The End of The Orbital Index

When we started The Orbital Index, Ben was working at an early-stage VC, and Andrew had just taken his first job in aerospace, building smallsat ground control software at a tiny startup called Kubos. The newsletter was a way for us to learn a new industry, a product design exercise, and a shared experiment in science communication and concise curation by two very long-time friends.

Since then, Orbital Index has developed its own voice and an avid following. Sarajane joined as our incredible assistant editor, and we somehow managed to publish nearly every week for almost seven years.

During those seven years, Andrew journeyed from industry outsider to a founding role at Vast and, later, to co-founding space solar energy startup Overview Energy. Ben used the newsletter as a vehicle to explore space deeply and develop the discipline of writing concisely and clearly—making mission concepts and rocket engine specs understandable without losing technical depth, all while writing significantly more than any of his English teachers ever thought he should.

The space industry has changed a lot during Orbital Index’s tenure. When we started, New Space was, well, new. The first privately funded lunar lander, SpaceIL’s Beresheet, had just launched; Opportunity’s mission had just ended, with Perseverance on the horizon; SpaceX’s Crew Dragon had yet to carry people into space; Starhopper hadn’t hopped and only two Starlink prototypes had flown; the Chinese Space Station hadn’t launched, nor had any of China’s ambitious sample return missions; and, not one commercial Chinese rocket had reached orbit.

Fast forward, and the landscape is dramatically different today. Commercial companies are exuberantly undertaking almost every aspect of space that used to be purely governmental. These ambitions will soon be bolstered by the arrival of significantly lower-cost launch on reusable launch vehicles from across the US, China, and, eventually, Europe.

The next decade of space is going to be incredible, and we’re excited to be involved in our own ways, but the amount of time and attention required to do it justice in a newsletter has grown beyond what we can muster alongside families, careers, and commitments. We both find ourselves at moments of transition, more burdened than energized by the weekly task of writing, and feeling ready for change, with our attention on new horizons and adventures. And so, as bittersweet as it is, this is our 350th and final issue of The Orbital Index.

In this last omnibus issue, we’ll share our incomplete view of where we see the space industry heading in the next decade.

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¶Private everything. It’s been clear for a while that, step by step, space is joining the domain of private enterprise. Corporations dominate launch, telecommunications, and much of Earth observation. Companies are now actively working on replacing governmental efforts with commercial offerings in space situational awareness, comms (including deep space), cislunar transport (more below), positioning and navigation, and some remaining niches of Earth observation (fire monitoring, CO2 monitoring, and more… but some EO may remain a poor fit for commercial ‘science-as-a-service’ business models). At least in the West, the next space stations will be commercial, as will transport to them. To be clear, this is only possible because of government support for the ISS over the last 30 years and additional funding through NASA’s CLD program. Similarly, NASA’s CLPS contracts have set the stage for increasingly commercial lunar missions. Beyond cislunar space and in the astrophysics and astronomy domains, most missions under development remain national, but that too is slowly changing. Rocket Lab and MIT's Venus Life Finder mission, and a new crop of asteroid mining startups, are slowly pushing the commercial sphere outward. Meanwhile, private non-profit efforts are quietly working on space telescopes, both big ones and somewhat smaller, cheap and mass-produced ones designed to revolutionize the questions that space science can ask. Enabled by the prospect of dramatically lower launch costs courtesy of Starship and New Glenn, private companies are also working on efforts that have no operational governmental analogues, including power beaming, orbital data centers, orbital refueling, in-space manufacturing, and orbital assembly. Like it or not, capitalism seems to be actively heading toward new capital markets the stars.

¶We hope the Moon likes rovers… cause it’s getting a lot. As lunar exploration ramps up worldwide, our celestial companion is slated to be explored by increasingly advanced rovers over the next 10 years. ⚙️

• Small but mighty: Building on its first successful CLPS Moon landing, Firefly’s next three CLPS landers this decade will all carry rovers: UAE’s Rashid 2 on the second lander, Honeybee Robotics’ first rover on the third—exploring a unique lunar volcano—and on the fourth mission, both Astrobotic’s versatile CubeRover and Canada’s first rover. NASA has also awarded future contracts for Astrobotic CubeRovers to demonstrate power transmission and lunar night survival. This year, Intuitive Machines’ third Moon landing attempt will carry NASA’s Lunar Vertex instruments on the lander along with a rover to study a magnetic swirl, helping us understand the Moon’s evolution. This lander will also deploy NASA’s three CADRE rovers, which collectively will autonomously map the surface and subsurface around Reiner Gamma. ispace US’s first CLPS mission through Draper in 2027 will carry a demonstration rover from the company’s European arm. China’s Chang’e 8 lander will deploy Pakistan’s first rover and two small mobile bots from private Chinese company STAR.VISION. Future Artemis IV astronauts will also deploy a rover, built by Lunar Outpost, which will study lunar dust and surface plasma. And finally, Australia’s first rover, called Roo-ver, will launch by 2030 on an as-yet-unidentified CLPS lander to explore water ice at the south pole.
• Sophisticated: Launching this year, China’s Chang’e 7 rover and hopper, carrying a comprehensive instrument suite, will map and characterize water ice and other volatiles on the Moon’s south pole, crucial for planning sustained crewed and robotic missions. Later this decade, a Chang’e 8 rover and dextrous mobile robot will comprehensively study the south polar geology & environment while also building lunar soil-based structures. Astrobotic’s Griffin CLPS lander will deploy Astrolab’s semi-autonomous FLIP rover on the Moon’s south pole later this year; it got manifested last year after NASA decided not to fly the critical VIPER rover for studying water ice. NASA has now tentatively chosen Blue Origin’s second Mark I lander to hopefully fly VIPER in 2027. The joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5/LUPEX rover mission later this decade will drill and analyze south polar water ice, and can provide NASA with critical data that is currently missing in Artemis planning.
• Crew support: China is progressing with prototypes of a small crewed rover as part of its ambitious plan to land humans on the Moon by 2030. NASA, meanwhile, plans to have a cutting-edge Lunar Terrain Vehicle being used by Artemis astronauts across missions starting at the end of this decade. JAXA will provide NASA with an even more advanced rover next decade, which will be pressurized, enabling astronauts to spend weeks exploring in it. In return, NASA has agreed to land two Japanese astronauts on the Moon.

— Contributed by our friend Jatan Mehta. For an expanded rundown of these rovers, read Moon Monday #256.

¶Future of Cislunar Transport. Cislunar space—a 550,000 km-radius spherical region governed by the combined gravitational influence of the Earth and Moon, including the five Earth–Moon Lagrange points—is poised to see a sharp increase in activity as lunar ambitions shift from short-duration visits to sustained presence. Driven largely by U.S. and Chinese programs, more than 100 missions are already planned for the Earth–Moon system over the next decade, spanning science, infrastructure, communications, and national security. This growing cadence is pushing cislunar space to host a transportation network rather than merely being a destination, shaped by its relatively low energy cost to access and the operational demands of heavier Earth–Moon traffic. From a delta-v standpoint, injecting payloads onto cislunar transfer trajectories (~3.2–3.9 km/s from LEO) is comparable to reaching geosynchronous orbit (~4.1–4.3 km/s), but once there, spacecraft must operate reliably within the dynamics of the three-body system, contend with a weak and irregular lunar gravity field, and actively maintain unstable orbits such as near-rectilinear halo orbits (Gateway will be in an L2 NRHO if it actually launches). These conditions make cislunar space an ideal environment for maturing in-space transport capabilities, forcing a transition from single-use missions toward sustained mobility. Future architectures increasingly rely on reusable transfer vehicles, space tugs, and logistics platforms capable of repeated rendezvous, continuous station-keeping, and multi-year operations—capabilities already implicit in the logistics requirements of NASA’s Artemis program and Lunar Gateway, as well as China’s Chang’e-derived lunar infrastructure roadmap. NASA recently funded initial studies into low cost commercial platforms such as Blue Origin’s Blue Ring and Impulse’s Helios kickstage toward a model in which cislunar transport functions as a service, moving spacecraft between Earth orbit, lunar orbit, and interplanetary departure points. These systems demand reusable propulsion, long-duration operation, and flexible mission profiles. In contrast, DARPA’s (surprising) decision to cancel the DRACO program (c.f. Issue № 229) highlights the near-term prioritization of chemically- and electrically-propelled architectures over higher-risk nuclear thermal propulsion. In the emerging cislunar architecture, the central technical challenge is no longer reaching cislunar space, but operating reliable, repeatable transportation systems within it—establishing the logistical backbone required for sustained lunar operations and eventual missions to Mars and beyond.

