Jareed Isaacman Surveys The Damages To Blue Origin's Complex 36

Blue Origin pad NASA administrator Jared Isaacman surveys the damage to Blue Origin’s Launch Complex 36. (credit: NASA/John Kraus) Artemis and the blue micromoon by Jeff Foust Monday, June 1, 2026 The full moon last weekend was called by some a “blue micromoon”. Blue because it was the second full moon of the month, or blue moon. Micromoon came from the fact that the Moon was more distant from the Earth than average, making it appear slightly smaller; the opposite of the “supermoon” hyped in recent years, even though the difference is size is difficult for the unaided eye to notice. The rechristening of the missions was a bit puzzling since they predate the agency’s lunar base plans and, in some cases, have little to do with it. The term might also reflect the mood in the space exploration community over the weekend. Barely 48 hours after NASA provided more details, and nearly $1 billion in contracts, to advance the lunar base plans it announced in March (see “Igniting a new vision for NASA”, The Space Review, March 30, 2026), the agency suffered a serious setback when one of the key vehicles needed for those plans exploded on the launch pad. Just how serious a setback, and how much further away the Moon now seems, is uncertain. Blue Moon A Blue Moon Mark 1 lander deploys an Astrolab rover to the lunar surface. (credit: NASA/John Kraus) Rovers, landers, and hoppers Last Tuesday, NASA held a briefing to outline some elements of its Moon Base initiative announced at the Ignition event in March. At the time, details were scarce: NASA said it would spend $20 billion over the next seven years, and more than $30 billion for the next decade, to build out a lunar base, including a monthly cadence of robotic landings. The agency said little in March, though, about how it would get there from here. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman started the event with a curious rebranding move. “We are discussing three Moon Base missions and a series of additional awards with more missions to be announced in the in the months ahead,” he said. Those three missions, though, were landers already in development, in some cases for several years. Moon Base 1 is the name NASA now gives to the first Blue Moon Mark 1 lander from Blue Origin, at the time scheduled to fly in the fall of 2026 with a NASA payload added to it through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Moon Base 2 is the new designation for Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander, also supported by CLPS even after NASA decided not to fly its VIPER rover on it. The third Intuitive Machines lander, carrying a science payload to the Moon’s Reiner Gamma region, became Moon Base 3. The rechristening of the missions was a bit puzzling since they predate the agency’s lunar base plans and, in some cases, have little to do with it. Reiner Gamma, for example, is far from the south polar regions of the Moon, the location NASA plans to establish that base. The agency said that with the new names comes additional resources for the companies, part of a push by Isaacman to provide agency expertise for commercial partners. “We want to make sure that the reliability is there, and we’re putting all the resources of NASA, including test facilities if they need them, in play here,” said Carlos Garcia-Galan, program manager for Moon Base at NASA. “We're basically putting all of our assets in play, including experts, facilities, know-how; whatever it takes to make them successful before they get to fly and when they’re flying.” The bigger news came later when Garcia-Galan announced a series of contracts. In 2024 NASA selected three companies—Astrolab, Intuitive Machines, and Lunar Outpost—for study contracts for its Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) Services program. Last year, they submitted proposals for the next phase of the program, contracts to develop and demonstrate the rovers on the Moon. However, at Ignition, NASA announced it was asking the companies to go back to the drawing boards, and quickly. Instead of the more advanced rovers previously sought by NASA, the agency asked for revised concepts that would be simpler and faster to develop, ready in time for the Artemis 4 landing in 2028. The companies had about a month to provide revised proposals. At last week’s briefing, Garcia-Galan announced NASA selected Astrolab and Lunar Outpost to develop their rovers, each receiving contracts valued at about $220 million. Astrolab offered what it called Crewed Lunar Vehicle 1, or CLV-1. It is based on the FLEX rover concept the company had originally adapted for the LTV program, but scaled down to meet NASA’s revised requirements. Lunar Outpost proposed Pegasus, a rover that used much of the design for its larger Eagle rover originally proposed for LTV. NASA did not discuss in detail why it selected those two companies and how they beat out Intuitive Machines. “They're a mix between the Apollo lunar roving vehicle and the Mars-style rover,” Garcia-Galan said, including the ability to operate autonomously or be teleoperated when astronauts are not present. “We're basically putting all of our assets in play, including experts, facilities, know-how; whatever it takes to make them successful before they get to fly and when they’re flying,” Garcia-Galan said of the lander companies. Besides changing the design of the rovers, NASA also changed how the rovers would be delivered. NASA initially treated the LTV effort as a service, leaving it up to the companies to decide how to get their rovers to the Moon. NASA took over responsibility for the rover delivery, instead giving the rover developers mass and volume envelopers their designs had to fit into, while using CLPS to select a landing system for them. NASA announced at the event that it picked Blue Moon Mark 1 to deliver both rovers on separate missions under a contract worth up to $468.4 million if all options are exercised. NASA didn’t state why it selected Blue Moon Mark 1, but given the size of the rovers—NASA set the upper limit on their mass at one metric ton—there were few other options as most CLPS landers are designed for smaller payloads. One other, smaller award made at the briefing was to Firefly Aerospace. The company won an $80 million deal to deliver to the Moon the “MoonFall” drone-like spacecraft being developed at JPL that will be able to hop across the lunar surface and serve as scouts. A Firefly Elytra spacecraft will ferry the spacecraft to a low lunar orbit, releasing them to allow them to land on their own. A clear message from the event was the role Blue Origin was playing in the lunar base plans. With the LTV lander contract, NASA now has four missions using the Mark 1 lander, including the renamed Moon Base 1 mission and a planned 2027 mission to deliver the VIPER rover. The Mark 1 lander also gives Blue Origin experience for its larger crewed Blue Moon Mark 2 lander. NASA did not discuss that lander at the briefing beyond Garcia-Galan’s comments that the Mark 1 missions “reduce the risk for future crewed missions.” Just after the briefing, NASA said that it will announce the crew of Artemis 3 at a June 9 event at the Johnson Space Center, along with providing updates on the mission’s design. NASA said earlier this year that Artemis 3, once planned to be the first crewed landing attempt of the Artemis program, will instead stay in low Earth orbit, approaching and docking with prototypes of both Blue Moon Mark 2 and SpaceX’s Starship. “America is returning to the Moon,” Isaacman announced at the briefing. “We are working alongside our many international and commercial partners to leverage the incredible capabilities from commercial industry to build a moon base.” Blue Origin faces launch pad surgery Those initial lunar base plans survived for only a little more than 48 hours. While NASA discussed those various missions in Washington, Blue Origin was busy at Cape Canaveral getting ready for the next launch of New Glenn. It would be a return-to-flight mission for the rocket after its previous flight in April suffered an upper stage malfunction (see “The great launch constraint”, The Space Review, April 27, 2026). After a remarkably fast investigation, the FAA cleared the vehicle to return to flight May 22, and Blue Origin was planning for an early June launch of 48 Amazon Leo broadband satellites. “Cleanup has to be done with a sense of urgency, but extreme precision. It’s literally launch pad surgery,” Donchev said. Those preparations included a static-fire test at Launch Complex 36. The vehicle, without its payload, rolled out to the pad, was erected, and filled with propellants. The company did not announce the test in advance but cameras around the Cape were watching the pad to catch the static fire. They instead saw a massive explosion. At 9 pm EDT, the first stage’s seven BE-4 engines ignited, but something went wrong. An explosion appeared to occur at the base of the vehicle, and in just a few seconds a massive fireball erupted, shock waves visible in the humid Florida air. When the fireball faded, the rocket was gone, along with its transporter-erector and a lightning tower. No one was injured in the blast, but the pad was severely damaged. Photos the next day showed metal beams in the main launch tower that were bent and buckled, with damage also visible in support buildings near the pad. The explosion recalled a similar incident, on a smaller scale, in 2016, when a Falcon 9 exploded at the Cape’s Space Launch Complex 40 ahead of a static-fire test (see “Blasting to conclusions”, The Space Review, September 6, 2016). It took SpaceX 15 months to rebuild SLC-40, although the company was able to resume launches after a few months using its pad at Vandenberg and Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, which