Comments on: Russia launches classified weather satellite https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/russia-launches-classified-weather-satellite/ Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:45:05 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Dick Eagleson https://behindtheblack.com/behind-the-black/russia-launches-classified-weather-satellite/#comment-1626763 Fri, 26 Dec 2025 00:45:05 +0000 https://behindtheblack.com/?p=120230#comment-1626763 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.

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