SpaceX launches more Starlinks
Earlier today SpaceX successfully placed another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit (including 13 with cell-to-satellite capability), its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 24th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
62 SpaceX
30 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 62 to 49. The company also has another Starlink launch planned for tomorrow morning. The launch was scrubbed, rescheduled for May 27th.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Earlier today SpaceX successfully placed another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit (including 13 with cell-to-satellite capability), its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 24th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
62 SpaceX
30 China
6 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 62 to 49. The company also has another Starlink launch planned for tomorrow morning. The launch was scrubbed, rescheduled for May 27th.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The Count is well-employed at SpaceX.
Elon to Arthur C. Clarke – “Take that Art!”
It looks like Mr. Clarke was w-a-a-a-y too conservative in a number of his predictions. Even he might have figured that launching 23 at one time was a little too much to believe. Then doing the same thing again and again and again and… yeah, even sci-fi nuts wouldn’t go for that.
Elon tips his hat to Mr. Clarke. Thanks for the ride(s).
It’s not even Memorial Day yet, and SpaceX has already launched to orbit more times than it did in all of 2022.
We take their success far too much for granted. But that’s the point, isn’t it? To make spaceflight regular, predictable, boring.
To Don.
Art would have liked the idea of Orbital Antenna Farms—huge structures with massive dishes and rugged flat panels for solar…maybe solar thermal.
Then electronics boxes would be all you swap out.
BlueWalker is proof that—the bigger the sat—the smaller a consumer device can be.
Similar
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/09/giant-satellites-in-geosynchronous-orbit-to-provide-internet-directly-to-smartphones.html
Not to be a downer, but Britain’s premier left-wing paper of record, The Guardian, has a new hit piece up this weekend on the incorporation of Starbase as a city, replete with strange hair colors and depressingly bizarre mantras like “environmental racism” and “colonial settler mindset.” It’s the kind of thing I don’t recommend to our regulars with high blood pressure. The writer clearly looked under every stone around to find the few locals who don’t like SpaceX, and the whole exercise is a worthwhile reminder that most of the opposition to expanding the human economy into space is now found on the progressive left. Peter Hague quips, “The great thing about opponents of space colonisation is they so readily offer up reasons why you wouldn’t want to share a planet with them.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/23/elon-musk-new-city-starbase-texas
Happy Memorial Day, everyone!
If they think Musk has too much and incorporating a city in Texas is revolutionary they are not Texans.
Just look up the history of the King Ranch. It was so big that I think 3 towns have incorporated in it..
It has so much Texas coastline that after one large hurricane enough sand and land was washed out to the gulf that an island was left behind.
The state of Texas and the federal government even tried to claim the Island as Texas and federal land under some stupid rule about a private citizen owning a recognized Island in the US.
Musk is small change compared to old Texas Ranchers.
The land south of Houston used to be a smugglers haven during the Civil War and especially during prohibition. Great grandpa made a good dollar down there.