Jared Isaacman Tapped To Head NASA

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump announced Jared Isaacman as his pick to lead the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, pilot and commercial astronaut, has made two trips to space aboard SpaceX capsules in fully private missions organized through his Polaris program. He has partnered closely with Elon Musk and invested hundreds of millions of dollars as a key customer of SpaceX’s expanding private astronaut business, according to Reuters.

“Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in Space science, technology, and exploration,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

Isaacman seemed eager to take the reins, noting that the second space age has only just begun. “It is the honor of a lifetime to serve in this role and to work alongside NASA’s extraordinary team to realize our shared dreams of exploration and discovery,” Isaacman said.

Isaacman’s nomination will need Senate confirmation next year. If approved, he will replace current NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

On Thursday Dec 5, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) head Bill Nelson announced the Artemis program, which aims to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972, has been delayed.

The agency is now targeting April 2026 for Artemis II, a mission that will take astronauts around the moon and back, and mid-2027 for Artemis III, a lunar landing mission. NASA explained that the delays will provide additional time to address the Orion spacecraft's environmental control and life support systems.

“The Artemis campaign is the most daring, technically challenging, collaborative, international endeavor humanity has ever set out to do,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in a press release. “We have made significant progress on the Artemis campaign over the past four years, and I’m proud of the work our teams have done to prepare us for this next step forward in exploration as we look to learn more about Orion’s life support systems to sustain crew operations during Artemis II. We need to get this next test flight right. That’s how the Artemis campaign succeeds.”

Introduced in 2017, Artemis is part of NASA’s plan to lay the groundwork for future human missions to Mars and reestablish a human presence on the moon. According to Reuters, the U.S. is expected to invest about $93 billion in the program through 2025.

The second and third missions in the space agency’s Artemis program—which seeks to return Americans to the moon—were each delayed nearly one year.  U.S. efforts to return Americans to the moon for the first time in half a century have suffered a setback.

During a press conference Tuesday afternoon, NASA officials announced that the Artemis II and Artemis III moon missions—planned for this year and next, respectively—will be pushed to September 2025 and September 2026. Artemis II is expected to put NASA astronauts in lunar orbit, while Artemis III aims to land them on the moon, where they would become the first humans to visit the lunar south pole.  The Artemis program is effectively the descendant of the Apollo missions, which concluded decades earlier. But unlike Apollo, it represents a shift toward leveraging private sector companies, such as SpaceX and Blue Origin, for key vehicle components.  Despite speculation that the Artemis lunar landing could be pushed to Artemis IV—which NASA affirmed is still on track for 2028—the space agency said no changes will be made to the flight plan of either mission, and no flights will be added. However, for a variety of reasons, many related to safety, both Artemis II and III will fly later than initially planned.  As Jim Free, associate administrator of NASA, put it: “We’ll launch when we’re ready.”

Attending Tuesday’s press conference were Free, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Deputy Associate Administrator of the Moon to Mars program Amit Kshatriya, and Associate Administrator of the Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate Catherine Koerner. The four officials—plus representatives from NASA industry partners such as SpaceX and Lockheed Martin—fielded questions from media about why the missions were delayed  According to NASA, several issues discovered during Artemis I, which carried the agency’s reusable Orion capsule around the moon in 2022, are causing delays to Artemis II. These center around the spacecraft’s heat shield, abort capabilities, and electrical systems and could pose threats its occupants.  Kshatriya said heat shield erosion during Artemis I caused pieces of the thermal cover to fly off—an outcome not predicted by NASA. The agency said it discovered the issue while rewatching the watershed flight and has spent “the bulk of 2023” working to understand its root cause.  Orion is also dealing with a design flaw in the motor valve circuitry for its life support system, which was tested and approved for Artemis II but not the subsequent mission. The spacecraft’s digital motor controllers are hampering its carbon dioxide scrubber, which absorbs the gas to provide breathable air for astronauts. Artemis I did not test any life support systems, but they will be added to Artemis II along with a new abort system.  Further, NASA found a deficiency in Orion’s batteries. The issue won’t hinder the spacecraft’s ability to separate from the booster in an emergency, but the agency said it could cause unexpected effects.