— Contributed by Sarajane Crawford, our amazing assistant editor for the past 3 years.

¶So many more rockets. In the seven years we’ve been writing Orbital Index, the commercial launch sector has seen the first few vehicles reach space from companies founded this century. But the NewLaunch world, imagined as a bustling marketplace featuring a plethora of launch providers vying for market share, driving costs lower, and consistently launching, has largely failed to materialize. Falcon 9 and Electron remain the only new, non-governmental vehicles with truly mature flight heritage, and they have only recently been joined by New Glenn, Firefly Alpha (with its recent mixed record), Vulcan, and Zhuque-3, all with single-digit successful launches. However, waiting in the wings is a growing cadre of will-definitely-launch-in-the-next-two-years rockets, which have almost become too numerous to track (ed. actually, it’d be great if someone built a web app to track all of them—but until then, there is a lovely list of all the small launchers). Here’s a partial list in rough order of our best guess of the likelihood of the next vehicles to successfully reach orbit sometime kinda-sorta-soonish: Starship (wenorbit?), Neutron (recent fairing test), Stoke Space Nova, Relativity Terran R (recent update video), Gilmour Eris Block 1, Hanbit-Nano, Isar Spectrum, Space One Kairos, RFA One, Orienspace Gravity-2, Northrop/Firefly Eclipse, Interstellar Zero, Skyrora XL, Space Pioneer Tianlong-3, Galactic Energy Pallas-1, Orbex Prime, PLD Space Miura 5, MaiaSpace Maia, i-Space Hyperbola-3, Skyroot Vikram-1, Deep Blue Nebula-1, and Astra Rocket 4. Several of these could be ranked higher, but don’t have publicly manifested non-governmental customers, meaning they’ll be slower to become truly ‘commercial.’ Our opinion is that reusability will, unsurprisingly, be the biggest determining factor in the business success of these rockets once they make it to orbit, mitigated in the near-term by vehicles with strong government contracting success.

¶ Space science. Over time, the availability of low-cost launch will rewrite the manual for space science, just like everything else in orbit. Lower costs enable iteration and scaled production, allowing mission designers to take more risk and adapt standardized interfaces to their own science questions (a la Cosmic Frontier Labs, linked above). These platforms will replace some of the exquisite, failure-is-not-an-option missions of today, along with their astronomical price tags. Blockbuster missions, though, will still have a place, and many are in the works, even despite the current US Administration’s dislike of science and active threat to ~41 space missions—some late-breaking good news here, though. NASA is still officially pursuing Dragonfly, the Roman Space Telescope, and several others, although much remains uncertain. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been and will continue to be stepping up, especially ESA (we’re excited for Comet Interceptor, PLATO, ARIEL, EnVision, eventually LISA, and a load of important Earth science missions) and China (missions to the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and later Jupiter, and maybe Uranus and Neptune). There are also ambitious Korean, Japanese (MMX!), Indian, and Emirati missions. As mentioned above, we also expect more private deep-space and science missions over time. It’s clear that science isn’t going to wait around for NASA, and we’re also quietly optimistic that, under the new leadership of Jared Isaacman, NASA will be back in the game sooner than many of us feared. 🤞 🔭

¶Space and Earth: the decade ahead. The next decade is vanishingly small on the timescale of planets, but it is likely to be a critical one for humanity, with space playing its own crucial role. And while the current US administration is pushing to cut Earth Science programs, personnel, and missions (both in development and operational; c.f. recent NCAR shutdown news), that doesn’t change the fact that modern climate science emerged in part from the truly global vantage point provided by our ability to put people, cameras, and sensors in orbit. While budgets are under fire at NASA/NOAA/USGS/etc, much of the rest of the world seems to understand that this work remains existential. ESA has more Earth Science missions in development and operation than ever before (we’re particularly excited for FORUM, Copernicus CO2M, and FLEX), JAXA is staying the course on its own small set of missions (ISS-hosted MOLI and PMM), China is beginning to add its version of Earth Science missions (TanSat-2 and DQ-2), and multiple smaller nations have missions in progress (Canada’s WildFireSat, Norway’s AOS-P, and South Korea’s recently launched KOMPSAT-7). These missions and the data they’ll produce are critical, as humanity is blowing past its +1.5 ºC warming limit after a decade of record average global temperatures and mounting climate-induced disasters. These realities firmly place us in uncharted territory; we don’t know how quickly or how drastically climate patterns will shift as a result, particularly given our limited understanding of climate tipping points that will likely accelerate warming (if you like board games, Daybreak is fun and our favorite that includes tipping points). Our ability to mitigate atmospheric methane and its sources (leaks, flaring, etc.); understand cloud behavior at particle, single-cloud, and weather system scale; measure carbon cycle components like biomass; and, monitor resilience metrics like surface temperature, moisture levels, and wildfires will only grow in importance as humanity comes face-to-face with its most daunting self-inflicted problem to date (AI may very well be next). As we’ve shared before (c.f. Issue № 48), here at Orbital Index we’re unabashedly in support of treating climate change as the massive problem and opportunity that it is and of focusing humanity’s substantial ability to produce, problem-solve, and build on securing a livable and pleasant future—one where we can turn our focus toward the stars without ignoring existential threats at home.

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We know many of you will miss The Orbital Index (and we’ll miss you too!). As we wind things down, we plan to move the current mailing list to a new list dubbed Orbital Index: Extended Mission. We might use it occasionally for space-related thought pieces or updates if the inspiration strikes, but we’re making no promises, and there definitely won’t be a regular cadence. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to send us a note.

Please also follow us individually: Ben (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, BlueSky), Andrew (LinkedIn, Twitter/X, BlueSky) & Sarajane (LinkedIn, BlueSky)

Fortunately, if you feel the need to plug an Orbital Index-sized hole in your inbox, there are other excellent space newsletters out there. Here are some we recommend:

• Jatan.space, the source of Moon Monday and Indian Space Progress – Covering all space things Lunar & Indian
• China Space Monitor – Doing the hard work to unwind the ever-developing Chinese space industry
• TerraWatch Space – Earth Observation industry analysis
• Europe in Space – Space tech paid for with Euros (the website as well as some issues are free)
• Guide to Space, Starts With A Bang, and Bad Astronomy – Papers, space science & cosmology (OTOH, if you’d rather cosmetology, we recommend this)
• Satellite Spotlight and Payload – Investments, events & space business news
• Rocket Report – Rockets!

Thank you to all of our supporting members who made this newsletter possible: Evan Maynard, Will Deaton, Marijan Smetko, Sam Anderson, Thomas Smyth, Thomas Paine, Manuel Imboden, Galen Stevens, Samuel Trask, Bill Allen, David Rolling, Eliot Gillum, Dave Gallagher, Jesse Coffey, Lindy Elkins-Tanton, William Aaron, Brian, Frederic Jacobs, Michael Barton, John Frank, Austin Link, Ben Frank, Mike Curtis-Rouse, Matt Harbaugh, and Dan Gluesenkamp. (To those of you who opted to keep your support anonymous, thank you too!)

We also couldn’t have done it without generous corporate sponsors, listed here in order of first appearance: Spaced Ventures, Xometry, Back to Space, Formlogic, Epsilon3 (our longest sponsor at 211 issues, right up to the end; thank you!), First Resonance, Spire, A.I. Solutions, Elodin, AllSpice.io, and CSC Leasing.
 

Thanks for sticking with us to the very end. And so, for now… so long and thanks for all the fish!

—Andrew & Ben
 

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Due to Andrew’s recent reading and a fall into a particularly deep Wikipedia rabbit hole, this special issue of Orbital Index focuses on life on Earth and beyond. No issue next week. Happy New Year!

