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Falcon 9's End Date & Four Landers Racing to the Moon
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
SpaceX's reported plan to end commercial Falcon 9 launches after 2028 threatens the entire lunar supply chain — just as four Moon landers reach advanced hardware testing. Today's episode covers the looming launch capacity crisis, Blue Origin's Endurance progress, Firefly's far-side mission, and an incoming aurora alert.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Four commercial lunar landers are in advanced testing right now, and all four are targeting launches within the next two to three years. That's the clearest signal yet that NASA's Moon Base isn't a concept anymore.
Blue Origin's Endurance lander has passed thermal vacuum and communications testing at NASA's Johnson Space Center. The next major milestone is propellant loading, which is the step that moves a lander from a test article to a flight vehicle.
Firefly Aerospace is planning something genuinely different. Blue Ghost Mission Two would be the first American landing on the far side of the Moon.
Intuitive Machines is targeting something different again. Their Trinity lander, paired with the Altus-1 relay satellite, is designed to be the first mission to land at a lunar swirl, specifically the Reiner Gamma geomagnetic feature.
Here's the development that runs underneath all of this. SpaceX has reportedly told the US government it plans to end commercial Falcon Nine launches after twenty twenty-eight.
One more item worth flagging. A coronal mass ejection from a mid-August solar flare is expected to produce G1 to G2 geomagnetic storm conditions on the seventeenth and eighteenth.
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