The beat goes on! SpaceX successfully launched another 28 Starlink satellites early this morning, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
76 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 76 to 55.
An evening pause: A blues piece performed live 1994.
Hat tip Alec Gimarc, who adds that “Al Kooper was the creative force behind Blood Sweat & Tears.”
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
Click for original image.
Today’s cool image illustrates starkly the limitations of orbital imagery. The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 30, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows flow features inside a depression that strongly resemble glacial features, with the downhill grade roughly heading south.
Such features are seen in many places on Mars, almost always in the 30 to 60 degree mid-latitude bands in both the northern and southern hemispheres (see here, here, and here for just three examples. For many more simply search this website using “glacier” or “glacial feature” as search terms).
The problem is that this location is not within that 30 to 60 degree latitude band. In fact, at this location no near surface ice should exist at all.
» Read more
Honda today successfully completed the first test of its own grasshopper prototype rocket, with the rocket reaching a height of 890 feet before landing vertically 56 seconds after launch.
I have embedded the video of the flight below.
Honda had announced this project back in 2021, but since then had published no updates of note. This flight indicates that project is real and is on going.
In 2021 the company said it was targeting the first orbital flights by 2030. Today’s update says it will be doing suborbital flights in 2029, which suggests the orbital flights will not occur in 2030.
» Read more
According to a Space News article yesterday, the FCC’s regulatory focus since January and the advent of the Trump administration has shifted significantly from its focus during the Biden administration.
The article describes in detail the present focus to streamline regulations and speed license approvals.
One early result of this push is a reduction in the FCC’s licensing backlog. Schwarz said the space bureau has reduced pending applications by 35 percent since January, including those for new space stations and ground infrastructure.
Modernizing regulations for non-geostationary satellite systems is another priority. The FCC is considering revising so-called “power limit” rules aimed at preventing interference between low-orbit constellations and traditional geostationary satellites and earth stations. Schwarz said these reforms could help pave the way for higher-throughput services that rival terrestrial broadband.
This focus appears correctly centered on the FCC’s actual legal statutory authority to regulate the limited bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum to avoid conflicts in its use.
Under Biden, the FCC instead focused on expanding its power beyond that statutory authority, claiming it had the right to determine how satellites were built, when they would be de-orbited, and in what manner. None of those activities have anything to do with bandwidth and the FCC’s legal responsibilities.
There was some legislative push back from Congress during the Biden administration, but it was slow and relatively weak. Now that push back has become unnecessary, because the FCC under Trump is back to doing its actual job instead of trying to build empires of regulation.
The agency also appears, for the moment, to have ended its partisan abuse of red tape for political reasons. Under Biden it used its regulatory power against SpaceX in retaliation to Elon Musk’s decision to publicly support Biden’s political opponents. It appears the present effort to speed license approvals for everyone has ended this practice.
Rocket Lab today announced it has been awarded a launch contract from an unnamed “confidential commercial customer” calling for two launches before the end of this year, with the first to occur only four days from today.
Launching from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, the first dedicated mission on Electron – named “Symphony In The Stars” – will take place no earlier than June 20, 2025 to deploy a single spacecraft to a 650km circular Earth orbit. A second dedicated launch on Electron to meet those same mission requirements is scheduled for launch before the end of 2025.
That the customer name is classified suggests these are both military launches, and are designed to demonstrate Rocket Lab’s ability to launch something fast under short notice. The new contract also increases the chances that Rocket Lab will manage two dozen launches in 2025, a pace of twice a month.
SpaceX last night successfully placed 26 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its third flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
A comparison between this launch of SpaceX’s Starlink with Amazon’s scrubbed ULA launch of 27 Kuiper satellites yesterday is worth noting. This launch of 26 Starlink satellites was utterly routine, and just one of four in just the past week, all of which put 98 satellites into orbit. Thousands of such satellites have been launched since the first launch in 2018.
Amazon’s attempt to launch 27 Kuiper satellites was scrubbed, and would have only been the second launch total, separated by about six weeks. The constellation only has 27 satellites in orbit, and its launches are anything but routine, despite signing launch contracts with four different rocket companies. And yet, Amazon proposed Kuiper at almost the same time SpaceX proposed Starlink, in the mid-2010s.
I will let my readers draw their own conclusions from this comparison.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
75 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 75 to 55.
An evening pause: The opening lyric sets the tone, asking questions about life. A translation:
Where are we going?
When we no longer have a home?
The flowers under the concrete,
Mom,
Tell me,
Where are we going?
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
Spinlaunch has now confirmed that it has signed a deal to build its spin launch facility on Adak island in the far western extent of the Alaskan island chain.
The facility will be a scaled up version of its spin launch test facility in New Mexico, shown to the right, that was used for tests back in 2022, hurling payloads 35,000 feet into the sky up by spinning them up.
Since then the company changed its leadership and shifted focus to building a satellite constellation that will at least initially will be launched by conventional rockets. This new agreement, actually signed in October 2024 but kept secret until now, suggests that it has not yet abandoned its spin launch technology.
» Read more
ULA today scrubbed its second Atlas-5 launch to place 27 more of Amazon’s Kuiper constellation satellites into orbit due to “an engineering observation of an elevated purge temperature within the booster engine.”
At the moment no new launch date has been scheduled.
So far Amazon has only placed 27 operational Kuiper satellites into orbit, on a single Atlas-5 launch in April. According to its FCC license, it must have 1,600 satellites in orbit by July 2026. Though it has contracts to launch these satellites 46 times on ULA rockets (8 on Atlas-5 and 36 on Vulcan), 27 times on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 18 times on ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, and 3 times on SpaceX’s Falcon-9, except for SpaceX all these companies have had problems getting off the ground.
Whether Amazon can meet the FAA licence requirement by next year is becoming increasingly questionable.