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¶Life shaped the Earth. Biology and geology seem to operate on dramatically different time scales, but on Earth, they are intimately linked. For example, limestone, and thus its metamorphic form, marble, is made of calcium carbonate, often from deposits accumulated by corals, mollusks, and single-celled organisms (for example, the pyramids of Egypt are made almost entirely of fossilized foraminifera). The cherts of the Bay Area are accumulations of microscopic radiolarian and diatom skeletons, sometimes with traces of the oil they once used for buoyancy. Meanwhile, life also shapes our climate and landforms, with vegetation changing erosional patterns, turning badlands into jungles, and over eons, shaping mountain ranges themselves. Cycles of global glaciation, both ancient and more recent, may be caused by the biosphere’s uptake of CO2. It’s even possible that, without life, a runaway greenhouse effect could have dried up the oceans and left Earth looking something like Venus—and without oceans enabling flux melting of subducting oceanic crust, arc volcanism may also have stopped. Biology terraformed our planet. Life may also enable planets outside of their stars’ nominal habitable zones to become habitable (paper).

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¶Life shapes our atmosphere. For most of Earth’s history, the sky would have been hostile to us. The Great Oxidation Event marks the moment biology (starting with microbes) pushed oxygen levels high enough to permanently alter the planet’s chemistry, creating an oxygenated atmosphere and an ozone layer that allowed aerobic life to flourish. The modern biosphere maintains this breathable atmosphere, and also releases other consequential (if sometimes strange) emissions: forests produce isoprene, a biogenic volatile organic compound, whose oxidation products can drive new particle formation in the upper troposphere (recently reproduced in CERN’s CLOUD chamber – paper), creating condensation nuclei that seed cloud formations. Carbonyl sulfide (COS/OCS) is even more interesting: sea animal colonies can shift Antarctic tundra soils from being an OCS absorber to an emitter by altering soil chemistry and microbial communities (e.g., penguins pooping and walking around on the tundra). Plants are typically a one-way absorber of OCS, making it a marker for photosynthetic carbon dioxide uptake and useful for estimating gross primary production that is more in line with other estimates than existing photosynthesis estimation methods (~120 PgC annually traditionally vs 157 ± 8.5 PgC via OCS – paper). These and other fluxes build into a non-mystical, feedback-only version of the Gaia hypothesis developed by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock: life and environment co-evolved into coupled feedback loops that can stabilize (or destabilize) our planet’s atmospheric states (without any need to claim purpose, a point of common criticism). And, the Gaia hypothesis can be turned outward: Lovelock’s intuition is that a planet-scale biosignature is atmospheric disequilibrium: look for combinations of gases that shouldn’t persist together without a large, continuous source—in our case, life. Which brings us to the sobering present: Ben recently read Gwynne Dyer’s excellent Intervention Earth, which makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that humanity—having attained a geologic-scale atmospheric impact—may end up having to intervene more heavily in atmospheric chemistry and radiative balance than any of us would like, not because it’s appealing or elegant, but because our timeline doesn’t allow for anything less. 

¶Life shaped our minerals. Life’s machinations also resulted in many of our minerals. It’s well known that coal, oil, and natural gas, the fuels of humanity’s rise (and maybe demise), are carbonized organic compounds built from CO₂ that was reduced by plants and algae. Less well known are the banded iron deposits from the Great Oxidation Event, which are a key source of iron for industry. These were formed when life added oxygen to our air, creating our protective ozone layer and rusting the planet (more above). This life-derived oxygen is one of the reasons Earth has 6,188 officially known minerals, while Mars has 161—a majority of our minerals may exist only due to the free oxygen made available by life. (Mars surely has more, but we won’t find them until we can stumble around and hammer on rocks.) Also likely due to life: a large amount of our native sulfur (although we’ve seen some on Mars); bog iron ore (one of the first sources of iron for tool making) which is often concentrated by iron-oxidizing bacteria; abelsonite, a chlorophyll-like mineral likely derived from the breakdown of ancient vegetation; and, even the bioaccumulation and formation of uranium, phosphate, vanadium and gold deposits—“bacteria and archaea are involved in every step of the biogeochemical cycle of gold, from the formation of primary mineralization in hydrothermal and deep subsurface systems to its solubilization, dispersion and re-concentration as secondary gold under surface conditions.” Related: About 4% of minerals are now the direct result of human activity—known as anthropocene minerals, these occur in places like mine walls, shipwrecks, and ancient slag (paper). Andrew recently thoroughly enjoyed reading The Story of Earth by Robert M. Hazen, the author of that anthropocene minerals paper and an explorer of mineral evolution. Recommended!

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• A recent study shows that even the Earth’s lower mantle has been affected by life, finding that diamond-bearing volcanic kimberlites from deep within the mantle exhibit a different carbon signature if they formed after the rapid development of fauna in the Cambrian Explosion. This is because seafloor sediments containing biological matter were subducted at plate boundaries and ended up deep in the mantle in kimberlites.
• There's a 'Subterranean Galapagos' deep inside the Earth, and studying 1.6 billion-year-old water from a Canadian mine.
• CERN provides free instructions on how to build a cloud chamber at home.
• Blue Origin’s latest New Shepard flight included ESA aerospace and mechatronics engineer Michaela Benthaus, who is likely the first wheelchair user to cross the Kármán line.
• Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Earth on Dec 19th, roughly 270 million kilometers away.
• Jatan Mehta shared a year-end “Achievements and shortfalls in global lunar exploration in 2025.”
• Katalyst Space selected Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus XL air-launched rocket (last flown in 2021) to deliver its robotic spacecraft to orbit for its NASA mission to boost Swift’s orbit, which is currently at too low of an inclination for most small rockets to reach from their designated launch sites.
• The stuff of nightmares: a 10 million solar mass black hole moving at 1,000 km/s (paper). This is the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, and it is pushing a massive bow shock in front of it while dragging a 200,000 light-year-long tail behind. Supermassive black holes moving at 0.003 c might be hazardous to your health.
• Plate tectonics, meanwhile, may increase the probability of life by “forming geological structures such as mountains, volcanoes and oceans, which also allow moderate weather and climate patterns to develop. Through weathering, nutrients are released into oceans. By creating and destroying habitats, plate tectonics puts moderate but incessant environmental stress on species to evolve and adapt.” The probable rarity of plate tectonics in the galaxy is even proposed as an addition to the Drake equation (paper). Our own planet’s plate tectonics may have been jump-started by impacts, with chemical traces in zircon crystals aligning with the period when “our Solar System passed through the galaxy’s spiral arms, which are densely packed with stars and gas. In these crowded regions, extra gravitational forces may have disturbed icy comets at the edge of our Solar System, knocking some onto paths that sent them crashing into Earth.” Time for the field of paleoastrobiogeology!

The Orbital Index

• ESO’s VLT observed a rogue planet—a free-floating planet unbound to any star—rapidly accreting material (paper). This observation suggests that some rogue planets may form through accretion, like stars, rather than forming in a stellar system and then escaping.
• Observations in 2023 show rings of debris forming around the small, 200 km solar system body Chiron, which orbits between Saturn and Uranus. If accurate, this would be the first time we’ve watched rings form (paper).
• Pulsars typically stop pulsing under a certain rate of rotation. However, some pulsars have been observed to be active even below this expected limit. The culprit might be tiny mountains, just centimeters tall, which would amplify local electric fields and enable lower-energy emissions (paper). The researchers also propose that for this to be true, neutron stars might be made of "strangeon matter," an “exotic form of matter bound together by the strong nuclear force rather than electromagnetic forces. This material would be tough enough to maintain surface features against the neutron star's extreme environment, with binding energies millions of times stronger than ordinary matter.”
• A pair of white dwarfs, 150 light-years away, are slowly spiraling toward each other (with energy radiated as gravitational waves). The duo has a combined mass of 1.56 Suns, making them the heaviest Type Ia supernova progenitor system identified, well over the 1.4 solar-mass Chandrasekhar limit (paper). When they eventually make contact and go supernova, they’ll be ten times brighter than the full Moon when viewed from Earth. On the other hand, it’s unlikely Earth will exist in ~23 billion years when this happens.
• A black hole 10 billion light-years away probably consumed a massive star in a tidal disruption event and emitted a flare 30x brighter than any previously observed from a black hole (paper). At its peak, it shone with the light of 10 trillion suns. Sounds a bit poetic, don’t it?