“We’re still very early in that investigation,” said Kshatriya.  The effort to replace and retest the faulty components will be tremendous, NASA said, but essential for Orion to fly on Artemis II and beyond. Nelson said the revised mission timeline will “give Artemis teams more time to work through the challenges.”  Even more work will need to be done for Artemis III, which NASA said will introduce several new components and systems: a human landing system (HLS), docking module, propellant transfer system, and spacesuits to name a few. Kshatriya said the timeline for that mission remains “very aggressive.”  Free said NASA expects the development of SpaceX’s Starship HLS and Axiom’s next-generation spacesuits will take additional time. The agency has also yet to solve the issue of propellant transfer, or in-flight refilling, which involves a spacecraft drawing fuel from another spacecraft or stationary outpost.   A SpaceX representative attending the media briefing estimated the company will need to complete ten refueling missions before Starship HLS lands on the moon, which the company hopes will happen in 2025.   The representative added that SpaceX’s Starship—the largest and most powerful rocket ever built—is working toward a NASA tipping point demo to explore propellant transfer between tanks. The company does not consider this a propellant test mission, but the maneuver will be studied during Starship’s third orbital test flight, expected in February.  When asked, the representative did not provide a minimum number of Starship orbital test flights needed before a lunar landing. But the propellant transfer flight, whenever that happens, will be the one that matters most.  “We’ve been building the machine to build the machine,” the representative said.  Free added that development of NASA’s Gateway space station—which is expected to fly on a future Artemis mission—and the Block 1B variant of its Space Launch System (SLS) also necessitated delays. But NASA officials said the larger gaps between the missions will allow the agency to incorporate more lessons from previous flights into each increasingly complex Artemis project. SpaceX and Blue Origin, for example, will be required to develop cargo variants of their human lunar landers as part of their obligations for Artemis IV, NASA said Tuesday.

When one questioner mentioned the space industry’s doubts about the new timeline—arising from previous Artemis delays—Free explained what makes NASA so confident.  He said the agency now has a better understanding of Orion and other Artemis vehicles. The bigger reassurance, however, is the industry’s support: Free said 11 industry and contractor partners attended Tuesday’s press conference, and all of them contributed to the revised mission schedule.  Kshatriya pointed to the SLS core stage delivery to NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility as a sign of readiness, adding that the spacecraft’s booster segments are ready to stack and the upper stage is “ready to go.” Further, NASA’s European Space Agency (ESA) partners will ship a service model to the agency in a few months, he said.  Nelson, meanwhile, dispelled fears that China could beat the U.S. to a moon landing. He expressed confidence that the rival superpower would not reach the lunar surface before Artemis III. But with the delay, the two competitors’ schedules are undoubtedly more aligned.  Nelson also pointed to the agency’s recent progress, most notably a partnership with the United Arab Emirates to build the airlock for Gateway and the launch of Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) missions.  The NASA administrator emphasized that Artemis will only be the beginning of the new era of American spaceflight. The agency is also developing its Moon to Mars program, which Nelson said will rely on international partners to land an American on Mars. Reaching the moon, he said, will be the first step toward missions to the red planet in the future.

Three launch systems and two landers from Boeing, SpaceX, and Blue Origin are all part of the complicated puzzle of NASA’s Artemis program.

Sixty-five years ago, the USSR shocked the world by sending the first robotic emissary from Earth to the moon. The September 1959 impact of Luna 2 on northeastern Mare Imbrium was a stunning achievement, reaching the moon less than two years after the launch of Sputnik 1 ushered in the Space Age. The event helped ignite the technological firestorm now known as the Space Race between the U.S. and the USSR.

The U.S. responded to the lunar challenge with a flurry of robotic and human explorers. Less than 10 years after Luna 2 reached the moon, Neil Armstrong took his “one small step for mankind” on the Sea of Tranquility.

But just as Apollo reached its stride and the scientific exploration of the moon began in earnest, politics ended the greatest technological effort in the history of humankind and the moon faded from our dreams.

Now, in the first decades of the 21st century, the Artemis program to return to the moon has taken root. The U.S. and international partners have formulated plans and hardware that will return humans to the moon within the next several years.

The current, publicly available Artemis timelines remain very optimistic, but they must be tempered with the program’s extraordinary complexity and ambition. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Artemis is facing repeated development delays, although none of the technological obstacles appear to be showstoppers.

The real question is: When will new footprints appear on the moon?

Click the button below to read the entire article from Flying Magazine.

SpaceX's Starship megarocket will start flying Mars missions just two years from now, if all goes according to plan.

"These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in 4 years," SpaceXfounder and CEO Elon Musk said via X on Saturday evening (Sept. 7), in a postthat announced the bold new target timelines. (Earth and Mars align properly for interplanetary missions once every 26 months.)

"Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years," Musk added in the same post. "Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet."

The stainless-steel Starship consists of two elements: a first-stage booster called Super Heavy and a 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper-stage spacecraft known as Starship. 

A stacked Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. It stands about 400 feet (122 meters) tall and generates 16.7 million pounds of thrust at liftoff — nearly twice that of the Space Launch System (SLS), the rocket for NASA's Artemis moon program.

