The Silicon Graybeard

I'll keep it short this year.  Just a few little things, too small even for a Small Story Roundup. 

This morning's early SpaceX mission went without a hitch, marking the 134th mission of the year and surpassing last year's record by 38 missions. Of the 134, 89 were Starlink missions, including this morning's. That's almost exactly 2/3 of the total. 

SpaceX's first launch of 2025 will be New Year's night (on the eastern time zone) at midnight also known as Thursday morning at 12:00 AM.  This will be a communications satellite called Thuraya 4-NGS for the UAE based Yahsat. The Falcon 9 will lift the satellite to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit.

It will be a relatively busy first week "just up the road" on the Space Force Station.

Note the announced date for the (dare I say "long-awaited"?) Maiden Flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn.  This one is going to be a "must see." 

There are no launch dates assigned to Vandenberg so far, and the fifth scheduled launch of the year is Starship's IFT-7 from Boca Chica Starbase in Texas. 

On last year's post I made a couple of predictions for '24. "I'm fairly confident Vulcan Centaur will fly - maybe even both Certification missions.  I'm rather less confident that Boeing's Starliner will fly, and about the same level of confidence New Glenn will fly."  Vulcan Centaur flew both certification missions in a roundabout way, and its first National Security flight is looking to be in spring of this year.  Starliner flew, but it's hard to consider it a proper mission since the two astronauts are still up there and Starliner came back to Earth empty.  Half a flight?  New Glenn, as just mentioned, didn't fly and is currently scheduled for its first flight on Sunday the 5th.  Thankfully, I think my predictions pretty much were right on.

I've never been much of a fan for celebrating New Years, so let me leave it there, along with a wish for a very Happy New Year to everyone who stops to read here.  May it be happy, healthy and fun for all.

This morning (EST) India launched a pair of satellites into orbit designed to test out methods of docking two spacecraft autonomously. 

A Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) lifted off at 11:30 a.m. Eastern (1630 UTC; 10 p.m. local time) Dec. 30 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, with the rocket climbing into the night sky.

The PSLV-C60 rocket carried the primary payload in the form of the Space Docking Experiment (SpaDeX) as well as 24 different experiments aboard the POEM-4 secondary payload module. Of the latter, 14 are Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and institutional payloads and 10 further payloads from non-government entities. These include a walking robotic arm, a debris capture robotic manipulator, a compact plant research module and a range of sensors.

SpaDeX is a mission by India's Space Research Organization (ISRO) to demonstrate on orbit docking using two small spacecraft.  Docking is one of those key technologies that the world's leading space programs have demonstrated the ability to do, going back to the 1960s with the Gemini program in the US.  Success will make India the fourth country to demonstrate rendezvous and docking, which will be essential for India's Gaganyaan program with a first crewed flight currently planned for 2026.  Uncrewed test flights are scheduled for 2025.

The SpaDeX mission consists of two small spacecraft (about 220 kg each) to be launched by PSLV-C60, independently and simultaneously, into a 470 km circular orbit at 55° inclination, with a local time cycle of about 66 days. The demonstrated precision of the PSLV vehicle will be utilized to give a small relative velocity between the Target and Chaser spacecraft at the time of separation from the launch vehicle. This incremental velocity will allow the Target spacecraft to build a 10-20 km inter-satellite separation with respect to the Chaser within a day. At this point, the relative velocity between the Target will be compensated using the propulsion system of the Target spacecraft.  

The chaser spacecraft is referred to as SDX01, with the target called SDX02.  The ISRO mission site doesn't talk about a schedule of when the various experiments will happen but it appears to be a long mission with the two spacecraft being used for more experiments after the initial docking and related experiments. 

“After successful docking and rigidization, electrical power transfer between the two satellites will be demonstrated before undocking and separation of the two satellites to start the operation of their respective payloads for the expected mission life of up to two years,” ISRO stated in a mission briefing. 

Image Credit: ISRO

Once they've demonstrated their abilities in this critical area, you can be sure we'll see it in more future missions.  It has already been talked about for the Chandrayaan-4 lunar south pole sampling mission, expected to launch in 2027 or 2028.

It's looking like SpaceX's last launch of the year will be Monday night just after midnight EST; more precisely at 12:34 a.m. EST (0534 GMT) on Tuesday, New Year's Eve.  Of course the farther west time zones will all show this as Monday, Dec. 30.   

The launch will be SpaceX’s 134th Falcon flight in 2024, surpassing the company’s prior year total by 38 missions. Of this year’s 134 launches, 89 were devoted to expanding the Starlink global network (including this upcoming flight).

Tuesday's launch is also SpaceX's third Falcon 9 launch in three days, following a Starlink mission launched from California and a four-satellite launch for Astranis from the company's other Florida launch pad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

This will also be a Starlink mission, carrying 21 Starlink satellites including 13 with direct to cell phone capability.  It will be the 16th flight for the booster which previously launched Crew-6, BlueBird-1, USSF-124, mPOWER-B, and 11 Starlink missions. Following stage separation, the first stage will land on the drone ship Just Read the Instructions about 8 minutes after liftoff. 

This morning's (12:00 AM local or 0500 UTC) Astranis mission is in highlight video format here.  

Starlink is a remarkable achievement. There are close to 7,000 active Starlink satellites of various versions on orbit now (currently said to be "more than 6,850" - meaning six or seven more launches gets them to 7,000).  At the recent pace of three launches per week, not all Starlink, they'll be at 7,000 by the end of January.

File photo of a Falcon 9 liftoff closer to sunset than midnight, from SLC-40.  Image credit: SpaceX

I notice that I haven't done one of these in over six months - although I have done updates for solar storms and other headline news.  So let's get on with it.  

First, I want to reference the videos I have used regularly for these posts, a talk to a ham radio group by Scott McIntosh that Scott gave about a month ago, and this is going to be based on what he talked about. I’m going to lead with NOAA Solar Cycle Progression chart from their web site as I often do.  

As always, the red curve is the predicted number, the gray area is the bounds of numerical uncertainty of the prediction and the erratic looking bunch of dots almost entirely above the uncertainty region is the measured monthly value.  The last dot on the right of the series is this month's, at 115.3 as of today. The top of the uncertainty range is 125.2. 

