Russia launches classified weather satellite
Russia today successfully placed a long delayed first satellite in a new series of weather radar satellites, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from the Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia.
The satellite, Obzor-R1, was originally proposed in 2015 for launch in 2019. It was placed in a polar orbit, so the rocket’s lower stages all landed in the oceans north of Russia.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
168 SpaceX
86 China
18 Rocket Lab
16 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 168 to 145.
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
Russia today successfully placed a long delayed first satellite in a new series of weather radar satellites, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from the Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia.
The satellite, Obzor-R1, was originally proposed in 2015 for launch in 2019. It was placed in a polar orbit, so the rocket’s lower stages all landed in the oceans north of Russia.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
168 SpaceX
86 China
18 Rocket Lab
16 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 168 to 145.
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


The plethora of Russian launches notionally to take place before year-end that were on the nextspacelight.com manifest only a week or so ago have melted away to just the mission launched today and one more from Vostochny slated to go up on Sunday. That would give Russia 17 for the year and eliminate them from the podium for 2025 with Rocket lab clinching the bronze.
The PRC was scheduled to have launched something a bit over an hour ago and have three more missions with dates attached on nextspaceflight.com that could fly before the end of the year. If all of those go on schedule, and are successful, that would give the PRC 90 for the year – a significant bump up from their high-60s numbers of the past three years. There are also three PRC launches of various “commercial” rockets still showing as notionally going during the remaining days of 2025, but with no dates attached so I doubt any of them will actually fly this year.
SpaceX’s only remaining mission for the year is the launch of a pair of small synthetic aperture radar sats for the Italian military scheduled for Saturday from Vandy. This will be an RTLS mission with the booster coming back to LZ-4 so OCISLY gets some more time off for a bit of maintenance and maybe a barnacle scrape before returning to heal-and-toe missions in 2026.