SpaceX was finishing converting into a Falcon 9 pad at the time of the SLC-40 explosion. However, Blue Origin has no other pad for New Glenn. It was planning a second pad at LC-36 and also in talks for a Vandenberg site, but both are likely years away. As long as LC-36 is offline, New Glenn is grounded, even if the problems that caused the explosion are resolved. How long it takes to rebuild LC-36 is one of the space industry’s biggest questions right now. Many speculate it will take at least a year, citing the experience with the SLC-40 explosion. One SpaceX executive, declining to comment on a rebuild timeline, noted that one of the most basic parts of it, the cleanup, can be time consuming. “In the initial days and weeks, you’re using a scalpel, not a bulldozer,” said Kiko Donchev, vice president of launch, on social media. That meticulous process, he said, is needed to preserve evidence for the accident investigation and to save equipment that can be salvaged, all while avoiding the risk of injury to those working on the cleanup. “Cleanup has to be done with a sense of urgency, but extreme precision. It’s literally launch pad surgery,” he said. CNBC interviewed Isaacman on Monday, and according to the network’s account he suggested an even longer timeline for repairs. “Even if you’re moving at, you know, a pretty quick pace, that’s going to take some serious time,” he said of launch pad repairs. The report suggested that Isaacman thought the pad might not be ready until 2028. “We will fly again before the end of this year,” vowed Limp. Isaacman said on social media Monday night that his remarks were misinterpreted. “I was pointing out that those [lunar base] missions are not until 2028, which should be well within what is possible for pad recovery,” he said. Moments later, Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp offered an aggressive schedule for pad repairs. Much of the pad infrastructure escaped serious damage, he said, including propellant tank farms that are “very long lead items” had they needed to be replaced. The main launch tower can be repaired, he said, and the company had already been considering an “alternative vertical conop” in place of the transporter-erector, so that system does not need to be replaced. “We will fly again before the end of this year,” he concluded. In that best-case scenario, the impacts on Artemis will be minimized. Moon Base 1, that first Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, will be delayed, but only by several months rather than a year or more. That would also limit the effects on the VIPER launch and the two LTV rovers, while keeping open the chance that Blue Moon Mark 2 would be ready for Artemis 3 if NASA sticks to a mid-2027 schedule. But if pad repairs slip into 2027, closer to the year-long timelines others have projected, the effects will be more significant. Moon Base 1 is primarily a test flight of the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, and NASA previously stated it wanted to see a successful landing before entrusting VIPER to that lander. If New Glenn and Blue Moon Mark 2 are not ready by mid-2027, NASA would have to decide whether to delay the mission, and thus push back the Artemis 4 landing later into 2028, or fly it without Blue Origin and thus rely on SpaceX’s Starship for that first landing attempt. Perhaps, like the blue micromoon, the Moon is only a little but further away than it was a week ago. But it’s unlikely to be the last disruption to NASA’s lunar plans in the years ahead. Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that all submitted comments will be posted. Home Subscribe to our weekly newsletter email address

Big Baaboom: The effects of a Sturn 5 Pad Explosion

Saturn V In the AppleTV+ series "For All Mankind," a Saturn V exploded on the launch pad. NASA evaluated this possibility during the Apollo program. (credit: Apple) Big badaboom: the effects of a Saturn V launch pad explosion by Dwayne A. Day Monday, June 1, 2026 On May 28, a New Glenn rocket became the biggest rocket ever to explode on the launch pad. There have been other bigger rocket failures before, most notably a Soviet N1 Moon rocket that blew up above its pad in 1969 and rained fiery hell below—the N1 rocket had more fuel, and made a bigger boom, than the New Glenn. Of course, there have been some innovative Starship failures, a Titan 34D that blew up over its launch pad in 1986, and many smaller missiles and rockets that blew up or over their pads at Cape Canaveral during the 1960s. Designers were less concerned about the damage that a launch pad explosion could do to the surrounding area than they were about the damage that an explosion could do to the astronauts who were trying to escape it. Although it was not the biggest, that New Glenn kind of explosion—let’s not call it an “anomaly”—was a concern during the Apollo program of the 1960s. Up until recently, the Saturn V was the largest rocket ever built by the United States. A true monster of a launch vehicle, it generated over 33 million newtons of thrust at liftoff and carried 2.5 million kilograms of fuel and oxidizer. If the Saturn V exploded, it could do so with the force of a small atomic bomb, the equivalent of half a kiloton, or about 1/26th the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Naturally, this was a significant concern for Apollo program officials. During the Apollo program, NASA officials conducted several studies to evaluate the effects of the ultimate worst-case scenario: a launch pad explosion of a Saturn V rocket. This was the worst possible accident for several reasons. The Saturn was most loaded with fuel at that point and posed the greatest danger to people on the ground. It also presented the fewest abort options, requiring the firing of the Launch Escape System (LES) rockets that would blast the Command Module away at high acceleration. The first season of the AppleTV+ show “For All Mankind” featured a Saturn V exploding on its pad during a pre-launch test. Early in the Saturn development phase, NASA officials carefully selected a launch site that was sparsely populated and where the actual launch pad could be isolated from other necessary facilities such as the Launch Control Center. They selected sites on the Atlantic coast of Merritt Island, surrounded by swampland and beaches. In 1961 and 1962 NASA planners decided the locations of physical structures for the two Saturn V launch pads, and designated the pads Launch Complexes 39A and 39B. Because of the pads’ isolation—and because unlike New Glenn they had two pads—after 1962 Saturn designers were less concerned about the damage that a launch pad explosion could do to the surrounding area than they were about the damage that an explosion could do to the astronauts who were trying to escape it. In September 1963, NASA conducted a short study of Saturn V booster explosion hazards and how they affected the survivability of the Apollo spacecraft. Titled “Saturn V Booster Explosion Hazards and Apollo Survivability Analyses,” the study focused on an on-pad explosion, and its authors calculated the propellant weights in each of the three stages and determined their equivalent weight in terms of TNT, a common means of establishing a benchmark for explosive yields. The study’s authors concluded that there was the equivalent of 222,000 kilograms of TNT in the S-IC first stage, 253,000 kilograms of TNT in the S-II second stage, and 68,000 kilograms of TNT in the S-IVB third stage. Although the propellant weight of the first stage was considerably higher than the second stage, the second stage’s explosive yield was greater because it utilized more explosive liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen (New Glenn’s first stage uses liquid oxygen and methane and its second stage uses liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen). The S-IC first stage was fueled with liquid oxygen and kerosene. The third stage, although also powered by liquid hydrogen, had far less fuel than the S-II stage. Together, the three stages had a theoretical maximum explosive yield of 543,000 kilograms of TNT, or a little over half a kiloton, to use the terminology common to nuclear weapons. The fuels would have caused fires in the surrounding vegetation and killed animal life for miles around. Maybe some of the alligators would have been okay. Based on existing data, the study’s authors felt that it was unlikely that all the fuel in the Saturn V would be consumed in an explosion, however. In previous on-pad explosions of other liquid-fueled rockets such as the Atlas and Titan, significant amounts of fuel fell to the ground and burned long after the initial explosion. In the case of the Saturn V, this was most likely to occur for the heavy kerosene in the S-IC first stage. The figure of 599 tons of TNT is therefore an absolute limit and the study’s authors suggested that the likely yield was probably only 60% of this, or around 400 tons. Rocco Petrone, the Saturn launch director, estimated that the real figure was more likely to be 300–400 tons. Even this lower yield explosion would have completely destroyed the launch tower, the Mobile Transporter, and significant parts of the launch pad itself. The detonation of the hydrogen and oxygen in the S-II second stage would have created a tremendous blast wave close to the launch tower, knocking it down. The fuels would have caused fires in the surrounding vegetation and killed animal life for miles around. Maybe some of the alligators would have been okay. Some sense of the possible devastation of a Saturn V explosion can be surmised based on the results of the July 3, 1969, launch pad explosion of the Soviet N1 rocket, which detonated with an estimated force of 250 tons of TNT. That explosion completely destroyed one of the launch pads and shattered windows nearly 