In case it's not immediately obvious we're around the peak of red prediction curve and it's possible that the peak of the cycle has already happened within the last few months but possibly back in the late summer.  Perhaps the biggest improvement to forecasting Dr. McIntosh has introduced is a way of identifying the exact time when the new sunspot cycle starts.  That's noted when new sunspots happen at very far northern or southern latitudes and have a magnetic polarity opposite the current cycle.  In the big picture sense, there are practically always spots of both polarities, which means two different sunspot cycles, measurable on the sun.   These are depicted as red and blue areas on this graphic.

The colors represent opposite polarities.  It doesn't matter which color you call magnetic north or south - as long as the people you're talking with understand it.  The center square is from a bigger plot, and was a bit too dark when I was working on the draft of this post, so I contrast enhanced it in my main photo editor, to better show the colors in the big element in the middle.  The two important parts of this plot are (1) the two red areas at the top and (2) red and blue always alternate - from left to right (W to E) and top to bottom (N to S). The topmost portion extends to the lower left (earlier in time, lower in latitude) in the uppermost marked off area. The red diagonal band at the top is first appearing around the vertical line marked 2024 on the bottom. It is clearly red as you look at 2025.  

The red and the blue areas at 2025 are indicating that cycle 26 has begun. So what does that mean?

The big thing is we probably have at least another year of better propagation, but solar flares and other sources are likely to be more common, especially from the solar latitudes closer to the poles.  In the last couple of months, we had some very high 10.7cm solar flux numbers (2803.738 MHz solar emissions - which you'd call noise if you heard it on a radio).  For the first time in my ham radio years on the 6 meter band (50-54 MHz) I could hear people within a couple of hundred miles having contacts with Alaska.  Solar flux (SFI) was over 300.  I never heard any of the half dozen Alaskan stations I saw reports of being heard near Florida.  Of the hams on that band, the most common situation I hear is folks saying they have every state worked and confirmed except Hawaii and/or Alaska.  At least I have Hawaii.

Finally, a plot I’ve shown regularly which shows the Smoothed Sunspot Number (SSN) for the last five cycles back to 1976. I like this plot because it’s my ham radio biography in one plot. I was first licensed in February 1976 (the blue curve), so every cycle I’ve been through is on this plot (and I was a shortwave listener for the cycle before that). The plot is posted to Space Weather News (bottom of the page) but is created by a separate site, Solen.info.

The sunspot number for Cycle 25 is approaching the dip between the dual peaks of cycle 23 at the latest measurement, month 52 after the cycle start.  It's the closest that the monthly SSN has come to exceeding a cycle 23 value, although a daily measurement has done that a few times. The last couple of weeks have had lower SSNs than the period that brought the dream of working Alaska hundreds of miles closer to me.  As I've said practically every time I've done an update on cycle 25, it's clearly a stronger cycle than 24 in the light pink, which ran from November of 2008 until December of 2019.  The negative, though, is Cycle 24 was the weakest cycle in a hundred years so being better than that isn't saying much.

We know that Blue Origin had considered their biggest goal for the year was to launch the New Glenn for the first time before the end of 2024; the question is if they can get there in the three days they have left.  I see no indication they've set an announced date, and it's difficult to determine if they've completed all the necessary steps before they try.  

In an article dated early in the day today (the 27th), Spaceflight Now writes that the FAA has granted the launch license. 

Blue Origin is preparing to put on a display of fire and fury out at Launch Complex 36. The company is gearing up for a crucial hot fire test of its New Glenn rocket, which is one of the big, final steps needed before it can launch. It comes as the Federal Aviation Administration granted a Part 450 commercial launch license for the rocket, clearing way for it to operate for five years.

They then go on to tell the story of the last couple of weeks, starting with the fueling test on December 19 and pointing out that Blue appeared to have done some tanking on its rocket, but they didn’t say if it was able to successfully complete a wet dress rehearsal.

Fueling operations again took center stage last Saturday, the 21st, and as I remarked on a "Small Story Roundup" that day, while I waited through the four hour video coverage of NASASpaceflight, we never saw evidence of a static fire. 

Which brings us to today.  This time I was too busy working with the latest thing to fail around the house to stick with a four hour live feed (and it seems it might have been a routine, easy fix - I'll find out tomorrow), but a quick skim through today's NASA Spaceflight video of the test shows no obvious first stage engine firing.  Add in that none of my regular space news sources say anything about a static firing, I'll tentatively conclude they didn't static fire today, either. Neither Next Spaceflight's Blue Origin page nor Blue Origin's corporate web page News say anything about a test today or a fixed date for the first New Glenn launch. 

Screen capture of the December 19th test from NASAspaceflight.com's video. 

EDIT 1030 ET Dec. 28 to add: It turns out that some time last night Blue had an apparently successful static fire of the New Glenn, at least according to Angry Astronaut on YouTube this morning. 

There's another video from a "SpaceX Community" channel saying there was a problem.  Blue Origin's website news page says "The campaign met all objectives and marks the final major test prior to launch."  Angry Astronaut says they will attempt to land the booster on a drone ship, while another source said they won't this time.  

Holding our breath is a little melodramatic because it has been out of communication since last Friday, but Friday, Dec. 27th should be the day NASA hears back from the Parker Solar Probe after the closest approach to the sun by any probe in history.  This screen capture from the mission's home page at the JHUAPL shows all the important numbers at the moment I grabbed the image.  As the fine print in the lower right corner says, these are values at that moment, and not the max or minimum of this phase of the mission.

The Parker Solar Probe flew within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the solar surface to "touch the sun" on Tuesday in what was the closest approach to the star by any human-made object. At the time, the spacecraft was streaking by the sun at a mind-blowing 430,000 mph (690,000 kph), making it the fastest spacecraft ever, NASA has said. It was expected to experience scorching hot temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (980 degrees Celsius) during the encounter.

Before the maneuver started on last Friday night (Dec. 20), the probe sent a beacon transmission "indicating all spacecraft systems were operating normally," NASA officials said in a update at the time.  That was the last time the spacecraft was heard from.  They say:. 

A more robust status update from Parker Solar Probe is expected on New Year's Day, Jan. 1, when the probe is programmed to beam its first telemetry and housekeeping data to Earth since the flyby. It's only then, Buckley said, that scientists will know if the spacecraft collected the expected observations of the sun from the flyby.

The Parker solar probe is one of the boldest, most ambitious missions ever planned.  

