¶Lanyue completes its first landing test. China’s in-development crewed ‘extraterrestrial’ lander completed its first landing and takeoff tests to simulate the lander’s arrival and departure from the lunar surface, currently scheduled for a pre-2030 crewed landing. The 26-ton, two-taikonaut-lander, along with the Mengzhou crew capsule, lunar EVA suit, and Tansuo crewed rover, will make up the architecture for China’s vigorous attempt to become the second nation to deliver humans to the Moon. The lander, with vacuum-optimized engine bells removed, performed multiple propulsion tests while attached to a suspension harness (video) simulating lunar gravity (over simulated cratered terrain), testing landing and takeoff, as well as onboard GNC, electrical systems, and early systems integrations. Testing was conducted at a Chinese Manned Space Agency (CMSA) facility in Hebei province outside of Beijing. China’s lunar mission architecture relies on dual launches of the in-development keralox-fueled LM-10 rocket, which will be capable of 27 tons to trans-lunar injection. After separate launches, the Mengzhou capsule and Lanyue will rendezvous in lunar orbit, with two of the (likely) three crew transferring to the lander. The lander will descend with its propulsion stage attached until a few km prior to landing. It will then have a short surface stay with ~6 hours of EVA before ascending back to Mengzhou for the trip home. Mengzhou also has an upcoming LEO variant capable of supporting up to 7 taikonauts and completed a dramatic pad abort test in June. Multiple robotic and crewed test missions in both Earth and Moon orbits will be required ahead of the PRC’s 80th anniversary in October 2029, the hoped-for date of a fully crewed landing. |
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 | Lanyue, suspended from its lunar gravity simulation harness during testing last week. |
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¶Blue Ghost 2. After their recent IPO, additional NASA CLPS orders, and, of course, their fully successful, not-tipped-over, commercial lunar landing in early 2025, Firefly’s lander team has turned its attention to Blue Ghost Mission 2, slated for 2026. This time, Firefly will attempt to deliver an orbiter as well as a farside lunar lander. Their cislunar OTV and orbiter, Elytra Dark, will perform its own functions and also carry ESA’s Lunar Pathfinder spacecraft to lunar orbit, a precursor to ESA’s Moonlight program for a lunar navigation and communications constellation. Blue Ghost 2 will carry a number of payloads, including the UAE’s second Rashid rover (paper), a replacement for the first Rashid, lost in 2023 when Japan’s ispace craft crash landed. Also onboard will be Fleet Space’s SPIDER seismometer to study Moonquakes and LuSEE-Night (c.f. Issue 211), a lunar far-side radio astronomy payload designed to characterize the far-side radio environment for future observatories and to measure radio signals from the ancient Universe before the first stars were born. LuSEE-Night will receive calibration support and comms from Elytra Dark in orbit. Elytra Dark will also likely provide imaging as part of Firefly’s upcoming lunar imaging service. |
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 | Blue Ghost 2 on the lunar farside, hopefully next year. |
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¶Status of a Russian Venera-D mission. Beginning in the 1960s, and spanning over 20 years, the Soviet Venera missions analyzed the atmosphere and surface of Venus—Soviet Russia is still the only country to have intentionally landed on the planet. The Venera program was shut down in 1984 (followed by a related series of Vega missions), but now, under Russia, it appears that a new(ish) Venera mission is in the works, with an expected launch date in the early 2030s. This new mission, given the name Venera-D or Venera-17, was first conceptualized in 2003, but has taken many years to obtain funding and resources. Initially an international collaboration between the US and Russia, the Russian invasion of Ukraine resulted in its forced transformation into a solely Russian mission. Venera-D is planned as a tandem mission, with an orbiting satellite to conduct atmospheric and surface mapping and a lander that is hoped to survive the intense surface heat and pressure for 2 hours or longer (pdf). Aerial balloon(s) have also been mentioned, which would float for weeks or months, collecting atmospheric data. The mission is still in the contracting phase and lacks actual hardware, so more schedule slippage is likely past its 2031 optimal launch window. Regardless, this mission would be the first Russian-led Venus mission since the Soviet era and would tell us more about how Venus turned from a possibly life-capable world into the scalding hellscape of today. — contributed by Maxwell Rost, a rising junior in Aerospace Engineering at Penn State University, who enjoys golf, travel, and researching new exoplanet discoveries. (ed., keep an eye out for more pieces from Max, who has been working on several during his summer break.) |
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 | Venera-D (or more recently Venera-17), rendered in its 2023 form. Credit: NPO Lavochkin |
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| ¶News in brief. Crew-10 departed the ISS and splashed down safely in the Pacific ● Firefly Aerospace went public in a traditional IPO, with shares peaking at 30% above open and reaching a $8.5B valuation before retreating ● Indian launch startup Skyroot Aerospace static-fired their Kalam-100 motor, India’s largest privately-developed solid rocket motor and the first stage of the company’s Vikram-1 rocket, set to launch later this year ● LA-based startup Orbital Operations raised an $8.8M seed to develop a high thrust, cryogenic liquid hydrogen orbital transfer vehicle with active cooling for persistent operations (likely mostly defense-related) ● SpaceX is now offering Starship flights to Mars, with Italy signing up as the first customer to send payloads (but wen?) ● Agnikul Cosmos, a Chennai-based startup, developed the world’s largest single-piece 3D-printed rocket engine, which is 1-meter long ● JWST found evidence of a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri A ● RocketLab launched its 69th Electron mission to deploy another SAR satellite for iQPS (video) ● Jim Lovell, Apollo 8 astronaut and Commander of Apollo 13, passed away at age 97. |
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 | The Apollo 13 crew splashed down safely in the Pacific on April 17, 1970, after a dramatic rescue made possible by the teamwork of the crew and NASA Mission Control — and the calm leadership of Commander Jim Lovell. RIP. |
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¶Etc.- ‘Gathering Moon dust with Honeybee Robotics,’ about Honeybee Robotics’s LISTER drill and PlanetVac soil sampler on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, as well as their future work on JAXA’s MMX.
- JPL wrote about their Dynamic Targeting approach, which is currently being tested on a CubeSat. Dynamic Targeting uses AI to enhance EO satellites by looking ahead and choosing to acquire imagery in areas along the ground track that have the fewest clouds.
- SWOT caught the leading edge of the tsunami produced by the recent 8.8 magnitude earthquake off the coast of the Kamchatka peninsula as the wave front crossed the Pacific. Its measurements allowed detailed modeling of the edge profile and height, which was ~45 cm tall (this may not seem like much, but tsunamis extend all the way to the bottom of the seafloor).
- The US Administration plans to shut down the two spacecraft of NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory, despite the mission producing widely used carbon dioxide and crop growth data, and having the potential to function for many more years. This is a direct effort to stop measuring CO2 levels, because if you don’t look, you certainly won’t get hit by the oncoming bus.
- NASA and Google are building a multimodal AI medical assistant (voice+text+image) for Mars-bound space travel (which is, perhaps oddly, currently hosted on terrestrial Google Cloud infrastructure). It was graded as 74% likely to be correct in its diagnosis of ‘flank pain’ (slide deck)—now we’re just left wondering when the most recent astronaut complaint of ‘flank pain’ was recorded. 🥩
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Hundreds of Canadian wildfires have been sending smoke across the continent, turning the sun red on the eastern seaboard of North America. This false color image from an ESA Sentinel-3 satellite shows the smoke on August 3rd. Credit: EU, Copernicus Sentinel-3 imagery |  |
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