¶Intuitive Machines landed on the Moon sideways, again. Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 Athena lander touched down near the Moon’s south pole, 250 meters from its target in the Mons Mouton region, inside of a crater. But, while a softer landing than last time, like IM-1 in Feb 2024, the lander appears to have fallen over into an “incorrect attitude” ending up “somewhat on its side.” A day later the mission was declared over, with little hope of even partial recovery due to solar panels oriented in the wrong direction and the extreme cold temperatures in the crater. We’re genuinely saddened by the loss of a whole host of interesting payloads (c.f. Issue 295), including the TRIDENT regolith drill, Lunar Outpost’s MAPP rover, IM’s µNova hopper, and AstroAnt. A lot of interesting exploration scheduled for this mission will unfortunately not happen. Some questions have arisen around the Nova-C lander’s design, which is twice the height of Firefly’s 2-meter-tall Blue Ghost and presumably has a comparably higher center of mass—however, landing conditions near the south pole for both IM-1 and IM-2 were significantly more challenging than for Blue Ghost, and the Methalox propulsion system is based on deep throttling during landing vs pulsed hypergolic thrusters, adding additional complexity. Assuming no schedule or contract changes due to engineering work out of this failure, IM-3 is targeting 2026 for a landing in the lunar equatorial region, and IM-4 will again aim for the south pole in 2027. |
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 | Athena, on its side, inside of a cold and dark creator near the Moon’s south pole. |
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¶Starship blew up over the Caribbean, again. Starship Flight 8, carrying Ship 33’s changes (internal changes, intentionally missing tiles, one tile with active cooling, and now four Starlink terminals) plus fixes intended to prevent a failure due to harmonic oscillations in the vacuum-insulated fuel lines that we saw in Flight 7, seems to have suffered the same fate as its predecessor. Eight minutes into Ship 34’s powered flight, four of its six Raptor engines shut down, and the craft began to tumble. Minutes later, it exploded over the Caribbean, producing a similarly spectacular light show as the last flight. Scott Manley has a timeline and analysis of the full launch. Aircraft flights were again halted and diverted (~240 flights this time) around the re-entry path leading to roughly 45-minute delays for impacted flights. This is a surprising setback given recent progress and may lead to a longer list of upgrades and delays before yet another try at successfully flying a Block 2 Starship, demonstrating Starlink satellite deployment, and performing an in-vacuum Raptor relight, which would allow the massive upper stage to safely enter a fully orbital trajectory. The repeated failures have some naysayers suggesting that 8 failures in 8 flights are an indication that the Starship architecture itself is flawed, but we feel that despite the various setbacks, the program will continue to make progress. (Unverified leaked images of burn-through from previous flights and a completely missing Raptor RVAC from this one, as well as details about the Flight 8 RUD, are interesting nonetheless.) In better news, Super Heavy Booster 15 was again caught by its launch tower, an incredible feat that is somehow slowly starting to look routine. |
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 | NASA Astronaut Don Pettit caught the breakup of Starship Flight 8 from aboard the ISS (faintly visible to the left of the white cloud-like structure). |
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¶The Voyagers get a bit older. NASA recently turned off Voyager 1’s cosmic ray subsystem experiment and Voyager 2’s low-energy charged particle instrument to conserve power. At 43 years old, both craft are at half their initial power levels, now operating at around 235W each and losing about 4W of power generation capacity each year. In part, this is due to the 87.7-year half-life decay of Plutonium-238, which powers the probes’ three Multi-Hundred-Watt Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (MHW-RTG), each of which initially produced 157W for a total of 470W per probe. RTGs also lose efficiency due to the degradation of their thermoelectronics. “The Graph” (below) tracks RTG degradation over time across multiple RTG architectures, including the MHW-RTG and the more recent MMRTG, which powers the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers and will also power the upcoming Dragonfly. (The final MMRTG unit is still unassigned to our knowledge.) This recent decrease in functionality due to power constraints in the Voyager probes is part of NASA’s power management strategy to extend the useful life of the missions. Next year, Voyager 1 will turn off its low-energy charged particle instrument, and Voyager 2 will disable its cosmic ray subsystem (which Voyager 1 just turned off). NASA’s plan will keep the probes operating with at least one science instrument into the 2030s, barring any unforeseen mission-ending hardware or software issues. (And, as much as we don’t like to say it, with 43-year-old probes, mission-ending events are not all that unlikely). 🚀🪐🛰️🌌 |
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 | “The Graph,” a dataset of radioisotope thermal generator degradation over time. Note the discrepancy between the decay rate of Pu-238 and the actual RTG power output, pointing to the degradation of thermocouples and other thermoelectric components over time. |
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| ¶News in brief. Upsetting rumors of possible massive NASA science budget cuts are circling, and a reduction in force seems to have started, including the Office of the Chief Scientist ● Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now Relativity Space’s CEO ● Seattle-based startup Kapta Space emerged with $5M in seed funding to adapt metasurface antenna technology for continuous space-based imaging and tracking ● Australia-based Esper Satellites raised a $3.1M seed to build their ‘Four Leaf Clover’ four-sat constellation that will use hyperspectral imaging to detect mineral deposits ● Redmond-based space data center startup Lumen rebranded as Starcloud and raised $10M in new funding ● SpaceX plans to invest $1.8B to build Starship launch pads and processing facilities on Florida’s coast near Cape Canaveral—it plans to transfer ships and boosters by barge from Starbase in Texas ● ISRO started construction for a new launch pad in Kulasekarapattinam, a location on India’s East Coast near the equator (unfortunately, eastward launches will take rockets directly over Sri Lanka) ● German launch startup Isar Aerospace acquired their first Asian customer, Japanese microgravity services startup ElevationSpace, ahead of their Spectrum rocket’s debut launch ● EO startup Albedo secured a $12M Air Force contract to share data and provide analysis of VLEO operations—Albedo’s 530 kg, low-flying (VLEO) Clarity-1 EO satellite is launching on Transporter 13 ● The secretive X-37B space plane returned to Earth after a 434-day mission ● China launched a classified satellite to GEO ● Another (fairly new) Falcon 9 booster tipped over after landing ● Firefly will soon launch a Lockheed Martin spacecraft on their Alpha rocket and won a NASA launch contract for the INCUS mission ● Sisir Radar, a Kolkata, India based startup, raised a $1.5M seed round to develop and launch the world’s highest resolution L-band SAR satellite ● Ariane 6 launched from French Guiana successfully on its second mission, delivering a French defense agency satellite (nice separation video). |
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 | Ariane 6 lifts off from French Guiana on its second, but first commercially operational, launch. |
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ESA’s Euclid Space Telescope captured a very nice Einstein ring, showing multiple copies of a 4.4-billion-light-year-distant galaxy as its light is gravitationally lensed by the significantly closer NGC 6505, just 590 million light-years away in our line of sight. Credit: ESA |  |
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