Transporter-14. SpaceX’s 14th Transporter mission launched last week. Payloads were inserted into several orbits with multiple upper-stage burns. As usual, service providers bundled and released satellites on this mission, with a total of 70 payloads, including multiple return capsules. German company Exolaunch released 45 satellites across 25 customers in 15 countries, their largest single mission deployment. Some payloads onboard were Gilmour Space’s MMS-1, a hyperspectral water quality imager from Australia’s CSIRO (this is Gilmour’s first satellite, they’re better known as a rocket company); NASA’s PADRE, which will observe solar X-rays; and, Varda’s fourth orbital manufacturing and reentry capsule, which was built in-house (including the heat shield), instead of being built by Rocket Lab, their previous supplier. Nyx, the Exploration Company’s experimental, sub-scale capsule, was released and completed two orbits before commencing re-entry. It established contact after an ionization blackout, but unfortunately experienced a parachute failure and crashed—a partial success. (In addition to a drug manufacturing experiment and bio samples, it carried human ashes which were intended to be recovered and returned to their families, but are now in the Pacific.) As usual, the numerous payloads were diverse, with dragsails, maritime surveillance, Arctic sensing, space situational awareness, comms, propellant tests, navigation, SAR, student payloads, quantum experiments, and lots of imaging, including multiple hyperspectral imagers like VanZyl-2, Hyperfield-1b, in addition to the previously mentioned MMS-1. |
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 | The Exploration Company's Nyx capsule on top of Transporter-14’s payload stack. Credit: SpaceX |
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Otter Pup grows up. Also on board T-14 was Starfish Space’s Otter Pup 2 (mission presser), which will attempt a first LEO docking with a commercial satellite not designed for the procedure. Otter Pup 2’s Rendezvous, Proximity Operations, and Docking (RPOD) will be with a friendly but non-optimized D-Orbit ION satellite in LEO, also launched on T-14. In 2023, when Starfish’s first Otter Pup left its spinning Launcher OTV and took six weeks to despin (see Issue № 234), it was unable to attempt docking with the malfunctioning OTV. D-Orbit stepped in as a substitute partner and collaborated with Starfish to salvage the mission, practicing proximity operations, including supporting Otter Pup 1 in approaching and taking photos of D-Orbit’s SCV006 sat. Starfish’s RPOD skills will be further developed through larger Otter missions (up to three) next year for Intelsat, NASA, and the US DoD. |
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 | Starfish Space’s Otter Pup 2, rendered approaching the lonely, hapless, and unprepared D-Orbit ION deployer, also released from Transporter-14, just before attempting to dock electrostatically. |
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ForgeStar-1. Also, also on T-14 was SpaceForge’s ForgeStar-1, the company’s second attempt at a manufacturing satellite after ForgeStar-0 was lost on the failed UK Virgin Orbit launch in 2023. This mission will test both the UK startup’s reentry systems, featuring an origami heat shield called Pridwen (named after King Arthur’s shield) that opens like an umbrella, and some of their in-space manufacturing technology. With this flight, SpaceForge aims to demonstrate manufacturing very high-quality semiconductor seed crystals in microgravity, which would then be productized in the next mission. Seed crystals are used to grow larger semiconductor crystals for the semiconductor industry, and the quality of the initial crystal, which microgravity potentially improves, determines the quality of the final boule grown from it. Later flights could expand to include the classic space-based manufacturing candidates of high-performance alloys, ZBLAN optical fibers, and advanced coatings, as well as providing microgravity research payload hosting with Earth return. In January, Chinese researchers claimed a significant breakthrough in manufacturing an advanced niobium-silicon aerospace alloy on the Chinese Space Station. |
