Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, plus one from reader Nate P. 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.

• Starlink is now New Zealand’s largest rural internet provider, with a 27% share
  This is an increase from 19% to 27% in one year.

• Mel Brooks was born four years before Pluto was discovered in 1930
  Now 100 years old, he has also outlived the entire time Pluto was defined as a planet (by some).

• Startup Inversion touts the precision landing capability demonstrated during drop tests of their engineering test vehicle
  The tests are for Arc, the company’s proposed point-to-point orbital cargo delivery capsule.

• Startup Outpost touts the payload capacity of its proposed point-to-point orbital cargo delivery capsule
  The company claims its CarryAll capsule will be able to return as much as 10,000 kilograms.

• Chinese pseudo-company LandSpace completes static fire test of first stage of its ZhuQue-3 reusable rocket
  No word on launch date, which will be its second attempt to recover the first stage. In December 2025 The first launch reached orbit, but the first stage crashed.

• France’s capsule startup The Exploration Company is now recruiting in Texas for its Nyx capsule team
  It appears the company is considering developing a U.S.-based operation, possibly to grab some NASA business. Up until now it has focused on getting work in Europe.

• Firefly touts its plan to use AI on its Elytra lunar orbiter to process data and images from its Blue Ghost Mission 2 lander
  It says this will speed up the data download and analysis. It also means AI will be deciding what is important in the images, before any human sees it.

• On June 30 1971 Soviet cosmonauts Georgiy Timofeyevich Dobrovolsky, Viktor Ivanovich Patsayev and Vladislav Nikolayevich Volkov died during their return from the first space station, Salyut 1
  The Soyuz-11 crew spent 24 days on the station, a record at that time, but died when a small valve opened by mistake when the service module detached from the descent capsule. See chapter 2 (“I wanted him to come home”) in Leaving Earth. I interviewed the daughter of Dobrovolsky to get some real background.