50 kilometers away. NASA’s September 1963 explosion hazards study divided the hazards from a Saturn V explosion into six categories: overpressure, dynamic pressure, fire, acoustic intensity, shrapnel, and impulse. Overpressure is the blast wave that is formed when the atmosphere surrounding the explosion is forcibly pushed back. The study’s authors considered overpressure to be the primary and most immediate threat to the Command Module in a sea-level (i.e. on-pad) explosion, although dynamic pressure from an explosion—the actual dynamic load imposed on the vehicle—became a greater threat than overpressure at high altitude, approximately 95 seconds into flight. The study assumed that an overpressure greater than five pounds per square inch (psi) would destroy the Apollo spacecraft. Because the S-II stage had the greatest explosive yield, that stage dictated how far the Command Module had to travel in a launch pad explosion to avoid the shock wave, which diminished over distance. The distance requirement for the S-II was 317 meters. But because the Command Module was already 43 meters from the assumed center of the explosion in the S-II, the Command Module only had to travel 274 meters to escape the lethal overpressure wave and therefore survive the explosion. The study’s authors determined that the fireball, shrapnel, and noise were irrelevant factors for an on-pad explosion. Because any shrapnel from the exploding stages had to travel through the stages above them as well as through the Lunar Module, Service Module, and Command Module heat shield, shrapnel was not considered a threat to the spacecraft except in a case where the vehicle toppled over on the pad. Noise would not be important either. Although the fireball would be the biggest ever produced by a non-nuclear detonation, at most the capsule would spend only two to three seconds inside of the fireball and the temperature would never be greater than what the spacecraft was already designed to withstand during reentry. In late 1964 or early 1965, the engineers at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas initiated the “Fireball Study” to evaluate the effects of the fireball produced during an on-pad explosion of either a Saturn 1B or a Saturn V. In August 1965, Richard W. High and Robert F. Fletcher of the Flight Engineering Section and Mission Feasibility Branch, respectively, issued their report on the effects of a fireball produced by a Saturn 1B or Saturn V explosion. Saturn V NASA evaluated the possibility that the fireball from an exploding Saturn V rocket could burn up the parachute lines of an Apollo spacecraft descending after firing its Launch Escape System. (credit: NASA) Although the earlier explosion hazards study had indicated that the fireball posed no major threat to the Command Module itself, NASA engineers became concerned about the effect of radiated heat from a fireball on the parachute shroud lines of a descending Command Module. It would do the astronauts no good to escape the initial explosion and the fireball only to have their shroud lines burn up because of the heat of the fireball. Plummeting to the ground from a thousand meters was no better than being crushed in the initial blast wave. High and Fletcher used both mathematical models and data gathered from previous on-pad explosions, such as a recent March 2, 1965, Atlas-Centaur failure (that one occurred at the same pad where New Glenn blew up), to calculate the size, duration, and thermal emissions from a fireball. However, they admitted that some of their conclusions were little more than educated guesses. The two men assumed that virtually all the propellants in the rockets would be consumed in a fireball, feeding it even after the initial explosion. They based this assumption on the belief that the initial blast wave would completely rupture all the fuel tanks and that any fuel not consumed in the initial explosion would burn underneath it, and feed it. NASA engineers determined that the most likely cause of an on-pad explosion of a Saturn V was a collision with the tower during liftoff. Based upon these assumptions and their calculations, High and Fletcher determined that the fireball from a Saturn V exploding on the launch pad would last for 33.9 seconds. This fireball would rise, but they assumed that it would only begin to rise in the last quarter of its expansion phase, based upon empirical data. They were unable to make an accurate calculation of the maximum surface temperature of the fireball and ultimately settled for the maximum value they obtained from several other studies: 1,370 degrees Celsius. They then calculated the radiated heat at 600 meters from the surface of the fireball. This information was then used in the design of the Launch Escape System. These studies provided useful data for the requirements for the Launch Escape System and emergency planning. But they started with the assumption that the vehicle was exploding. NASA engineers also looked at the question of what set of circumstances could lead to such a situation in the first place. They determined that the most likely cause of an on-pad explosion of a Saturn V was a collision with the tower during liftoff. Colliding with the tower would immediately rupture the fuel tanks causing fuel to flow out and contact the hot engine exhaust, leading to an explosion in fractions of a second. Tower collisions had been a major concern for earlier rocket programs, including the Saturn I. Saturn program officials even placed cameras on the top of the Saturn I launch tower looking down to assist in manually determining if the rocket was sliding toward the tower. In 1964, David Mowery of the Control Applications Section at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama conducted an evaluation of the Saturn V liftoff. The primary purpose of Mowery’s study was to determine what factors could cause a tower collision. By knowing this, the designers of the Launch Escape System could develop sensors and electronic equipment for determining when this was about to happen to fire the escape rockets. The Saturn V did not simply rest on its launch pad through force of gravity. It was held down to the pad by four pairs of hold-down arms that kept the rocket secure until the five F-1 engines achieved their proper thrust, at which time the arms retracted and the rocket lifted off the pad. Mowery noted that due to structural considerations, the Saturn V could not be released instantaneously, so Saturn designers were developing a system to release the rocket gradually. The hold-down force would decrease linearly to zero in 0.6 seconds. But this system had to work perfectly or it could create a dangerous situation during liftoff. Mowery considered seven factors that could disturb the liftoff path of the vehicle. These were: a variation in the hold-down force of plus or minus 15%, a variation in thrust of 4%, engine misalignment, an offset in the vehicle’s center of gravity, wind, engine failure, and an “engine hardover.” Engine failure and engine hardover, unlike the other factors, were considered vehicle malfunctions and if they occurred for either of the engines closest to the tower—engines 1 and 2—they posed a danger during the initial liftoff phase. To steer the giant rocket in flight, the Saturn V’s huge F-1 engines could gimbal, or move, in several directions, pushed by actuators. In an engine hardover, a failed actuator would push the engine all the way to its maximum gimbal limit, rolling the rocket in the opposite direction and causing it to slide toward the tower. If this happened for one of the inboard engines before the Saturn V had risen above the height of the tower, it could push the Saturn V toward the tower. It took 7.5 seconds for the Saturn to clear the tower. Saturn V The biggest overall risk during a Saturn V launch was the rocket sliding into the tower during liftoff. Several factors would have to combine for this to happen. (credit: NASA) Mowery concluded that: “no problem as to tower collision exists for combined disturbances if a malfunction does not occur.” In other words, simply wind or a misaligned vehicle, even in combination, could not cause a tower collision. In addition, neither an engine failure nor an engine hardover for either of the inboard engines alone could cause a tower collision. But if any of the other factors occurred combined with an engine malfunction, the vehicle would roll and slide toward the tower and one of its large fins would collide with the tower structure, causing a catastrophe. Probably the most likely non-malfunction factor would be wind pushing the vehicle toward the tower. The Saturn V was designed to be capable of launching in windy conditions with no risk of tower collision—provided nothing else went wrong during liftoff. Of the two kinds of malfunction, engine failure posed the greatest overall risk because the vehicle was most susceptible to this failure for the longest period of time. An actuator failure between T minus zero and T plus 5.5 seconds could cause a tower collision. But engine failure at any time between T minus zero and T plus 7.5 seconds could cause a collision. NASA launched 13 Saturn V rockets without a single catastrophic failure. Although the vehicles did experience occasional engine problems in flight, an engine hardover never occurred, and these problems did not greatly affect mission performance. During the launch of the first vehicle, AS-501, Rocco Petrone watched the rocket lift off from his seat in launch control and kept his hand near the button that would close protective covers over the windows if the Saturn V exploded. But he always suspected that if something did go catastrophically wrong and the Saturn V detonated with the force of a small atomic bomb, he would simply keep watching instead. Dwayne Day can be reached at zirconic1@cox.net.