In order to get close to the sun, the Parker Solar Probe flew by Venus seven times to snag gravity boosts that accelerated up to its current speed. It also swung around the sun 21 different times, speeding up at getting ever closer with each pass. The Dec. 24 flyby marked the 22nd sun flyby by the Parker Solar Probe, and is the closest the probe will get to the star. It has at least two more orbits ahead at the same speed and distance from the sun, NASA has said.

“This is one example of NASA’s bold missions, doing something that no one else has ever done before to answer longstanding questions about our universe,” said Parker Solar Probe program scientist Arik Posner at NASA Headquarters in Washington in a Dec. 20 statement. "We can’t wait to receive that first status update from the spacecraft and start receiving the science data in the coming weeks."

The sun has been fairly quiet in terms of flares and solar eruptions pointed our way since last Friday and we have every reason to think that the spacecraft was designed for the temperature excursions and other aspects of the close approach to the sun it will see, so it should be fine.  It's still a bit nerve-racking to wait for the radio contact.

EDIT 0845AM ET Dec 27: The JPL Website reports this morning:

It seems that Space.com said, "around midnight on Friday (Dec. 27)" and I read that as not midnight when the 26th becomes the 27th - late Thursday night - but as the very end of the day on the 27th. 

EDIT 0945AM ET Dec 27: It's not the JPL. It's the JHUAPL (APL), which is the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in Laurel Md.  See the comments below.

I constantly have to remind myself that while I might put up a post about some event that happens (or happened) on any given day, most people won't read it until the following day.  While I'm writing this on Christmas Eve, Tuesday Dec. 24, most readers will read this on Christmas Day .  

On this night 56 years ago, Christmas eve of 1968, Apollo 8 was on the world's first mission to the moon. Like sailors sailing out of sight of land for the first time, man was leaving the safety of shore for the first time. We were becoming a space-faring population.  The crew,  Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, spent almost one full day in lunar orbit, completing 10 orbits of the moon before heading back to Earth.

The six-day long mission full of firsts lifted off on Dec. 21, 1968, and it would feature the first time that humans had looked down on the moon from orbit; the first time that humans had seen the far side of the moon with their own eyes, not an orbiting camera.  And it would mark the first time anyone had ever seen the Earth rise over another world.

I think any vote on the top 10 photos from the Apollo era would include this famous Earth rise shot from Apollo 8, arguably as the most famous or most important.  

Christmas Eve was the day they orbited the moon, the day that the crew spoke to us of the "stark and unappetizing" look of the lunar surface and read from the book of Genesis, the first book in the Christian bible.  Here on Earth, 1968 had been a tumultuous year. There had been riots in many places, assassinations and troubles all around the globe. On Christmas eve, in awe of what these men were accomplishing, it seemed like the world held its breath and watched.  

As a space-fanatic 14 year old, I was captivated by the mission.  Of course, the easiest video to find about the mission is the message they sent down on that Christmas eve, 56 years ago.  

As I led off with, I'm writing this on Christmas Eve, but you will most likely be reading this on Christmas day.  As I say every year, hold close the ones you love.  Thanks to those who work today so many others don't have to. If we're very lucky, this will be the worst Christmas of our lives and everything in life gets better year by year for the rest of our lives.  And if things get worse, we'll remember this as the "good old days".  Either way, hold tight. 

 

 

... to have our Month of WTF??!!?? that I talked about Friday.  Two of the things that bit the big one this month are a small one, our bedroom fan, and a big one, our TV.  The fan is still limping along on its replacement, our hurricane prep fan which runs on either Ryobi "One+" 18V batteries or the 120V outlet (AC), and I haven't gone looking for a replacement, yet. 

The TV, though, is a big one.  Last Sunday night, the 15th, the TV was on and everything was normal. I left the room for a while (it was something like "Fast and Furious 28") and the set had a sudden loss of picture quality - darker and just "not quite right."  Colors are wrong as well as brightness and contrast. Over the course of the next few days, I tried to research this sort of issue and tried to see if there was something I could do to fix it.  The old TV was a Hitachi “48 inch class” HD set (an inch class means the diagonal dimension of the display is plus or minus 1/2 inch from that size- which means, in turn, it's sure to be closer to 47-1/2" than 48-1/2") and I found the date we bought it in my old checkbook. It was July of 2017, so the set is 7-1/2 years old. 

I started out in electronics as a hobby at around age 12, and once I could work on things without killing myself, I used to fix TVs. This was in the vacuum tube days, back when the corner drugstore would have a tube tester near the front of the store, so I have some time working on TVs. Everything I worked on was a black&white TV, but I fixed a few of those including some with fairly involved problems so it wasn't all replacing bad tubes.

Last time I had a TV that needed repair, I just bought a new one.  That's how we got this Hitachi set.  So after a couple of days poking around trying to find ideas on how to fix it, we decided to see what a replacement costs. 

I suppose it's not a bad time to be shopping because everyone is claiming some sort of "special deal" on TVs and it's a matter of finding something you like.   

After a couple of days of looking and a couple of days deciding, we went to pick up a Roku smart TV.  While I started out completely opposed to a smart TV due to privacy concerns, we've been driving TVs with a Roku streaming device since about 2003 so it's not like we're going to get exposed to a whole new world. 

Screen capture from the online ad at BestBuy.  

The part of the ad page that I edited out was the part describing my options.  I could (1) go pick it up in the store, (2) go to a designated parking space and have them bring it out to me or (3) not leave the house and have them deliver it tomorrow.  I went with #1.  Getting the TV running and all of my services playing was pretty easy, took around an hour, and inconveniences were few.  Those mostly involved walking to another room to look up something.

Getting the 33% discount shown in the ad is a pretty good starting point and the Hitachi we replaced was smaller and quite a bit more expensive when we bought it in '17.  Add to the "smaller and more expensive" that the higher price didn't include the Roku streaming hardware, that brought the cost of the older setup even higher.  It makes this set seem like a pretty good deal. 

The Big Story I was keeping an eye on never materialized - I thought there was going be a static fire of New Glenn on Saturday evening but it never happened.  That video is four hours long and the guys narrating the video talk about "they could still fire this puppy up" for at least the last two hours.  (Disclaimer: nobody actually said those exact words.)

So some other little stories, mostly from the Rocket Report. 

