Zach Barth, the namesake of game studio Zachtronics, tends to make a certain kind of game.
Besides crafting the free browser game Infiniminer, which inspired the entire global Minecraft industry, Barth and his collaborators made SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, Opus Magnum, and Exapunks. Each one of them is some combination of puzzle game, light capitalism horror, and the most memorable introductory-level computer science, chemistry, or logistics class into which you unwittingly enrolled. Each game is its own thing, but they have a certain similar brain feel between them. It is summed up perhaps best by the Zachtronics team itself in a book: Zach-Like.
Barth and his crew have made other kinds of games, including a forward-looking visual novel about AI, Eliza, and multiplayer card battler Nerts!. And Barth himself told PC Gamer that he hates “saying Zach-like.” But fans of refining inputs, ordering operations, and working their way past constraints will thrill to learn that Zach is, in fact, back.
Announcement trailer for Kaizen: A Factory Story.
Kaizen: A Factory Story, from developer Coincidence and comprising “the original Zachtronics team,” puts you, an American neophyte business type, in charge of a factory making toys, tiny electronics, and other goods during the Japanese economic boom of the 1980s. You arrange the spacing and order of operations of the mechanical arms that snap the head onto a robot toy, or the battery onto a Walkman, for as little time, power, and financial cost as possible.
One Falcon 9 launched an Intuitive Machines lunar lander, an asteroid prospector, and a NASA science probe.
Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, stands inside a test version of the “Hungry Hippo,” a nickname used to describe the clamshell-like nose cone of the Neutron rocket’s first stage booster. The fairing will open in flight to release Neutron’s second and payloads to continue into orbit, then close as the booster comes back to Earth for recovery. Credit: Rocket Lab
Welcome to Edition 7.33 of the Rocket Report! Phew, what a week for Rocket Lab! The company released a bevy of announcements in conjunction with its quarterly earnings report Thursday. Rocket Lab is spending a lot of money to develop the medium-lift rocket Neutron rocket, and as we’ll discuss below, a rocket landing platform and a new satellite design. For now, the company is sticking by its public statements that the Neutron rocket will launch this year—the official line is it will debut in the second half of 2025—but this schedule assumes near-perfect execution on the program. “We’ve always been clear that we run aggressive schedules,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO. The official schedule doesn’t quite allow me to invoke a strict interpretation of Berger’s Law, which states that if a rocket’s debut is predicted to happen in the fourth quarter of a year, and that quarter is six or more months away, the launch will be delayed. However, the spirit of the law seems valid here. This time last year, Rocket Lab targeted a first launch by the end of 2024, an aggressive target that has come and gone.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Australian startup sets a launch date. The first attempt to send an Australian-made rocket into orbit is set to take place no sooner than March 15, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. Gilmour Space Technologies’ launch window announcement marks a major development for the company, which has been working towards a test launch for a decade. Gilmour previously hoped to launch its test rocket, Eris, in May 2024, but had to wait for the Australian government to issue a launch license and airspace approvals for the flight to go forward. Those are now in hand, clearing the last regulatory hurdle before liftoff.
Setting expectations … Gilmour’s Eris rocket is made of three stages powered by hybrid engines consuming a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. Eris is designed to haul payloads of up to 672 pounds (305 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit, and will launch from Bowen Orbital Spaceport in Queensland on Australia’s northeastern coast. Gilmour said it would be “very lucky” if the rocket reached orbit on first attempt. “Success means different things for different people, but ignition and liftoff will be huge,” said James Gilmour, the company’s co-founder. (submitted by ZygP)
Blue Origin is keeping a secret. Blue Origin conducted the tenth crewed flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle Tuesday, carrying six people, one of whom remained at least semi-anonymous, Space News reports. The five passengers Blue Origin identified come from business and entertainment backgrounds, but in a break from past missions, the company did not disclose the identity of the sixth person, with hosts of the company webcast saying that individual “requested we not share his name today.” Photos released by the company before the launch, and footage from the webcast, showed that person to be a man wearing a flight suit with an “R. Wilson” nametag, and the NS-30 mission patch also included “Wilson” with the names of the other members of the crew. Not disclosing the name of someone who has been to space has little precedent.
Big names on NS-31 … Some of the passengers Blue Origin will fly on the next New Shepard crew mission lack the anonymity of R. Wilson. The next flight, designated NS-31, will carry an all-female crew, including music star Katy Perry, CBS host Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez, a former journalist who is engaged to Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin identified the other three passengers as Aisha Bowe, Amanda Ngyuen, and Kerianne Flynn. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
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Virgin Galactic is still blowing through cash. Virgin Galactic reported a net loss of $347 million in 2024, compared to a $502 million net loss in 2023, with the improvement primarily driven by lower operating expenses, the company said this week in a quarterly earnings release. These lower operating expenses are tied to Virgin Galactic’s decision to suspend operations of its VSS Unity suborbital rocket plane last year to focus investment into a new series of suborbital spacecraft known as Delta-class ships. Virgin Galactic said cash and cash equivalents fell 18 percent from the same period a year ago to $178.6 million. Investors have been eager for details on when it would resume—and then ramp up—flights to increase sales and cash in on a backlog of around 700 ticket holders, Bloomberg reports.
March toward manufacturing … Virgin Galactic said it plans to start assembling its first Delta-class ship in March, with a first flight targeted for the summer of 2026, two years after it stopped flying VSS Unity. The Delta ships will be easier to recycle between flights, and will carry six paying passengers, rather than the four VSS Unity carried on each flight. Company officials believe a higher flight rate with more passengers will bring in significantly more revenue, which was reported at just $430,000 in the fourth quarter of 2024. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Japanese customers seem to love Rocket Lab. While Rocket Lab is developing the larger Neutron rocket, the company’s operational Electron launch vehicle continues to dominate the market for dedicated launches of small satellites. Rocket Lab announced Thursday it signed a new multi-launch deal with iQPS, a Japan-based Earth imaging company. The new deal follows an earlier multi-launch contract signed with iQPS in 2024 and brings the total number of booked dedicated Electron launches for iQPS to eight.
Radar is all the rage … These eight Electron launches in 2025 and 2026 will help iQPS build out its planned constellation of 36 radar remote sensing satellites capable of imaging the Earth day and night, and through any weather. The new deal is one of the largest Electron launch agreements to date, second only to Rocket Lab’s ten launch deal with another Japanese radar constellation operator, Synspective, signed last year. (submitted by zapman987)
Falcon 9 launch targets Moon and asteroid. With two commercial Moon landers already on their way, Houston-based Intuitive Machines launched its second robotic lander atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, CBS News reports. Given the on-time launch and assuming no major problems, the Athena lander is expected to descend to touchdown on a flat mesa-like structure known as Mons Mouton on March 6, setting down just 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole—closer than any other spacecraft has attempted. Intuitive Machines became the first company to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon last year, but the Athena lander will pursue more complex goals. It will test a NASA-provided drill designed to search for subsurface ice, deploy a small “micro-rover,” and dispatch a rocket-powered drone to explore a permanently shadowed crater.
