Because of the new crisis in the USA, of necessity this issue of ‘Space Notes’ is an interim one. There are much bigger issues at stake there than merely the future of the space programme, and I know some people would regard that statement as heretical. It reminds me of the situation in the summer of 1984, when I went to a lecture at the San Diego ‘Omnimax’ planetarium by the science fiction writer Greg Bear. Walter Mondale was standing for U.S. President on a platform which included a pledge to abolish NASA, and Greg said, with evident discomfiture, that while he hated ‘one-issue voting’, he found himself compelled to vote Republican, for Ronald Reagan, against all his other convictions. Reagan’s attitude to space was undeclared at the time, and he made a shaky start by proposing to shut down the Voyager spacecraft in the outer Solar System. (Kit Weinrichter, ‘Voyager: The Last Picture Show?’, Spacereport, March 1986.) He later changed his stance, restarting the much-needed National Space Council and launching the space station project, as a result of which the people mentioned above still call him ‘wonderful Mr. Reagan’, despite (for instance) his brutal cancellation of benefits for the disabled. The current situation is a great deal worse.
President Trump’s proposals for NASA include a 20% cut of the overall budget, putting thousands of employees out of work, and cancelling 41 space projects, 29 of which currently have spacecraft in flight. The budget went before Congress and Senate, who had to accept the cuts, amend them or reject them, by October 1st (originally given as September 30th in the media, and with notices of prospective layoffs already issued to large numbers of staff.) As I understand it, the Senate proposed instead to leave the NASA appropriation untouched, and in Congress (where the Republicans have a majority) opposition was less confrontational, but still involved keeping existing spacecraft in operation. The Senate vote to reject the space cuts was defeated by just one vote, and there has been criticism of Democrats who voted with the government to avoid what has happened now.
Where the White House proposals foundered was on the far more drastic cuts to healthcare, medical research, and foreign aid including participation in international health programmes. For just one example, it has been estimated that the sudden withdrawal from the international campaign against malaria may cost 3 million lives in the first year alone. The cuts to cancer research are equally drastic, and the vaccination issue is too controversial even to start on here. On those issues, the Senate has refused to compromise, and as a result the US government has been shut down, putting hundreds of thousands of workers ‘on furlough’, with the President threatening to use that as an opportunity for dismissals on an even larger scale. As Samuel Pepys might have said, ‘What will come of it, God knows’, but in view of the humanitarian issues at stake, we may have to accept the space cuts as a small price to pay for the defeat of the budget in more important areas. It has been said that ‘This will be the end of 50 years of US supremacy in space’, and it will probably take that long to rebuild it.
Private space ventures are not affected to the same extent, and Elon Musk has announced October 14th as the provisional date for his next Starship/Superheavy launch. Static firings of both stages have already taken place (Figs. 1 & 2). As that too will be from his Texas spaceport, the shutdown of facilities at Kennedy Space Centre will not prevent it, but whether he will be able to get clearance for it from the Federal Aviation Authority is a different matter. Other space projects like the continuing buildup of his Starlink constellation, launching from KSC and Vandenburg, undoubtedly will be.
This might be a good moment to comment on some anti-SpaceX comments I’ve been seeing online. There’s one critic who appears regularly on a general science website with articles like ‘Superheavy will never work’, ‘Starship will never work’ and ‘Starlink will never work’. The last three words appear to be his mantra, but I’m reminded of the similar theme followed by some writers for New Scientist in the days of the space race. As Projects Mercury and Gemini advanced, one such predicted a coming shutdown due to reliance on the Saturn, ‘a rocket which everyone refers to as if it was in the final stages of proving’, when in fact it had still to fly. He foresaw failures on the first ten launches and a much longer delay before the booster could be ‘man rated’. In the event there were no failures of either Saturn I or the much larger Saturn V (Figs. 3 & 4), and the entire Apollo programme ran successfully within the number of launches which he thought would be required for the first crewed flight.
A similar article before Shuttle flights began predicted that there would be no use for it: it would be flown once a year at most, by bored pilots who wanted to add another type to their logbooks, and at most they might carry a couple of scientists ‘monitoring a tiny experiment in a corner of the huge, empty cargo hold’. In the event, the Shuttle manifest was completely taken up for all 135 flights it achieved. Still another article predicted that no scientific work would ever be done on the Space Station, because the crews’ time would be entirely taken up with maintenance and repairs; yet work on it was at the cutting edge of many scientific disciplines within a year of the start. As SpaceX pursues its policy of ‘build it, fly it, break it, build another and fly it again’, even more demanding than the ‘all-up testing’ with which NASA pursued development of the Saturn, it’s likely that we’ll see all the objectives met in due course.