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| News in brief. Axiom Mission 4, a private Crew Dragon flight, launched and docked with the ISS for a two-week stay with four astronauts, including the first Indian to visit the station (Crew-11 is up next) ● The Exploration Company unveiled a proposed crewed variant of their Nyx spacecraft (see above) that aims to bring 5 astronauts to and from LEO by 2035, contingent on funding from ESA (which funded their T-14 cargo capsule) ● French startup Skynopy raised $17.6M to expand their ground station network ● Denver-based Lux Aeterna emerged with $4M in seed funding to develop a fully reusable satellite platform with an encompassing a heat shield and parachute for atmospheric reentry and landing ● NATO released its first Commercial Space Strategy document to encourage stronger ties with the commercial sector ● The DOD has killed DRACO, its promising Reactor on a Rocket (ROAR) program ● Firefly Aerospace is now allowed to export its Alpha rocket to Sweden for launch, after the US and Sweden signed a technology safeguards agreement ● ESA signed an agreement to study sending European payloads, and maybe astronauts, to Orbital Reef ● German launch startup Isar Aerospace raised $174M to continue developing their Spectrum rocket (that flew for the first time in March, but failed quickly after liftoff) ● The US DOD said it would stop sharing satellite weather data with scientists and forecasters, then delayed the decision, originally citing ‘cybersecurity concerns’; the satellites remain operational and their data is critical for huricane forecasting (weather data from them would now be reserved exclusively for military use) ● Two Chinese astronauts conducted a spacewalk outside Tiangong ● Xona Space Systems raised a $92M Series B to continue developing their navigation satellite constellation in LEO (their first “production-class” satellite, Pulsar-0, launched on T-14) ● Blue Origin launched NS-33, which brought the 750th person past the Kármán line ● NASA tested a new, higher-performance SLS solid rocket booster and it suffered an anomaly a minute into its first test burn (the SRB is planned for Artemis 9, but may never fly due to likely SLS cancellation) ● NASA also (successfully) tested a first brand new RS-25 engine (for Artemis V) manufactured since the shuttle era ● John Casani, project manager for Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini, as well as JPL’s first chief engineer, passed away at 92 years old ● A large (possibly beach ball sized) meteor triggered a daytime fireball over the Southeastern US, was captured by NOAA’s GOES-19 (GOES East) satellite, and may have crashed through a house in Georgia. |
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 | | Dash cam footage that captured the daytime fireball as it streaked across the South Carolina skies, with similar sightings reported across the rest of the Southeastern states |
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Etc.- ‘An exceedingly rare asteroid flyby will happen soon, but NASA may be left on the sidelines.’ With the current White House budget cancelling the extended mission of the successful, tested, and already-in-space OSIRIS-REx, NASA may miss the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to visit near-Earth asteroid Apophis as it flies by Earth in 2029. (Meanwhile, ESA is developing Ramses to visit Apophis—with a proposed sample return—and Chinese researchers are pushing for a flyby swarm.)
- Relatedly, June 30th was Asteroid Day, a UN-sanctioned day of public awareness about the risks of asteroid impacts, held on the date of Earth’s largest recorded asteroid impact, the Siberian Tunguska event.
- The Habitable Worlds Observatory will require 10-picometer total material thermal expansion stability over several hours to enable its targeted 1,000x contrast ratio improvement over JWST and RST. NASA and commercial company ALLVAR have developed a new alloy with inverse thermal expansion characteristics (shrinking when heated/expanding when cooled: -30 ppm/°C CTE) to be used strategically to compensate for the more traditional coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE) in other materials.
- Using its coronagraph, JWST recently spotted, and the Very Large Telescope further imaged, the smallest mass exoplanet ever directly observed, and JWST’s first exoplanet discovery via direct imaging. The new object, of roughly Saturn’s mass, is located in a system 111 light-years away (paper). (JWST has directly imaged known exoplanets before.)
- NASA’s PUNCH released its first images of solar CMEs—view them stitched into a video.
- Tomorrow is aphelion, when Earth is furthest from the Sun, at 149.6 million km away from our mostly harmless star.
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