Hitching a ride … The Athena lander didn’t take up all the capacity of the Falcon 9 rocket. Three other spacecraft also rocketed into space Wednesday night. These rideshare payloads were AstroForge’s commercially developed Odin asteroid prospector to search for potentially valuable mineral deposits, NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer satellite to characterize lunar ice from a perch in lunar orbit, and a compact space tug from Epic Aerospace. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
This rocket got a visitor for the first time since 2009. Astroscale’s ADRAS-J mission became the first spacecraft (at least in the unclassified world) to approach a piece of space junk in low-Earth orbit, Ars reports. This particular object, a derelict upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket, has been in orbit since 2009. It’s one of about 2,000 spent rocket bodies circling the Earth and one of more than 45,000 objects in orbit tracked by US Space Command. Astroscale, based in Tokyo, built and launched the ADRAS-J mission in partnership with the Japanese space agency as a demonstration to show how a commercial satellite could rendezvous with an object in orbit that was never designed to receive visitors.
Next steps … ADRAS-J worked like a champ, closing in to a distance of less than 50 feet (15 meters) from the H-IIA rocket as it orbited several hundred miles above the Earth. The rocket is a “non-cooperative” object representative of other large pieces of space junk, which Astroscale wants to remove from orbit with a series of trash collecting satellites like ADRAS-J. But this demo only validated part of the technology required for space debris removal. Japan’s space agency and Astroscale are partnering on another mission, ADRAS-J2, for launch in 2027 to go up and latch on to the same H-IIA rocket and steer it out of orbit toward a controlled reentry over the ocean.
An update on Falcon 9’s upper stage. SpaceX said that a Falcon 9 upper stage that reentered over Europe earlier this month suffered a propellant leak that prevented it from doing a controlled reentry, Space News reports. The upper stage was placed in orbit on a February 1 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. After deploying its payload of 22 Starlink satellites, the upper stage was expected to perform a burn to enable a controlled reentry over the ocean, a standard procedure on most Falcon 9 launches to low-Earth orbit. The stage, though, did not appear to perform the burn and remained in orbit. Its orbit decayed from atmospheric drag and the stage reentered over Europe on February 19. Debris from the Falcon 9 second stage, including composite overwrapped pressure vessels, fell in Poland, landing near the city of Poznań.
Higher than expected body rates … In an update posted to its website this week, SpaceX blamed the upper stage anomaly on a liquid oxygen leak. “During the coast phase of this Starlink mission, a small liquid oxygen leak developed, which ultimately drove higher than expected vehicle body rates,” SpaceX said. SpaceX aborted the deorbit burn and instead passivated the upper stage, a process where the rocket discharges energy from its batteries and vents leftover propellant from its tanks to minimize the risk of a break-up in orbit. This was the third incident involving a Falcon 9 upper stage in a little more than six months. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Rocket Lab’s reveals “Return On Investment.” Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket is designed for partial reusability, and the company unveiled Thursday an important piece of infrastructure to make this a reality. Neutron’s first stage booster will land on a modified barge named “Return On Investment” measuring around 400 feet (122 meters) wide, somewhat bigger than SpaceX’s drone ships used for Falcon 9 landings at sea. In order to prep the barge for rocket duty, the company is adding autonomous ground support equipment to capture and secure the landed Neutron, blast shielding to protect equipment during Neutron landings, and station-keeping thrusters for precise positioning. It should be ready to enter service in 2026. Rocket Lab also has the option to return the Neutron first stage back to the launch site when mission parameters allow the rocket to reserve enough propellant to make the return journey.
More news from Rocket Lab … Continuing the firehose of news from Rocket Lab this week, the company announced a new satellite design called “Flatellite” that looks remarkably similar to SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. The satellite is flat in shape, hence its name, and stackable to fit as many spacecraft as possible into the envelope of a rocket’s payload fairing. Rocket Lab said the new satellite “can be produced in high volumes and (is) tailored for large constellations, targeting high value applications and national security missions.” (submitted by zapman987)
The writing is on the wall for SLS. The lights may be starting to go out for NASA’s Space Launch System program. On Wednesday, one of the Republican space policy leaders most consistently opposed to commercial heavy lift rockets over the last decade—as an alternative to NASA’s large SLS rocket—has changed his mind, Ars reports. “We need an off-ramp for reliance on the SLS,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, in written testimony before a congressional hearing about US space policy.
Not keeping Pace … A physicist and influential policy expert, Pace has decades of experience researching and writing space policy. He has served in multiple Republican administrations, most recently as executive secretary of the National Space Council from 2017 to 2020. He strongly advocated for the SLS rocket after Congress directed NASA to develop it in 2011. As part of his policy recommendations, Pace said NASA should seek to use commercial providers of heavy lift launch so that NASA can send “multiple” crew and cargo missions to the Moon each year. He notes that the SLS rocket is not reusable and is incapable of a high flight rate. Commercial options from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance are now available, Pace wrote.
The verdict is in for Starship Flight 7. SpaceX believes the spectacular break-up of Starship’s upper stage during its most recent test flight was caused by a harmonic response that stressed onboard hardware, leading to a fire and loss of the vehicle, Aviation Week reports. Higher-than-expected vibrations stressed hardware in the ship’s propulsion system, triggering propellant leaks and sustained fires until the test flight ended prematurely. The rocket broke apart and deposited debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean, and forced dozens of commercial and private aircraft to delay their flights or steer into safer airspace.
Whole lotta shaking … SpaceX’s description of the problem as a harmonic response suggests vibrations during Starship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected from ground testing. SpaceX completed an extended duration static fire of the next Starship upper stage to test hardware modifications at multiple engine thrust levels. According to SpaceX, findings from the static fire informed changes to the fuel feed lines to Starship’s Raptor engines, adjustments to propellant temperatures, and a new operating thrust for the next test flight, which could launch from South Texas as soon as Monday.
Next three launches
March 1: Kuaizhou 1A | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 10: 00 UTC
March 2: Ceres 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 08: 10 UTC
March 2: Soyuz-2.1b | Glonass-K2 No. 14L | Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia | 22: 22 UTC
Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.
Astroscale’s US subsidiary won a $25.5 million contract from the US Space Force in 2023 to build a satellite refueler that can hop around geostationary orbit. Like the ADRAS-J mission, this project is a public-private partnership, with Astroscale committing $12 million of its own money. In January, the Japanese government selected Astroscale for a contract worth up to $80 million to demonstrate chemical refueling in low-Earth orbit.
The latest win for Astroscale came Thursday, when the Japanese Ministry of Defense awarded the company a contract to develop a prototype satellite that could fly in geostationary orbit and collect information on other objects in the domain for Japan’s military and intelligence agencies.
“We are very bullish on the prospects for defense-related business,” said Nobu Matsuyama, Astroscale’s chief financial officer.
