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Blue Origin drops space station plans to focus on moon

Orbital Reef space station
An artist’s concept shows the Orbital Reef space station. (Blue Origin Media)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has decided not to seek further NASA funding for its Orbital Reef space station project in order to tighten its focus on lunar missions.

For the past five years, Blue Origin has played a lead role in Orbital Reef, alongside partners including Sierra Space and Boeing. In late 2021, Blue Origin won a $130 million contract from NASA in the first phase of the space agency’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Destinations program, or CLD.

Now NASA is seeking proposals for the next phase of the program, which will fund the development of orbital outposts to replace International Space Station in the 2030s. Proposals are due on Dec. 8, with contracts expected to be awarded next spring.

Blue Origin indicated that it will not submit a bid.

“Blue Origin’s mission is to build a road to space for the benefit of Earth so that millions of people can live and work in space. Establishing a sustained human presence on the moon is a critical step toward that future,” the company said in an emailed statement.

“As our role supporting NASA’s Artemis and Moon Base missions continues to grow, we’re focusing resources on capabilities that directly advance our lunar projects,” Blue Origin said. “By sharpening that focus, we can move faster on the technologies and infrastructure needed to make lunar permanence a reality.”

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Universe Today

Starship soars, but SpaceX misses out on booster catch

Starship ascending with Texas coastline in background
SpaceX's Starship rocket rises from its Texas launch pad. (Credit: SpaceX via X)

SpaceX sent its Starship on a flight that was meant to feature a first-ever retrieval of both rocket stages, but a launch-pad catch of the first-stage booster had to be canceled due to safety concerns.

Instead, the Super Heavy booster was diverted during its descent to make an offshore splashdown. Observers at SpaceX’s Starbase on the South Texas coast could hear the sonic boom and see the fiery plunge that took place minutes after launch at 4:47 p.m. CT (2:47 PT) today. “Wow, you could feel the rumble of that splashdown there,” launch commentator Jessie Anderson said.

This 15th flight test still has a chance to make history: The mission plan calls for the Starship second stage to spend as much as 22 hours in orbit — ending with a return to the pad for a midair capture by the launch tower’s giant extendable arms. SpaceX has caught Starship’s booster during three previous test flights, but this would be a first for a second stage.

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GeekWire

Constellation Space launches software for satellite fleets

Illustration: Giant screen showing satellites orbiting the globe
Constellation Space’s software platform uses machine learning to optimize satellite data transfer. (Constellation Space Illustration)

Seattle-based Constellation Space is rolling out its flagship software platform, which uses machine learning to streamline operations for fleets of satellites and the ground networks that serve them.

“We build models in-house for things like weather, attenuation, signal jamming, demand … and synthesize all of that to help operators understand what their ground contact plan looks like in the future, and how to optimize their fleets,” CEO Kamran Majid told me.

The Constellation Platform is tailor-made for a growing number of satellite constellations in low Earth orbit. Keeping track of thousands of satellites, and the best opportunities for downlinking data from each of those satellites, is becoming an increasingly complicated task.

Constellation Space, which was founded last year, draws upon Majid’s experience as a NASA engineering intern and as a software engineer working on SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network.

“At Starlink, I saw firsthand how manual mission-control processes break down as constellations scale,” he said. “I started Constellation to help smaller teams get ahead of link failures instead of spending their time rebuilding pass plans and recovering from outages.”

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Glitch ends satellite inspection mission prematurely

An artist’s conception shows Starfish Space’s Otter spacecraft in orbit. (Starfish Space Illustration)
An artist’s conception shows Starfish Space’s Otter spacecraft in orbit. (Starfish Space Illustration)

Starfish Space says it can no longer receive data from its first full-scale Otter space vehicle, bringing a $15 million NASA mission to inspect inoperable satellites to a premature end.

In a LinkedIn post, the Tukwila, Wash.-based startup said its Otter 24C spacecraft was not able to complete all the objectives for the mission, known as Small Spacecraft Propulsion and Inspection Capability (SSPICY). “Starfish and NASA are exploring opportunities to fulfill mission objectives through other Starfish missions,” the company said.

