SpaceX launches NASA ocean radar satellite
SpaceX tonight successfully launched Sentinal-6B, a NASA radar satellite designed to measure the global sea level, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The first stage completed its 3rd flight, landing back at Vandenberg.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
150 SpaceX (a new record)
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 150 to 117.
Note that until SpaceX began to up its launch rate significantly in 2022, the entire global rocket industry — run entirely by governments — never completed more than 135 successful launches in a single year, and usually failed to make 100 launches. SpaceX is now proving that those global numbers over more than a half century were indicative of the failure of those governments. Those governments controlled everything, and so they prevented innovation, competition, and new ideas.
The transition to capitalism and freedom since 2010 has finally begun to open up space for everyone.
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 tonight successfully launched Sentinal-6B, a NASA radar satellite designed to measure the global sea level, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The first stage completed its 3rd flight, landing back at Vandenberg.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
150 SpaceX (a new record)
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 150 to 117.
Note that until SpaceX began to up its launch rate significantly in 2022, the entire global rocket industry — run entirely by governments — never completed more than 135 successful launches in a single year, and usually failed to make 100 launches. SpaceX is now proving that those global numbers over more than a half century were indicative of the failure of those governments. Those governments controlled everything, and so they prevented innovation, competition, and new ideas.
The transition to capitalism and freedom since 2010 has finally begun to open up space for everyone.
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
And if another administration cuts funding to this satellite—then what was the point. With Goldstone not in much better shape than Arecibo—we see the intellectual dishonesty of your NewSpace golden calf worship.
We are told to not worry about megaconstellations because telescopes, radar-sats, need to be put into space—so who cares about the ground game?
But I don’t see anything like of space telescopes keeping up with mega-constellations.
We are once again seeing another fiscal-hawk caused disaster like the Flint water crisis.
And before you trot out the “kill-SLS-and-that-would free-up-funds” myth…it is likely due to NASA Centers being in Red States that the fiscal hawk hammer hasn’t been more severe.
This is why I want NASA Centers in every state.
It keeps Greens from being as nutty and GOPpers from being as stingy. They might not spend everything you agree with, but this radar sat may never have been funded without government. If there is a center in a blue state, the congressman might not listen to Greens who want nothing else ever launched.
Shoot at the mean dog—you better hit it.
Best to throw the neighborhood gangsta dog a few scraps, so if Greta wants to take your Estes Falcon away—the dog will clamp on her neck and not yours.
Them’s the breaks.
”Note that until SpaceX began to up its launch rate significantly in 2022, the entire global rocket industry — run entirely by governments…”
Say what? Private companies have been launching rockets into space since 1989. They’ll be coming up on 37 years now in a few months.
Benign Neglect is a religion
On rare earths
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/the-engineering-cs-aerospace-human-resources-problem.50213/page-2#post-851737
This is true, unfortunately. Of course it is *possible* that a major government somewhere *could* have launched at such a high cadence, *if* the political will was there to pay for the payloads that needed so much launching, and the launches themselves. And being a government operation, of course, such an effort would have been….stupendously expensive. And likely not very innovative.
The empirical proof for this is arguably found in the Soviet space program — civilian and military — which managed to reach 100 launches in six years between 1976 and 1984, thanks mainly, as we all know, to the frequent need to replace their short-life milsats. And while Soviet expenditures are notoriously difficult to calculate even now, a CIA report to Congress from 1980 suggests just how stupendously expensive it was for them. Quote: “The estimate of 1 to 2 percent of Soviet GNP, if correct, implies a space budget of $7 to $14 billion in 1974, and $14 to $28 billion in 1980.” Those are nominal dollars. Converting to 2025 dollars, even that middle figure of $14B comes to $58 billion. Frankly, that seems hard for me to believe, and conversions of Soviet economic figures are always a very tricky exercise. But I think it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Soviets were spending a tremendous amount of money to achieve those launch levels (and the requisite payloads).