ArianeSpace plans to test their reusable rocket in '25

Back in 2019, Ariane announced plans to build a reusable rocket patterned after the Falcon 9. When the ESA signed the contract with ArianeGroup for the Themis program in 2020, they had said they would do the initial low-altitude hop tests by 2022. Clearly they're running two years late, double the scheduled time. 

ArianeGroup has brought the main elements of the Themis reusable booster demonstrator together for the first time in France during a "full-fit check," European Spaceflight reports. This milestone paves the way for the demonstrator’s inaugural test, which is expected to take place in 2025. Themis, which is funded by the European Space Agency, is designed to test vertical launch and landing capabilities with a new methane-fueled rocket engine. According to ESA, the full-fit check is one of the final steps in the development phase of Themis.

The first up-and-down hops will be based at the Esrange Space Center in Sweden, and will use the vehicle ArianeGroup is assembling now in France. A second Themis rocket will be built for medium-altitude tests from Esrange, and finally, a three-engine version of Themis will fly on high-altitude tests from the Guiana Space Center in South America. At the rate this program is proceeding, it's fair to ask if Themis will complete a full-envelope launch and landing demonstration before the end of the decade, if it ever does.

The only image I have of the Themis, a concept rendering from 2019. Why, yes, it sure does look like the Falcon 9's landing structure.

When you need a responsive launch provider, who you gonna call?

Ask yourself: you're the US Space Force.  You can only call the launch providers you've certified to handle National Security payloads, and you want to demonstrate how responsive the Space Force can be.  To quote the Ghostbusters theme, who you gonna call?  Back on Dec. 17th, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, sending a military Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite to orbit in a mission called Rapid Response Trailblazer-1 (RRT-1).  

[T]his mission was a US national security space launch and was also intended to demonstrate military capabilities to condense a typical two-year mission planning cycle to less than six months. The payload, GPS III SV-07, is the seventh satellite of the GPS III constellation, built by Lockheed Martin. The spacecraft was in storage awaiting a launch on United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket.

"We decided to pull SV-07 out of storage and try to get it to the launch pad as quickly as possible," Col. James Horne, senior material leader for launch execution at the US Space Force’s Space Systems Command, told Space News. "It’s our way of demonstrating that we can be responsive to operator needs." Rather than the typical mission cycle of two years, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and the Space Force worked together to prep this GPS satellite for launch in a handful of months. Military officials decided to launch SV-07 with SpaceX as ULA's Vulcan rocket faced delays in becoming certified to launch national security payloads. According to Space News, Horne emphasized that this move was less about Vulcan delays and more about testing the boundaries of the NSSL program’s flexibility. “This is a way for us to demonstrate to adversaries that we can be responsive,” he said. Because SV-07 was switched to SpaceX, ULA will get to launch GPS III SV-10, originally assigned to SpaceX.

Butch and Suni to spend at least another month on orbit

You've probably seen the rumors online, but it's actually true this time and not clickbait. NASA has announced that it's delaying the SpaceX Crew-10 launch until next March instead of February.  Probably. So far. 

You know that Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on Boeing's Starliner capsule last June, expecting a 10 day mission.  The Starliner, unfortunately, displayed a handful of issues on the way to the ISS, and after a couple of months of extending the mission, they were told to stay on the Space Station and Starliner would come back to Earth uncrewed. The Crew 9 mission was changed to two astronauts going up so that Butch and Suni will return in the Crew 9 Dragon.  A crew mission, like 9, is usually not set to leave the station until the next mission, Crew 10 arrives.  Now, Crew-10 will get off the ground at least a month later than expected because NASA and SpaceX teams need "time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission."

... but the Federal Government did not shut down last night.  If you're a Fed.gov employee whose job has been rated “nonessential,” sorry, no paid vacation for you, and if you're considered essential, you already know you weren't getting that paid vacation.  Yes, I know that you don't get paid until the issue is settled so you need to live off savings for the few minutes or days that are shutdown. It never, never, hurts to have some savings you can use for times when things go pear-shaped - or however you like to describe it. 

As usual, talk about that mythical debt ceiling came up and that linked article (Business Insider) brings that up as something that was a problem. 

Republicans denied Trump's request to suspend or even eliminate the debt ceiling, which would have resolved a thorny political issue in advance of a likely GOP effort to extend Trump's 2017 tax law. According to Punchbowl News, Johnson said Republicans have agreed to address the nation's borrowing limit next year when the GOP will retake entire control over Washington.

I call the debt ceiling mythical because not once since it was made a law has the debt ceiling actually decreased or done anything to stop the debt from increasing.  The best it has done was to hold the measured debt constant for a short period while the things being shutdown stopped the debt increasing for a few days. Which has historically often meant the groups keeping track of spending and the debt were lying.  LCS - lie, cheat and steal - gets them through these times.  

Here's a chart I put together using a crude tool (Microsoft Paint) that tries to depict the life of the Debt Ceiling since its inception. There are no stops, no point where the ceiling goes continually down, nothing but constant increase. The place where they meet was labeled $6 trillion on both plots, but the vertical scale is a bit compressed on the right, so the situation is actually worse-looking.

Notice how this plot ends at about $28 trillion in 2022?  The current national debt, according the excellent US Debt Clock site is $36.25 trillion dollars. We have been adding another $1 trillion roughly every 100 days. That's pretty much 3 months or one quarter of the year. These fights and threats to shut the government down are show business of the worst time.  Not only is the outcome known in advance, they spend months writing these Continuing Resolutions or CRs to keep the government running and then drop 12 or 1500 page turds laws on the legislators with about two days to read it and approve it. Clearly proposing any changes is actively discouraged. I've run this cartoon since it first showed up because it sums up the story completely.  They set everything up so that they can look like heroes. It's all a show for people who understand nothing but headlines.

You might want to read the poem at this link: it's one of Rudyard Kipling's best.

It has been an odd December here and I honestly have to say I don't have much Christmas spirit going.  I've come to refer to this month as, "the December of WTF??!!??" because of the cascade of odd problems and things breaking that has been a bit overwhelming.  We decorated later than the first few years after we got our artificial tree in 2017, but earlier than we used to when we had real (live) trees.  That should probably read, "real trees living the last days of their lives" rather than just "live."

One of the constant puzzles has been the fence gate problem I mentioned after Tropical Storm Milton back in October. I had tried a couple of different things but winds out the east at 20 or more would always push the fence open.  Somewhere along the line I had the realization that the exact vertical position of the latch hardware didn't matter much and after struggling with finding the right hardware for a while, I was able to lower the latch an inch or two, and get the gate to latch closed, for the first time since before Milton. We haven't had really strong Easterly winds to test it out since I finished the fix, so we'll see.