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¶High-flying filling stations, off-planet petrol, & the future of fuel. Since the beginning of the Space Age, orbital refueling has remained an unfulfilled dream that promises to revolutionize the space industry—primarily by extending the life and range of spacecraft. Refueling would enable greater mass dedicated to payload at launch, more complex in-space assembly, access to new and more plentiful target destinations, and more reusable space tugs. Liquid methane (LCH4) boils at -162 °C, oxygen (LOx) at -183 °C, and hydrogen (LH) at -253 °C, while other common liquids freeze in space, including RP-1 (-51 °C), hydrogen peroxide (−0.89 °C), water (0 °C), and hydrazine (2 °C). Storing these propellants in space, therefore, requires advanced thermal management to prevent boil-off or freezing using tank geometry, materials and insulation, active cryocoolers/heaters, sun shades, and other thermal control systems. Challenges also include microgravity effects on propellant (difficult liquid mass gauging and unpredictable liquid/gas distribution), increased operational complexity due to rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking (RPOD) for transfers, propellant depot orbital accessibility, hydrogen embrittlement of storage tanks, and the need to periodically refill depots. But technology is slowly inching toward refueling. Starting in March 2007, DARPA’s Orbital Express mission performed multiple hydrazine fuel transfers between the prototype servicing satellite (ASTRO) and a surrogate satellite (NextSat), and NASA’s Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) included three phases of cryogenic fuel transfer work on the ISS in the 2010s. Orbit Fab’s Tanker-001 Tenzing launched to a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) in 2021, carrying high-test hydrogen peroxide (HTP) to test the Rapidly Attachable Fluid Transfer Interface (RAFTI) fueling port. SpaceX’s Starship Flight 3 in March 2024 tested refueling technologies by transferring 5+ metric tons of cryogenic LOx from one internal tank to another. Earlier this year, the Chinese Shijian-25 demonstration refueling satellite docked with Shijian-21 and potentially transferred propellant. Upcoming missions include NASA’s LOXSAT (NET early 2026), which will demo a cryogenic fluid management system. Orbit Fab plans to deliver up to 1,000 kg of xenon gas to power the ion thrusters of Astroscale’s Life-Extension In-Orbit (LEXI) geostationary servicing satellite (NET 2026), and up to 50 kg of hydrazine to one of the two Tetra-5 satellites operated by the U.S. Space Force (both via an integrated RAFTI port). Astroscale’s Prototype Servicer for Refueling (APS-R) will attempt to refuel the other Tetra-5 satellite in mid-2026, while Northrop Grumman’s Passive Refueling Module (PRM) will refuel Tetra-6 in 2027. Of course, the ultimate goal—one that would drastically reduce launch cost on Earth—would be to have all stages of propellant production (mining, processing, and storage) performed in space to avoid hauling liquids out of Earth’s deep gravity well

¶CINEMA and CMEx move forward. Cross-scale Investigation of Earth’s Magnetotail and Aurora (CINEMA) is a small-class explorer mission focused on improving our understanding of magnetic convection in Earth’s magnetotail, which drives energetic, sometimes explosive, plasma flows associated with aurorae and fast plasma jets. The mission will now move into Phase B development, planning the flight system and mission operations. If selected for full development, with a total mission cost not to exceed $182.8M (excluding launch), CINEMA would launch nine formation-flying small satellites into three planes in polar orbit, each carrying an identical instrument set including an energetic particle detector, an auroral imager, and a magnetometer. Meanwhile, CMEx (Chromospheric Magnetism Explorer) was selected for an extended Phase A study (12 months; $2M). CMEx is a proposed single-spacecraft concept that builds on proven UV spectropolarimetric instrumentation demonstrated on NASA’s CLASP sounding rocket flights, and would observe the Sun’s inner chromosphere to understand the origins of solar eruptions and identify the magnetic sources of the solar wind, supporting improved space-weather prediction relevant to satellite and astronaut safety. 

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• This Proton M rocket explosion from 2013 (slow motion HD video) is WAY too much like the rockets Andrew used to build in KSP. Related: things KSP teaches you that are wrong.
• Do datacenters in space make economic sense? A long-form, delightfully interactive, deep dive from Andrew McCalip. 
• If you made a beach out of sand grains proportionate in size and quantity to the stars in the Milky Way, what would that beach look like? 
• A look at Skylab’s final orbit and reentry in 1979, including a pieced-together audio track of the final telemetry and NASA commentary during tracking.
• The Space Freighter and Star-Raker single-stage-to-orbit space plane, envisioned in the 1970s for delivering massive components to space for space solar energy and other missions.
• Impulse and Starfish quietly conducted an RPO(D) experiment over the past several months (minus the D), using Starfish’s software and Impulse’s Mira spacecraft to bring it within 1,250 km of an older Mira vehicle. The Impulse vehicle, using high-thrust chemical propellants, was not heavily modified to enable this mission, other than the addition of a single camera and Starfish’s flight computer. The mission was named Remora after the fish that attaches to a host.

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¶Overview Energy launches. A huge disclaimer upfront: this is the space solar energy company that Andrew co-founded and spent the last four years working on, so we cannot in any way be impartial. We do think it is very cool, though. Overview Energy came out of stealth today and announced successful power transmission from a moving aircraft to a ground receiver 5 km below, what we believe is a world first (video). Overview’s mission is to allow existing solar projects to produce power at dawn, dusk, and night, times when clean baseload power is needed but the Sun is weak or unavailable. The company’s vision is to build many geosynchronous satellites, illuminated by the Sun almost 24/7, that transmit power to large existing solar farms on the ground via a wide (~2-5 km across), invisible (near-infrared), and safe (eye safe and less than solar intensity) beam of light. This optical power delivery approach means that no specialized ground receivers need to be built, and the satellites can be a size that is manufacturable and deployable (albeit still very large) with no robotics or in-space assembly. This compares favorably to microwave space solar energy proposals, which require apertures in space that are on the order of a kilometer or more across and which may struggle with safety on the ground. Overview Energy’s next major milestone is a LEO test mission scheduled for early 2028. Overview is hiring!

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¶IM-3. After two almost-landings on the Moon, Intuitive Machine is steadily working on IM-3 (with fixes to its laser altimeter and crater recognition systems). IM-3 is scheduled to launch in the second half of 2026 and is contracted to deliver payloads for NASA, ESA, KASI, and others. It will land in the Reiner Gamma region of the Moon, which contains a lunar swirl, probably caused by unusual local magnetic fields. One interesting payload is JPL’s trio of four-wheeled, solar-powered, carry-on-bag-size CADRE rovers, which will work together autonomously to map an area of the lunar surface and subsurface in 3D with cameras and ground-penetrating radar. They are designed to function for one lunar day (14 Earth days)—presumably, they lack radioisotope heaters to survive the lunar night. CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) is a step toward autonomous operation (something we discussed in Issue № 229) and multi-robot mission design—the robots form a mesh network and collaborate to map and act as distributed receivers for each other’s radar signals. At the same time, IM-3 relays their comms to Earth. Also onboard IM-3 are ESA’s MoonLIGHT Pointing Actuator retroreflector (paper) for ranging and KASI’s Lunar Space Environment Monitor, which will measure the energy distributions of charged particles on the Reiner Gamma to help understand the formation of lunar swirls and space weathering (paper).

