speculation, by the way) or even whether they’ll cancel Artemis altogether. I think there are a lot of reasons to believe that huge changes are coming to NASA, and both SLS and Artemis are in danger of cancellation.

Artemis I, credit: NASA

However, my suspicion is that, at minimum, Artemis II will move forward as scheduled simply because they’ve gotten so far. We’re just over a year away from this launch, the hardware is almost ready, it would be a big triumph for this administration to get a crewed Artemis flight off the ground. There is no other human-rated operational rocket that could accomplish this mission, as of right now.

(That being said, neither Jared Isaacman nor President Trump seem to be ones to consider sunk costs as overly relevant, so I could be completely wrong about this and they may indeed fully cancel both SLS and Artemis.)

Now there are JWST funding cuts!?!

Honestly, this one is just unpleasant. I picked this up from Jeff Foust’s report at SpaceNews, but the bottom line is that JWST — the incredible telescope that cost $10 billion (at the time of launch), is in its third year of observations, and is outperforming all expectations — may be facing a significant budget cut.

NGC 604, credit: NASA/STScI

What happened: According to a town hall presentation from Tom Brown, the head of the mission office for JWST at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), NASA has advised STScI (the organization that operates JWST) that there may be around a 20 percent budget cut for fiscal year 2026 (which beings on October 2025). We don’t have NASA’s FY 2026 budget request yet; the FY 2025 request came out in March 2024.

There are a few reasons this is happening. First, the operations costs for JWST were set in 2011, and they were much lower than the actual costs of operating the observatory. Second, actual inflation was much higher than what was accounted for in these cost estimates. This means that even with flat top-level funding, the team has less money to worth with. And third, NASA is facing across the board cuts to its science budgets because it’s operating in a limited budget environment.

Why it matters: I don’t think I need to tell you that a 20% cut to JWST operating costs when it’s still in the first five years of its mission would be devastating. Demand for time on this observatory is off the charts, and we’re learning amazing things that crosses science disciplines from it. It’s unreal to think that we spent this much money on a flagship observatory, and then NASA just can’t come up with the money for the operational budget during its primary mission.

Jupiter and its rings, credit: JWST/NASA/STScI

And this isn’t the first we’ve heard of about budget constraints for NASA’s big science missions. The list is, sadly, starting to feel endless. From the cancellation of Chandra to budget cuts for Hubble to the cancellation of VIPER to the laughable situation around Mars Sample Return, some have started to ask whether science is even a priority anymore. It seems like the only thing that isn’t dealing with budget issues is Artemis — and it’s not like that program is exactly going well. NASA’s in a terrible budget environment, and the organization is having to make difficult choices, but it’s hard to reconcile this one.

And if you’re wondering, “Well, maybe if NASA cancels SLS and Artemis that will be good because there’s more money for these scientific program,” well, that’s not really how NASA’s budget works. SLS gets funding because members of Congress like SLS (mostly because it provides jobs in their particular states). If SLS were to be canceled (which would be a mess, frankly, because again, a lot of Congress likes the program), then NASA wouldn’t get to spend that money elsewhere. It would be removed from NASA’s budget altogether.

It’s a tricky situation, made altogether more complicated by the fact that the incoming NASA administrator Jared Isaacman has publicly expressed dismay at the cuts to Chandra and Hubble, which means all of this could change once he’s confirmed.

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Things are going to change. That much is clear, from just these first few days of the second Trump administration. (From the tone of recent press conference, it’s also clear that NASA is expecting dramatic changes to the agency.)

How that will affect space policy, the goals of NASA, regulation, and private space companies (especially SpaceX) is yet unclear, but here’s what I can say based on words and actions so far.

An image of airglow over the Earth, because we all deserve some beauty this week. Credit: Don Pettit/NASA

The bottom line is I think we’ll see more money for space across military and commercial sectors, and NASA’s budget might increase. But the places it will increase (and where it will likely be cut: Earth science programs, outreach, STEM education) may not be in line with what’s best for sustainable, long-term spaceflight and science goals. Change needs to happen across NASA and the regulation of commercial space, but what’s coming is, I think, not going to fix the things that need fixing.

Jared Isaacman, NASA administrator

Billionaire space tourist Jared Isaacman is Trump’s pick for NASA administrator. While Isaacman has shown that he’s a competent businessman (he’s the founder and CEO of Shift4 payments, a position he’s leaving to serve in the new administration), it’s unclear how that will translate to an agency like NASA.

When the pick was announced, I parsed the ins and outs of what Isaacman might do at the agency, based on his past statements and actions. I want to flag that NASA is a huge bureaucratic organization, across multiple states, employing over 15,000 people. Managing it is a monumental task, and the drastic changes that Trump has already made to the federal workforce won’t make Isaacman’s job any easier once he’s confirmed.

Not only that, but Isaacman has zero experience with civil space (he does have experience with military space from a previous company). Being the leader of NASA means negotiating with Congress and standing up for what the agency needs. It is unclear whether he has the experience to navigate the delicate politics around budgets and funding within House and Senate committees. His public criticism of SLS, NASA’s boondoggle rocket that’s a darling of the Senate, is certainly notable.

Stacking booster segments for Artemis II, credit: NASA/Kevin Davis

The incoming administrator also has close ties to SpaceX, which raises the question about whether that company will receive preferential treatment from NASA. Whether he does or not, commercial space will likely play a larger role at the agency than it has in the past.

My opinion here is that Isaacman is an interesting pick. Frankly, I was not optimistic about who would be in this position under the new administration. Isaacman, at least, has a demonstrated interest in, knowledge of, and experience with space (he’s been vocal about wanting to save both Chandra and Hubble), and he has made statements in the past that indicate he believes in human-caused climate change. Change would be good for NASA, as the agency has become weighed down under its own bureaucracy, but it remains to be seen whether Isaacman will bring the kind of leadership it needs.

Trump wants to plant a flag on Mars

The biggest piece of space news to come out of the inaugural address is the proclamation that U.S. astronauts would basically plant flags on Mars. It’s important to note that no time frame was given for this during the speech, though Trump has said at other times that he wants it to happen during his administration.

The helicopter Ingenuity on Mars, credit: NASA

I have issues with this for many reasons, including that while the goal of planting a flag on the moon was the reason we made it to the moon so quickly in the 1960s, it’s also why we haven’t been back since 1972. NASA is building a sustainable human presence on the moon with Artemis, and you can criticize that program all you want (I certainly have!) but at least science and exploration are integral to the reasons to go, versus just planting a flag. Setting a goal of getting to Mars, without plans to actually do anything there, is the recipe for getting there and then not going back for 50+ years. We can do better.

(I’m not even going to get into the idea of “manifest destiny in the stars.” We should explore space. That doesn’t mean it’s ours to claim.)

There’s also the question of how you’d do it — the president has previously stated that SpaceX’s Starship (first uncrewed and later crewed) would be the vehicle to take astronauts to Mars. Right now, Starship can’t even get into space, so I think that’s overstating what’s actually possible at this moment. My worry here is that the administration moves forward in a reckless way to try and see this goal come to fruition, which will likely end up costing lives.

But still, it’s clear that going to Mars is important to Trump. He didn’t mention the moon at all, so that leaves the fate of the Artemis program unclear.

Jim Free Janet Petro, acting NASA administrator

NASA administrator Bill Nelson resigned on Monday, which is normal for political appointees. In the interim, until Jared Isaacman is confirmed, it was the new administration’s job to appoint an acting NASA administrator from the civil service.

That would usually be the associate administrator of NASA, who is the highest ranking civil servant at the agency, which in this case is Jim Free. For awhile after the transition of power, the NASA website listed Jim Free as the acting administrator because that’s who everyone assumed would be in charge.

Janet Petro, Credit: NASA/Cory Huston

Well, after the inauguration, the new administration announced Janet Petro, the center director for Kennedy Space Center in Florida, would be the NASA administrator, bypassing Jim Free entirely. Jim Free is one of the big faces of the Artemis program, so this could be an indication that the new administration does not support Artemis and seeks to fundamentally change (if not altogether cancel) NASA’s program to return to the moon. That’s especially interesting because Artemis was a centerpiece of space policy during Trump’s first administration.

National Space Council shutdown? Doesn’t really matter

There are reports that the president will also disband the National Space Council. This absolutely doesn’t matter but it also matters a whole lot. Let me break down why.

The National Space Council was established in 1989 and is chaired by the Vice President. It basically handles space policy development. However, the office didn’t operate between 1993 and 2017. President Trump revived it during his first administration, and now he’s disbanding it. It’s not a huge deal.

Nick Hague shoots a quick selfie during a spacewalk, credit: NASA

Why I do think it matters is because it’s yet another indication of the shift towards commercial space. I have not personally confirmed this, but reports indicate that the shutdown is the direct result of SpaceX lobbying. If true, this is another indication that SpaceX will play a big role in the next few years of space, and the company’s CEO may be the one who determines space policy for NASA, as we know he has a big role in this current administration.

Regulation is a mess and it will get worse

This is an administration that had made clear they want to dismantle much of the regulatory apparatus of the United States government. How does this translate to space? Well, the FAA oversees commercial space, which is probably about to get a lot bigger and more robust. The agency issues launch licenses, ensures that crewed and uncrewed rockets are safe and operate as intended, performs environmental studies to determine the impact of rocket launches, making sure launch plans don’t involve debris falling on populated areas — that sort of thing.

USSF 67 launch, credit: SpaceX

Dealing with the FAA can be very cumbersome, but the agency performs an important function in ensuring that spaceflight is as at least mostly safe for humans, both those on the ground and those atop the rockets. They could be doing better in a lot of respects: for example, the agency has come under criticism for allowing SpaceX to, essentially, investigate itself in response to problems with both their Falcon 9 and Starship launches. (The counterargument here is that SpaceX obviously knows its own hardware well, and can diagnose and come up with a fix for a problem a lot more quickly, easily, cheaply, and more effectively than the FAA could. There is merit to both of these arguments.)

There are also accusations that government agencies aren’t doing enough to regulate and mitigate harm to the environment when it comes to space-related activities. Back in November, the FAA cleared SpaceX to launch up to 25 Starship flights per year from their launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, despite repeated accusations (and evidence) that these flights are harming the local environment.

Super Heavy booster catch on Starship IFT-6, credit: SpaceX

The FCC is in charge regulating satellite constellations, and they do so from a standpoint of communications, which makes sense given the agency. But that also means there is little consideration when it comes to the environmental impacts of regulation (how many satellites is too many in orbit, considering space junk issues? Are dark skies and lack of satellite pollution a right people have?)

Who can forget when Starlink satellites photobombed my aurora photos in Iceland?

These are just a few examples of the myriad regulatory problems when it comes to commercial space. There isn’t enough regulation, and yet at the same time, what is in place can often feel stifling and outdated because it wasn’t really built for this level of activity. But that doesn’t mean that dismantling it all is a good thing.

Besides broader past statements about deregulation, there are a few other reasons I think that we’re in for significantly less regulation for commercial space. First, SpaceX’s CEO has been vocal about his battles with the FAA, and it’s clear he will influence over policy (the FAA issued fines to SpaceX over launch license violations for two missions in 2024).

Second, there is a bill to move the Office of Commercial Space Transportation (AST) out from under the FAA and directly under the Secretary of Transportation as its own agency. SpaceX has publicly supported this bill.

What’s more, Trump’s nominee for Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, said that he would review both fines against SpaceX as well as the entire regulatory framework at the FAA for commercial space.

One thing that is clear: We’re in for a lot of change over the next few years.

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The Milky Way is weird. I mean, really all of space is weird, that’s why I like it so much, but the more we learn about the Milky Way, the more we realize just how strange and wondrous it is. For example, did you know we live in a giant cannibal?? And that there are GHOST SPIRAL ARMS haunting our galaxy???

We don’t even know what shape our galaxy is, that’s where we are with understanding the Milky Way. But thanks to the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft, we’ve been learning a lot more cool stuff about our home in the cosmos. Gaia has been creating the most detailed and precise map of our galaxy ever for the last decade, making more than three trillion observations of two billion stars. But now, it’s time to say goodbye to Gaia.

Today, I’m going to break down the absolute weirdness of our Milky Way galaxy that this observatory revealed, why we’re retiring Gaia, and what might come next.

Our galaxy is bizarre!

All right, let’s talk about how weird the Milky Way is. That’s not to say it’s significantly weirder than other galaxies, but that because it’s our galactic neighborhood, we can study it a lot more closely than we can other galaxies.

Gaia’s map of the sky, credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

But that also presents challenges.

The shape of the Milky Way

One of the things we’ve been trying to figure out is the shape of the Milky Way. I know that seems super basic, but think about it — we’ve barely sent spacecraft outside our solar system. We’ve never seen the galaxy from the outside. Think about trying to figure out the shape of a house, what it’s made of, and its position within a larger city without actually being able to see the outside of the house. It’s not easy.

We’ve long thought the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy — which makes sense, because we think around 77 percent of the galaxies in the universe are spirals. But is it a regular spiral galaxy? A barred spiral?

NGC 2985, a regular spiral galaxy with tightly wound arms, credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. Ho

Are the arms tightly or loosely wound?

NGC 1084, loosely wound spiral galaxy, Credit: NASA, ESA, and S. Smartt (Queen's University Belfast), Acknowledgement: Brian Campbell

How many arms does it have — two? four? six?

NGC 1300, a barred spiral galaxy with two arms, credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team STScI/AURA

Or is it lenticular, which is basically a spiral galaxy with no arms?

NGC 6684, credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, R. Tully

Gaia has helped scientists confirm that our host galaxy is a barred spiral. For a long time, we thought that the Milky Way had four prominent arms. Then in 2017, data from the Spitzer telescope indicated that the Milky Way was actually dominated by just two major arms, with two minor arms.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)

But then came Gaia. Below is the best and most accurate illustration we have of the Milky Way, thanks to Gaia.

Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

You can see the barred center of the galaxy, home to our dormant supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. You can also see a lot more than two major arms — instead, Gaia has shown us that the Milky Way likely has multiple minor arms. (We’re in the Orion outer arm, if you’re curious, around 26,000 light years from the galaxy’s center, near the bottom of this illustration).

There are ghost arms from our galaxy’s past

But the galaxy didn’t always look like this. Scientists used Gaia motion data to identify structures moving through our galaxy, and the results are fascinating. Scientists didn’t expect how many fossils and ghosts they’d find.

Credit: Laporte et al. (2022)

In this map, you can see an all-sky map of the Milky Way created from Gaia data. The darker black and purple is areas of significant motion, while yellow is areas with low motion. The blue lines that are overlaid on the map are areas of significant motion. You can see the Magellanic Clouds on the bottom left, while the Sagittarius galaxy is all the way on the bottom right.

Scientists think these blue-line structures may be what’s left of additional spiral arms that were disrupted by the many collisions the Milky Way has had with neighbor galaxies. They’re, in essence, fossils or ghosts of the spiral arms our galaxy once had.

The Milky Way is an unrepentant cannibal

We also have learned that the Milky Way has unrepentantly EATEN other galaxies again and again throughout its history.

The colliding spiral galaxies NGC 4568 and 4567 give us a preview of what might happen one day between the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy, credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA

Again and again, throughout history, the Milky Way has grown thanks to these kinds of collisions with other galaxies, sometimes consuming the other galaxy altogether. In 2018, researchers discovered that a specific group of 30,000 stars moved in a synchronized way in the opposite direction of the seven million stars that surrounded them. They also were able to see that these stars had a common origin that was different than the stars around them, which led the researchers to believe that these stars were ripped from another galaxy, possibly the debris that resulted from a galactic merger.

Scientists think that the Milky Way may have merged with another galaxy — GSE, or Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus — early in its formation, somewhere around 10 billion years ago. Another galaxy collision around the same time was responsible for the globular clusters that orbit the Milky Way’s core in the wrong direction.

But an encounter doesn’t have to be so violent as a galactic merger for our galaxy to steal stars. Some scientists think that the Milky Way’s unique shape might be the result of periodic collision with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (it may be the reason that the spiral arms aren’t symmetrical).

Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

Sagittarius orbits the Milky Way’s core, and we think it’s collided with the Milky Way at least three times, most recently around two billion years ago. Every time this happens, Sagittarius loses stars to the Milky Way, leaving the sad dwarf galaxy smaller. At some point in the future, the two galaxies will collide again, and there may be nothing left of Sagittarius, as the Milky Way is in the process of currently tearing it apart.

One interesting note, though, is that stealing stars from Sagittarius isn’t the only way the Milky Way has gained stars from the dwarf galaxy. In the aftermath of a galactic collision, concentration of gas and dust increased. This led to increased rates of star formation; one of these bursts of star formation occurred about 4.7 billion years ago when our own star, the sun, formed.

Credit: ESA

But the most recent collision? According to Gaia, that was even more recent than scientists previously thought — possibly as recently as 3 billion years ago, which is not that long ago in cosmic terms.

Parts of the Milky Way are truly ancient

One especially interesting tidbit from Gaia is that parts of the Milky Way are truly ancient, much older than scientists would have ever expected. Science tells us that the Big Bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago, and for a long time, the assumption was that the Milky Way took almost 3 billion years to start forming.

Well, now we think it was much earlier than that. Scientists used Gaia data combined with data from China’s Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope to derive the ages of around 250,000 stars.

There are a few different parts of the Milky Way. There’s the disc, which surrounds the halo. The bulge is the central part of the galaxy, while these globular clusters are groups of ancient stars that orbit the galactic center, but above and below the pancake plane of the galaxy.

Credit: Left: NASA/JPL-Caltech; right: ESA; layout: ESA/ATG medialab

Now the disc has basically two different parts — the thin disc and the thick disc.

Credit: Stefan Payne-Wardenaar / MPIA

The thin disc is what we normally think of as the Milky Way, the thin band of stars you can see across dark skies. The thick disc is much larger than the thin disc but contains many fewer stars.

By comparing ages of stars between the two, scientists discovered that stars began forming in the thick disc less than a billion years after the Big Bang. The inner part of the halo may have also begun forming at this point, but the Milky Way really got going after that afore-mentioned collision with Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, which triggered intense star formation.

