Let's start with this week's soundtrack.
Steve Green, aka Vodkapundit, covered this week's Starship 8 flight test, which, as he says, went half-kablooey.
No worries, though — failures are expected in SpaceX's "hardware-rich" testing environment. SpaceX (and increasingly, Blue Origin) doesn't share the "do it once, do it right" mindset of the older space firms. Rapid testing, rapid data collection, and rapid iteration followed rapidly by the next test is the name of the game now.
The Starship team is now in the "rapid data collection" phase, and it won't be long until Flight Test 9 gives them much more data to collect.
Still, I badly wanted to see Ship 33 complete its mission.
I agree.
A self sustaining city on Mars will require a certain integer number of exploded Starships, and today we are one closer. Like any ambitious target worth pursuing there will always be a risk of failure, even in 2050. Each of these early launch failures is visual evidence of… https://t.co/Uca4lLnCL3
— Casey Handmer, PhD (@CJHandmer) March 7, 2025
My favorite rumor of the week:
It's been a big week for space. The Space Force mystery plane, the X-37B, came back after something over a year in orbit. Recent testing that I covered here included a "high eccentricity" or Molniya orbit and some "trans-atmospheric" maneuvering. The details weren't released, but I would bet that they were plane-change maneuvers. That is, it used the atmosphere to alter the plane of its orbit. That's an expensive maneuver for a rocket.
Easily visible from the Florida Keys.
Hilarity ensues.
John Krause often has the most dramatic videos and photos.
But that wasn't the only space news. Firefly Aerospace landed the Blue Ghost lander on the moon, and NASA's LoGRE experiment onboard successfully used GPS from there. I presume "success" here is a little more definite than "up there somewhere."
The Lunar South Pole is a very likely first spot for a lunar colony because we have good reason to believe there's ice there. Ice means water, water means air to breathe, and rocket fuel that doesn't have to be brought uphill from Earth.
Getting a little farther out, let's look at Saturn and its scalloped ring.
This is a render from Cassini data. Here's the source:
I like to remind people that any JWST pictures are "false color" because JWST only "sees" infrared.
But the false colors are not only spectacular but actually convey useful information because they map different frequencies of infrared to colors in the visible spectrum.
Which makes for great pictures, doesn't it?
And that's it for this week. As always, I love comments. And come back next week for a big announcement.