¶Astrophysics, but cold. There are nearly 70 research stations across the 14.2 million km² continent of Antarctica. Antarctica’s high altitude and dry, stable atmosphere provide exceptional conditions for astronomy by helping to minimize atmospheric distortion and reduce infrared sky emissions. Antarctica also experiences very little light pollution, low seismic activity, a six-month polar night, and the presence of circumpolar stars and constellations, which never dip below the horizon, allowing for continuous observation of those targets. A site named Ridge A, ~1,000 km from the South Pole, has been declared the best place on Earth for astronomy. One instrument on Ridge A is the remote-controlled High Elevation Antarctic Terahertz far-infrared telescope, which has been operating since 2012 for submillimeter- and terahertz-wavelength observations. Antarctica’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station experiences average temperatures of -49 °C, and is home to four astronomical projects: the South Pole Telescope, the IceCube Neutrino Observatory (the clear Antarctic ice enables the detection of high-energy neutrino interactions), and the BICEP3/BICEP Array. The Long Duration Balloon Facility at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station conducts scientific balloon experiments, launching payloads into the stratosphere for periods of 10-20 days to study the Earth's atmosphere and space. The Chinese Kunlun Station, located just 7.3 km from Dome A (Argus)—the highest point of the Antarctic plateau—hosts three astronomical instruments: the China Star Small Telescope Array with four 14.5-cm telescopes, the Antarctic Survey Telescope (AST3-1 and AST3-2) consisting of three 50-cm instruments, and the near-infrared telescope, which is part of the Kunlun Dark Universe Survey Telescope project. China’s Three Gorges Antarctic Eye, a 3.2-metre radio/millimeter-wave telescope, recently began observations at China’s Zhongshan Station, located near Russia’s Progress II Station and Romania’s Law-Racoviță-Negoiță Station. Some future Antarctic astronomy missions include the Dome A Terahertz Explorer-5, planned for installation at Kunlun; the Polar Large Telescope, to be built at the French-Italian station on the Dome C (Concordia) site; and the Antarctic TianMu Time-domain Astronomical Observation Array at Zhongshan. (Related: lest we forget, Antarctica is also the richest source of meteorites on our planet. Rocks seem to have trouble hiding on ice sheets.) 🔭🐧

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• A big list of cool astronomy simulations and visualizations.
• That time the CIA stole a Soviet lunar probe for a night so that they could photograph it and figure out which factories had made the parts. (They actually did it twice.)
• Galactic Algorithms are ones with “world-beating theoretical (asymptotic) performance,” but which are never used in practice due to complexity or incredibly high constant terms, which means that they’re only useful for data sets larger than we’ll ever encounter on Earth. For example, there is a known method of multiplying two numbers in O(n log n) bit operations, but it has a huge constant in front and requires something like a 1,729-dimensional Fourier transform. This is compared to the widely used Karatsuba algorithm for multiplying numbers in O(n^1.58) time.
• The Tragic Tale Of How NASA's X-34 Space Planes Ended Up Rotting In Someone's Backyard.

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¶The ‘world’s only commercial spaceplane’ is finally sort of nearing launch. Sierra Space’s perennially delayed Dream Chaser Cargo System (DCCS) is now scheduled to launch in Q4 of next year on a Vulcan rocket, no longer planning to visit the ISS, but still attempting a runway landing at Vandenberg Space Force Base (animated launch video). The vehicle recently completed pre-flight tests at Kennedy Space Center, where it will launch. If successful, it’s not entirely clear what would be next for the reusable, autonomous spaceplane. The cargo variant of the vehicle was originally planned to start a multi-mission NASA Commercial Resupply Services-2 (CRS-2) contract for ISS cargo delivery, but that contract now seems to be in flux. Much like Cargo Dragon with its expendable trunk, DCCS includes the Shooting Star cargo module with docking hardware and solar panels for power, which will burn up on re-entry. DCCS would be capable of delivering 5 tons of cargo to the ISS, and carrying about a ton back to Earth for landing on a commercial runway while subjecting it to no more than 1.5 g. The vehicle maneuvers in orbit with ‘green’ hydrogen peroxide propellant and has folding wings that allow it to fit in standard 5-meter fairings. A crewed version (originally funded through phases of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program but ultimately passed over in favor of Starliner and Crew Dragon) could carry up to seven people to LEO, should the vehicle ever be developed (its most likely use may be commercial station deliveries in either configuration, given its partnership in the Orbital Reef, should that station ever progress).

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• A new paper calls into question the accelerating expansion of the Universe, potentially resolving the Hubble tension. The team produced evidence that type Ia supernovae, a key standard candle used to estimate distances in the Universe, are strongly affected by the age of their progenitor stars, with supernovae from younger stars appearing fainter than those from older stars. This fits recent data from DESI, derived from baryonic acoustic oscillations and the CMB. “Our study shows that the universe has already entered a phase of decelerated expansion at the present epoch and that dark energy evolves with time much more rapidly than previously thought.” Further updates and confirmations will be needed over the next few years (with some likely coming from Rubin LSST data), but this may be an exciting development in cosmology!
• Astronomers found a Jupiter-sized planet, tidally locked to a millisecond pulsar, with an atmosphere made up of almost exclusively carbon (paper). The planet may once have been a star, but so much material has either been stolen by the pulsar or blasted away by gamma rays that what is left is Jupiter-sized. The source of the planet’s carbon-rich atmosphere isn’t yet understood. This type of system, where a pulsar consumes or ablates a planet, is sometimes called a black widow pulsar.
• One long-standing, though generally poorly accepted, theory for the cause of a period of abrupt cooling of the climate 12,000 years ago—which saw the disappearance of megafauna and the Clovis culture—is known as the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH). The theory posits that a comet airburst caused massive fires and subsequent global cooling, wiping out woolly mammoths and causing the collapse of the Clovis culture. No craters have been found, but a layer of black strata, which might be burnt material, as well as microspherules and platinum, has been cited as evidence. Now, a recent paper reports the discovery of shocked quartz at three well-known Clovis sites, strengthening evidence for an extraterrestrial cause. Shocked quartz—quartz sand grains with molten silica solidified in fractures—is known to occur after nuclear weapons tests and inside impact craters (the latter seeming more likely here).

¶A Bigger, Newer Glenn. Following its very successful second launch, including a successful booster return, Blue Origin released an update on what’s next for its heavy lift rocket. First up are engine upgrades, with both the BE-4 and BE-3U getting thrust increases that will yield better performance for the current rocket configuration. These upgrades include subcooling for the rocket’s propellant (which SpaceX also introduced in the Falcon 9 block 5 upgrade) and will deliver ~15% more thrust to the first stage and 25% more to the upper stage (interestingly, BE-3U has only delivered up to ~70% of its current thrust capability on the test stand to date). In addition to engine upgrades, Blue will introduce a recoverable/reusable fairing on the current rocket, which should help increase launch cadence. Looking further into the future, the company intends to introduce an even larger version of New Glenn; this variant would feature 9 BE-4s and 4 BE-3Us (Blue refers to this as a 9x4 configuration, compared to the current 7x2 version). This new variant should be capable of delivering 70 tons to LEO and will require stretched tanks and a new aft thrust section. 9x4 will feature an even larger 8.7-meter fairing—altogether, this version will be taller than the Saturn V and squarely move the rocket into the Super Heavy camp (Starship will still be taller and produce significantly more thrust, however). No word on when it is planned for launch (we’d be a bit surprised to see it before 2028).

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• NASA shared more images of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS taken from spacecraft all over the solar system.
• Moss spores survived for 9 months outside the International Space Station.
• Airbus update on A320 Family precautionary fleet action (SEUs in aircraft!)
• ESCAPADE, recently launched on New Glenn’s second flight, has seen first light. 
• All about Apollo 11’s feared biological back contamination risk and the isolation procedures applied to returning astronauts. “This is how a completely abstract argument about alien germs was taken seriously and mitigated at great effort and expense during the 1969 Apollo landing.”
• ESA announced a project to study food production in space using hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria to make protein from microbes that need only air, hydrogen (via electrolysis), and a bit of astronaut urine (for urea). Think Soylent for astronauts. (An interesting effort to find the most efficient possible path to generate food in space, or for an emergency on Earth, is ALLFED. Here’s a review paper of non-agricultural food production, including wood/biomass to sugars, single-cell proteins from various gas/liquid feedstocks, including hydrogen, chemical synthesis from hydrocarbons or CO₂, and precision fermentation. And here is another on direct chemical synthesis of food.)

Orbital Index is taking next week off for American Thanksgiving. Happy turkey / turducken / tofurky day, everyone! 🦃

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¶Data centers, in space, in the news.