Today, SpaceX is spending about $10-15 million on an average Falcon 9 launch. Most of the dollar value of its launches are in the payloads. And their success rate is much better than the Soviets were achieving in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
Jeff,
I mean, that’s always been a risk, hasn’t it?
mkent: As I note correctly, until SpaceX, government’s controlled everything. The American rocket companies in the 80s and 90s were essentially government-focused, designed almost entirely to get government money. They made no serious effort to cut costs or grab market share, which is why by 2000 when Europe’s government Ariane-5 rocket began launching it grabbed 50% of the market share. At high prices.
Jeff Wright,
Flailing cluelessly in all directions as you so often do, I see.
This particular satellite is part of a long-standing joint NASA-NOAA-EUMETSAT-ESA project and the ESA seems to be paying for the routine operation of the payload – or much of it anyway. In any event, it was the ESA control center featured in the launch webcast, not a NASA or NOAA facility. So there would be political ramifications for any future administration that just decided to cancel the project and not much in the way of monetary savings to be had in return for that political expense.
The satellite is also an Earth science bird. The current administration would be more likely to cancel such a mission than any likely future administration and it didn’t do so. So where you get the idea this is a reasonable possibility going forward I certainly haven’t a clue.
Why you bring up Goldstone’s recent self-inflicted wound in an effort to indict NewSpace has origins at least as mysterious as your baseless panic about Sentinel-6B. Goldstone is run by NASA – or JPL anyway – with no NewSpace involvement at all. Some JPL staffer screwed up. Very possibly one of its numerous DEI hires of recent years who has not yet been sent packing. Or, even worse, someone who already knew they were on the RIF list and decided to hand JPL/NASA an unlovely parting gift.
NewSpace is, in any case, not the Golden Calf in the current space picture. That would be places like MSFC which, despite their expensive gold plating, ceased answering any prayers decades ago. NewSpace, in contrast, produces.
The idea of a NASA center in every state is never going to happen because if it was going to, it already would have – and it hasn’t. Except to die-hard Dems, government is no longer a growth sector. Aside from entirely gobbling an even larger than actual – or obtainable – NASA budget strictly for acquisition and upkeep of entirely superfluous facilities – thus allowing no funds for actual space stuff – your notion runs directly counter to the reality that NASA already has too many centers as it is and will have notably less to do, going forward, than it has now. Among the centers that richly deserve closure, MSFC – which hasn’t done anything useful in nearly a half-century – would be at the top of my personal hit list. NASA has forfeited any consequential future role in manned spaceflight vehicle development and operations through a combination of profligacy and incompetence.
NASA used to be pretty good at unmanned space stuff, but has even managed to lose the plot on that in recent years as well. That – and not the advent of mega-constellations – is why the number of space telescopes in the pipeline is dwindling.
Some truly ruthless pruning and reorganization is seriously overdue.
Your marksmanship is equally lacking anent the Flint water crisis. It wasn’t pinch-penny conservatives who made the relevant disastrous decisions, it was a Democrat city administration that had been in power for decades. As has been generally true of the nation’s cities everywhere in recent decades, Dem city bosses have sought to pare infrastructure maintenance and upgrade to the bone – or beyond – in order to fund ever more municipal government jobs for the Party faithful.
Note that this launch was also the 500th overall reflight of a flight-proven orbital class rocket. Just amazing.
Gwynne Shotwell: “Congratulations to the SpaceX team on completing 500 (!!!!) missions with flight-proven rocket boosters. You’ve made the impossible possible with reusable rockets, paving the way to land huge amounts of cargo and lots of people to establish permanent human presence on the Moon and beyond with Starship!”
https://x.com/Gwynne_Shotwell/status/1990306213104611642
(Elon retweeted this.)
If it was going to happen, it would have happened in the 1960’s.
”The American rocket companies in the 80s and 90s were essentially government-focused, designed almost entirely to get government money.”
No, they were not. The Atlas II was designed to launch commercial communications satellites. Lockheed formed International Launch Services (ILS) to market Atlas launches worldwide.
McDonnell Douglas (MacDAC) spent $1.5 billion on the Delta III. There were no government dollars in that program. It was entirely commercial, designed for the commercial satellite market. It was the first commercially developed non-small launch vehicle and had the world’s first commercially developed cryogenic stage (the Delta Cryogenic Second Stage (DCSS)).
