The Orbital Index

SpaceX’s Starship launch infrastructure. SpaceX currently has one active Starship launch tower at Starbase, TX, with a second, at Starbase Pad B, nearing completion. Meanwhile, at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX is actively building a launch tower at their LC39A site, which could see a launch next year after finishing touches to its launch mount, flame trench, chopsticks, ground support equipment, and plumbing (check out this picture for the scale of Starship’s tower vs Falcon 9’s). As Ars recently explored in depth, there is much more to come. First, the company is exploring adding a second, catch-only tower to LC-39A. Next, a recent favorable draft Environmental Impact Statement cleared the path to demolition of ULA’s mothballed Delta IV launch infrastructure at nearby Space Launch Complex 37 (here’s Delta’s MST coming down). In place of ULA’s systems, which launched the last Delta IV Heavy in April 2024, SpaceX hopes to build at least two more Starship launch/catch towers (but possibly four, if there’s room: two launch/catch and two catch-only) which could handle 76 Starship launches annually, possibly starting in 2027. If you’re keeping track, this is somewhere between 6 and 8 Starship towers on two coasts (counting both launch/catch and catch-only towers). SpaceX also has two Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy launch pads in Florida, a Vandenberg Falcon 9 launch pad, and a second Vandenberg pad which will support both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy coming online next year. ULA, meanwhile, “has reduced its footprint from seven launch pads to two as a cost-cutting measure. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, operates a single launch pad at Cape Canaveral [and another suborbital site for New Shepard in western Texas], although it has unannounced plans to open a launch facility at Vandenberg. Rocket Lab has three operational launch pads in New Zealand and Virginia for the light-class Electron rocket and will soon have a fourth in for the medium-lift Neutron launcher.” With Massey’s damaged in the recent Starship test-stand explosion, SpaceX will temporarily use Pad A as a static fire test stand.

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$10B more for NASA. The Republican-controlled US House and Senate passed a budget reconciliation bill on July 3rd that added $10B back into the national budget for NASA programs. This reconciliation bill, H.R.1, commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, includes roughly $10B in additions that were slated to be cut in the Whitehouse’s budget request. These include operational funding for the ISS through 2030; $4.1B for Artemis IV and V SLS rockets; full funding of current Lunar Gateway plans; $1B in unspecified improvements to NASA centers around the country; $700M for the (revived after 20 years) Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, a close fit to the orbiter in Rocket Lab’s MSR proposal; an additional $325M for launching the SpaceX ISS deorbit vehicle; and, oddly, the relocation of a “space vehicle” assumed to be the Space Shuttle Discovery from DC to Johnson Space Center in Houston (to the tune of $85M). Despite the funding for these programs—most of which smell like pork barrel politics—little to no science was restored in the reconciled budget, meaning most if not all of the worst-case scenarios for NASA astrophysics and Earth science funding are poised to come true (every living NASA science chief opposes this anti-science budgetary agenda). This budget, it should be noted, despite cutting Medicaid and healthcare spending, many social services, renewable energy, and grid modernization, will increase the federal debt by a hefty $3-5 trillion, primarily by providing tax cuts to people and corporations that don’t particularly need them.

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Flight heritage matters. ispace released the results of its investigation into its recent Mission 2 lunar landing attempt, which ended as a new crater, rather than a functioning spacecraft, on the surface of the Moon. While similar in outcome to the company’s previous flight, the root cause was determined to be a faulty Laser Range Finder (LRF), which was the sole source of altitude data for the landing sequence (the Mission 1 crash was due to a software error). During the final descent phase, the spacecraft’s LRF hardware gave delayed or inaccurate readings of the lander’s altitude (possibly due to lower-than-expected surface reflectivity), causing the craft to eventually impact the lunar surface at >50 km/hr. The LRF on board had not been flown before, as the one used on ispace’s first flight had been discontinued. The key learning for the team was that flying “blind” without additional surface sensing capabilities was a core design issue. ispace’s future flights (three and four) shouldn’t impact their schedule (the next one is scheduled for 2027), but will cost a bit more (~$10M) and pack additional sensors for use during landing.

• ‘Space industry urges US Congress not to axe system that prevents satellite collisions.’ (This is the Traffic Coordination System for Space, or TraCSS.) Seems like a reasonable request. 🤦‍♂️
• ESA’s Solar Orbiter caught humanity’s first views of the Sun’s poles and their complex and dynamic magnetic fields.
• Astronomers may have spotted a third interstellar object (after 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019). Comet 3I/ATLAS, which might be as much as 20 km in diameter, is currently about 4.5 AU away, but it’s coming in hot on a hyperbolic trajectory which will bring it within about 2 AU of the Sun in October, at which point it’ll be moving at 68 km/s, before heading out again into interstellar space. Here’s a trajectory animation.
• Speaking of interstellar objects, until the mission is unnecessarily canceled due to short-sighted budget cuts, New Horizons remains operational and continues to deliver science. Recent results include demonstrating stellar cartography (using stellar parallax to measure the spacecraft’s position in the galaxy), measuring the Universe's cosmic optical background, and slowing down Jupiter.
• Every Astronomy Picture of the Day from the last 30 years, as a single mosaic. Happy 30th birthday APOD! (Will APOD get the axe in the new budget? Who knows.)
• A look at the canopy-penetrating images of ESA’s Biomass satellite.
• ‘Cameras and 220 Days of Amazing Images From Space’, about Don Pettit’s photography on the ISS.