Category: Behind The Black

July 24, 2023 Quick space links

5:09 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

  • Details on recently awarded NASA unfunded agreements with seven companies

    • Jay notes, “Only two of the seven companies have anything physical: SpaceX and Northup-Grumman.” I must add however that Northrop Grumman’s proposal has to do with things it hasn’t built yet. SpaceX as usual has the most compelling idea: reconfiguring Starship as an orbital space station.

    Since NASA is providing no funds, I am not sure what the companies are getting from the agency in winning these contracts. Its engineers can provide some technical advice for sure, but in the end all they really can do is provide a second pair of eyes to review the work. Or to put it another way, someone whose only job will be to say “no.”

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The trench war continues in the Ukraine

12:51 pm

The continuing trench war in Ukraine
For the original maps, go here (April 16, 2023)
and here (July 23, 2023).

My last full update on the Ukraine War, on April 17, 2023, was written about the time that the Russian winter offensive had ended (with generally empty results) and a counter-offensive by the Ukrainians was expected to begin.

At that time I concluded as follows:

The Ukrainians have no hope of getting [sufficient] military aid from the rest of the world. Unless the Russians can bring [vastly larger] numbers to this battlefield, something that seems unlikely based on the present political situation in Russia, it now appears that this war is devolving into a World War I-style trench war. Neither side can make any significant gains militarily, and neither side is willing to negotiate a settlement.

Based on that assessment, I expected the Ukrainian spring/summer offensive to be as ineffective as the Russian winter campaign. This has proven true. The map above, adapted from maps created by the Institute for the Study of War, illustrates the general lack of change in either direction along the entire northern frontline. Though the Ukraine has made some minor gains north and south of Bakmut (as noted in ISW’s July 23, 2023 update), it has not succeeded in recapturing the city. Meanwhile, the Russians have made some minor gains to the north, west of the cities Svatova and Kreminna.

Similarly, though the Ukraine has made some small gains along the southern frontline (compare this April 16th map with this July 23rd map), none of those gains have been of any great significance. The Ukraine’s long pause in offensive operations, from November 2022 until April 2023, allowed the Russians to build a deep and extensive defensive set-up, including many minefields that have slowed Ukrainian advances to barely a crawl.

In addition, it appears that the flooding from the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in the south has almost entirely benefited the Russians, blocking what appears to have been a major Ukrainian plan to invade across the Dneiper River. Since the dam break, the Ukraine has been pushing at the one major bridge still standing, but with no real success. Since the Ukrainians do not appear to have the ability to make an amphibious assault, the Russians need only defend this one bridge, and have so far been able to.

In its June 14, 2023 update, ISW noted the following about the Russian defensive setup:
» Read more

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No, that is not a sunspot on Mars!

11:33 am

No, that is not a sunspot on Mars!
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on April 20, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). While at first glance this Martian terrain vaguely resembles the granular surface of the Sun, with the largest depression having its own faint resemblance to a sunspot, the resemblance exists only in our feverish imagination.

The depression might have been formed by an impact, though it is also possible it is a caldera, not of lava but of ice processes. The granular surface is likely resulting from the sublimation of ice, creating random holes and ridges as underground material changes from ice to gas and escapes at weak points on the surface.

My guess that we are looking at ice processes is based on the location, not far from where the first manned spacecraft will likely land.
» Read more

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Spirals within spirals

8:58 am

Spirals within spirals
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of two different research projects that are studying galaxies where supernovae previously occurred. This particular galaxy is estimated to be about 192 million light years away, and is a classic example of a barred spiral.

Despite appearing as an island of tranquillity in this image, UGC 12295 played host to a catastrophically violent explosion — a supernova — that was first detected in 2015. This supernova prompted two different teams of astronomers to propose Hubble observations of UGC 12295 that would sift through the wreckage of this vast stellar explosion.

Supernovae are the explosive deaths of massive stars, and are responsible for forging many of the elements found here on Earth. The first team of astronomers used Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to examine the detritus left behind by the supernova in order to better understand the evolution of matter in our Universe.

The second team of astronomers also used WFC3 to explore the aftermath of UGC 12295’s supernova, but their investigation focused on returning to the sites of some of the best-studied nearby supernovae. Hubble’s keen vision can reveal lingering traces of these energetic events, shedding light on the nature of the systems that host supernovae.