That led to the Delta IV Medium, which was also commercially developed for the commercial launch market. MacDAC built the Common Booster Core (CBC), the RS-68 engine, the factory at Decatur, the launch facility at the Cape, heavily modified the launch facility at Vandenberg, and built the Delta Mariner barge to tote stages around all with company money to compete in the commercial launch market.
All of the Delta IV infrastructure was built to handle 50 launches a year, five to ten times the US government launch market. That’s why MacDAC bought 100 RL-10 engines in a giant block buy.
Then there’s Boeing, who with international partners developed Sea Launch, an entirely commercial endeavor. It did not even do government launches. It used a modified Zenit booster to launch from a converted oil rig in the Pacific Ocean. All of that infrastructure — the launch platform, the rocketship, the land-based facilities — was commercially developed, including the world’s first commercial range.
”They made no serious effort to cut costs or grab market share…”
All of the above was meant to cut costs and grab market share. MacDAC’s switch from Delta III to Delta IV Medium, Lockheed’s switch from the Atlas II to the Atlas III with Russian engines, and then its switch from Atlas III to Atlas V were all designed to cut costs and grab market share. There was no reason to do any of that for the government market.
”…which is why by 2000 when Europe’s government Ariane-5 rocket began launching it grabbed 50% of the market share.…”
First of all, the reason Ariane had such a “high” share of the commercial market is because Arianespace defines the commercial market as “those launches bid on by Arianespace.” By definition, if Arianespace didn’t bid on it, it wasn’t commercial. So Arianespace called a French military satellite launching on an Ariane a commercial launch but a batch of Iridium satellites launching on a Delta II a military launch.
Second, the government subsidies received by Arianespace were enormous. The European governments spent $3-4 billion on development of Ariane V. That’s about $6-8 billion in today’s money and 2-3 times what MacDAC spent on Delta. Then factor in that MacDAC had to pay commercial interest rates on what it spent while Arianespace didn’t have to pay back the money at all. Then add in a 9-figure operating subsidy on top of that *each year* (about a quarter billion dollars in today’s money).
The commercial launch market in the 1990s and 2000s just wasn’t big enough to compete against those subsidies, subsidies designed by the governments of Europe to drive the American commercial companies out of the market. It was meant as a post-Cold-War demonstration of the superiority of “third-way socialism.”
You would think that a freedom-loving capitalist space writer would know all of this and rail against the market-destroying subsidies while praising the space capitalists trying to make a go of it in the face of such government-driven adversity. But for some reason your love of SpaceX has blinded you to everything that came before. It’s a pity, and your writing suffers for it.
mkent: You need to read more of my earlier work. :) You would find out that I was as much disgusted with those “market-destroying subsidizes” as you are. I also realize that the effort by Lockheed Martin and Boeing in the 1990s was an attempt to win commercial business.
It failed, however, because neither company succeeded in reducing costs. When faced with subsidized Arianespace, they gave up and switched to a merger that devoted most of their effort to serving the military.
Note that SpaceX overcame those Arianespace subsidizes, so much so that it ended up destroying it. My complaint is the failure of these old space companies to compete, to fight. When SpaceX came along the American rocket industry was dying, as I noted in this UPI column from 2005, A Shrinking, Timid Industry
One of those new kids in 2005 was SpaceX. And in another one of my predictions years ahead of anyone else, I wrote, “If SpaceX succeeds, however, the company’s pricing, $5.9 million plus range costs for the Falcon I and $15.9 million for its larger Falcon V [which became the Falcon 9], will be a serious challenge both to Boeing and Lockheed’s joint venture as well as to the Russians.”
By the way, that $15.9 million price is remarkable close to what SpaceX today could likely charge for a Falcon 9 launch, if it had some competitive pressure from others.
SpaceX is a unicorn.
The fact is that investors don’t like upfront costs that aerospace has as compared with computer start UPS that need only code monkeys and cubicles
Jeff Wright,
“With Goldstone not in much better shape than Arecibo—we see the intellectual dishonesty of your NewSpace golden calf worship.”