Debris With Telemetry-The Cyber Pathway To Kessler

Earthset Disabling control of hundreds of megaconstellation satellites could lead to cascading collisions in congested orbits. (credit: ESA/ID&Sense/ONiRiXEL) Debris with telemetry: the cyber pathway to Kessler by Daniel Morgan Monday, June 1, 2026 It is a Tuesday morning in the late 2020s. At a satellite operations center on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, a duty controller is halfway through a coffee when the first telemetry anomaly arrives. A spacecraft in the operator’s mid-inclination shell, one of several thousand small satellites at an altitude of roughly 550 kilometers, has failed to acknowledge a routine stationkeeping burn. Ninety seconds later, a second satellite in an adjacent orbital plane reports the same fault. Then a third. In a cascade that takes less than four minutes to develop, 200 satellites across three commercial megaconstellations stop responding to maneuver commands. A cyberattack against a satellite need not seize control of it. It need only deny control to the legitimate operator. The on-call engineer assumes a software regression and begins a rollback. The rollback fails. The propulsion controller on each affected satellite is no longer accepting authenticated commands. Telemetry continues to flow. Position reports continue to arrive. The actuators are inert. A senior systems architect, woken at home, is the first person in the building to use the word “intrusion.” The intrusion did not begin that Tuesday. It began 13 weeks earlier, when a contractor working on ground segment integration opened a spear-phishing email purporting to come from a regulatory body. The credentials harvested from that single compromise gave the attacker a foothold on a development network. From there, the path to a production telemetry, tracking, and command gateway took patience rather than brilliance. By the time the dormant payload triggered, it had already been signed by the satellites’ own update infrastructure. It overwrote the firmware governing the propulsion subsystem on each compromised spacecraft with a near-identical image that alters the cryptographic checks performed before a thrust command would execute. Every command from the legitimate operator would now be received, logged, and silently rejected. By 17:00 UTC on the same day, the first conjunction warning involving two of the affected spacecraft was issued. The predicted miss distance was 412 meters. Under normal circumstances, a small avoidance burn would have resolved it. On this Tuesday, the operator could only watch. In the language of orbital mechanics, 200 satellites had ceased to be operational and had become, in a single coordinated instant, debris with telemetry. A threat the architecture was not designed to address The scenario above is not a forecast. It is a plausible composition of vulnerabilities that already exist, joined together by orbital geometry. None of its steps requires a technological capability that does not currently exist. None of its dynamics are novel. What distinguishes it from the dozens of cascade scenarios in the technical literature is the trigger. In the canonical scenarios, the trigger is an accidental collision, a botched anti-satellite test, or a battery explosion. Here, the trigger is a line of code. A modern small satellite is, in functional terms, a flight-qualified data center with thrusters. Software updates, telemetry retrieval, and command uplinks are managed through ground stations that, in the commercial sector, increasingly operate under a “ground station as a service” model. The economic logic is sound, but the security implications are less so. The literature on space system cybersecurity has identified the same set of weaknesses for over a decade: weak or absent encryption on uplinks, single-factor authentication for command authority, unsigned firmware updates, and a general absence of redundant command paths that would allow an operator to override a compromised primary channel. A cyberattack against a satellite need not seize control of it. It need only deny control to the legitimate operator. That is the critical distinction. Hijacking a spacecraft requires either valid cryptographic credentials or the ability to forge them. Denying control requires only the ability to interfere with the legitimate command path. The threshold of capability is significantly lower, and the resulting failure mode is the one that matters for debris generation. A satellite that cannot maneuver is a non-maneuvering object in a maneuvering environment. It does not need to fail catastrophically. It only needs to fail to respond. Why this is plausible today Three structural features of the contemporary orbital regime turn an old class of vulnerability into a present systemic risk. The first is automation at scale. A constellation of several thousand satellites must rely on highly automated command and control. Manual oversight of each spacecraft is impossible. The same automation that allows an operator to manage a fleet of 5,000 spacecraft with a small team also allows a single compromise of the command pipeline to propagate to the entire fleet. The very property that makes megaconstellations commercially viable, namely homogeneity at scale, is the property that makes them attractive targets. The orbital environment does not care whether the cascade was started by a missile, a meteoroid, or a software update. Once it is running, the cause becomes a footnote. The second is ground segment exposure. Each ground station is a terrestrial network endpoint, often connected through vendor, cloud, or operator infrastructure. Each spacecraft authenticates commands using cryptographic keys that must be provisioned, rotated, and stored somewhere, and the somewhere is rarely as well protected as the spacecraft itself. The Viasat KA-SAT incident of February 2022 demonstrated, in operational rather than academic terms, that the ground segment of a satellite system can be attacked at scale, with effects that propagate beyond the targeted assets. KA-SAT did not produce orbital debris because the targeted assets were modems. The lesson generalizes. The third is orbital density. Parts of the region from 800 to 1,000 kilometers are already among the most debris-sensitive orbital bands even in the absence of any deliberate event. The system is closer to the edge than the public conversation reflects. A correlated loss of maneuvering capability across a substantial fraction of an orbital shell is not the only way to push it over. It is, however, among the more plausible. What happens next The temporal evolution of a cascade triggered by simultaneous loss of maneuvering across a substantial fraction of an orbital shell has been examined in recent modelling work, with collision-to-cascade timelines on the order of days under plausible LEO debris densities. The qualitative dynamics are robust across modelling assumptions, even where the precise timeline is contested. At T+0, the payload executes. Operators retain telemetry. Public catalogues continue to list the objects as active. Conjunction warnings begin to flag predicted close approaches involving the affected spacecraft, but the warnings are addressed to operators who can no longer act on them. Within the first day, the first collision occurs. Two non-maneuvering satellites of several hundred kilograms converge at a relative velocity in the order of 14 kilometers per second. The kinetic energy is sufficient to fragment both spacecraft entirely, producing hundreds of trackable fragments and tens of thousands of smaller, lethal, but untrackable ones. Within two days, the expanding fragment cloud has intersected the orbital paths of additional spacecraft. Within three days, the local debris flux in the most contested band crosses into a regime where the collision rate exceeds the natural decay rate. The cascade, in the technical sense Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais defined in 1978, has begun. The orbital environment does not care whether the cascade was started by a missile, a meteoroid, or a software update. Once it is running, the cause becomes a footnote. Why current regulation fails The existing regulatory architecture is the product of a different era and a different threat model. National licensing regimes have made meaningful progress on debris mitigation. The US Federal Communications Commission tightened its post-mission disposal rule in 2022. European agencies and regulators have moved in the same direction, including through ESA’s updated debris mitigation requirements and the Zero Debris Charter. The general direction of travel is toward shorter disposal timelines and more rigorous demonstration of disposal capability at the licensing stage. What these regimes do not, in general, contain is any mandatory cybersecurity standard for the satellites being licensed. The contrast with terrestrial critical infrastructure regulation is striking. Operators of electricity transmission networks, water utilities, and financial services infrastructure are subject in most developed jurisdictions to detailed cybersecurity obligations, including incident reporting, penetration testing, and supply chain security requirements. Operators of megaconstellations, whose failure modes include the contamination of the orbital environment for decades, are subject to almost none. The voluntary architecture is more developed than the binding one, which is both a strength and a weakness. The UNCOPUOS Long-Term Sustainability Guidelines, the European Space Agency’s Zero Debris Charter, and the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee’s mitigation guidelines together form a credible body of best practice. However, they have no penalty for non-compliance. They are, in a phrase that has begun to circulate among space lawyers, handshake agreements in a gunfight. The architecture assumes that the parties who matter will