• While not particularly new or groundbreaking, the concept of moving energy-intensive AI (and other) compute to space is having a moment. On one hand, SSO and high orbits provide far more hours of sunlight than are available on Earth, and having the infrastructure there reduces terrestrial energy and water use issues. On the other hand, GPUs are high CAPEX with short useful lives (possibly necessitating upgrades in orbit), and dissipating all of the waste heat generated during computation will be challenging in the vacuum thermos of space. Nonetheless, numerous orgs are piling on.
• NVIDIA-backed startup Starcloud has a first test launch, in collaboration with infrastructure provider Crusoe, NET late 2026.
• Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt (who now owns Relativity Space), and now Elon Musk have all expressed interest. Elon recently replied to an Ars article about space-based data centers with, “Simply scaling up Starlink V3 satellites, which have high speed laser links would work. SpaceX will be doing this.”
• Not to be left out, Google took the wraps off its Project Suncatcher, a study into a constellation of solar-powered satellites hosting AI compute infrastructure with laser crosslinks to scale machine learning. A preprint paper describes models of high-bandwidth intersatellite links, dynamics of sun-synchronous orbits for near-constant sunlight, and studies into the radiation hardness of Google’s AI-focused Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). To achieve the required inter-satellite bandwidth, they propose flying satellites in very close proximity (potentially sub-kilometer, their study looked at just 100-200m separation). Google also tested their TPUs in a 67MeV proton beam, finding irregularities after a cumulative dose of 2 krad, which they say is 3x the expected shielded five-year mission dose (although we wonder about the required level of shielding might be). Google projects launch costs below $200/kg by the mid-2030s, which we also anticipate. “At that price point, the cost of launching and operating a space-based data center could become roughly comparable to the reported energy costs of an equivalent terrestrial data center on a per-kilowatt/year basis.” We’d love to see more about their thermal analysis. Google is partnering with Planet for a test mission of two prototype satellites NET early 2027.
• Alternatively, we could transmit solar energy collected in space down to Earth, where upgrading GPUs is easy, no radiation shielding is required, and energy can be used where it’s most needed. This vision of space solar energy for Earth is being pushed forward by companies like Aetherflux, Virtus Solis, Space Solar, and Overview Energy, a startup which Andrew co-founded—more on Overview soon!

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¶New Glenn mission NG-02 sticks the landing. After terrestrial and space weather delays, the usual wayward downrange boat, along with a hold or two, Blue Origin’s second New Glenn mission launched. The heavy-lift rocket climbed into the Florida skies, successfully set its high-efficiency second stage on course for an escape trajectory, and returned its booster to the autonomous drone ship Jacklyn (landing video). New Glenn, weighing ~1,650 tons when fueled, has a stated payload to LEO of 45 tons, roughly double that of Falcon 9 (which weighs in at 550 tons) and similar to Falcon Heavy (1,420 tons). New Glenn’s first stage is 16+ meters taller than a Falcon first stage, making this landing the largest booster ever to land at sea (Starship’s 52 m upper stage has splashed down, but will eventually be caught by a land-based tower when mature). Despite the size difference, Jacklyn/LPV1, New Glenn’s landing pad droneship, is only slightly bigger than Falcon 9’s due to NG’s ability to deep throttle,  hover, and translate into position, unlike F9’s hoverslam. Jacklyn is equipped with a robot that performs safing and 6 robotic transport stands that secure the booster to the ship. Additionally, immediately after landing, the booster explosively welds (patent) itself to the deck (rather than doing this). Blue is hoping to reuse this booster (named Never Tell Me the Odds) on its very next flight, which the company is currently aiming to have happen early next year. The mission’s payload was ESCAPADE, two spacecraft that will study the Martian magnetosphere and how its atmosphere has been stripped by the solar wind over time (also useful to understand if we’re ever to try terraforming the red planet). ESCAPADE was managed (under budget!) by UC Berkeley Space Science Lab and built by Rocket Lab. Due to New Glenn not being ready, the mission missed its original launch window last year. So, while we’re not currently in a Mars transfer window, New Glenn was available now (and maybe so was the NASA budget…), so ESCAPADE will loiter around Earth-Sun L2 (not Cleveland) for about a year before flying back near Earth for an efficient burn deep in our gravity well before heading on to Mars. (Related: New Glenn’s comparatively quick success with recovering boosters isn’t likely to trouble SpaceX in the near term, which has been landing rockets for 9 years and just completed its 500th mission with reused rocket boosters, but may spell trouble for ULA, to whom Blue just delivered another set of new BE-4 engines.)

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• Pioneer Labs is hiring an Operations Associate in Emeryville, CA. Pioneer is “building the first microbes that can turn Martian dirt, water, and air into the building materials needed to sustain life in the low-resource environment of the red planet,” so that’s pretty darn cool.

• TerraWatch’s Aravind Ravichandran shared his opinion on ‘Why "Science-as-a-Service" doesn't work for Earth Science.’
• In case we haven’t linked it before, the Armagh Observatory has a fun series on the largest rocket concepts that never made it to the pad (parts 1, 2, and 3).
• Ars reported recently on Russia's 15-year project to finish construction of the Vostochny spaceport, a development project deeply marred by hunger strikes, unpaid workers, purges of top officials for corruption, theft of $126M, and “a man driving a diamond-encrusted Mercedes [who] was arrested after embezzling $75,000.” Now, the contractor building the spaceport has failed to pay its energy bills (~$600k), and power has been shut off to under-construction areas of the spaceport, with the contractor possibly heading into bankruptcy. Russia hopes to launch its newest launch vehicle, Angara, from this facility in the future, allowing it to phase out the aging Proton.

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¶More orbital manufacturing news. Following our recent coverage of Besxar Space Industries and their use of returning Falcon 9 boosters for in-space manufacturing development, it’s worth mentioning a bunch of other recent in-space manufacturing updates. While the market doesn’t exist today, many companies hope to create it.

• Beleaguered Momentus received a $5.1M contract from NASA’s Flight Opportunities program for their Vigoride OTV to host the Commercial Orbital System for Microgravity In-Space Crystallization (COSMIC) experiment. COSMIC, from SpaceWorks and Astral Materials, will explore growing higher-quality and more consistent semiconductor crystals than can be grown terrestrially.
• Varda signed an agreement for 20 more manufacturing spacecraft landings at Australia’s Koonibba Test Range and a joint development agreement with United Semiconductor to produce semiconductors in orbit. Varda will also now operate two spacecraft simultaneously for the first time, with the launch of their fifth capsule on Transporter-15, joining their fourth mission still in orbit.
• UK-based SpaceForge, which raised a $30M Series A in May and launched its ForgeStar-1 in July, has formed its own partnership with United Semiconductors for in-space semiconductor manufacturing.
• In China, ground tests were completed on a 2-meter-diameter cylindrical inflatable module for in-space manufacturing of “biopharmaceuticals, 3D printing, and the production of novel materials.”
• LambdaVision raised a $7M seed round to scale up manufacturing of artificial retina implants by using the LEO microgravity environment to control surface tension, sedimentation, and convection-driven buoyancy. This allows for precise material deposition during the manufacturing of their precision nanomolecular devices. LambdaVision has previously flown nine times to the ISS and produced a 200-layer protein thin film artificial retina precursor.

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¶Shenzhou takes a hit. Just as the new three-person Shenzhou-21 crew arrived at Tiangong station for their six-month stay, the return of the Shenzhou-20 crew, which they were meant to relieve, was delayed to assess the safety of their return craft after a suspected space debris impact. The Shenzhou-20 crew has already spent six months on the station, which is only designed to support more than three taikonauts for short periods. China does have the Shenzhou-22 capsule on standby and could launch it in short order (possible as soon as eight days), allowing the S-20 crew to return on S-21’s craft and a replacement to arrive shortly after for S-21’s eventual return. Once again, Musk has been called on to ‘rescue’ the delayed (not stranded) crew, much like the theatrical retrieval of the Starliner demo crew from the ISS—however, there’s an exceptionally low likelihood that such an operation could even begin to be feasible due to the Chinese station’s orbit, docking differences, and spacesuit incompatibility, let alone the political implications and impact on future Dragon missions (SpaceX does not have an unassigned fleet of Dragons on standby, so would have to reallocate another customer’s spacecraft for retrieval). This is the second debris hit on a crew vehicle in recent years (Soyuz MS-22’s radiator was struck in 2022, necessitating the launch of a replacement vehicle to the ISS), underscoring the growing problem of space debris as discussed last week. It also highlights the need for international standardization of items like docking adapters and suit interoperability. (ESA may require them to all charge via USB-C?) While unlikely to be needed for this mission, as private stations proliferate, the need for a rescue mission, conducted using whatever crew vehicle is available, seems eventually inevitable. 

