The Overview · your week in space

From The Decisional Pass

Landing an orbital rocket booster on its engines has, for years now, been something exactly two American companies could do. As of Wednesday morning in the Gobi Desert, there's a third name on the list, and it isn't American. Around that: NASA went and photographed the hole a Falcon 9 punched in the Moon, two astronauts got half a job done outside the station, and SpaceX flew two rockets 38 minutes apart on opposite coasts.

🚀 LandSpace stuck the landing

Zhuque-3 lifted off at 7:35 a.m. Beijing time on August 19 from the Dongfeng commercial zone, put the Honghu 03 satellite where it belonged, and then, about six minutes later, set its first stage down on legs at a pad in Minqin County roughly 240 miles downrange. That's China's first recovery of an orbital-class booster on land, and it makes LandSpace the third private company anywhere to pull this off after SpaceX and Blue Origin.

What gets me is that this was flight two. The December 2025 debut reached orbit fine but lost the booster to what LandSpace called an abnormal combustion event during the landing burn. The fix list that followed is the unglamorous one you'd write yourself: landing propulsion, thermal protection, return-control software, autonomous flight termination. Four systems changed, right on the next try. The vehicle itself is 76.6 meters of stainless steel burning methane and oxygen through nine engines, taller than a Falcon 9, and LandSpace says each booster is built for 20 flights with a first reflight targeted inside six months. Landing once is a stunt. Flying the same hardware again is the business.

References: Spaceflight Now · AeroTime · Space.com

🌑 We dented the Moon and then went to look

On August 5, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage hit the lunar near side near Einstein crater. It had been up there since January 2025, when it sent Firefly's Blue Ghost 1 and ispace's Resilience toward the Moon, and its orbit slowly drifted into a collision course. This week NASA published what the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter found: a fresh crater about 60 feet across and under 10 feet deep, with bright rays fanning out from the rim.

The part I love is how they found it. LRO moves about a mile a second from 60 miles up, so aiming it at a specific spot is a ten-second problem. South Korea's Danuri orbiter got there first, imaging the site hours after NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies predicted where the stage would hit. That prediction was good to about six-tenths of a mile, and Danuri's coordinates let LRO tighten its own sequence on August 11 and 12. Two agencies, two spacecraft, one piece of our own trash. The ejecta comes in two flavors, dark weathered dust from the top foot and a half and brighter fresh material from below, which is free stratigraphy nobody had to pay for.

References: NASA Science · LROC · CNN

🛰️ Half a spacewalk

Tuesday's U.S. Spacewalk 97 was supposed to be a straight swap: pull the failed space-to-ground antenna off the station truss, go get the spare, bolt it on. Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot got the failed unit off and tied it down, and then the clock ran out. Disconnecting the electrical cables and breaking the bolts loose took longer than planned, and after 6 hours 23 minutes they came inside with the new antenna still in storage. They'll go back out Tuesday, August 25.

Nothing broke and nobody was in danger. This is what EVA timelines look like when hardware that's been bolted outside for years doesn't want to come apart. It was also Adenot's first spacewalk, and the first by a French woman.

References: NASA · Space.com

🌙 "Extremely confident" is a strong word

At Kennedy Space Center on August 14, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said he's "extremely confident" Artemis 3 flies in 2027. Remember what that mission is now. After February's rework it isn't the landing anymore, it's an Earth-orbital test flight where Orion rendezvouses and docks with test articles of both landers, Blue Origin's Blue Moon MK2 and SpaceX's Starship HLS. SLS stacking is underway in the VAB, with rollout to 39B around November for a wet dress rehearsal. Andre Douglas, Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio and ESA's Luca Parmitano fly it. The landing slides to Artemis 4 in 2028. Docking two competing lander prototypes on one flight is a genuinely useful test. It's also four vehicles that all have to be ready at the same time.

References: Spaceflight Now · SpacePolicyOnline

⚡ Thirty-eight minutes, two coasts

On August 15 SpaceX launched eight Globalstar replenishment satellites from Cape Canaveral, then 38.5 minutes later launched the classified USSF-366 from Vandenberg. Both boosters came home, and B1088's was the 650th Falcon recovery. Three days later, Starlink 17-50 pushed the constellation past 11,000 satellites in low Earth orbit on a booster flying its 12th mission. Whatever you think about that number overhead, the ground operation behind it is the most under-discussed engineering story in this industry.

References: Spaceflight Now — Globalstar/USSF-366 · Spaceflight Now — Starlink 17-50

👀 On deck

• Chang'e 7, August 24. CNSA's orbiter, lander, rover and hopping probe head for the lunar south pole on a Long March 5 from Wenchang, hunting water ice in permanently shadowed craters. Follow it on the lunar dashboard.
• Spacewalk, take two, August 25. Menon and Adenot go back out to finish the antenna install.
• Starship Flight 14, no earlier than August 28. Ship 41 headed to Massey's for static fire on the 19th. This is the one meant to try a tower catch of the ship.

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