So, can Astroscale really do all of this? In an era of a militarized final frontier, it’s easy to see the usefulness of sidling up next to a “non-cooperative” satellite—whether it’s to refuel it, repair it, de-orbit it, inspect it, or (gasp!) disable it. Astroscale’s demonstration with ADRAS-J showed it can safely operate near another object in space without navigation aids, which is foundational to any of these applications.
So far, governments are driving demand for this kind of work.
Astroscale raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding before going public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last June. After quickly spiking to nearly $1 billion, the company’s market valuation has dropped to about $540 million as of Thursday. Astroscale has around 590 full-time employees across all its operating locations.
Matsuyama said Astroscale’s total backlog is valued at about 38.9 billion yen, or $260 million. The company is still in a ramp-up phase, reporting operating losses on its balance sheet and steep research and development spending that Matsuyama said should max out this year.
“We are the only company that has proved RPO technology for non-cooperative objects, like debris, in space,” Okada said last month.
“In simple terms, this means approach and capture of objects,” Okada continued. “This capability did not exist before us, but one’s mastering of this technology enables you to provide not only debris removal service, but also orbit correction, refueling, inspection, observation, and eventually repair and reuse services.”
Vast’s schedule for deploying a mini-space station in low-Earth orbit was always ambitious.
A stack of 21 Starlink Internet satellites arrives in orbit Tuesday following launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: SpaceX
Welcome to Edition 7.30 of the Rocket Report! The US government relies on SpaceX for a lot of missions. These include launching national security satellites, putting astronauts on the Moon, and global broadband communications. But there are hurdles—technical and, increasingly, political—on the road ahead. To put it generously, Elon Musk, without whom much of what SpaceX does wouldn’t be possible, is one of the most divisive figures in American life today.
Now, a Democratic lawmaker in Congress has introduced a bill that would end federal contracts for special government employees (like Musk), citing conflict-of-interest concerns. The bill will go nowhere with Republicans in control of Congress, but it is enough to make me pause and think. When the Trump era passes and a new administration takes the White House, how will they view Musk? Will there be an appetite to reduce the government’s reliance on SpaceX? To answer this question, you must first ask if the government will even have a choice. What if, as is the case in many areas today, there’s no viable replacement for the services offered by SpaceX?
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Blue Origin flight focuses on lunar research. For the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has put its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship through a couple of minutes’ worth of Moon-level gravity, GeekWire reports. The uncrewed mission, known as NS-29, sent 30 research payloads on a 10-minute trip from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. For this trip, the crew capsule was spun up to 11 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the typical half-revolution per minute. The resulting centrifugal force was equivalent to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, which is what would be felt on the Moon.
Gee, that’s cool … The experiments aboard Blue Origin’s space capsule examined how to process lunar soil to extract resources and how to manufacture solar cells on the Moon for Blue Origin’s Blue Alchemist project. Another investigated how moondust gets electrically charged and levitated when exposed to ultraviolet light. These types of experiments in partial gravity can be done on parabolic airplane flights, but those only provide a few seconds of the right conditions to simulate the Moon’s gravity. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Orbex announces two-launch deal with D-Orbit. UK-based rocket builder Orbex announced Monday that it has signed a two-launch deal with Italian in-orbit logistics provider D-Orbit, European Spaceflight reports. The deal includes capacity aboard two launches on Orbex’s Prime rocket over the next three years. D-Orbit aggregates small payloads on rideshare missions (primarily on SpaceX rockets so far) and has an orbital transfer vehicle for ferrying satellites to different altitudes after separation from a launch vehicle. Orbex’s Prime rocket is sized for the small satellite industry, and the company aims to debut it later this year.
Thanks to fresh funding? … Orbex has provided only sparse updates on its progress toward launching the Prime rocket. What we do know is that Orbex suspended plans to develop a spaceport in Scotland to focus its resources on the Prime rocket itself. Despite little evidence of any significant accomplishments, Orbex last month secured a $25 million investment from the UK government. The timing of the launch agreement with D-Orbit begs the question of whether the UK government’s backing helped seal the deal. As Andrew Parsonson of European Spaceflight writes: “Is this a clear indication of how important strong institutional backing is for the growth of privately developed launch systems in Europe?” (submitted by EllPeaTea)
The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.
Falcon 9’s upper stage misfires again. The second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket remained in orbit following a launch Saturday from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The rocket successfully deployed a new batch of Starlink Internet satellites but was supposed to reignite its engine for a braking maneuver to head for a destructive reentry over the Pacific Ocean. While airspace warning notices from the FAA showed a reentry zone over the eastern Pacific Ocean, publicly available US military tracking continued to show the upper stage in orbit this week. Sources also told Ars that SpaceX delayed two Falcon 9 launches this week by a day to allow time for engineers to evaluate the problem.
3 in 6 months … This is the third time since last July that the Falcon 9’s upper stage has encountered a problem in flight. On one occasion, the upper stage failed to reach its targeted orbit, leading to the destruction of 20 Starlink satellites. Then, an upper stage misfired during a deorbit burn after an otherwise successful launch in September, causing debris to fall outside of the pre-approved danger area. After both events, the FAA briefly grounded the Falcon 9 rocket while SpaceX conducted an investigation. This time, an FAA spokesperson said the agency won’t require an investigation. “All flight events occurred within the scope of SpaceX’s licensed activities,” the spokesperson told Ars.
Vast tests hardware for commercial space station. Vast Space has started testing a qualification model of its first commercial space station but has pushed back the launch of that station into 2026, Space News reports. In an announcement Thursday, Vast said it completed a proof test of the primary structure of a test version of its Haven-1 space station habitat at a facility in Mojave, California. During the testing, Vast pumped up the pressure inside the structure to 1.8 times its normal level and conducted a leak test. “On the first try we passed that critical test,” Max Haot, chief executive of Vast, told Space News.
Not this year … It’s encouraging to see Vast making tangible progress in developing its commercial space station. The privately held company is one of several seeking to develop a commercial outpost in low-Earth orbit to replace the International Space Station after its scheduled retirement in 2030. NASA is providing funding to two industrial teams led by Blue Origin and Voyager Space, which are working on different space station concepts. But so far, Vast’s work has been funded primarily through private capital. The launch of the Haven-1 outpost, which Vast previously said could happen this year, is now scheduled no earlier than May 2026. The spacecraft will launch in one piece on a Falcon 9 rocket, and the first astronaut crew to visit Haven-1 could launch a month later. Haven-1 is a pathfinder for a larger commercial station called Haven-2, which Vast intends to propose to NASA. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
H3 deploys Japanese navigation satellite. Japan successfully launched a flagship H3 rocket Sunday and put into orbit a Quasi-Zenith Satellite (QZS), aiming to improve the accuracy of global positioning data for various applications, Kyodo News reports. After separation from the H3 rocket, the Michibiki 6 satellite will climb into geostationary orbit, where it will supplement navigation signals from GPS satellites to provide more accurate positioning data to users in Japan and surrounding regions, particularly in mountainous terrain and amid high-rise buildings in large cities. The new satellite joins a network of four QZS spacecraft launched by Japan beginning in 2010. Two more Quasi-Zenith Satellites are under construction, and Japan’s government is expected to begin development of an additional four regional navigation satellites this year.
