Category: Points of Information

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.

• NASA seeks volunteers to passively track the first manned Orion mission around the Moon, presently scheduled for April 2026
  It appears NASA wishes to find out if commercial communications systems can do the same as its government network of antennas.

• French startup The Exploration Company’s Nyx cargo capsule passes initial ISS safety review
  The company is targeting its first cargo flight to ISS in 2028. Its longer range goal is to provide cargo and eventually manned service to the commercial stations that will follow. A successful docking in 2028 will strengthen its competitive position.

• German rocket startup Isar Aerospace secures launch agreements with European Space Agency
  The deal is for two smallsat launches beginning in 2026, and will depend on Isar first achieving a successful launch, having failed in its first attempt in March 2025.

• On this day in 1962, Mariner 2, the first successful mission to another planet, launched to Venus.

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.

• AT&T to Acquire Spectrum Licenses from EchoStar
  Jay: “This is not Spectrum the cable company, these are radio spectrum rights that EchoStar owns, and I would be surprised if old AT&T leases them out.”

• Blue Origin successfully completes static fire of the New Glenn 2nd stage

• Rocket Lab’s Neutron launch pad has been completed
  The company is still targeting the first Neutron launch before the end of this year.

• Firefly Aerospace gets Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) clearance to resume Alpha rocket launches
  This completes the investigation into the April launch failure.

• Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy signs agreement to launch Piesat’s satellites with its Ceres-2 solid-fueled rocket
  This is for Piesat’s Nuwa radar satellite constellation.

• RKK Energia, Russia’s prime contractor in human space flight, publicly admits that the company is in dire financial straits, with debt eating its budget, demotivated staff and obsolete processes
  The Russian invasion of the Ukraine cut Energia off from all its international customers. It no longer has any way to make money.

• On this day in 1999, NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory released its “First Light” image of Cassiopeia A

The past 24 hours SpaceX did more than complete its stunningly successful tenth launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket. The company also launched its Falcon 9 rocket twice from opposite coasts.

First it launched a commercial Earth observation satellite, built by the European company OHB Italia for Luxembourg, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 27th flight, landing back at Vandenberg..The launch also placed several smallsats in orbit as well.

Then this morning, ten hours after the Starship/Superheavy launch, another Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, placing another 28 Starlink satellites in orbit. The first stage completed its second flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

After including all three SpaceX launches, this is the leader board for the 2025 launch race:

107 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 107 to 84.

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.

• Astronomers discover dozens of new luminous quasars

• The Miura-5 rocket’s second-stage engine for the Spanish rocket startup PLD is now ready for qualification testing
  The company had been targeting the first launch of Miura-5 before the end of 2025. It appears that launch will likely slip to early 2026.

• On this day in 1989, Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Neptune
  It passed within 3,000 miles of the planet, and to this day is still the only spacecraft to get a close look.

• On this day in 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope, the fourth in the Great Observatory program
  An infrared telescope, Spitzer was a precursor to the Webb Space Telescope. It was named after Lyman Spitzer, who conceived the Hubble Space Telescope and was central in getting it built.

Diane and I are on the road today, leaving the Grand Canyon, which remains as grand as ever, and heading to Colorado to visit friends we haven’t seen since before the COVID panic.

Thus, I will likely not be able to watch today’s third attempt by SpaceX to complete the tenth launch of its Starship/Superheavy rocket, as it happens.. (Live stream can be found here.)

Once settled in Colorado I will catch up. Like you all, I have my fingers crossed that the launch will go off as hoped with a largely successful test flight.

One fortunate thing that has occurred during the previous two launch attempts in the past two days is that it appears the protest of boats proposed by a Mexico radical activist group to block the launch has so appeared to be a bust. There has been no indication of any boats entering the launch range in the Gulf of Mexico, and if any have tried, it appears they have been removed quickly.

China today successfully launched another ten satellites for its Guowang internet constellation, its Long March 8A rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

This was the tenth launch for the Guowang constellation, which eventually intends to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink with a constellation of 13,000 satellites. Today’s launch brings the number of satellites presently in orbit to 82.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

104 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 104 to 84.

Both the Webb Space Telescope and the newer SPHEREx space telescopes have now been aimed by scientists at the interstellar comet 3I/Atlas.

According to the paper describing the Webb results, the comet’s coma is dominated by carbon dioxide gas.

The SPHEREx results [pdf] also show a strong signal of carbon dioxice in the coma, as well as a strong signal of water ice in its nucleus.

These results, along with all the observations by multiple other telescopes in space and on the ground, are in line with what is expected from a comet, with the kind of unique differences expected from each object. There is nothing seen so far from the data to suggest anything alien about it, despite the claims of some pubicity-seeking scientists who don’t even specialize in comet research.

The big scientific discovery here is that this interstellar comet is so much like comets that come from our own solar system. The implication is that other solar systems have great similarities to our own. .