Neither Goldstone nor Arecibo have anything to do with NewSpace and their demises only show the failure of government-space projects. There is no comparison with NewSpace. If you want to show intellectual dishonesty of NewSpace worship, you will have to do better.
“But I don’t see anything like of space telescopes keeping up with mega-constellations.”
Yet another failure of the very rich governments. Commercial space has much less money, yet it is able to do so much more with their limited funds. Governments, on the other hand, limit their funding for space projects, because space is not their priority, which is another reason why they deliver so little benefit to us earthlings. This is definitely a reason to worship NewSpace.
“And before you trot out the “kill-SLS-and-that-would free-up-funds” myth…it is likely due to NASA Centers being in Red States that the fiscal hawk hammer hasn’t been more severe.”
Goldstone is in deep-blue California, but that didn’t help keep it functional, and may have been why it went south. JPL and Ames are also in California.
“SpaceX is a unicorn.”
As is Rocket Lab, which is showing similar signs of success. A few other NewSpace companies are likewise showin gsigns of rapid development leading to reusable launch vehicles. In fact, I guess we could say that NewSpace is a unicorn, as it does things uniquely different than the OldSpace, heritage companies.
Huh. No wonder so many people worship NewSpace.
_______________
mkent,
“The Atlas II was designed to launch commercial communications satellites. Lockheed formed International Launch Services (ILS) to market Atlas launches worldwide.”
Your memory is faulty. The Atlas II was commissioned in the late 1980s by the Air Force to launch defense communication payloads, not commercial payloads, and ILS was founded in 1995 specifically to serve as a broker for payloads on Russian launch vehicles.
“That led to the Delta IV Medium, which was also commercially developed for the commercial launch market.”
Once again, Delta IV was developed for the Defense Department’s (now War Department) Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV), which is why it cost an arm and a leg to launch.
None of these did anything to undercut the Arianes, and they were just for government launches. Any commercial launches would be mere bonuses, but these companies already knew that they could not compete with the subsidies that Arianespace received. ApaceX was the first company that tried to compete with Arianespace, the Russians, and the Chinese, who by then were already off the list of approved launchers for U.S. companies.
Sea launch was in this century, which is outside of Robert’s scope of government focused launch companies and vehicles.
“By definition, if Arianespace didn’t bid on it, it wasn’t commercial.”
The way you define that word, “commercial,” I do not think it means what you think it means.
“Second, the government subsidies received by Arianespace were enormous.”
Your explanation here does more to explain why American launch vehicle makers stayed out of the commercial launch business. They couldn’t compete, and they knew it. They complained bitterly about those subsidies, but no one did anything to stop them or to make launch a competitive business.
“The commercial launch market in the 1990s and 2000s just wasn’t big enough to compete against those subsidies, subsidies designed by the governments of Europe to drive the American commercial companies out of the market.”
I keep reminding us all that in the mid 1990s the commercial satellite industry begged the launch providers to make launch vehicles that would drop the price to orbit from $10,000 per pound to $2,000 per pound (mid-1990s dollars), so that they could drastically increase the market. The response was SpaceX, a decade later. Kistler also tried to make a launch vehicle, but he went out of business before he could succeed — due to lack of demand for commercial launchers. Orbital Sciences tried to get into the commercial launch business, but they were bought out by OldSpace Northrup Grumman, which is not trying to do anything particularly new.
What you should have argued was Lockheed’s (later Lockheed Martin) Lockheed Launch Vehicle (later Athena), which was an attempt to launch small satellites. There were not a lot of commercial small satellites, at the time, but Athena had a chance of beating Orbital Sciences’s expensive Pegasus.
Jeff Wright,
You don’t seem to have any real grasp of what investors do or do not like.
There are software-only businesses that require merely a roomful of coders, but that isn’t where the really big money goes. That would be social media platforms which require gigantic data centers and AI which requires even bigger data centers. NewSpace companies build factories and so do “NewDef” companies that are very much aerospace companies building missiles and aircraft. Neither has found it particularly difficult to come by investment capital in recent years.