The Orbital Index

Blue Ghost makes lunar landing look easy. Firefly became the first commercial company to complete a fully successful soft-land on the Moon—marking a hopeful end to wrong-way-up Moon landings and an increase to a ⅔ success rate for CLPS landers. Please take a moment to watch their gorgeous video of descent and landing—the last landing shot, with the dust rapidly clearing in vacuum, is stunning. The live stream, ongoing live mission updates, and image gallery are all artifacts of Firefly’s eminently transparent and copious documentation of the mission’s progress. During the two-hour landing stream, Blue Ghost slowly decreased its altitude before initiating a 9-minute powered descent, employing D’Souza guidance (here’s D’Souza’s optimal guidance law paper) and a final gentle set down using quickly-pulsed RCS thrusters. Standing on Mare Crisium with its X-Band antenna deployed (note this fun observation in one of the images taken of its X-band antenna, with Earthrise beyond) and a fleeting two weeks of lunar sunlight ahead, science operations are now in full swing. Blue Ghost’s 10 CLPS payloads (see our previous coverage) will measure, drill, and vacuum the surrounding environment, testing technologies in situ for the first time that are necessary for future Artemis objectives. Blue Ghost was, in part, powered by Nyx, ANISE, and Hifitime, open-source Rust libraries from reader Chris Rabotin, which were used to provide high-precision timing synchronization, computation, and orbit determination—you can find Nyx and other space libraries and tools on our Awesome Space list.

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Cuts at NASA and beyond. The Trump administration, via executive order and DOGE (a rename of the United States Digital Service), is acting quickly to make its mark on the US Government. We have very mixed feelings about some of the changes being made and how they’re being executed, and we've been hearing from readers about how much chaos and personal anxiety the cuts are causing. Numerous agencies have been impacted (these include the DOD, FAA, NIH, VA, DOE, and EPA, to name just a few), as well as important climate-related monitoring and modeling at NOAA and the US government’s involvement in the IPCC, which are especially concerning. But in this item we’re going to focus on the immediate impacts to NASA and the space industry.

• After ongoing rumors, news from a few weeks ago was that NASA would lose ~10% of its workforce, including many probationary workers, but a last-minute reprieve reduced this to a ~5% workforce reduction, primarily through the "deferred resignations" buyout program. NASA turns over ~1,000 positions annually, so many of these roughly 900 resignations were likely forthcoming this year regardless. (It’s worth noting that many of the cuts across government agencies have broadly been to “probationary” employees, which are not only new hires within the past year, but also recently promoted staff—it strikes us that terminating many of the employees who are likely to bring new ideas, processes, and technologies to the table or who have performed well enough to earn a competitive promotion may not be the best approach to improving efficiency.)
• Cuts to NOAA have reached its Commercial Remote Sensing Regulatory Affairs (CRSRA) office, which handles licensing of commercial imaging spacecraft which (hopefully temporarily) “no longer has any senior personnel to do that job.” This may affect Earth imaging companies and their launches.
• The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which handles JWST science, has been asked to prepare for a 20% budget cut. JWST is less than halfway through its primary science mission (although the telescope will likely end up lasting much longer than its 10-year design life).
• The ISS is currently scheduled for deorbit in 2030 by a SpaceX-built U.S. Deorbit Vehicle. Musk recently suggested that it should be deorbited much sooner. Whether this will have an impact on NASA and the Administration’s decisions around the ISS remains to be seen.
• The future of the SLS and its involvement in the Artemis program remains highly uncertain. Boeing told their employees to prepare for potential layoffs—due to a 60-day notice requirement—were they to have funding cut in April. (SLS is a wildly expensive launch system costing many billions per launch that we’ve poked fun at numerous times in the past, so we wouldn’t be too upset to see it exit stage-left, but that may not be realistic for Artemis II or III timelines. Additionally, being in no small part a jobs program, about ~1,000 NASA personnel and ~25,000 jobs nationally are tied to SLS.)
• While government efficiency is broadly positive, we feel that the current approach could learn from past efforts—the last time the budget was balanced, during the Clinton administration, it was done through a process of listening to federal employees and investing significantly in new programs that implemented their on-the-ground suggestions for efficiency gains. (Without a more strategic approach, there seems no way for DOGE to possibly deliver on its lofty promises of $2T in gains, a balanced budget, or tax cuts that don’t incur deficit spending.) For NASA and the larger space industry, a lot will depend on decisions Jared Issacman will make once confirmed as the next NASA Administrator.

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• SpaceX’s supercut of Starship Flight 7, in anticipation of Flight 8. (Flight 8 is now scheduled for this evening, March 5th, at 6:30 pm after scrubbing its previous attempt due to low pressures during turbo machinery spin up in Booster 15.)
• China built a large ground station in Namibia, which has “CHINA AID FOR SHARED FUTURE” painted on it. As China Space Monitor puts it, “the message is clear enough: as the US’s developmental footprint abroad shrinks, there is a power vacuum that China is happy to fill.” Complex geopolitics on Earth are quickly moving to space, and we’re going to continue to see a trend of Chinese national and commercial space efforts expanding internationally.
• India’s approach to building up to a crewed Moon landing is through mastering orbital rendezvous and docking and then assembling a craft in orbit from multiple modules, rather than using a single large rocket. The benefits, they say, are cost and reuse—they’re trading the complexity of docking for the ability to use an extant multifunctional launch vehicle with significant flight heritage (LVM3, née GSLV Mk III) instead of having to develop a new large rocket that is mostly only useful for Moon missions. In January, India became the fourth nation to demonstrate orbital docking with their SpaDeX mission.
• The history and future of sea-based orbital rocket launches.
• While researching the Blue Ghost lunar landing item above, we ran across this interesting interview with Chris D’Souza, one of the leaders of GNC development at NASA in recent years, about his work as a navigator and his take on mentoring. “It takes, on average, about 10 years to train up a great navigator from the time they begin grad school [to] where they can be on their own and impact the next generation.”
• ‘White Hat Hackers Expose Iridium Satellite Security Flaws.’
• To commemorate the upcoming International Women’s Day on March 8th, Via Satellite recognized 45 Women in Satellite.
• A fun discussion of lunar photography and why Moon photos have a particularly distinctive ‘look’.
• SpaceBoard: a digital display that shows the latest space news headlines, space policy activities in the U.S. Congress, and countdowns until the next space launch. 
• Here’s a paper and video about a robotic mole that could burrow on other planets.
• We really want to make this $100 muon tomography machine.