Issue No. 334

The Orbital Index Issue No. 334 | Sep 3, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰

¶India’s next 15 years. ISRO and India’s Prime Minister recently shared updated objectives for the country’s space program over the next decade and a half, with the ultimate goal of a crewed domestic Moon landing by 2040. A key change is the way ISRO will send astronauts to the Moon—rumored, but now confirmed, LMLV will be India’s new heavy-lift Moon rocket, ostensibly replacing, but likely an evolution of, the out-of-favor and somewhat underpowered NGLV. LMLV is slated to be ready by 2035. In the meantime, the country will expand its regional GNSS coverage (IRNSS) to a global system (completing its rebrand as NavIC) over the next several years, joining the slowly growing list of global navigation constellations: GPS (US), GLONASS (Russia), Galileo (EU), and BeiDou (China). The successful Chandrayaan program will continue with Chandrayaan-4 returning lunar samples and the long-announced but only recently inked Chandrayaan-5, which is the ISRO/JAXA 350 kg LUPEX rover delivery mission to the South Pole. Ch-6 and beyond are still undefined, but may build toward ISRU and a lunar navigation system. ISRO also plans to expand its satellite fleet to (an oddly specific) 103 satellites by 2040 and build a 140-satellite internet constellation through public-private partnership, possibly facilitated by the “soon-to-be finished” commercial enablement Space Bill (which was originally drafted in 2017… so we’re not holding our breath). Altogether, this plan aims for India and ISRO to grow to capture ~10% of the global space market over this time, up from their current 1.7% share.  A model of India’s newly announced LMLV, set for development by 2035. The Orbital Index is made possible through generous sponsorship by:     ¶CRS-33 will boost the ISS. SpaceX’s 33rd commercial resupply mission arrived at the ISS last week. Along with the usual multiple tons of station experiments and supplies (1,500 tortillas, for example), this mission’s Dragon capsule carries an unusual payload in its trunk. The Reboost Kit is a pair of SpaceX Draco thrusters with an independent propellant system that will be used to boost and maintain the ISS’s altitude over the course of multiple burns scheduled throughout the fall. Dragon demonstrated an ISS boost with its non-steerable Dracos in Nov 2024, but this time it’s a dedicated system with better alignment to the ISS’s velocity vector and more fuel to support larger reboosts. Northrop’s Cygnus demonstrated a reboost in 2022 from its suboptimal berthing port at the bottom of the station using its main engine, gimbaled to provide a better vector, and has done so multiple times since. Both these and the SpaceX demonstrations are an effort by NASA to ensure that the agency can maintain the ISS’s altitude without Roscosmos, whose Progress spacecraft has historically been responsible for the station’s orbit maintenance. CRS-33 should have 1.5x the reboost capability of a Progress, delivering 25% or more of the ISS’s annual boosting needs. Eventually, a SpaceX vehicle will thrust the other way and bring the ISS out of orbit in the early 2030s. A view inside the CRS-33 Dragon’s “boost trunk”. All future Dragon trunks will feature attachment points for a boost module, should NASA require it. Credit: SpaceX ‹Support Us› Orbital Index is made possible by readers like you. If you appreciate our writing, please support us with a monthly membership! ¶News in brief. Rocket Lab officially opened Launch Complex 3 at the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport (aka MARS) on Wallops Island, VA, where they plan to launch their first Neutron rocket later this year ● Belgian satellite manufacturer Aerospacelab closed a $109.3M Series B to scale their ‘Megafactory’, designed to produce up to 500 satellites a year by 2027 ● Firefly Aerospace closed the investigation of their failed launch in April, citing ‘plume-induced flow separation,’ which caused intense heat that broke apart the first stage booster ● Rainier Weiss, the physicist & Nobel prize winner who invented the gravitational wave detector and built LIGO, passed away ● SpaceX reused a booster for the 30th time, setting a new record ● China heated a tungsten alloy aboard Tiangong to 3,100 °C (using electrostatic levitation and dual-wavelength laser heating), the highest heating temperature achieved in space material science experiments ● ISRO performed the first drop test of their Gaganyaan crew capsule to test its reentry system parachutes ISRO’s Gaganyaan crew module deployed its parachutes during a 3 km drop test at Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota ¶Etc. Check out these gorgeous videos of Starship soft splashing into the Pacific from SpaceX’s “camera bolted to a Starlink terminal sitting in a kiddie pool.” The heat shield seems to have done well. Rocket Lab released a video of their new LC-3 Wallops Island launch facility for Neutron. LC-3 joins the company’s existing LC-2, which has launched a half dozen Electron rockets in orbital and suborbital HASTE configurations over the past two years. ‘The Vera Rubin Observatory is ready to revolutionize astronomy.’ JunoCam was showing signs of radiation damage after having spent years in Jupiter’s intense radiation environment, so controllers tried an experiment: commanding it to turn on its heater to heat soak the sensor, with the hope that the high temperature would anneal out the damage. And it worked, for a time, returning images that “were almost as good as the day the camera launched.” Annealing also works for solar cells in space. Juno’s controllers would need to repeat the process as more damage accumulates, if the mission were further extended, which may be unlikely—Juno’s extended mission is scheduled to end this month. SPHEREx and JWST reveal what comet 3I/ATLAS is... and isn’t. Still waiting for ULA's SMART approach to engine reuse. Instead of using optical interferometry, it may be possible to detect gravitational waves using magnetic fields. When a gravitational wave passes through a DC magnetic field, it causes oscillations in the current-carrying conductors at the frequency of the gravitational wave. Current and future magnetic detectors designed to search for dark matter may also be able to utilize this effect to look for kHz-range gravitational waves (paper). ISS NASA Astronaut Nichole Ayers captured this photo of a ‘gigantic jet’ over Coahuila, Mexico. This kind of upper-atmospheric lightning above a thundercloud has been observed to reach 90 km.

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