What struck me about this picture however were the many smaller spiral galaxies scattered nearby and behind UGC 12295, with one face-on spiral highlighted near the top. I can count at least three or four other background spiral galaxies, all reddish in color likely because their light has been shifted to the red due to their distance.

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SpaceX launches another 22 Starlink satellites

6:01 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched another 22 second generation Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their seventh and eighth flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

49 SpaceX
29 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 56 to 29, and the entire world combined 56 to 48, with SpaceX by itself leading with the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 49 to 48.

SpaceX’s 49 successful launches so far this year carries some additional historical significance. This number exceeds the launch count of the entire United States per year from 1968 to 2021, and SpaceX has done it in only a little more than half the year. Its reported goal of completing 100 launches this year remains very much within reach.

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China’s Long March 2D rocket places four satellites into orbit

9:52 am

China’s Long March 2D rocket today put four satellites into orbit, three to provide “remote sensing observation data and provide commercial remote sensing services,” and one “satellite communications technology verification.”

That’s everything China’s state run press tells us. The launch was also from China’s Taiyuan interior spaceport, which means the rocket’s lower stages crashed somewhere in China. No word on whether they attempted to control the landing, or if it crashed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

48 SpaceX (with a launch planned later today. Live stream here.)
29 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 55 to 29, and the entire world combined 55 to 48, with SpaceX by itself tied with the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 48.

The SpaceX launch later today was originally scheduled for yesterday, but got scrubbed due to weather.

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Weekend repost: The Democratic Party of thugs and goons

12:26 pm

The effort by Democrats to censor Democrat Robert Kennedy from speaking at a House hearing on July 20, 2023 focused expressly on documenting censorship and blacklisting not only illustrated the ugly totalitarian nature of the Democratic Party, it also illustrated their utter lack of self-awareness as well as their inability to think, in any way at all.

The moment he started talking, the Democrats went into censorship mode by making motions to censor Kennedy, points of order, accusations, and finally a vote to table Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s (D-Fla.) motion to cancel Kennedy’s “testimony and degradation” and put it behind closed doors so the poor American people would not be subjected to words spoken by Joe Biden’s primary opponent.

Their actions at that hearing are not exceptions to the rule, however, they are the rule. In order to make this fact clear, I think it worthwhile reposting an August 2022 essay, which documented their long term goonish storm-trooper behavior. It didn’t just start at that hearing, it has been going on for a long time.

————————-
The Democratic Party of thugs and goons

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Will the Trump raid finally wake Americans up?

While the outrage and fury has only begun to rise over the unjustified raid of the home of former President Donald Trump yesterday by the FBI, ordered by Biden Justice Department with a warrant issued by an Obama-supporting judge with ties to Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex operation, nothing about that raid was anything new or startling. For the past seven years, since Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, the Democratic Party and its supporters have increasingly acted like Nazi storm-troopers, willing, able, and eager to crush their opponents at every opportunity, and to do so cruelly and with great viciousness.

I therefore ask, shouldn’t we have exhibited the same amount of rage and fury for the hundreds and hundreds of ordinary Americans these same thugs have harassed and ruined since 2016? Why did it take a raid on Trump to finally bring that rage to the forefront?

Two Americans committed suicide because of Biden administration persecution after they dared protest the questionable election of Joe Biden on January 6th. What about them?

Scores of conservative FBI agents in the past two years have been fired from their jobs, simply because they did not agree politically with the Democrats. What about them?

What about the arrest by the FBI of a Republican candidate for Michigan governor, simply because he had also protested on January 6th the questionable election of thug Joe Biden? Or the threats of violence and murder against Supreme Court justices by leftist Democratic Party allies?

What about the effort by Biden’s labor board to shut down the conservative outlet The Federalist, simply because its founder sent out an anti-union joke?

What about the former Trump lawyer whose career was destroyed, simply because he was a former lawyer of Trump?

These stories are only a small sampling of the political abuses of power exercised by Democrats and the Biden administration time after time against their political opponents in just the last eighteen months. The list is long and painful to read.
» Read more

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Indian company Skyroot conducts rocket engine test

11:24 am

Capitalism in space: The Indian rocket startup Skyroot successfully conducted a ten-second static fire test of a new engine, using a test facility of India’s space agency ISRO.

