Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Rocket Lab today successfully launched four radio surveillance satellites for the company Hawkeye 360, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads at its New Zealand spaceport.
This was Rocket Lab’s second of three launches under a Hawkeye 360 three-launch contract.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
80 SpaceX
35 China
9 Rocket Lab
7 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 80 to 59.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 1, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels a “chain of pit craters in [a] graben”.
A graben is a surface fissure created when the surface either spreads or two sections shift sideways in opposite directions. The chain of pits suggest that there is a larger void below into which the surface is sinking. It is also likely that a lot of the sinking material is volcanic ash, thrown free in an eruption hundreds of millions of years ago, which over the eons has been blown up to this location to settle in the crack to fill it. It is now trapped there, and sinking.
What caused the ground here to shift and create the fissure? In this case, the cause is quite large and massive, in a way that boggles the mind.
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During a static fire test of a new upgraded strap-on solid-fueled booster to be used on the second version of NASA’s SLS rocket, it appears the nozzle broke off near the end of the test.
I have embedded the video below.
This failure is not good for getting the upgraded version of SLS built, dubbed Block 2. Block 1 has flown once unmanned, and is planned for the next two manned missions. Block 2 would be for further manned missions beyond that. The Trump administration has proposed cancelling it, ending SLS after those two Block 1 flights. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has instead introduced a bill that would save it in order to fly two Block 2 SLS manned missions.
This failure is definitely going to delay and add cost to Block 2 development, a program that is already over budget many times over and a decade-plus behind schedule. These additional delays and cost overruns are not going to help it politically. It justifies the Trump administration’s desire to cancel it.
Moreover, this nozzle failure suggests a very fundamental design problem. Northrop Grumman, which built and was testing this booster, also builds the solid-fueled strap-on boosters used on ULA’s Vulcan rocket, which had a similar nozzle failure during Vulcan’s second launch in October last year. Both Northrop Grumman and ULA have said they had identified and fixed the cause of that failure, and the military has certified it for operational launches, but nonetheless Vulcan still remains sidelined, more than eight months later.
I suspect ULA is going to have to do more testing of the Northrop Grumman Vulcan side boosters before its next Vulcan launch, delaying that rocket further.
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The French Guiana spaceport. The Diamant launchsite is labeled “B.”
Click for full resolution image. (Note: The Ariane-5 pad is now the
Ariane-6 pad.)
The French rocket startup Latitude has announced it will spend $9.3 million to build its own launchpad at the spaceport in French Guiana, where hopes to launch its Zephyr rocket in 2026.
In a 23 June update, Latitude confirmed the Guiana Space Centre as the launch site for the inaugural flight of its 19-metre-tall, two-stage Zephyr rocket, which is designed to deliver payloads of up to 200 kilograms to low Earth orbit. The site was one of two under consideration, with the company also having committed to developing launch infrastructure at SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland. When that partnership was announced in March 2022, Latitude, then known as Venture Orbital Systems, aimed to carry out its first launch from SaxaVord in 2024.
Construction of the ELM-Diamant shared launch facility began in 2025 and is expected to be completed by 2026. According to Latitude’s 23 June update, the company will work with CNES and the European Space Agency in the coming months to implement its dedicated launch infrastructure at the site. This will be followed by the inaugural launch of its Zephyr rocket in 2026.
It is not clear exactly how that ELM-Diamant launch site will be shared. France’s space agency CNES (which operates French Guiana) had previously said it wanted all the new European rocket startups that wanted to launch from there to use a common launch infrastructure, thus requiring them to share technology as well as redesign their rockets to fit CNES’s requirements. The rocket startups objected, but it now appears two startups, Latitude and PLD, and come to an agreement of some sort.
This deal also suggests that Latitude is shifting away from using the Saxavord spaceport in the United Kingdom, possibly because it has seen the difficult regulatory hurdles required there and has decided French Guiana is a better option.
Using the Webb Space Telescope astronomers have now successfully taken an infrared false-color image of Saturn-sized exoplanet orbiting a young star about half the mass of the Sun and about 111 light years away.
The image is to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. The star, its light blocked out, is indicated by the circle with the star in the middle. The exoplanet is the orange blob to the upper right, sitting inside the blue accretion disk that surrounds the star, photographed in optical light by the Very Large Telescope in Chile.
You can read the paper here. The scientists rejected the possibility that this was a background galaxy after doing computer modeling, based on the data available. From their paper:
Dedicated N-body simulations were conducted for a planet with a mass of 0.34 [mass of Jupiter], located at 52 au [astronomical units] around the 0.46 [solar mass] central star. This value is consistent with the measured projected separation, assuming that the planet and the ≈13°-inclined disk are coplanar. The simulation also included a disk of 200,000 planetesimals, distributed between 20 and 130 au. These parameters were selected to roughly match the boundaries of the observed disk.
Note too that the picture to the right has been significantly enhanced by the press department at JPL, based on the actual data shown in the paper itself. These fact underline the uncertainties involved in this discovery.
Nonetheless, it is a good result, and suggests we are looking at the formation process of a new solar system surrounding a very young baby star.
The president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, yesterday indicated that her government was considering taking legal action against SpaceX because of the debris from its Superheavy rocket that was found washed up on its beaches after a test launch.
Mexico’s government was studying which international laws were being violated in order to file “the necessary lawsuits” because “there is indeed contamination”, Sheinbaum told her morning news conference on Wednesday.
…Mexican officials are carrying out a “comprehensive review” of the environmental impacts of the rocket launches for the neighboring state of Tamaulipas, Sheinbaum said.
Other than this one quote, the article at the link is largely junk, focusing on the test stand explosion last week of Starship, an event that has nothing to do with the material found on Mexico’s beaches. Moreover, that debris was apparently so harmless Mexicans were able to quickly gather it for souvenirs, with some immediately making money from it by selling it on social media.
In other words, this “investigation” and this “reporting” is nothing more than anti-Musk rhetoric because Musk has aligned himself with Trump.
SpaceX’s newest manned Dragon capsule, dubbed Grace, this morning successfully brought Axiom’s fourth commercial passenger mission to ISS, docking with the space station after launching yesterday on a Falcon 9 rocket.
The spacecraft docked at 6:31 a.m. to the space-facing port of the space station’s Harmony module. Former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation) astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski of Poland, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary now are aboard the space station after launching at 2:31 a.m. on June 25, on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for the fourth private astronaut mission to the orbiting laboratory, Axiom Mission 4.
The plan is for them to stay on ISS for two weeks.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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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.
Click for full images.
Astronomers using both old and new and ground- and space-based telescopes have created a full set of observations of the Andromeda Galaxy (also known as M31) across five different wavelengths, producing one of the most complete views of the galaxy so far.
This new composite image contains data of M31 taken by some of the world’s most powerful telescopes in different kinds of light. This image includes X-rays from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton (represented in red, green, and blue); ultraviolet data from NASA’s retired GALEX (blue); optical data from astrophotographers using ground based telescopes (Jakob Sahner and Tarun Kottary); infrared data from NASA’s retired Spitzer Space Telescope, the Infrared Astronomy Satellite, COBE, Planck, and Herschel (red, orange, and purple); and radio data from the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (red-orange).
Each type of light reveals new information about this close galactic relative to the Milky Way. For example, Chandra’s X-rays reveal the high-energy radiation around the supermassive black hole at the center of M31 as well as many other smaller compact and dense objects strewn across the galaxy.
The contrast in emissions between different wavelengths is certainly striking. The radio, infrared, and ultraviolet data clearly delineate the galaxy’s arms where star formation is occurring. The X-ray highlights the galaxy’s central black hole.
This press release is clearly intended to lobby against the cuts at NASA, especially considering that several of these images (Galax, Spitzer) are not new. At the same time, it does demonstrate the need to look at the heavens across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. It seems to me that the astronomical community should begin to consider other methods of funding for this work, other than just the federal government, and in fact they prove this point themselves by the use of images above from some smaller ground-based telescopes not funded by American tax dollars.
SpaceX today successfully launched 27 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 20th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
80 SpaceX
35 China
8 Rocket Lab
7 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 80 to 58.
Click for full resolution. For original images go here and here.
Click for interactive map.
Cool image time! The panorama above, assembled from two pictures taken on June 23, 2025 (here and here) by the left navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, looks to the south and uphill into the canyon that the rover will eventually climb.
The overview map to the right provides context. The blue dot marks Curiosity’s present location, the white line its past travel route, and the red dotted line its future route. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama.
The science team is presently exploring the boxwork formation on the right, and should spend at least the next month or so there before moving on. As the rover moves up into this canyon we should also expect the science team to spend a great deal of time studying that many layered cliff face to the right.
Eventually the rover will enter those white very hilly regions on the horizon. No route through those hills however has yet been chosen.
