Author: Robert Zimmerman

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.

• Astronomers discover dozens of new luminous quasars

• The Miura-5 rocket’s second-stage engine for the Spanish rocket startup PLD is now ready for qualification testing
  The company had been targeting the first launch of Miura-5 before the end of 2025. It appears that launch will likely slip to early 2026.

• On this day in 1989, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Neptune
  It passed within 3,000 miles of the planet, and to this day is still the only spacecraft to get a close look.

• On this day in 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope, the fourth in the Great Observatory program
  An infrared telescope, Spitzer was a precursor to the Webb Space Telescope. It was named after Lyman Spitzer, who conceived the Hubble Space Telescope and was central in getting it built.

Diane and I are on the road today, leaving the Grand Canyon, which remains as grand as ever, and heading to Colorado to visit friends we haven’t seen since before the COVID panic.

Thus, I will likely not be able to watch today’s third attempt by SpaceX to complete the tenth launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, as it happens.. (Live stream can be found here.)

Once settled in Colorado I will catch up. Like you all, I have my fingers crossed that the launch will go off as hoped with a largely successful test flight.

One fortunate thing that has occurred during the previous two launch attempts in the past two days is that it appears the protest of boats proposed by a Mexico radical activist group to block the launch has so appeared to be a bust. There has been no indication of any boats entering the launch range in the Gulf of Mexico, and if any have tried, it appears they have been removed quickly.

China today successfully launched another ten satellites for its Guowang internet constellation, its Long March 8A rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

This was the tenth launch for the Guowang constellation, which eventually intends to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink with a constellation of 13,000 satellites. Today’s launch brings the number of satellites presently in orbit to 82.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

104 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 104 to 84.

Both the Webb Space Telescope and the newer SPHEREx space telescopes have now been aimed by scientists at the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas.

According to the paper describing the Webb results, the comet’s coma is dominated by carbon dioxide gas.

The SPHEREx results [pdf] also show a strong signal of carbon dioxice in the coma, as well as a strong signal of water ice in its nucleus.

These results, along with all the observations by multiple other telescopes in space and on the ground, are in line with what is expected from a comet, with the kind of unique differences expected from each object. There is nothing seen so far from the data to suggest anything alien about it, despite the claims of some pubicity-seeking scientists who don’t even specialize in comet research.

The big scientific discovery here is that this interstellar comet is so much like comets that come from our own solar system. The implication is that other solar systems have great similarities to our own. .

The unmanned cargo Dragon that SpaceX launched on August 24, 2025 successfully docked with ISS earlier today.

At 7:05 a.m. EDT, the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the forward port of the International Space Station’s Harmony module. The spacecraft carried over 5,000 pounds of scientific investigations and cargo to the orbiting laboratory on SpaceX’s 33rd commercial resupply services mission for NASA.

It will remained docked for the next several months.

The tenth orbial test flight of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket was scrubbed tonight due to bad weather.

The countdown got down to T-40 seconds before scrubbing. Mission control then ran the count down to T-10 to complete instead a full dress rehearsal countdown before fully scrubbing.

Expect them to try again tomorrow, though this has not yet been confirmed.

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.

• Amateur astronomer images the just launched X-37B
  He also captured a smallsat in the imagery.

• Billboard for new Chinese spaceport at Haiyang touts planned 4 land-based launchpads and 4 semi-floating pads off the coast
  This site on China’s northeast coast would give it more launch capacity without having to drop stages on their citizens’ heads.

• NASA reposts the spectacular images of the asteroid Dimorphos after its impact by DART, taken by the Italian LICIACube spacecraft as flew past the asteroid immediately thereafter
  The images found that 35.3 million pounds of rubble spewed from the asteroid.

• On this day in 2006, the IAU passed its idiotic new definition of a planet expressly designed to take that designation from Pluto
  Almost no planetary scientist agrees with that definition. They generally ignore it.