comply. In a scenario where the relevant actor is a state-sponsored adversary deliberately seeking to create debris, the assumption does not hold. A further problem sits underneath the regulatory one. Even if the framework were adequate, its activation depends on attribution. A cyber-induced collision, viewed from the outside, is initially indistinguishable from an accidental conjunction failure. Forensic confirmation that a precipitating event was caused by a deliberate intrusion takes months, and the entities best placed to establish the cyber character of the event are often those with the strongest commercial reasons to characterize it as an anomaly. Anomalies trigger insurance payouts. Attacks may trigger exclusions. Attacks invite questions about the operator’s security posture that may threaten its license. By the time attribution is publicly established, the cascade is mature and the strategic moment for a calibrated response has passed. What should be done The prevention architecture is not technically difficult to design. It is politically and bureaucratically deferred. Four measures, in combination, would materially reduce the probability of the scenario described above. None requires a new treaty. None requires a technological breakthrough. The first is mandatory cybersecurity baselines for licensed satellite operations. National licensing authorities should condition the grant of a commercial satellite license on demonstrated implementation of cryptographically signed firmware updates, multi-factor authentication for command authority with at least one factor held by the operator and not by any third-party ground-station provider, and default-safe behavior in the event of loss of command authority. These measures are common practice in adjacent industries. They are not novel. Their absence reflects a regulatory choice rather than a technical constraint. Voluntary agreements are, in a phrase that has begun to circulate among space lawyers, handshake agreements in a gunfight. The second is mandatory redundancy in maneuvering capability for spacecraft above a defined mass threshold. A satellite whose collision avoidance depends on a single propulsion subsystem and a single command path is a satellite whose continued safe operation can be defeated by a single failure, accidental or adversarial. A requirement that satellites above a sensible mass threshold carry two independent propulsion subsystems with independent command authentication, and that they be capable of executing autonomous collision avoidance in the absence of ground command, would substantially raise the threshold for the kind of mass disablement the scenario contemplates. The third is a defined incident-reporting obligation. Operators should be required to report maneuver anomalies, command authentication failures, and confirmed or suspected intrusions to the licensing authority within timelines short enough to be operationally useful. The current reliance on voluntary disclosure produces an attribution architecture in which the entities best placed to identify the cyber character of an event are those with the strongest reasons to obscure it. Mandatory reporting, with credible verification, corrects the asymmetry. The fourth is parallel investment in active debris removal (ADR) as an insurance against the failure of the preventive measures, not as a substitute for them. Active debris removal is technically credible, with key rendezvous, capture, and proximity operations demonstrated in precursor missions, but operational removal of large debris objects remains limited and expensive. The legal complications, particularly the jurisdictional rule that a debris object remains under the jurisdiction of its registering state indefinitely, are real. They are not insurmountable. They mean only that ADR cannot be the primary tool of cascade prevention and must be developed alongside the regulatory measures, not in place of them. Three of these measures could be implemented unilaterally by major spacefaring states without waiting for any international process. The FCC could initiate a rulemaking on mandatory firmware signing, building on the precedent of its disposal rule. The European Union could clarify the application of NIS2 to spacecraft as well as to ground-based service delivery. The UK Space Agency, the French space agency CNES, and their peers could each adopt licensing conditions requiring redundant command authentication and incident reporting. None requires international agreement. Each, on its own, would close one of the principal vectors in the scenario. The case for these measures does not depend on assigning a high probability to the specific cascade described above. It depends only on assigning a non-trivial probability, multiplied by the magnitude of the consequences, and comparing the result to the modest costs of prevention. By that calculation, the case is overwhelming. By the calculations that have actually governed regulatory practice over the past decade, the case has been deferred. The technology to reduce this risk already exists. What is missing is not basic capability, but enforceable standards. The treaties are not the immediate constraint. The license conditions are. They can be changed at any time. They have not been. The next cascade may not begin with an explosion. It may begin with a login. Daniel Morgan is a space governance researcher exploring how regulatory systems must adapt as human and commercial activity moves beyond Earth.

Locating A Radioactive Payload

SNAP The SNAP-19 debris on the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel off the California coast. In 1968, several search efforts were mounted to locate the radioactive payload, which proved elusive. (credit: NASA) Lost and found on the Pacific floor: the Nimbus SNAP-19 nuclear generators by Dwayne A. Day Monday, June 1, 2026 On May 18, 1968, a Thorad-Agena rocket carrying the third NASA Nimbus Earth observation satellite lifted off from its pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the California coast. As it rose it started to arc out over the Pacific. But within two minutes, as it was over the Santa Barbara Channel, it began straying off course and the flight safety officer blew it to smithereens. Among the debris falling into the water north of San Miguel Island were two SNAP-19 radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs, carrying plutonium fuel. The satellite was designated Nimbus B-1. Its RTGs were a new design developed after a 1964 accident involving a Transit satellite equipped with an RTG spread radiation in the atmosphere. They provided about 50 watts of power. The SNAP-19 was designed to contain the radioactive material during an accident. Whereas NASA could have left the rocket and satellite debris where it was, the plutonium had to be recovered. SNAP The May 18, 1968 launch of the third Nimbus satellite took place at night from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Two minutes after launch the range safety officer blew up the rocket after it strayed off course. Debris fell in the Santa Barbara Channel. (credit: Peter Hunter) Lost, found, lost Immediately after the accident, government officials established radiation monitoring sites along the coast to detect any radioactivity from the mishap. No radioactive contamination was detected in any of the air, water, soil, plant, and fish samples they took. SNAP A diagram of the Nimbus satellite inside its payload fairing. Nimbus had a unique design that included a central lattice structure. (credit: Sandia) Trajectory data had been obtained from a transponder in the satellite, and an FPS-16 radar that skin-tracked the spacecraft. The impact point of the debris was calculated to be approximately 7.4 kilometers (four nautical miles) north of Harris Point on San Miguel Island. SNAP The SNAP-19 generators were relatively small. Two were carried on the Nimbus-B satellite. (credit: NASA) The Navy immediately set out to search the location. The Agena upper stage that carried the Nimbus was fitted with two water-actuated “pingers” designed to operate for ten days. But the search was hampered by weather and no sound contact was made. The first search was called off on May 29, 1968. SNAP The two SNAP-19 generators were intended to provide power to the Nimbus satellite after its solar panels had degraded. (credit: Sandia) SNAP The search for the Nimbus debris went through several phases. Initial searches in May and July 1968 did not turn up any debris. It was later located in September, but then temporarily lost again before the SNAP generators were recovered in October. (credit: Sandia) Ocean Systems, Inc., under contract with the Navy, was requested to plan a second search operation. The oil supply boat Sea Tender was used as a support ship, carrying a side-looking sonar and an underwater television system and OSI diving equipment. The mission began on July 19, but did not arrive on station until July 24. The search was conducted in a “prime” area. But this search also did not identify any debris and was terminated on July 27. SNAP Swan was a recovery vessel operated by Sandia to deal with nuclear payloads lost in the ocean. The lab intended to start practicing with the ship and equipment in 1968 when it was pressed into an actual recovery of nuclear materials. (credit: Sandia) The Sandia nuclear laboratory was responsible for supporting underwater nuclear testing operations and had been developing a capability to search for and recover nuclear materials at sea. Sandia had already been planning to conduct a test search on a practice object near Santa Cruz Island in 1968, but the loss of the Nimbus payload now provided a real target. SNAP The Deep Ocean Work Boat, or DOWB, was a three-man deep submergence vehicle used in the search for the SNAP-19 RTGs. (credit: General Motors) Sandia’s resources included the support ship Swan. Swan could support a deep sea submersible. General