SpaceX launches another 53 Starlink satellites
Capitalism in space: Earlier this morning SpaceX successfully launched 53 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket.
The first stage was flying its thirteenth flight, and supposedly landed successfully, though the stage’s video cut off just before landing, the drone ship video did not show it on the pad, and the confirmation of that landing was very late. It is possible it landed on a spot that the camera did not show, or that the landing occurred in the ocean and the stage was lost. We shall have to wait and see.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
28 SpaceX
21 China
8 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
4 ULA
The U.S. now leads China 40 to 21 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 40 to 35.
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 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
Capitalism in space: Earlier this morning SpaceX successfully launched 53 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket.
The first stage was flying its thirteenth flight, and supposedly landed successfully, though the stage’s video cut off just before landing, the drone ship video did not show it on the pad, and the confirmation of that landing was very late. It is possible it landed on a spot that the camera did not show, or that the landing occurred in the ocean and the stage was lost. We shall have to wait and see.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
28 SpaceX
21 China
8 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
4 ULA
The U.S. now leads China 40 to 21 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 40 to 35.
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 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
From the camera view aboard stage 1, it looked to me like they were going to miss the bullseye, and possibly miss the droneship entirely. But the SpaceX Twatter feed says, “Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship”, so maybe everything went okay after all.
Starlink now stands at 2,706 satellites in five orbital shells. That’s literally over half of all active sattellites in earth orbit, which is staggering to think about.
The TV advertisements for “HughesNet” satellite ISP claims they have the largest number of subscribers of any “satellite” service. I wonder if that’s still true?
The spat between Dish Network and Starlink over 5G frequency interference is mildly interesting. 5G seems to have interference with a LOT of other “near by” uses of the spectrum.
I hope soon there will be other customers for SpaceX beside the cousin-company, Starlink. What sorts of things can be done for/by individuals who can put a shoe-box sized payload into orbit? It’s, I hope, similar to the dawn of the personal computing age. Oh my, print your own greeting cards! Make a budget on the “spreadsheet”! Track your gas mileage!
E-mail!!!
I wonder what the killer app for small sat projects will be?