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• NASA may be quietly gutting an iconic campus with what it calls strategic closures, workers fear: ‘Furloughed employees were given just days to temporarily return to work and help empty entire buildings of highly specialized equipment, according to sources and internal emails obtained by CNN. In the communications, NASA managers wrote that equipment not moved in time — including one-of-a-kind hardware — could be thrown away or donated.’
• Blue Sky Space, a UK-based startup, will soon launch Mauve, a 16U cubesat with a 13 cm UV telescope, and plans to sell its astronomical data via a subscription priced roughly equivalent to 1 PhD salary/year.
• NY Times: How Lunar Photography Brought the Heavens Down to Earth.
• Joining ESA’s ExoMars and Mars Express, CNSA’s Tianwen-1, orbiting Mars, imaged interstellar object 3I/ATLAS at a distance of ~29 million km.
• A reader shared their free-to-use API (docs) with 1.18M pre-analyzed landing sites at the lunar south pole, built on NASA LOLA and LROC data. The sites scored on metrics including slope, illumination, elevation, comms line of sight, and proximity to resources.
• As Canada and Europe push for domestic launch markets, the limitation may be experience, not capital. With ~$600M in funding, German company Isar has “attracted more investment than Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, and Astra collectively raised on the private market before each of them successfully launched a rocket into orbit.”
• Space Elevator. Wee!

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¶Falcon 9 booster as a research and return vehicle. Startup Besxar Space Industries de-stealthed last week to announce a launch deal with SpaceX, which will fly 24 reusable, microwave-sized manufacturing payloads on 12 upcoming Falcon 9 first-stage boosters. The company was founded in 2023 by Ashley Pilipiszyn, an early employee of OpenAI. They believe that the vacuum and microgravity environment of space can be utilized to manufacture next-gen, higher-quality semiconductors for GPUs and other applications. On Earth, gravity results in buoyancy‑driven convection and sedimentation, and imperfect vacuums can lead to trace gas defects in thin-film epitaxial deposition and crystal growth. We’re somewhat skeptical of the vacuum quality and duration available to a Falcon 9 first stage during boostback, but it’s certainly clever to use the booster for rapid return and turn around, which could enable faster iteration early on before moving on to longer orbital durations. The use of the readily available LEO vacuum for manufacturing was explored during the Shuttle era with the free-flying Wake Shield Facility, which demonstrated a vacuum on the order of 10^-10 Torr. The vacuum, microgravity, and thermal stability of space are all clear benefits that companies will leverage as launch costs continue to move down the price curve. Companies in this space include Varda (crystallized Ritonavir, an HIV/AIDS protease inhibitor), Redwire (ZBLAN, optical crystals, ceramics, human heart tissue, pharmaceuticals, and more), Flawless Photonics (ZBLAN), along with up-and-comers Space Forge (similar semiconductor ambitions), BioOrbit, Outpost Space, Orbital Matter, and more. 

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¶A brief history of space debris. ESA now estimates that over 140 million pieces of space debris, each larger than 1 mm, are traveling in Earth’s orbit at an average velocity of 7-8 km/s (roughly similar to a jackhammer hitting a spot the size of the tip of a pencil). As the number of defunct and fragmented human-made objects in space rapidly increases, so do the hazards they present—this number has grown from estimates of ~35M fragments ≥1mm in 1995. The Tiangong Space Station’s core module, Tianhe, launched in 2021 and was impacted by a Micrometeoroid and Orbital Debris (MMOD) event within just two years. The impact damaged solar panels, causing a partial loss of power, necessitating two spacewalks for repairs and the installation of external debris protection devices. The 25-year-old International Space Station (ISS) has performed more than 30 in-orbit maneuvers to avoid satellites and trackable space debris. MMOD damage over the years to the ISS has impacted Russian Progress and Soyuz vehicles, Canadarm2, and one of the seven windows of the cupola. When the Resurs-P1 satellite broke apart in 2024, creating more than 100 pieces of trackable debris, the ISS crew took emergency shelter in their return vehicles for over an hour. Two major incidents in the early 2000s created substantial debris fields in low Earth orbit: China's 2007 anti-satellite (ASAT) test produced >3,500 objects larger than 10 cm, and the 2009 collision between Iridium-33 and Cosmos-2251 satellite generated nearly 2,000 similarly sized pieces. A Russian direct ascent ASAT test in 2021 was the most recent large debris generation event, generating 1,500+ trackable fragments that threatened the ISS (cf. a list of additional events). The fear, of course, is that unmitigated space junk could cross a threshold into a cascading, self-sustaining cycle of space debris fragmentation and proliferation, which could make it hard or impossible to continue launches, prohibiting long-term utilization of space—aka Kessler Syndrome. Objects are being launched or fragmenting in space faster than they’re being removed by natural orbital decay—and so far, while progress has been made, international policy and technological advancements to manage and mitigate space waste haven't kept up. National space agencies, the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN), the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, and various commercial companies have initiatives that address space debris issues. Some solutions for cleaning up low-to-medium orbit space junk involve detection, tracking, scheduled deorbit via passive or active systems, and improving craft designs (passivation, enhanced shielding for protection, shedding minimization, collision avoidance systems, etc.). Innovative techniques have been proposed for capturing, tugging, nudging, ablating, harpooning, tethering, and recycling objects. A few of the more entertaining-sounding cleanup methods include a foam-lattice ejecting craft, an air-blowing ‘huff-and-puff’ Space Debris Elimination satellite, capturing debris in an inflatable bag, and laser brooms that use either thrust from ablation or just photon pressure to deorbit target spacecraft. Debris management is a hard problem, but a tractable one with cooperation.

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• This week marks 25 years since Expedition 1 launched, the first long-duration expedition to the ISS, in which a three-person crew lived aboard the station for 136 days, starting the ISS’s still-uninterrupted human occupation. 
• ISS in Real Time is a new site that visualizes the station’s history and joins the incredible Apollo in Real Time.
• NASA’s Quiet Supersonic Jet Takes Flight.
• ‘NASA is sinking its flagship science center during the government shutdown—and may be breaking the law in the process, critics say’
• We mentioned NASA’s (threatened) and ESA’s (planned) Venus missions last week, but failed to mention other Venusian missions in the works:  ISRO (orbiter packed with science payloads, aiming for 2028) and CNSA (early 2030s, ambitious atmospheric sample return) both have missions in development. And, Rocket Lab + Schmidt Science’s private Morning Star Venus atmospheric probe is progressing toward a launch date next year.
• Jatan Mehta wrote about China’s upcoming Chang’e 7 lunar south pole mission, which includes an orbiter that will spend two months surveying for water before releasing its lander, rover, and hopper to study polar deposits. All these components have their own science payloads and collaborate with the existing lunar relay satellite Queqiao 2. Queqiao 2 will also demonstrate precise long baseline positioning (which has the potential for sub-kilometer accuracy all the way to Jupiter).

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¶Innospace is about to bring Alcantara back to life. South Korean launch startup Innospace is nearing the launch attempt of its first orbital rocket, the HANBIT-Nano. The company recently received a modified license for its first orbital launch attempt—the first for a private South Korean company—with a launch window running through November 28th. Previously, the company successfully tested a suborbital single-stage configuration of the hybrid rocket, HANBIT-TLV, in 2023. The final version of the 22-meter-tall, two-stage paraffin/lox rocket will be capable of carrying 90 kg to space, putting it squarely at the small end of the small launch category (similar to Iran’s operational Qased and India's in-development Agnibaan). HANBIT-Nano is slated to lift off from Brazil’s somewhat languishing Alcântara launch site, the first orbital attempt from the facility since 1999. (The Brazilian VLS-1, which had an in-flight failure in ‘99, never left the pad again, with its next launch attempt in 2003 igniting one of its boosters spontaneously while on the pad and killing 21 people, effectively ending the program.) A new pad has been built for Innospace launches; hopefully, the diminutive rocket will finally bring orbital launches to Brazilian soil. This first mission, dubbed SPACEWARD, will carry 5 spacecraft (from South Korea, Brazil, and India) and 3 non-separating test navigation systems, plus an empty aluminum can for some reason (in “collaboration” with South Korean beverage company BREWGURU), to a 300 km low Earth orbit.

