A Major Deal for an Israeli Company: This Week in Space

Computers worth tens of millions of dollars

The Israeli space computer company Ramon Space will supply digital computers for the OneWeb satellite communication network of the European company Eutelsat, in a deal estimated at $70 million. The company operates a low Earth orbit communication satellite network that provides internet services similar to SpaceX’s Starlink network. Currently, the company operates more than 540 such satellites, making it the largest communication satellite network aside from the American company’s.

“In the first phase of the deal, which is expected to last about three years, we will supply computing systems for the next 70 satellites in this constellation,” said Ramon Space CEO Avi Shabtai to the Davidson Institute website. “These are computing systems that enable digital processing of data and improve the satellite’s performance. They can also be upgraded during the satellite’s lifespan, which improves the company’s business model.”

Ramon Space is currently in the process of delivering the first computers to the European company, and the first satellites with the Israeli computer are scheduled for launch toward the end of next year. Ramon declined to specify where the computers are manufactured. About two years ago, the company signed a cooperation agreement with the large Taiwanese computer manufacturer Ingrasys. “That an Israeli company supplies these systems to a leading European company says something about our company and its standing in the space computing market,” Shabtai emphasized.

Ramon Space, which employs about 80 people, manufactures computers and computing systems for the space market. “Currently, we focus on two markets: communication satellites, and sensing and imaging satellites,” said Shabtai. “Our computers are primarily designed for communication technologies, data processing, and recently increasingly for data storage — there are space missions that accumulate large amounts of data, and it’s impossible to transmit all of it to Earth in real-time, so we provide solutions for storing data in space.”

The company currently operates two centers in Israel, in Yokneam and Hod Hasharon, and also has centers in the United States and England, which opened last year. “We are working on several other projects, and just this week we signed another project that will be announced soon,” Shabtai added.

Each computer is expected to generate about a million dollars for the company. Ramon Space computers | Source: Ramon.Space

The Return of Starship

SpaceX is expected to conduct the ninth test flight of the Starship system next week — the giant spacecraft intended, among other things, to carry humans to Mars. After more than two years of test flights, the spacecraft has still not entered orbit around Earth or completed an orbital revolution. The last two test flights, in January and March this year, ended similarly: the launch rocket, Super Heavy, returned to the ground and successfully landed on the launch tower, where it was caught by specially designed arms and placed on the ground. However, the spacecraft itself, the “ship,” exploded minutes later, both in the seventh and eighth tests.

Earlier this week, the company completed a static fire test of the “ship,” during which all six engines of the spacecraft were fired on the ground for about a minute. This was the third ground test of this spacecraft, which is intended to go to space on the ninth test flight. The flight profile of the test has not been published, but it is likely the company will attempt what it failed to do in the previous two flights: a ballistic trajectory flight without orbiting Earth, which will bring the spacecraft back into the atmosphere above the Indian Ocean. There it will perform a controlled atmospheric reentry and a landing maneuver over the sea, designed to mimic a soft vertical landing on land.

The mission may include additional tests the company has planned, primarily firing the spacecraft’s engines in space, transferring fuel between tanks in preparation for spaceship refueling, or deploying dummy satellites in space. The test is also expected to include an interesting development: for the first time, the company will reuse the Super Heavy booster. The launch rocket bringing the spacecraft to space will be the same rocket used in the seventh test flight, which, as noted, was successfully caught by the launch tower.

No official date for the test has been announced yet, partly because the company has not yet received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Such approval will be granted after the FAA approves the company’s failure report on the eighth test flight and the measures taken to prevent the failure from recurring. However, from warnings the company issued to aircraft and vessel operators near its space base in South Texas, it appears it is aiming for a launch on May 21, Wednesday.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced in a tweet that before the test flight, he will present the company’s plans for a Mars mission. Last week, the U.S. administration announced a significant budget cut for NASA in 2026, alongside increased funding for the planning and development of manned Mars missions. It is very likely that such missions will fall to SpaceX, both because it is the only company seriously developing these capabilities and due to Musk’s high standing in the U.S. administration.

