It Was Quite a Week for Blue Origin

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral on Thursday night, May 28, 2026. (Spectrum News 13/Kevin M. Sackett)

It was certainly a mixed week for Blue Origin. The week started with new lunar contracts and ended with a rocket that could not get off the launch pad. Yesterday’s explosion not only destroyed a New Glenn rocket, but also a launch pad. It was reminiscent of the Roscosmos launch pad explosion late last year, as well as the SpaceX launch pad explosion at Cape Canaveral back in 2016 (which took a year to rebuild).

While Blue Origin must be dizzy, NASA is probably panicking. The Artemis III mission is not very likely in 2027 at this rate. Neither Blue Origin or SpaceX seem anywhere near close to ready for a low-Earth orbit display. The much derided Space Launch System (SLS) is looking better and better as time passes. Maybe the planned phase out of that rocket should be put on hold until Blue Origin and SpaceX have a proven replacement.

Given this mess, one can only hope the Chinese are secretly having problems as well with their Moon mission but keeping mums about it. Otherwise, the race to the Moon may be a little too close for comfort.

In addition the Artemis III worries, NASA will be spending the weekend rethinking its upcoming Moon base plans, which includes Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance lander being launched to the Moon later this year. The idea of exploring the Moon and starting a Moon base seems more difficult now when multiple missions are relying on Blue Origin hardware. This may mean more work for SpaceX at a time it is still struggling with other lunar tasks.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who only this week announced the details of his Moon base program, will be pretty busy in the weeks ahead. The rest of us, including China, will be very interested in his adjusted Moon mission plans.

Pic of the Week: The Crystal Ball Nebula

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): An image of NGC 1514, also called the Crystal Ball Nebula, as captured by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. (International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA)

This week’s image is from the Gemini North telescope located on the summit of Maunakea in Hawaii. NGC 1514, or the Crystal Ball Nebula, is about 1,500 light-years away. It was first discovered in 1790 by German–British astronomer William Herschel, who classified it as a planetary nebula.

Here is a little more about the nebula from NOIRLab:

Planetary nebulae form when a low- or intermediate-mass star ejects its outer layers near the end of its life, forming a somewhat spherical cloud of gas. They typically have smoother, spherical shapes, making the Crystal Ball Nebula unique for its bumpy shells of gas. As the central star casts away this gas, its inner core is exposed. Radiation from the core energizes the gas, giving it a scorching temperature and chromatic glow…While it may appear in this image as if there is a single shining light source at the heart of the Crystal Ball Nebula, as Herschel saw, it actually contains two stars. These two stars orbit each other with a period of around nine years — the longest known for any binary pair within a planetary nebula. Scientists believe that one of these stars, which was once several times more massive than our Sun, released its outer layers while in the throes of death. As the progenitor star and its binary companion orbit each other, they mold the expanding shell of gas with their strong, asymmetrical winds, forming the lumpy layers we see today.

Astronomy Questions: What Do You Know About SpaceX?

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by Gino Crescoli from Pixabay.

As part of the recent release of financial data related to SpaceX’s upcoming Initial Public Offering, we learned a few things about the company. Here are a few questions pertaining to that data and SpaceX operations in general.

True or False: SpaceX had a net loss in 2025.

Multiple Choice: SpaceX provides computing power to what AI company?

A. Anthropic
B. CoreWeave
C. Meta
D. Open AI

Multiple Choice: SpaceX was responsible for what percent of global rocket launches in 2025?

A. 36 percent
B. 51 percent
C. 60 percent
D. 85 percent

Take a guess and then check your answer by going to the “Astronomy Question Answer Sheet” page.

Space Stories: ESA & China Are Smiling, Blue Origin Beats SpaceX to the Moon, and JWST Analyzes Exoplanet Atmosphere

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Here are some recent space-related stories.