There have been plumbing problems and TV problems, our old man cat Mojo had a bloody nose for unknown reasons and an emergency vet visit but is back to being himself.  Mrs. Graybeard had her cataracts removed starting in October, getting her vision back - but not without unusual struggles getting through that. She was released on December 10th.

I could just regurgitate some of my favorite posts in an effort to enhance the Christmas spirit, or my Christmas spirit.  How about two of the pictures I've posted the most? 

This is from Roswell, New Mexico on Christmas Eve, 1949.  Found linked on Pinterest, the Great Sargasso Sea of the Internet, where you can wander for hours amid images both sublime and stupid - or both.  No true source credited.  The original URL from when I ran across the picture (six years ago) is dead.  

While going through my mom's things after she passed away back in 2013, we found this picture.  This is my brother (on the right) and me visiting Santa.  He looks a bit more skeptical than me, but he is the older and wiser brother.  While I'm not sure of the date, I'm guessing around 1960, plus or minus a year or two.  If it was 1960, I'd have been 6 and older bro 9.  That's right: this is the only "full frontal" picture of me I've posted here!

Back at the start of December, I mentioned a get together with big bro's son - my nephew and his wife, my grand niece and lots of family and friends.  This week my niece (nephew's sister) had her first baby, another grand niece. I hope to meet her soon.  Meanwhile nephew's wife is expecting their second in March. 

There have been a lot of distractions from a "plain ole Christmas" and here we are with Christmas Wednesday and the first day of Hanukkah on Thursday. 

As far as I can tell, Blue Origin's first New Glenn rocket did something today, it's just hard to know what it actually was.  According to the local newspaper, Florida Today, it seems like they did a wet dress rehearsal (WDR), fully fueling the vehicle and doing everything that must happen before they start the engines, without actually starting the engines for their static fire test. 

Thursday afternoon, the massive 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket sat on Launch Pad 36 at Cape Canaveral, steam billowing from it − indicating fuel was being poured into the rocket.

Blue Origin's promised wet dress rehearsal may have been underway, where New Glenn would be fueled, but not launched. After multiple hours of steam venting from the rocket, all activity stopped − signaling they concluded the test.

The only problem is that I just find no confirmation that's what they did from the top four news sources I regularly check and a visit to the "News" page on Blue Origin's website.  I see a video from NASA Spaceflight that has visuals of the rocket with "steam billowing from it" and the narrators refer to it as a WDR.  The video is about 90 minutes long and the steam is apparent from 10 minutes in to 60 minutes - approximately in both times.

We know that Blue Origin is pushing to try to launch before the end of this year,  now only 12 days away if you count working on Christmas.  It's possible that IF this was a WDR and IF it was successful that they could go to a static fire quickly, although I can't estimate how long that might take.  I only know if it wasn't successful, it will take longer to get to the static fire and first launch.  

Screen capture of the test from NASAspaceflight.com's video. The local time at the top left is close to 30 minutes on the sliding bar visible on the video when you're manually adjusting the times.

The New Glenn has been talked about for quite a long time.  While I have no idea when I heard about it for the first time it seems like it was at least as long as this has been a primarily space-oriented blog.  It might well be the first rocket talked about as being a reusable multistage rocket.  More powerful and larger than the Falcon Heavy, the New Glenn will feature seven of the BE-4 engines also used on ULA’s new Vulcan.  There are two and three stage versions with different payload capacities, this one seems to be the two stage version. In addition to being the first flight of any version of the New Glenn, this NG-1 mission will also be aimed at certifying the vehicle for National Security missions.

This mission is more like a Transporter rideshare mission without the Transporter hardware than competitors having to work with each other. Today we learned that this January both the next Firefly Aerospace and iSpace lunar landers will start their journeys to the moon aboard the same Falcon 9. A launch date hasn't been named.

In an online presentation late Dec. 17 to discuss preparations for its Resilience lander, Takeshi Hakamada, founder and chief executive of ispace, said that his company’s mission would launch during a six-day window in mid-January on the same rocket launching Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost 1 mission.

“The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will not only be carrying the ispace Resilience lander. Another private company’s lander aiming to reach the moon will also be riding on the same rocket as us,” he said. On-screen graphics stated that lander was Firefly’s Blue Ghost.

Apparently both SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace seem a little reluctant to talk about it.  About a week ago, Bloomberg first reported on this, noting that they had been expected to fly on separate boosters as they did on their first flights. Both Firefly and ispace didn't answer questions about this, deferring reporters to SpaceX, who didn't answer either.  Yesterday, at a NASA teleconference about the upcoming mission, Jason Kim, chief executive of Firefly, declined to discuss if his company was sharing a launch with ispace. “I would defer the answer to that to our launch provider, SpaceX,” he said. 

In the ispace presentation hours after the NASA briefing, Ryo Ujiie, chief technology officer of ispace, said that Firefly’s lander will separate first from the Falcon 9, after which the upper stage will perform another burn. After that, ispace’s Resilience lander will be deployed. 

In overview this really is simply a ride sharing mission to Low Earth Orbit. The two landers take completely different paths from LEO to the moon. Firefly's Blue Ghost lander will remain in Earth orbit for about 25 days before performing a translunar injection maneuver.  It's not wasted time, during the 25 days, ground controllers will commission the lander and begin collecting data from some of its payloads.

The lander will reach the moon four days after performing the translunar injection. It will spend 16 days in lunar orbit, calibrating its vision navigation system and moving into a low lunar orbit, before attempting a landing.

ispace's Resilience, will take a much longer route, much like their first lander.

It will first operate in an elliptical transfer orbit, then use a lunar flyby to move into a low-energy transfer trajectory, taking it about one million kilometers away before returning to enter lunar orbit. On ispace’s first mission, it took about four and half months from liftoff to its attempted landing. The spacecraft crashed during the landing because of a software flaw.

Clearly, they're simply completely different landers on completely different missions. The companies don't see each other as enemies or competitors, rather mutual explorers of that "strange new world" in orbit around us. 

