¶Isar’s Spectrum might have an inaugural launch this week. The first flight of Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket could take place over the coming week from the Andøya Spaceport in Norway (its launch window is currently March 20-30). Spectrum is a two-stage, LOX-and-propane (LPG) rocket with a payload capacity of about 1,000 kg to LEO (or 700 kg to SSO). If successful, Spectrum will become the first orbital propane-fueled rocket. (Orbex is also developing their much smaller LOX-BioLPG Prime vehicle.) Propane burns cleaner than RP-1 due to having fewer carbon-carbon bonds, making it good for reuse by creating less engine coking and soot buildup. It is also denser than methane, allowing for smaller tank sizes—these qualities make it a potential entrant into the modern cryogenic fuel arena, which has recently been dominated by methane. NASA did tests with propane-fueled engines in the 60s, but it has been relatively untouched as a rocket propellant since then. In addition to Isar’s recently announced contract with Japanese company ElevationSpace, the company also just announced last week that it has a signed contract with the Norwegian Space Agency to launch two Arctic Ocean Surveillance (AOS) satellites to SSO in 2028. We’re rooting for a successful European launch startup debut! |
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 | Isar Aerospace completed final tests on their Spectrum rocket in February. Credit: Isar Aerospace |
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¶NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH launch. NASA’s next two space science missions launched last week to SSO on the same Falcon 9. SPHEREx (c.f. Issue 306) is an IR space telescope which will collect data on 450 million galaxies, a hundred million stars, and hopefully numerous NEOs closer to home. PUNCH (c.f. Issue 304), meanwhile, is a collection of four formation-flying smallsats that will look inward into our solar system instead of outwards, producing a constant view of the Sun and studying how its corona becomes the solar wind—all four look nominal so far. We’re looking forward to reporting on the scientific findings from both missions. |
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 | SPHEREx post-deployment from its Falcon 9 on March 11th. |
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¶Blue Ghost signs off. Firefly’s Blue Ghost completed its two weeks of lunar daytime operations, and its telemetry signal has now been lost. During its mission it successfully operated its payloads and captured several particularly interesting videos: one from its gas-powered LISTER drill digging into the lunar regolith to measure heat flow, another of PlanetVac collecting regolith, as well as one from the downward pointing 8 fps SCALPSS cameras during landing—which was more challenging than we previously suggested due to the low-angle lunar dawn lighting conditions during descent and landing. Blue Ghost is the first unequivocal success for the CLPS lander program, and we hope it starts a trend. Before it went silent, Blue Ghost captured the incredible image below of the Earth totally eclipsing the Sun on March 14th from Mare Crisium (light refracts around our planet through its outer atmosphere, which casts a red illumination on the Moon during totality) . 🫡 |
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| ¶News in brief. A Crew Dragon launched and docked with the ISS, carrying Crew-10 astronauts from NASA, JAXA, and Roscosmos, and Crew-9 returned yesterday, bringing to a (hopeful) close the Butch and Suni drama ● NASA received a one-week extension for layoffs 😟● The ISRO’s two SpaDex spacecraft undocked from each other, with plans for more docking/undocking maneuvers in the next few months ● Russia launched three military satellites, and another Russian military satellite made an orbital adjustment after two years of inactivity ● China launched two imaging satellites ● Rocket Lab plans to acquire Mynaric, an optical communications terminal supplier, for $75M—their sixth post-SPAC acquisition that we’re aware of ● Chinese commercial launch company iSpace secured Series D funding worth “several hundred million yuan” (USD tens of millions) and is targeting a first orbital launch of their Hyperbola-3 rocket in December (Berger’s law states that this rocket will therefore launch in 2026) ● A manufacturing defect was announced as the root cause of the loss of a solid rocket motor nozzle during ULA’s second Vulcan flight last year ● China launched 18 more satellites from a new commercial launch pad for their ‘Thousand Sails’ constellation (now at 90 satellites launched—but also see the current bottleneck state of China’s launch capability) ● Poland fired the head of their space agency POLSA over a hacking incident and a botched response to Falcon 9 debris rentering in four places in the country ● China opened their request for proposals for the Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission to international partnerships on the system and payload level ● Transporter-13 launched—more on this next week ● German startup Constellr released first-light imagery from Skybee-1, the first satellite in their thermal imaging constellation (launched on Transporter-12). |
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 | Skybee-1’s first-light thermal imaging of Tokyo by night. Skybee-1 is the first in a constellation of <120 kg thermal imaging microsatellites that are able to image at 30m resolution despite their size—this is in part due to their inclusion of cryocoolers that cool the satellite’s longwave infrared sensors. |
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¶Etc.- The nearest star to Earth, after the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system (4.25 ly), is the red dwarf known as Barnard’s Star (5.96 ly). Previously, one small planet was known to orbit Barnard’s Star, spotted in 2024. Now, three more sub-Earth-mass planets have been found using data from the MAROON-X spectrograph at Gemini North and from ESPRESSO at the Very Large Telescope. One is the smallest planet ever identified using the radial velocity method. The detected planets are likely rocky, but these observations have, unfortunately, probably ruled out the system containing an Earth-mass planet in the habitable zone.
- A “miniature laser-powered mass spectrometer, which can analyze the chemical composition of a sample in detail as fine as a micrometer” could look for microscopic fossils on Mars.
- DARPA shared a Request for Information to garner proposals around “Large Bio-Mechanical Space Structures.” Reach out if you want to grow biological structures “of unprecedented size in microgravity,” pursuing “rapid, controlled, directional growth to create very large (500+ meter length) useful space structures would disrupt the current state-of-the-art and position biology as a complimentary component of the in-space assembly infrastructure.” 🧫
- Saturn has 128 more moons, bringing its total to 274. But on a planet surrounded by a ring of debris… what even is a moon after all?
- Universe Today, one of our favorite space resources, recently went through a full website crash, complete with corrupted backups. Fraser Cain and his team put the pieces back together, and we have to say, the new version is clean, fast… and also creative commons-licensed and ad-free. Fraser took the opportunity to take a leap of faith and remove ads from the site, transitioning their revenue model to be fully reader-supported. We’re hoping this new model is a win for the Universe Today crew—we know it is for the rest of the space community!
- The Dzhanibekov Effect, as seen through a camera.
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A four-camera HDR image of our nearest neighbor, eclipsed by yours truly. The red cast to the Moon is due to light refracted through the Earth’s atmosphere, delivering light to the surface of the Moon while also increasing the proportion of red spectra since shorter wavelengths are refracted more than long wavelengths (this is the same reason sunsets/sunrises are red).
Credit: Andrew McCarthy
(Andrew also has a free 4K desktop wallpaper version you can download from his website.) |  |
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