Category: Behind The Black

The three launches completed today including two major new achievements

12:33 pm

The beat goes on: There were three launches globally today, repeating a pattern we’ve seen several times in the past few weeks, with China completing one launch and SpaceX completing two.

First, China’s solid-fueled Kinetica-1 (Lijian-1) rocket placed three Pakistani satellites into orbit, one of which is what Pakistan’s state-run press claimed was its first multi-spectral environmental satellite. China’s press also provided no information about where Kinetica-1’s lower stages crashed inside China, having launched from its Jiuquan spaceport in the country’s northwest. The rocket itself is supposedly commercial, but it is built by a government agency, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the government state-run press illustrated this by making no mention of this agency in reporting the launch.

Next, SpaceX set a new record for the reuse of a Falcon 9 first stage in placing 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, the rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage, B1067, completed its 31st flight, a new record for a Falcon 9 first stage, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The updated rankings for the most reflights of a rocket:

39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
31 Falcon 9 booster B1067
29 Falcon 9 booster B1071
28 Columbia space shuttle
28 Falcon 9 booster B1063
27 Falcon 9 booster B1069

Sources here and here.

Finally, less than two hours later, SpaceX launched another 28 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage completed its 11th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

With these two launches, SpaceX has now placed more than 10,000 Starlink satellites into orbit, though a large percentage have been de-orbited over the years as the company has upgraded the satellites. Nonetheless, the number of Starlink satellites presently in orbit far exceeds all the satellites now in orbit for every other planned constellation, combined.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

135 SpaceX
63 China
13 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 135 to 104.

In the coming days the global rocket industry will also achieve a number of additional milestones. SpaceX is just two launches short of its record of 137 launches achieved last year, while the U.S. is just three launches short of its own record of 157 launches, also set last year. Similarly, China is just three launches short of its own record of 66 set in 2023.

Globally, the world has presently completed 239 successful launches in 2025, a number only exceeded by the 2024 record of 256. Expect this record also to fall before the end of the year.

11 comments

Oman streamlines its launch license regulations

11:06 pm

Middle East, showing Oman's proposed spaceport
The Middle East, showing the location of
Oman’s proposed spaceport at Duqm.

In its effort to establish its new Etlaq spaceport in the coastal town of Duqm, the government of Oman announced on October 16, 2025 that it has streamlined its launch licensing process so that approvals will be given within 45 days.

The recently issued Civil Aviation Directive (CAD 5-01) sets out the process for coordinating spaceflight activities within Oman’s airspace. Under the directive, companies seeking launch approval must submit an evidence-based safety case to the CAA in order to reserve launch windows in the Muscat Flight Information Region (FIR). Applications aim to be processed in as little as 45 days, giving operators one of the fastest approval cycles globally, while maintaining rigorous aviation, maritime, and ground safety requirements.

Though this appears good on the surface, at the moment it could be nothing more than a lot of sizzle rather than a real steak. The spaceport in April had outlined five planned suborbital launches through the end of 2025, but none of those launches have taken place. Both the April and July tests were scrubbed supposedly due to weather, but no new launch dates have been announced. The April launch was to test a prototype vertical take-off and landing rocket by the Middle Eastern rocket startup Advanced Rocket Technologies. The company’s website now says it is targeting a third quarter launch date, though that quarter has already ended.

Oman has made a strong effort to encourage companies to launch there, with the Spanish rocket startup PLD signing a deal to use Etlaq in future launches. American companies are not going to sign similar deals however because of strict State Department rules designed to prevent U.S. technology from being stolen by hostile foreign powers, and at the moment Oman is certainly not considered a reliable ally.

0 comments

October 17, 2025 Quick space links

3:20 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

6 comments

Meandering channel in Mars’ southern cratered highlands

1:25 pm

Meandering channel on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 30, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Dubbed a “channel” by the MRO science team, it shows us a meandering canyon with a floor that seems filled with corroded linear features seen frequently on Earth glaciers. Here, the linear ridges appear broken, in many places missing, and in other places so broken their linear nature disappears.

If this was on Earth and I was a global warming activitist, I would immediately claim that the glacier has been evaporating away due to a warming climate caused by SUVs and Republican intransigence. This however is on Mars, where there are no SUVs or Republicans. So what is going on?
» Read more

0 comments

If there is any microbiology on Mars, new research says it will be found in the red planet’s ample ice

9:11 am

The uncertainty of science: New research that attempted to simulate conditions in the ice on Mars has determined that ancient microbes are more likely survive there for very long periods, as much as fifty million years, rather than the red planet’s dry sediments.

The research team, led by corresponding author Alexander Pavlov, a space scientist at NASA Goddard — who completed a doctorate in geosciences at Penn State in 2001 — suspended and sealed E. coli bacteria in test tubes containing solutions of pure water ice. Other E. coli samples were mixed with water and ingredients found in Mars sediment, like silicate-based rocks and clay.

The researchers froze the samples and transferred them to a gamma radiation chamber at Penn State’s Radiation Science and Engineering Center, which was cooled to minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature of icy regions on Mars. Then, the samples were blasted with radiation equivalent to 20 million years of cosmic ray exposure on Mars’ surface, vacuum sealed and transported back to NASA Goddard under cold conditions for amino acid analysis. Researchers modelled an additional 30 years of radiation for a total 50-million-year timespan.