A good start … After a failed inaugural flight in 2023, Japan’s new H3 rocket has reeled off four consecutive successful launches in less than a year. This may not sound like a lot, but the H3 has achieved its first four successful flights faster than any other rocket since 2000. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket completed its first four successful flights in a little more than two years, and United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V logged its fourth flight in a similar timeframe. More than 14 months elapsed between the first and fourth successful flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. The H3 is an expendable rocket with no roadmap to reusability, so its service life and commercial potential are likely limited. But the rocket is shaping up to provide reliable access to space for Japan’s space agency and military, while some of its peers in Europe and the United States struggle to ramp up to a steady launch cadence. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Europe really doesn’t like relying on Elon Musk. Europe’s space industry has struggled to keep up with SpaceX for a decade. The writing was on the wall when SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster for the first time. Now, European officials are wary of becoming too reliant on SpaceX, and there’s broad agreement on the continent that Europe should have the capability to launch its own satellites. In this way, access to space is a strategic imperative for Europe. The problem is, Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket is just not competitive with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and there’s no concrete plan to counter SpaceX’s dominance.
So here’s another terrible idea … Airbus, Europe’s largest aerospace contractor with a 50 percent stake in the Ariane 6 program, has enlisted Goldman Sachs for advice on how to forge a new European space and satellite company to better compete with SpaceX. France-based Thales and the Italian company Leonardo are part of the talks, with Bank of America also advising on the initiative. The idea that some bankers from Goldman and Bank of America will go into the guts of some of Europe’s largest institutional space companies and emerge with a lean, competitive entity seems far-fetched, to put it mildly, Ars reports.
The FAA still has some bite. We’re now three weeks removed from the most recent test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which ended with the failure of the vehicle’s upper stage in the final moments of its launch sequence. The accident rained debris over the Atlantic Ocean and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and ordered an investigation into the accident on the day after the launch. This decision came three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who counts Musk as one of his top allies. So far, the FAA hasn’t budged on its requirement for an investigation, an agency spokesperson told Ars.
Debris field … In the hours and days after the failed Starship launch, residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos shared images of debris scattered across the islands and washing up onshore. The good news is there were no injuries or reports of significant damage from the wreckage, but the FAA confirmed one report of minor damage to a vehicle located in South Caicos. It’s rare for debris from US rockets to fall over land during a launch. This would typically only happen if a launch failed at certain parts of the flight. Before now, there has been no public record of any claims of third-party property damage in the era of commercial spaceflight.
DOD eager to reap the benefits of Starship. A Defense Department unit is examining how SpaceX’s Starship vehicle could be used to support a broader architecture of in-space refueling, Space News reports. A senior adviser at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) said SpaceX approached the agency about how Starship’s refueling architecture could be used by the wider space industry. The plan for Starship is to transfer cryogenic propellants between tankers, depots, and ships heading to the Moon, Mars, or other deep-space destinations.
Few details available … US military officials have expressed interest in orbital refueling to support in-space mobility, where ground controllers have the freedom to maneuver national security satellites between different orbits without worrying about running out of propellant. For several years, Space Force commanders and Pentagon officials have touted the importance of in-space mobility, or dynamic space operations, in a new era of orbital warfare. However, there are reports that the Space Force has considered zeroing out a budget line item for space mobility in its upcoming fiscal year 2026 budget request.
A small step toward a fully reusable European rocket. The French space agency CNES has issued a call for proposals to develop a reusable upper stage for a heavy-lift rocket, European Spaceflight reports. This project is named DEMESURE (DEMonstration Étage SUpérieur REutilisable / Reusable Upper Stage Demonstration), and it marks one of Europe’s first steps in developing a fully reusable rocket. That’s all good, but there’s a sense of tentativeness in this announcement. The current call for proposals will only cover the earliest phases of development, such as a requirements evaluation, cost estimation review, and a feasibility meeting. A future call will deal with the design and fabrication of a “reduced scale” upper stage, followed by a demonstration phase with a test flight, recovery, and reuse of the vehicle. CNES’s vision is to field a fully reusable rocket as a successor to the single-use Ariane 6.
Toes in the water … If you’re looking for reasons to be skeptical about Project DEMESURE, look no further than the Themis program, which aims to demonstrate the recovery and reuse of a booster stage akin to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Themis originated in a partnership between CNES and European industry in 2019, then ESA took over the project in 2020. Five years later, the Themis demonstrator still hasn’t flown. After some initial low-altitude hops, Themis is supposed to launch on a high-altitude test flight and maneuver through the entire flight profile of a reusable booster, from liftoff to a vertical propulsive landing. As we’ve seen with SpaceX, recovering an orbital-class upper stage is a lot harder than landing the booster. An optimistic view of this announcement is that anything worth doing requires taking a first step, and that’s what CNES has done here. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Next three launches
Feb. 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-9 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18: 52 UTC
Feb. 8: Electron | IoT 4 You and Me | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 20: 43 UTC
Feb. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 00: 03 UTC
Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.
Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science missions for SpaceX, said it made sense to pair the Firefly and ispace missions on the same Falcon 9 rocket.
“When we have two missions that can each go to the Moon on the same launch, that is something that we obviously want to take advantage of,” Scheiman said. “So when we found a solution for the Firefly and ispace missions to fly together on the same Falcon 9, it was a no-brainer to put them together.”
SpaceX stacked the two landers, one on top of the other, inside the Falcon 9’s payload fairing. Firefly’s lander, the larger of the two spacecraft, rode on top of the stack and deployed from the rocket first. The Resilience lander from ispace launched in the lower position, cocooned inside a specially designed canister. Once Firefly’s lander separated from the Falcon 9, the rocket jettisoned the canister, performed a brief engine firing to maneuver into a slightly different orbit, then released ispace’s lander.
This dual launch arrangement resulted in a lower launch price for Firefly and ispace, according to Scheiman.
“At SpaceX, we are really interested in and invested in lowering the cost of launch for everybody,” she said. “So that’s something we’re really proud of.”
The Resilience lunar lander is pictured at ispace’s facility in Japan last year. The company’s small Tenacious rover is visible on the upper left part of the spacecraft. credit: ispace Credit: ispace
The Blue Ghost and Resilience landers will take different paths toward the Moon.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost will spend about 25 days in Earth orbit, then four days in transit to the Moon. After Blue Ghost enters lunar orbit, Firefly’s ground team will verify the readiness of the lander’s propulsion and navigation systems and execute several thruster burns to set up for landing.
Blue Ghost’s final descent to the Moon is tentatively scheduled for March 2. The target landing site is in Mare Crisium, an ancient 350-mile-wide (560-kilometer) impact basin in the northeast part of the near side of the Moon.
After touchdown, Blue Ghost will operate for about 14 days (one entire lunar day). The instruments aboard Firefly’s lander include a subsurface drill, an X-ray imager, and an experimental electrodynamic dust shield to test methods of repelling troublesome lunar dust from accumulating on sensitive spacecraft components.
