Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

Rocket Lab gets a quick launch contract from unnamed customer

8:50 am

Rocket Lab today announced it has been awarded a launch contract from an unnamed “confidential commercial customer” calling for two launches before the end of this year, with the first to occur only four days from today.

Launching from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, the first dedicated mission on Electron – named “Symphony In The Stars” – will take place no earlier than June 20, 2025 to deploy a single spacecraft to a 650km circular Earth orbit. A second dedicated launch on Electron to meet those same mission requirements is scheduled for launch before the end of 2025.

That the customer name is classified suggests these are both military launches, and are designed to demonstrate Rocket Lab’s ability to launch something fast under short notice. The new contract also increases the chances that Rocket Lab will manage two dozen launches in 2025, a pace of twice a month.

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SpaceX launches 26 more Starlink satellites

8:44 am

SpaceX last night successfully placed 26 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its third flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

A comparison between this launch of SpaceX’s Starlink with Amazon’s scrubbed ULA launch of 27 Kuiper satellites yesterday is worth noting. This launch of 26 Starlink satellites was utterly routine, and just one of four in just the past week, all of which put 98 satellites into orbit. Thousands of such satellites have been launched since the first launch in 2018.

Amazon’s attempt to launch 27 Kuiper satellites was scrubbed, and would have only been the second launch total, separated by about six weeks. The constellation only has 27 satellites in orbit, and its launches are anything but routine, despite signing launch contracts with four different rocket companies. And yet, Amazon proposed Kuiper at almost the same time SpaceX proposed Starlink, in the mid-2010s.

I will let my readers draw their own conclusions from this comparison.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

75 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 75 to 55.

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June 16, 2025 Quick space links

3:36 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.

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Spinlaunch signs deal to build its spin launch facility on island in Alaska

12:30 pm

Spinlaunch prototype launcher

Spinlaunch has now confirmed that it has signed a deal to build its spin launch facility on Adak island in the far western extent of the Alaskan island chain.

The facility will be a scaled up version of its spin launch test facility in New Mexico, shown to the right, that was used for tests back in 2022, hurling payloads 35,000 feet into the sky up by spinning them up.

Since then the company changed its leadership and shifted focus to building a satellite constellation that will at least initially will be launched by conventional rockets. This new agreement, actually signed in October 2024 but kept secret until now, suggests that it has not yet abandoned its spin launch technology.
» Read more

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ULA scrubs 2nd Kuiper constellation launch due to technical issue

10:24 am

ULA today scrubbed its second Atlas-5 launch to place 27 more of Amazon’s Kuiper constellation satellites into orbit due to “an engineering observation of an elevated purge temperature within the booster engine.”

At the moment no new launch date has been scheduled.

So far Amazon has only placed 27 operational Kuiper satellites into orbit, on a single Atlas-5 launch in April. According to its FCC license, it must have 1,600 satellites in orbit by July 2026. Though it has contracts to launch these satellites 46 times on ULA rockets (8 on Atlas-5 and 36 on Vulcan), 27 times on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 18 times on ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, and 3 times on SpaceX’s Falcon-9, except for SpaceX all these companies have had problems getting off the ground.

Whether Amazon can meet the FAA licence requirement by next year is becoming increasingly questionable.

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China launches science satellite to study Earth’s electromagnetic fields

9:34 am

China today successfully launched a science satellite built in partnership with Italy and designed to study the interaction of the Earth’s atmosphere with its electromagnetic fields, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China. As for the satellite:

With a designed lifespan of six years, the satellite is equipped with nine payloads, including an electric field detector co-developed by China and Italy, as well as a high-energy particle detector developed by Italy. It will carry out quasi-real-time monitoring of global electromagnetic fields, electromagnetic waves, the ionosphere and the neutral atmosphere, detecting electromagnetic anomalies caused by geological and human activities, as well as monitoring thunderstorm and lightning activity, according to CNSA.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

74 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 74 to 55.