This is a map of metal-poor stars in the Milky Way, the circled area is the galaxy’s “poor old heart", credit: H.-W. Rix / MPIA

Some of these stars at the core of the Milky Way are so ancient that they don’t contain many heavy metals because they hadn’t been created yet. Scientists call this area of the galaxy the Milky Way’s “poor old heart” because the stars in the region are so metal-poor.

Why we must say goodbye to Gaia

This is just a snapshot of the things we’ve learned about our galaxy, using data from one telescope (and often combining Gaia’s data with that from other telescopes.) There’s so much more — Gaia found a dormant black hole within our galaxy less than 2,000 light years away. It’s the third dormant black hole found with Gaia data.

Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC

So, you might be asking, if Gaia has been this productive, why is the observatory being retired?

The Gaia space telescope launched in December 2013, and it’s a fully European mission, a product of the European Space Agency. Gaia was designed to create a three-dimensional map of the Milky Way. It’s cataloged almost two billion stars in the galaxy, taking note of their luminosity, temperature, and composition. It also tracks their motion, which is not an easy thing to do considering that Gaia itself is constantly in motion as it orbits the sun at Lagrange Point 2, about a million miles (or 1.5 million km) from the Earth. This allows the spacecraft to take observations without passing into and out of Earth’s shadow.

Credit: ESA

Gaia is actually two space telescopes that between them have 10 mirrors to focus light into the science instruments.

Gaia relies on its astrometric instrument to determine positions of stars in the sky using both parallax and proper motion. The radial velocity spectrometer measures velocity, while the photometric instrument provides color information for stars, from which scientists can derive mass, temperature, and chemical composition. Gaia uses all of these instruments in combination to create its three dimensional map of the Milky Way.

But creating this kind of three-dimensional map means that Gaia has to spin and scan the sky. The telescope relies on a cold gas propellant to do this, and the gas is running out. As of January 15, 2025, Gaia’s mission is over. Its science observations are finished.

Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC, Milky Way impression by Stefan Payne-Wardenaar

This isn’t the end of the mission — there are two more huge data releases coming, and scientists will continue to use the observatory for technical tests that will allow them to gather data to improve future spacecraft. Once that’s concluded, Gaia will leave L2 for a heliocentric orbit — an orbit around the sun, and will be fully retired on March 27, 2025. It’s truly a sendoff into the sunset.

What’s next for the study of our galaxy?

Well, the Gaia data releases will go through the end of the decade, and there are still some major mysteries about the Milky Way scientists are hoping can be solved. We’re expecting the next Gaia dataset, DR4, in mid-2026, and there 66 months of data to go through. DR5, which is expected to be released at the end of the decade, will have a massive 10.5 years of data.

There is a planned successor for the Gaia Space Telescope, the Gaia Near-Infrared mission, would survey 12 billion stars in the Milky Way, and would launch in the early 2030s. It’s not clear if this will happen, though, so we will see.

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Mars Sample Return….is a mess. We got an update this week on NASA’s ambitious program to return 30 carefully prepared sample tubes of Mars regolith and rock that are on the red planet, and as someone who very much wants this mission to happen, frankly, I have some questions.

Today I’m going to break down what Mars Sample Return is, why it’s important and why I do want it to happen, the challenges it’s facing and what NASA announced, and why I’m not quite satisfied with what we heard from the agency this week.

Why do we care about Mars samples?

The Mars Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater on the red planet on February 18, 2021.

Perseverance landing on Mars; the sky crane is at the top left, Credit: NASA

This landing spot was chosen VERY deliberately. Scientists think Jezero Crater is the site of an ancient river delta, now dry, on Mars. NASA intentionally landed Perseverance in a place where it was likeliest ancient life could have thrived — in water. We think certain chemical elements — carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous, and sulfur, as well as water, are necessary for any sort of life to develop.

Left is the Jezero crater on Mars. right is the Nile River delta, credit: NASA

Perseverance is basically a robotic geologist that is specifically designed to look for indications ancient life may have existed on the red planet.

But it’s important to note that Perseverance is not designed to tell us whether life existed at one point (or currently exists) on Mars. That’s a determination humans would have to make looking directly at Martian rock and regolith in a lab.

That’s why the Mars Perseverance rover has been collecting and storing samples since it landed on the red planet. It’s very complicated and cool, here’s how it works: the robot’s percussive rotary drill takes a core sample, and then docks it, where it’s taken inside the rover to a place where the sample handling arm can grab it. The sample arm then pulls the full tube out of the drill bit, after which Percy images it with a camera inside the Sample Cacheing System.

Animation of Perseverance collecting samples, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

After that, a ramrod is shoved into the container to gauge its size, then it’s quickly sealed, after which another photo is taken. Then it’s placed in the sealing station, where the tube is more thoroughly hermetically sealed, at which point it’s returned to and stored in Perseverance.

These samples are invaluable; not only are they intended to be the first intentionally collected pieces of Mars that we can directly study here on Earth (we do have meteorites ejected from the Martian surface here on Earth, but they’re ancient and have been subjected to the stress of re-entry and contaminated by Earth), but they also could directly contain fossilized evidence of microbial life.

Perseverance’s samples, credit: NASA

Every 10 years, different science disciplines conduct what’s called a Decadal Survey, which basically outlines the highest scientific priorities for the next 10 years. For planetary science, the highest priority for two decades has been Mars Sample Return. It’s a huge deal, and we’ve been working on it for a very long time.

The challenges of Mars Sample Return

Now, the mission architecture of Mars Sample Return is incredibly complicated. NASA has experience collecting samples from the moon with astronauts (China and Russia have collected them robotically) and thanks to missions like OSIRIS-REx, NASA has experience landing on and collecting samples from asteroids. But Mars is a whole different story.

The OSIRIS-REx sample container after landing, credit: NASA

Mars is much further than anything we’ve returned samples from before. While the asteroid Bennu, which was the target of OSIRIS-REx, probably originated as a main-belt asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, it’s now a near-Earth asteroid. It comes within 186,000 miles (299,000 km) of Earth every six years. Mars is, on average, 140 million miles (225 million km) from Earth. Launch windows only occur every 26 months, if you’re using the most energy efficient Hohmann transfer orbit which would cut down on costs and use the minimum amount of propellant. And the journey to the red planet would take 9 months one way, using the propulsion methods in use today.

Hohmann transfer orbit animation, credit: NASA

Not only that, but the landing had to be pinpoint. To be able to collect Perseverance’s samples, whatever craft lands on the Martian surface to collect them had to land within 200 feet, or 60 meters, of its target site because it has to be close enough for Perseverance to come back to it, and Percy’s top speed is .1 mph. Pinpoint landings on other planets, when things like GPS don’t exist, are hard to say the least.

The original mission architecture

The previously approved plan, as a joint mission from NASA and the ESA was as follows:

There were three separate parts. The first is the robot Perseverance, which is on Mars collecting samples as we speak. The second part is the actual retrieval of the samples from the surface and retuning them to Mars orbit. The third is the Earth Return Orbiter.

MSR architecture, credit: ESA

With the new plan, the overall architecture is the same. Where NASA changed things is within that middle part, how we’d retrieve the samples from the surface.

Originally, the plan was to launch a sample return lander in 2028, which would also travel with the Mars Ascent Vehicle and two sample recovery helicopters, similar to Mars Ingenuity. The Mars Sample Return Lander would have 5 solar arrays, weigh almost 7,500 lbs (3,375 kg), and be the average size of a two-car garage. It’s not small, nor is it lightweight. Landing this thing was going to be a real challenge, hence why NASA was planning on building an entirely new spacecraft from scratch.

Mars Sample Return lander concept, credit: NASA

The two Ingenuity-style helicopters were to help collect samples, in case Perseverance struggled to return to the landing site.

Ingenuity’s 47th flight, credit: NASA

The Mars Ascent Vehicle, or MAV, is a separate two-stage solid fueled rocket currently being developed by Lockheed Martin. Once the samples are safely on board, it will take off and enter Martian orbit.

Mars Ascent Vehicle, credit: NASA

At that point, once safely in orbit, the payload fairing would eject the sample container into orbit. The spent second stage of the rocket would remain in orbit and broadcast a signal to make it easier to find.

Then we come to the third part of the mission: the MAV would dock with the Earth Return Orbiter, developed by the ESA. Onboard would be the NASA capture and containment system for safeguarding the Mars samples. The ERO would be able to home in on the broadcasted signal in order to locate the sample container. Once it’s locked on, it would slowly and carefully overtake the sample container and then basically swallow it.

Earth Return Orbiter, credit: ESA

Once the sample container is safely on board, the capture and containment system would be sealed, safeguarding the samples, after which an onboard robotic arm would place the entire thing into a capsule designed for Earth re-entry. The spacecraft would then head back to Earth, and would release the Earth Entry Vehicle when it’s three days away from our planet. The Earth Entry Vehicle is designed to re-enter without parachutes and will touch down at the same location as the OSIRIS-REx samples, the Utah Test and Training Range.

Well back in April 2024, NASA announced that with this mission architecture, the mission would cost $11 billion and the samples would not get back before 2040, which is why NASA started looking for alternatives.

I also want to add that there’s some additional schedule pressure here because China is planning on a Mars sample return mission by 2030. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think it matters who does it first, but beating China is a big priority of the new administration, so doing this quickly matters in that respect.

The changes to MSR: Are they enough?

NASA’s announced changes aren’t very dramatic. The overall mission architecture — meaning the three separate parts, Perseverance, the sample lander and ascent vehicle, and the return to Earth — have to pretty much stay the same. There’s no feasible way to combine any of this without incurring significant additional costs and complexity. Having to build entirely new spacecraft from scratch adds a lot of time and money, so NASA started looking for ways to reduce that.

Perseverance on Mars, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

What they announced is basically just some changes to the middle part of the mission, specifically the Mars Sample Return Lander and the Mars Ascent Vehicle; Perseverance is obviously already on Mars, so no changes there, and the ESA Earth Return Orbiter would stay the same.

There are two possible strategies.

Both involve cutting down the size and mass of the Mars Ascent vehicle, which would in turn mean that the Mars Sample Return Lander could be much smaller. They would also cut weight from the Mars Sample Return lander by switching to nuclear batteries instead of the solar panel array. This cuts down costs, as well as gives NASA more flexibility because they’d be able to operate during dust storm season. It will also warm the solid rocket motors on the MAV.

Radioisotope generator from Voyager 1, credit: NASA

They’re also doing away with the Ingenuity-style helicopters because they have confidence that Perseverance will be able to trek to the landing site to deliver samples. There are 10 additional samples stored around Jezero Crater that the helicopters were supposed to retrieve, but these will remain on the red planet. Only the 30 stored on the Perseverance rover will come back.

So with that in mind, here are the two options:

(1) Using heritage and flight proven technology to land it

Because of the significant weight reduction, the entire package could be delivered to the Martian surface by the sky crane, which NASA has successfully used to deliver both Mars Curiosity and Perseverance to the surface of the red planet.

This would involve lowering the Mars Sample Return Lander and Mars Ascent Vehicle with a cable attached to a rocket stage hovering above the ground. The sky crane would need to be about 20 percent bigger than the one used for Curiosity and Percy.

Entry, descent, and landing profile for Mars Curiosity, credit: NASA

(2) Partnering with a commercial company to build a lander and landing mechanism that would work for NASA’s purposes.

There was also the question of whether we return the samples directly to Earth, or return them to lunar orbit (which would, again, make the process of getting the samples off Mars and back to the Earth-moon system less expensive and faster). But NASA prefers returning them to Earth because we’d still have to go get them from lunar orbit (though by this point, if Artemis stays as-is and isn’t significantly modified by incoming administrator Jared Isaacman, we’d have the Gateway space station in orbit of the moon). The idea would be that would incur additional cost, increase complexity, and it would take longer to get the samples back to Earth.

Remember, the thing that prompted this redesign was a cost estimate of $11 billion and the samples wouldn’t be back on Earth until the 2040s. This revised architecture has an estimated cost of less than $8 billion. The earliest launch possibilities, according to the associate administrator of NASA’s science directorate Nicky Fox, would be 2030 for the Earth Return Orbiter and 2031 for the sample return lander. We don’t have an estimate return date for the samples, all Dr. Fox said was that they’re confident it would be before 2040.

I have thoughts, and I have questions, so let’s get into them.

My thoughts and criticisms

Let’s start with this: NASA hasn’t made a decision between the two options, that will come in mid-2026 and will be the responsibility of the new administration. I’m going to stress again that I want Mars Sample Return to happen, and that I personally think it’s important, but the entire thing feels a little bizarre.

Perseverance drilling a sample, credit: NASA

I’ll get into each of these points, but in sum:

• They didn’t have a decision to announce, or anything really concrete to say beyond “we aren’t cancelling the program”;

• We’re still not getting all the sample containers back, which was a big emphasis of the April 2024 press conference

• It’s still going to be really expensive, and it’s money they don’t currently have

• I personally think their schedule continues to be unrealistic

• This makes me question NASA’s ability to even execute a broad flagship program at this point.

Punting the decision to the next administration

I don’t want to criticize NASA for holding a press conference, because I think frankness and information disclosure is a good thing, but there was really nothing to announce here. There have been no decisions made, and we all suspect the agency is going to go through a drastic reorganization under the new administration, so what they announced may not even be relevant in 18 months, when the decision point comes.

Mars Perseverance dangling from the sky crane, credit: NASA

The timing of this felt very much politically motivated — NASA wanted to announce something so their work on the program up to now is public record, and to make it harder to cancel, basically, as well as emphasize the need to fund it.

It’s especially interesting considering they did make decisions on the Orion heat shield last month, and did not leave that to the next administration. It feels like they’re picking and choosing here a little bit, when both Artemis and Mars Sample Return are supposed to be top priorities for the agency.

And to be clear, they need the extra time to refine the options and do engineering analysis. They’re not ready to make a decision on this right now. But the fact that they aren’t ready to make a decision is indicative of a larger problem at NASA.

The schedule and budget have long been problematic

Here’s the thing: It’s not like Mars Sample Return is new!

NASA has been working on Mars Sample Return for decades, since the discoveries of the Viking landers in the 1970s.

Viking 2 on Mars, credit: NASA

Mars Sample Return has been a flagship mission for NASA since 1988. This is not new. This has been a “top” priority since the 1980s. So how are we now, in the year 2025, still hearing about how NASA is trying to simplify the complexity of the mission by changing out some components on the Mars Sample Lander and making the Mars ascent rocket less heavy? It just seems very basic.

NASA has been working in a less than ideal budget environment for literally decades, basically since the first budget cuts of the Apollo program before we even landed on the moon in 1969. Since then, they have not had enough money to do everything they want to do in the way they want to do it. This is not new. This is something that NASA is very used to.

And let’s look at the timing, too. The MSR independent review board was convened in May 2023, which by the way wasn’t even the first independent review board for Mars Sample Return, there was another in late 2020. This second review board delivered their report in September 2023. The program was scrapped to be redesigned in April 2024. It’s now January 2025. That’s almost two years, and we still don’t have a decision on Mars Sample Return.

A meteorite from Mars called Black Beauty, credit: Caltech

It’s frankly hard to listen to an announcement like this and not think, “NASA has been in a limited budget environment for decades and trying to cut costs. Why wasn’t this updated architecture something considered years ago?”

Are NASA’s updated estimates even realistic?

What’s more the MSR independent review board made it clear that the current version of MSR had unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning. And I’m honestly not sure that even the current, newly announced budget and schedule expectations are realistic.

Back in September 2024, the NASA Office of the Inspector General issued a report on the challenges and risks associated with keeping the International Space Station in orbit until 2030, or longer if necessary.

It’s a really interesting report, but one of the key takeaways for me was that the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle, which NASA contracted with SpaceX to develop in 2024, very may well may not be ready in time. The vehicle is supposed to launch in 2029, but the report points out:

Now I’m not overly worried about USDV because it’s based on heritage Dragon hardware with just a modified trunk. But the point stands: Eight and a half years is the average.

For example, the first contract award for SpaceX’s Crew Dragon was in 2014. The first operational mission was in late 2020. We’re not going to even talk about Boeing.

For the Mars Sample Return Lander, let’s be generous and say it takes that same six years, which is not an unreasonable prediction. The decision point for which option they they’re going to pick is mid-2026. Then they have to award the contract. So let’s say that doesn’t happen until 2027. That means the vehicle wouldn’t be ready until 2033. There is a launch window in 2033, but if NASA isn’t able to get the vehicle ready in time? Then the next launch window isn’t until 2035. And keep in mind we’re talking about two different vehicles integrated into one here (the lander and the ascent vehicle) so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think they may not make a 2033 window.

One of Perseverance’s sample tubes, credit: NASA

So if they launch in 2035, arrive in 2036, then wait for the next optimal Hohmann transfer window to come back, which is the middle of 2037, then the samples don’t get here until 2038. That’s not much better than 2040 in my opinion.

And let’s look at the cost as well. We’re talking $6 billion to $8 billion more, and it’s cost $20 billion to date. I’m not actually criticizing the cost here. It’s a flagship mission for the agency, we always knew it was going to be expensive. Flagship missions should be expensive and daring and cutting edge.

But my point is that NASA didn’t have $11 billion when they decided to redesign the mission last year, and they don’t have $6 to $8 billion now. One of the first things that Administrator Nelson said during the press conference was that Congress needed to start funding MSR in this fiscal year or it’s not going to happen. And, again, because I’m pretty sure they’re not going to make a 2030 launch window, it’s probably going to be even more money than they’ve stated.

Samples that would not be retrieved, credit: NASA

And this approach gets back the bulk of the sample return containers, 30, which you know is definitely better than getting none back, but it doesn’t get back all 40+ of them.

And I already know that the comments are going to be full of people asking why I’m being so mean to NASA. Look, I love NASA. I have so much respect for the agency and people who work there, I know a lot people who work there and they do amazing work. I have so much respect for NASA, and that’s why I’m disappointed here. My job here isn’t to be nice to NASA, it’s to look at what they’re doing and be honest in my analysis.