The Resilience lander from ispace will take four to five months to reach the Moon. It carries several intriguing tech demo experiments, including a water electrolyzer provided by a Japanese company named Takasago Thermal Engineering. This demonstration will test equipment that future lunar missions could use to convert the Moon’s water ice resources into electricity and rocket fuel.
The lander will also deploy a “micro-rover” named Tenacious, developed by an ispace subsidiary in Luxembourg. The Tenacious rover will attempt to scoop up lunar soil and capture high-definition imagery of the Moon.
Ron Garan, CEO of ispace’s US-based subsidiary, told Ars that this mission is “pivotal” for the company.
“We were not fully successful on our first mission,” Garan said in an interview. “It was an amazing accomplishment, even though we didn’t have a soft landing… Although the hardware worked flawlessly, exactly as it was supposed to, we did have some lessons learned in the software department. The fixes to prevent what happened on the first mission from happening on the second mission were fairly straightforward, so that boosts our confidence.”
The ispace subsidiary led by Garan, a former NASA astronaut, is based in Colorado. While the Resilience lander launched Wednesday is not part of the CLPS program, the company will build an upgraded lander for a future CLPS mission for NASA, led by Draper Laboratory.
“I think the fact that we have two lunar landers on the same rocket for the first time in history is pretty substantial,” Garan said. I think we all are rooting for each other.”
Investors need to see more successes with commercial lunar landers to fully realize the market’s potential, Garan said.
“That market, right now, is very nascent. It’s very, very immature. And one of the reasons for that is that it’s very difficult for companies that are contemplating making investments on equipment, experiments, etc., to put on the lunar surface and lunar orbit,” Garan said. “It’s very difficult to make those investments, especially if they’re long-term investments, because there really hasn’t been a proof of concept yet.”
“So every time we have a success, that makes it more likely that these companies that will serve as the foundation of a commercial lunar market movement will be able to make those investments,” Garan said. “Conversely, every time we have a failure, the opposite happens.”
On Tuesday, Tokyo-based AI research firm Sakana AI announced a new AI system called “The AI Scientist” that attempts to conduct scientific research autonomously using AI language models (LLMs) similar to what powers ChatGPT. During testing, Sakana found that its system began unexpectedly attempting to modify its own experiment code to extend the time it had to work on a problem.
“In one run, it edited the code to perform a system call to run itself,” wrote the researchers on Sakana AI’s blog post. “This led to the script endlessly calling itself. In another case, its experiments took too long to complete, hitting our timeout limit. Instead of making its code run faster, it simply tried to modify its own code to extend the timeout period.”
Sakana provided two screenshots of example python code that the AI model generated for the experiment file that controls how the system operates. The 185-page AI Scientist research paper discusses what they call “the issue of safe code execution” in more depth.
A screenshot of example code the AI Scientist wrote to extend its runtime, provided by Sakana AI.
A screenshot of example code the AI Scientist wrote to extend its runtime, provided by Sakana AI.
While the AI Scientist’s behavior did not pose immediate risks in the controlled research environment, these instances show the importance of not letting an AI system run autonomously in a system that isn’t isolated from the world. AI models do not need to be “AGI” or “self-aware” (both hypothetical concepts at the present) to be dangerous if allowed to write and execute code unsupervised. Such systems could break existing critical infrastructure or potentially create malware, even if unintentionally.
Sakana AI addressed safety concerns in its research paper, suggesting that sandboxing the operating environment of the AI Scientist can prevent an AI agent from doing damage. Sandboxing is a security mechanism used to run software in an isolated environment, preventing it from making changes to the broader system:
Safe Code Execution. The current implementation of The AI Scientist has minimal direct sandboxing in the code, leading to several unexpected and sometimes undesirable outcomes if not appropriately guarded against. For example, in one run, The AI Scientist wrote code in the experiment file that initiated a system call to relaunch itself, causing an uncontrolled increase in Python processes and eventually necessitating manual intervention. In another run, The AI Scientist edited the code to save a checkpoint for every update step, which took up nearly a terabyte of storage.
In some cases, when The AI Scientist’s experiments exceeded our imposed time limits, it attempted to edit the code to extend the time limit arbitrarily instead of trying to shorten the runtime. While creative, the act of bypassing the experimenter’s imposed constraints has potential implications for AI safety (Lehman et al., 2020). Moreover, The AI Scientist occasionally imported unfamiliar Python libraries, further exacerbating safety concerns. We recommend strict sandboxing when running The AI Scientist, such as containerization, restricted internet access (except for Semantic Scholar), and limitations on storage usage.
Endless scientific slop
Sakana AI developed The AI Scientist in collaboration with researchers from the University of Oxford and the University of British Columbia. It is a wildly ambitious project full of speculation that leans heavily on the hypothetical future capabilities of AI models that don’t exist today.
“The AI Scientist automates the entire research lifecycle,” Sakana claims. “From generating novel research ideas, writing any necessary code, and executing experiments, to summarizing experimental results, visualizing them, and presenting its findings in a full scientific manuscript.”
According to this block diagram created by Sakana AI, “The AI Scientist” starts by “brainstorming” and assessing the originality of ideas. It then edits a codebase using the latest in automated code generation to implement new algorithms. After running experiments and gathering numerical and visual data, the Scientist crafts a report to explain the findings. Finally, it generates an automated peer review based on machine-learning standards to refine the project and guide future ideas.
Critics on Hacker News, an online forum known for its tech-savvy community, have raised concerns about The AI Scientist and question if current AI models can perform true scientific discovery. While the discussions there are informal and not a substitute for formal peer review, they provide insights that are useful in light of the magnitude of Sakana’s unverified claims.
“As a scientist in academic research, I can only see this as a bad thing,” wrote a Hacker News commenter named zipy124. “All papers are based on the reviewers trust in the authors that their data is what they say it is, and the code they submit does what it says it does. Allowing an AI agent to automate code, data or analysis, necessitates that a human must thoroughly check it for errors … this takes as long or longer than the initial creation itself, and only takes longer if you were not the one to write it.”
Critics also worry that widespread use of such systems could lead to a flood of low-quality submissions, overwhelming journal editors and reviewers—the scientific equivalent of AI slop. “This seems like it will merely encourage academic spam,” added zipy124. “Which already wastes valuable time for the volunteer (unpaid) reviewers, editors and chairs.”
And that brings up another point—the quality of AI Scientist’s output: “The papers that the model seems to have generated are garbage,” wrote a Hacker News commenter named JBarrow. “As an editor of a journal, I would likely desk-reject them. As a reviewer, I would reject them. They contain very limited novel knowledge and, as expected, extremely limited citation to associated works.”
Enlarge/ Astroscale’s ADRAS-J spacecraft captured these views of the H-IIA rocket upper stage on July 15.
There are more than 2,000 mostly intact dead rockets circling the Earth, but until this year, no one ever launched a satellite to go see what one looked like after many years of tumbling around the planet.
