December 25, 2024

Double Lunar Lander Launch: SpaceX to Send Two Private Moon Missions in January (Source: Launchpad)
A single SpaceX rocket will carry two private lunar landers to the moon next month, marking a significant milestone in commercial lunar exploration. Japanese company ispace announced that its Resilience lander will share the ride with Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost on a Falcon 9 rocket, scheduled to lift off from Florida’s Space Coast no earlier than mid-January 2025.

Resilience will carry five payloads, including a microrover called Tenacious, a deep-space radiation probe, and an experimental food-production module. After following a low-energy trajectory, the lander will attempt its touchdown four to five months after launch. If successful, Tenacious will gather lunar soil samples under contract with NASA.

Sharing the Falcon 9 ride is Firefly’s Blue Ghost, which will be the first to deploy and reach the moon. The lander is expected to touch down about 45 days after launch in Mare Crisium. Designed to operate for a full lunar day (14 Earth days), Blue Ghost will collect data, capture imagery of the lunar sunset, and analyze how lunar regolith reacts to solar influences during dusk. (12/23)

Private Moon Landings Are a Preview of a New Lunar Economy—but Are Governments Ready? (Source: Launchpad)
The upcoming double lunar lander launch by SpaceX is more than just a milestone in commercial spaceflight—it’s a wake-up call for governments and legacy agencies. While private companies like ispace and Firefly Aerospace are racing to the lunar surface with cutting-edge payloads, national space programs risk being left behind in the race to define the next lunar economy.

Here’s the catch: these private missions are not just about science. They’re laying the groundwork for resource extraction, commercial infrastructure, and even lunar tourism. Companies like ispace are openly building the tools for a "lunar economy," and yet, where are the public strategies to regulate, collaborate, or compete? NASA’s reliance on private partners through programs like CLPS is a step forward, but it’s not enough. The rules of the moon are being written now—through missions, tech capabilities, and the market players involved.

Governments that fail to act risk losing their influence in this new frontier, where economic interests may soon outweigh scientific ones. The question isn’t whether private companies will dominate the moon—it’s whether national agencies can adapt fast enough to lead alongside them. If they don’t, the moon’s future might be shaped by the highest bidder rather than the global community. (12/23)

AI-Designed, Monolithic Aerospike Engine Successfully Hot-Fired (Source: New Atlas)
Showing how far AI engineering has come, a new aerospike engine burning oxygen and kerosene capable of 1,100 lb (5,000 N) of thrust has successfully been hot-fired for 11 seconds. It was designed from front to back using an advanced Large Computational Engineering Model.

Designing and developing advanced aerospace engines is generally a complicated affair taking years of modeling, testing, revision, prototyping, rinsing and repeating. With their ability to discern patterns, carry out complex analysis, create virtual prototypes, and run models thousands of times, engineering AIs are altering the aerospace industry in some surprising ways – provided, of course, they are properly programmed and trained. (12/22)

No Magma Ocean For Io, Jupiter’s Volcano-Covered Moon (Source: Sky & Telescope)
Io, the innermost of Jupiter’s four largest Galilean moons, is covered with hundreds of volcanoes, some shooting lava fountains dozens of miles high. But what kind of interior could drive this magma fury? After NASA’s Juno orbiter made two close flyovers of Io, planetary scientists now think they know. New findings reveal that Io likely has no subsurface magma ocean but rather a rigid, partially molten interior much like Earth’s. (12/20)

Startup Aims to Use Giant Space Robots to Solve Earth's Energy Crisis (Source: The CoolDown)
Three companies in the business of developing renewable solar energy from space struck a historic partnership deal in late October. This deal set the wheels in motion for an unprecedented method of producing clean, solar energy in space through unobstructed power from the sun. Space Solar, a U.K. startup, is collaborating with Transition Labs, an Icelandic climate initiative development business, to build an energy-generating solar system in space and beam clean energy back down to stations on Earth through high-frequency radio waves. Ground-based stations would then convert this energy into electricity.

Reykjavík Energy, the third company in this deal, is set to buy the electricity generated from this novel method of solar at the prototype's start in 2030. Space Solar's initial prototype would feature a solar array that is about 400 meters long. The array could generate 30 megawatts of energy, according to a Space Solar new release, which would power around 5,190 homes, Market Watch estimates. (12/23)

Senate NASA Bill Focuses on Commercial Space Stations, Science Mission Overruns (Source: Space News)
A NASA authorization bill introduced in the Senate in the final days of the current Congress would have directed NASA to accelerate work on commercial space stations and address cost overruns on science programs. The NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2024 was formally introduced in the Senate Dec. 18 by Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, along with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), ranking member of the committee. Other co-sponsors include Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) and Eric Schmitt (R-MO), chair and ranking member of the committee’s space subcommittee, and Sens. Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Roger Wicker (R-MS).

The bill would have authorized $25.478 billion for NASA in fiscal year 2025, slightly above the $25.434 billion in the Senate version of an appropriations bill for the year and higher than the $25.384 billion requested by the agency for 2025. (12/24)

NATO’s Emergency Plan for an Orbital Backup Internet (Source: IEEE Spectrum)
On 18 February 2024, a missile attack from the Houthi militants in Yemen hit the cargo ship Rubymar in the Red Sea. With the crew evacuated, the disabled ship would take weeks to finally sink, becoming an symbol for the security of the global Internet in the process. Before it went down, the ship dragged its anchor behind it over an estimated 70 kilometers. The meandering anchor wound up severing three fiber-optic cables across the Red Sea floor, which carried about a quarter of all the Internet traffic between Europe and Asia.

