Author: Robert Zimmerman

Ground-based imagery now suggests China has completed a docking and undocking of two robotic servicing satellites

10:28 am

According to ground-based imagery by the commercial company S2A, China’s Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 robotic servicing satellites appear to have completed a docking and undocking on June 13 and June 14, 2025.

China’s Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 satellites had been moving toward each other in geosynchronous orbit, around 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above the equator, Spacenews reported on June 6. And now the pair appear to have had a brief first encounter, according to observations from the ground.

Optical tracking by the space situational awareness firm s2a systems shows a close approach between the two on June 14, with the pair, at times, virtually unresolvable from the other. This suggests that Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 made at least a test-run close approach and may have even performed a docking and undocking test.

You can see video of the first apparent docking here.

Shijian-21 was launched in 2021, and was used to grab a defunct Chinese geosynchronous satellite and tug it to a graveyard orbit. Shijian-25 was launched in January 2025 to test robotic servicing of satellites. These maneuvers with Shijian-21 appear to be part of those tests.

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Monaco-based startup unveils its proposed European-built lunar rover

10:17 am

Capitalism in space: The Monaco-based startup Venturi Space, this week unveiled its own proposed European-built lunar rover, dubbed Mona Luna. and offered it to both the European Space Agency (ESA) and France’s CNES space agency.

Venturi has received some support from ESA for key technologies needed for the rover. The company is hoping to win support for a rover development project at ESA’s ministerial conference in late November, when member states will decide on funding for agency programs for the next three years. Antonio Delfino, Venturi’s director of space affairs] argued a rover like Mona Luna fit a gap in Europe’s exploration plans. Mona Lisa is designed to be delivered to the lunar surface on ESA’s Argonaut lander, which would launch on an Ariane 64.

The company has said it is willing to commit some of its own investment capital to develop the rover, should either ESA or CNES decide to buy it. Whether ESA or CNES agree to build this rover however will likely depend on whether either has a program to land on the Moon. At the moment the status of NASA’s Artemis program is unclear, and it was that program that Europe was relying on to get to the Moon.

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Starlink begins or expands service in three more countries

10:07 am

Starlink this week officially began service in both India and the African country of Guinea-Bissau, while expanding its service in the Ukraine to include phone-to-satellite texting.

In India the final licensing approval came through, and the service is now available to customers through two different Indian telecommunication platforms.

The deals consists of selling Starlink’s equipment through Jio and Airtel’s retail networks, while Jio will also offer customer service, installation, and activation support. It will emphasise on providing high-speed internet to businesses, healthcare centres, schools and remote communities across India, according to reports.

SpaceX also begain to offer its services in Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony located on Africa’s northwestern coast and the seventh African country to approve Starlink. Its license had been approved in April, but the service wasn’t available apparently until now.

Finally, regulators in the Ukraine have now approved the use of Starlink’s phone-to-satellite service by the Ukrainian telecommunications company Kyivstar. The program will at present be limited to texting and emergency alerts. This expands Starlink’s already extensive internet availability there.

In every case, Starlink will act to decentralize control of communications aware from the government, as its sells terminals to ordinary citizens.

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Russia launches classified military satellite using its Angara-5 rocket

9:50 am

Russia today successfully launched a classified military satellite, its Angara-5 rocket rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in northeastern Russia.

This was the fifth flight of the Angara-5 rocket, the most powerful version in the Angara family of rockets that Russia first proposed three decades ago to replace its older rockets and has had an extremely slow development history. Its core stage and four strap-on boosters crashed in drop-zones across Russia,

On June 9, 2025, the administration of the Kolpashevo District in the Tomsk Region of Russia declared several communities at risk of debris impact during an Angara-5 launch scheduled around 06:00 Moscow Time on June 19, 2025. The danger area covered the Verkneketsky, Kolpashevsky, Kargasoksky and Parabelsky Districts and was located around 65 kilometers north-west of Lake Tresh. This particular area, located around 2,320 kilometers downrange from Plesetsk, would normally be used as a drop zone for the second stage of an Angara rocket heading to an orbit with an inclination 63.4 degrees toward the Equator.

The rocket’s first stage boosters were expected to fall in the Komi Republic around 850 kilometers downrange, while the third stage would splash down in the Pacific Ocean, east of the Philippines, where the Russian authorities also declared a danger zone.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

76 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
7 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 76 to 56.

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Major explosion during preparations for static fire test of Starship prototype

11:14 pm

The moment the explosion begins on this Starship prototype<

As engineers tonight were preparing for a standard static fire engine test at Boca Chica of the next Starship prototype, expected to fly on the tenth Starship/Superheavy test flight, the spacecraft suddenly exploded.

I have embedded video of the explosion below. The event occurred prior to the actual static fire test, while Starship’s tanks were being filled. The image to the right is a screen capture just as the explosion begins. The white cloud is the initial release from the explosion (not standard venting), with the red dot indicating the location where the event began. It appears very much to have started inside this Starship spacecraft, which SpaceX was preparing for the next test flight.

Fortunately, no injuries have been reported.

Obviously, this is going to delay somewhat that tenth test flight. SpaceX has more Starship prototypes ready to go, but the company must first figure out what went wrong in this case. It also appears there might be some damage to that test stand, which will also have to be rebuilt so that future static fire tests of upcoming Starships can take place.
» Read more

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June 18, 2025 Quick space links

3:06 pm

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.

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France’s space agency agrees to let Spanish rocket startup PLD establish its own launch site at French Guiana

12:38 pm

Though France’s space agency CNES had initially attempted to place many rules and restrictions on the commercial operations of new independent private rocket companies at its spaceport in French Guiana, it has now backed off those demands in agreeing to let the Spanish rocket startup PLD establish its own launch site there at the decommissioned launchpad used by France’s Diament rocket in the 1970s.

This new contract greenlights the implementation of the infrastructure project designed by PLD Space with technical support from CNES and grants legal use of land in the ELM-Diamant area, where the MIURA 5 Preparation Zone and Launch Zone will be located. Construction will begin with the start of the dry season in French Guiana, expected in the summer months of 2025.

In September 2024 CNES said it wished to standardize the launch site for the seven different European rocket startups (Avio, HyImpulse, Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, PLD Space, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Latitude) it had approved to use it. At the time I sensed there was opposition from these companies to this policy, since each rocket was different and would not function with this standardized design.

At a minimum that policy apparently delayed PLD’s plans, as it originally hoped to start its launchpad construction in October 2024 and launch in 2025. That schedule went by the wayside.

It now appears PLD will proceed with development as it wishes, for its rocket, and the others will have to figure out how fit their rockets to that design. Or maybe CNES is going to open up further sites at French Guiana to avoid this conflict.

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A blacklisted American wins in court

12:16 pm

Bruce Gilley of Portland State University, willing to fight
Bruce Gilley, formerly of Portland State University

Back in 2017 political science professor Bruce Gilley wrote a quite reasonable historical paper in the academic journal Third World Quarterly that took a look at the colonialism of the western nations in 1800s and concluded that this colonialism had not been all bad, and in fact had brought “significant social, economic and political gains” to the nations colonized.

For this sin of honest academic analysis (certainly open to debate), the academic community put together a coordinated international campaign to get his paper withdrawn and his reputation ruined. He received death threats, and later in response to these threats and this campaign — including the resignation of fifteen of its board members — the journal withdrew Gilley’s paper. It didn’t do so because of any academic flaws in the work, only because it dared state conclusions that today’s leftist, Marxist, and very bigoted academic community cannot tolerate.

Soon thereafter Gilley found himself blacklisted and censored at his university, Portland State University in Oregon. The communication manager for its Division of Equity and Inclusion, Tova Stabin, blocked him from a college X discussion group because Gilley had had the nerve in one email to quote Thomas Jefferson, noting that “all men are created equal.”
» Read more

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Astronomers claim radio data detects much of the universe’s “missing mass”

10:55 am

The uncertainty of science: Using radio data from 60 fast radio bursts scattered across the sky, astronomers think they have detected the signature of much of the universe’s “missing mass” that has until now been ascribed to some unknown material dubbed dark matter but in fact is mostly ordinary matter that was previously unobserved.

The results show that about 76% of baryonic matter is in the intergalactic medium, 15% is in the halos around galaxies and the rest is inside stars or cold galactic gas.

From the paper’s abstract:

Approximately half of the Universe’s dark matter resides in collapsed halos; significantly less than half of the baryonic matter (protons and neutrons) remains confined to halos. A small fraction of baryons are in stars and the interstellar medium within galaxies. The majority are diffuse (<10−3 cm−3) and ionized (neutral fraction <10−4), located in the intergalactic medium (IGM) and in the halos of galaxy clusters, groups and galaxies.

In other words, the dark matter is simply ordinary matter made up of ionized “diffuse ionized gas” that ” is notoriously difficult to measure.”

One major uncertainty of this result is its dependence on fast radio bursts. The scientists claim the sixty bursts they used came from distances ranging from 12 million to 9 billion light years, but it is unclear how they determined those distances. We do not currently know the source of fast radio bursts, which means we also do not really know exactly where they occur or how distant they are from us. This research however relies on that uncertain knowledge, because it measures the changes to each burst’s radio emissions as it travels through intergalactic space.

Nonetheless, if confirmed this result shouldn’t surprise us. The universe is gigantic and mostly hard to observe. For there to be a gigantic amount of undetected ordinary matter scattered between the galaxies is perfectly reasonable. Inventing something extraordinary — dark matter — is actually a far more unreasonable scientific strategy.

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Another company enters the military’s hypersonic test market

9:57 am

UP Aerospace today announced the successful launch of its suborbital small Spyder rocket, designed expressly for hypersonic flight testing.

The maiden flight took place at 7:00 AM MST at Launch Complex 36 [at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico], marking a new era in hypersonic mission capabilities. The mission reached the threshold of hypersonic speeds similar to the UP Aerospace SpaceLoft rocket missions that have been operational for 20 years.

In the U.S. the military now can do hypersonic flight tests using this small rocket, Stratolaunch’s giant Roc plane and Talon-A flight vehicle, Rocket Lab’s Haste reconfiguration of its Electron rocket, and Varda’s orbital capsules on their return from space. In addition there is at least one other startup, Radian, that hopes to build a space plane for hypersonic testing as well.

I also expect this testing to result in some new technologies for both commercial aircraft as well as rockets.

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Europe’s old aerospace industry struggles with the concept of competition

9:46 am

Made in European Union

Two stories today from Europe’s aerospace industry suggest that its older big space companies are having real difficulties dealing with the new space landscape of competition and freedom.

First, Arianespace and Avio issued a statement demanding that Europe require that all European launches occur on European rockets.

The statement warned that without “sustained support,” European rocket builders were at risk of losing out to institutionally backed competitors from the US. “Major space powers support their industries through stable and guaranteed institutional markets, enabling long-term investments, innovation, and the preservation of leadership,” explained the statement.

…The pair argue that Europe risks falling behind not due to a lack of technical capability, but because of structural market weaknesses. While Ariane 6 and Vega-C have demonstrated competitiveness and reliability, they caution that this progress is fragile in the absence of guaranteed long-term demand.

While a preference for European launch providers is clearly in the best interest of both Avio and Arianespace, the pair did reserve a slice for new entrants to the market. “Enshrining European preference as an untouchable principle would support not only Ariane and Vega, but also foster the development of emerging projects in the small launcher sector.” [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence reveals the true reasons behind this call against competition. » Read more

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NASA/Axiom announce another four-day launch delay for Axiom’s fourth manned mission

8:55 am

NASA and Axiom today announced that they have rescheduled the launch of Axiom’s fourth manned mission to ISS, dubbed Ax-4, to June 22, 2025 in order to give Russian and American engineers more time to assess the leak repairs in the station’s Russian Zvezda module.

The press announcement provided little information, simply stating that:

The change in a targeted launch date provides NASA time to continue evaluating space station operations after recent repair work in the aft (back) most segment of the International Space Station’s Zvezda service module.

It would be nice if the agency would release some actual data. Earlier reports had suggested that the repairs had completely sealed the leaks and that the station was no longer losing air. The vagueness of today’s report suggests that the repairs might not have been as successful as hoped. It could also be engineers simply want more data for a longer period to prove the repairs have worked.

