SpaceX launches Sirius radio geosynchronous satellite
SpaceX tonight successfully launched a SiriusXM radio geosynchronous satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida.
The first stage (B1085) completed its 17th flight (31 days after its previous mission), landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their 6th and 30th flights respectively.
This was SpaceX’s second launch today. The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
78 SpaceX
41 China
10 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
8 Russia
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 78 to 71.
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.
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"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
On a related note, Iridium to be acquired by Rocket Lab:
Oops! The URL went missing in my earlier post:
Iridium/Rocket Lab
“The two fairings completed their 6th and 30th flights respectively.” Don’t the fairings burn up on reentry?
SpaceX recovers all Falcon 9 fairings and resuses them. They have been doing so for about a decade.
Evidently not. :)
There are three reasons the fairing halves survive. The first is that they’re not moving at orbital velocity when they start their plunges back to Earth – only at about 1/3 of that.
The second is that they are quite “fluffy” – i.e., they have low mass for their surface areas. They naturally orient themselves like boats on water as they hit significant atmosphere, then slow down very quickly from air resistance to a fairly low terminal velocity before much heat builds up.
Third, they have parachutes that drop them, gently, into the water where recovery ships are waiting nearby. The chutes also allow a certain degree of maneuver while airborne to refine their landing spots.
Nifty! Iridium got its second-generation constellation up on Falcon 9s at market rates. I think it has figured out that future upgrades/additions to the constellation would best be done as part of a company that, like SpaceX, can launch its own stuff at cost.
This does make one wonder if Blue Origin will either someday acquire the LEO constellation from Amazon or at least make it some sort of joint venture entity – perhaps in combination with Blue’s own TeraWave – that can also acquire launch at cost. Long term, it’s going to be a heavy enough lift to compete with Starlink without the added burden of also having to pay retail for launches.