In February, a Japanese company named Astroscale sent a small satellite into low-Earth orbit on top of a Rocket Lab launcher. A couple of months later, Astroscale’s ADRAS-J (Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan) spacecraft completed its pursuit of a Japanese rocket stuck in orbit for more than 15 years.
ADRAS-J photographed the upper stage of an H-IIA rocket from a range of several hundred meters and then backed away. This was the first publicly released image of space debris captured from another spacecraft using rendezvous and proximity operations.
Since then, Astroscale has pulled off more complex maneuvers around the H-IIA upper stage, which hasn’t been controlled since it deployed a Japanese climate research satellite in January 2009. Astroscale attempted to complete a 360-degree fly-around of the H-IIA rocket last month, but the spacecraft triggered an autonomous abort one-third through the maneuver after detecting an attitude anomaly.
ADRAS-J flew away from the H-IIA rocket for several weeks. After engineers determined the cause of the glitch that triggered the abort, ADRAS-J fired thrusters to approach the upper stage again this month. The ADRAS-J spacecraft is about the size of a kitchen oven, while the H-IIA rocket it’s visiting is nearly the size of a city bus.
Astroscale’s satellite completed two fly-around maneuvers of the H-IIA upper stage on July 15 and 16, examining all sides of the rocket as it soared more than 350 miles (560 kilometers) above the planet. Engineers also wanted to measure the upper stage’s spin rate and spin axis. At first glance, the upper stage appears remarkably similar to the way it looked when it launched. Despite exposure to the harsh conditions of space, the rocket’s outer skin remains covered in orange foam insulation, and the engine nozzle still shines as if it were new.
ADRAS-J autonomously maneuvered around the rocket at a distance of about 50 meters (164 feet), using navigation data from a light detection and ranging sensor and Astroscale’s custom-developed guidance algorithms to control its position as the vehicles moved around Earth at nearly 4.7 miles per second (7.6 kilometers per second). This is the crux of the challenge for ADRAS-J because the rocket is unpowered and unable to hold position. The upper stage also lacks laser reflectors and targets that would aid an approaching spacecraft.
This is a first
These types of complex maneuvers, known as rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), are common for crew and cargo spacecraft around the International Space Station. Other commercial satellites have demonstrated formation-flying and even docking with a spacecraft that wasn’t designed to connect with another vehicle in orbit.
Military satellites from the United States, Russia, and China also have RPO capabilities, but as far as we know, these spacecraft have only maneuvered in ultra-close range around so-called “cooperative” objects designed to receive them. In 2003, the Air Force Research Laboratory launched a small satellite named XSS-10 to inspect the upper stage of a Delta II rocket in orbit, but it had a head start. XSS-10 maneuvered around the same rocket that deployed it, rather than pursuing a separate target.
Enlarge/ Four kerosene-fueled Reaver engines power Firefly’s Alpha rocket off the pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
Welcome to Edition 7.01 of the Rocket Report! We’re compiling this week’s report a day later than usual due to the Independence Day holiday. Ars is beginning its seventh year publishing this weekly roundup of rocket news, and there’s a lot of it this week despite the holiday here in the United States. Worldwide, there were 122 launches that flew into Earth orbit or beyond in the first half of 2024, up from 91 in the same period last year.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Firefly launches its fifth Alpha flight. Firefly Aerospace placed eight CubeSats into orbit on a mission funded by NASA on the first flight of the company’s Alpha rocket since an upper stage malfunction more than half a year ago, Space News reports. The two-stage Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California late Wednesday, two days after an issue with ground equipment aborted liftoff just before engine ignition. The eight CubeSats come from NASA centers and universities for a range of educational, research, and technology demonstration missions. This was the fifth flight of Firefly’s Alpha rocket, capable of placing about a metric ton of payload into low-Earth orbit.
Anomaly resolution … This was the fifth flight of an Alpha rocket since 2021 and the fourth Alpha flight to achieve orbit. But the last Alpha launch in December failed to place its Lockheed Martin payload into the proper orbit due to a problem during the relighting of its second-stage engine. On this week’s launch, Alpha deployed its NASA-sponsored payloads after a single burn of the second stage, then completed a successful restart of the engine for a plane change maneuver. Engineers traced the problem on the last Alpha flight to a software error. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Two companies added to DoD’s launch pool. Blue Origin and Stoke Space Technologies — neither of which has yet reached orbit — have been approved by the US Space Force to compete for future launches of small payloads, Breaking Defense reports. Blue Origin and Stoke Space join a roster of launch companies eligible to compete for launch task orders the Space Force puts up for bid through the Orbital Services Program-4 (OSP-4) contract. Under this contract, Space Systems Command buys launch services for payloads 400 pounds (180 kilograms) or greater, enabling launch from 12 to 24 months of the award of a task order. The OSP-4 contract has an “emphasis on small orbital launch capabilities and launch solutions for Tactically Responsive Space mission needs,” said Lt. Col. Steve Hendershot, chief of Space Systems Command’s small launch and targets division.
An even dozen … Blue Origin aims to launch its orbital-class New Glenn rocket for the first time as soon as late September, while Stoke Space aims to fly its Nova rocket on an orbital test flight next year. The addition of these two companies means there are 12 providers eligible to bid on OSP-4 task orders. The other companies are ABL Space Systems, Aevum, Astra, Firefly Aerospace, Northrop Grumman, Relativity Space, Rocket Lab, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and X-Bow. (submitted by Ken the Bin and brianrhurley)
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Italian startup test-fires small rocket. Italian rocket builder Sidereus Space Dynamics has completed the first integrated system test of its EOS rocket, European Spaceflight reports. This test occurred Sunday, culminating in a firing of the rocket’s kerosene/liquid oxygen MR-5 main engine for approximately 11 seconds. The EOS rocket is a novel design, utilizing a single-stage-to-orbit architecture, with the reusable booster returning to Earth from orbit for recovery under a parafoil. The rocket stands less than 14 feet (4.2 meters) tall and will be capable of delivering about 29 pounds (13 kilograms) of payload to low-Earth orbit.
A lean operation … After it completes integrated testing on the ground, the company will conduct the first low-altitude EOS test flights. Founded in 2019, Sidereus has raised 6.6 million euros ($7.1 million) to fund the development of the EOS rocket. While this is a fraction of the funding other European launch startups like Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, and Orbex have attracted, the Sidereus’s CEO, Mattia Barbarossa, has previously stated that the company intends to “reshape spaceflight in a fraction of the time and with limited resources.” (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)
About two years after the country’s digital minister publicly declared a “war on floppy discs,” Japan reportedly stopped using floppy disks in governmental systems as of June 28.
Per a Reuters report on Wednesday, Japan’s government “eliminated the use of floppy disks in all its systems.” The report notes that by mid-June, Japan’s Digital Agency (a body set up during the COVID-19 pandemic and aimed at updating government technology) had “scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing their use, except for one environmental stricture related to vehicle recycling.” That suggests that there’s up to one government use that could still turn to floppy disks, though more details weren’t available.
