Adenot swaps a station antenna while Cape pads expand and an orbital mirror glares
ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot will make her first spacewalk to swap a station antenna as Blue Origin adds a Cape pad and modelling puts one orbital mirror at four times a full moon.
Science··Evening
Adenot and Menon set to replace a space-to-ground antenna
ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and NASA astronaut Anil Menon are due to leave the International Space Station's Quest airlock at about 14:35 Central European Summer Time on 18 August to replace a Space-to-Ground Antenna, the link that carries data between the station and mission control in Houston. ESA coverage opens ahead of 14:35, at 13:00. The outing is planned to last about six and a half hours and would be the ninety-seventh US spacewalk. Adenot works as Extravehicular Crew Member 2 in an unstriped suit and Menon as EV1 in red stripes. ESA says Adenot trained more than 150 hours underwater for the task; she would be the fifth French astronaut and the thirty-first European to perform a spacewalk.[1]
Blue Origin adds LC-36B while repairing the first pad
Blue Origin has said it intends to add a second pad, LC-36B, at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station while it repairs LC-36A after a New Glenn 7x2 rocket exploded during a static fire test on 8 May. The expansion is meant to support the larger New Glenn 9x4, still in development, and will be accompanied by a vertical integration facility and a payload processing facility on nearby land. Space.com reports the company expects repairs at LC-36A in time for New Glenn 7x2 to fly again by the end of the year, without giving a date for LC-36B or a debut for the 9x4. The designations count engines: seven BE-4 motors and two BE-3U motors on the current vehicle, nine and four on the taller one. LC-36 last hosted Atlas launches in 2004 and 2005 before being demolished; Blue Origin took the lease in 2015 and flew the first New Glenn from it in 2025. Plans for eight to twelve launches in 2026 now stand at a hoped-for single flight.[2]
Modelling puts one orbital mirror near four full moons
Atmospheric modelling by Miroslav Kocifaj and colleagues, reported by Phys.org and accepted at Astrophysical Journal Letters, estimates the light pollution from Reflect Orbital's proposed constellation. A single 54-metre production mirror would reach magnitude -16.7, about four times a full moon, with scattered glow exceeding moonlight up to 34 km away. The pilot satellite Eaerendil-1 carries an 18-by-18-metre reflector at 600 km altitude and was approved by the Federal Communications Commission in July over objections from the American Astronomical Society. The company has described a constellation of roughly 50,000 mirrors; the paper calculates that operating 400 of them at once would make skyglow visible from 80 km away. The analysis is a preprint on arXiv, accepted for publication with the journal version still to come.[3]