Motors had built the unimaginatively named Deep Ocean Work Boat (DOWB) submersible, and the GM Automatic Ship Positioning System (ASPS), which were carried by Swan. The DOWB was a three-man deep submersible rated to 1,981 meters (6,500 feet). The waters near San Miguel were only about a hundred meters deep, which was not a challenge for the DOWB and could even be accessed by deep sea divers. The ASPS was a portable array consisting of three ship-mounted hydrophones and associated electronic gear. The ASPS was capable of continuously monitoring the position of the DOWB relative to the support ship. On September 23, the Swan departed Santa Barbara Harbor and arrived on station in the early morning. On Tuesday, September 24, just as the DOWB was about to end its search for the day, it located a large section of the missile shroud. This was marked with a surface buoy that was referred to as “Delta I.” The debris was at a depth of 91 meters. SNAP Wreckage of the Thor fairing on the ocean floor. (credit: Sandia) The next day diving continued and debris was again sighted. This consisted of shroud sections, spherical tanks, clamps, and assorted electronics. But observers also spotted what they described as a child’s “jungle gym.” This was the Nimbus portion of the payload and it was marked with an additional surface buoy, referred to as “Delta II.” The Swan’s position was also marked. The DOWB and Swan were also used to lay a cable on the floor to mark the location, but this was apparently dragged out of position by the Swan’s anchor. On September 26, search operations resumed, but the DOWB could not locate the Delta II wreckage on the sea floor. On September 27, during continued search operations, the SNAP-19 was found and photographed. It was positively identified by representatives of NASA, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Sandia. SNAP The SNAP generators were positively identified with photographs taken on the ocean floor. (credit: Sandia) But again on September 28 and 29, efforts to relocate the SNAP-19 were unsuccessful. According to a report, “It became evident that a strong wind and strong current, working in opposite directions, had moved the surface buoys.” The mission was terminated on the evening of September 29. SNAP Deep sea divers were involved in the Nimbus recovery. The wreckage was at a depth of 91 meters. (credit: NASA) The Swan went out again the following week. The generators were re-located on October 4. The RTGs were recovered on the afternoon of October 9 using the DOWB and “hard hat” divers. The nuclear generators had no visible damage except for the loss of a small portion of graphite coating on one generator. They were placed in a steel drum containing fresh water. The drum was sealed and loaded on a truck and shipped to Mound Laboratories. SNAP Recovery of the Nimbus debris in late 1968. (credit: NASA) SNAP The SNAP generators being placed in a barrel on board the Swan recovery ship. No radiation was detected after the accident. (credit: NASA) Later examination found no radiation in the drum’s water. The RTGs had remained intact. Throughout the entire operation, no radiation leakage was detected. The new RTG design had been proven in the real-world crucible of a launch accident. At Mound Laboratories, the plutonium fuel was extracted and reused. SNAP Several Nimbus Earth observation satellites were launched starting in the 1960s. They had a distinctive design. The third satellite was equipped with radioisotope thermoelectric generators in addition to its solar panels. (credit: NASA) Launching Nimbus-3 In April 1969, NASA successfully launched a Nimbus satellite, again carrying two SNAP-19B RTGs. This one reached orbit and was designated Nimbus-3. NASA later successfully used SNAP power sources on several Apollo surface missions, but the United States adopted a policy of no longer placing them in Earth orbit. Further reading: Environmental Surveillance Southwestern Radiological Health Laboratory, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, National Center for Radiological Health, “NIMBUS-B/SNAP-19 Launch, May 18, 1968, Off-Site Radiological Surveillance,” December 1968. Sandia Laboratories, “Underwater Search Operation: Nimbus B/SNAP 19 Generators,” November 1968. Maya Wei-Haas, “The Day the Nimbus Weather Satellite Exploded,” Smithsonian Magazine, January 9, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/day-nimbus-weather-satellie-180961686/ “SNAP 19 Radioisotope Power Supply: Operation and Maintenance. Technical Manual (Report).” January 1, 1967. doi:10.2172/4513086. OSTI 4513086. Dwayne Day can be reached at zirconic1@cox.net.

The "Public" In Public Space Agencies

Earthset The Earth setting behind the Moon as seen by the Artemis 2 crew. (credit: NASA) The “public” in public space agency by Alex Li Monday, June 1, 2026 “I would suggest to you that when you look up here, you’re not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you. And if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.” — Jeremy Hansen, Artemis 2 mission specialist On April 10, 2026, the Orion spacecraft carrying Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen came home after a nearly ten-day mission around the Moon. The mission took the crew roughly a quarter of a million miles from Earth. At its farthest point, they were farther from home than anyone else had ever gone. While a lot has been written about what this means for the broader Artemis effort, what I want to focus on is something more nuanced and, to my surprise, maybe even more important: It is the way Artemis 2 slipped into ordinary life; into couches, kitchens, group chats, lunch breaks, and family conversations among people who, during most weeks, aren’t even thinking about outer space at all. That was the part I did not expect, but maybe I should have. A surprising kind of attention One of my friends is a primary care doctor. Her days are full of actual human problems: aching shoulders, strange lab results, worried families, and the steady stream of small emergencies that make up ordinary medicine. Outer space is not exactly on her daily list of concerns. I would never have guessed that she would be texting me about NASA mission timing, or asking about the difference between a launch window and a launch time. I know the Apollo comparison is obviou, but for my generation, it’s not a memory but rather something we inherited from documentaries, grainy footage, and conversations with our elders. Then Artemis 2 happened. And there she was, asking questions with the kind of unfiltered kid-like curiosity adults tend to lose somewhere among the daily grind of being responsible for things. Something about that rocket, that crew, and that loop around the Moon had caught her. It would not let go. She was not alone. Another friend told me her nephew now wants to be an astronaut. He watched the April 1 launch, and somewhere around liftoff he told his parents that he wanted to do that exact thing: the rocket thing, with the people inside it. These moments stopped me for a second.‍ It made me think, in a small way, of what Apollo must have done to a generation of American kids in the 1960s. Those launches came through living-room televisions and made the Moon feel less like a distant object in the sky and more like a place people might actually go. Maybe even a place someone you knew could go. I know the Apollo comparison is obvious. Maybe too obvious. But for my generation, it’s not a memory but rather something we inherited from documentaries, grainy footage, and conversations with our elders. With Artemis 2, I felt like I was watching that kind of attention arrive in real time for the first time in my own life. The odd thing is that I should have seen it coming. I have followed Artemis and its precursor programs for almost a decade. I have written about the architectural pivots, the hardware delays, the political bargains, and the uncrewed test flight that made this mission possible. If anyone had asked me whether a successful crewed return to lunar flight would capture public attention, I would have said yes. But I would have hedged. I would have guessed it would last for a news cycle, maybe two. That seemed reasonable. After all, the first crewed launch of the Commercial Crew Program was, by every objective measure, a major milestone. It was the first time American astronauts had launched from American soil since the Space Shuttle retired. It earned a special report, but then by dinner time, much of the country had moved on. Yet somehow, Artemis 2 was different, significantly so. Not just bigger but stickier. It stayed in the room longer: the launch felt like an event, and the splashdown felt like a homecoming. NPR described the reaction as nationwide, with stadium Jumbotrons and ordinary viewers pulled into the same moment. That’s what shocked me. A Starship test flight can earn a C-block mention and some B-roll, and among space people it can dominate the conversation for days. But an Artemis 2 splashdown could completely take over a Friday night, and not just for the space community. It reached people who don’t know the difference between Orion and Dragon, and who likely don’t care to learn it unless the right story gives them a reason. And so in this way, Artemis 2 clarified something for me: the kind of attention that pulls a whole country into the same moment is, even now, something only a public space agency can reliably produce. It can pull a primary care doctor and a curious kid into the same conversation. Even in this commercial era of outer space, that unifying job is still NASA’s to do. What only a public agency can do Don’t get me wrong. The commercial sector has a significant role to play in humanity’s future in outer space. Nothing here is an argument against that fact. SpaceX has changed expectations around what an orbital launch should cost and how often it should fly. Blue Origin is building systems that will matter in the