SLS is expendable, but Starship is designed to be fully and rapidly reusable. Indeed, SpaceX plans to land Super Heavy back on the launch mount after each liftoff, enabling quick inspection, refurbishment and relaunch.

SpaceX believes that Starship's combination of brawn and efficiency will finally bring Mars settlement — a long-held dream of Musk's — within humanity's grasp.

Join NASA as they explore and go forward to the Moon and on to Mars. Plus, discover the latest on Earth, the Solar System and beyond from NASA in your inbox.

The agency extended its deadline for a deorbit vehicle that will eventually steer the ISS into Earth's atmosphere.

The space station turned 25 years old on Wednesday (Dec. 6), and NASA is preparing for the pioneering outpost's end.

The agency just celebrated the milestone mission that docked the first two International Space Station (ISS) modules on Dec. 6, 1998. In the runup to that event, NASA updated its private proposal request to help deorbit the station when it retires in 2030 or so. And early stage funding is underway for several commercial replacements that would be run by private companies, with NASA as a customer. The agency wants all these vehicles ready by the time the ISS' work is done.

Commercial activity will allow more astronauts, from more countries, to "conduct science and technology development," ISS Expedition 70 commander Andreas Mogensen said during a livestreamed event on Wednesday marking the 25th anniversary.

"I think that's incredibly exciting, to see how many countries [will fly], and hopefully also in the future private companies are interested in utilizing a laboratory in low Earth orbit," said Mogensen, who is with the European Space Agency.

The International Space Station is 356 feet (109 meters) end-to-end with a mass of 925,335 pounds (419,725 kilograms) without visiting vehicles. The solar panels alone cover one acre. There is 13,696 cubic feet of habitable volume for crew members, not including visiting vehicles. The space station has seven sleeping quarters, with the ability to add more during crew handover periods, two bathrooms, a gym, and the cupola — a 360-degree-view bay window of the Earth. You can learn more in the reference guide here. 

The space station orbits Earth at an altitude of approximately 250 miles (402 kilometers), with its orbital path taking it over 90 percent of the Earth's population. Thanks to the size of its solar panels, it can be seen with the naked eye at dusk or dawn when flying over a local area. You can track the space station's path near you at spotthestation.nasa.gov. 

The International Space Station is exactly that — international. It is a partnership of five space agencies from 15 countries who contributed different parts to make up the ISS, which are still owned by the respective partner, and we all help to continuously operate the station 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. The space station is composed of parts provided by the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada, and the countries comprising the European Space Agency. 

United Launch Alliance (ULA)—the Boeing/Lockheed joint-venture that provides space launch services to the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, and other major players in the space industry—expects the first flight of its Vulcan Centaur rocket to take place soon.

The Vulcan Centaur will replace ULA’s Atlas-5 launch vehicle—a twenty-year old Lockheed Martin design and the oldest active American rocket.

Each Atlas-5 comprises two main stages, the first of which is powered by a Russian RD-180 engine. The RD-180 is being phased out on account of the national security implications inherent its being reliant on foreign parts—which became a concern subsequent the U.S.’s and Russia’s disagreement over Ukrainian sovereignty. 

Provided preparations proceed apace, the partially reusable Vulcan Centaur’s inaugural mission will see it depart from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station carrying Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander—an autonomous, robotic vehicle capable of delivering payloads of up to 265-kilograms to the lunar surface with a target accuracy of one-hundred meters. 

The Vulcan Centaur was to have launched in 2020, but the program has been delayed by the rocky development of Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine (pictured)—which burns methane and is more powerful than the main engines that powered the space shuttle. ULA’s optimism notwithstanding, space industry insiders believe it’s unlikely that Kent, Washington-based Blue Origin will deliver the new engines before 2023.

Gary L. Wentz Jr., ULA’s vice president of government and commercial programs, asserts ULA has in its possession a number of the Russian-made RD-180 sufficient to complete the Atlas-5’s planned missions. Mister Wentz states Atlas 5 flights will wind-down as Vulcan Centaur launches spool-up. At present, Atlas-5 operations are slated to continue into 2024.

Space Force Col. Erin Gulden shares Mr. Wentz’s outlook, stating of the transition from the Atlas 5 to the Vulcan Centaur, “from the Space Force’s perspective, we don’t see any issues or concerns at this point with a gap in capability or ability to launch.”  

The Space Force’s first launch on a Vulcan Centaur is planned for late 2023.

This article is reprinted from "Propwash"

To learn more about United Launch Alliance go to: 

 https://www.ulalaunch.com/rockets/vulcan-centaur

The history of the universe and how it evolved is broadly accepted as the Big Bang model, which states that the universe began as an incredibly hot, dense point roughly 13.7 billion years ago. So, how did the universe go from being fractions of an inch (a few millimeters) across to what it is today?