¶The latest from Russia (with love). Russia’s space planners have recently unveiled pieces of a rose-tinted space roadmap—₽4.4 trillion (~$57B USD) through 2036 (₽1.7 trillion of which is earmarked by 2030) to move the nation back into the “top three launch powers,” courtesy of reusable Angara hardware (that has yet to reuse anything) and the Vostochny Cosmodrome launch facility that is still more famous for fraud investigations (140+) than flights (19). Top current priority goes to “Rassvet,” an 886-satellite broadband constellation pitched as a Starlink analog; so far, only a handful of demo sats have flown (a recent Iran-Russia announcement may lead to Iran building satellites for Roscosmos). On the station side, the first Russian Orbital Station (ROS) elements are now NET 2027, with a four-module core by 2030 and full build-out ~2035. A Sino-Russian memorandum shifts Russia’s completion of a nuclear reactor unit for the joint International Lunar Research Station to 2036, pushing out last year’s target by one year. Meanwhile, Moscow’s most recent concrete orbital achievements remain depressingly kinetic: the Cosmos-1408 ASAT test littered low-Earth orbit with debris in 2021, and a satellite the U.S. says could be a demo for one that would host a nuclear warhead (Cosmos-2553) is currently reported to be tumbling (not particularly comforting). Another reality is the aging ISS, where a repeated repair attempt on a long-standing leak in the Zvezda module has pushed Axiom’s Ax-4 mission to NET June 19th. The leak is located in a vestibule called PrK, which connects a docking port to the module and is sealed except when a Progress cargo craft needs to be accessed. In April, NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP) identified the leak as one of its highest station concerns. Russia’s broadcasted space ambitions unfold against Washington’s recent display of fiscal self-destruction: budget hacks that will cut Earth science, many deep space exploration missions, space science, Lunar Gateway, and Mars Sample Return, while SLS might unfortunately get saved—proof that America’s political churn can do space self-sabotage every bit as theatrically as Russia. Putin’s June 6th investor pitch and intentions for commercial high-resolution EO availability—spiced up with an off-hand “asylum for Elon” mention—underscore Roscosmos’s aspirations to attract capital that has generally flowed to the US space industry (which we think is unlikely to be successful). |
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 | Russia’s space station priorities. Image credit: Roscosmos |
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¶Papers- Juno spotted its largest eruption on Io yet, a field of closely-spaced hot spots larger than Lake Superior with “eruptions [emitting] six times the total energy of all [Earth’s] power plants. The total power value of the new hot spot’s radiance measured well above 80 [terawatts].” Io is heated continually as it is squeezed and flexed during its 42-hour orbit in Jupiter’s intense gravity well.
- Magnetic rocks on the Moon are a mystery because the Moon lacks the global magnetic field necessary to imprint them during formation. But, a new analysis suggests that past impact events could have briefly surrounded the Moon with a plasma environment that interacted with weak magnetic fields to amplify them, imprinting the magnetism into rocks. This is a testable hypothesis, as rocks antipodal to the impact (on the opposite side of the Moon) should show the strongest effects—and indeed, highly magnetic rocks have been detected in a lunar far-side south-pole region opposite the large Imbrium impact basin. ☄️
- A new dwarf planet may be joining our solar system’s five others (Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake). The trans-Neptunian object 2017 OF201 has an extremely long period orbit of 25,000 years, with its aphelion at 1,600 AU and perihelion at 44.5 AU (similar to Pluto’s orbit). It may be 700 km across (paper), which should be enough to maintain hydrostatic equilibrium—a spherical shape determined by self-gravity, and the requirement for classification as a dwarf planet. (The smallest icy body known to be round is Saturn’s satellite Mimas, with a diameter of about 400 km, giving a likely rough lower bound on dwarf planet size, but Mimas is a moon, so it’s unfairly disqualified.)
- Researchers identified and named the largest structure yet observed in the Universe, containing 200 quadrillion solar masses and spanning 1.3 billion light-years (paper). The superstructure, named Quipu after the Incan recording devices made of knotted cords, was one of five identified by mapping X-ray emissions from large clusters of galaxies. Knowing where the densest regions of matter are in our local universe allows refinement of our models of the cosmic microwave background and measurements of the Hubble constant.
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 | A plot showing matter density, with the clusters of the five superstructures marked as areas covered with black circles. Quipu is the long one running vertically on the left-center of the image. That’s 428 megaparsecs right there. |
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| ¶News in brief. Honda conducted a successful VTOL test of a subscale experimental reusable rocket ● Voyager Technologies went public on the NYSE at a $3.8B valuation (after initially targeting $1.8B), raising $382.8M ● Germany’s Polaris Spaceplanes secured €5.4M to bring their multipurpose spaceplane and hypersonic transport system to market ● SF-based startup Aethero raised $8.4M to develop high-performance space-rated computers ● Quantum Space raised $40M to advance their Ranger spacecraft for national security applications in cislunar space ● Muon Space raised $89.5M and acquired propulsion startup Starlight Engines, developer of solid-propellant Hall effect thrusters that Muon plans to vertically integrate into Halo ● Logos Space Services raised $50M to advance plans for 4,000+ broadband satellites at 870-925 km altitude ● French space situational awareness company Look Up raised $57.6M to continue developing its space object tracking radar network ● China’s CAS Space completed a hot fire test of the first stage of its Kinetica-2 kerosene rocket ahead of their first orbital launch later this year ● NASA consolidated their social media footprint, flying in the face of recent micro-account proliferation trends—we’ll miss Percy and others ● Two Chinese Shijian satellites appear to be maneuvering towards each other in GEO and will likely dock and test refueling ● The two spacecraft on ESA’s Proba-3 mission (c.f. Issue 279) maneuvered to 150 m apart at mm-level precision and captured the first artificial solar eclipse in space. |
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 | | The solar corona viewed from the ASPIICS optical instrument on the Coronagraph spacecraft that flew behind the Occulter spacecraft to capture the first artificial solar eclipse for ESA’s Proba-3 mission. |
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JWST’s MIRI & NIRCam captured this image of Herbig-Haro object 30, a small nebula found in a star-forming region where outflowing gas from a young star is heated to luminescence by shockwaves and forms a narrow jet. A protoplanetary disk obscures the source star. Here’s an annotated version. |  |
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