next phase of Artemis. ULA remains one of the quiet workhorses of American launch, and is now positioned to carry the Centaur V into the lunar architecture. There are countless other commercial companies and startups in the wing as well. Thus, commercial space is not the villain in this story. In many ways, it is the tool that makes the next chapter of human exploration possible. I have written that argument before, and I still fundamentally believe it. My point here is narrower, and it focuses on the other side of the coin. That there are things a public space agency can do that a private company, however innovative or visionary, cannot quite replicate. Not because these companies lack technical capability, but because they lack a public mandate. A company can inspire. A company can run a flawless livestream. A company can even build a real fandom. But a company is not designed to turn a national achievement into a public commons. Artemis 2 gave millions of people a reason to stop, point, text a friend, call over a child, or look up from dinner and care about the same thing at the same time. NASA was created with that public purpose in mind. The National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 declared that American activities in outer space “should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of all mankind.” That creed is not just ceremonial language. It shows up in concrete places. One of those places is imagery. A schoolteacher in Nebraska can pull an Artemis 2 image into a Monday morning slide deck without phoning a licensing department; a local newspaper can run the splashdown photo on the front page; and a blogger like me can build a post around Earthset, credit NASA, and get on with thinking about what the image means. And that matters. When the Artemis 2 crew released Earthset, the image did not become premium content locked behind a platform or a brand asset guarded by a watermark. It became a shared visual inheritance. Classrooms, newspapers, social feeds, and weird little space law and policy blogs could all hold the same picture up to the light. Commercial operators have every right to protect their imagery, their trademarks, and their brand. I am not annoyed at any of them for doing so. But the thing a public space agency produces, almost as a byproduct of doing its job, is a public commons. Multiplied across decades of missions, those small acts add up to one of NASA’s most underpriced contributions: not just rockets and spacecrafts, not just data and science, but a public visual archive of wonders that anyone can pull without asking for permission. That kind of value does not show up as revenue. It does not fit neatly into a budgetary spreadsheet. But it is part of what the public is buying. And the image archive is only one piece of what a public mandate can produce. The bigger piece is what Artemis 2 just did to a Friday night news cycle. It gave millions of people a reason to stop, point, text a friend, call over a child, or look up from dinner and care about the same thing at the same time. A crater called Carroll There is another thing a public space agency can do, and Artemis 2 showed it to me in a way I didn’t see coming. During the lunar flyby, mission specialist Jeremy Hansen, speaking on behalf of the crew, proposed names for two previously unknown small lunar craters. One was Integrity, after the Orion spacecraft. The other was Carroll. Carroll Crater was inspired by Carroll Taylor Wiseman, Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife. Carroll died of cancer in 2020 after a five-year battle. She was 46, a pediatric nurse practitioner and the mother of two daughters. The crater name still has to go through the International Astronomical Union; even honors have paperwork. But emotionally, the permanence had already arrived the moment the words were broadcast out of the spacecraft. Wiseman put out a hand. Koch wiped tears. The four floated together for a long hug, and a lot of people watching cried with them. On paper, a crater naming is a small bureaucratic thing. Coordinates, designation, review, approval. But what made the moment special was that four astronauts, flying a public mission aboard a publicly owned spacecraft launched by a publicly funded rocket, used a quiet minute of public airtime to put a moment of private, yet profoundly relatable, human emotion into the permanent public record of the Moon. That is a thing only a public space agency can do with the type of dignity that this moment deserves. I do not say that as a dig at private companies. A commercial operator could certainly honor someone. But the institutional context changes the meaning of the gesture. In a commercial setting, the same moment would almost inevitably have to pass through brand calculation, something I have seen this in person. Someone would ask how it reads. Someone would ask whether it belongs in the rollout. Someone would worry that it looks like content that the company can’t control. NASA does not merely sell access to this space, but through these public missions and experiences like how the Carroll Carter came about, it gives the public a way to see itself there. NASA’s moment landed differently because it was not selling anything. It was not a brand activation. It was a public mission carrying the fact that astronauts are not symbols first. They are spouses, parents, sons, daughters, relatives, friends, co-workers, neighbors, and people who carry grief, and by extension what it means to be human, with them even when they leave the planet. And in this way, Hansen’s announcement was less about leaving Earth than about bringing its human inhabitants, with all of our emotional heritage, along. In that minute, NASA did something that the commercial industry is not equipped to do. It carried our marriages and joys, funerals and sadness, and all the ordinary sauce of being human into a frame normally reserved for the cosmos. It invited us to see a place in the universe that would otherwise feel vast and devoid of humanity as somewhere touched by human feeling and memory. Commercial operators may one day put more humans into outer space than NASA ever will. I hope they do. But getting humans into space is not quite the same thing as extending the human experience beyond Earth. One task is transportation. The other is both cultural and emotional: taking a realm that feels inhuman and remote, and making it something we can emotionally recognize and perhaps one day inhabit. The first task is increasingly commercial. The second still belongs to a public space agency. This is not because commercial spaceflight lacks human ambition, but because its central relationship is transactional. Meanwhile, NASA’s relationship to outer space, when done right, is civic. It does not merely sell access to this space, but through these public missions and experiences like how the Carroll Carter came about, it gives the public a way to see itself there. One line item I am glad to pay for I pay federal taxes. Like everyone else, I am sometimes annoyed by the waste, inefficiency, and strange compromises that come with how those taxes are spent. NASA is not perfect either. The SLS saga exists for a reason. The agency can be slow, expensive, political, and frustrating. I don’t think a defense of NASA requires pretending otherwise. But NASA is still the line item I have the fewest complaints about. The agency’s fiscal year 2026 budget sits around $25 billion, or roughly a third of one percent of total federal spending. For that price, the United States gets a Moon program that is trying, however messily, to work. It gets a science fleet that stretches across the solar system, a space station still circling above us like a guardian angel, and a media archive that classrooms and curious people can actually use. And, every so often, it gives us a moment when the country looks up from whatever it was doing and cares about the same thing at the same time. For the first time in a long time, Artemis2w delivered that last item. It did so in a way that led to a friend’s nephew deciding he wanted to wear the spacesuit, and a physician friend who normally has zero interest in any of this texting me about it unprompted. If you are keeping a ledger, put those intangibles on the revenue side. When a public space agency succeeds, it brings a value that is not simply a number on a chart. It is the value of unity and curiosity. None of this is to argue that NASA should be the end all be all of every outer space mission or project. Commercial space entities are already doing many things better than a public space agency can do, and they will keep doing more. And good, they should. The point is not to preserve NASA as the only actor in outer space. The point is to preserve the kind of work only a public space actor can do. The imagery any of us can use, the broadcast anyone can turn on, a crater named for a family member rather than a sponsor. Kids deciding at liftoff that the spacesuits could one day be theirs. A doctor who has patients in the morning but still wants to know how a spacecraft comes home from the Moon. Those things are not sentimental extras. They are part of why exploration still earns its keep in our uniquely human society. The SLS saga will continue, and I will no doubt have more complaints. But when a public space agency succeeds, it brings a value that is not simply a number on a chart. It is the value of unity and curiosity. It is a reminder that a public space agency, funded by all of us (even the rocket industry-bound teenagers who are taxed on their summer job salaries) can still make a whole country look up at once. And that’s not just a rocket program. It is the mirror Hansen was talking about, and it is the one line item I am glad to pay for as a taxpayer. Alex Li is the creator of #TheSpaceBar blog (www.onthespacebar.com), where he primarily writes about the legal, policy, and regulatory aspects of outer space.