And I just don’t see this happening, to be honest.

NASA may be trying to do too much

I’d love to be surprised because as I’ve said I think MSR is important, but I don’t see a way in NASA’s current budget environment, and with an incoming administration that’s set on cutting back, to make a mission like this work. I think a lot of us are starting to ask questions about NASA’s capability to manage large missions like this, given what we’ve seen.

I often talk about how difficult it is in this day and age to be a space reporter, when it seems like everything is a space company. The best just so big — from the history of the universe to astrophysics to planetary science to space policy to politics to spaceship engineering to medical stuff, the health of astronauts to environmental concerns — during the eclipse I had countless people asking me about analyzing weather forecasts. I’m a space reporter. I don’t know anything about the weather!

The total eclipse of 2024, credit: NASA

But you’re expected to be able to cover all of this stuff and have enough knowledge to be able to do it competently. It’s HARD. And I feel like that’s a little of what NASA is dealing with. When the entire agency was focused on one goal, going to the moon, they were really at their peak and they were able to accomplish amazing things.

And to be clear, they’re still able to accomplish amazing things — look at JWS, for example. But the fact remains that it seems like they’re trying to do so much that they’re struggling to make progress on their top priorities because there are too many top priorities. And I think we’re seeing that in both Mars Sample Return and the Artemis program. We’ll see what happens, I hope they find a way to make MSR work.

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I had every intention of sending out another in-depth newsletter this week; after all, there’s no dearth of topics to choose from when it comes to space. But instead, given that it’s the holidays, and that my house isn’t exempt from the absolute chaos that comes with this season, I thought instead I’d bring you some follow-ups to stories I’ve done and brief updates on what’s going on in the space world.

Boeing Starliner astronauts’ ISS stay extended

If you have followed my Boeing Starliner coverage, you know exactly what I was thinking when I saw this. Crew-10 will head to the ISS on a SpaceX Crew Dragon (because what else is there at this point) in late March. That launch was previously targeted for February.

Suni Williams on the ISS, credit: NASA

I’ve said again and again that delays happen. This is totally normal. It’s because they need some extra time to process the Crew Dragon that these astronauts will fly on, which won’t arrive at the Cape until early January. It wouldn’t even be news except…well, NASA likes to do a handover between ISS crews. This means that Crew-9 can’t depart until Crew-10 has arrived. NASA looked at a lot of different scenarios (because believe it or not, they do take extending Butch and Suni’s stay even further seriously) but in the end, the best decision in their view was to just keep Crew-9 up there a little longer.

If you’re keeping count, Butch and Suni launched June 6 on what was supposed to be a minimum of an eight day mission. It’s looking like that will now be an almost 10-month mission.

NASA’s yule log

Yes, you read that right. If you watch my vertical videos, you may have seen this one already, but NASA has an amazing yule log video featuring the SLS rocket framed by a picturesque fireplace. There’s even the sound of roaring rockets in the background. It’s my favorite thing this holiday season.

In the fireplace, you can see SLS's four RS-25 engines. These are Space Shuttle engines, previously known as the Space Shuttle Main Engines. Each Shuttle was equipped with three of these, and they were removed and updated for use on SLS. All four of Artemis I's RS-25 engines were previously used by Space Shuttles.

Artemis I rollout, credit: NASA

Flanking the RS-25 engines, you can see the flames of two solid rocket boosters. On the rocket, these stand 17 stories tall and they provide more than 75 percent of SLS's thrust at launch.

Voyager 1 and 2: The power situation

In case you missed it, Voyager 1 is back in full contact with Earth. A few weeks ago, I reported that the aging spacecraft was using its S-band transmitter, which hadn’t been turned on since 1981. The good news was that it worked. The bad news was that if the Voyager 1 team couldn’t figure out what had happened and get Voyager 1 to switch back to its X-band transmitter, the mission would effectively be over.

Well, the team was able to switch Voyager 1 back. Basically, there are models of how much power the spacecraft is using (and has available to use) at any different time. But according to a spokesperson from NASA, we’re talking about fractions of a watt here. The team thought they had enough power to flip on a heater, but they didn’t. It’s an indicator that our estimates of Voyager 1’s available power may no longer be accurate. This is also why NASA had to turn off one of Voyager 2’s science instruments in October.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The plasma science instrument, which was critical to determining the spacecraft had left our heliosphere, measured the amount of plasma, or charged particles, and the direction they were flowing. This means that there are only four operational science instruments on Voyager 2.

Engineers had tried hard to avoid this step as long as possible. Back in April 2023, engineers at NASA’s JPL made the decision to use a reservoir of backup power for the spacecraft in hopes of delaying another instrument shutoff until 2026 or later. In this case, using the extra power didn’t buy Voyager 2 as much time as engineers had hoped.

Starship’s next test flight may be January 7

SpaceX is gearing up for the next test flight of Starship, and an internal NASA email may have given us the launch date: January 7. According to an email obtained by The Launch Pad Network, NASA is requesting permission for multiple Gulf Stream jet flights in order to observe the launch.

The booster catch from Flight 5, credit: SpaceX

Who knows if this is accurate, and launch dates can always slip. But there’s no reason to think this isn’t real, so for now, I have January 7 blocked off on my calendar. There’s going to be no fight with the FAA this time; the organization has already issued a launch license for the flight.

Axiom’s space station might be up and running soon

At the request of NASA, Axiom Space has shifted its space station plans in order to get the station up and running sooner than expected. This comes as NASA is trying to solidify its deorbit plans and ensure that there’s an operational private space station in low Earth orbit they can pass the torch to.

Credit: Axiom Space

The plan tweaks will involve sending up a power module to dock with the ISS in 2027. This will detach nine months later to dock with Axiom’s habitat module. This means that Axiom will have a two-module space station up and running in 2028, versus the original plan of detaching from the ISS with four modules in 2030.

Will this work? Will this be ready on time? Who knows. The entire commercial space station endeavor has been plagued by delays and cancellations, but it’s a good plan. Let’s just see if they can stick to it.

Russia will stay on the ISS through 2030

In other ISS news, it looks as though Russia might be committed to the ISS through 2030? I flagged this as a problem for NASA’s ISS deorbit plans: At the time they were crafting them, Russia was only publicly committed to the ISS through 2028.

The head of Russia’s space agency Yuri Borisov has now stated publicly that Russia will stay on the ISS and cooperate with NASA’s deorbit plans for the aging Space Station. (This was first reported by Ars Technica.) According to the article, the official documents haven’t been signed. The timing of this makes you wonder how much cooperating with the incoming administration led to the decision.

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Last week, NASA announced that they will delay the next flight of the Artemis program, Artemis II, from September 2025 to April 2026. They also announced the results of the comprehensive investigation into problems with the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield, and that the agency would fly Artemis II as-is, but with a modified re-entry trajectory to mitigate the issue.

Since then, NASA has come under fire from pretty much every angle. Some say NASA is being too conservative, because the charring issue would not have put astronauts in danger. Others think NASA is being way too cavalier in flying Artemis II as is; the heat shield has already been bolted on the spacecraft. To change the heat shield would mean a years-long delay, and some think NASA is too deadline oriented and is compromising on astronaut safety. Still others understand the decision but don’t trust NASA because of their reluctance to release information around the issue.

Let’s break it down.

Orion’s heat shield on Artemis I

Let’s start with a brief summary of the problems with Orion’s heat shield.

But the short story is that during the Artemis I flight, Orion’s heat shield behaved in unexpected ways. The heat shield covers the bottom of the capsule, 16 feet in diameter, and is made of a material called AVCOAT.

AVCOAT is the same ablative material that was used in the heat shield for the Apollo missions. We have a lot of experience with it and we know how it’s supposed to behave.

Artist’s impression, credit: NASA

What happens is during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, Orion can experience temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees F or 2,760 degrees C. At those temperatures, Orion’s titanium skeleton and carbon fiber skin would basically melt. The AVCOAT ablates away, charring in order to protect the capsule (and the crew inside). Or, at least, that’s what it’s supposed to do.

After Orion touched down in December 2022, and examination of the capsule began, NASA noticed that the AVCOAT heat shield layer had chunks missing. The material was charred, and that’s supposed to happen.

Credit: NASA Office of the Inspector General

What is not supposed to happen is that the charred material cracked and broke off in chunks. This happened in about 100 spots on the Orion capsule. NASA needed to know why.

How was Artemis I different than Orion’s previous flight?

The thing is, we’ve flown Orion before, on an Exploration Flight Test, or EFT-1 in December 2014. The heat shield has been tested and there were no problems on EFT-1. But there were some big differences between EFT-1 and Artemis I.

Baby me at Orion EFT-1 in December 2014

Let’s talk first about skip entry.

The velocity of coming back from the moon is much greater than orbital or sub-orbital re-entry velocity. So NASA takes steps to slow the Orion capsule down using a technique called skip entry. The capsule basically dips in and out of the atmosphere, which reduces the spacecraft’s velocity. When it pulls back up into the atmosphere, this is called a “skip dwell,” which will become important later.

This was a technique first attempted on Artemis I.

Artemis I, credit: NASA

There were other relevant differences between Artemis I and EFT-1, though.

First of all, the basics: the re-entry velocity and re-entry temperature of the flight test were both lower than they were for Artemis I. EFT-1 was a four and a half-hour orbital flight test. It didn’t leave Earth orbit and certainly didn’t go to the moon. While NASA did raise Orion’s orbit to test the heat shield, re-entry velocity maxed out at around 20,000 mph / 32,186 kph and a temperature of 4,000 degrees F / 2,200 degrees C.

In contrast the maximum re-entry velocity for Artemis I was around 25,000 mph / 40,000 kph. That’s Mach 32 (32 times the speed of sound), and temperatures were up to 5,000 degrees F or 2,760 degrees C.

The application of AVCOAT was also different between Artemis I and the Orion EFT. For the Orion flight test, the AVCOAT was applied individually. Workers filled 300,000 honeycomb cells by hand, one by one, with the ablative material, after which they heat cured it. That’s also how it was done for Apollo. As you can imagine, this is a painstaking and labor intensive process.

Heat shield application for Orion EFT-1, credit: NASA

For Artemis I, Lockheed Martin and NASA changed the application process (Lockheed Martin builds Orion, but it’s under a cost plus contract, which means NASA owns and operates the vehicle, and is intimately involved with every step and every decision. It’s very different from, say, NASA contracting with SpaceX for astronaut flights to the ISS.)

For Artemis I and Artemis II, they manufactured AVCOAT blocks that are carefully designed to fit a particular position and they’re bonded onto Orion’s carbon fiber skin. They worked with 186 blocks total, and each block is anywhere from one to three inches thick. It’s a huge time and efficiency savings, and it was supposed to work the exact same way. But this was the first thing that occurred to me when we learned about the heat shield problems.

Credit: NASA

Now, NASA hasn’t actually released the independent review team’s findings — I’ll talk about that decision a little later — so we have very little insight into how this all came together. But what we know now is that some of these differences did matter. Let’s break down what NASA disclosed last week.

The root cause of the liberated char on Orion

If you saw my coverage of Boeing Starliner, then you know NASA cares a lot about “root cause.” If astronauts had been aboard Artemis I, nothing would have happened to them. They would have returned safely, and wouldn’t have even experienced an increase in temperatures inside the cabin.

But NASA has had experience with crew returning safely when something is acting in a way it shouldn’t, and they’ve learned the hard way with both Challenger and Columbia that if they don’t take the time to understand the root cause of aberrant behavior, it can lead to tragedy. So they have basically spent the two years since Artemis I ended looking for the root cause to this issue.

Orion’s heat shield after Artemis I, credit: NASA

NASA and the independent review team found that one of the issues that contributed to the char loss from Orion’s heat shield was the skip entry technique. What they learned is basically, during the skip dwell (which remember is when the capsule lifts back up into the atmosphere), the heating rates decreased and gases started to form inside the AVCOAT.

The other issue here is permeability of the AVCOAT. Basically, the ablated AVCOAT produces this gas when it burns without oxygen. But as a result, the AVCOAT must be permeable, because if it’s not, that’s what causes the gases to be trapped, versus being able to be released.

AVCOAT Testing — the top section is permeable, the rest is not. Credit: NASA

The lowered heat during the skip dwell produced less char but increased production of gases. These gases were unable to permeate the outer AVCOAT layer so the internal pressure within the heat shield built up. That led to cracking, and then to the liberation of the charred material.

Why didn’t NASA know this before Artemis I?

Now, there are a few reasons NASA was unaware of this issue before Artemis I. It’s important to remember that in a lot of ways, this was still a test flight. That’s why it was uncrewed, to test the entire vehicle, Orion and SLS, to iron out any kinks before putting crew on it. But still, why didn’t NASA catch this if they have a lot of experience using AVCOAT?

Well, first, the AVCOAT used during the Apollo mission was robust, and we had a lot of experience with it — but it was different in some ways than what’s being used on Orion. Specifically, there were materials used that we can’t use today because of environmental regulations.

Apollo heat shield fragment, credit: National Air and Space Museum

Plus, a lot of knowledge on heat shield construction was lost when the Constellation program was cancelled under President Obama. (This is also a concern with the new administration, if they slash budgets and personnel, a lot of institutional engineering knowledge will be lost. We’ve seen it before). So, basically, there was a gap in knowledge on how to formulate the AVCOAT. That meant there were very small changes in the material between Apollo and now that affected performance.

On top of that, there is the issue of the AVCOAT blocks, which I mentioned previously. Because this was a big change, NASA and Lockheed Martin tested this extensively to make sure it worked before they put it on the Artemis I capsule. And they got the construction of it right.

EFT-1 heat shield after re-entry, credit: NASA

The thing they missed is specifically in regard to the skip entry. They assumed that basically, if it worked higher in the atmosphere and lower in the atmosphere, it would work the entire way down. But they didn’t take the specific skip dwell time, and changing temperatures, into account. And when they were developing this technique and testing it, NASA did not have the capability to test the varied heating rates during skip entry (they have since developed the capability, which is how they were able to recreate the issue.)

Now, let’s talk about that block AVCOAT application. It turns out that the hand honeycomb technique of Apollo provided a separation between the AVCOAT.

Apollo heat shield application, credit: Textron Systems

It would absolutely crack, but because it was basically in a titanium honeycomb design, those cracks wouldn’t spread across the vehicle. When it’s in blocks, and the blocks are designed in such a way that they fit together seamlessly, if one area of AVCOAT cracks, it’s not limited to that area.

So, why don’t they just go back to this hand-applied method? Well, Orion is a lot bigger than Apollo. The Apollo command module was 12.8 feet in diameter versus Orion’s 16 feet. The material that the capsule itself is made of is also different. What NASA and Lockheed Martin discovered when they applied the AVCOAT by hand to the EFT capsule was that it was much harder to do than during the Apollo area. Because of the size and material of the capsule, it was flexing on them and it wasn’t a great process. That’s why they shifted to the blocks method.

What does this mean for Artemis II?

Artemis II is designed to be about 10 days long and it’s going to be the first mission with crew. Astronauts won’t land on the moon — the mission will go around the moon and come back to Earth on a free-return trajectory, but because of this they will experience those higher temperatures and the higher re-entry velocity, versus just hanging out in Earth orbit.

Credit: NASA

Now, Artemis II has been delayed from September 2025 to no earlier than April 2026. (The first moon landing, Artemis III, is now delayed from September 2026, a date that there’s really no way they could have made, to mid-2027.)

NASA didn’t make this direct connection, but the extensive Orion heat shield testing is likely the cause of that delay. There are other problems — ground systems issues, abort system fixes. But basically I think that they’ve been delaying big decisions because they’ve been waiting on the final word about the heat shield, and that makes it too strenuous to continue towards that September 2025 date.

The other big change is that NASA is altering the re-entry profile of Artemis II and moving forward with this heat shield, rather than pulling it off the spacecraft and making a new one. If they’d chosen to replace the Artemis II heat shield, that would have pushed Artemis II from September 2025 to late 2026/early 2027, and then Artemis III would have been the end of 2028.

Heat shield mating on Orion EFT-1, credit: NASA

It’s important to note that these changes will constrain available launch windows for Artemis II — so while Artemis I had a window every 12 days, Artemis II will have that cut by about 50 percent, which is considerable. This is going to be a much more difficult launch, and Artemis I was not easy if you recall (though extensive tanking tests should cut down on the propellant loading problems we had during that launch cycle.)

For the re-entry profile, one thing they’re doing is reducing the amount of skip dwell time. NASA believes the generation of gas that will occur during the modified Artemis II skip dwell time is low enough that they won’t build up enough pressure to crack the heat shield. They’ve run these tests and they are confident with their decision.

For Artemis III on, the heat shield will incorporate changes to make the AVCOAT more permeable and avoid the gas pressure buildup. But one concern for Artemis II is that the heat shield for that capsule is actually less permeable than the heat shield for Orion on Artemis I.

Ultrasound testing of heat shield, credit: NASA

According to an article on Ars Technica, which included an interview with Paul Hill, the leader of the independent review team, one big concern was that in order to examine the strength of the attachment between the AVCOAT blocks and Orion’s carbon fiber skin, NASA uses ultrasound testing. They found this difficult for Artemis I because of the permeability of the AVCOAT, so they made the Artemis II heat shield even more impermeable — which means gases will build up even faster than they did for Artemis I.

Did NASA make the right decision?

As a result of this revelation, and generally the decision to fly a capsule with a known flaw in its heat shield, NASA’s come under some fire. It’s no secret that the agency is in a time crunch here. The rhetoric about beating China to the moon during this press conference was very interesting, considering I’d never really heard much about that from NASA previously. In my mind that makes it very clear they’re concerned about Trump slashing budgets because he’s not happy with the progress of Artemis and are trying to emphasize forward progress. That makes sense.

