Year: 2025

Two more SpaceX launches

1:15 pm

SpaceX yesterday completed two launches, placing a total of 58 Starlink satellites into orbit.

First, a Falcon 9 lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying 29 Starlink satellites. The first stage completed its 8th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Four hours later, a second Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, carrying another 29 Starlink satellites. Its first stage completed its 24th flight, also landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

149 SpaceX
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 149 to 117.

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I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I think we all take for granted the amount of sophisticated engineering that goes into modern construction. No English, but you don’t need it.

Hat tip Cotour.

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November 11, 2025 Zimmerman/Space Show appearance

3:55 pm

David Livingston has now uploaded the audio of my appearance on the Space Show earlier this week on November 11, 2025.

You can download the audio of the program here.

To watch the zoom broadcast, go here.

The most important point I made during this show was at the beginning, as described by David Livingston’s summary of the show:

During the program Bob made some predictions about the future of space exploration. Zimmerman claimed that SpaceX, rather than NASA, is currently the most effective American space program. He predicted that in two years, everyone would recognize SpaceX’s dominance. Zimmerman also suggested that NASA’s role should become less significant, with its focus shifting to supporting private space endeavors rather than leading space exploration efforts.

I was actually more blunt. I said that SpaceX is the American space program right now, and that SpaceX doesn’t need NASA or the U.S. government in any way to carry it out, as it is entirely funded from Starlink revenues. I also predicted that NASA and its Artemis program is now irrelevant, though no one yet realizes it.

I added that this is going to be one of my many predictions that everyone will claim they made, two years hence. I’m making it now. I am quite willing to bet I will be right.

Everyone should take a listen. You will find the discussion afterward most revealing.

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The orbital propulsion module for India’s Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander drifts back into lunar orbit

3:48 pm

When India’s Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft arrived in lunar orbit in August 2023, it separated into three units, the lander, a lunar orbiter, and a propulsion unit used to get everything to the Moon.

While the Vikram lander successfully touched down several hundred miles from the Moon’s south pole and the Chandrayaan-3 orbiter continues to make observations of the Moon, in October 2023 engineers had the propulsion module do a burn that sent it out of lunar orbit and into an Earth orbit that was close to one of the Lagrange points where the gravity of the Earth and Moon are balanced.

Now, three years later, that module has drifted back into lunar orbit, where it has since done two close fly-bys of the surface.

This intricate orbital dance culminated when the module once again entered the Moon’s SOI [sphere of influence] on November 4, 2025, an event marking the transition where lunar gravity dominates its motion.

The first recorded lunar flyby occurred on November 6, 2025, at a distance of 3,740 km from the lunar surface, though it was outside the Indian Deep Space Network’s (IDSN) visibility range. A second, closely monitored flyby took place on November 11, 2025, bringing the module within 4,537 km of the Moon and well within observation capabilities.

These events noticeably altered the satellite’s orbital parameters, expanding its orbit size from 100,000 x 300,000 km to a massive 409,000 x 727,000 km and shifting its inclination from 34° to 22°.

It is not clear what happens next. Having this module in lunar orbit could be an issue for present and later orbiters, as no orbit around the Moon can ever be stable. At some point India’s space agency ISRO needs to properly dispose of this unit, either by sending into the Moon or out of the Moon-Earth system entirely. I am of course assuming it has the fuel to do so.

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Bezos releases new video of the New Glenn first stage landing yesterday

3:35 pm

Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, today released on X new footage showing from a distance the full landing sequence of New Glenn’s first stage on a barge in the Atlantic.

I have embedded it below. It is quite spectacular, and suggests the Blue Origin team can match SpaceX’s team in controlling a landing spacecraft. The stage comes down several hundred feet to the side of the barge, hovers, and then slides sideways to touch down exactly on target. As Bezos notes:

We nominally target a few hundred feet away from Jacklyn to avoid a severe impact if engines fail to start or start slowly. We’ll incrementally reduce that conservatism over time.

This is not unlike the landing maneuver performed by Starship prior to capture by the tower chopsticks. If Blue Origin can do it also, it means it has capabilities it has been hiding for the past decade due to its slow and timid testing/launching pace.
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Comet C/2025 K1 — NOT interstellar 3I/Atlas — breaks up as it passes closest to the Sun

12:10 pm

The broken apart nucleus of Comet 3I/Atlas
Click for original image.

CORRECTION: I originally posted this story thinking the comet imaged was the interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas. It is not. It is a different one. I have changed to post below to correct my error.

——————
Sometime on November 11, 2025, the nucleus of interstellar C/2025 K1 broke into three pieces as it passed through its closest and hottest point to the Sun.

The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, comes from images of the break-up taken by the Virtual Telescope project, which gathers data from many small telescopes remotely.

From the first link, translated by Google from the Italian:

Its trajectory led it, in early October, to pass through a point of minimum distance from the Sun (perihelion) quite close to our star, about 0.33 astronomical units, just outside the orbit of Mercury. Because of this “short” distance from the Sun, it experienced high solar irradiation, which caused a significant increase in the temperature of the surface and internal layers of the nucleus.

These are precisely the conditions under which a “breakup” event is expected: depending on the internal properties of the nucleus—namely, its porosity, its state of cohesion, its composition, and the percentage of ice—it is possible that the increase in temperature could cause significant “outgassing,” a sudden and violent outflow of gaseous and dusty material, and the consequent fragmentation of the nucleus, sometimes into a few pieces of roughly similar size, sometimes into a cloud of fragments and debris that spread along the trajectory of the original comet.