I Have No Other Country, Also Because Its Soil Is Burning

While Mars is considered a preferred target for manned space missions, our neighbor on the other side, Venus, actually resembles Earth more in terms of size and gravity. However, life on its surface would be far more challenging due to a very dense atmosphere: the air pressure at the surface is similar to that found at a depth of 900 meters below sea level on Earth. To that, add scorching temperatures, toxic gases, acid rain, and volcanic activity. Now, new research suggests that Venus’s ground is less stable than we previously thought.

Researchers from the United States and Switzerland reanalyzed data collected by the Magellan spacecraft, which mapped Venus’s surface about three decades ago. Their study focused on land formations called "Coronae" — roughly circular or oval-shaped depressions that can be hundreds of kilometers in diameter. Previously, these were thought to be asteroid impact craters, but deeper research revealed that the coronae are the result of volcanic activity. Molten rock pushes the outer crust layer from below, creating a bubble-like shape. When the rock cools, it sinks—like a cake that “collapses” after being taken out of the oven—and the bulge becomes a crater-shaped depression.

Venus’s crust is stable and does not consist of tectonic plates like Earth’s, but the researchers hypothesized that tectonic activity still exists beneath the surface, pushing the formation of coronae in regions where “upwellings” of molten rock meet the outer crust. To understand whether coronae were indeed formed this way on Venus, and what kind of activity occurs beneath the planet’s surface, the researchers developed theoretical models that could explain the process. They then cross-checked the models with the topographic mapping of 75 coronae from Magellan’s findings and with gravity data measured by the spacecraft, which can indicate what is happening underground. They found that in more than two-thirds of the coronae, gravity was weaker in the center, likely indicating molten material with lower density, as predicted by their models.

In their research paper, the scientists detail the tectonic processes that led to the coronae’s formation and note that this is another similarity between Venus and Earth: ongoing tectonic activity that continues to shape the planet’s surface.

The ground never stops moving, even on our neighboring planet. This is how one of Venus’s coronae looks through the eyes of an artist — a vast valley probably created by underground movement of molten rock | Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Peter Rubin

The Universe Calculates Its End Backwards

When will our universe come to an end? No one has a clear answer to this question, but theoretical physicists occasionally propose hypotheses. In a study published this week, researchers from the Netherlands updated their own previous estimate, determining that the universe will end in 10⁷⁸ years (“1 followed by 78 zeros”) instead of 10¹¹⁰ years.

The reason for the universe’s end, as the researchers see it, is a phenomenon called Hawking radiation, named after the English physicist Stephen Hawking who proposed it in 1975. Black holes, as is well known, do not emit any matter or radiation due to their immense gravity. However, Hawking suggested a mechanism by which they lose mass anyway. When a particle and its antiparticle meet, they annihilate each other, meaning they vanish and turn into energy. In quantum physics, the opposite process can also occur: a particle and an antiparticle suddenly appear from nowhere. If this happens exactly at the event horizon—the boundary of the black hole—one particle escapes outward and the other is pulled inward. The particle pulled into the black hole has, by definition, negative energy, causing the black hole to lose energy or mass, which are physically equivalent.

Falcke and his colleagues at Radboud University in the Netherlands based their previous calculation on black holes. Their new calculation also includes the estimated mass loss rate of other massive bodies, primarily neutron stars and white dwarfs. “So the end of the universe will come much earlier than we expected, but luckily it is still a very long time from now,” Falcke said in a press release, in which the university emphasized that the research was done with a wink. The researchers even calculated how long it would take for a human to disappear via this mechanism and found it to be about 10⁹⁰ years—slightly longer than the average human lifespan influenced by other factors.

It is worth noting that although Hawking radiation is considered a fairly accepted theoretical idea, there is currently no direct observation confirming its existence, certainly not detecting mass loss in black holes or other bodies by this mechanism. To put the calculation in perspective, remember that the current age of the universe is estimated at about 13.8 billion years. So even if the calculation is correct, it is expected to occur about six orders of magnitude longer than its current age. This will probably not affect us much: our Sun is expected to end its life in about five billion years as a red giant that will engulf much of the planets. If we manage to survive that, we will still have trillions upon trillions of years to prepare for the challenges ahead.

White dwarfs also lose mass via Hawking radiation, at least according to the theoretical calculation. A white dwarf star, formed from the matter left after a supernova explosion | Illustration: Nazarii_Neshcherenskyi, Shutterstock