But NASA is not a deadline driven organization. Even at their darkest moments, during Challenger and Columbia, they weren’t caving to schedule pressures and knowingly compromising safety. There’s an amazing book on this called The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan that I highly recommend that makes clear that the conventional wisdom about Challenger is wrong. It’s so influential that Vaughan was consulted during the Columbia accident investigation.

Instead, it was a combination of problems, including NASA’s organizational culture, that led to these tragedies. I had a lot of questions about whether their culture had changed after Columbia, and I dove into this question and NASA’s risk culture when discussing Boeing Starliner, which was the biggest safety issue the organization had faced since Columbia.

But I think the thoroughness of the process during that period showed a lot of us that NASA’s safety culture in intact. Their determination to find the root cause of the thruster issues, even as everyone was criticizing them, gave me some confidence.

And that extends to here. Paul Hill, the leader of the independent review board, was a flight director at NASA. He knows NASA inside and out. He also understands the organization at its worst moments — Hill led the accident investigation team for Columbia that was in charge of recovering debris, analyzing all the sensor information from various government agencies, and radar testing. He also was the flight director for the return to flight mission after Columbia, and he understood intimately the thoroughness necessary for an investigation like this.

Columbia debris, credit: NASA

There have been questions about whether NASA is caving to time pressure by using the Orion heat shield for Artemis II. But Hill said to Ars Technica that the concern about the impermeability of the heat shield was negated by the modified re-entry profile for Artemis II. It shouldn’t be an issue.

And as with Boeing Starliner, I think the amount of time they took to make this decision makes it clear they did not take it lightly.

Why did all of this take so long?

It’s also about making sure they completely understand the issue — not that they think they understand the issue. NASA was aware of the foam shedding issue before the Columbia disaster. They even saw the foam strike the wing of the orbiter during launch.

Foam strike during launch, credit: NASA Glenn

While some engineers within NASA thought this could be a problem, most of management dismissed it. What damage could foam do to the reinforced carbon-carbon Space Shuttle?

(This by the way is called normalization of deviance — nothing is supposed to shed during launch, but because this foam issue had happened before, they figured it was safe and moved on without trying to figure out why the foam was shedding or possible consequences of it happening.)

Even after the destruction of the spacecraft, many at NASA still didn’t believe that the foam strike was the culprit. It wasn’t until they tested with a reinforced carbon carbon wing panel from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, and the foam blew a hole in the panel, that they realized the foam had been the culprit.

Foam impact testing, credit: NASA Glenn

It’s easy to think you know why something happened, especially when it’s as complicated as spaceflight. It’s really easy to look back and say, “Of course the foam was the problem.” But sometimes you can get so focused on what you think the problem is that you try to prove that is, indeed, the problem and you miss the real cause. NASA didn’t want to do that with Orion, they didn’t want to let their theories and preconceived notions and unconscious biases direct the testing. So they tested everything. That’s why it took so long.

I will also say I personally think that NASA’s structure contributed to the amount of time this took. The Artemis program has been spread across centers around the U.S. It’s a game NASA plays to keep Congress happy, and therefore continue to get funding. This means that there are a lot of individual places with deep knowledge about any given part of Artemis, but the broadness is sometimes missing. That’s why NASA established the Moon to Mars office, to be able to oversee all parts of Artemis, which is good.

But the thing is, Congress only authorized funding of the Moon to Mars office 18 months ago. Artemis I touched down in December 2022. We’re two years out from that. But the independent review team wasn’t convened until April of this year to oversee NASA’s testing of the heat shield problem and to make sure they were being thorough. To be clear, NASA has been working on this problem since they identified it after direct examination of the Orion capsule in 2022. But has it been as directed or intense since the Moon to Mars program took over? I don’t know about that.

Artemis I, credit: NASA

My guess is there was about a year between when Artemis I touched down and when the Moon to Mars office was in place and operating efficiently that things weren’t moving all that fast. That’s part of why the office was established in the first place. This is just my speculation, but the timing explains why it took almost a year and a half for NASA to put the independent review team into place.

So they did the testing, with no deadline in mind so the team could focus on every possible cause with no time pressure, they had to identify the root cause which is a challenge because replicating complex re-entry conditions on the ground is hard, they had to test every other possibility to make sure they weren’t missing anything, and then once they found the root cause, they had to model re-entry scenarios to see what the risks are and whether Artemis II could fly safely with its current heat shield. THEN they had to develop a flight rational for flying Artemis II as is. It takes time, for sure.

Artemis II Orion capsule testing, credit: NASA

But it seems that the independent review board unanimously agrees with NASA’s decision to fly Artemis II as is, and the testing has clearly been thorough. At some point you either trust NASA knows what it’s doing or you don’t, based on their history. I’m choosing here to think they did make the right decision, given everything else I’ve learned and seen.

Where is the independent review team report?

I do wish, though, that NASA had made the independent review team report available to the public. I’m honestly not sure why they didn’t, and that makes me wary. Especially considering NASA has been so cagey about this issue generally.

To be clear, NASA was very frank and straightforward about the heat shield problem at last week’s press conference. But that’s in stark contrast to the way they’ve treated this issue up until now. We didn’t even learn about the seriousness of the problem until April 2024, when the NASA Office of the Inspector General released a report with the first photos we’d seen of the damage.

I do understand NASA doesn’t want to release information until there’s something definitive to say, but as we saw with Boeing Starliner, not releasing information makes it seem like they have something to hide and it just drives people to speculate about what’s going wrong.

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On Wednesday, December 4, the president-elect announced that his nominee for NASA administrator will be Jared Isaacman. If you’re not overly familiar with the ins and outs of private spaceflight, you may have no idea who this is or why it matters.

Who is Jared Isaacman?

If Jared Isaacman’s name is familiar, it might be because I’ve talked about him quite a bit over the past few years. Isaacman is a billionaire who’s the founder and CEO of Shift4 payments, a credit card payments processor (interesting note, he dropped out of high school at the age of 15 and founded the company in 1999, at the age of 16).

Jared Isaacman, credit: John Kras / Polaris Program

He paid for and flew on 2021’s Inspiration4 mission, and Isaacman also flew on and was one of the two astronauts to perform the first private spacewalk on Polaris Dawn (a mission he also paid for) earlier this year. He’s basically a huge fan of spaceflight and space science. You may remember a private spaceflight asking if they could boost and service the Hubble Space Telescope for free. That was Jared Isaacman with the Polaris Program, and NASA turned him down.

I had thought a lot about who the next NASA administrator might be. It directly affects my job, and it affects my interests because I haven’t been shy about the fact that I love space and I want to be out there more. I want more human spaceflight and I want more robotic missions and space telescopes and space science, as well as more study of climate change and Earth science. Just give me more of all of it.

This pick is, frankly, someone I never considered. It’s unexpected, to say the least. But I don’t think it’s objectively terrible. Here’s Isaacman’s acceptance post for the nomination.

He specifically calls out the space economy, which means more emphasis on commercial space, and he cites that, “We will never again lose our ability to journey to the stars and never settle for second place.” That’s certainly interesting — it suggests that Artemis will be a top priority, as it is for the current administration.

NASA administrator is a post subject to Senate confirmation, but I don’t think that’s going to be an issue here, so it’s not presumptuous to talk about what he might do as NASA administrator.

Isaacman: The background

Trump’s last pick for NASA administrator was Jim Bridenstine, someone who didn’t believe in human-caused climate change when he was appointed. I didn’t have much confidence in him, but he surprised me as a relatively effective leader of NASA. He reversed his position on climate change; he pulled together the disparate bits of the program to return to the moon, gave it a name (Artemis) and a schedule; and generally he was a positive for agency.

Jim Bridenstine, the former head of NASA, credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

(It’s worth noting that Republicans are often more interested in NASA than Democrats because they see the agency as a way of boosting the American reputation, so NASA generally enjoys more funding and more visible successes under Republican presidents.)

Isaacman has a genuine interest in spaceflight and science. It’s also reassuring that he’s posted about needing to not mess up Earth because we can’t just go to another planet and set up a civilization there quickly or easily.

I was unable to find anything specific from Isaacman on his views about climate change (because remember, NASA does exceptional work on this front, and there have been a lot of worries about these budgets being slashed.)

But I did find this pledge letter from his Inspiration4 mission, in which he specifically calls out climate change as a challenge facing us.

(And it’s worth noting Isaacman has a long history of philanthropy, and has partnered extensively with the Make-A-Wish foundation). He also supports STEM education; Trump tried to slash NASA’s education budget in his first term, and it’s not certain what will happen this time around.

Isaacman does seem to be an effective leader, at least in a private company setting — how that will translate to NASA remains as-yet unclear.

NASA: Redundancy is important. Isaacman disagrees.

Here’s what I think could happen based on Isaacman’s past comments. (Keep in mind that people can change their minds when confronted with new data and being internal to an organization, versus an outside critic, and I think that an open mind is a good thing.)

Artemis I, credit: NASA

There will be a lot of changes to the Artemis program. Getting back to the moon, and quickly, was a priority during Trump’s first administration, and that will continue. (When I was at Engadget, I remember covering Trump’s suggestion that NASA put astronauts on Artemis I, the first flight of the SLS rocket, to speed up the moon landing). That pressure will likely continue and ramp up.

But Isaacman has been vocal about his criticisms of the Artemis program. His main criticisms are basically, that NASA is wasting money on Artemis while cutting back its science programs.

It’s not that he thinks Artemis is a waste of money — instead, Isaacman believes that NASA’s insistence on redundancy for the program is wasteful when NASA could be spending that money to bolster its science portfolio. Last year, Isaacman specifically criticized NASA on the possible cancellation of the New Horizons mission, which is currently exploring the Kuiper Belt, to save $3 million, when NASA has spent billions of dollars on two separate companies building lunar landers that do, essentially, the same thing.

According to a report from the Government Accountability Office, SpaceX’s lunar lander HLS life cycle cost is $4.9 billion, while Blue Origin’s contract award was $3.4 billion. HLS will be used on Artemis III and IV, while Blue Origin’s lunar lander will be used on Artemis ,. The idea behind this redundancy is that right now, NASA’s aggressive Artemis schedule is frankly unrealistic. Part of the reason for this delay — though not all of its, for sure — is partner hardware, including delays with getting SpaceX’s Starship operational. (HLS is just a modified version of Starship, and will require multiple operational Starship vehicles for fueling.)

But Isaacman could save the Chandra Space Telescope

NASA wants multiple providers for redundancy, and that’s important, but it’s also hard to argue with the idea that NASA is slinging around billions of dollars on its Artemis side while cancelling small and incredibly successful science programs that don’t cost all that much. New Horizons got a reprieve from NASA in 2023, but the Chandra X-Ray telescope is currently on the chopping block.

From NASA’s FY 2025 budget

This is a historic telescope launched in 1999 and it’s unmatched. We don’t have another X-Ray telescope like Chandra if this one were to be retired, and it’s invaluable. I’ve personally talked a lot about how I don’t think Chandra should be cancelled, it’s very short sighted from NASA.

And the program is only $68 million dollars, which doesn’t seem like much compared to the Blue Origin award.

And seemingly, Isaacman agrees.

He’s made multiple comments about how NASA should save Chandra.

(I do want to take a second to note that NASA has been in a bad budget environment the past few years, and that’s up to Congress, not NASA. I’ve talked about this a lot, but determining these priorities with not enough money to go around is hard, and I don’t want to downplay that.)

Will he cancel SLS, NASA’s moon rocket?

Isaacman has also been a vocal critic of SLS, NASA’s eye-wateringly expensive moon rocket. I think the latest figures have us at about $4.3 billion per launch. I think it’s safe to say that Isaacman might at least try to cancel SLS in favor of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy or Starship.

Starship, credit: SpaceX

But he wouldn’t be the first administrator to try and find an alternative to SLS. Jim Bridenstine explored commercial options back in 2019 to try and meet Trump’s goal of putting NASA astronauts on the moon by 2024. They even looked at a combination of the Falcon Heavy rocket and a second stage ICPS built by United Launch Alliance (the Falcon Heavy on its own does not provide enough power on its on for the translunar injection burn, hence the need for the second stage.)

This clearly didn’t materialize, mainly because SLS has deep, deep institutional support in the Senate. Senator Richard Shelby from Alabama pushed to re-use Space Shuttle engines, rather than developing new technology for SLS, in order to make the rocket seem more cost-effective. (Clearly, that wasn’t the case — but Shelby was invested because SLS provides a lot of jobs at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Alabama.)

Credit: NASA

Shelby has repeatedly threatened to defund NASA programs and fire people if the agency pursued newer technology (such as in-space refueling) that might give commercial companies an advantage over NASA in deep space operations. He was SLS’s staunchest supporter. While his successor, Senator Katie Britt, supports SLS and the Marshall Space Flight Center, it’s unclear how she would respond to any attempts to cancel the program.

Isaacman’s close ties to SpaceX are concerning

And there’s the added issue of Jared Isaacman’s relationship with SpaceX. He pays SpaceX, a NASA contractor, for the Polaris Program, his series of private spaceflight missions. But it’s more than just a transactional relationship. Isaacman tests out new SpaceX hardware on his flights, he pushes the boundaries of what SpaceX is capable of with human spaceflight — the program is very much a collaboration. Two SpaceX employees flew on Polaris Dawn.

SpaceX is a company with many NASA contracts — both commercial crew and cargo to the International Space Station, the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle for the ISS, HLS for Artemis — and it’s not clear how or whether Isaacman will be objective with future contract awards. NASA has historically awarded contracts across private companies, preferring to share the wealth rather than awarding one company all of their contracts. Will, for example, Blue Origin continue to get NASA contracts, or will SpaceX get the lion’s share?

Credit: SpaceX

What makes this all more complicated and vague, of course, is that at this point SpaceX is usually both the least expensive and most experienced provider bidding on a contract. But NASA isn’t just looking at costs; the agency’s goal with commercial space is to bolster companies that might not otherwise survive, and give them a footing (and necessary funding). NASA did this for SpaceX in 2008, and I think it’s important they continue to do this for other companies.

There is a possibility that disproportionate contract awards for SpaceX that go against NASA’s previous strategy as stewards of space industry might be destabilizing for the growing commercial space sector.

He also doesn’t like government contracts

Isaacman has also said previously that he thinks that federal government contracting encourages waste and inefficiency.

This would be the cost plus contracts NASA uses on vehicles they own like Orion and SLS, and previously on the Space Shuttle and Apollo-era craft, for which NASA is responsible for any cost overruns.

Credit: NASA

But with SpaceX, NASA uses what’s called a fixed-price contract, which means that the company is required to put in some of their own money, and NASA isn’t on the hook for overspending or delays. The company owns the hardware and is free to use it and make money off of it.

Isaacman clearly favors the latter, and though he’s said that his views aren’t about preferring SpaceX, this view does advantage a private company like SpaceX. Cost plus isn’t great, and it does encourage overspending, but also it gives NASA a lot more control over the final vehicle, and it’s much easier to make changes along the way.

Credit: SpaceX

Isaacman has experience with government contracts thanks to his previous co-ownership of a defense contracting firm called Draken International, which trains Air Force pilots and has the largest fleet of private military aircraft in the world. It makes sense, he’s passionate about flying, and is flight qualified in multiple military aircraft. He even set a world record in 2009 for flying around the world in a light jet. But it’s important to note that Isaacman sold his shares in Draken International in 2019.

According to a letter posted online to Shift4 employees, Isaacman plans on leaving the company after his confirmation. He will keep his majority interest in the company, but says he will reduce his voting power.

It’s safe to say we’re in for an interesting four years in spaceflight.

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The Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico defined a generation of radio astronomy, It was commissioned in 1963. For over 50 years, until 2016, it was the world’s largest radio telescope. It tragically collapsed in 2020, and decommissioning work is ongoing.

But what happened exactly? Why did the observatory collapse, when by all accounts, it was structurally sound? Why did the wires snap when they weren’t bearing their maximum load?

Credit: NSF/UCF

A new report from the National Academies, National Science Foundation, and the University of Central Florida focuses on the Arecibo Telescope collapse — specifically, the failure of the zinc-spelter sockets — and gives us new information on what the root cause might have been.

Why is Arecibo important?

You may be wondering why I’m talking about a telescope that collapsed four years ago, but Arecibo was— and still is—iconic. Arecibo has a unique place in pop culture, but it’s also made many important contributions to science. NASA’s radar transmitter at Arecibo meant that it was important for tracking asteroids that could threaten the Earth.

Scientists found the first exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, thanks to Arecibo. The funny part is scientists were able to make the observation because the telescope was undergoing repairs, so it was looking out at one fixed part of the sky. It was able to pick up small fluctuations in radio bursts from a pulsar over a long period of time, which scientists decoded as small tugs, or wobbles, on the star resulting from planets orbiting it.

For many of us, Arecibo represented something bigger: the small hope that someone is out there, that there’s intelligent life somewhere in the universe looking for us. It’s a belief in something greater, in the cosmos itself.

For me, Arecibo captured my imagination thanks to Carl Sagan’s book Contact. When I saw the film starring Jodie Foster, I was immediately taken in by the romanticism of this place in the jungle where people were working towards something better. (You may also have seen the observatory in the James Bond film GoldenEye, and it is the subject of one of 116 photos on Voyager’s Golden Record.)

Golden Record image, credit: NAIC

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017 and did serious damage to the island, but we thought Arecibo was spared. It was 2020 that was devastating for the telescope, and honestly, for anyone connected to the observatory (whether they’d worked there, done research with the observatory, or just had an emotional connection like my own), it felt personal.

On August 7, 2020, one of the observatory’s cables broke. Another followed in November, and on November 19, the NSF announced that the telescope would be decommissioned.

The collapsed platform, credit: NSF

Then, on December 1, 2020, the instrument platform collapsed into the dish. Thankfully no one was harmed. But it had been a hard year, we’d lost so much already. And now Arecibo was gone. I was devastated. I still am.

Time has passed, but questions remain. Why did Arecibo collapse? It shouldn’t have.

How Arecibo was designed to work

To understand what’s going on here, let’s talk a little bit about how Arecibo was designed.

