Many Departures at NASA, No Clear Path Forward

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Credit: Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay.

The problem with a poorly-planned downsizing of an organization is that you may lose too many people in key positions and the disarray demotivates those who remain. Hence, it should be no surprise that this is what we are seeing at NASA as well as other agencies.

NASA is now looking at losing about 20 percent of its workforce, or about 4,000 employees, who have been harassed and prodded towards the door. That represents the loss of an amazing amount of talent. Of course, the White House doesn’t seem to care given its proposed budget cutting NASA’s 2026 budget by about 24 percent.

It will not be long before we have a blame game about “Who lost the Moon?” once China surpasses us in the race to the Moon. We may even be asking “Who lost Mars” now that we have abandoned retrieving a Mars soil sample while China and Japan have plans to bring back Martian soil. All of this is foreseeable to the average person, but for some reason no light seems to penetrate the persistent fog in Washington, DC.

We already read stories about whether Boeing even knows how to build a new airplane, Will we soon have stories about that nation that once put men on the Moon but lost its way?

The United States was behind the Soviets in the space race when it found the will to dream big. I am seeing no signs of dreaming in this nightmarish dismantling of science in this country. We have to work hard to remain ahead of this latest space race, and should we stumble there are plenty of other countries waiting to fill the void.

We are making the same mistake that Russia did when it invaded Ukraine and put its space hopes on hold. The difference here is that we have trained the guns on our own space and science programs.

The Recently Created iSpace Crater Has Been Spotted

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The arrow indicates the impact site for ispace’s Resilience lunar lander, as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera on June 11, 2025. (NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University)

It doesn’t look like much, but NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently spotted the small crater made by the crashed ispace lunar lander named Resilience. The Japanese lander crashed on the Moon’s surface earlier this month after the company’s second try at a lunar landing.

The Moon is littered with debris and pockmarks from various successful and failed missions. The Apollo crew alone left enormous amounts of trash, debris, and space equipment scattered around the Moon. The Russians also left quite a bit of space equipment on the Moon many years ago, as well as its most recent Luna-25 mission, which crash-landed.

We can only hope that the Artemis mission will soon enough be adding to the equipment on the Moon without the drama of crash landings.

Space Quote: Japanese Lunar Lander Fails a Second Time

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): Artist’s rendering of the Resilience lunar lander approaching the moon. (ispace)

“Given that there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to swiftly analyze the telemetry data we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause.”

-Statement by Takeshi Hakamada, CEO and founder of Japan’s private space company ispace, in a press release following the failure of the company’s second lunar lander mission to the Moon. The company noted that the lander experienced a “hard landing” when it failed to sufficiently decrease its speed on approach. The mission started back in January when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried both this mission as well as Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost, which had a successful landing on the lunar surface. The ispace lander was named Resilience – something it will need more of to stay in the space race.

Space Stories: The Disappearance of Dark Skies in Chile, Subaru Telescope Gets New Eye, and Roman Telescope Previews

Posted on by onespaceman2000
Image (Credit): The four large Unit Telescopes and the four smaller Auxiliary Telescopes that make up the European Southern Observatory’s (USO) Very Large Telescope. (USO)

Here are some recent stories related to astronomy telescopes.

—Sky & Telescope: “Industrial Project Threatens Dark Chilean Skies“

When a study in 2023 crowned Cerro Paranal the darkest observatory site in the world, astronomers must have felt reassured to have chosen the right spot. The 2,635-meter (8,645-foot) mountain in Chile’s Atacama Desert is home to the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope, one of the most advanced and prolific astronomical facilities. But now, if a company named AES Andes (a subsidiary of the U.S. power company AES Corporation) gets its way, Paranal’s observational prowess might soon be history: Light pollution emitted by a proposed industrial “megaproject” could do away with the dark skies over this observatory.

—National Astronomical Observatory of Japan: “Prime Focus Spectrograph on the Subaru Telescope to Begin Science Operations in February“

Researchers have finished equipping the Subaru Telescope with a new special “compound eye,” culminating several years of effort. This new eye is an instrument featuring approximately 2,400 prisms scattered across the extremely wide field of view available at the Subaru Telescope’s primary focus, allowing for simultaneous spectroscopic observation of thousands of celestial objects. This unrivaled capability will help researchers precisely understand the formation and evolution of galaxies and the Universe. Among 8-meter-class telescopes, the Subaru Telescope is the most competitive with the largest survey capability in the world. This instrument, the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS), will be ready to begin scientific operations in February 2025.

—NASA: “Simulated Universe Previews Panoramas from NASA’s Roman Telescope“

Astronomers have released a set of more than a million simulated images showcasing the cosmos as NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will see it. This preview will help scientists explore Roman’s myriad science goals. “We used a supercomputer to create a synthetic universe and simulated billions of years of evolution, tracing every photon’s path all the way from each cosmic object to Roman’s detectors,” said Michael Troxel, an associate professor of physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the simulation campaign. “This is the largest, deepest, most realistic synthetic survey of a mock universe available today.”

2024 Space Hightlights – Missions

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Image (Credit): An artist’s rendering of NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft over Europa. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Another list worth highlighting at year-end covers all of the space missions from 2024. For example, this list from Freethink, “the top 10 space stories of 2024,” includes the launch of the Europa Clipper, China’s Chang’e 6 round-trip to the Moon, and a successful commercial launch to the Moon (Odysseus lunar lander).

Here are some other lists of missions from 2024:

Note: The Awesome-Universe list of top missions looking back in 2024 include: