SpaceX this evening successfully placed 28 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 26th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
94 SpaceX
39 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 94 to 68.
An evening pause: Performed on television sometime in the 1960s.
Hat tip to Diane Zimmerman.
Sorry this is late. Got distracted this week with doctors’ appointments and other silly stuff.
Click for video, cued to just before launch.
The first launch of the Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space’s Eris rocket ended in failure today when the rocket started drifting sideways after rising about 150 feet and then crashing near the launchpad.
The picture to the right is a screen capture from an independent live steam of the launch posted on youtube by Aussienaut, captured about 20 seconds after liftoff. The red dot indicates the location of the launchpad where the rocket took off to make clear the rocket’s sideways motion. Ten seconds after this, the rocket fell to the ground and exploded.
This launch attempt was the first ever by a private commercial Australian rocket company, so the failure itself is not surprising. It was also the first orbital test launch from a privately owned Australian spaceport. Whether the company has the resources to recover remains to be seen, but I suspect it will try again.
The Starlab design in 2025. Click
for original image.
The consortium designing the commercial Starlab space station has now signed a partnership deal with the interior design company Journey for the latter to design the station’s habitable interior.
Journey brings a deep portfolio of globally recognized projects, including the Sphere in Las Vegas, the Empire State Building observatory in New York City and the Sun Princess Dome for Princess Cruises. The agency will be working closely with Hilton, one of the original strategic partners in the Starlab program, designing the Starlab hospitality and crew experience. Journeyโs role adds a vital layer of design and experiential innovation, shaping a space that reflects both function and humanity.
Much of the press release is similar blather. It is good that Starlab is thinking about making the living space in its station “both a cutting-edge research platform and a welcoming, livable habitat,” but this deal doesn’t include any actual design work. Apparently nothing concrete will be done until Starlab wins the big NASA construction project — assuming it does so. Thus, I still rank Starlab low in my rankings of the four commercials stations being built or proposed, but this deal has convinced me to raise its ranking above Orbital Reef. Both have built little, but Starlab is at least making a lot of partnership deals with others, strengthening the quality of its team.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
From figure 3 of the paper.
Using the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers think they can now disentangle the strange spiral shape of the expanding dust shells caused by the colliding powerful winds flowing from a binary pair of giant aging Wolf-Rayet stars, dubbed the Apep system.
Apparently, a third smaller O-type star sits in the system, and is acting to block the winds and destroy the dust within them, carving out a large cavity in the spiral shells. The image to the right, produced by the Very Large Telescope in Chile, shows the spiral dust shells shaped by the strong solar winds flowing and colliding from the binary Wolf-Rayet stars (the bright dot in the center). The O-type star can be seen just above them. The yellow lines indicate the empty cone. Without the O star computer models had predicted a very bright shell north of the binary, and its non-existence in VLT images caused these further Webb observations.
From the paper’s [pdf] conclusion:
The JWST observations of Apep reveal luminous circumstellar dust that support[s] … our finding that the O supergiant โnorthern companionโ is dynamically associated with the binary WR stars in Apep; this is the first time that dust destruction has been observed by a tertiary star in a colliding wind nebula, and marks Apep as part of a rare class of triple colliding wind binaries.
The dust produced by Wolf-Rayet stars is thought to be a major component in seeding the formation of later stars, such as our own Sun. Finding that a third star in the system can destroy that dust suggests (as always) that this process can be far more complicated that first believed.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
The rocket startup and lunar lander company Firefly yesterday posted details about its initial public stock offering, designed to hopefully raise more than $600 million.
Firefly Aerospace, a market leading space and defense technology company, today announced that it has launched the roadshow for its proposed initial public offering of 16,200,000 shares of its common stock. In addition, Firefly intends to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase an additional 2,430,000 shares of its common stock at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions. The initial public offering price is expected to be between $35.00 and $39.00 per share.
The company stated it would use the money “to repay outstanding borrowings under its credit agreement, pay any accrued and unpaid dividends on certain series of its preferred stock, and for general corporate purposes.”
The company has not yet announced the date when this stock offering will become available for purchase.
The Chinese pseudo-company Ispace successfully placed a classified payload into orbit today, its solid-fueled Hyperbola-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
This was the first launch by Ispace since July 2024, following a launch failure. Not only did China’s state-run press say nothing about the payload, no information about where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China was provided.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
93 SpaceX
39 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 93 to 68.
An evening pause: This song is from the Broadway production of Cole Porter’s Guys & Dolls, which unfortunately got cut from the movie. It is song by an older man, a kind of father figure in the play, wishing the best for a young woman co-worker.
This version is actually the best live performance I could find, and amazingly it is from Beijing in 2017.
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.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and enhanced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a monitoring program studying the two supernovae that have occurred in this galaxy previously.
Hubble has turned its attention toward NGC 1309 several times; previous Hubble images of this galaxy were released in 2006 and 2014. Much of NGC 1309โs scientific interest derives from two supernovae, SN 2002fk in 2002 and SN 2012Z in 2012. SN 2002fk was a perfect example of a Type Ia supernova, which happens when the core of a dead star (a white dwarf) explodes.
SN 2012Z, on the other hand, was a bit of a renegade. It was classified as a Type Iax supernova: while its spectrum resembled that of a Type Ia supernova, the explosion wasnโt as bright as expected. Hubble observations showed that in this case, the supernova did not destroy the white dwarf completely, leaving behind a โzombie starโ that shone even brighter than it did before the explosion. Hubble observations of NGC 1309 taken across several years also made this the first time the white dwarf progenitor of a supernova has been identified in images taken before the explosion.
The image however carries a far more philosophic component. Except for the star near the top (identified by the four diffraction spikes), every single dot and smudge you see in this picture is a galaxy. NGC 1309 is about 100 million light years away, but behind it along its line of sight and at much greater distances are innumerable other galaxies, so many it is impossible to count them. And each is roughly comparable in size to our own Milky Way galaxy, containing billions of stars.
The scale of the universe is simply impossible to grasp, no matter how hard we might try.
Capitalism in space: South Korea’s space agency KARI has now completed the transfer of its government-built Nuri rocket to the private South Korea company Hanwha Aerospace.
The transfer includes a total of 16,050 technical documents. While some 2 trillion won ($1.45 billion) in public funds was invested in developing the Nuri rocket, the two sides agreed on a technology transfer fee of 24 billion won, based on direct research and development costs. The agreement comes nearly two years and 10 months after Hanwha Aerospace was selected as the preferred negotiator.
Under the contract, Hanwha Aerospace has secured exclusive rights to lead Nuri production until 2032, which coincides with the governmentโs target for the next-generation Korean launch vehicle. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted phrase is important, as it shows that this transfer is not completely shifting space development and ownership from the government to the private sector. Hanwha is going to operate the rocket, but it does not appear to own it, nor is it clear it will be allowed to market it to others for profit. Furthermore, it is not Hanwha but KARI that will be developing the next-generation rocket, using government funds.
The dominance of the South Korean government is also reflected in the cost, as the article notes that the Nuri rocket costs “per kilogram … about 10 times that of SpaceXโs reusable Falcon 9.” Like all governments, KARI was not focused on profit in developing Nuri, so it built a rocket uncompetitive in the present launch market.
Still, this deal indicates the South Korean government’s recognition that it must foster a robust private sector aerospace industry if it truly wishes to enter the space age. This deal is thus just a first step.
The bankrupt high-altitude balloon company Space Perspective has now been purchased by the Spanish balloon startup Eos X Space.
Space Perspective “will operate with full autonomy, under U.S. leadership and corporate structure,” Eos X Space representatives said in an emailed statement on Thursday (July 24). Space Perspective’s efforts will dovetail with those of Madrid-based Eos X Space, an aerospace outfit founded in 2020 that has been working on a balloon-tourism system of its own.
Eos X is one of three Spanish balloon startups, all vying to provide high altitude flights to tourists, with the other two companies being Zero-2 and Halo. All three have been in a long legal fight, with the latter two indicted in 2023 over the theft of Eos X’s balloon concept. In an earlier legal action, Zero-2 claimed its concept was stolen by Eos X.
None, including Space Perspective, has as yet actually flown any tourists.
