¶Hera should launch next week. ESA’s Hera mission is scheduled to launch this coming Monday on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral (pending Falcon 9 grounding updates). Hera will take humanity back to the Didymos system and its asteroid moon Dimorphos, the target of NASA’s exceedingly successful DART mission. In 2022, DART slammed into Dimorphos at 6 km/s, ejecting at least 1,000 tons of regolith, changing its shape, creating a debris tail ten thousand kilometers long, and modifying its orbital period around its host asteroid, Didymos, by 33 minutes. This effect was much more significant than pre-impact predictions due to the quantity of debris ejected from the loosely bound object as well as other possible factors. Hera’s job, supported by the two cubesats APEX and Juventas, will be to survey the damage, further assessing our ability to deflect future space objects via kinetic impact. The triad of spacecraft will work together to characterize the asteroid’s gravitational and magnetic fields and both surface and subsurface compositions. Hera will also demonstrate autonomous navigation and is planned to come within 200 m of the surface of Dimorphos, imaging at resolutions down to 2 cm per pixel. Both cubesats (and maybe Hera itself) will attempt soft landings in the system at the ends of their missions. Before it arrives at Didymos in late 2026, Hera will fly by Mars, conducting a bit of bonus science along the way. |
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 | The last complete image of the surface of Dimorphos taken by NASA’s asteroid-seeking missile. We assume all of these boulders have been thoroughly manhole covered and will not be seen again. |
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¶A Lunar EVA suit for China. China unveiled the Lunar Extravehicular Activity suit that will support its first human lunar missions, the first of which is planned to happen by 2030 (spacesuit reveal video). This suit is an evolution of the Fentian EVA suits currently used aboard the Chinese Space Station (CSS) in LEO, with significant improvements aimed at increasing lower body mobility, which is crucial for lunar activities (sample recovery, ladder descent, squatting, and golf). The new design prioritizes lightweight materials and better body fit to ensure functionality during extended moonwalks. It incorporates multiple cameras, a chest-mounted control unit, and advanced fabric optimized for protection against extreme temperatures and abrasive lunar dust. This new EVA suit will play a key role in China’s first crewed lunar mission, which has a planned surface duration of six hours. The mission will be launched on two Long March-10 (LM-10) rockets rendezvousing in lunar orbit before landing. LM-10 is under development—key thrust components and other precursor technologies are tested and complete, with vehicle fabrication and its testing up next. A first launch could happen as soon as 2025. LM-10 is designed for reuse, including grid fins and a novel sea platform-based booster recovery system involving guy wires to avoid the mass penalty of landing legs (definitely check out 40s into that video for an animation). Lunar launches will take off from the under-development Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost launch complex. |
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 | LM-10’s proposed guy-wire-based recovery system—cables that will catch the rocket move on two axes kind of like an XY plotter. |
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¶Is SpaceX even a launch company anymore? With Hawaiian Airlines’ announcement that Starlink-based wifi is now active on most of the company’s trans-pacific fleet (here’s an initial review), and Air France announcing its plans to switch to the service for their entire fleet, following quickly in the footsteps of United’s announcement that it will roll out free Starlink starting next year, it feels like the service has successfully reached initial maturity. Starlink is now active in almost 90 countries, including being recently approved for use in the Solomon Islands, Zimbabwe, Yemen, and Burundi. The service recently crossed 4 million subscribers and annual revenue is now estimated at $4-6B. Meanwhile, 2023 revenue for the company’s launch business has been estimated at $3.5-4B. This reality puts to bed much of the skepticism of the company’s plan to launch Starlink as a way of funding ongoing Starship development—whether it will support a Mars program is left to the imagination of the reader (but it really seems to be Elon’s single-minded goal, and so far he’s mostly delivered). Despite Starlink’s growth, competitors are still painting a rosy future for an even larger space-based communications market. Growth is forecasted by many satellite internet players (Viasat, Eutelsat/OneWeb, Astranis, etc.) and Amazon continues to push hard toward the launch of Project Kuiper on the back of the soon-to-launch New Glenn. |
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| ¶News in brief. SpaceX is pausing Falcon 9 launches again after the upper stage on the Crew-9 launch experienced an ‘off-nominal deorbit burn’ that led to missing its expected landing zone in the ocean—Crew-9, along with its two empty seats for stranded astronauts Williams and Wilmore, successfully reached the ISS without issue ● Longshot Space raised $5M to build a 500-meter-long gun in the Nevada desert to push 100 kg payloads to Mach 5 (32x slower than a certain manhole cover)—the company dreams of drastically lowering launch costs to $10/kg ● China launched its fourth Jielong-3 solid rocket from a sea platform to carry eight remote sensing satellites into orbit ● Starfish Space won a $15M NASA SBIR contract to develop a debris inspection mission (named SSPICY) with their Otter spacecraft ● FAA administrator Mike Whitaker defended the recent fines for SpaceX, citing safety concerns, and seemed to reference multiple incorrect statements (according to SpaceX, leading to a public rebuttal) ● OTV and space logistics company D-Orbit closed a $168M Series C ● LA-based startup Reflect Orbital raised $6.5M to develop a fleet of satellites that aim to reflect sunlight onto specific ground points via large mirrors (the constellation’s reflected light, even outside of the ground spot, could be brighter than the full Moon leaving astronomers and wildlife quite displeased) ● Spanish startup Sateliot raised a $33M Series B to build-out their constellation of 100 IoT satellites ● Lunar Outpost replaced Lockheed Martin with Leidos as a collaborator on their NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services Lunar Dawn team ● Seattle startup Radian Aerospace started conducting flight tests in Abu Dhabi with a prototype of their single-stage to orbit reusable space place ● Japan launched a classified radar satellite aboard the second-to-last H-2A rocket (which is succeeded by the H3 rocket that has launched 3 times thus far) ● Blue Origin successfully tested the upper stage of its first New Glenn rocket, marking the first time this two-decade old company fired a fully integrated orbital rocket stage |
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 | New Glenn’s second stage during its recent successful hot fire test, paving the way for a hot fire of the core stage, and then launch. Credit: Blue Origin |
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¶Etc.- Inside the Globus INK, a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight: “One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus, which used a rotating globe to indicate the spacecraft's position above the Earth. This navigation instrument was an electromechanical analog computer that used an elaborate system of gears, cams, and differentials to compute the spacecraft's position.”
- End of an era: Historic Landsat 7 mission takes final images.
- New tests at the Event Horizon Telescope, the international collaboration and globe-spanning telescope array that imaged the first black hole in 2019, achieved a record angular resolution of 19 microarcseconds using only some of the array. “With the full array, the EHT could see details as small as 13 microarcseconds, equivalent to seeing a bottle cap on the Moon from Earth.”
- Articles all about NASA’s armored vehicles, Pad 39A’s Rubber Room, and the Pad Rescue team.
- What it’s like to be on an ISS spacewalk (very high-def video!).
- A nice little infographic to remind us of all the things we’ve left on the Moon. (Originally published in 2013, so there are a number of additional landers, crashed or otherwise, up there now as well.)
- Meanwhile, walking around on Earth in DLR’s new lunar gravity simulation environment sounds like fun. It uses a ‘Constant Force Module’, which is “attached to a robotic system that tracks astronauts or payloads that are attached to it and moves with them along a specialized framework above the training area. This allows users to move freely around the training area as their weight is offset, mimicking conditions on the lunar surface.”
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| What’s left of Booster 11’s outer thrust ring was fished from the ocean after a mostly soft landing (and then explosion) during Flight 4. |  |
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