In ‘The Sky Above You, October 2025′ (ON, 1st October), I’ve mentioned the chequered history of ESA’s Rosalind Jackson Mars rover, and it’s worth reviewing it in this context. The proposed mission goes back a long way: at one of the British Rocketry Oral History Conferences, at Charterhouse school in the early 2000s, the prototype rover was on display, picking its way around the rock-strewn stage as it had previously done in the ‘Extended Mars Yard’, at British Aerospace (Fig. 5), and in high-altitude Chilean desert near the Paranal observatory (Fig. 6).
In its early development it was known as ‘BB’, for breadboard, but to the French engineers from Thales that meant Bébé, for Brigitte Bardot, and for a while the British prototype was called ‘Brigid’ (Fig. 7), later ‘Bryan’ (as in Fig. 5 above), before the final design was named ‘Rosalind Franklin’, after the pioneer of x-ray crystallography whose work led to the identification of the DNA double helix (Figs. 8 & 9), only for her to miss sharing of the Nobel Prize due to her premature death (it can only be given to living recipients).
The rover was part of the Exomars programme (Fig. 10), which began with the launch together of the Trace Gas Orbiter and Schiaparelli lander (Fig. 11), on a Russian Proton booster in 2016 (Fig. 12).
They were successfully delivered to Mars orbit, but the Schiaparelli descent thrusters shut down immediately after ignition (Fig. 13), apparently having misread the parachute separation as the shock of the landing.
Trace Gas Orbiter is still doing fine, and is one of the Mars probes trying to get a sight of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, which passed Mars at 18 million miles on October 2nd. Having renewed contact with Prof. Avi Loeb and sent him my ON articles backing the idea of sending the Juno orbiter to the object, which didn’t happen, I’ve held back from the controversy until we’ve learned what can be learned about 3I/ATLAS meantime.
The rover was originally to fly on a second Proton, but an agreement with NASA replaced that with Atlas V, only to be cancelled by the Obama administration in 2012 to pay for cost overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope (Fig. 14). The mission was re-engineered for Proton launch and a Russian descent stage, only for that too to be cancelled after the invasion of Ukraine.
The descent stage is now being built by British Aerospace (Fig. 15), and as I said in ‘The Sky Above You’, there’s a new agreement for NASA to procure a booster for launch from Kennedy Space Centre in 2028. I can’t find any statement of what that booster will be, but the Franklin rover on its descent stage is a serious piece of kit (Fig. 16) and I can’t see Falcon 9 being man enough to take it to Mars.
The candidates would seem to be the SpaceX Falcon Heavy, the new Space Force Vulcan booster, the Blue Origin New Glenn, or one of the last United Launch Alliance Atlas Vs. Launching the twin ESCAPADE Mars probes on New Glenn would be an important proof of its ability, but due to the shutdown it’s unlikely to make its late October or early November launch window.
Rosalind Franklin’s destination is Oxia Planum (Fig. 17), where the ancient floodwater from Valles Marineris spread out across the plain of Chryse (Fig. 18), where Viking 1 landed in 1976 and produced results in the search for life which remain controversial to this day.
The Franklin mission has received a shot in the arm from the results of the Perseverance rover, in and above Jezero crater, because they make Oxia Planum a very likely place to find traces of ancient life (Figs. 19 & 20).
Other nations remain active in space, though there’s sad news of Japan’s Akatsuki Venus orbiter, which was launched on an H-II booster in 2010 (Fig. 21).
It was the first interplanetary transfer conducted by solar sail (Figs. 22-25), intended to separate from it on approach for a rocket burn (Fig. 26), entering orbit between 300 and 80,000 km, but the engine failed and it passed the planet at 50,000 km in December 2010 (Figs. 27-28).
After orbiting the Sun for five years it was nursed into orbit between 1000 and 360,000 km in December 2015, since when it has made too many discoveries about Venus to list here. But a year ago contact with it was lost, and after long efforts to regain communications the JAXA space agency has given up the attempt.
There’s better news of Japan’s Hyabusa 2, which successfully returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020. (My friend Del Cotter, who keeps the London Zoom group right on such matters, points out that it should be pronounced “Ree-yugu”, or at worst “R’yugu”, eliding the ‘y’.) Hyabusa 2 is now en route to the asteroid 1998 KY26, to arrive in 2031. On March 21st it experienced an ‘anomaly’, and as of April 17th it was still in ‘safe mode’ and in touch with Earth, but there was no further news when I reported on it in the May ‘Sky Above You’. All seems to be well, however, because the latest news continues discussion about its target.
Further study of 1998 KY26 has established that it’s much smaller than previously thought, just 11 metres in diameter, and rotating twice as fast, in five minutes rather than 10 (Fig. 29; ‘Trouble for Hayabusa2? Asteroid target smaller than expected’, EarthSky, online, September 25th, 2025). As that implies, it’s brighter than anticipated and may be a single large rock, rather than a rubble pile like Ryugu and Bennu, and that alone would make it worthy of a visit. The low gravity may make an orbit impossible, in which case the remaining fuel won’t last so long, and the rapid rotation may make a landing impossible, unless at one of the poles (Fig. 30).
