¶Rocket Moves. Lots of movement in the world of rockets this week, good and bad. Here are a few that bubbled to the top for us.- Somewhat surprisingly, Blue Origin announced it plans to ramp up the launch cadence and fleet size for New Shepard due to significant demand. Their goal is to fly weekly once three upgraded vehicles are completed and come online next year.
- Just prior to its return-to-flight, Firefly lost booster FLTA007 on the test stand (ok, it blew up) ahead of its mission to launch Lockheed’s TacSat.
- ESA penned a contract with Avio (makers of Vega) for a reusable upper stage demonstration mission.
- Perhaps not quite a rocket unless you squint pretty hard, but NASA gutted much of its contract with Sierra Space for their long-in-development, and oft delayed, Dream Chaser cargo delivery vehicle, reducing the multi-mission contract to a single orbital demonstration. Due to lack of certification of the propulsion system, Dream Chaser will no longer dock with the ISS on this first flight, currently still slated for late 2026.
- Galactic Energy raised a $336M Series D—the largest funding round ever for a Chinese launch startup—to continue development of Ceres-2 (capable of 1,600 kg to LEO, 4x the payload of Ceres-1) and Pallas-1 (an 8-ton, or 17.5 tons in 3x booster configuration, medium-lift rocket).
- Blue Origin’s second flight of New Glenn is now scheduled to launch ESCAPADE toward Mars in October or early November.
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 | Security footage from a nearby Harold’s Auto Parts caught the explosion of Firefly’s FLTA007 booster during testing. This marks another failure for the rocket, which has only had two fully successful launches to date. |
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¶(Planetary Science) Papers - According to new JWST data (paper, paper), Trappist-1 e (one of seven rocky planets in the famous Trappist-1 cool red dwarf system, and located in the star’s habitable zone) might have an atmosphere. If confirmed through further observation, this would be the first detection of an atmosphere on a rocky, habitable-zone world. (No aliens detected yet, though.)
- Data from NASA’s Mars InSight seismometer reveal km-wide fragments of ancient impactor material inside Mars’s mantle (paper). Some 4.5 billion years ago, massive impacts on the red planet melted “continent-size swaths of the early crust and mantle into vast magma oceans, simultaneously injecting the impactor fragments and Martian debris deep into the planet’s interior.”
- And, more analysis of InSight data suggests that, like Earth, Mars has a solid inner core surrounded by a liquid outer core (paper). Previous work found a liquid outer core, and left the status of the inner core unresolved; this new analysis, based on the detection of seismic phases consistent with transmission through a solid inner core and reflections from an inner-outer core boundary, suggests that an Earth-like solid and liquid layering best explains the data. Given the similarities, Mars’s lack of a current dynamo and global magnetic field is interesting. One possibility is that Mars had a dynamo in the past (as suggested by evidence of past liquid surface water and current latent magnetism in rocks), but cooled more rapidly than Earth, causing the available core heat to drop below the threshold required to sustain a dynamo. However, further research is needed.
- JWST observed seasonal weather, including possibly methane rain, on Saturn’s moon Titan. Dragonfly is going to have some fantastic views!
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| ¶News in brief. NASA selected 10 astronauts from 8,000+ applicants for their 2025 class, which for the first time includes more women than men, with six women among the group ● Two Japanese commercial companies, iSpace and ElevationSpace, plan to develop a lunar sample return mission ● Another batch of Kuiper satellites launched on ULA Atlas V ● The head of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center is stepping down, the third NASA center director to do so this year ● NASA awarded Katalyst, an Arizona-based startup, a $30M contract to attempt to boost the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory telescope (which has no docking ports, propulsion, or any design affordances for servicing) ● Spanish startup Kreios Space closed a $9.38M seed round to fly a demonstration mission of their air-breathing electric propulsion spacecraft in VLEO ● Solstar Space won a $150k NASA SBIR contract to develop Wi-Fi on the Moon for CLPS and Artemis missions ● NASA and ISRO released the first radar images from NISAR (c.f. Issue 300), one of the most powerful (and expensive) EO satellites launched to date, capable of capturing SAR images with up to 2 meter resolution. |
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 | Maine’s Mount Desert Island seen in one of the first images captured by NISAR’s L-band radar |
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¶Etc.- New high-quality video, reprocessed from public data, tracks ~100 small boulders ejected by DART when it impacted Dimorphous, suggesting that the probe shattered several larger boulders into pieces, resulting in over 100 tons of ejecta (paper).
- windy.com has great weather data visualization.
- Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA)’s Himawari-8 and -9 satellites monitor Earth’s weather patterns with multispectral imagers. A recent study looked at instances when Venus photobombed these images (437 times in total) and found that the sensors could capture changes in Venus' atmosphere, including thermal tides and planetary-scale waves (paper). This is a creative use of existing longitudinal data from Earth observation missions.
- A video captured by GOES-19 of the Moon eclipsing the Sun.
- The Earth is safe from the 60-meter-wide asteroid 2024 YR4, but there is currently a 4% chance that it will hit the Moon in December 2032. If this happens, it could throw up significant debris, causing ("up to 1,000 times the normal background [micrometeoroid] average [impact rate] for a few days"). On the one hand, we’d likely see incredible meteor showers; on the other, it could endanger satellites and, potentially, astronauts in LEO. We could try to deflect it, but a new paper suggests that a 1-megaton nuke is the only way to be sure.
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A trio of collaborative rovers pose next to the entrance to a lava tube on Lanzarote, a Spanish volcanic island. Check out this video about their analogue mission and lunar rover development (paper). The rover on the bottom left (SherpaTT) can support a tether for the bottom right robot (Coyote III) to use to descend into caves. Image Credit: Aerial Skylight Robots/ University of Malaga |  |
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