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Jonathan's Space Report
No. 853 Draft                                                           2026 Jan 5  Somerville, MA, USA
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The 2025 annual summary is at https://planet4589.org/space/papers/space25.pdf


ISS
----

Expedition 74 began on Dec 9  (I forgot to note this last issue - oops.)

On Jan 7 the EVA-94 spacewalk was cancelled after one of the Crew-11
astronauts (Cardman, Fincke, Yui, Platonov) suffered an unidentified
'serious medical issue'. Crew-11 member Kimiya Yui asked the ground for
a "PMC" (private medical confererence), possibly on behalf of one of his
crewmates. On Jan 8 NASA boss Jared Isaacman held a press conference to
announce that Crew-11 would return to Earth early aboard their Dragon
Endeavour ferry ship. It was reported that 'crew came to the aid of
their colleague right away' and the crewmember is 'now stable'. One
option available to NASA is what's called an 'emergency deorbit' where
the crew return to Earth within hours. Instead, NASA elected a less
extreme option, 'controlled medical evacuation', allowing a regular
preparation for return, just targeting a date several weeks earlier than
originally planned.

Some questions at the press conference were not answered very clearly by NASA:

- did the affected astronaut agree that return was sensible, or did they
get all right-stuffy and want to soldier on? Isaacman gave a general answer
that there was consensus between MCC and 'the crew' that return was right option,
but that leaves some room for there having been some persuasion required.
We'll know when they write their memoirs.

- does 'stable' mean that they are working as normal doing regular
duties on ISS, or are they on floaty bed rest?

This will be the fourth such space station medevac in history: in 1976 Vitaliy
Zholobov became ill aboard the military Almaz OPS-3 space station (cover name
Salyut-5), possibly from leaking toxic propellant, and the crew returned to
Earth aboard the Soyuz-21 ferry ship. In 1985, Vladimir Vasyutin got sick
from an infection aboard the DOS-6 (Salyut-7) space station, and was returned
to Earth along with the rest of his crew aboard Soyuz T-14. In 1987,
aboard the Mir space station, Aleksandr Laveykin had a minor cardiac issue.
On the next visiting crew flight he was replaced by one of the visiting
crewmembers, A. Aleksandrov, and returned to Earth on Soyuz TM-2 in Jul 1987
instead of staying aboard until the end of the EO-2 expedition in Dec 1987.

Editorial comment: if space is going to be a place where humans live
and work, they will sometimes get sick. This incident is a feature, not
a bug.


Starlink launches
------------------

Starlink Group 6-88 (29 Ku sats) was launched on Jan 4 from Canaveral.
Starlink Group 6-96 (29 Ku sats) was launched on Jan 9 from Canaveral.

Twilight mission
-----------------

On Jan 11 SpaceX launched the Twilight rideshare mission from Vandenberg to a sun-sync
orbit with 0528 local time descending node (LTDN).

The payloads included three astronomy satellites:

  Pandora, led by NASA-Goddard, to study exoplanets with optical transit photometry and NIR spectroscopy;
  SPARCS, from Arizona State U, with an ultraviolet telescope to study the radiation environment of low-mass stars;
  BlackCAT, from Penn State U, with a coded-mask X-ray telescope to study gamma ray bursts and other transients.

Also aboard were:
  10 Aether lasercom satellites from Kepler Comms (Canada)
  Radar sats: Two from ICEYE (Finland) including one for the Finnish Defence Forces; one from Umbra (US); two from Capella (US);
    one from Surrey Satellite (UK; CarbSAR)
  IoT comm cubesats; eight Lemur-2 for Myriota (Australia) and Spire (Luxembourg); four for Plan-S (Turkey; Connecta IoT 13-16)
  A hyperspectral meteorological spectrometer satellite for Spire (US; Lemur-2-Kutar)
  Two microwave radiometer meteorology satellites for Tomorrow.io (US, Tomorrow-S10/S11)
  Hydra-2, a thermal imaging satellite for Aistech (Spain)
  Radio spectrum monitoring: 3 sats from Hawkeye360 (US; Hawk 13A to 13C)
  
and some interestingly novel payloads:
  Dcubed-1, a cubesat which will 3D-print and extend a0.6m long boom in a test of in-space manufacturing, from Dcubed (Munich).
  Flamingo-1 from Vyoma Space (Munich), with optical imagers for space situational awareness (satellite tracking).  

PSLV-C62
---------

ISRO launched PSLV flight C62 on Jan 12 with the EOS-N1 military hyperspectral imaging satellite and a set of small payloads.
However, the third stage began tumbling out of control towards the end of its burn and the mission failed to reach orbit,
falling in the southern Indian Ocean around 0506 UTC, perhaps near 75E 18S (to within a few degrees).

Soyuz rideshare malfunction
----------------------------

The Soyuz launch on Dec 28 appears to have been only partly successful. The AIST-2T satellites
were deployed in a 368 x 381 km orbit after the second Fregat burn. After two more Fregat
burns the cubesat payloads were deployed in a 495 x 515 km orbit. Fregat burn 5 put the
stage in a 500 x 720 km transfer orbit. However, a sixth burn intended to put Fregat
in a circular 720 km orbit appears not to have happened, with several objects
tracked in the elliptical transfer orbit. These objects likely inclued the Marafon
satellites. Another object in a 473 x 869 km orbit, object A, is susected to be the Fregat
stage, which was meant to be actively deorbited.

Errata
--------

The date of the last report should have been 2026 not 2025 of course! I expect I'll
be making that mistake for at least the next month...

The cover name for the payload launched on Dec 9 was USA 570, not USA 590;
Launch of SatNet LEO 16 was Dec 11 not Dec 12, although satellite deployment was
on Dec 12.


Table of Recent Orbital (and near-Orbital) Launches
---------------------------------------------------

Date UT       Name			          Launch Vehicle	 Site		 Mission  INTL.  Catalog  Perigee Apogee  Incl	 Notes

Jan  3 0209   CSG 3                                    Falcon 9           Vandenberg SLC4E Radar      01A  622 x 627 x 97.9
Jan  4 0648   Starlink Group 6-88                      Falcon 9           Canaveral LC40   Comms      02   258 x 268 x 43.0
Jan  9 2141   Starlink Group 6-96                      Falcon 9           Canaveral LC40   Comms      03   252 x 262 x 43.0
Jan 11 1544   Twilight                                 Falcon 9           Vandenberg SLC4E Rideshare  04
Jan 12 0448   EOS-N1                                   PSLV-DL           Satish Dhawan FLP Rideshare  F01  -3780? x 390? x 98

Table of Recent Suborbital Launches
-----------------------------------

Dec 20 1415   NS-37             New Shepard         W Texas              Tourist         107     W Texas
Dec 23        RV                K-4               INS-S74, Bay of Bengal Test            500?    Indian Ocean
Jan  8 2130?  RV x 6?           Oreshnik           Kapustin Yar          Weapon          500?    Lviv, Ukraine

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|  Jonathan McDowell                 |                                    |
|  Somerville MA 02143 USA           |  inter : planet4589 at gmail       |
|  and                               |  twitter: @planet4589              |
|  Bromley, UK                                                            |
|                                                                         |
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