Credit: UCF

The primary reflector dish was a spherical cap made of over 38,000 aluminum panels, suspended just above the ground thanks to steel cables over a natural sinkhole.

Below Arecibo, taken in 2021, credit: NSF

It was 1000 feet or 305 m in diameter, built in 1963, and upgraded several times over the decades, most significantly in 1997.

Because the primary dish was so big, unlike other radio telescopes, it didn’t move. Instead, there was a focal structure suspended 150 m or 900 feet above it, weighing 900 short tons/803 long tonnes. It was also where all the receiving equipment was stored. Scientists would “point” the telescope by moving receivers on the suspended platform. The Gregorian dome, installed in 1997, helped focus radio waves onto the receivers.

Arecibo’s suspended platform, credit NSF

This suspended structure was attached to three concrete towers, confusingly named Towers 4, 8, and 12, with steel cables. When Arecibo was originally built in 1963, there were four cables per tower, making a total of 12 main cables. The concrete towers were then tied to the ground with 5 cables each called backstays, so that’s a total of 15 backstays, from each tower top. The suspended platform was also tied directly to the ground with six tiedowns.

Now as I mentioned in 1997, the Gregorian dome was added, which significantly increased the weight of the platform — it was around 40% heavier. More supports were added — more auxiliary cables, with two additional backstay cables per tower.

Photo credit NSF, Annotations by me

At this point there were over 4 miles of steel cables supporting Arecibo. And when I say cable, I don’t mean a simple cable. These were made up of 126 to 216 galvanized steel wires in concentric layers woven into a single strand. The number of wires depended on the cable type.

Credit: Thornton Tomasetti (2022)

All of these cables were anchored into zinc-filled spelter sockets, which will become important later.

The collapse of Arecibo

Okay, so. Let’s talk about the collapse.

Here’s the thing — even though it felt sudden, it didn’t actually happen at all once.

The red area is the area of the most damage from Maria. You can see Arecibo is outside that area, credit: NASA/NOAA/GOES

Hurricane Maria slammed into Puerto Rico as a Category 4 storm on September 20, 2017, and that was the beginning of the end for Arecibo. We don’t actually know how much damage Maria did because of “sparse inspection documentation,” according to the NSF report, but it seemed to be minimal. I’ll talk more about that in a minute.

But then, almost three years later, on August 10, 2020, an auxiliary cable attached to Tower 4, pulled out of its socket. The socket failed. Because of the tension, when it pulled out of the socket, it hit the Gregorian dome and then crashed onto the primary reflector dish. The main cables held, but their weight load increased due to the missing auxiliary cable.

Dish damage after first cable failure, credit: NSF

The damage was bad, as you can see above. The NSF assessed the situation and put together a repair plan, but they were hampered by the fact that there was no obvious cause for the socket failure. Parts were ordered and repair work was scheduled to begin on November 9.

Then, on November 6, one of the main cables attached to Tower 4 failed, also pulling out of its socket. At this point, the National Science Foundation determined that it wasn’t safe to conduct repairs on the observatory, leading to the November 19 announcement that Arecibo would be decommissioned. The observatory would be demolished rather than repaired because they could not assure the safety of engineers and repair workers.

On December 1, one more of the three main cables attached to Tower 4 failed, once again due to its socket. The cables that were left simply could not handle the weight of the suspended platform, and it collapsed into the reflector dish.

Credit: NSF

I’ve created basic GIFs of two videos from the National Science Foundation below, but it’s worth checking out the full video.

Credit: NSF

This first one shows the top of Tower 4, as taken from a drone that was designed to monitor these cables to ensure the health of Arecibo’s support structures. You can already see some fraying wires, and you can see some paint chipping on the middle cables due to wire breaks.

Then, the collapse. It all happens really fast.

Credit: NSF

Okay, here’s another view from the platform. This was taken from the operations building at Arecibo. That’s Tower 4 in the background. At the end of the GIF, you see the top of Tower 12 collapsing.

Zinc-filled spelter sockets: The whys

The thing that’s confusing about the Arecibo collapse is that it shouldn’t have happened. After these incidents, as you can imagine there was a lot of finger pointing — criticisms of the NSF for cutting funding, claims that not enough supports were installed after the 1997 upgrade, there wasn’t enough maintenance—but the fact of the matter is no one could really explain why it had happened. These kinds of sockets were widely used, and there had been no recorded failure of them before Arecibo.

Testing showed that the sockets failed when the tension in the cables was less than their Minimum Breaking Strength. They should have been able to handle the load. There was no defect in design or in workmanship, no issue with the materials, no environmental effects that could be pointed to that could have caused this kind of socket failure.

The Gregorian Dome, credit: SETI

That’s where the National Academies report comes in. If you’re interested in reading the entire report yourself, it’s a fascinating read, but it’s also 113 pages long, so I’ll summarize it for you the best I can here.

The report focuses in on the failure of these sockets. Each one of Arecibo’s steel cables had zinc-filled spelter sockets at both ends. This is basically a steel block with a cone shaped area where the cable is inserted. The wires are spread out, and then that cone shaped area is filled with molten zinc. The zinc solidifies, forming a solid block, and as a result anchoring the cable in the socket.

This diagram of a spelter socket from Thornton Tomasetti, which conducted a forensic investigation into the collapse of Arecibo in 2022, is very helpful if you aren’t overly familiar with this kind of socket. These kinds of sockets are widely used and don’t fail like this.

Diagram of a zinc-filled spelter socket, credit: Thornton Tomasetti

This last image is key here, so remember this. The cable is pre-stretched before it’s installed, which typically means some of the zinc extrudes from the socket. This isn’t considered a big deal, it’s standard, but it’s called “cable slip.”

Zinc-filled spelter sockets are widely used in cable-supported pedestrian bridges. The American Association of State Highly and Transportation officials, for example, states that the maximum allowable slip is “one-sixth of the cable diameter when proof-loaded to 80 percent of the cable’s minimum breaking strength.” For Arecibo’s cables specifically, this would allow for maximum slip of about half an inch.

Now, look at these photos, also from the Thornton Tomasetti report.

Credit: Thornton Tomasetti

You can see here the cable slip on the first auxiliary cable that pulled out of its socket in August 2020. This is a slip of 1.125 inches. This kind of zinc creep allows the weight load to be transferred to the outer wires of the cable, rather than the stronger inner ones (remember the outer wire snaps we saw in the video?), and it means that the cable can bear less weight. That explains the cabe failure, but not why the zinc creep was happening.

The National Academy of Sciences report posits that the collapse of Arecibo began with Hurricane Maria. Peak winds may have been as high as 118 miles per hour, but post Maria inspections showed little damage to the telescope’s structural integrity. Nothing was recorded, but if you look at the difference in the zinc socket between a 2003 image and one from 2019, you can see significant cable slip that went unreported.

It’s not clear whether Maria contributed to the cable slip, but as the report makes clear, it should have been recorded. But even if it had been, the zinc creep wasn’t really a concern at that time. The observatory would have still collapsed, even if the post-Maria repairs had been completed, because fixing this was not on their radar.

Arecibo’s responsibility in the collapse

But the whys? Why was this cable slip so pronounced? Well, that’s what this report gets into and it’s more a process of elimination than anything else. The report posits that it was Arecibo itself that contributed to its own demise.

In other words, because Arecibo was such a powerful radio telescope, that led to a unique electromagnetic environment in which it introduced a low current into its cables. In lab testing, zinc has been found to have an elevated creep rate when electric current is flowing into it. It’s important to note that the lab conditions varied significantly from those at Arecibo, so this isn’t proof or a definitive explanation — just what might be the most likely explanation of what was so different at Arecibo as compared to all the other places these sockets have been used successfully.

Arecibo partially dismantled, credit: Google Earth

Arecibo will continue to be a place for science, even without the observatory. The NSF Arecibo C3 is scheduled to open in 2025, which is a STEM focused education and research center. And scientists have proposed a replacement for Arecibo, but it has yet to be funded, so we’ll see what happens there.

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You probably have seen reports that Voyager 1, the little spacecraft that could, is using a transmitter that hasn’t been used since 1981. This is honestly an amazing thing, that this spacecraft was built in such a robust way that after the coldness and intense radiation environment that Voyager 1 is in, instruments and components that have been off for decades can be turned on and they work. I don’t want to take away from that, because it is absolutely amazing.

But this communication issue with Voyager 1 is actually very serious, to the point where if the team can’t figure out a way to fix it, the Voyager 1 mission will be over. Let’s dive into what’s going on with Voyager 1 and whether this is the end of an almost 50-year mission.

Voyager 1’s difficult year

You may remember a huge communication problem with Voyager 1 that was resolved earlier this year — the spacecraft was sending gibberish back to Earth, and engineers had to figure out how to fix the problem. It was a big deal, and even the Voyager 1 team wasn’t sure they could get the spacecraft operational again.

The FDS, or Flight Data System, of Voyager 1, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The short story is that engineers figured out that a computer chip on Voyager 1 had failed and had to send instructions to the spacecraft on how to store its data in chunks to route around it. Once they did that, the probe began sending back real data and the team was able to slowly turn the science instruments back on.

But that wasn’t the end of Voyager 1’s woes this year — the thruster performance was also degrading. The NASA JPL team swapped the thrusters on the probe from 15 billion miles/24 billion kilometers away.

The current communications problem

So, what now, you might be asking!! Well, this was yet another communications issue, but it’s different than what we’ve seen from Voyager 1 before: The spacecraft autonomously switched off one of its two radio transmitters, and the team at JPL is still trying to figure out why it happened.

Here’s what we know and what we think we know:

On October 16, the Voyager 1 team sent a command to turn on the spacecraft’s heaters. I spoke with someone at NASA to find out why, and basically, the circuits in one of Voyager 1’s computers are beginning to degrade because of age and exposure to radiation. The team was trying to warm them up with a heater which they hoped would trigger a process called “annealing” in order to improve performance.

Annealing is a process of heat treatment that can do various things depending on the circumstances in which it’s used, including restore the original properties of materials and therefore reverse radiation damage. The team was flipping on this heater to warm up these specific circuits.

Voyager 1 diagram, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

They did the math and they were certain they had enough power available when they sent that command on October 16. Now, every time any instructions are sent to Voyager 1, the spacecraft sends back engineering data describing how it responded to that command. There’s no working model or testbed of Voyager 1’s computers anymore (there’s just no way to model on Earth the conditions the spacecraft is in), so the team is very reliant on this communication to understand how Voyager 1 is executing commands.

(Sometimes, in the past, Voyager 2 has even been used as a test to see how Voyager 1 will respond because Voyager 1 is further into interstellar space, and therefore considered the more valuable spacecraft and mission.)

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Round trip travel time for a signal to Voyager 1 is approaching 46 hours, almost 23 hours each way. But on October 18, the NASA-JPL discovered that the Deep Space Network wasn’t picking up Voyager 1’s return signal. They were out of contact with Voyager 1.

The spacecraft usually uses an X-band radio transmitter to talk with Earth, and the Deep Space Network couldn’t find that specific X-band signal. The team then sifted through the signals the Deep Space Network was receiving — and found a lower rate X-band transmission from Voyager 1, which confirmed their suspicions: The command to turn on the heater had triggered Voyager 1’s fault protection system. As a result, Voyager 1 switched to a lower power mode of communication with the X-band transmitter.

Power management is a constant problem

The fault protection system is automatic, and it can be triggered for quite a few reasons. One of them is if the spacecraft overdraws on power, Voyager 1 will automatically turn off systems to prioritize the health of the spacecraft.

Voyager’s RTGs, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The twin Voyager spacecraft are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs. The versions on Voyager 1 and 2 are specifically called Multihundred-watt radioisotope thermoelectric generators, and they were developed specifically for this program. Each generator uses 24 pressed plutonium-238 oxide spheres to generate heat that, at the time of launch, provided 157 watts of power. Each spacecraft is equipped with three of these RTGs, for a total of 470 watts at launch.

They’re called generators, but really they’re just nuclear batteries — as the plutonium-238 decays, it creates waste heat that’s converted into energy. It’s a great energy solution for a spacecraft for which fuel cells, chemical batteries, or solar power just aren’t really feasible. But there’s a downside.

Every single year, as the plutonium decays, the twin Voyager spacecraft lose about 4 watts of power. This means that at this point, Voyager 1 has 220 watts available, or about 47 percent of its original power left, according to the person at NASA I spoke with.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

This has huge implications for the future of the spacecraft, because the available power to operate science instruments is expected to run out by around 2030, at which point NASA will shut off all science instruments for the twin spacecraft. But as long as Voyager 1 can continue to point itself towards Earth with its thrusters, it will send back telemetry and engineering data hopefully through 2036, at which point it will travel beyond the range of the Deep Space Network’s ability to pick up its X-band transmissions.

A transmitter that hasn’t been used since 1981

Ok, so back to the transmitter — Voyager 1 was sending back an X-band transmission at a lower rate, but the spacecraft appeared to be stable. That is, until October 19, when the X-band transmission stopped entirely. Based on their correct assumption that the original X-band transmission issue had been triggered by Voyager 1’s fault protection system, they concluded that it had happened twice more — and as a result, Voyager 1 had switched to its S-band transmitter, which hadn’t been used since 1981.

The S-band transmitter uses less power than the X-band, but it also sends a weaker signal. That’s why it stopped being used after Voyager 1 completed its primary mission in 1980.

At this point, the Voyager 1 team wasn’t even sure they’d be able to detect the S-band signal. It’s just so weak, and Voyager is 15 billion miles/24 billion km away. But the little spacecraft that could managed to send a strong enough signal with its S-band transmitter that engineers at the Deep Space Network were able to pick it up.

Deep Space Network—S-band communication with Voyager 1

That’s basically where we are now. The Voyager 1 team sent back a transmission on October 22 to confirm that the S-band transmitter is working properly. They received an affirmative response on October 24. Now they have to figure out why the fault protection system triggered and if it’s safe to try and turn the X-band transmitter back on.

It’s amazing that the spacecraft was able to do make this transmitter switch automatically, and that the S-band transmitter is still working. But it’s not good for the long term.

Is this the end of Voyager 1’s mission?

A spokesperson at NASA told me that if they can’t turn the X-band transmitter back on, then the Voyager 1 mission is effectively over. The S-band transmitter isn’t powerful enough to send telemetry, let alone science data. There’s no engineering data to take a look at the health of the spacecraft. All they can really do with it is keep Voyager 1 pointed at Earth and send commands to the spacecraft.

If they can’t get the X-band transmitter working again in the near future, then we will be saying goodbye to Voyager 1.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

I don’t want to start predicting the spacecraft’s impending doom, because it seems like every time I start despairing about the spacecraft, the amazing team at NASA figures out a way to keep Voyager 1 going. But I also know the clock is ticking, and that each of these serious problems could be the spacecraft’s last one.

Engineers were hoping to keep Voyager 1 operational through its 50th anniversary in 2027. I’m just really hoping that happens.

I’m going to end with what the NASA spokesperson told me in an email, because I don’t think I could say it any better myself:

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NASA is going back to the moon!! The next flight of the Artemis program, Artemis II (which will be the first flight with crew!) is scheduled for September 2025!! The first moon landing in 50 years is scheduled for September 2026!!!

Now let’s talk about why NASA’s triumphant return to the moon . . . will likely not happen on schedule.

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A quick summary of Artemis

Here’s what you need to know for the purposes of this newsletter: Orion is the crew capsule that will carry astronauts to the moon. SLS is the giant rocket that’s controversial because of its high cost. Artemis I was the first flight of the program, without crew, that lifted off on November 16, 2022, and for the most part it went very well.

Artemis I, credit: NASA

Artemis II is the first crewed flight of the program, in which four astronauts will fly Orion around the moon on a 10-day mission. That’s scheduled for September 2025, while Artemis III, the first moon landing that will see two NASA astronauts set foot on the moon, is scheduled for September 2026.

(It goes without saying that if Artemis II is significantly delayed, it’s hard to imagine Artemis III will still be able to make a September 2026 launch date.)

Before I dive in, I want to make clear: I have tremendous respect for NASA, and I have a lot of respect for the people working there, as well as their partners. I like this program and I want NASA to go back to the moon. This is not intended as an attack or a diatribe. I’m just trying to talk honestly about my understanding of what’s going on.

Orion’s heat shield: It’s still bad!

On Artemis I, which was basically an uncrewed test flight of the SLS rocket and Orion capsule, NASA teams noticed something odd about the Orion capsule after splashdown: the heat shield didn’t behave as they expected.

The short story is that the heat shield is located at the base of the Orion capsule. It’s made of a material called Avcoat which is ablative, which basically means it protects the capsule from the heat of re-entry by melting off.

Avcoat blocks of Orion’s heat shield, credit: NASA

But for that first flight, it was charring and came off in chunks, and there was more liberation of heat shield material than expected, which is not how this is supposed to go.

Credit: NASA OIG

It’s not good for many reasons. The bottom line is that if crew had been aboard, they wouldn’t have experienced any discomfort and they would have returned safely. But NASA also has a history of not exploring the root cause of problems when they occur; that culture led to both the Challenger and Columbia disasters, so they need to make sure they understand this problem and why it’s happening.

NASA has been very tight lipped about this issue. The only reason we know any details at all is that back in May, a report from the NASA Office of the Inspector General came out on NASA’s readiness for Artemis II. That report revealed the extent of the problem, gave us our only images of the damage, and informed us that the heat shield was part of the reason that Artemis II was delayed from November 2024 to September 2025.

Heat shield after Orion’s flight test back in 2014, credit NASA

According to NASA’s response to that report, an independent review board convened in May 2024 to try and find the root cause of the heat shield charring. Their estimated date to have a report ready was June 30, 2024.

As you can imagine, I took quite a bit of interest in this because it’s a big issue. I started reaching out to NASA in mid-June and pinging them every one to two weeks to see if there was a report ready or any findings they could disclose. I basically got “we expect something soon, check back in the next couple of weeks.”