The discussion group behind my book Man & the Planets (Ashgrove Press, 1983) considered those points as they applied to the larger asteroid Eros, and concluded, ‘All I ask is a tall ship and a star to bounce her off…’ The NEAR-Shoemaker probe which went to Eros achieved a landing at the end of its mission, directed by Dr. Robert Farquhar and without official permission, but it had no landing gear and the cameras were on the underside, so no pictures were obtained. ESA’s Rosetta probe did likewise at the end of its mission to Comet 67-P, and as anticipated its solar panels snapped off on touchdown. Fig. 30 appears to show Hyabusa 2 with landing gear, but actually it didn’t have any and instead extended a sampling probe, as OSIRIS-REx did at Bennu (Fig. 31), so at best it could only achieve a somewhat precarious wobble and would fall over when the attitude control thrusters ran out of fuel.
Meanwhile China’s asteroid sampler Tianwen 2, launched on 28th May 2025, is proceeding on its way to Kamo’oalewa, one Earth’s seven known “quasi moons”, from which it’s intended to return samples in 2027 (see ‘Space Notes, June 2025′, ON, 29th June 2025). On October 1st, the spacecraft took a ‘selfie’ showing part of the structure including the Chinese flag, with the Earth in the background at what’s described as a distance of 26.5 million miles (Fig. 32), which would be at the most distant point of Kamo’oalewa’s resonant orbit of the Earth (Fig. 33).
It’s a remarkable image because in the only comparable one I know of, taken by OSIRIS-REx at 39.5 million miles in January 2018 (Fig. 34), the Earth and Moon show only as dots.
Earth was photographed from Mars with recognisable features at still greater distance by Mars Global Surveyor in May 2003 (see ‘The Earth from Space’, ON, May 7th, 2023), and by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2007 (Fig. 35), and again in 2016, but none of those included the spacecraft in the foreground – the depth of view is remarkable.
Concern has been expressed recently in the media about whether China might lay claim to the resources of Kamo’oalewa, which is believed to have been blasted off the Moon by an impact. If the impactor was an asteroid, Kamo’oalewa might contain large amounts of precious metals such as platinum. (Oliver Harris, ‘Asteroid Mining: the New Gold Rush in Space’, Mining Technology Insights, February 25th, 2025; Tom Brown, ‘Earth’s next ‘mini-moon’ could create a gold rush for asteroid miners’, MSN, online, September 26th 2025.) Lecturing in Hamilton in May 1974, the late A.T. Lawton gave as an example the amount of platinum to be found in even a small rocky asteroid – what would it do to the value of platinum if it was brought back to Earth? “Especially at the point of impact”, one of his listeners drily commented.
But for me, the major significance of Kamo’oalewa sampling will be the age of the samples, because last year it was suggested that the ‘mini-moon’ had been expelled from the Farside crater Giordano Bruno (Robert Lea, ‘Earth’s weird “quasi-moon” Kamo’oalewa is a fragment blasted out of big moon crater’, Space.com, April 23rd, 2024). In ‘The Green Children of Woolpit, Part 2′, (ON, June 26th, 2022), I mentioned the remarkable report of 1178 of what appeared to be multiple impacts on the Farside of the Moon (Fig. 36).
There’s a great deal more to say about it, which took up half a chapter in my book Children from the Sky (Mutus Liber, 2012), but in summary, the suggestion when the event was first highlighted in the 1970s was that the 12 impacts had formed the Giordano Bruno crater, whose existence had been predicted by Patrick Moore and H. P. Wilkins from the rays of debris reaching the Nearside, and was confirmed by the Soviet Luna 3 in 1959. The impacts of the Shoemaker-Levy comet fragments with Jupiter confirmed that such events could happen, but instead of forming crater chains, as other such events have done on Jupiter’s moons, the 12 impacts of 1178 in a period of 45 minutes appeared to have formed just one crater. To do that, the stream of incoming objects must either have been coming in vertically, concentric with the Moon’s disc, or else tracking the Moon’s rotation over the time involved. Either way, it makes the event seem artificial, and for it to have happened at the height of the Green Children affair could hardly be a coincidence, whatever the purpose was.
Giordano Bruno was photographed from orbit by several Apollo missions, and later in detail by Japan’s Selene orbiter and by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (Fig. 37). The conclusion reached was that the crater was about 4 million years old, judging by the number of smaller craters on the ejecta blanket surrounding it. But there’s one problem with that. If we accept the account of the monks at Canterbury who witnessed the 1178 event, each subsequent impact would have overlaid that blanket with fresh ejecta, so there would be far more small craters on it than would otherwise be expected. I don’t need to say more than that at present: the samples brought back in 2027 by Tianwen-2 will either be a big surprise for me, or for everyone else – something to look forward to, either way.
Duncan Lunan’s recent books are available from bookshops and through Amazon; details are on Duncan’s website, www.duncanlunan.com.