The Modi government has established a policy that ISRO must provide its facilities for private companies to develop their rockets, and this test was another demonstration that this policy is taking hold. It also indicates that Skyroot is getting closer to launching its first orbital rocket, Vikram-1.

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China launches two smallsats

11:17 am

A Chinese pseudo-company dubbed Galactic Energy today placed two smallsats into orbit, using its solid-fueled Ceres-1 rocket that lifted off from China’s Jiuquan interior spaceport.

This pseudo-company might have gotten investment capital and operate like a private company, but its technology — solid rockets — is utterly derived from missiles, and thus it has done nothing without full control by China’s government. Like all of China’s pseudo-companies, it owns nothing that it sells.

Meanwhile, the rocket’s lower stages crashed somewhere in the interior of China. No word if they landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

48 SpaceX (with a launch planned later today. Live stream here.)
28 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 55 to 28, and the entire world combined 55 to 47, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 47.

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July 21, 2023 Quick space links

3:37 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who is more awake than I on this Friday afternoon.

 

 

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The corporate fad to impose racial quotas appears to be fading fast

11:42 am

Coca-Cola's bigoted company policy
Examples of the bigoted educational material
being pushed by Coca-Cola

Here’s some good news to brighten your weekend: The corporate fad that became a steamroller after the death of George Floyd in 2020 to impose discriminatory racial quotas in hiring — all favoring minorities — now appears to be fading very quickly.

New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer.

…The number of [Chief Diversity Officer] searches is down 75% in the past year, says Jason Hanold, chief executive of Hanold Associates Executive Search, which works with Fortune 100 companies to recruit HR and DEI executives, among other roles.

The DEI movement not only demanded that companies hire more minorities, solely because of their race, it also tried to impose the anti-white hatred of critical race theory on all employees, as shown by the powerpoint presentations above that Coca-Cola foisted on its employees back in 2021. Since then the bad press as well as the crushing loss of customers who were offended deeply by these policies (think Bud Light, Gillette, and Target) has apparently hit home with corporate management.

The fight is not over however. Be warned that the leftists running this movement still have gigantic financial and political resources. One need only look to events in Congress yesterday, where Democrats at a hearing focused on the evils of censorship attempted to censor Robert Kennedy — who also happens to be a Democrat running against Joe Biden for president.

These thugs are still in power, and are getting increasingly brazen in how they abuse that power. If Americans let up their guard at this moment these thugs will move in fast to reimpose and even increase their power.

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Strings of Martian cones

10:10 am

Strings of Martian cones

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 25, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists describe these cones as “longitudinally aligned cones,” but this is puzzling since the alignment runs from the northwest to the south east, not north-south along the longitude.

No matter. The alignment is in itself the mystery, especially because the full image shows many more strings of cones in this area, all running from the northwest to the southeast. The strings also are all curved in the same way, sagging to the southwest as if expressing a wave flowing in that direction.

What could create these strings of cones? The overview map below gives us a hint.
» Read more

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Chandrayaan-3 completes fourth engine burn in Earth orbit

9:04 am

Chandrayaan-3's mission profile

According to India’s space agency ISRO, engineers have successfully completed the fourth of about six engine burns designed to raise Chandrayaan-3’s Earth orbit in preparation for sending it on its path to the Moon.

As shown in the graphic to the right, these adjustments are relatively small, but each increases the speed of the spacecraft at its orbit’s closest point to the Earth. That extra velocity thus reduces the amount of fuel needed for that trans-lunar-injection burn.

If all the maneuvers continue to go as planned, the landing attempt will occur around August 23, 2023.

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South Korean researchers turn simulated lunar soil into building blocks

8:51 am

Using simulated lunar soil, South Korean researchers have developed the engineering that turns that soil into building blocks shaped as needed.

The researchers first produce simulated moon soil by grinding black volcanic rock from Cheorwon County bordering the North. They then use a microwave to turn the sand-like simulant into solidified blocks. Lee said the team has developed a technique to make blocks by heating the soil in a mold to more than 1,000 degrees Celsius in two to three hours and cooling them. In space, the process could be powered by nuclear energy.

The article at the link also provides a nice summary of the status of South Korea’s entire space effort.

