Two Weeks With No Texts From Earth Is Exactly the Point

Two Weeks With No Texts From Earth Is Exactly the Point

Ellen Ellis and three other people have now spent 200 days inside a 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat in Houston, living as if they're on Mars — and for the next two weeks, they're also living as if Earth has gone silent. NASA's CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog) mission 2 is currently in a simulated communications blackout, the kind that happens when Mars moves behind the Sun and no signal can get through. The crew handles everything that comes up using preplanned procedures and whatever is on hand — no mission control, no rescue call, no internet.

Commander Ross Elder, medical officer Ellis, science officer Matthew Montgomery, and flight engineer James Spicer entered the habitat on Oct. 19 and won't emerge until Oct. 31, 378 days total. In the time since, they've completed robotic operations, habitat maintenance, crop growing, simulated spacewalks, geology sessions, exercise, and medical work — all while dealing with limited supplies and staged equipment failures designed to mirror what a real Mars crew would face. "Having limited resources, be it tools, equipment, software, supplies, or no internet, really bounds what you have to solve problems," Montgomery said. "Finding creative and clever solutions has been both challenging and rewarding."

NASA cares about the answer because the data from this mission is meant to shape everything from habitat design to mental health support for future deep-space crews. Mars is not just far away — it is inconveniently far away, in a way that forces a crew to own its problems completely. If Mars is ever going to stop being a poster and start being a place, this is the boring, grinding rehearsal that makes it possible.

Gobble's Take: The future of Mars won't be won by brave speeches — it'll be won by people who can keep calm when the group chat dies for two weeks.

Source: r/space

The Sun Caught on Camera Looks Less Like a Star and More Like a Warning Label

A 152mm hydrogen-alpha solar telescope — the kind a dedicated amateur astronomer can own — just turned the Sun into something you'd normally only see in a physics demo or a disaster film. A timelapse making the rounds on r/Astronomy shows an active region on the solar surface churning, flickering, and throwing out plasma loops in a way that makes the Sun look less serene and more like it's building toward something.

That matters because active regions are where solar flares and eruptions are born. When the Sun gets rowdy enough, the fallout can rattle satellites, scramble radio signals, and shove unwanted currents into power grids. The terrifying part is the scale: the energy outputs involved are so far beyond anything humans can engineer that the machinery of civilization looks, by comparison, like a science fair project left in the rain.

The clip is also a reminder that the star responsible for all life on this planet is not a lamp — it's a nuclear reactor 93 million miles away with a talent for sending problems our way. The community response alone is worth a scroll, with commenters debating Dyson Spheres, nuclear bomb equivalents, and whether "bad hair day" covers it when the hair is plasma.

Gobble's Take: The Sun is having a bad hair day, except the hair is plasma and the consequences are satellite outages, power grid surges, and pilots losing their radios.

Source: r/Astronomy

Blue Origin Reused New Glenn's First Stage — Then Put the Satellite in the Wrong Orbit

Blue Origin reused the first stage of its New Glenn rocket for the first time on April 19. New Glenn lifted off for the third time, and the booster landed on the offshore ship Jacklyn for the second time. That part worked. What didn't was the only part customers actually care about.

One of the second stage's two BE-3 engines failed, leaving AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 communications satellite in a useless orbit. The satellite will be deorbited. AST SpaceMobile said insurance would cover the loss — cold comfort when a satellite built to extend direct-to-cell broadband coverage never reaches its intended destination. Blue Origin demonstrated it can land and reuse its booster, but satellite operators don't pay for elegant recoveries; they pay for their hardware arriving where it needs to go.

There was one piece of better news for AST SpaceMobile: days after the failure, the FCC granted the company approval to launch 248 satellites to provide satellite communications to cell phones. That approval doesn't replace the lost spacecraft, but it at least confirms the regulatory path forward remains open.

Booster reuse is a milestone. A satellite in the wrong orbit is a failure. Blue Origin achieved one and delivered the other on the same flight.

Gobble's Take: Reusing a booster is a feat of engineering, but until the payload arrives in the right orbit, it's a feat that customers can't build a business on.

Source: Douglas Messier, Substack

China's Rocket Boom Has Nine Reusable Vehicles in Simultaneous Development

China now has no fewer than nine reusable rockets under simultaneous development, driven by both state-owned contractors and private companies. The same forces — government subsidies, preferential policies, and cutthroat domestic competition — that pushed China to dominate solar energy and electric vehicles are now playing out in the country's launch industry.

One of the more unusual entries is the Long March 12A, manufactured by the state-owned Shanghai Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology. It shares the same hull as the already-flying LM-12 but is different enough that it arguably deserves its own designation entirely. The LM-12 burns kerolox and uses YF-100K engines on the first stage and YF-115 engines on the second. The LM-12A, by contrast, burns completely different fuel — methalox — and uses different engines: seven reusable Longyun engines on the first stage and a single YF-209 on the second. It carries up to 12,000 kg to LEO. The rocket completed a successful maiden flight in December 2025 but failed to stick its first landing, crashing in a ball of flames — a familiar outcome for early reusability attempts.

The LM-12A is just one vehicle on a long list. Others include Zhuque-3, which reached orbit in December 2025 and nearly landed successfully on its first try, and the Long March 10, a heavy-lift vehicle designed to land via a cable-catch system on a floating platform. The scale of simultaneous effort is the real story.

Gobble's Take: Nine rockets in parallel development isn't a space program catching up — it's one building enough institutional failure to eventually make everyone else look slow.

Source: Risk & Progress, Substack

April Was the Month the Moon Came Back — and the Launch Manifest Didn't Wait for Applause

On April 1, NASA's Space Launch System launched the Orion spacecraft Integrity with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, plus Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen. After a day in Earth orbit checking systems, the crew fired Orion's engine and headed for the Moon. They spent eight days flying around it, breaking Apollo 13's record for the furthest distance from Earth by a crewed spacecraft, then splashed down in the Pacific off San Diego on April 10 — completing the first crewed lunar flight since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

April didn't stop there. New Glenn reused its first stage for the first time on April 19, with the booster landing on ship Jacklyn for the second time. But the mission failed where it mattered: one of the second stage's two BE-3 engines left AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 satellite in a useless orbit. The satellite will be deorbited, with losses covered by insurance. Russia's Irtysh (Soyuz-5) completed a successful suborbital flight test on April 30 — its first success. Underneath all of it, 103 orbital launches completed in the first four months of 2026, up 10 over the same period last year, with 97 successes and 6 failures across 31 April launches.

That volume is the real shift. A historic lunar flyby shared a month with a debut booster failure, a Russian milestone, and a continuous drumbeat of satellites going up. NASA plans Artemis III no earlier than late 2027, with a lunar south pole landing attempt targeted for 2028.

Gobble's Take: The Moon got its glamour back in April, but the launch ledger is the part that will decide who actually gets to stay there.

Source: Douglas Messier, Substack, Space Times Substack

In Case You Missed It

Yesterday's top stories:

• The Moon's Real Prize Isn't Water — It's Who Gets to Own the Return
• In 1975, Two Rivals Shook Hands in Orbit. The Playbook Still Exists.
• Europe Is Building Its Own Launch Sector — One Scrub, One Rocket, One Delay at a Time
• Artemis III Has Slipped to Late 2027 — and Starship Is Why