Space Stuff and Launch Info

[.Scott]

They are not stranded and haven’t been for months. There are two seats on the Dragon currently docked at the station dedicated specifically to them and that has been the case since Crew-9 launched nearly six months ago.

So, they were stranded for 3 months and then their ride showed up - but they still have to wait.
And if you were stuck at the airport overnight because you missed your bus and the next one wasn't scheduled to leave until morning, you would not use the word "stranded" to describe your plight. Got it.

I'm not going to fight the semantics. Whether they are "stranded" or unexpectedly having to wait, it's still not a big deal.

 

[robphy]

Blue Ghost has entered a Moon orbit, a landing is planned for March 2. Firefly is very active on YouTube, e.g. with this in-flight update or the orbit insertion update.

Live Moon Landing broadcast

 

[mfb]

Successful landing. The first commercial lander that managed to land properly.

Their solution includes better ventilation in that region. This suggests to me that the "leaks" are part of the design. The problem isn't that they leaked but that they leaked too much. This doesn't surprised me. We are talking about cryogenic plumbing that's under a lot of vibration and stress. The plumbing likely needs to have some give - even at the expense of leaks.

They fix the leak source as well, obviously.
The launch is now planned for Monday.

 

[mfb]

The launch is now planned for Monday.

In ~12 hours. Livestream:

https://www.spacex.com/launches/mission/?missionId=starship-flight-8

They run tons of experiments with the heat shield, it's a bit different in many places. So far it has never failed completely, so they are confident they can test what works best for future reuse.

Edit: Scrub, next attempt possibly tomorrow.

 

[mfb]

Ready for the second Moon landing (attempt) within a week? A Nova-C lander by Intuitive Machines in under 24 hours:



Starship has been delayed to Thursday.

Edit: Successful or at least mostly successful landing of IM-2. It's on the surface, they have contact, but one of the two antennas seems to have issues.

 

[mfb]

Starship launched. The booster returned to the launch site and was caught successfully (3rd booster catch), but the ship lost 4 of its 6 engines late into the launch (~30s before cutoff) and then lost attitude control. It looks quite similar to the flight 7 failure, although it seems to have made it a bit farther this time (so hopefully less impact on airspace). Will be interesting to watch the accident investigation.

Ariane 6 made its second flight, successfully launching a French military satellite. This time the upper stage completed its reentry burn.

Edit: Apparently the reentry of Starship debris was visible from the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos, similar to the previous flight.

 

[Flyboy]

Man, I don't know what they changed about the propellant feed lines in Starship V2, but it is not working.

Good to see they're nailing the RTLS/boostback and recovery, though.

 

[Flyboy]

The X-37B reentered and landed at Vandenburg SFB overnight, after a (relatively) brief 434 day mission.

 

[mfb]

It turns out that IM-2 landed in the wrong orientation, just like IM-1.
After less than a day, the Athena lander is dead on the Moon
IM-3 is planned for next year.

Crew-10 is scheduled for March 12. After a few days of handover, Crew-9 will return home. This includes Barry Wilmore and Sunita Williams, who launched on Starliner in June. A planned 8-day mission that became a 9-month ISS stay. The astronauts probably don't mind - it's likely the last flight of their career and being in space is what they trained their whole life for.

ULA is preparing an Atlas V to launch the first batch of 27 Kuiper satellites. No specific launch date yet, but likely within a month. They destacked a Vulcan rocket to make space for the Atlas V. In order to secure its allocated spectrum, Kuiper needs to launch half of its 3200 satellites before August 2026, which would mean almost one launch per week. That's unlikely to happen, but if they can show a significant effort to use the bandwidth then they are likely to get an extension.

 

[mfb]

Crew-10 launched, Crew-9 returned. Watch one last round of misinformed people shouting all sorts of nonsense about the Starliner crew, but now they are back on Earth.

Isar Aerospace is in the final preparations for its first launch of Spectrum, with daily launch opportunities from March 20 to 30. The first orbital launch attempt for a German rocket (Arianespace is just partially German), and the first orbital rocket using propane. With 1000 kg to low Earth orbit, this is a relatively large rocket for a startup. Germany doesn't have a spot for a launch site, so this rocket launches from Norway. They want to use Kourou later, too.
News, company website
As usual with startups, it would be very surprising if they reach orbit on the first try, but the test flight should give them tons of data to improve the rocket for a second attempt. At least two more rockets are already under construction.

Some interesting discussion about supersonic retropropulsion (igniting a front-facing engine at high speed in an atmosphere). NASA had a test plan that would have needed ~300 million, then SpaceX decided to do it with Falcon 9 boosters after their main mission. NASA scrapped the test plan as SpaceX had shown it to work.
The full interview is worth watching, too.

 

[mfb]

Fram2 is now scheduled to launch April 1, 03:20 (Mar 31 local time). It will be the first crewed mission in a polar orbit ever, flying right over the poles before returning a few days later. The crew will use Resilience, the same Dragon capsule that also launched Inspiration4 and Polaris Dawn.

 

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Isar Aerospace is in the final preparations for its first launch of Spectrum

They had the rocket fueled today, but it was too windy for a launch. Looks like there is no live coverage and their website has been down for a while now.

 

[glappkaeft]

I saw a upper stage venting while trying out a new telescope mount. Got this images using my phone. I think this is the Space X NROL-69 launch. The time was pretty much 19:00 UTC and it launched 17:48. Location was outside Linköping, Sweden.

 

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It was that launch. The second stage vented propellant and prepared to deorbit over the Indian ocean. It produced a spiral that was widely visible from central Europe.