The lack of detailed information causes unnecessary speculation.

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June 17, 2025 Quick space links

2:51 pm

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.

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Mars will be mystery until we can walk its surface

1:43 pm

A Martian mystery
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

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Honda’s grasshopper rocket successfully completes vertical take-off and landing

10:48 am

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

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Under Trump FCC shifts from regulating satellite construction and de-orbit to streamlining red tape

9:15 am

FCC seal

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.

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Rocket Lab gets a quick launch contract from unnamed customer

8:50 am

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.

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SpaceX launches 26 more Starlink satellites

8:44 am

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.

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June 16, 2025 Quick space links

3:36 pm

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.

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Spinlaunch signs deal to build its spin launch facility on island in Alaska

12:30 pm

Spinlaunch prototype launcher

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

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ULA scrubs 2nd Kuiper constellation launch due to technical issue

10:24 am

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.

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Cruz’s pork/budget bill also adds new taxes to rocket launches

10:08 am

Ted Cruz, a typical
Ted Cruz, a typical “tax-and-spend” Republican

It appears the Senate appropriations bill that was put forth last week by senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), head of the Senate’s commerce committee, was not simply filled with pork, it also establishes a new tax structure for rocket launches, with the money supposedly allocated to pay for the increased red tape required by the FAA.

Cruz’s section of the Senate reconciliation bill calls for the FAA to charge commercial space companies per pound of payload mass, beginning with 25 cents per pound in 2026 and increasing to $1.50 per pound in 2033. Subsequent fee rates would change based on inflation. The overall fee per launch or entry would be capped at $30,000 in 2026, increasing to $200,000 in 2033, and then adjusted to keep pace with inflation.

You can read the bill here [pdf].

In a statement by Cruz during a senate hearing last week, he justified these new taxes as follows:
» Read more

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China launches science satellite to study Earth’s electromagnetic fields

9:34 am

China today successfully launched a science satellite built in partnership with Italy and designed to study the interaction of the Earth’s atmosphere with its electromagnetic fields, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China. As for the satellite:

With a designed lifespan of six years, the satellite is equipped with nine payloads, including an electric field detector co-developed by China and Italy, as well as a high-energy particle detector developed by Italy. It will carry out quasi-real-time monitoring of global electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic waves, the ionosphere and the neutral atmosphere, detecting electromagnetic anomalies caused by geological and human activities, as well as monitoring thunderstorm and lightning activity, according to CNSA.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

74 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 74 to 55.

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Axiom manned flight to ISS rescheduled; NASA attempts to clarify ISS leak situation

9:26 am

In a NASA update today, it announced a new launch date of June 19, 2025 for Axiom’s fourth manned flight to ISS while also attempting to clarify ISS leak situation that caused this last and more extended delay.

On June 12, NASA and Axiom Space delayed the mission as the agency continued to work with Roscosmos to understand the most recent repair efforts to seal small leaks. The leaks, located in the aft (back) most segment of the International Space Station’s Zvezda service module, have been monitored by flight controllers for the past few years.

Following the most-recent repair, pressure in the transfer tunnel has been stable. Previously, pressure in this area would have dropped. This could indicate the small leaks have been sealed. Teams are also considering the stable pressure could be the result of a small amount of air flowing into the transfer tunnel across the hatch seal from the main part of space station. By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal between the space station and the back of Zvezda.

It appears, though NASA doesn’t say so directly, that the Russians did not wish to change the situation at ISS with another docking — even if it was a docking on the American half of the station — while it was evaluating these leak repairs. It now appears they have gotten enough data to allow NASA to set a new launch date later this week.

If the repairs have managed to stop the leaks this is excellent news. At the same time, it doesn’t reduce the risks of a catastrophic failure of Zvezda, since the existence of these numerous stress fractures in its hull suggest a chronic long term failure that can only worsen with time.

The sudden delay of Axiom’s AX-4 last week also indicates poor coordination between NASA and Roscosmos. It was as if NASA had no idea the repair work was occurring, either because it wasn’t paying attention to what the Russians were doing or because the Russians had kept this work secret until it was completed. In either case, this is not how such a partnership should operate.

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