In pure water ice, more than 10% of the amino acids — the molecular building blocks of proteins — from the E. coli sample survived the simulated 50-million-year time span, while the samples containing Mars-like sediment degraded 10 times faster and did not survive. A 2022 study by the same group of researchers at NASA found that amino acids preserved in a 10% water ice and 90% Martian soil mixture were destroyed more rapidly than samples containing only sediment.

In other words, if there was ever microbiology on Mars, it is very unlikely Perseverance or Curiosity will ever find any, roving as they are in the dry Martian tropics.

Though this work has many uncertainties, especially in its assumption that it successfully simulated a 50-million-year time span, the result is hardly an earth-shaking discovery. If anything, it confirms the obvious, which is why NASA’s ludicrous claim that Perseverance’s prime mission is to look for life has always been a lie. It is traveling in the wrong place, a fact that was self-evident from the start.

Whether any microbiology might exist in Mars’ ice however is unknown. The odds are very very low, but not zero. If it does, it is even less likely it is living, based on orbital data.

13 comments

China launches 18 satellites

8:56 am

China today successfully placed 18 more Spacesail or Qianfan satellites in orbit, its Long March 6A rocket lifting off from Taiyuan spaceport in northeast China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.

This was the sixth launch for this internet satellite constellation, intended to provide Chinese citizens service similar to Starlink, but controlled by the Chinese government. At present it has 119 satellites in orbit, out of a planned 648 in the constellation’s first phase. That phase was supposed to be completed by the end of this year, something that now seems very unlikely. The constellation’s final configuration could have as many as 10,000 satellites.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

133 SpaceX
62 China
13 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 133 to 103.

0 comments

October 16, 2025 Quick space links

3:04 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

26 comments

Layers of Martian ash

1:08 pm

Layering on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 31, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The science team labels this as “layering”, which surely is an apt description. As the latitude is 9 degrees south, this location is within the dry tropics of Mars, where no near surface ice has yet been found. Thus, the terraced layers of this low 20-foot-high mesa are not indicative of the many glacial climate cycles found in the mid-latitudes.

Instead, we are looking at sedimentary layers of rock or dust, laid down over time and later exposed by erosion.

So what caused the layers? And what is causing them to be exposed, one by one? As always the overview map helps provide a possible explanation.
» Read more

2 comments

ESA awards contract to Italian company to provide an ocean landing platform

10:19 am

Avio's proposed reusable upper stage
Click for original.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has awarded the Italian company Ingegneria Dei Sistemi (IDS) a contract to build an ocean vessel for recovering the planned reusable test upper stage being built by the Italian rocket company Avio, as shown in the graphic to the right.

In late September, ESA awarded a €40 million contract to Avio for the design of a reusable rocket upper stage. The project scope encompasses preliminary design work, including system requirements and technological solutions, for both the launch system and the ground segment. According to the agency, the project has a number of potential applications, including as an evolution of Avio’s Vega family of rockets.

On 15 October, IDS announced that it had been awarded the contract to design the project’s recovery vessel, which falls under the systems ground segment. The company has subcontracted Italian naval systems consultancy Cetena and Norwegian shipbuilder Vard to assist with the project.

ESA very clearly is trying to encourage the development of reusable rockets by Europe’s private sector, but the nature of this particular program seems badly thought out. Rather than have Avio design the system in its entirety, in order to make it as efficient and profitable as possible, it appears ESA is micromanaging the design process, and thus bringing other subcontractors in who are outside Avio’s control. As a result, the final demo might work, but it is not likely it will be competitive with the private reusable rockets being built in the U.S. and elsewhere. Too many cooks in the kitchen.

1 comment

South African red tape will likely delay Starlink there for years to come

10:06 am

According to an article in South Africa yesterday, regulatory red tape and political demands in South Africa will likely block approval of Starlink in that country for years to come, if not forever.

Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies Solly Malatsi gazetted a draft policy direction on the role of EEIPs [Equity Equivalent Investment Programme] in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector on 23 May 2025. He explained that rules requiring electronic communications service providers to have 30% historically disadvantaged ownership prevented some companies from contributing to the country’s transformation in ways other than traditional ownership.

The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment (B-BBEE) Act and the ICT Sector Code supported the use of EEIPs to allow qualifying multinationals to meet empowerment obligations through alternatives. These can include investing in local suppliers, enterprise and skills development, job creation, infrastructure support, research and innovation, digital inclusion initiatives, and funding for small businesses.

However, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa’s (Icasa) ownership regulations do not provide for EEIPs.

In other words, the laws contradict each other, and to make it possible to issue any licenses for a foreign company like SpaceX, the government needs to resolve this conflict. That is expected to take years of political maneuvering.

Even if this issue is resolved, SpaceX has already said it would not agree to the racial quota system proposed. It has offered to instead provide Starlink for free to 5,000 schools. It is not clear if politicians in South Africa will consider that sufficient.

6 comments
1 … 112 113 114 115 116 … 2,915