Some more pictures here, here, here, here.

 

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Liftoff of Spectrum - unfortunately it lost thrust and/or attitude control soon after launch. It fell down into the ocean near the launch pad.
NSF coverage

The launch site looks amazing:

Edit: Video of the rocket falling back

 

[nsaspook]

A nice first launch attempt. It cleared the tower.

8.5

 

[berkeman]

A nice first launch attempt. It cleared the tower.

LOL. I think this is my favorite quote from the launch "success" evaluation...

"Our first test flight met all our expectations, achieving a great success," Daniel Metzler, Isar's chief executive and co-founder, said in a news release. "We had a clean liftoff, 30 seconds of flight and even got to validate our Flight Termination System."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rocket-isar-aerospace-crash-takeoff-norway/

 

[Flyboy]

Optimism!

 

[Filip Larsen]

Eric Berger had a nice interview with Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams about their experience of docking Starliner while handling multiple thruster failures:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/...starliner-was-like-when-its-thrusters-failed/

 

[mfb]

Losing 6 degrees of freedom control is wild. It's crazy that Boeing wanted to return the astronauts in that capsule.

Fram2 launched and is now flying in its polar orbit. A tweet from space.

 

[berkeman]

Losing 6 degrees of freedom control is wild.

Yeah, and like a good pilot, he was already thinking/planning for what else could go wrong ("what if we lose comms too?)... Scary stuff.

 

[nsaspook]

Could those Boeing pressure suits have been used for an emergency EVA (they were close) to the ISS if those thrusters didn't get recycled back into operation and more were lost until even a great pilot couldn't fly it to docking or reentry?

 

[Flyboy]

I don’t know. I think, but can’t find proof either way, that the launch and entry suits lack any sort of internal life support, and are part of a redundant system integrated into the capsule itself.

 

[Filip Larsen]

The Starliner suit seems to be clearly classified as an IVA pressure suit with limits mainly designed to cope with in-vehicle emergencies (loss of cabin pressure, smoke or fumes). In the (rather annoying) video included at https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/new-spacesuit-unveiled-for-starliner-astronauts/ there is a short sequence showing the wearer holding a box with the text indicating the suit (and box) supports emergency pressurization and some extend of emergency life support. If the box contains an oxygen bottle able to deliver flow to the helmet one guess could be it can supply the suit for some amount of time, perhaps with carbon dioxide rich suit air being vented by some over-pressure valve (I would be very surprised if the box contain any form of circulatory flow, like scrubbers). Could be interesting to know if emergency EVA transfer of the Starliner crew (or any other crew visiting ISS for that matter) is something that is planned and trained for, because if so then the suit most surely must be designed to allow this. However, given how surprised Boeing seem to have been that a systematic error lead to a zero-fault tolerance situation during a test flight (!) any such emergency EVA procedure, should it exist, is probably not driven by Boeing.

 

[mfb]

Could those Boeing pressure suits have been used for an emergency EVA (they were close) to the ISS if those thrusters didn't get recycled back into operation and more were lost until even a great pilot couldn't fly it to docking or reentry?

No. The suits don't have an independent life support system. They rely on the capsule for air, thermal control and so on. They have zero propulsion either because you don't need that inside the capsule. In addition, the Starliner capsule has no mechanism to start an EVA.
You are basically missing all the development that SpaceX did for the Polaris Dawn mission, and then something in addition (the suits for Polaris were still connected to the capsule and had no propulsion).

 

[nsaspook]

No. The suits don't have an independent life support system. They rely on the capsule for air, thermal control and so on. They have zero propulsion either because you don't need that inside the capsule. In addition, the Starliner capsule has no mechanism to start an EVA.
You are basically missing all the development that SpaceX did for the Polaris Dawn mission, and then something in addition (the suits for Polaris were still connected to the capsule and had no propulsion).

I'm not missing the Polaris Dawn mission EVA suits and their normal mission capability. I just couldn't find as much information on the Boeing IVA suits emergency capabilities or if they even had any for an extremis ("in the farthest reaches" or "at the point of death") abandon ship scenario.

Sure, a EVA from the Starliner capsule would be dangerous even with a full qualified EVA suit but as sailors/pilots we trained for abandon ship where the alternate of staying on the ship was worse than the danger of being shark food.

 

[mfb]

It's not dangerous, it's guaranteed death.

Docking with the ISS needs precision, deorbiting is much more forgiving. You need to reach roughly the right orientation for the deorbit burn and you want the heat shield to face forward as you start reentry (once drag becomes relevant, the capsule steers by shifting its center of mass) - but position is completely irrelevant, giving you extra redundancy.

 

[Flyboy]

The capsule also has separate RCS thrusters for orientation during reentry. Once you cut the service module loose, you have pointing control.

The issue would be maintaining attitude control authority during the deorbit burn.

 

[nsaspook]

 

[mfb]

The US Department of Defense has awarded $14 billion for "Phase 3 Lane 2", covering various launches until 2033: $5.9 billion for SpaceX, $5.4 billion for ULA, $2.4 billion for Blue Origin. Lane 2 has the highest requirements so only these three had a realistic chance to win, Lane 1 is more flexible and will be awarded later.

Zena Cardman, who didn't get to launch with Crew-9 due to the Starliner issues, will now fly on Crew-11 (planned for July). Stephanie Wilson didn't get reassigned to Crew-11, maybe she'll fly with Crew-12.

The first batch of Kuiper satellites is ready for launch, bad weather shifted the launch date to April 14.