The Orbital Index

ispace’s second lunar landing attempt ends in failure. Japanese company ispace’s Resilience lander made the company’s second attempt to land on the Moon last week, unfortunately ending in a second failure. Ispace’s Hakuto-R crashed on the Moon two years ago. This time, Resilience’s target was Mare Frigoris, at about 60° north, on the Moon’s near side. There, it would have performed surface experiments and deployed Tenacious, a 5 kg rover from ispace’s European subsidiary. During landing, the vehicle lowered its altitude to 20 km and slowed down to 187 km/h by ~2 minutes before landing. Then telemetry was lost, and no further updates were received. The company suspects ranging issues, sharing that, “the laser rangefinder used to measure the distance to the lunar surface experienced delays in obtaining valid measurement values.” These delays meant the lander hadn’t slowed as much as it should have by this point in the landing sequence. NASA wasn’t involved with this mission, but has contracted for a future ispace + Draper CLPS mission in 2027. The company also has a fourth mission planned, in addition to collaborations with Redwire. Despite the successes of Firefly and, to a lesser extent, Intuitive Machines, the Moon continues to be a very hard commercial target. We wish ispace success on their next mission.

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Dragon isn’t going anywhere. Despite Elon and Trump’s recent social-media eruptions, there’s (unsurprisingly) no sign that SpaceX has any real intention of mothballing Dragon—last week, Elon threatened to “begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately,” in response to cringeworthy threats from the White House, but then quickly walked back the statement. However, the ongoing public spat has added tension to the agency-contractor relationship—both the DOD and NASA have asked alternative launch providers to speed up work on in-development vehicles for government missions. But NASA has no near-term Dragon replacement for Commercial Crew and CRS (downmass). With Starliner’s next flight now penciled in for NET 2026 after continued propulsion-system woes, NASA is fully reliant on Dragon for ISS access. On the monetary side, recent CRS-2 extensions price each four-seat Crew Dragon at roughly $250M, with ~$200M going to SpaceX; across all orders, Dragon-related NASA awards exceed $5B. Dragon has also achieved commercial success, with Polaris, Axiom, and others, such as FRAM2, relying on it. Ax-4—targeting a liftoff today—is Axiom’s next private ISS mission on Crew Dragon, commanded by retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson (who holds the US record for most time in space) and joined by India’s Shubhanshu Shukla, Poland’s Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski, and Hungary’s Tibor Kapu as crewmates (the mission is named “realize the return,” and carries the 2nd astronaut for all three countries). The flight features a newly built capsule and is slated for a two-week ISS stay, focusing on privately funded research, while also underscoring Dragon’s continued monopoly on commercial orbital crew transport. Any Dragon retirement would hinge on a step change in Starliner’s timeline or Starship becoming human-rated and routinely operational—still years away even by Musk’s own recently revised Mars-window timelines—so, provocations aside, Dragon remains the indispensable ride to space for both government and private fliers today.

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• On the ISS, astronaut Kate Rubins and crew turned official plant experiments into a secret space garden, hiding kale from NASA cameras and trading seeds with Russian and Japanese crewmembers to create a ‘bootleg agrarian society’.
• End of an Era: Landsat 7 Decommissioned After 25 Years of Earth Observation
• The Shape of Taurus in 3D from the Space Telescope Science Institute, and an in-depth explanation of it from Bad Astronomy’s Philip Plait.
• WhaleSETI is studying humpback whale bubble rings as a way “to develop filters that aid in parsing cosmic signals for signs of extraterrestrial life.”
• Based on assumptions around how much material is thrown out of our solar system through dynamical effects, a paper models debris leaving the Alpha Centauri system and finds that, if it’s similar, quite a bit of material from our closest neighbor should be in our solar system. “If α Centauri ejects material at a rate comparable to our own Solar System, we estimate the current number of α Centauri particles larger than 100 m in diameter within our Oort Cloud to be [1 million], and during α Centauri’s closest approach [in 28,000 years], this will increase by an order of magnitude. However, the observable fraction of such objects remains low as there is only a probability of 10⁻⁶ that one of them is within 10 au of the Sun. A small number (∼10) of meteors greater than 100 micrometers from α Centauri may currently be entering Earth's atmosphere every year.”
• NASA’s Workmanship Guide for wire splicing.