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Viking cemetery found at new Saxavord spaceport in Scotland

8:43 am

Archeologists have discovered a Viking “ritual cremation cemetery” about 4,000 years old near the launch site at the new Saxavord spaceport in Scotland.

The burnt bones were found inside an arc of large granite boulders set into pits in the ground. A small platform of white quartz pebbles was also discovered which may have once been linked to a burial. Quartz is often associated with burial tombs in the prehistoric, and covered the entire outside wall of Newgrange in Ireland.

Test launches at Saxavord are expected to begin in the fall, with the first orbital launch next year. This schedule of course assumes launch licenses can be obtained from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority.

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July 20, 2023 Quick space links

3:34 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, helps make sure nothing gets missed.

 

 

 

 

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Real pushback: Stanford Law forces out administrator who aided and abetted a mob

12:31 pm

Tirien Steinbach: in favor of censorship and mob rule
Stanford’s former administrator Tirien Steinbach:
gone because she was in favor of censorship and
mob rule

Bring a gun to a knife fight: It appears that common sense and civilized behavior at Stanford Law School is finally being considered as the only proper behavior for the future and present lawyers that school is supposed to be training.

This story begins on March 9, 2023, when a mob of students and faculty at Stanford, led by Tirien Steinbach, the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion dean, shouted down U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan when he tried to give a lecture about the law for the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society.

At the time the school’s response was weak and inconsistent. Though it sent a letter of apology to Duncan, it also equivocated about punishing anyone who had misbehaved. No students were expelled or suspended, and Steinbach was simply put on leave, even as university officials attempted to portray her as the victim. As I wrote then:

[Law School Dean] Martinez still appeared sympathetic to Steinbach, expressing “..concern over the hateful and threatening messages [Steinbach] has received as a result of viral online and media attention.”

Now, four months later Martinez has finally announced that Steinbach is resigning her post, though even now Martinez appeared regretful that this resignation was necessary.
» Read more

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Unknown Mars

11:36 am

MRO context camera mosaic
Click for interactive global mosaic.

Cool image time! The picture to the right was created from a global mosaic of all the context camera images taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) since it entered Mars orbit in 2006. It shows an unnamed 17-mile-wide-depression located only about seven miles south of the southern rim of Valles Marineris.

I highlight this particular depression because, despite seventeen years in orbit, MRO’s high resolution camera has at this time still not taken any pictures inside or around it. This is a place on Mars that remains unstudied in detail, in any way, even though its depth is comparable to the Grand Canyon and its features strongly suggest its is a collapse feature, created when the roof over an underground void gave way. If so, it suggests an origin for Valles Marineris that conflicts with present theories.
» Read more

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China’s Kuaizhou-1A rocket launches four satellites

10:57 am

China’s Kuaizhou-1A solid-fueled smallsat rocket today successfully launched what the state-run press said were four weather satellites “belonging to the Tianmu-1 meteorological constellation.”

The launch was from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China, so the rocket’s lower stages crashed somewhere inside China. No word on where or if they landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

48 SpaceX
27 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 55 to 27, and the entire world combined 55 to 46, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 46.

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Hubble image shows several dozen boulders flung from Dimorphos

9:40 am

Boulders drifting from Dimorphos
Click for original image.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have photographed several dozen boulders that were flung off of the asteroid Dimorphos following the impact by the space probe DART. The picture to the right, reduced and brightened to more clearly show those boulders, was taken on December 19, 2022, four months after DART’s impact.

These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the Solar System. The ejected boulders range in size from 1 meter to 6.7 meters across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at around a kilometre per hour.

The blue streak is the dust tail that has streamed off of Dimorphos since the impact, pushed away from the sun by the solar wind.

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The possibility of more than one exoplanet sharing the same orbit

9:27 am

PDS 70, as seen by ALMA
The Trojan debris clouds around PDS 70, as seen by ALMA

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have detected evidence that suggests the possibility of more than one exoplanet sharing the same orbit around PDS 70, a star 400 light years away.

This young star is known to host two giant, Jupiter-like planets, PDS 70b and PDS 70c. By analysing archival ALMA observations of this system, the team spotted a cloud of debris at the location in PDS 70b’s orbit where Trojans are expected to exist.

Trojans occupy the so-called Lagrangian zones, two extended regions in a planet’s orbit where the combined gravitational pull of the star and the planet can trap material. Studying these two regions of PDS 70b’s orbit, astronomers detected a faint signal from one of them, indicating that a cloud of debris with a mass up to roughly two times that of our Moon might reside there.