The Otter spacecraft was sent into low Earth orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Oct. 1. “Following a successful launch and deployment, Starfish established two-way contact with the spacecraft and successfully commanded Otter 24C, downlinking significant telemetry during early operations,” Starfish said.

However, the mission team lost contact with the oven-sized spacecraft during the commissioning process. “An investigation into the loss of communications has determined that fault protection on the satellite bus provided by Astro Digital had an error that turned off the radio and prevented re-establishing communications,” the company said.

Starfish, NASA and Astro Digital determined that the spacecraft was unrecoverable. In today’s update, Starfish said it is working closely with Astro Digital to fix the fault protection system and update testing procedures for future Otters.

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Fiction Science Club

What will politics look like on other planets?

Scene showing an individual wearing a cape, standing atop a platform surrounded by thousands of subjects
Throngs salute Paul Atreides, who reigns as emperor of the known universe in "Dune: Part Three." (Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures)

When we make our home on other worlds, who will be in charge?

Will it be an emperor, like the main character in “Dune: Part Three,” the final movie in a trilogy based on Frank Herbert’s sci-fi saga? Or a billionaire, like the space mogul who plays a key role in setting up a Mars base in “For All Mankind”? Or a rebel alliance, like the revolutionaries in “Star Wars” and “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress”?

Jacob Haqq Misra, an astrobiologist who literally wrote the book on space sovereignty, suggests that it’ll be none of the above, at least during the initial phases of extraterrestrial expansion.

“You’re going to have Earth cultures represented, and ideas about Earth governance represented, and what will emerge is sort of a mishmash legal framework of agreements for how to coexist peacefully,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “That’s maybe not even so bad.”

During our podcast chat, Misra laid out what sounds like a sensible perspective on the future of space politics, based on earthly precedents rather than starry-eyed assumptions about the final frontier.

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Universe Today

Virgin Galactic unveils a new space plane with new name

Apeiron space plane attached to Eve mothership in midflight
Virgin Galactic's first Delta-class space plane is flown to its home base in New Mexico, tucked beneath its mothership. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

Virgin Galactic is back in the spaceflight spotlight with the unveiling of a shiny new object: an updated Delta-class suborbital space plane with an exotic name.

More than two decades after SpaceShipOne won a $10 million X Prize for private spaceflight, Virgin Galactic ferried its third-generation rocket ship today from its factory in Mesa, Ariz., to its home base at Spaceport America in New Mexico. The spaceship was named Apeiron in an online contest that drew votes from more than 80 countries. Don’t pronounce the word like “ape-iron”; it’s actually “app-err-on,” as in the Greek word for “Boundless.”

“This morning, we gave Apeiron a name. This afternoon, Apeiron came home,” Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier said.

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GeekWire

Move over, Pluto: Telescope spots dwarf planet prospect

Illustration: Paths of planetary objects in solar system, with 2026 ED138 highlighted
A visualization highlights the orbit of dwarf planet candidate 2026 ED138. (Credit: Rubin Observatory / NOIRLab / SLAC /AURA / R. Proctor)

Astronomers sorting through data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile have found an icy world that has a good chance of joining Pluto in the solar system’s retinue of dwarf planets.

University of Washington astronomer Mario Jurić joined the astronomer who made the discovery, Matthew Holman of the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, to announce the findings today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences in Spokane, Wash.

Jurić, the Rubin team’s solar system lead scientist, said the observatory’s capabilities made it possible to detect and characterize the new dwarf planet candidate, known as 2026 ED138.

“Rubin is giving us an unprecedented capacity to explore the sky through a combination of speed, depth, and precision,” Jurić said in a news release. “And the discovery is just the beginning: Once we identify a new object, we can search back months, and sometimes even decades, finding it in images where nobody knew to look. This ability to both discover and ‘precover’ objects is transforming how quickly and accurately we can determine their orbits and understand the distant solar system.”