—European Space Agency: “Smile Lifts Off on Quest to Reveal Earth’s Invisible Shield Against the Solar Wind“

The Smile spacecraft lifted off on a Vega-C rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana at 04:52 BST / 05:52 CEST (00:52 local time) on 19 May 2026. The launch marks the beginning of an ambitious mission to better understand solar storms, geomagnetic storms, and the science of space weather…Smile is a collaboration between the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It will reveal how Earth responds to the streams of particles and bursts of radiation from the Sun, using an X-ray camera to make the world’s first X-ray observations of Earth’s magnetic shield, and an ultraviolet camera to watch the resulting northern lights non-stop for 45 hours at a time.

—The Guardian: “Nasa Selects Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for First of Three Uncrewed Lunar Missions“

Nasa announced on Tuesday ambitious plans for three uncrewed lunar missions this year to kickstart construction of a $20bn moon base, and said it had chosen the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to conduct the first...[NASA’s Administrator] said the three missions planned for 2026 would be followed by “more than a dozen” more in the coming years to test systems and equipment. He said the highly successful Artemis II mission last month that sent four astronauts around the moon for the first time since 1972 had been both a catalyst and incentive to advance the moon base plan.

—Astrobiology: “Astronomers Observe Exoplanet Atmospheres With New Cloud-detecting Method“

Every morning, clouds roll in, and by evening, they have cleared off. This sounds like a weather forecast for a coastal city here on Earth — but it’s for WASP-94A b, a well-studied gas giant orbiting a star located nearly 700 light-years away. A new study published in the journal Science documents the first detection of repeating cloud cycles on a hot Jupiter exoplanet. The first author of the study is Sagnick Mukherjee, a 51 Pegasi b postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. Mukherjee is part of a research team that analyzed data from the James Webb Space Telescope targeting WASP-94 A b, a gas giant in the constellation Microscopium. The team discovered that the planet’s morning side is blanketed in clouds of magnesium silicate, the same mineral found in common rocks, while its evening side is under clear skies.

Note: Here is the podcast version of this post.

Study Findings: TESS Planet Occurrence Rates Reveal the Disappearance of the Radius Valley around Mid-to-late M Dwarfs

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). (NASA)

The Astronomical Journal abstract of study findings:

We present the deepest systematic search for planets around mid-to-late M dwarfs to date. We have surveyed 8134 mid-to-late M dwarfs observed by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite with a custom-built pipeline and recover 77 vetted transiting planet candidates. We characterize the sensitivity of our survey via injection–recovery and measure the occurrence rate of planets as a function of orbital period, instellation, and planet radius. We measure a cumulative occurrence rate of 1.10 ± 0.16 planets per star with radii >1 R⊕ orbiting within 30 days. This value is consistent with the cumulative occurrence rate around early M dwarfs, making M dwarfs collectively the most prolific hosts of small close-in planets. Unlike the bimodal radius valley exhibited by close-in planet populations around FGK and early M dwarfs, we recover a unimodal planet radius distribution peaking at 1.25 ± 0.05 R⊕. We additionally find 0.954 ± 0.147 super-Earths and 0.148 ± 0.045 sub-Neptunes per star, with super-Earths outnumbering sub-Neptunes 5.5:1, firmly demonstrating that the radius valley disappears around the lowest-mass stars. The dearth of sub-Neptunes around mid-to-late M dwarfs is consistent with predictions from water-rich pebble accretion models that predict a fading radius valley with decreasing stellar mass. Our results support the emerging idea that the sub-Neptune population around M dwarfs is composed of water-rich worlds. We find no hot Jupiters in our survey and set an upper limit of 0.012 hot Jupiters per mid-to-late M dwarf within 10 days.

Citation: Erik Diego Gillis et al. TESS planet occurrence rates reveal the disappearance of the radius valley around mid-to-late M dwarfs. AJ 171 317 (2026).

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ae5810

Study-related stories:

Phys.org – “The Most Common Planets in the Galaxy Don’t Appear Around the Most Common Stars, TESS Observations Suggest”

Newsbreak – “TESS Uncovers Cosmic Surprise: Galaxy’s Most Common Planets Skip Its Most Common Star”

Universe Today – “Closing The Exoplanet Radius Gap”