Kim said he saw no potential conflicts between Firefly’s lunar mission and others, including both ispace’s Resilience and Intuitive Machines’ IM-2 mission that is currently scheduled for launch in February. IM-2 is taking a direct route to the moon that with a landing planned about a week after launch, so its operations could overlap with Blue Ghost’s.

“We call each other. We talk to each other. We root for each other,” he said. “I don’t foresee any conflicts in 2025.”

The completed Blue Ghost 1 lander, at Firefly's Texas headquarters, will launch in January on a Falcon 9.

With a figurative snap of the fingers, the FAA granted a launch license for Starship's Flight Test 7 today, December 17, rendering at least part of yesterday's post obsolete.   

The article on Space.com concludes the headline with "But when will it fly?" and that's the big question. Nothing in the article contradicts things we've already heard about the flight, so the apparent date is still No Earlier Than (NET) January 11.  I found the self-praising tone that the FAA used to be the interesting part of this. 

"The FAA continues to increase efficiencies in our licensing determination activities to meet the needs of the commercial space transportation industry," Kelvin B. Coleman, FAA Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation, said in a statement. "This license modification that we are issuing is well ahead of the Starship Flight 7 launch date and is another example of the FAA’s commitment to enable safe space transportation."

Gee, one short paragraph, two sentences long, with two references to how they're not the problem, they're working to increase efficiencies, and this license is another example of how good they are.  Think they're a little motivated by the talk earlier this year about how they're holding back the US in space?  Such that now they're looking over their shoulders for DOGE raiders to come eliminate their jobs? 

There's a bit more talk about the Flight Test, saying they primarily are duplicating last month's IFT-6.  

During the Flight 6 test flight in November, SpaceX skipped the booster catch due to a sensor issue but successfully soft-landed its Starship vehicle in the Indian Ocean, capturing stunning video of the splashdown. The Starship Flight 7 test is expected to recreate that Ship landing in the ocean while also making another attempt at catching the Super Heavy booster.

"The Flight 7 mission profile involves launch of the combined Starship/Super Heavy vehicle from Boca Chica, Texas, a return to the launch site of the Super Heavy booster rocket for a catch attempt by the launch tower, and a water landing of the Starship vehicle in the Indian Ocean west of Australia," FAA officials wrote in the license update.

Static firing of the booster for FT7, last week on December 9.  Image credit: SpaceX

Ticking off the milestones on the way to Starship Flight Test 7, that is. In this case, running a successful-looking static fire of Starship 33 on Sunday Dec 15 at Boca Chica Starbase.  

Ship 33 during its static engine fire test, Dec. 15, 2024. (Image credit: SpaceX)

A video of the test from Space.com is here.

Its next launch, Integrated Flight Test-7 (IFT-7), is expected around Jan. 11, based on communications between NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which has yet to issue a launch license for the upcoming test. Once mated, the Super Heavy/Starship stack towers a staggering 400 feet (122 meters) tall, with the Starship upper stage alone standing taller than the Statue of Liberty.

There has been no announcement of the intended mission, at least not one I've been able to see.  IFT-6 back on November 18th was "mostly successful" but didn't complete one of it's major goals, to catch the SuperHeavy booster with the giant chopsticks as they accomplished on IFT-5.  I assume that will be part of this test's goals as well.  Since Ship 33 is second generation Starship and none have flown, this might be a step backwards to verify both the new things and everything that has already been tested all works as intended.  

Well, pretty much annual. It's that time of year again. The tree is up, the house is decorated, at least as much as we do, and we get some music trickling through.  

Regulars here know that I'm somewhat of a blues fan.  I've introduced the outrageously talented Joanne Shaw Taylor, and the late country blues master (and songwriting partner to Eric Clapton) JJ Cale.  More appropriate to Christmas, every year around this time I comment on my favorite bluesy Christmas song, “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.” 

The song dates from 1944, is credited to Hugh Martin and Ralph Blaine for Judy Garland's 1944 movie, Meet Me in St. Louis, but it's generally acknowledged to be Hugh Martin's writing.  The somber tone is understandable; Christmas of 1944 was three years into World War II, and many people had undergone the hardship of long separations from or the loss of family members. The war was wearing on the national psyche; the death toll was the highest seen since the Civil War.  They were dark days.  It's interesting, then, that Martin has said he wasn’t consciously writing about wartime separations.

You'll note that at the end of the song, the line isn't “hang a shining star upon the highest bough,” it's the more subdued “until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow.” Much more fitting to a more somber song written during WWII. The change to “...highest bough” (which seems to be the last) was prompted by Frank Sinatra in 1957. According to Entertainment Weekly in 2006:

Then, in 1957, Frank Sinatra — who'd already cut a lovely version with the movie's bittersweet lyrics in 1947 — came to Martin with a request for yet another pick-me-up. “He called to ask if I would rewrite the 'muddle through somehow' line,” says the songwriter. “He said, 'The name of my album is A Jolly Christmas. Do you think you could jolly up that line for me?' ”

That request led to the line we hear most often, although Martin says he thinks the original line is more “down-to-earth.”  “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” has become one of the most popular songs year after year.  EW says it's second only to the song Nat King Cole popularized: “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire).”  It has been covered by a gamut of artists from Sinatra to Connie Stephens, to James Taylor (who sings something closer to the '40s, Judy Garland version) to '80s metal band Twisted Sister, and many, many more.

I'm not so one-dimensional that this is the only song I can live with for the month, though.  When I play them myself, I tend to start by playing “O Holy Night” although I can't hope to get within a light year of the ability or the vocal range of Kerrie Roberts under any circumstances.

Still, a fingerstyle guitar can approach the sound of the piano in the mix here.  I can't really link to a video that sounds like what I attempt to play because I sit with a piano song book and work from that sheet music. 

And there are more.  If asked to pick my one most favorite Christmas song, as if I could, I'd probably pick one of these two.   There are lots that are fun to listen to once or twice a year, even the cliche' “Jingle Bell Rock” is fun a few times. There are fewer that I could listen to over and over throughout this month.