At the end of August, a NASA official publicly confirmed that the review board had completed their investigation. I checked back and on September 6, I got this response:

Basically, from this I inferred that they had found the cause and NASA was trying to figure out how to proceed from there. Then this week Ars Technica reported that Lori Glaze, acting deputy associate administrator for NASA’s Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate, did confirm that NASA had found the root cause of the issue and was embarking on more testing, which they expect to finish up by the end of November, and that Administrator Nelson himself will be involved in the final decisions. You can bet I’ll be tuning in for that media briefing and will report back.

Illustration of Orion re-entry, credit: NASA

But basically, what are even the options here?

There are two:

• Rebuild the heat shield to correct the flaws. The heat shield is already mounted to the Artemis II capsule, so this would require disassembling the entire thing. That could mean a delay of one to two years for the mission if this is the path forward.

• Change the re-entry angle. It’s possible that changing Orion’s flight plan and how it re-enters could lead to less stress on the heat shield and lower temperatures, and less charring as a result. Changes to the heat shield could then be implemented for Artemis III on.

The path forward will be determined by what’s safest for the crew, which is the most important consideration.

Now, if NASA can figure out the heat shield issue and come up with a solution for Artemis II that doesn’t involve dismantling the capsule, it is possible Artemis II could launch on or around its target date. But also, there’s more going on here.

SLS, or the boondoggle of a megarocket

SLS, or the Space Launch System, is NASA’s mega-rocket that will end up costing somewhere around $4.2 billion per launch, which is just an eye-watering figure.

Artemis I, taken by me

But SLS did well for Artemis I. There were a lot of propellant loading issues which delayed the launch, but once SLS was off the ground it performed very well. For the duration of the flight, it either met or exceeded expectations. Now Artemis II will be the first crewed launch of the program and the first time putting crew on SLS, but the rocket will be pretty much the same.

NASA is planning on making some tweaks to the fueling process to make propellant loading go more smoothly, but most of the changes to SLS between Artemis I and II are to ground systems, which I’ll talk about later. There will likely be similar changes based on lessons learned for Artemis III, so again, not a huge stumbling block here.

But one thing to note: the Orion heat shield issue I talked about previously is impacting the the stacking SLS for Artemis II. I’ll explain how the ground hardware works a little later, but NASA is currently preparing to stack SLS for Artemis II in the Vehicle Assembly Building with Mobile Launcher 1.

The core stage, solid rocket boosters, and launch vehicle stage adapter are ready to go. They could start stacking the rocket in the next few weeks, but the thing is once they do, they need to be within about a year of launch because the joints connecting the pieces of SLS’s solid rocket boosters to the core are only certified for a year. That being said, NASA extended that to two for Artemis I, so it’s not overly concerning.

Waiting a few weeks to stack the rocket on the launch platform isn’t a huge deal, but it’s a good example of how one problem with a single part of the spacecraft can ripple across the entire mission.

The lunar lander question

What is a stumbling block is the status of the lunar lander. We don’t need a lunar lander for Artemis II — it’s a crewed flight, but there’s no landing. For Artemis III, they will use HLS, or the Human Landing System, to get to the moon’s surface. It will stay on the surface with them, and then they’ll return to lunar orbit in HLS.

This is a really complicated mission. If you’re familiar with the Apollo program, they had four crewed flights before attempting a lunar landing with Apollo 11. Apollo 7 was the first crewed flight of the program, after the Apollo 1 tragedy, just basically testing the hardware. Then Apollo 8 went around the moon, Apollo 9 tested the lunar module for the first time in orbit, Apollo 10 went to lunar orbit and undocked and flew the lunar module but didn’t land, and then Apollo 11 was the lunar landing.

Earthrise from Apollo 8, credit: NASA/Bill Anders

For Artemis, there’s only one flight to test the Orion capsule and SLS rocket with crew before the attempted lunar landing on Artemis III. Now, we’ve been to the moon before, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is all new hardware that needs to be tested in space to make sure it works.

That’s why the state of HLS is such a big deal. It’s going to be built by SpaceX as a variation of Starship (which is why NASA is watching those test flights of Starship so closely, because they need Starship to be operational for Artemis III to land on the moon).

HLS illustration, credit: SpaceX/NASA

The mission profile would have HLS launch into Earth orbit, where it will be refueled by Starship tankers that are already in Earth orbit. This is why SpaceX is working on propellant transfer demonstrations for Starship, another one is scheduled for 2025. Once refueled, HLS will head to the moon and place itself in near-rectilinear halo orbit around the moon.

Then Artemis II will launch, an Orion crew vehicle on an SLS rocket, and it will dock with Starship in lunar orbit. Two astronauts would then transfer from HLS to Orion and descend to the lunar surface near the moon’s south pole, stay there for up to about a week, and then return to lunar orbit.

The thing is, if we were just talking about one HLS vehicle, it might be doable. Keep in mind that Starship isn’t operational yet, and there are quite a few test flights that still need to happen before it can become operational — this is a part of SpaceX’s current fight with the FAA over launch licensing, which these regulations are a whole story to themselves I will get into in another newsletter.

Artemis III mission profile, credit: NASA

SpaceX needs to have a fleet of tankers in orbit to refuel HLS — estimates put it somewhere between 15 and 20 to be able to carry enough propellant to fully refuel HLS because of cryogenic propellant boil-off. SpaceX can build hardware fast enough, I’m not too worried about that aspect of it. But getting Starship operational, having enough Starship launches to get that many tankers, being able to launch them in rapid succession so early after it’s operational, demonstrating Starship’s crew comfort and life support systems can work in space and on the lunar surface — there’s a lot that has to go right here in a very short amount of time. We’re less than two years away from the scheduled launch date of Artemis III and Starship isn’t even operational yet.

It’s so much to test out that there have been whispers that NASA is looking at simplifying the parameters of Artemis III to do more hardware testing and not making it a landing mission, but until the whispers get much, much louder or the agency makes an announcement, we have to assume Artemis III will stick to its official mission profile.

While it really does not seem like HLS will be ready in time, I also don’t want to count SpaceX out fully. SpaceX has demonstrated a wild lack of adherence to their own stated time frames but they’ve also pulled off incredible feats.

Starship IFT-5 booster landing, credit: SpaceX

That being said, a GAO report from January shows HLS as likely being delivered at least a year and a half late. There’s 70 percent confidence that HLS will be ready for a lunar landing by February 2028.

I should also mention that NASA awarded a second contract for a lunar lander last year to Blue Origin, but this hardware isn’t supposed to be ready until Artemis V, currently scheduled for 2029.

AxEMU: The spacesuit

Let’s say SpaceX manages to pull it off though — HLS is ready for a crewed mission by September 2026. Well, guess what else NASA astronauts need to walk around the moon?? Spacesuits!!!

And it’s looking like these might not be ready in time either.

NASA contracted with Axiom Space to make the first moonwalking suits, called the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit. We actually just recently got our first full look at the outer layer of these suits, designed by both Axiom Space and Prada.

AxEMU, credit: Axiom Space

It’s as yet unclear when the suits will be ready for a crewed mission. They’re expected to enter Critical Design Review in 2025, which if the suit passes, will mean Axiom has a go ahead for production of the spacesuits.

Again, it’s very possible that they might be ready. But one of the big criticisms of the Polaris Dawn Crew Dragon EVA was the number of firsts — including opening the hatch to the vacuum of space in spacesuits that hadn’t been tested in space before. The whole thing went very well, but the question is, is this a similar issue? This may be part of those whispers around NASA about changing the profile of Artemis III — getting a chance to test out the moonwalking suits before the lunar landing.

Credit: Axiom Space

If you’re wondering whether SpaceX suits can be used for Artemis, moonwalking suits have very specific needs, including being able to operate independently for at least 8 hours. SpaceX may very well be able to modify their suits to meet NASA’s specifications (they’ve said that the suits used on Polaris Dawn will eventually be adapted for use on the moon and Mars) but they aren’t currently usable as is.

That being said, SpaceX might start out ahead because the spacesuit has already been tested in space on a brief EVA. But they’d still have to go through NASA procedures and quality controls, and the Polaris Dawn spacesuit did not have a Personal Life Support System, or PLSS.

SpaceX suit, credit: Polaris Program/John Kraus

The two spacewalkers Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis were provided oxygen and power by umbilicals connected to their Crew Dragon spacecraft, and a PLSS is a huge component of a moonsuit and necessary for a spacewalk — it’s basically half the suit.

The PLSS is the backpack on Buzz Aldrin, credit: NASA/Neil Armstrong

It’s definitely an interesting option but it’s just not really clear whether they could be operational in time, plus NASA doesn’t like awarding too many contracts to a single provider, and SpaceX already has the HLS contract.

Ground systems: Not the most fun, but still crucial

Now let’s talk about the most exciting part: Infrastructure!!

No, but seriously. Let’s talk about the Exploration Ground Systems, or EGS, and the Mobile Launcher.

Mobile Launcher 1, credit: NASA

EGS is basically systems and facilities to support the missions. There are three key parts of the Exploration Ground Systems or EGS for Artemis:

• processing of rockets and spacecraft and integration/stacking

• launch systems

• recovery of the crew and spacecraft. There’s a lot of support that goes into missions like these, and EGS covers a lot of it.

Well, a report from the GAO (Government Accountability Office) from two weeks ago makes it clear that these systems might not be ready in time for Artemis II. The first testing of a lot of these systems was with Artemis I, but adding crew to a flight drastically increases its complexity and the need for redundancy.

There are quite a few risks here:

• software is looking like it might not be ready

• there’s still work to do on the emergency egress system

• there’s issues with environmental controls

• the crew access arm is having problems and needs more testing.

Most of this stuff is pretty minor, but the problem the GAO points out is there’s no schedule margin left in case any of these things becomes a real issue. There’s about 3 months of schedule margin to complete all of these things to support a September 2025 launch date for Artemis II. Well, NASA has apparently assigned all that margin to refurbishment and upgrades of Mobile Launcher 1, which means that if any of these other things have more problems than expected, it will likely delay the Artemis II launch. And this is space, so there are always more problems than expected.

Artemis I rollout with ML1, credit: NASA

This brings me to the Mobile Launcher. Mobile Launcher 1, or ML1, was used during Artemis I. This basically supports the stacking and testing of the rocket, transfers SLS and Orion to the launch pad, and is the structural support to launch the rocket. Right now there is only one mobile launcher.

A second one is being constructed to be used for Artemis IV and beyond. It will not shock you at this point to know it’s delayed — a report from the NASA Office of the Inspector General from back in August says that ML2 will likely not be ready until spring 2029. Artemis IV is supposed to launch in September 2028, and considering the problems with Boeing’s building of the SLS Block IB, which will also be necessary for Artemis IV, I will be shocked if that mission takes off as planned.

But back to ML1. It sustained a surprising amount of damaged as a result of Artemis I. The crew elevator doors were blown off, the crew access arm was damaged — it took awhile to repair. While NASA had ML1 in the VAB, they were also upgrading it to support Artemis II. ML1 was rolled back to the VAB in December of 2022 and it’s only in the past few weeks that it’s ready to start stacking Artemis II, which means it took almost two years to refurbish and upgrade. There’s only one year on the schedule between Artemis II and Artemis III, which means the refurbishment and upgrades for that mission have to be a lot faster.

Mobile launcher and launch pad after Artemis I, credit: NASA

Part of the reason repairs to ML1 have taken so long is that NASA wanted to ensure that the structure is more robust so fewer repairs will be necessary after Artemis II launches, plus the modifications that need to be made between two crewed missions is much less intensive than those made between Artemis I and II, an uncrewed and crewed mission. All of that being said, though, the Mobile Launcher is still a concern here in terms of schedule.

Budget: Because it always comes back to money

Finally (yes, I am almost done), let’s talk about budget. To be clear, this isn’t specifically a thing that’s going to delay Artemis II or III but a GAO report from January also pointed out that NASA hasn’t publicly delivered a cost estimate for Artemis III. This mission is supposed to happen in less than two years, and we don’t really know how much it’s going to cost.

Instead of providing a full cost estimate, NASA is just asking for funding year to year in its budget requests, but that means that people making the decisions have no idea what the all-in cost for this lunar landing will be.

Artemis I, credit: NASA

My guess is part of the reasoning here is that NASA doesn’t want to make it easier to cancel Artemis missions by separating them out. The idea is funding the whole Artemis program year to year, rather than an individual mission, especially because there are large up front costs to build infrastructure that gets reused through the program.

But it also makes it seem like Artemis is just this huge aimless blob that isn’t really going anywhere or doing anything, especially because of the high costs of SLS. For reference, for FY 2024, NASA requested $6.8 billion for the Artemis program. Of that, SLS was $2.5 billion. Not offering clarity into budgets is a great way to be underfunded, or even worse, have a program cancelled in my opinion. And without the money to make Artemis happen, there’s no way NASA will meet their September 2026 goal of landing on the moon.

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There are cracks in the ISS. The International Space Station is leaking air.

We’ve known about this air leak for years, and have done a lot to try and fix it, and haven’t been able to. It’s just getting worse, to the point NASA recently elevated the issue to the highest level of risk in their internal system. The fact is, we don’t even understand exactly why the leak is happening, much less how to fix it.

And yet NASA is considering keeping the ISS in orbit past 2030.

Is that even possible at this point? What are the major issues facing the ISS? Is the deorbit plan—to have SpaceX design and build a new vehicle in just five years—feasible? Will private space stations be ready by 2030? And what happens if Russia doesn’t agree to all this, as they’re only committed to the ISS through 2028??

The OIG report and ISS’s current situation

A report came out in the last few weeks from the NASA Office of the Inspector General that basically outlines the risks of operating the ISS through 2030 (or possibly beyond.) Right now, the ISS is scheduled for retirement in 2030 and controlled deorbit in early 2031.

But NASA has also made clear that they don’t want to retire the ISS if there’s nothing to take its place—they want to hand the torch over to private, commercial space stations that can continue the work of the ISS in low Earth orbit, and they want them in orbit before the end of life of the ISS.

Orbital Reef Space Station by Blue Origin (Concept Art) funded by NASA, credit: Blue Origin

That means that the contingency plan that NASA is currently working on is an indefinite extension of the ISS’s life past 2030. They don’t especially want to do this, and it’s not the primary plan—but it’s a very real (and honestly likely) possibility. The question is: Can the ISS even handle that? The ISS is not in great shape, and every year that goes by it gets worse.

The air leak in question is located in the Zvezda Service Module is on the Russian side of Space Station, and it’s the third oldest module on the ISS, after Zarya and Unity. It launched in July of 2000. If you know how spacecraft work, Zvezda is basically the ISS’s service module. It provides power, life support, docking ports for Progress cargo modules and Soyuz spacecraft, sewage processing, and is the primary source for the ISS’s propulsion systems.

It’s not all that surprising that one of the early Russian modules is the one that’s falling apart. These early modules have undergone significant stress as the ISS has been expanded and added onto. Plus the original structural frame of Zvezda dates back to the mid-1980s. It was intended as a successor to the Mir space station, called Mir 2.

Mir on the left, Zvezda is the right (with a Progress attached to it at the bottom), credit: NASA

At the time the Russian space program was so strapped for cash that they launched Zvezda on a rocket emblazoned with the Pizza Hut logo, for which the company reportedly paid over a million dollars. (The first U.S. module Harmony was also modified from what was supposed to be a U.S. space station. And guess who built that module? The Boeing Company.)

I wish I were joking, credit: Roscosmos

If you’re getting the sense here that the construction of the ISS was a little haphazard—you’re not wrong. Everyone was basically scrambling to repurpose plans and hardware from their individual space stations that didn’t pan out.

Knowing all this, it’s not surprising that 24 years later, the ISS is falling apart a little bit.

The air leak in Zvezda

Okay, so: What’s going on with this air leak?

NASA has known about it since 2019. It’s located in a vestibule that separates a Progress docking port from the rest of the service module, called the Service Module Transfer Tunnel, and the leak has gotten progressively worse. I say “leak” in the individual, but that’s technically inaccurate because we’re talking about multiple leaks of varying sizes. Some of them, NASA and Roscosmos have been able to pinpoint the source and do work mitigating or fixing them. Others, they haven’t been able to figure out. This has been going on for five years, and everything has gotten worse.

Credit: NASA Office of the Inspector General

The ISS normally leaks a lot of air in its normal day to day operations. The stable leak rate is around 0.6 pounds-mass of air per day. Anything above that requires NASA and Roscosmos to investigate the source. Well in September of 2019, that increased dramatically to 1.2 pounds per day. Then a year later, it dramatically increased again to 3 pounds per day. In 2022, NASA and Roscosmos identified multiple air leak sources and fixed them, but only managed to bring the leak rate down to 1.7 pounds per day. After 2021, they brought it down to 0.2 pounds, but it’s been an ongoing problem.

That’s how they’ve functioned for years, with this leaky vestibule. At this point we know that the Service Module Transfer Tunnel is cracking; that’s why it’s leaking. But why is it cracking, when nowhere else on the Station seems to have that problem?? That’s the mystery.

The original ISS. From left: Progress, Zvezda, Zarya, Unity. The air leak is between Progress and Zvezda. Credit: NASA

They’ve basically ruled out a debris or micrometeoroid strike. Is it defective workmanship? Is it stress from docking and undocking? The analysis says, based on what the Service Module Transfer Tunnel has experienced, it shouldn’t be in this state. Yet it is, so something is going on.

Credit: NASA OIG

The location of the leak is actually incredibly lucky because it can be sealed off by an airlock to mitigate air loss. Right now on the ISS, they keep the hatch on that area closed, and so it doesn’t really impact the day to day of Space Station. If the leak gets significantly worse, and they feel like it’s a present danger, they can just close off the tunnel completely. They’ll lose a valuable docking port, but it is an option.

But without understanding why these cracks are happening, it remains a serious danger to the astronauts and cosmonauts aboard the ISS and severely complicates any plan to extend the life of the Space Station.

The ISS in 2018, credit: ESA

Especially because — the leak is getting worse! Both NASA and Roscosmos maintain that the condition of the Service Tunnel Transfer Module isn’t an immediate risk to the structural integrity of the ISS, But in February of this year, the leak rate increased again to 2.4 pounds per day, and then two months later it went up again to 3.7 pounds.