2026 ED138 traces a tilted orbital path that takes it well beyond Pluto, the solar system’s best-known dwarf planet. It’s currently at a distance of 46 astronomical units, where 1 AU equals the average distance between Earth and the sun. Pluto, by comparison, is currently about 40 AU from the sun. Astronomers suspect ED138 formed billions of years ago closer to the sun before being flung into a wider orbit by gravitational interactions with Neptune.

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GeekWire

Orbital Robotics plans to send robot arms to space station

Combination image: Illustration showing Astrobee robot with Orbital Robotics' arms at left, and picture showing astronaut and Astrobee robots on ISS at right
An illustration shows an Astrobee free-flying robot equipped with Orbital Robotics’ arms, at left. NASA astronaut Megan McArthur shows off three Astrobees aboard the International Space Station, at right. (Credits: Orbital Robotics for illustration at left, NASA for photo at right)

A free-flying NASA robot aboard the International Space Station will soon demonstrate a system for capturing and servicing satellites in orbit, using a pair of autonomous robotic arms built by Seattle startup Orbital Robotics.

“This demo will prove our ability to capture, manipulate and upgrade satellites on orbit, moving humanity one massive step forward towards reusable satellites,” Orbital Robotics CEO Aaron Borger said today in a news release.

Borger told me the company plans to send its arms to the space station in the third quarter of 2027. Three separate demonstrations would be conducted, each about a month apart, he said.

The mission will mark a major milestone for Orbital Robotics, which was founded in 2024 by Borger and other veterans of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, including lead hardware engineer Riley Mark, lead software engineer Sohil Pokharna and adviser Doug Kohl.

Orbital Robotics has been developing arms controlled by artificial intelligence for use on free-flying spacecraft, and this will be the company’s first opportunity to prove out its capture technology and autonomous control software together in microgravity under real spaceflight conditions.

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GeekWire

Seattle space ventures face problems and prospects

Varda space capsule on display in foreground of conference hall, with attendees milling about in the background
Dale Goulding, chief operating officer at Forge Digital, chats with Michael Reilly, chief strategy officer at Varda Space Industries, at the Space Northwest Symposium in Federal Way, Wash. One of Varda’s orbital capsules is on display in front of them. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

How high can Washington state’s space industry rise?

Preliminary findings suggest that the economic impact of the state’s space sector more than doubled between 2018 and 2022, and nearly doubled again between 2022 and now. But at the same time, some leaders of the space community are questioning whether the Pacific Northwest can keep pace with other regional clusters in, say, Florida, Texas and Colorado.

That good news, bad news situation made headlines this week when Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa questioned whether he’d pick the Seattle area as his home base if he had to do it over — just before taking the stage as a member of Gov. Bob Ferguson’s Washington Space Council.

Ferguson isn’t the only elected official trying to make sure the Seattle area keeps up on the space frontier. Dana Ralph, the mayor of Kent, Wash., where Stoke is headquartered, made that clear in her remarks during the kickoff for Seattle Space Week at the Museum of Flight.

“We don’t take you for granted,” said Ralph, addressing a gathering of CEOs, investors and other VIPs. “I want you to hear that out loud: We don’t take you for granted.”

Seattle Space Week — highlighted by the Space Northwest Symposium in Federal Way — provided plenty of opportunities for discussing the challenges facing Washington state’s space ventures. Here are four problems to face, and four prospects to look forward to…

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GeekWire

Starfish Space’s first Otter spacecraft goes into orbit

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rising into blue sky
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket rises from its California launch pad, sending 130 payloads into orbit. (Credit: SpaceX via X)

Starfish Space’s first full-scale Otter satellite servicing vehicle went into orbit today, marking a milestone for the Tukwila, Wash.-based startup.

The Otter spacecraft was among 130 payloads launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Otter is roughly the size of a kitchen oven, with solar arrays that were folded up for launch.

Other payloads on the satellite rideshare mission, known as Transporter-18, included Cowboy Space’s first power-beaming satellite, a prototype for Google’s AI data-center constellation, and a NASA-funded probe that will track the energy released by galaxies and supernovas.

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