I’m Anthony Colangelo.

This is very relevant to this week’s episode. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Moon has much more political capital than Mars, and I would not at all be surprised to see a focus on the Moon over the course of the next administration.

We should get some closure in the next few weeks on the AMOS-6 front. They’re getting started with static fires and testing in McGregor again, which means the investigation is entering the wrap-up and sign-off phases. The return-to-flight mission seems to be Iridium NEXT out of Vandenberg, with a flight out of 39A in mid-December.

A commercial cargo-style program for getting payloads to the Moon would be wonderfully interesting. It would be well-timed to be used as NASA participation in the Moon Village idea that is talked about within ESA (and pretty much everywhere but the US).

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Friday afternoon before a holiday: the time to bury press releases. I’m not sure why SpaceX buried this particular update since the news is encouraging.

Chris Bergin of NASASpaceFlight, with an encyclopedic post about the work that will need to take place—between EM-1 and 2—to revamp the Mobile Launcher to support the Exploration Upper Stage.

It’s important to keep the budgets of NASA and other governmental agencies in context: NASA is spending billions per year on Orion’s development. Roscosmos is spending an average of $122 million per year on Federation.

After putting together a component test unit, I hooked it up to a Teensy++ 2.0—the brains of the controller—and took it for a spin in X-Plane.

The mission status report says, “The team is still investigating the cause of the reboot and assessing two main engine check valves.” and gives no other update on the delayed orbit-lowering maneuver. The lack of information on that front is a little worrying, to say the least.

Let’s hope that the Rocket Lab test launch isn’t the new Falcon Heavy—always two months away.