The Orbital Index

New Glenn reaches orbit. After a couple of scrubs over the week and a wayward boat, New Glenn’s first mission, So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance, finally launched… and reached orbit on its first attempt, which is quite the accomplishment. (You can point out that Blue Origin is about 24 years old, 2 years older than SpaceX, but we still want to give credit where credit is due on an impressive and successful first launch.) The Mach diamonds from its 7 BE-4 engines and blue methalox exhaust were pretty gorgeous (good video). Unfortunately, but also unsurprisingly, the attempted barge landing of the first stage was unsuccessful. New Glenn is a big rocket, standing 98 meters tall with a massive 7-meter diameter fairing; it can carry 45 tons to LEO or 13.6 tons to GTO, making it well-aligned to launch bulky objects like spy satellites and space station modules. And that is very much the direction the company is looking— this launch was the rocket’s first National Security Space Launch Certification flight. The Blue Ring Pathfinder also performed nominally, according to the company. It will be interesting to see how quickly Blue can launch New Glenn again.

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Starship Flight 7 doesn’t. The first Starship launch with a Block 2 Ship (S33), 1.8m taller, carrying 25% more propellant, and packing numerous upgrades, took to the skies last week. After failing to catch the Booster on their sixth test flight, SpaceX executed a second gorgeous Booster tower catch (remember, this thing is the size of a skyscraper). However, while everyone was admiring the catch, less fortunate events were transpiring on the ascending Starship second-stage. Flickering flames were briefly visible next to a flap, and its engines started to shut down one by one. Telemetry was eventually lost, and Starship exploded, creating an incredible debris shower over Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean and diverting a number of aircraft flights— here’s a reasonably terrifying video from one of them. Scott Manley has a review covering many launch details, in which he points out that the flight termination system (FTS) likely triggered once Starship got too far off course and that FTSes on vehicles like Starship, made of steel and designed to survive reentry, may not be the best idea—it might be better to have a single, possibly controllable object returning than a shrapnel cloud. Here are photos of some fragments that appear to have made landfall. Musk shared that S33 had an “oxygen/fuel leak in the cavity above the ship engine firewall that was large enough to build pressure in excess of the vent capacity”— pressure in excess of the vent capacity is a great new euphemism for an explosion. We’re sure SpaceX will be learning and, after an FAA investigation, trying again

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2025 NIAC Phase I awards: Part I. We always love reviewing NASA’s most sci-fi and future-looking funding awards, and this year’s Phase I’s didn’t disappoint. Here are brief summaries of each project that received a Phase I award earlier this month. This installment focuses on large structures and planetary exploration.

• TOBIAS: A basketball-sized towbody suspended on a multi-kilometer tether below a high-altitude Venusian balloon that uses wind shear for power generation while imaging the surface below the planet’s thick cloud layer. 🪁
• Construction Assembly Destination: ThinkOrbital aims to establish large-scale in-space manufacturing capabilities, building on their 2024 robotic welding demonstration. Their study will develop CONOPS and preliminary designs for a LEO shipyard supporting future large spacecraft assembly. 🏗️
• Dynamically Stable Large Space Structures: Novel dissipative metamaterials and phononic crystals could enable ultra-stable large (>100m) starshade structures at significantly reduced mass, potentially revolutionizing exoplanet imaging capabilities through structural dynamics that don’t have to trade off between damping and stiffness. 🛰️
• LUNar Glass Structure (LUNGS): LUNGS explores monolithic lunar habitat construction using in-situ melted lunar glass compounds, proposing a large spherical shell structure created by blowing lunar glass into a sphere using microwave melting. 🌖
• Exploring Venus with Electrolysis (EVE): Using Solid Oxide Electrolysis, EVE enables sustained balloon exploration of Venus by converting atmospheric CO2 into CO and O2 for both buoyancy and power generation during ~50-hour night-side traverses. 🎈
• Inflatable Starshade: A 35-100m diameter inflatable occulter (cf Issue № 279) design targeting compatibility with the proposed 6m Habitable Worlds Observatory and 39m ELT telescopes, potentially enabling Earth-like exoplanet imaging. 🌟
• Thermo-Photo-Catalysis: A compact “Microlith” reactor enabling CO2 → O2 conversion for Mars transit life support using innovative catalytic processes that focus on replacing energy-intensive methods with high surface area passive reactions. 🧪

Two landers head to the Moon. We’ve recently covered both ispace’s M2/RESILIENCE lunar lander (and onboard TENACIOUS rover and multiple surface payloads) and Firefly’s own Blue Ghost lander (with 10 NASA CLPS payloads, including PlanetVac, funded in part by the Planetary Society). Both missions launched together on the same Falcon 9 last week, releasing separately into different trajectories (4 months for ispace and ~45 days for Blue Ghost). Both will use onboard engines to raise their orbits and eventually enter lunar orbit, with Firefly planning a landing attempt in early March and ispace shooting for May-June. M2 is Japanese company ispace’s second attempt to land on the Moon after their first mission crashed in 2023. Moon Monday praised both ispace and Firefly’s public communications and praised ispace in particular for their communications during their failed 2023 mission. Both landers appear healthy so far.

• A video of a meteorite falling in someone’s yard on Prince Edward Island, complete with sound, was caught by a security camera. The ordinary chondrite meteorite shattered on their paving tiles.
• We recently talked about Google’s work using cell phone GPS readings to map the ionosphere. Here’s an older effort and dataset we recently stumbled on that used differential GPS readings to monitor ionospheric perturbations resulting from natural and anthropogenic events—impressively, “earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis can cause significant displacements of air that produce vertically propagating atmospheric acoustic and gravity waves. These waves typically reach the ionosphere within 8 to 40 minutes after an event and mechanically couple with it, causing fluctuations in ionospheric electron density.” Which we can detect through GPS readings.
• The World Monument Fund has designated the Moon as an at-risk site due to unregulated space tourism, with the International Council on Monuments and Sites nominating it because of its abundance of human artifacts, such as Apollo-era relics (like Apollo 11’s golden olive branch left behind to symbolize peace).
• A BepiColombo Mercury flyby timelapse.
• What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?