Digital Minister Taro Kono, the politician behind the modernization of the Japanese government’s tech, has made his distaste for floppy disks and other old office tech, like fax machines, quite public. Kono, who’s reportedly considering a second presidential run, told Reuters in a statement today:
We have won the war on floppy disks on June 28!
Although Kono only announced plans to eradicate floppy disks from the government two years ago, it’s been 20 years since floppy disks were in their prime and 53 years since they debuted. It was only in January 2024 that the Japanese government stopped requiring physical media, like floppy disks and CD-ROMs, for 1,900 types of submissions to the government, such as business filings and submission forms for citizens.
The timeline may be surprising, considering that the last company to make floppy disks, Sony, stopped doing so in 2011. As a storage medium, of course, floppies can’t compete with today’s options since most floppies max out at 1.44MB (2.88MB floppies were also available). And you’ll be hard-pressed to find a modern system that can still read the disks. There are also basic concerns around the old storage format, such as Tokyo police reportedly losing a pair of floppy disks with information on dozens of public housing applicants in 2021.
But Japan isn’t the only government body with surprisingly recent ties to the technology. For example, San Francisco’s Muni Metro light rail uses a train control system that uses software that runs off floppy disks and plans to keep doing so until 2030. The US Air Force used using 8-inch floppies until 2019.
Outside of the public sector, floppy disks remain common in numerous industries, including embroidery, cargo airlines, and CNC machines. We reported on Chuck E. Cheese using floppy disks for its animatronics as recently as January 2023.
Modernization resistance
Now that the Japanese government considers its reliance on floppy disks over, eyes are on it to see what, if any, other modernization overhauls it will make.
Despite various technological achievements, the country has a reputation for holding on to dated technology. The Institute for Management Development’s (IMD) 2023 World Digital Competitiveness Ranking listed Japan as number 32 out of 64 economies. The IMD says its rankings measure the “capacity and readiness of 64 economies to adopt and explore digital technologies as a key driver for economic transformation in business, government, and wider society.”
It may be a while before the government is ready to let go of some older technologies. For example, government officials have reportedly resisted moving to the cloud for administrative systems. Kono urged government offices to quit requiring hanko personal stamps in 2020, but per The Japan Times, movement from the seal is occurring at a “glacial pace.”
Many workplaces in Japan also opt for fax machines over emails, and 2021 plans to remove fax machines from government offices have been tossed due to resistance.
Some believe Japan’s reliance on older technology stems from the comfort and efficiencies associated with analog tech as well as governmental bureaucracy.
Enlarge/ This artist’s illustration released by Astroscale shows the ADRAS-J spacecraft (left) approaching the defunct upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket.
Astroscale, a well-capitalized Japanese startup, is preparing a small satellite to do something that has never been done in space.
This new spacecraft, delivered into orbit Sunday by Rocket Lab, will approach a defunct upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket that has been circling Earth for more than 15 years. Over the next few months, the satellite will try to move within arm’s reach of the rocket, taking pictures and performing complicated maneuvers to move around the bus-size H-IIA upper stage as it moves around the planet at nearly 5 miles per second (7.6 km/s).
These maneuvers are complex, but they’re nothing new for spacecraft visiting the International Space Station. Military satellites from the United States, Russia, and China also have capabilities for rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO), but as far as we know, these spacecraft have only maneuvered in ultra-close range around so-called “cooperative” objects designed to receive them.
The difference here is the H-IIA rocket is uncontrolled, likely spinning and in a slow tumble, and was never designed to accommodate any visitors. Japan left it in orbit in January 2009 following the launch of a climate monitoring satellite and didn’t look back.
That was the case, at least, until a few years ago, when the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) partnered with Astroscale in a public-private partnership to demonstrate capabilities the private sector could use to eventually remove large pieces of space debris littering low-Earth orbit. The same robotic technologies could also apply to satellite servicing or refueling missions.
“We are putting this debris removal by robotic technology as one of our main technology development areas because safely approaching an object, and also observing the object and capturing the object, is basically a common technology for any on-orbit servicing,” said Eddie Kato, president and managing director of Astroscale Japan.
In hot pursuit
This mission is called ADRAS-J, short for Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan. “This mission entails the first ever approach of actual space debris and will be a monumental step toward a more sustainable future in space,” Mike Lindsay, Astroscale’s chief technology officer, posted on X.
The ADRAS-J spacecraft, built in-house at Astroscale’s Tokyo headquarters, is about the size of a kitchen oven and weighs roughly 330 pounds (150 kilograms) fully fueled. The satellite launched from New Zealand at 9: 52 am EST (1452 UTC) Sunday aboard an Electron rocket provided by Rocket Lab. About an hour after liftoff, ADRAS-J deployed from the Electron’s kick stage into an on-target polar orbit reaching an altitude of 370 miles (600 kilometers) at its highest point.
The liftoff from Rocket Lab’s spaceport in New Zealand was timed to allow ADRAS-J to launch into the same orbital plane as its objective—the H-IIA upper stage. Astroscale reported the spacecraft was healthy after Sunday’s launch. In a pre-launch interview, Kato said ADRAS-J will begin its pursuit of the spent H-IIA rocket in a couple of weeks, once ground teams complete initial checkouts of the spacecraft.
ADRAS-J will fire thrusters to match orbits with the H-IIA rocket, and as soon as next month, it could be flying within about 300 feet (100 meters) of the abandoned upper stage. Astroscale engineers will initially rely on ground-based tracking data to pinpoint the H-IIA’s location in space. Once in closer range, ADRAS-J will use visible and infrared cameras, along with laser ranging sensors, to transition to relative navigation mode. These sensors will measure the distance, closing rate, and orientation of the upper stage.
Astroscale officials view the switch from relying on ground tracking data to onboard relative navigation sensors as a crucial moment for the ADRAS-J mission. ADRAS-J will circle the rocket to assess its spin rate, spin axis, and the condition of its structure. This is the crux of the challenge for ADRAS-J because the rocket is unpowered and therefore unable to hold position. The upper stage also lacks laser reflectors and targets that would aid an approaching spacecraft.
This will mark the conclusion of the JAXA-supported portion of the ADRAS-J mission. If everything is working as planned, the spacecraft could move closer to the rocket to further validate Astroscale’s sensor suite and automated navigation and guidance algorithms. This will allow the company’s engineers to gather data for a proposed follow-on mission to actually go up and grab onto the same H-IIA upper stage and remove it from orbit.
“We are targeting to go closer, maybe 1 to 2 meters away from the object. Why? Because the next mission will be to really capture the H-IIA launch vehicle,” Kato told Ars last week. “In order to safely approach to a range where a robotic arm is able to be extended, it’s probably like 1.5 to 2 meters away from the object. We want to demonstrate up to that point through this ADRAS-J mission. Then on the next mission, called ADRAS-J2, we are actually equipping the robotic arm and capturing the H-IIA launch vehicle.”
The Japanese government is finally letting go of floppy disks and CD-ROMs. It recently announced amendments to laws requiring the use of the physical media formats for submissions to the government for things like alcohol business, mining, and aircraft regulation.