NASA and Roscosmos have done work to mitigate this leak rate—the current leak rate isn’t clear but some repairs have been done, and Russia is limiting operations in the area and keeping the hatch closed when the airlock isn’t in use. But also, another problem: NASA and Russia haven’t actually agreed on what the highest maximum acceptable leak rate is, which means there’s no consensus on the point at which that part of the Space Station needs to be sealed off permanently.

But the air leak isn’t the only problem here

This is a hard situation. And it’s just one of the problems facing the ISS right now. There are others that are a real problem when it comes to the idea of extending ISS operations past 2030. Right now, there isn’t really a viable private space station that looks like it will be ready by then, which means it’s very possible NASA will be looking to extend ISS operations.

Let’s talk about the practical problem with that: Russia hasn’t agreed to any plan to extend ISS operations past 2030, and core modules of the ISS are dependent on one another—you can’t separate the U.S. and Russian parts of the ISS and use them independently. We can’t keep the ISS in orbit without the Zvezda module’s thrusters and the boosts that the Progress spacecraft provide. Literally, as the ISS is configured right now, without the Russian Progress spacecraft, we can’t keep the ISS in orbit.

Lack of redundancy is a huge concern

And as the NASA Office of the Inspector General points out, we’re dependent on Russia in other ways too. Many times, over the course of the history of the ISS, the Russian Soyuz has been the only way to get NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Stations—from the grounding of the Shuttle fleet after the Columbia disaster to the long period between the end of the Space Shuttle program and the launch of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon.

STS-135, the final Space Shuttle launch, credit: NASA

And still, we don’t have redundancy. The U.S. only has one operational crew spacecraft to take astronauts to and from the ISS (and as of right now, NASA still hasn’t decided when Boeing Starliner will fly again, and if there will be another crewed test flight required. We’re looking at June of 2025 for them to even make that decision, but the spacecraft’s fate is still uncertain.)

Three times in the past few months, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket has been grounded after anomalies with the second stage or after landing. They’ve all been relatively short periods, the longest one was only about two weeks, but right now the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is the only way we have to get crew to and from the Space Station besides the Soyuz.

One grounding was a result of this Falcon 9 booster landing, and then tipping over in a fiery mess, credit: SpaceX

What’s even worse is that it’s also the only way we have to get cargo to and from the ISS besides the Progress. SpaceX holds one of the commercial cargo contracts with the Dragon spacecraft. Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus vehicle is the other spacecraft that resupplies the ISS. They’re currently in between rockets, waiting on the new Antares that’s supposed to debut next year. Until it does . . the Cygnus is launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9. The Falcon 9 is literally the only way the U.S. has to get crew or cargo to the ISS. (If you’re wondering about the Sierra Space Dream Chaser, it’s delayed, we’re hoping the first cargo flight will be in 2025.)

Again, as I’ve said many times: SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is a great and reliable launch vehicle, the workhorse of the launch industry. These anomalies have been minor, and none of them affected the mission. But this kind of dependence on one launch vehicle is NOT good, and NASA’s plans for redundancy haven’t generally gone well (again, I give you the case of Boeing Starliner).

Sierra Space Dream Chaser, credit: NASA/Sierra Space

And if Boeing Starliner has taught us anything after that whole “return without spacesuits contingency plan” it’s that having extra spacecraft docked to the ISS for an emergency is a good thing. We just don’t have that capability at the moment.

Right now, there are still crew swaps going on between cosmonauts and astronauts—one NASA astronaut trains with a Russian crew and flies on a Soyuz, and vice versa. But this cooperation is scheduled to end in 2025 (though NASA is negotiating with Roscosmos to extend it).

Micrometeoroid strikes, replacement parts, and NASA’s budget

That’s not the only issue facing a possible extension to the life of the ISS—the ISS is increasingly vulnerable to micrometeoroid and debris strikes as it ages.

Canadarm 2 has a hole in it from a micrometeoroid strike, credit: ESA

A micrometeoroid strike is what likely damaged a Soyuz capsule in 2022 and led to NASA astronaut Frank Rubio’s record-breaking spaceflight: an extension from 6 months to over a year because Russia had to send up a second vehicle to bring the astronauts back.

Soyuz MS-22 coolant leak, credit: NASA

And more and more parts need to be replaced. Have you tried replacing a part on something that’s over 20 years old? A lot of the time it’s easier to just replace something than try and find that replacement part, but that’s not an option with the ISS. The core modules weren’t designed to be replaced or swapped out. So NASA is doing their best to order and have replacement parts on hand, but it’s getting more tricky.

Back in June, NASA actually had to pull some of Butch and Suni’s personal suitcases off of Boeing Starliner because they had to get a replacement urine pump part up to the ISS as soon as possible. Until it got fixed, astronauts were just having to store urine. You might have been asking “why don’t they just have this replacement part on board if it’s so crucial” — this is why, they’re hard to come by and take an increasingly long time to get. As the ISS gets older and older, this is going to become a bigger problem. They’re also getting more expensive.

Which brings me to the budget issues. NASA is already cancelling programs left and right because they aren’t in a good budget environment.

The ISS costs NASA about $4.1 billion per year for operations and research, which is around 16 percent of NASA’s budget. That’s a huge cost that’s just going to increase as the ISS gets older, and it’s unclear if NASA can even afford to extend ISS operations past 2030. They don’t seem to have the budget for it right now.

The U.S. De-orbit Vehicle may not be ready on time

The ISS was originally scheduled for deorbit in 2015, and that’s been extended through 2020, 2024, and now 2030. The question is will it happen again? It’s not like NASA can make that decision unilaterally. The ISS is managed by NASA, Roscosmos, the CSA (Canadian Space Agency), JAXA (Japanese Space Agency), and the ESA (European Space Agency). All the partners except Russia have agreed to extending the ISS’s lifetime through 2030. Russia has only agreed to 2028.

If at this point you’re asking yourself “Wait, if Russia is currently only in until 2028, what’s going to happen between 2028 and 2030” you are at the same place I am. Let’s say the life of the ISS isn’t going to be extended and we’re all sticking with the 2030 date. The plan is to start the end of life process for the ISS with Progress spacecraft and then finish it with the U.S. Deorbit Vehicle built by SpaceX.

U.S. Deorbit Vehicle, credit: SpaceX/NASA

Except as the NASA Office of the Inspector General reports point out, it takes an average of eight and a half years from the awarding of a contract for a new vehicle to the first operational flight. Now, the USDV is based on heritage Dragon hardware—they’re just going to add some propulsion and other systems to the trunk of the spacecraft. That will certainly cut down on development time. But this contract was awarded in June of 2024. There’s a lot of questions of whether the vehicle will be ready by the time it needs to launch in 2030.

If it’s not, we will have to delay deorbit until it is ready, and again, Russia is only committed to the ISS through 2028. Earlier this year, the U.S. and Russia signed an agreement about their roles and responsibilities if an emergency deorbit of the ISS is required, which is good because the thing weights 925,000 pounds (420,000 kg) and we don’t want it coming down in an uncontrolled manner. But Russia hasn’t agreed to the current deorbit plan (that doesn’t mean they won’t, but until they do agree there will be a lot of uncertainty around it.)

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SpaceX successfully conducted a fifth test flight of Starship—and managed to catch the first-stage booster in mid-air back at the launch site. I don’t feel the need to go over the whole thing in detail because a lot of what there is to say has already been said. But the aspect I have been getting the most questions about—and what I want to focus on—is that booster landing.

Specifically, why a “catch” in mid-air, rather than a landing on a droneship or landing pad like the Falcon 9? Did the chopstick arms really catch the spacecraft, or did it just dock back at the launch pad? Why not use parachutes to slow the booster down? Why did it look like the rocket was on fire during the landing burn?

The test flight was a success

I’m not really here to debate whether the flight was a success because I think it was absolutely a success. That doesn’t mean it was perfect or the ship is ready to be operational, just that for what they were trying to achieve, SpaceX nailed this flight. The two big things we were watching on this flight were the booster landing and a pinpoint splashdown of the upper stage. They both went very well.

Okay, but why should I care?

There are a lot of people who have (understandable) mixed feelings about SpaceX for myriad reasons — everything from the CEO to space junk to satellite pollution. So if you’re wondering why this test launch in particular is important in terms of a broader view—it’s crucial for NASA’s plan to return humans to the moon.

NASA’s current plan is to land humans on the moon in September of 2026 (they likely will not make this deadline, but hopefully it will happen by the end of the decade.) There are many reasons for the possible delay to landing, but one of those is partner hardware.

Artist’s depiction of HLS, credit: SpaceX/NASA

The Human Landing System, or HLS, will take humans from lunar orbit to the surface, remain on the surface during the landing, and then return the astronauts to orbit. HLS is a modified version of Starship (HLS will also need to be refueled in space, hence why SpaceX has been working on those demonstrations—the next one is currently planned for 2025, when two Starships will dock in orbit, with one transferring propellant to the other).

But back to Artemis, to be able to land on the moon, NASA needs Starship operational. I can tell you that they were watching this launch closely and likely breathed a sigh of relief at the success here.

Here’s the thing: They landed a 20-story building

If you're still wholly unimpressed by this, I'm actually not quite sure why you're still here (hate reading will take years off your life, don't do it, it’s not worth it!) but I'd tell you this to put things into perspective.

Credit: SpaceX

Super Heavy (not the entire Starship/Super Heavy combo, we’re just talking about the booster here) is 233 feet tall (or 71 meters). That’s taller than the average 20 story building. And they’re sending it to the edge of space, and then bringing it back and catching it with mechanical arms attached to a launch tower.

The livestream play-by-play: Launch to “catch”

At this point, I’m going to go through the livestream. This is really easiest if you just watch, rather than read, (the analysis in my video starts here.) However, if you’d really just rather read, I’ll do my best to insert screencaps and GIFs to show a bit of what I’m talking about.

Starship on the launch pad, credit: SpaceX

You see here Starship on the launch pad. The upper stage, Starship, looks black here, while the booster Super Heavy looks white on the bottom, which makes it easier to see what's going on and the part of the rocket we’re focusing on.

All of the Raptor engines lit upon liftoff, so no engine failures for the booster, which is great. The curving as seen below is normal, pitching downrange to cut through the atmosphere to get to the thinner parts of the upper atmosphere more quickly and using less propellant.

Pitching downrange, credit: SpaceX

The vehicle made it through Max Q beautifully. Max Q is the moment of maximum aerodynamic pressure on the vehicle, basically where the launch vehicle is the most stressed, so there's always a sigh of relief when that happens.

One thing that's important to note is you can really see the blue methalox flame. Without getting too technical, Starship uses liquid methane as propellant and liquid oxygen as the oxidizer, it's more efficient and cleaner burning than the traditional liquid oxygen and rocket grade kerosene that other rockets, including Falcon 9, use. I'll talk about methalox a little more later, but this is a great view of the flame below.

The blue methalox flame, credit: SpaceX

The next big thing to talk about is stage separation.

Starship uses hot staging—basically Starship, the upper stage, ignites its engines to move away from the Super Heavy booster before separation is complete. That's a tweak that SpaceX made after that first test flight when the two stages didn't separate.

First Super Heavy's boosters shut down—this is what SpaceX calls "Most engines cut off" instead of "Main engine cut off," the traditional term, because three engines remain lit (the lights on the bottom left and right show which engines are lit—Starship the upper stage is on the right, while the Super Heavy booster is on the left.)

Then the stage separation happens, and the booster’s engines light back up for the boostback burn. Starship, the upper stage, also lights its engines.

Stage separation, credit: SpaceX

Now, for the purposes of this video only, we're saying goodbye to Starship, though it continued on into space for its suborbital flight and survived re-entry and splashdown mostly intact, and then after it splashed down it exploded in a pretty spectacular fashion. This may have been a controlled detonation or a result of a fuel leak as it tipped over and fell into the ocean.

Starship splashdown, credit: SpaceX

But, back to the booster. At this point, Super Heavy is making its way back to the launch site in Boca Chica, Texas, with the boostback burn. On every previous flight test for Starship, SpaceX has dropped the booster into the Gulf of Mexico. This time they wanted to land it back at their base, but it's not what you think of as a traditional booster landing. The idea is to maneuver it into place with what they call chopsticks—giant mechanical arms on their launch gantry, called Mechazilla. Super Heavy has pins on it that you can actually see below (where the arrow is pointing), and these are what need to slid into place for these giant arms to catch the Super Heavy booster.

Credit: SpaceX

Before the booster could return, SpaceX had to perform automated checks on it to ensure that it was healthy and ready. When everything checked out, they sent the command for Super Heavy to try and return back to base. If it hadn't checked out, they would have dumped it in the Gulf and tried again next time. But luckily, the tower was "go" for catch.

Now the boostback burn is complete, all engines are shut down, and you can see the thrusters on the side firing just to maneuver the rocket as it returns back to the launch pad. You can see the hot staging ring falling away.

That little dot is the hot staging ring, credit: SpaceX

Because they are trying to land the booster here, they jettisoned the hot staging ring, which isn't new, that happened on the last test flight. This is just to take off as much mass as possible while they're trying to figure out the booster's return, it's around 20,000 lbs, that's about 9 metric tons.

One interesting thing below—that glow at the bottom of the booster is the engines themselves, not the engines firing. There's no burn happening. That is some immense heat, from the friction with re-entry. We did learn after the flight that there was some outer engine warping from the heat—no huge deal, but interesting to see.

Credit: SpaceX

The landing burn goes in stages. It starts with 13 Raptor engines to slow down its speed. While it’s descending though, keep an eye out for the flame just above the engine burn and the black smoke that goes with it. There have been a lot of questions about what’s going on here, and I’ll get to that.

First half of the landing, notice the extra flame + black smoke? Credit: SpaceX

We're in the next stage of the landing burn and down to the final three engines (this will become important), Super Heavy is maneuvering here. I know this looks really close on the feed, like Super Heavy was about to run into the launch pad, but if you look at it from other angles, which I'll show you later—it's close but not AS close as it seems here.

Credit: SpaceX

And....success!!!!

Credit: SpaceX

Let’s talk about the black smoke and fire

Okay, so let's go back over that and address some of the many questions that I've gotten about this: what is on fire, is that normal, what's the black smoke from, was this really a catch versus just a mid-air landing, is the catch necessary or just all for show, why aren't they just landing this like they do with a Falcon 9.

SpaceX provided multiple camera angles for this over the past couple of days, which has really been helpful to parse what's going on. Let's talk about that fire first. I want to flag that I talked with rocket engineer Gokul Das, who's worked on ISRO missions, to parse out what we think is happening.

Keep in mind that unless SpaceX tells us directly what's going on, everything you hear and see about this is conjecture. I've seen a lot of people talking very authoritatively about this, as if they know exactly what's happening and unless they work for SpaceX or have heard it directly from someone who works at SpaceX, there's not really authority there just because we aren't entirely certain. But there's a lot we do know, and quite a bit we can deduce.

Let’s look at this alternative shot, where we can get a better idea of where the flame and smoke are coming from.

Credit: SpaceX

The secondary fire, I think, is from fuel venting. Basically the vehicle vents its fuel before the catch in order to avoid overpressurization. Simple, right? Well there is actually more going on than that in my opinion.

When Super Heavy hits 1 km, it starts its landing burn. That's 13 engines, three center engines and the ring of 10 around it. That's certainly a lot of thrust to slow the rocket down, which they need to do quickly. But once they slow it down, that many engines are not good for fine control, which is why they shut down those 10 after they achieve the desired deceleration and we're left with three engines.

But when those 10 engines shut down, there's what Das described as a "flame fold back"—basically when the engines are shut down, the flame folds back because of air flow and that ignited the methane, and because there's additional methane spewing around in the engine compartment, this might have ignited the actual engine compartment as well. I’ve slowed down the video so you can see it in the GIF below—watch what happens to the flame as the engines (bottom left display) shut down.

Credit: SpaceX

There's been some speculation that there was more venting than was intentional, that this may have been a leak and not just an intentional vent. My thinking it was probably an intentional vent, maybe they vented more than they intended, I'm not sure they wanted it to catch on fire, but it's not a huge deal that it did.

The black smoke is more complicated, simply because just burning methalox fuel wouldn't cause that. But because liquid fueled engines take awhile to shut down (you have to do it slowly), there's still a lot of methane as well as exhaust floating around, so as I mentioned, the engine compartment might have ignited as well. There may be something in the engine compartment that's burning to give off this black smoke, but we don't really know what.

My suspicion here is that it's some sort of thermal protection on the engines that's burning off. It's very possible that there's an internal fire going on that's charring through some stuff. It's not great, but this is a test flight. It's certainly not terrible, and not taking away from the overall accomplishment—I don't want my focus on this to be interpreted as it being a serious issue. I just was personally very curious about what might be going on here and wanted to dive in.

This would need to get fixed at some point but also...depending on what happened here, this heating may not even be an issue.

Credit: SpaceX

Raptor 3, the next iteration of the Raptor engines don't actually require a heat shield so this may all be a moot point because the internal plumbing on these includes regenerative cooling. These are currently in production—but also SpaceX does often overpromise when it comes to timing on these things, so I don't want to just say it's not a problem because Raptor 3 will take care of it soon.

But also, if the engine compartment catches on fire, and the internal plumbing isn't well protected, and Raptor engines are cooled by methane, and that internal plumbing catches on fire . . . well, let's just say fires in an engine compartment generally aren't ideal, and this is something SpaceX will need to look at.

Is this a catch or a docking?

It is a catch—the giant Mechazilla arms do move to grab the rocket. It's hard to see in that wide main shot, but in this other video video SpaceX provided from the launch tower, you can actually see the arms moving to grab the booster (GIF is below). It is a catch.

Credit: SpaceX

Is the mid-air catch just for show?