Back in September, a cascade of news sources produced a graph that disappeared into the background very quickly.  It's a graph from research paper started by the Washington Post (of all places) aiming to show the most accurate reconstruction of global temperatures for the last half a billion years.  To everyone's surprise, it totally flew in the face of conventional wisdom, so nobody knew what to do about it, and consequently virtually no one talked about it.  Here's the graph - and,  yes, it doesn't say "half billion years", it says the last 485 million, 15 million short of a half billion. I'm rounding it a bit - 15 years out of 500 is 3% - just so I can write or say, "half billion" instead of "four hundred and eighty-five million." ;-)

I got this plot from Watts Up With That? (WUWT), probably the best site for truth about climate change, and I've been meaning to share this for at least a month.  The yellowish circle at the very right is now - the "current geological stage"). We are at the coolest point in the last half billion years (maybe tied with a low around 330 million years ago).  Also pretty evident is that since a short-duration temperature peak 50 million years ago, Earth has been in a cooling period.  If you want to see a zoomed in plot showing just the last 7000 years, I posted that at the end of July, 2023.

It seemed disingenuous to compare current temperatures to the coolest point in the last 7000 years, so comparing it to the coolest temperatures in the last half billion years takes disingenuous to a whole new level.

It's not strictly true that no other outlet than the Washington Post covered this; ZeroHedge covered it and their coverage by "Tyler Durden" is what WUWT based their reporting on. Go read ZeroHedge's coverage, there are several tweets in there that are worth the time to read.

To borrow the quote from ZeroHedge:

Maybe, just maybe, the level of human-caused global warming doom porn pushed by the Government, corporate media outlets, global NGOs and far-Left billionaires is not as apocalyptic as they make it sound.

Maybe, just maybe, the world was starting to recover from whatever dropped the temperature to the half billion year low and it would have started warming no matter what people were doing. Maybe we have nothing to do with the temperature changes.  If they're even real and not just made up.

It's almost hard to avoid the story about drones being reported in New Jersey and other states.  All except for the time required to read and try to extract a real meaning out of the news coverage - that's pretty easy to avoid.  So a trip to a place that ought to be fairly reasonable in its coverage seemed to be in order. Not a local news outlet, or one of the big network names maybe a site more objective?  

Unable to find one I thought would be ideal, I avoided the main media outlets and went to Forbes and "Mystery drones over New Jersey and nearby states"

What Exactly Do We Know About The Drones?

Almost nothing, New Jersey Assemblywoman Dawn Fantasia said on X Wednesday. Fantasia’s post was a lengthy summary of a legislative meeting with the Department of Homeland Security about the mysterious sightings. She described the government’s investigation strategy, which includes a coordinated effort led by the FBI with state police, the Office of Homeland Security and the U.S. Coast Guard. She described the dozens of nightly sightings as “coordinated” operations of drones “up to 6 [feet] in diameter” flying for six to seven hours—distances of 15 miles—unrelated to “hobbyists” or the Department of Homeland Security, which “appear to avoid detection by traditional methods (e.g., helicopters, radio frequencies).” They also reportedly aren’t related to military operations, the Picatinny Arsenal said in a statement to NJ Advance Media on Nov. 24.

Dawn Fantasia's post on X is worth the time to read, but all of this ignores the reporting of these drones from New York, Oregon, as well as other states and even other countries, such as the UK and Germany

The FBI and DHS released a statement on Thursday saying the investigation has “no evidence at this time” of “malicious activity” in New Jersey or a “national security or public safety threat.” The statement adds they have not identified “a foreign nexus” for the drones and will continue the investigation. It also said many of the drone sightings have been “cases of mistaken identity,” confusing drones for lawful, identified aircraft.

There are reports of "large and loud" drones that are "the size of SUVs" as opposed to the small, hobbyist class of drones.  There are reports of groups of drones coming off the ocean into New Jersey - I've seen a report of 50 coming ashore together.  There are reports of drones "going dark" and turning off running lights at night, but the mere act of keeping the lights on "most of the time" at night seems like an attempt to avoid collisions.

I'm sure you've seen the congressman saying they're Iranian and coming from a ship at sea.  I find that hard to believe. To borrow a line from the Cold War, "they can't even make a decent clock radio," so how can we expect them to make something as complex as a remote controlled flying drone. 

Besides, I notice that whomever is behind these drones, or whatever they are, they don't fly to areas full of southern, "good ole boys."  It would turn into a giant skeet shooting party. 

Eric Berger at Ars Technica took on a pretty mundane topic over at Ars Technica, but managed to blow my mind in the setup.  The topic, the kind that's always a matter of opinion, is to rank the 25 coolest things in space so far in this century.  The subtitle, though, is the thing that kicked me in the head: “Taking stock of spaceflight one-quarter of the way through the 2000s.”  That's right, in three weeks, New Year's Day 2025, we're 1/4 of the way through the 21st century.  Sure, it's obvious when you think about it, I just never gave a moment of thought to it.  

It's an interesting read, far more interesting than the typical end-of-the-year retrospectives we get every year for New Year's, and I wouldn't dream of picking 25 things just to match the number of years but it might be fun to think about the top 10 coolest things.

10: The Voyagers continue in interstellar space

I write about the two voyagers regularly, whenever a story comes up.  Pretty much every time, the problems are things never seen before.  Components are working at temperatures they never were certified for; and that's true for every system on the pair of satellites. The team that got Voyagers started on the mission have all retired or passed away, replaced by younger engineers and techs that have to work on things that they must have confidence won't do something awful because of the two day delay between sending a command and getting results back.  This coming August and September will mark their 48th year in their four year mission. 

9: New Horizons Pluto Mission

On January 19, 2006, at 1900 UTC, Mrs. Graybeard and I were riding our bikes home from a moderately long bike ride and interrupted our ride to watch a rocket arc downrange (saying the ride was moderately long is based purely on where we pulled off the side of the road to watch it). It was the Atlas V carrying New Horizons as it started its mission to fly by Pluto.  The flyby was on July 14, 2015 - close to 9-1/2 years travel. It was the first time since the Voyagers in the 1980s that a probe reached a planet never-before seen in such resolution. No one knew what to expect and the images were jaw dropping.  

8: Philae touches down on a comet

Built by the European Space Agency, Philae was a small robotic lander that traveled to a distant comet, 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, aboard the Rosetta spacecraft. After a journey of about a decade, Rosetta reached orbit around the comet and released Philae. In November 2014, Philae touched down on the comet, but harpoons designed to anchor the spacecraft failed to deploy. Accordingly, Philae bounced a few times before coming to a soft landing on the nucleus.

This marked the first time a spacecraft had ever landed on a comet. Although lying on its side in the shadow of a steep cliff, Philae still returned rich data about the comet’s nucleus over the next half year or so.  It returned images and video from a comet that were at once familiar but also entirely alien.