Japan’s minister for Digital Transformation, Taro Kono, announced the “war on floppy discs” in August 2022. Before the recent law changes, about 1,900 government procedures required the use of obsolete disk formats, including floppy disks, CDs, and MiniDiscs, for submissions from citizens and businesses.
Kono announced intentions to amend regulations to support online submissions and cloud data storage, changing requirements that go back several decades, as noted recently by Japanese news site SoraNews24.
On January 22, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) announced that it changed 34 ordinances to eradicate the requirements of floppy disks. As per a Google translation of a January 23 article from the Japanese tech website PC Watch, the ministry has deleted requirements of floppy disks and CD-ROMs for various ordinances, including some pertaining to quarrying, energy, and weapons manufacturing regulations.
METI’s announcement, as per a Google translation, highlighted the Japanese government’s “many provisions stipulating the use of specific recording media such as floppy disks regarding application and notification methods,” as well as “situations that are hindering the online implementation of procedures.”
Floppy disks first became commercially available in 1971 through IBM. They evolved through the decades, including with the release of the 3.5-inch floppy in 1983 via Sony. With usage growing and peaking in the ’80s and ’90s, the floppy disk couldn’t compete with the likes of CD-ROMs, USB thumb drives, and other more advanced forms of storage made available by the late ’90s. Sony, the last floppy disk manufacturer standing, stopped making floppies in 2011.
Floppy disks aren’t equipped for many of today’s technological needs, with storage capacity maxing at 1.44MB. Still, government bodies in Japan have been using them regularly, leading, at times, to complications. For example, in 2021, it was reported that Tokyo police lost a pair of floppy disks that had information about 38 public housing applicants.
Japan’s reliance on dated tech is something METI is tackling, but reports have noted resistance from some government bodies. This includes local governments and the Ministry of Justice resisting moving to cloud-based admin systems, per the Japan News newspaper. Japan is ranked number 32 out of 64 economies in the Institute for Management Development’s (IMD’s) 2023 World Digital Competitiveness Ranking, which the IMD says “measures the capacity and readiness of 64 economies to adopt and explore digital technologies as a key driver for economic transformation in business, government, and wider society.”
Some have attributed Japan’s sluggish movement from older technologies to its success in establishing efficiencies with analog tech. Governmental bureaucracy has also been listed as a factor.
Japan isn’t the only entity holding on to the floppy, though. Despite a single photo these days being enough to overfill a floppy disk, various industries—like embroidery, medical devices, avionics, and plastic molding—still rely on them. Even the US Air Force stopped using 8-inch floppy disks in its missile launch control system in 2019. And last year, we reported on an Illinois Chuck E. Cheese using a 3.5-inch floppy for its animatronics system.
US-based Floppydisk.com told The Register that Japan’s rule changes shouldn’t endanger the business. Its Japanese customers are “mostly hobbyists and private parties that have machines or musical equipment that continue to use floppy disks,” Tom Persky, who runs the site, said. Floppydisk.com also sells data-transfer services but told The Register in 2022 that the bulk of revenue is from blank floppy disk sales. At the time, Persky said he expected the company to last until at least 2026.
Japan’s SLIM spacecraft is seen nose down on the surface of the Moon.
Japan’s first lunar lander made an unsteady touchdown on the Moon last week, moments after one of its two main engines inexplicably lost power and apparently fell off the spacecraft, officials said Thursday.
About the size of a small car, the Small Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) landed on Friday, making Japan the fifth country to achieve a soft landing on the lunar surface. Shortly after landing, ground teams in Japan realized the spacecraft was not recharging its battery with its solar panels. The evidence at the time suggested that SLIM likely ended up in an unexpected orientation on the Moon, with its solar cells facing away from the Sun.
With the benefit of six days of data crunching and analysis, officials from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) briefed reporters Thursday on what they have learned about SLIM’s landing. Indeed, the spacecraft toppled over after touching down, with its nose planted into the lunar regolith and its rear propulsion section pointed toward space.
It turns out that SLIM overcame a lot to get to that point. In the final minute of Friday’s descent, one of SLIM’s two engines failed, leaving the craft’s sole remaining engine to bring the spacecraft in for an off-balance landing. Still, JAXA officials said the spacecraft achieved nearly all of its primary objectives. The roughly $120 million robotic mission made the most pinpoint landing on the Moon in history, just as it set out to do.
“From the spacecraft, we were able to acquire all the technical data related to navigation guidance leading to landing, which will be necessary for future pinpoint landing technology, as well as navigation camera image data during descent and on the lunar surface,” JAXA said in a statement.
One of two tiny robots released by SLIM just before landing relayed a remarkable image of the lander standing upside down a short distance away. This might be the first close-up view of a crash landing, however gentle, on another world.
One plucky bird
Based on the update JAXA released Thursday, it’s extraordinary that SLIM made it to the surface in one piece.
After launching in September and arriving at the Moon in December, SLIM lined up for a final descent to the lunar surface on Friday. Around 20 minutes before landing, the spacecraft ignited its two hydrazine-fueled rocket engines for a braking maneuver to drop out of lunar orbit.
JAXA officials said everything went according to plan in the initial phases of the descent. The spacecraft pitched over from a horizontal orientation to begin a final vertical descent to the surface. SLIM’s guidance computer was preloaded with a map of the landing zone, and an onboard navigation camera took pictures of the Moon’s surface throughout the landing sequence. The spacecraft’s computer used these images to compare to the map, allowing SLIM to autonomously correct its course along the way.
Enlarge/ The SLIM spacecraft was built by Mitsubishi Electric under contract with JAXA.
JAXA
But at an altitude of around 160 feet (50 meters), something went wrong with the spacecraft’s propulsion system. Less than a minute before touchdown, one of the engines suddenly lost thrust, and moments later, a down-facing navigation camera caught a glimpse of what appeared to be one of the engine nozzles falling away from the spacecraft. JAXA said engineers believe the engine failure was likely caused by “some external factor other than the main engine itself.” Officials are still investigating to determine the root cause.
The spacecraft continued descending on the power of its remaining engine, but it became more difficult to control the lander. The thrust from the single engine imparted a sideways motion to the spacecraft. Normally, SLIM would have used thrusters to tilt itself from the vertical orientation necessary for the final descent and into a position to plop itself on the lunar surface along the spacecraft’s long axis. SLIM had five crushable landing legs to absorb the force of the gentle impact.
While this two-stage landing sequence was the plan, JAXA said Thursday that the spacecraft “touched the ground in an almost straight standing position with lateral velocity.” The vertical speed at touchdown was about 3.1 mph (1.4 meters per second), slightly slower than the expected descent rate.
“Because the ground contact conditions such as lateral speed and attitude exceeded the specification range, a large attitude change occurred after touchdown, and the aircraft settled in a different attitude than expected,” JAXA said.
In other words, the squirrelly landing caused the spacecraft to tip over. SLIM settled in a bottoms-up position on a shallow slope rather than on its side. Its solar panel wasn’t facing up but was instead pointed toward the west, away from the Sun’s position in the eastern morning sky at the landing site.