Data transmissions had to be rerouted as system engineers realized the cables had been damaged. So this year, NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, will begin testing a plan to fix the vulnerability that the Rubymar’s sinking so vividly illustrated. NATO launched a pilot project to figure out how best to protect global Internet traffic and redirect it when there’s trouble. The project is called HEIST, short for hybrid space-submarine architecture ensuring infosec of telecommunications. The project aims to expand the number of pathways for data to travel. In particular, HEIST will be investigating ways to divert high-priority traffic to satellites in orbit. (12/24)

New Commercial Artemis Moon Rovers Undergo Testing at NASA (Source: Phys.org)
Through NASA's Artemis campaign, astronauts will land on the lunar surface and use a new generation of spacesuits and rovers as they live, work, and conduct science in the moon's south pole region, exploring more of the lunar surface than ever before. Recently, the agency completed the first round of testing on three commercially owned and developed LTVs (Lunar Terrain Vehicle) from Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.

As part of an ongoing year-long feasibility study, each company delivered a static mockup of their vehicle to Johnson at the end of September, initiated rover testing in October and completed the first round of testing in December inside the Active Response Gravity Offload System (ARGOS) test facility. Lunar surface gravity is one-sixth of what we experience here on Earth, so to mimic this, ARGOS offers an analog environment that can offload pressurized suited subjects for various reduced gravity simulations. (12/23)

NASA History Seminar Series on Aerospace Latin America (Source: Space 3.0)
The NASA History Office will present a seminar series on Aerospace Latin America “To explore the origins, evolution, and historical context of aerospace in the region since the dawn of the Space Age, canvasing a broad range of topics including aerospace infrastructure development, space policy and law, Earth science applications, and much more.” (12/23)

Fireball Seen From Florida to Southern Illinois was Chinese Space Junk (Source: West Kentucky Star)
A fireball in the sky seen late Saturday night caused a flurry of social media posts and calls to local authorities from New Orleans and Florida to southern Illinois and southeast Missouri. The bright, slow-moving streak blazed across the southern sky shortly after 10 p.m. It took more than 30 seconds to break into pieces and fade out, giving shocked onlookers plenty of time to get out their cellphones and take spectacular videos.

After that, conjecture was rampant on what the fireball could be. Some speculated that it was part of a meteor shower which was peaking this weekend. However, shooting stars move much more quickly and only last for a few seconds. Experts soon confirmed that it was the re-entry and disintegration of a defunct Chinese commercial imaging satellite — GaoJing 1-02. (12/22)

SpaceX Launches Starlink Mission From Cape Canaveral Ahead of Christmas Eve (Source: Florida Today)
At 12:35 a.m. on Monday, the rocket lit up the cloudy Florida night sky as it rumbled to orbit. Its delivery − the next batch of SpaceX Starlink internet satellites. This batch included 21 satellites total, with 13 of them for Starlink mobile service. This specific mission was referred to as Starlink 12-2. The booster saw its fourteenth flight, with previous missions including: seven Starlink missions, Axiom-2, Axiom-3, CRS-30, SES 24, Cygnus NG-21, and Euclid. (12/23)

James Webb Telescope Uncovers a Mind-Bending Hybrid of Asteroid and Comet Defying All Expectations (Source: Daily Galaxy)
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has captured groundbreaking observations of a hybrid celestial object combining characteristics of both an asteroid and a comet. This extraordinary discovery is reshaping our understanding of the solar system’s history and the nature of these enigmatic objects. With its advanced tools, JWST has provided unparalleled insights into this hybrid’s unique features and behaviors. (12/23)

India Govt's Push for Home-Grown Satellite Constellation Gets 30 Aspirants (Source: Business Standard)
Thirty Indian companies have answered the space regulator's call to build and operate constellations of Earth observation (EO) satellites in a groundbreaking private-public partnership to reduce the country's reliance on foreign data for defense, infrastructure management and other critical mapping needs. "We have received 9 applications ... Each applicant represents a consortium, involving a total of 30 companies," said Pawan Goenka, chairman of the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Center, or IN-SPACe. (12/24)

Dark Energy is Misidentification of Variations in Kinetic Energy of Universe’s Expansion, Scientists Say (Source: Sci.News)
Dark energy is commonly thought to be a weak anti-gravity force which acts independently of matter and makes up around two thirds of the mass-energy density of the Universe. The Lambda Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) model, which has served as the standard cosmological model for quarter of a century, requires dark energy to explain the observed acceleration in the rate at which the cosmos is expanding.

Astrophysicists base this conclusion on measurements of the distances to supernova explosions in distant galaxies, which appear to be farther away than they should be if the Universe’s expansion were not accelerating. However, the present expansion rate of the Universe is increasingly being challenged by new observations. “Our findings show that we do not need dark energy to explain why the Universe appears to expand at an accelerating rate,” said Professor David Wiltshire. “Dark energy is a misidentification of variations in the kinetic energy of expansion, which is not uniform in a Universe as lumpy as the one we actually live in.” (12/23)