7: 20 Years of Continuous Exploration on Mars

Since 2004, there have been rovers continuously exploring on Mars, starting with Spirit and Opportunity and continuing through Curiosity in 2012 and 2020’s Perseverance.  The continuous ability to observe and monitor conditions on Mars goes beyond the headline, “search for evidence of life” on Mars to a continuous ability to observe Mars, which could benefit plans to settle on the world.  

Part of the “coolness factor” of 20 years on Mars includes the Ingenuity helicopter and its 72 flights out of a planned 5.  Ingenuity is almost worthy of a spot of its own in the Top 10 coolest.

6: Kepler Space Telescope finding planets

The existence of planets outside our solar system was confirmed in the 1990s, but the launch of the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009 changed that picture.  The first planets were detected by monitoring the brightness of stars for periodic dips in brightness that would indicate a planet blocking (occulting in astronomer-talk) the star by passing between the telescope here and the star.  

Kepler did the same, monitoring the brightness of approximately 150,000 main sequence stars in our neighborhood of the Milky Way Galaxy, looking for the periodic brightness dips to identify transiting planets. To date, Kepler has detected more than 2,700 exoplanets and found that far from being rare, there are probably at least as many planets in our galaxy as stars, if not many more.  In case it’s not immediately clear, 2,700 has to be a lower limit to the number of exoplanets for two reasons: first, if the plane of the orbit doesn’t line up right, we’ll never see the occultation, and second, if the orbital period is more years than Kepler was able to observe, we’ll never see it. 

5: The James Webb Space Telescope

Another example of late and over budget, but that’s far more understandable for something never done before, like the JWST, than something that’s almost completely reuse of existing hardware like SLS. JWST is a self-deploying multi-mirror infrared (IR) telescope that was bound for an orbit that nothing can reach if the telescope needed to be fixed. A high risk mission.

After lifting off on an Ariane 5 rocket on Christmas Day 2021, the telescope spent half a year unfolding and deploying in space before finally beginning operations. But the astronomical results have been worth it. The saga of Webb has been a story of persistence and perseverance by NASA, Northrop Grumman, and other partners who strived to bring this magnificent instrument online. A happy ending was far from certain, but we got one anyway.

4: The first successful landing of an orbital class rocket

I remember this one vividly.  It was the night of December 21, 2015, from Cape Canaveral and we were watching from the backyard while listening to the Kennedy Space Center Amateur Radio Club live relay on their 2 meter repeater. The landing was below our horizon but we could see the engine burns in the night sky and hear the radio coverage.  It seemed like Sci-Fi for a rocket that had just launched a few minutes earlier to return and land near the launch site. Like many people, we had paid attention to the attempts to land on a barge at sea, and while we were hopeful, those weren’t all that encouraging. That landing changed everything, and the first recovery at sea was in April 8, 2016.

I could go on about how important reuse is, but I’ve done that too much already.

The rest of what follows is all SpaceX.

3: Demo 2 and America's return to manned spaceflight

By the spring of 2020, we had gotten used to SpaceX landing Falcon 9 boosters and their seemingly incredible rate of progress.  On the other hand, since the last Shuttle flight in 2011, NASA had seemingly been sliding backwards, forced into buying rides to the International Space Station from the Russians.  Sliding backwards, that is, until SpaceX’s Crew Dragon came along.
 
The vehicle’s first mission, carrying Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, came during a summer of unrest when America needed a win. The country was still largely shut down by COVID-19, and its politics were fractured by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25. America’s return to human spaceflight marked a significant technical achievement by SpaceX, which became the first private company to launch humans into orbit, and it allowed NASA to fly more astronauts to the space station and take full advantage of that facility's research capabilities. Dragon has flown more than a dozen times since.  

2: Falcon Heavy with a choreographed landing of two boosters

Choreographed for the two Falcon 9 boosters to land about one second and a few hundred feet apart on the Cape.  This Falcon Heavy launch, in February of 2018 took the #1 spot in Eric Berger’s polls of readers that he did to write his piece.  It was a visual candy treat – irresistible.  It starts with the 27 Merlin engines of the three strapped-together Falcon 9s, then that choreographed landing, and is topped off with the arresting view of a cherry red Tesla (and Starman) flying away from Earth and out toward Mars.

It was a spectacle that understandably captured the public’s attention. But the new rocket was more than a spectacle. By designing, building, and launching the Falcon Heavy, SpaceX demonstrated that a private company could independently fund and fly the largest and most powerful rocket in the world. This showed that commercial, heavy-lift rockets were possible. By providing competition to the Delta IV Heavy, the Falcon Heavy saved the US government billions. It's likely that the US government will never design and develop a rocket ever again.  

1: Catching the massive superheavy booster with the launch tower at Starbase

I’m rating this as the coolest thing in the first quarter of the 21st Century while Eric Berger at Ars Technica rated it #11.  Everyone knows the visual impact from having watched replays over and over again, I guess I’m just more impressed by that little demonstration.

On October 13 of this year, SpaceX launched its massive Starship rocket for the fifth time, but this flight profile was different in that the company sought to recover the Super Heavy first stage. Remarkably, the rocket returned to the launch site, hovered alongside the launch tower, sidled into the space between the pair of massive “chopsticks” then was plucked from the air by them and subsequently set down back on the launch mount.

There are a few reasons why this is such an important event. It demonstrates a number of important things.  First, it verifies the radical approach to catching a rocket (obviating the need for landing legs and reducing launch turnaround times). It allows SpaceX to accelerate the development and testing of Starship.  Finally, the visually stunning tower grab captured the public’s attention and brought wider recognition of Starship’s potential to change spaceflight forever.  In the first few weeks after the mission I heard more people who aren’t particularly interested in day to day space activities talking about how incredible this was, saying things like “Elon Musk makes towers that grab flying rockets out of the air” or talking about how it’s the most fantastic thing they’ve heard about since the moon landings. 

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And there you have it. Lists like the Top 10 of anything are always one person's opinions and I'm sure few, if any, of you will agree with mine. I'm still not tired of watching Falcon 9s land after a successful flight, and I still stop to watch highlights of the flight test with the booster being grabbed by the chopsticks. There were some cool things in Eric's list I couldn't replicate, but he had the top 25 (for 25 years) and I stopped at 10.  

Feel free to voice any opinions, as always.