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Axiom manned flight to ISS rescheduled; NASA attempts to clarify ISS leak situation

9:26 am

In a NASA update today, it announced a new launch date of June 19, 2025 for Axiom’s fourth manned flight to ISS while also attempting to clarify ISS leak situation that caused this last and more extended delay.

On June 12, NASA and Axiom Space delayed the mission as the agency continued to work with Roscosmos to understand the most recent repair efforts to seal small leaks. The leaks, located in the aft (back) most segment of the International Space Station’s Zvezda service module, have been monitored by flight controllers for the past few years.

Following the most-recent repair, pressure in the transfer tunnel has been stable. Previously, pressure in this area would have dropped. This could indicate the small leaks have been sealed. Teams are also considering the stable pressure could be the result of a small amount of air flowing into the transfer tunnel across the hatch seal from the main part of space station. By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal between the space station and the back of Zvezda.

It appears, though NASA doesn’t say so directly, that the Russians did not wish to change the situation at ISS with another docking — even if it was a docking on the American half of the station — while it was evaluating these leak repairs. It now appears they have gotten enough data to allow NASA to set a new launch date later this week.

If the repairs have managed to stop the leaks this is excellent news. At the same time, it doesn’t reduce the risks of a catastrophic failure of Zvezda, since the existence of these numerous stress fractures in its hull suggest a chronic long term failure that can only worsen with time.

The sudden delay of Axiom’s AX-4 last week also indicates poor coordination between NASA and Roscosmos. It was as if NASA had no idea the repair work was occurring, either because it wasn’t paying attention to what the Russians were doing or because the Russians had kept this work secret until it was completed. In either case, this is not how such a partnership should operate.

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June 13, 2025 Quick space links

3:24 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.

8 comments

The mad mountains of Mars

10:34 am

The mad mountains of Mars
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map

Cool image time! The picture above, cropped to post here, was taken on June 10, 2025 by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Curiosity, and shows some of the stranger terrain found higher up the flanks of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater.

The blue dot on the overview map to the right marks Curiosity’s present position, where it is doing another drilling campaign into the first boxwork geology it has encountered. The white line marks its past travels, while the green dotted line its planned route.

The yellow lines indicate the area seen in the picture above. The wild mountain peaks on the horizon are part of the sulfate-bearing unit that appears very bright in the overview map. The material that makes up this terrain appears to be very easily eroded, based on its features as seen from orbit, as well as Curiosity’s distant view. Whether that erosion was wind, water, or ice, remains undetermined, and is the main question Curiosity will attempt to answer once it gets there, likely in a year or so.

Regardless, the landscape appears almost like it soft sand being washed away.

Where the rover will go next the science team has not yet decided. It will definitely continue uphill, but they do not yet know the route they will take through that sulfate-bearing unit.

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SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites

9:16 am

SpaceX this morning successfully placed 23 Starlink satellites into orbit (including 13 with phone-to-satellite capabilities), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 21st flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlanta.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

74 SpaceX
33 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 74 to 54.

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French startup The Exploration Company launches its own recovery ship

9:10 am

The French startup, The Exploration Company, has now launched its own ship designed to recover its next prototype test cargo capsule, set to launch on a Falcon 9 on June 21, 2025.

In an 11 June update, The Exploration Company announced that the recovery vessel tasked with retrieving the Mission Possible capsule after splashdown had departed the previous day from a harbour in Alaska. The vessel, named Makushin Bay, is a 40-metre salvage and rescue ship owned and operated by US-based maritime logistics company Resolve Marine. Two members of The Exploration Company’s team will accompany the vessel on its mission. Over the next week, it will make its way to the expected splashdown zone in the central Pacific Ocean. According to The Exploration Company, current weather conditions appear favourable for both splashdown and recovery operations.

The company aims to provide cargo to the commercial space stations under development using its proposed Nyx capsule. As part of its own development program it has flown a smaller prototype already on the first launch of Europe’s Ariane-6 rocket, but was unable to test its re-entry capability because of a failure in that rocket’s upper stage. This second larger prototype will try again, and this time has a better shot at completing its test because it if flying on SpaceX’s very reliable Falcon 9. Thus, the launch of this recovery vessel.

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