The press release — as well as most news reports — touts the possibility that they have found a second planet in this orbit. They have not, and are likely not going to. As noted above, the data indicates the presence of “a cloud of debris”, which is most likely a clustering of Trojan asteroids, just as the more than 12,000 asteroids we see in the two Trojan points in Jupiter’s orbit.

Nonetheless, this is the first detection of what appears to be a Trojan clustering in the accretion disk of a young star.

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NOAA pays smallsat company PlanetiQ $60 million for its weather data

9:12 am

Capitalism in space: NOAA today awarded the smallsat company PlanetiQ a $60 million contract to provide the agency weather data from the company’s planned constellation of 20 satellites.

At present two satellites are in orbit, with more scheduled for launch in 2024. The satellites use data obtained in orbit from the different GPS-type satellite constellations to determine the atmosphere’s temperature, pressure, humidity and electron density.

In 2018 NOAA had awarded PlanetiQ and two other commercial companies, Spire and GeoOptics, small developmental contracts. This appears to be the first full contract, and continues NOAA’s very slow shift from building its own weather satellites to buying data from commercial satellites built by private companies. The agency has resisted this change, but since it can’t get its own satellites built and launched on budget or on time, it is increasingly being forced to do so.

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ISRO successfully tests propulsion system of Gaganyaan’s service module

8:56 am

India’s space agency ISRO revealed today that it has successfully completed the second phase of static fire engine tests of the complete propulsion system to be used by the service module of its Gaganyaan’s manned space capsule.

The first hot test of the Phase-2 test series demonstrated the integrated performance of the Gaganyaan Service Module Propulsion System. The test, conducted for a duration of 250 seconds, involved LAM engines firing in continuous mode, along with RCS thrusters, adhering to the test profile.

As part of the Phase-1 test series of SM SDM, ISRO had previously conducted five hot tests, totalling a duration of 2750 seconds. The earlier phase involved five 440 N LAM engines and eight 100 N RCS thrusters. For the Phase-2 test series, the current configuration includes the full configuration of five 440 N LAM engines and sixteen 100 N RCS thrusters.

ISRO had been hoping to launch the first manned mission in ’24, but that target date remains very uncertain.

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Scientists discover in archival data a slowly pulsing object that has been beating since 1988

8:48 am

The uncertainty of science: Using archival data, scientists have discovered a previously undetected but very strange slowly pulsing object that has been doing so since 1988.

Astronomers have found an ultra-slow, long-lasting source of radio-wave pulses, and they are perplexed as to its true nature. While “regular” radio pulsars have very short periods, from seconds down to just a few milliseconds, this source emits a brief pulse of radio waves about three times per hour. What’s more, it has been doing this for decades. “I do not think we can say yet what this object is,” says Victoria Kaspi (McGill University), a pulsar researcher who was not involved in the new study.

Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin University, Australia) and her colleagues discovered the mysterious source in data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) observatory in Western Australia. They carried out follow-up observations with the MWA and with other radio observatories in Australia and South Africa. Known as GPM J1839-10, the tardy blinker is located at a distance of some 18,500 light-years away in the constellation Scutum. Archival data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Indian Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope reveal that it has been pulsating at least since 1988, with a period of just under 22 minutes (1,318.1957 seconds, to be precise).

In a sense, the object is a pulsar, since on a very basic level it does what all pulsars do, send a radio beat in our direction in a precise pattern. The problem is that according to present theories that say pulsars are actually magnetized neutron stars rotating quickly, this object is rotating too slowly to be one.

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SpaceX launches 15 more Starlink satellites into orbit

9:20 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched fifteen more Starlink satellites into orbit, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific. Both fairings successfully completed their sixth flight.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

48 SpaceX
26 China (with a launch also planned for tonight)
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India

American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 55 to 26, and the entire world combined 55 to 45, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 45.

An additional note: This was the 100th successful orbital launch in 2023. In the history of space rocketry, reaching 100 launches in a year was generally considered an indication of an active launch year. Now the global rocket industry accomplishes it in just over half the year. Last year set a record with 179 launches. There is now an outside chance of breaking that, topping 200 launches in 2023.

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