SpaceX launches another 29 Starlink satellites
SpaceX last night successfully placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 9th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
166 SpaceX (a new record)
83 China
16 Rocket Lab
15 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 166 to 136.
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 or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
SpaceX last night successfully placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 9th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
166 SpaceX (a new record)
83 China
16 Rocket Lab
15 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 166 to 136.
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 or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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
Looks like SpaceX will just miss the 180 mark. Absolutely amazing that we are at this point. Imagine when we reach 500 launches in a year. That will be something.
I think 300 is just as impressive considering the start point from decades back. I look to the future without forgetting that I’m living in the now. And now is pretty good.
john hare,
Now is pretty good. But Joe is correct that things will be getting considerably better in fairly short order. 500 launches worldwide could happen as soon as next year – 2027 for sure.
All: Yup, I am already rethinking how I will post launch updates, possibly doing an evening summary of the day’s launches each night, rather than a report for each launch. I fully expect that by 2027 this will work quite well.
I would think the range of payload size has increased.
I am always looking for less visible changes to space lift that a wider selection of rockets allow–not just tons to orbit.
I think there was a bias against rocketry…the gap between Titan IV and the next best option.
Rockets were seen as a necessary evil. Long before NewSpace critics of NASA, any proposed money to improve rocketry was widely opposed–with wide acceptance of just making do with existing rockets.
It took until the 1990s for EELVs (rockets NOT bodged from ICBM corpses) to match the all liquid vehicles the Soviets had all along.
My point is that it shouldn’t have taken an outsider like Elon to fix this–though Electron I actually see as more a safety valve.
My thesis is this…the payload centric approach of economy, saving weight–not looking at rocket development as its own good –that’s is what actually held back the plethora of spacecraft we see now.
Jeff Wright,
You are certainly right about some of that.
I think a major influence on the long-time flatlining of new rocket development – besides NASA’s strenuous efforts to kill new private-sector launch start-ups until Columbia – was the old-school aviation mindset of the legacy aerospace contractors. They didn’t do engines – except North American and then only at arm’s length.
Even in the piston-and-propeller days, there were only two US makers of large aviation engines, Curtiss-Wright and Pratt & Whitney. As jets displaced pistons and props, Curtiss-Wright failed to make the cut and was replaced by GE. When rockets showed up, it was the formerly pipsqueak sideshows Rocketdyne and Aerojet that stepped up and grew. But both lost the knack for developing new large engines and eventually merged and are now a subsidiary again as both were when starting out.
NewSpace – especially SpaceX – ignored the conventional legacy aerospace “wisdom” – brainlessly inherited from airplane-only days – that airframes and engines shouldn’t be done by the same company. And here we are. Vertical integration of structures and engines is now the rule rather than the exception in the rocket patch.
Jeff Wright,
You wrote: “My point is that it shouldn’t have taken an outsider like Elon to fix this–though Electron I actually see as more a safety valve.”
You bet it shouldn’t. The Space Shuttle should have done it. MSFC should have done it long ago and had the opportunity in the mid-1990s with DC-X and X-33. Too bad they dropped those balls. They had the opportunity again with Ares and SLS, but those were two more dropped balls.
“My thesis is this…the payload centric approach of economy, saving weight–not looking at rocket development as its own good –that’s is what actually held back the plethora of spacecraft we see now.”
If by that you mean that the engineers were optimizing for fuel efficiency performance rather than for cost per pound performance, I agree with you. It wasn’t until someone became concerned about the price to access space that something was done about it. It looks like MSFC’s priorities were all wrong for the past several decades. I don’t know why, because the basic idea behind the Space Shuttle was to reduce the cost to get into orbit and to be able to do so regularly. When that failed, for some reason NASA and Marshall seemed to have given up on the idea, even in the mid 1990s, when the satellite industry was begging for a less expensive way to get into orbit.
The satellite operators promised that if the price dropped to $2,000 per pound (1990s dollars) then there would be a greater demand for launches. As we have seen, they were right, because today’s demand is very high, now that SpaceX has fulfilled their request.
Why Marshall didn’t listen to them and give them what they wanted, I don’t know, but maybe you, Jeff, can enlighten me.
Dick Eagleson noted:
“NewSpace – especially SpaceX – ignored the conventional legacy aerospace “wisdom” – brainlessly inherited from airplane-only days – that airframes and engines shouldn’t be done by the same company. And here we are. Vertical integration of structures and engines is now the rule rather than the exception in the rocket patch.”
Wright brothers: engine, airframe; same manufacturer.
And, as you noted, falls off quickly from there. I don’t find private space’ vertical integration of airframe and engine all that remarkable; the auto industry has been doing it for some time. I am looking forward to the time when a freight company can go to Rockets ᴙ Us and order a suitable booster off-the-shelf.