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• Are the Sun’s 11-year solar cycles caused by the similarly-timed alignment of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter (paper)? And, could this help explain why our star is less active than many other Sun-like stars? “[Researchers] have developed a model that derives virtually all the sun’s known activity cycles from the cyclical influence of the planets’ tidal forces. [And have] now demonstrated that this external synchronization automatically curbs solar activity.”
• The complex organic molecules detected by Cassini in plumes rising from Saturn's moon Enceladus, which are often cited excitedly as evidence of the possibility of finding life there, may have formed on its surface due to radiation, not within its subsurface ocean (paper). On the other hand, another excited citation states: ‘Prospect of life on Saturn’s moons rises after discovery of organic substances’. We’ll probably have to go back there to see.
• 22.6%+ of lunar material ejected by impact events ends up hitting Earth (paper). This seems reasonable, if not a bit low? 💥
• A close stellar flyby early in the solar system’s evolution can explain the distribution of colors of Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), which seem to correlate with where in the original protoplanetary disk the objects formed and the local population of materials present (paper).
• The first evidence of lava tube entrances was spotted in old radar images of Venus (paper). (The last operating spacecraft at Venus, JAXA’s Akatsuki, was recently declared over after contact was lost in April 2024. ESA’s EnVision is targeting arrival in the early 2030s, while NASA’s DAVINCI and Veritas missions are deeply at risk with current NASA budget uncertainty.)
• When light travels through a magnetic field, its polarization is rotated due to the Faraday effect. Using this phenomenon, researchers have inferred distances and material environments from MeerKAT radio images, resulting in 3D CT-scan-like images of galaxies, black holes, and jet structures (paper).
• Rovers that are blown around Mars like tumbleweeds (paper).

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• With SpaceX’s 10,000th Starlink satellite launched to orbit, and 8,562 active as of Oct 20th, a staggering ⅔ of humanity’s active satellites in orbit are controlled by a single private company.
• Open Lunar launched the Lunar Ledger, an open database designed for operators to publish and cross-reference lunar mission information.
• Science YouTuber Steve Mould teamed up with NASA astronaut Don Pettit to test his chain fountain theory in zero gravity on the ISS.
• ‘Giant mirrors in space to reflect sunlight at night? No, thank you, astronomers [and biologists] say.’
• Startups and defense primes are rushing to get in on the mad $$$ from Trump’s Golden Dome program, which calls for space-based interceptors to shoot down ballistic missiles, akin to Reagan’s Star Wars program. Apex announced a self-funded mission to test home-grown interceptors mid next year.
• The South Atlantic Anomaly (SSA) is a region of the Earth’s magnetic field that is mysteriously weaker, posing a cumulative radiation risk to spacecraft and astronauts that repeatedly pass through it. ESA’s Swarm mission has been studying the SSA since 2013 and has shown that it has changed significantly since then, expanding by an area nearly half the size of continental Europe (paper). Simultaneously, the Earth’s northern magnetic pole has been moving toward Siberia, strengthening there and weakening over Canada. We live on a dynamic planet.

The Orbital Index

¶China’s reusable rockets are in the wings. SpaceX remains the undisputed leader in reusable-rocket development—the company probably will carry ~90% of global payload mass to orbit in 2025, mostly on ‘flight-proven’ boosters. In the US, the competitors closest to reuse are Rocket Lab and Blue Origin. Blue Origin’s New Glenn had its maiden flight in January from LC-36, demonstrating the 7-meter-diameter first stage intended for reusability (but missed its first droneship landing)—next launch is set for November 9 with another try at booster recovery. Rocket Lab’s Neutron (cf. Issue № 339) is currently under pad integration at Wallops Island, and its Archimedes flight engines are in the midst of final qualification. China’s commercial sector (here’s a round-up of rockets in development) is perhaps in a close third place and is gaining ground quickly. LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 (ZQ-3) is on deck for a potential fourth-quarter 2025 debut after a nine-engine cluster static fire at Jiuquan earlier this year—first reusability attempts are scheduled for sometime next year. ZQ-3 is 76.6 meters tall, with a 660-ton liftoff mass, and is capable of 21.3 tons to LEO when expended, and up to 18.3 and 12.5 tons respectively for down-range and RTLS flight plans. Also privately funded, Space Pioneer is readying its Tianlong-3, having completed a static fire on September 15th (not to mention an unintentional first flight). The 31-meter, 200-ton RP-1 fueled rocket is powered by nine TH-12 engines, enabling vertical landing and designed for up to ten reuses—ahead of an inaugural launch to sun-synchronous orbit, probably in the first half of next year. China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) is conducting 10 km vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL) hops of a Long March reusable-technology demonstrator, and China’s next-generation crewed Long March 10 series includes a smaller, reusable variant now in design and testing. Additionally, Orienspace’s integrated hot-fire tests and JianYuan’s YuanXingZhe-1 sea-splashdown recovery trials (video) have validated propulsion and control subsystems for future reuse on those vehicles as well. Europe is noticeably trailing all these efforts: ESA’s Themis reusable-rocket demonstrator, employing the Prometheus cryogenic engine and a VTVL design, was hoisted onto its pad at Esrange Space Center in Sweden on September 19th, marking the first full-scale European test article ready for low-altitude hops, although somehow still not before 2026.

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• Could gravity be the byproduct of the simulation we all live in, trying to minimize information entropy (paper)? “It appears that the gravitational attraction is just another optimization mechanism in a computational process that plays a role in reducing the computational power and compressing information.” If you were simulating a Universe, though, would you really choose an optimization mechanism that fundamentally shaped the behavior of the system being optimized? Our Universe looks totally different without gravity—that seems like more than an ‘optimization side effect’. Meanwhile, “the abundance of symmetries observed at all scales in the universe is another example of a computational optimization process, or data compression, because symmetry scales inversely proportional to the information content or computational power.” Eh, maybe? 🤷
• We don’t know the nature of dark matter, the missing 85% of matter in the Universe. If dark matter is a massive particle that doesn’t annihilate when interacting with more of its kind, these particles could slowly accumulate inside exoplanets, eventually forming black holes (paper). So, if we see planet-massed blackholes, that would be telling. On the other hand, the fact that “many exoplanets (and Jupiter in our solar system) [have not] collapsed into black holes” limits superheavy non-annihilating dark matter models, which seems good.
• Another proposed form for dark matter, this time by skipping a step, is just small black holes themselves. Was the highest energy neutrino ever seen (>100 peta-electron-volts, spotted by KM3NeT, c.f. Issue № 329) the result of a microscopic primordial black hole (PBH) exploding within 2,000 AU of Earth (paper)? If real, PBHs would have formed moments after the Big Bang and would slowly evaporate through Hawking radiation. "The more a black hole radiates, the hotter it gets and the more high-energy particles it releases. This is a runaway process that should produce an incredibly violent explosion of the most energetic particles just before a black hole evaporates away. [...] In its final nanosecond, [the researchers] estimate that once a black hole is smaller than an atom, it should emit a final burst of particles, including about 10^20 neutrinos ... with energies of about 100 peta-electron-volts", just about the energy that KM3NeT saw while observing at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. (Another recent paper predicted that we'll observe an exploding PBH within the decade.) 💥❓

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• AllSpice is hiring a Director of AI and Data Architecture who will be responsible for leading the development of AI-driven tools to enhance both collaboration and automation in hardware design processes.
• AllSpice is also hiring a Senior / Principal Fullstack Engineer who will lead the architecture development of AllSpice’s full-stack web application, focusing on enhancing CAD design capabilities

• Jared Isaacman might be back in the running for NASA Administrator??
• Meanwhile, about 4,000 NASA employees (more than 20% of the Agency) have left or been fired in the last six months. The Planetary Society writes about this dangerous brain drain.
• Fortunately, the OSIRIS-APEX mission, which was cut by the president’s budget request but included in Congress’s, was reinstated at NASA, but many other missions are still on the cutting block.
• Measuring the Earth’s 26,000-year axial precession (and nutation) with a free-space ring laser gyroscope (paper), accurate to picoradians per second.
• The Strange Saga of the Great Texas Space Shuttle Heist (SciAm subscription required).
• Astronaut Don Pettit captured a great video of a Starlink satellite train passing in orbit from the ISS. 1-2 Starlinks are deorbiting per day now.