…”From an initial quick analysis of the images, we can confirm that there are certainly two fairly similar pieces, whose brightness maxima are separated by approximately 2,000 km (distance projected on the star field); “Furthermore, we can intuit the presence of a third, smaller and fainter fragment to the left of the pair,” observes Mazzotta Epifani.

It will be interesting to see if the same thing happens to interstellar Comet 3I/Atlas as it makes its own pass close to the Sun.

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China’s Shenzhou-20 crew on Tiangong-3 returns on Shenzhou-21 capsule

11:27 am

The Tiangong-3 station, as presently configured
The Tiangong-3 station, as presently configured

After about a week of analysis, China today announced that the Shenzhou-20 capsule was too badly damaged to bring its crew back from its Tiangong-3 space station.

In making that announcement China finally revealed some details about the damage.

Tiny cracks have been found in the return capsule’s viewport window, which are most probably caused by external impact from space debris, according to the [China Manned Space Agency (CMSA).]

To get that crew home, which had already spent almost seven months in orbit, China had them board the Shenzhou-21 capsule that had only launched two weeks earlier on October 31, 2025 and use it to return to Earth today.

This leaves the present three astronauts on Tiangong-3 without any way to get back to Earth should something go wrong with the station.

China apparently had limited options. It doesn’t have enough docking ports on Tiangong-3 to dock three Shenzhou capsules to it, so one capsule had to undock and leave the station to make room for a replacement capsule.

Undocking Shenzhou-21 however is puzzling. Why didn’t China instead undock the damaged Shenzhou-20 capsule and de-orbit it? Had it done so, the six astronauts would have had only one lifeboat for three, but the docking port would have been opened for a new rescue capsule. There have been indications that China is preparing the next Shenzhou-22 capsule and a Long March 2F rocket for launch, though China has not provided any information about when that launch will occur.

With Shenzhou-21 gone, the three remaining Tiangong-3 astronauts are truly stranded in space, with no way home.

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Amazon renames its proposed internet constellation from Kuiper to Amazon LEO

9:59 am

Amazon today announced that it has renamed its proposed internet constellation from the initial internal code name “Kuiper” to “Amazon LEO, to give “a simple nod” to its location in low Earth orbit.

Our long-term mission remains the same, and we’re making good progress against it. We now operate one of the largest satellite production lines on the planet. We’ve invented some of the most advanced customer terminals ever built, including the first commercial phased array antenna to support gigabit speeds. And we now have more than 150 satellites in orbit [154 to be exact], and customers and partners like JetBlue, L3Harris, DIRECTV Latin America, Sky Brasil, and NBN Co., Australia’s National Broadband Network operator, already signing up to deploy the service.

The company’s FCC license requires it to have 1,600 satellites in orbit by July 2026. To even get close to this number the three launch companies that have Amazon launch contracts, ULA (46 launches total), Arianespace (18 launches), and Blue Origin (27 launches) have got to start launching regularly. ULA has completed three launches, and promises to do many in 2026. Arianespace says it will begin launches in 2026. Blue Origin has said nothing, but the successfully launch yesterday of New Glenn suggests it will also begin Amazon launches in 2026.

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ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket launches Viasat communications satellite

8:40 pm

ULA tonight successfully launched a Viasat communications satellite, its Atlas-5 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

This was the fifth launch for ULA in 2025, matching its count from last year. For the past year the company has repeatedly promised a launch rate of once to twice a month, but as yet to do so. In fact, it hasn’t managed twelve launches in a year since 2016. Hopefully this will change in the coming year.

With this launch, ULA only has eleven Atlas-5s left in stock before the rocket is retired, with five of those launches for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation and six for Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule. While the Kuiper launches will almost certainly happen by the end of 2026, the Boeing Starliner missions are very much in limbo, as that capsule itself remains in limbo with it entirely unclear when it will carry astronauts again for NASA.

As this was only the fifth launch by ULA in 2025, the leader board for the 2025 launch race remains unchanged:

147 SpaceX
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 147 to 117.

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Historical proof that today’s public schools are nothing but indoctrination mills poisoning minds

4:57 pm

A typical classroom in 1909
Click for original.

You want to know why today’s kids know nothing about America’s past, and in fact in many cases actually believe falsely that America invented slavery and has always been an evil oppressive nation founded on that even more evil concept of capitalism, you need only compare pictures of two typical public school classrooms, one from 1909 and one from 2025.

The picture to the right was taken in 1909, showing an elementary classroom in the Washington, DC area. Note the picture of President Teddy Roosevelt on the wall, surrounded by American flags. Note the blackboard that covers two entire walls, its entire face filled with detailed information these children were expected to learn. Note how there is nothing else. Very clearly the focus is on learning the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, with a lot of American history and science thrown in as well. As noted in the article of many such vintage classroom images from which this picture was drawn:

Students wear their best clothes for this formal photograph. The classroom features standard educational decor of the period—portraits of historical figures, maps, and instructional charts. Such photographs documented not just the students but the educational standards and resources of local communities.

As a child who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I can say that the classrooms of my day were quite similar. There was almost always a portrait of George Washington and the Declaration of Independence on the wall, along with map of the world and the U.S. And above all, the focus was on learning basic facts and essential skills.

The next picture below was taken in 2025 by a parent of an 11-year-old boy while attending a parent orientation night. It is also typical of the classrooms one sees nowadays in the public schools, and the contrast is more than striking.
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