Is this just something SpaceX is doing for theatrics? That's a hard no. This is a very actually smart and elegant solution to the problem of building landing infrastructure. The reason you can't use parachutes, and the reason they didn't want to land the thing on the ground is the same—Super Heavy is HUGE. Remember, I said it's the height of a 20- or 25-story building. It does not have landing legs, and the amount of weight landing legs would add to the booster in order to be able to support its weight and the shock of landing would be . . . well, it'd make it that much harder to land.

Why not use parachutes?

Parachutes to slow it down have the same issue—the thing is so big and heavy (the thing roughly weighs about 200 metric tons, which is around 440,000 lbs, as compared to the Crew Dragon which is slowed by parachutes, which weighs around 12,000 kg or 26,577 lbs ) that parachutes wouldn't make much of a dent. Also parachutes are relatively inaccurate. They're fine when you have a landing zone a few kilometers wide but they aren't super useful for a pinpoint landing at a launch pad. Plus parachutes are heavy, and they don't want to add to the mass of the booster even more.

What about landing on a droneship or on land?

It can be hard to find the precise numbers, but from what I can tell from my research the Falcon 9 booster weighs around 25,000 kg. The weight of the landing legs alone is 2,000 kg, or around 8 percent of the weight. You can see the four of them per booster below.

Falcon Heavy booster landing, credit: SpaceX

Starship would need bigger ones, and maybe more—possibly 6 instead of 4. Even making the legs as lightweight as possible, which if anyone can do it at this point SpaceX can, that's still a lot of extra weight. Plus they'd need to be sturdy enough to support the weight of Super Heavy which might mean making them even stronger and therefore heavier.

What's more, the landing infrastructure would need to be extensive. The landing infrastructure is often damaged by the rocket. It's not a huge deal with the Falcon 9 because it's not an especially powerful rocket. But Super Heavy could do a great deal of damage to landing infrastructure when it's coming in, not to mention stuff could get kicked back up and damage the booster.

Super Heavy does have the ability to hover, which also helps with the catch (but would also damage landing infrastructure even further if it hovered right above a pad). Falcon 9 can't get its thrust low enough to hover, but this does mean that Super Heavy can minimize the shock absorption necessary for any landing structure—but Mechazille and the chopstick arms do have shock absorption built in.

Starship and rapid reuse

Credit: SpaceX

The idea for rapid reuse of Starship includes not having to refit the booster in between uses. They want to be able to do basic checks on it, refuel it, and use it again, possibly a turnaround of hours not even days. (This is also where landing legs are a problem. On the Falcon 9, they need to be refurbished between uses). That means landing infrastructure that can handle a lot of use, as well as rockets that can land without damaging themselves or what's around them. That means catching the rocket in midair, instead of letting it land on the ground, protects everything on the ground while still bringing the rocket back.

Plus landing it back at the launch site means they can literally lower it to the ground, refuel it, and go. They don't even need to take the time to transport it back like they do with Falcon 9s landed on drone ships.

Environmental concerns? Here are mine.

Before I close this newsletter out, I do want to mention that venting of methane into the atmosphere before the catch. Methane is a greenhouse gas, and while it's cleaner burning than traditional liquid oxygen and rocket grade kerosene, I don't love the venting here for environmental reasons. (There are other environmental issues to get into with Starship, the flame deluge system is currently under investigation, that's a whole separate topic and this is long already. I'll cover all of these at some point)

I want to point this out, not because it's a big deal now—this is a test flight, it's a one off, most of the methane burned off whether intentional or not (though the byproducts are water and . . . carbon dioxide, again not great for climate change). But if we're talking about rapid reusability, if we're talking about one day sending Starship into the sky multiple times a week and landing Super Heavy back at the base—that's going to add up, and I hope that's something that will get addressed because we don't need to add to our environmental woes with this.

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Voyager 1 is in interstellar space, and it’s taken a lot of work from brilliant engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to get it there. But a recent engine problem threatened to cut off the beloved spacecraft’s communication with Earth. Let’s dive into how engineers diagnosed and fixed Voyager 1 from 15 billion miles away.

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Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Voyager 1’s ongoing issues

You may recall that there was a long period of time from late 2023 to mid 2024 where Voyager 1 was having a computer issue. It was sending back basically garbage data, and we didn’t know whether it could be fixed — but engineers pulled it off.

What we’re going to talk about today is different: Voyager 1 has been having thruster problems, and they’ve built up into a serious concern. The spacecraft isn’t using thrusters to propel itself through space — that’s happening just based on momentum. But in order to communicate with Earth, Voyager 1 needs to be able to point its antenna towards our planet, and for that, it needs functional thrusters. Engineers thought they could fix the problem, but there was a question of whether implementing that fix would further damage the spacecraft. Here’s how they managed it.

The problem: Clogged fuel tubes

Voyager 1 launched on September 5, 1977, and its original mission was to fly by Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon Titan. It was the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, which occurred on August 25, 2012, and since then, it’s just been a game of prioritization to keep the spacecraft operational and in communication with Earth as long as possible.

The problem here is the thrusters. Basically, when engineers were designing Voyager 1 and 2 (the two spacecraft, both currently outside our solar system, are identical), they chose hydrazine as the propellant for a simple reason: It’s very reliable. The probe has 16 hydrazine thrusters, and a healthy Voyager 1 spacecraft would conduct about 40 thruster pulses a day to accomplish this.

The MR-103 thrusters were designed for Voyager but versions are still in use today on spacecraft, credit: Aerojet Rocketdyne

But sadly, Voyager 1 is not a healthy spacecraft. The side effects of these constant thruster pulses have been building, and over the years, the fuel tubes inside the thrusters have become clogged. These tubes specifically direct liquid fuel to the catalyst beds, where it’s turned into a gas. What that means is that more fuel is required to accomplish the same amount of work, pointing the spacecraft, with each of those pulses — and Voyager 1’s fuel supply is finite. They don’t want to be using more fuel than they need to, nor do they want the tubes to get so clogged that they can no longer fire the thrusters. Right now, the twin Voyager spacecraft have about a decade of fuel left.

If it weren’t for the computer issue last year and early this year, the hydrazine thruster problem would have been easily labeled the most significant problem facing Voyager 1 over the past decade.

Engineers have been taking steps to mitigate this problem over the years. The Voyager 1 team first noticed the problem in 2002 with one branch of attitude control thrusters and switched to the other one. The spacecraft has three different branches of thrusters, the attitude control thrusters take up two of these branches and one is the trajectory correction maneuver, or TCM, thrusters. The TCM thrusters are identical to the attitude control thrusters, they’re just located on the back of the spacecraft.

Voyager spacecraft structure, credit: Voyager Mission Status Bulletin

But as I mentioned, Voyager 1 isn’t using its engines to correct its trajectory. That means these TCM thrusters hadn’t been used since the Saturn flyby on November 8, 1980. Well, on November 28, 2017, for the first time in 37 years, engineers powered up the TCM thrusters. They worked, and so Voyager 1 switched to exclusively using these thrusters in January of 2018.

Well. Now these thruster tubes are also clogged, and they’re even worse than the attitude control thrusters were. They were originally .25 mm in diameter, now they’re .035 mm, which according to NASA is about half the width of a human hair. So, now they have to switch the thrusters back from the TCM thrusters to a branch of the attitude control thrusters. Simple, right? Well, when it’s an almost 50-year-old spacecraft 15 billion miles away in interstellar space, NOTHING is simple.

Why the solution is complicated: Power and heat

To understand why this is a problem, we need to discuss Voyager 1’s dwindling power supply.

Voyager 1 uses three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, for power. You can think of this as, functionally, nuclear batteries. As the plutonium decays, that’s converted into electricity. But because it’s limited by the half life of the fuel source, in this case plutonium, basically these RTGs produce less power each year. Voyager 1’s available power decreases by around 4 watts per year. That’s why engineers have slowly been turning of science instruments and conserving as much as possible, because the spacecraft has to operate on less and less power each year.

One of Voyager’s three RTGs, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

One of the results of this is a loss of heat. Basically between shutting off science instruments that generated heat and shutting off heaters of thruster branches they weren’t using, the spacecraft is cold. Because of this chill, engineers couldn’t just flip a switch and turn on the attitude control thrusters due to risk of damage. They needed to turn on their heaters first, and that’s the problem: Where’s the power for that? At this point, any extra power use on Voyager 1 has to come at the expense of something else. And they didn’t want to just turn off a science instrument in order to power the heaters for awhile — because what if they couldn’t turn it back on?

And the problem is also, there’s no real way to test this on the ground. According to NASA, there are no functional models, or testbeds, of Voyager hardware or software anymore. And on top of that, even if there were, there’s no real way to simulate the conditions that the attitude control thrusters have been in these last few years, nor that the spacecraft has been in for the last 47 years.

Engineers have actually used Voyager 2 as a testbed for Voyager 1 before. Because Voyager 1 is further out into interstellar space, it’s considered more valuable basically, at 15 billion miles away. Voyager 2 is at around 12 billion miles out.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Back in 2023, engineers sent a software patch to the Voyager spacecraft — but they sent it to Voyager 2 first. That way, they would know if the software rewrite would work before sending it onto Voyager 1. In this case, though, they had to work directly with Voyager 1 and make sure they got it right on the first try.

So they had to come up with another plan, and one that wouldn’t risk damaging the spacecraft’s thrusters or its instruments.

Engineers finally find the fix

In the end, the engineers determined it would be safe to turn off one of the spacecraft’s main heaters for up to an hour, which would allow enough power to flip on thruster heaters. But keep in mind that it takes 22.5 hours for a commend to reach Voyager 1 through the Deep Space Network.

Credit: Deep Space Network

That means they had to send the command to turn off the main heater, send the command to turn on the thruster heater, then after a delay (but not more than an hour!) send the command to turn on the thrusters, then send the command to turn off the thruster heaters, then, finally, send a command to turn the main heater back on. And then…just hope that it worked, because it would take another 22.5 hours (total roundtrip communication time of 45 hours) to check and see. (To be clear, these commands probably were sent through a program Voyager executed, versus sending the individual commands manually).

Well, the sigh of relief: For the first time in six years, on August 27, that branch of attitude control thrusters pointed Voyager back at Earth. The thruster switch was successful.

How long can Voyager 1 continue operating?

Voyager 1 was designed for a five-year mission, and yet here it is 47 years later, still going. Currently, Voyager 1 has for operational instruments: the plasma wave subsystem, magnetometer instrument, cosmic ray subsystem, and low energy charged particle instrument. Six additional instruments were either turned off after the Saturn flyby or have been switched off due to dwindling power.

As I mentioned, Voyager 1 has about 10, maybe 15 years of fuel left. But really, engineers are just hoping to keep the spacecraft operational through its 50th anniversary in 2027 (current estimates are that it will continue sending back science data through at least 2025). The hope was with the switch to the TCM thrusters, they’d buy another three to five years for the spacecraft, but now we’re back to the still-clogged attitude control thrusters, and it’s not clear how long we’ll be able to point Voyager 1 towards the Earth.

Credit: NASA/HPL-Caltech

If Voyager 1 can still point itself towards Earth, it will continue to send back engineering data as long as it can, through 2036. Science instruments will have to be shut off well before then, but 2036 is the point Voyager 1 will travel beyond the range of the Deep Space Network and it will no longer be able to communicate with Earth, even if it still has power and the ability to keep itself pointed at the Earth.

For now, I’m just really glad to see this spacecraft still operational. It’s hard not to get attached to various spacecraft, and Voyager 1 is one that I’m VERY attached to, so I’m glad we’re not having to say goodbye yet — even though I know it’s coming soon.

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Scientists solved a HUGE mystery about the early universe that has been puzzling scientists since JWST’s first observations. Basically, scientists observed that early galaxies were much larger and more luminous than expected, and they questioned everything, from what they knew about star formation to theories about the early universe

But now, scientists think they may have an answer that doesn’t break the standard model of cosmology. Let’s dive into why JWST is so good at observing the early universe, what the early universe looked like, the crisis in cosmology surrounding these large early galaxies, and what these scientists uncovered to solve the mystery — as well as the questions we still have.

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Why JWST is so good at the early universe

JWST is incredibly good at observing the early universe because that’s what it was designed for. It’s an infrared optimized telescope, while Hubble is optimized for visible and UV light (though it does have the capability to “see” in some near-infrared wavelengths). Infrared is important because as light has traveled through the universe as the universe is expanding, the wavelength has stretched. It’s shifted to the longer, or red, end of the spectrum — what you may know as redshift.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

That means to see the earliest light of the universe, the light of the first stars and galaxies, we can’t just be observing the universe in visible light because the wavelength has stretched into the infrared. JWST is optimized for near- and mid-infrared observation with NIRCam and MIRI, the mid-infrared instrument. And it’s VERY good at observing these wavelengths of light

Remember that looking through a telescope is like looking back in time because of the time this light takes to reach us. So when we look really far into the universe, we’re observing how the universe was in the distant past.

Credit: STScI

With previous telescopes, scientists could observe early galaxies. Hubble allowed observation of UV dominant early galaxies, but wasn’t sensitive enough in the infrared wavelengths to pick up IR ones. Spitzer, a now-retired infrared-optimized telescope, was able to detect some of this light but because it wasn’t nearly as sensitive as JWST, scientists had trouble distinguishing light sources and things kind of blurred together.

But JWST has blown all expectations out of the water. It has shown unprecedented ability to focus light from distant targets (what’s called a point-spread function) — it’s actually twice as sharp as design requirements, so it’s the best telescope we’ve ever had for this purpose and it’s why JWST has been revolutionizing our understanding of the early universe since its deployment.

Credit: NASA

What we think we know about the early universe

So, then, what’s this mystery? Well, when scientists first started observing the universe with JWST, they immediately started uncovering the most distant galaxies we’ve ever seen. And many of them were big. Much bigger than was theorized by our understanding of the early universe an Lambda CDM, or the Standard Model of Cosmology.

Massive early galaxies as seen in the CEERS survey

The issue was that these galaxies were bright. Too bright. And if all of that luminous matter came from stars, then it was clear we seriously had misunderstood star formation in the early universe.

Here’s what we think we know about the early universe. After the Big Bang, the universe was incredibly hot — a thick, hot soup of subatomic particles. As the universe began to cool down, the particles began to combine into the first ionized atoms. This happened during the era of recombination, around 240,000 to 300,000 years after the Big Bang, and this is really the earliest point of light we can observe, because before that the universe was opaque and light couldn’t freely travel through it.

Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

This is when CMB, or cosmic microwave background radiation, formed, and this is the first light of the universe, but then came the dark ages. This was the universe after CMB and the era of recombination but before the first stars and galaxies formed. We think these began forming at around 400 million years after the Big Bang.

Cosmic Microwave Background, credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA

The first stars in the universe formed out of clumps of hydrogen gas. The clumps basically grew and grew until they were dense enough to collapse and form the first stars. These were likely large, massive stars, so they were gravitationally attracted to one another to form the first star clusters, then to form the first galaxies, then galaxy clusters.

The problem: Bright and massive early galaxies

Scientists use galaxy brightness as a proxy to estimate their mass and number of stars, and these galaxies were way too massive and had too many stars. So then, the theory goes that the first galaxies would be filled with large, massive stars, but they’d be relatively small and dim because it would take time for galaxies to accumulate enough matter to grow larger and brighter. But that’s not what scientists were finding.

In February of 2023, scientists pinpointed six different galaxies that formed in the universe’s first 700 million years. All six were up to 100 times more massive, according to the amount of stars they must have contained, than our current theories predict. They were so massive, in fact, that the six galaxies had more mass among them than should have been available in the universe at that time. Something was seriously wrong, either with the observations, or our theories, or our assumptions.

The answer: That’s no star

We’ve been chipping away at this mystery, finding different answers for this problem. One is starburst — basically stars aren’t forming at an even rate but all at once, which makes a galaxy brighter for a period of time. Another was refining our simulations to have higher resolution in order to predict the pattern and rate of star formation in the early galaxies. Now this new study helped us unlock another piece of the puzzle.

The answer came courtesy of a study in the Astronomical Journal led by UT Austin graduate student Katherine Chworowski. Basically, the answer to these galaxies having too many stars, and therefore being too bright and too massive is — it’s not because of stars. It’s because of black holes.

The event horizon of our own black hole, with a magnetic field direction overlay, credit: EHT team

JWST has already shown us that massive black holes existed in the early universe far earlier than we thought. It was basically the same problem — it takes time for black holes to gather enough matter to form. And it takes time for them to consume enough matter to become big. The question was could they form large with enough collapsing matter to just create a massive black hole at the beginning, or were these the product of stellar-sized black holes merging and growing more rapidly than we thought? Evidence has pointed to the former — basically giant clouds collapsing into large black holes in the early universe.

And this appears to be the answer to the massive early galaxy problem as well. The research team looked at galaxies from the CEERS, or Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science, survey, which targets a sliver of the sky to provide parallel observations from multiple instruments, supported by data from a similar CANDELS survey with Hubble. This helps scientists “see” distant redshifted galaxies and pinpoint distinct sources of light from distant objects.

CEERS Survey, credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Steve Finkelstein (UT Austin)

The team went through the CEERS data looking for redshifted galaxies, focusing on those that were at z > 4 (z corresponds to the fractional change in wavelength and is number value for redshift). For reference, a z value of about 5 corresponds to light emitted about a million years after the Big Bang. A z value of 9 is light emitted when the universe was about .55 billion years old.

What they found, basically, is that many galaxies that appears way too bright and were puzzling scientists actually had accreting massive black holes within them. We can’t directly detect black holes, but when they start consuming matter at a high rate, they begin to gather gas and dust around them — called an accretion disk outside the event horizon of a black hole. As black holes consume matter, the friction in this gas and dust is incredibly luminous, which is what we’re detecting. When the scientists removed these galaxies with black holes from their data, the rest conformed to the expectations of the Standard Model.

This doesn’t completely solve the mystery of the early universe, though. We still need to figure out why there are so many more massive black holes than we expect. And this study doesn’t explain why there are more galaxies than expected either. Those are still mysteries we need to solve, and hopefully JWST will operate for a long time and continue to give us more insight into the early universe.

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