Larry Goldberg Talks About The Tesla IPO

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Star Ships Are Meant To Fly

Starship liftoff SpaceX’s Starship lifts off on its Flight 12 mission May 22. (credit: SpaceX) Starships are meant to eventually fly by Jeff Foust Tuesday, May 26, 2026 In a week filled with remarkable events for SpaceX, perhaps the strangest was the cameo appearance last Thursday during the company’s webcast for the latest Starship launch attempt. On a previous flight, it was Elon Musk who dropped by the webcast; this time, it was… Nicki Minaj? For all the focus on Starships and other rockets, the prospectus showed SpaceX today is a company that makes the majority of its revenue on telecommunications and spends most of its money on artificial intelligence. Yes, it was the singer whose claim to fame was the song “Starship,” recorded long before SpaceX publicly announced plans for a vehicle that would eventually become Starship. While this was the 12th test flight of Starship/Super Heavy, this was the first that Minaj attended—or any launch, for that matter, she said. “This is a lot of fun. I'm excited,” she said, wearing a SpaceX Starship shirt. “Major shout out to Elon. Elon, thank you for everything that you're doing for humanity.” Alas, on that day Starship was not meant to fly. The countdown got stuck in a cycle where it exited a hold at T-40 seconds only to stop and return to the T-40 mark several times before SpaceX scrubbed the launch for the day. The company later said a hydraulic pin that holds an umbilical arm on the launch tower in place failed to retract, keeping the arm from swinging away. The scrub was an interlude between two key events for SpaceX that week. The day before, it released its long-awaited prospectus for its initial public offering, providing the first official, detailed look at the company’s finances and ambitions. For all the focus on Starships and other rockets, the prospectus showed SpaceX today is a company that makes the majority of its revenue on telecommunications and spends most of its money on artificial intelligence. In 2025, SpaceX recorded $18.7 billion in revenue, with $11.4 billion coming from its connectivity business line, which includes Starlink, compared to $4.1 billion from space—launches and services like Dragon missions—and $3.2 billion from AI, which comes from the xAI acquisition earlier this year. Starlink, as many expected, is a cash cow for the company. The connectivity business reported an operating income of $4.4 billion in 2025, up from $2 billion in 2024. Space has an operating loss of $657 million in 2025 because of Starship expenditures—$3 billion in 2025 alone—although that part of SpaceX broke even in 2024. However, AI has an operating loss of nearly $6.4 billion for the year. The company had an overall net loss in 2025 of $4.9 billion, counting interest and other expenses, but was profitable in 2024: a net income of $791 million. What was also remarkable about the prospectus is the company’s vast ambitions. “We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (TAM) in human history,” it stated, with that market totalling $28.5 trillion worldwide. By comparison, the World Bank estimated the gross domestic product of the United States in 2024 at $28.75 billion. The vast majority of that addressable market is in AI: $26.5 trillion, mostly in enterprise applications. Connectivity accounted for $1.6 trillion while space came in at just $370 billion: a little more than 1% of the overall market that Space envisions. Yet the document made clear that without space, there is no massive SpaceX TAM. While the market for selling launches and related services might be tiny compared to connectivity and AI, it is essential to both of those markets since SpaceX needs those capabilities for its own products and services. Starship liftoff Starship during its brief time in space on Flight 12. (credit: SpaceX) And that future depends on Starship. “Any failure or delay in the development of Starship at scale or in achieving the required launch cadence, reusability and capabilities thereafter would delay or limit our ability to execute our growth strategy, including the deployment of next-generation satellites, global satellite-to-mobile connectivity, and orbital AI compute, which could materially adversely affect our business, financial condition, results of operations, and future prospects,” the company stated. “Achieving our targeted launch cadence will require significant progress on several key milestones and the continued investment of significant capital resources,” the company stated. While SpaceX has built up its connectivity business using Falcon 9 launches, it is depending on Starship to launch larger future-generation Starlink satellites with greater throughput and direct-to-device capabilities that will allow broadband connectivity directly to smartphones. “Our current operational rockets, including Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, are not capable of deploying V3 satellites and V2 Mobile satellites,” the company said in the prospectus. However, a Starship will be able to carry 60 of the V3 broadband satellites and 50 of the V2 Mobile satellites. Likewise, SpaceX’s ambitions for orbital data centers also require Starship. Moreover, the company said that while failing to achieve full reusability for Starship—yet to be demonstrated since the Starship upper stage has not been recovered on its test flights so far—would increase costs for Starlink, “AI compute satellites at scale need full Starship reusability to be economically compelling.” “Achieving our targeted launch cadence will require significant progress on several key milestones and the continued investment of significant capital resources,” the company stated, adding it faces “a number of material challenges and uncertainties” to do so. That was on display Friday when SpaceX made its second attempt to launch Starship. This vehicle is the first version 3 model of Starship, with significant upgrades to both the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage, including the introduction of new Raptor 3 engines. For Super Heavy, the changes included an integrated “hot staging” ring at the top of the booster that remains attached after stage separation rather than detach as it had previously; the ring allows exhaust from the Starship upper stage’s engines to escape when the engines ignite before stage separation. The booster also has three, rather than four, grid fins that are larger and will also be used to catch the booster when it returns to the launch site. The Starship upper stage has a redesigned propulsion system to address the fires seen on some V2 flights and also accommodate larger propellant tanks. Other upgrades include docking ports to allow Starships to dock with each other in orbit and transfer propellant, a key technology for missions beyond Earth orbit, including lunar landing missions. Starship liftoff Starship making its “soft splashdown” in the Indian Ocean. (credit: SpaceX) Starship V3 is also intended to be the vehicle that SpaceX will put into service, carrying up to 100 tons of payload to low Earth orbit. Those flights could begin in the second half of this year, deploying Starlink satellites and carrying propellant for in-space transfer tests. The countdown the second time around—this time, without a cameo by Minaj—went smoothly, and at 6:30 pm EDT the vehicle lifted off. The ascent appeared to go smoothly but was not without incident: one of the 33 Raptor engines shut down about 100 seconds into flight, but the vehicle continued to climb. At stage separation, Super Heavy was supposed to perform a “boostback” burn: while SpaceX did not plan to return the booster to the launch site, they wanted to demonstrate maneuvers leading to a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. However, the booster appeared to suffer multiple engine failures—possibly an engine failure that took out neighboring engines—and the maneuver ended early. Super Heavy plummeted to Earth, with telemetry showing it traveling at nearly 1,500 kilometers per hour just before it hit the water. One of the six Raptor engines on the Starship upper stage also shut down early in its burn. The other five engines continued to fire for about a minute beyond the scheduled shutdown time. “It does look like we are within bounds of what we analyzed” if an engine failed, said SpaceX’s Dan Huot during the webcast. “I wouldn’t call it nominal orbital insertion, but we’re on a trajectory that we had analyzed, and it’s within bounds.” SpaceX has invested $15 billon on Starship so far, including $3 billion last year and nearly $1 billion in the first quarter of 2026. It was good enough for one of the mission’s goals. While on its suborbital arc, Starship’s “Pez” payload door opened and the vehicle ejected 20 Starlink mass simulators. It also deployed two “Dodger Dog” spacecraft, so named because their cylindrical propellant tanks extended beyond their body. They were equipped with camera intended to inspect while in space. SpaceX did not attempt a relight of a Raptor engine, as planned, but the spacecraft handled reentry with few issues. It made its “soft” splashdown under propulsion in the Indian Ocean, tipping over and exploding as expected to conclude the 66-minute flight. Well before this Flight 12 mission, SpaceX officials had suggested that it might move ahead with an orbital launch attempt. However, the Raptor malfunctions suggest at least one more suborbital test flight might be needed before trying to do an orbital launch, let alone an orbital launch where both the booster and ship return to land at Starbase. SpaceX has invested $15 billon on Starship so far, including $3 billion last year and nearly $1 billion in the first quarter of 2026, the company revealed in its prospectus. Despite the development struggles, there is no turning back now: the company’s future, including its trillion-dollar valuation as it goes public in the coming weeks, depends on Starship, even if launch is just small part of the company's business. Starships are meant to make SpaceX’s IPO fly. Jeff Foust (jeff@thespacereview.com) is the editor and publisher of The Space Review, and a senior staff writer with SpaceNews. He also operates the Spacetoday.net web site. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author alone. Note: we are now moderating comments. There will be a delay in posting comments and no guarantee that