Orbex delays first launch from Saxavord until 2026

2:26 pm

Map of spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea

The rocket startup Orbex has now announced that “infrastructure requirements and engagement with regulators” has forced it to delay the first launch of its Prime rocket from 2025 until 2026.

Orbex at the start of this decade had signed a 50-year lease to launch its Prime rocket from the proposed Sutherland spaceport on the north coast of Scotland. In February 2022 it applied for a launch license, with the hope of launching before the end of that year. For three years it waited for the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to approve that license, to no avail.

Finally in December 2024 it gave up on launching from Sutherland and shifted its plans to the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands, apparently because that spaceport had been more successful in getting its CAA approvals (though even it had to wait years).

Though the company attributes this new delay as much to getting its launch facility ready at Saxavord, delays caused by British red tape continues to be a systemic and entrenched problem in the United Kingdom. It appears it remains so.

9 comments

More successful launches today

10:44 am

Two more launches occurred this morning, one in Japan and one in the U.S.

First, Japan completed the last launch of its H2A rocket, lifting off from its Tanegashima spaceport in south Japan, placing a Japanese climate satellite into orbit. This was the 50th launch for the H2A, which has now been replaced by the as expensive H3 rocket.

Next, SpaceX continued its unrelenting launch pace, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California carrying 26 more Starlink satellites into orbit. The first stage completed its eighth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean.

As Japan’s launch was only its second in 2025, it does not make the leader board of the 2025 launch race:

82 SpaceX
35 China
10 Rocket Lab
7 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 82 to 61.

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon, any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

Two American launches this evening

12:19 am

This evening two different American companies completed successful commercial launches, doing so from opposites sides of the globe.

First, SpaceX launched another 27 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral, with the first stage completing its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. This launch was on the evening of June 27th.

Then, a few hours later Rocket Lab completed the first of two quickly scheduled launches for an unnamed commercial customer, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand. This launch, on June 28th in New Zealand, was the company’s second launch in less than two days, its fastest turn around yet. As of posting the payload was not yet deployed.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

81 SpaceX
35 China
10 Rocket Lab
7 Russia

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 81 to 60.

6 comments

Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

June 27, 2025 Quick space links

2:56 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.

16 comments

Another blacklisted professors wins big in court

11:22 am

Law professor Scott Gerber
Law professor Scott Gerber

Fight! Fight! Fight! After two years of battle in the courts, a blacklisted tenured professor who was fired by his university in 2023 without due process because he had publicly criticized and opposed its racist diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) quota policies has now won a complete victory in court.

First the background: In 2023 Ohio Northern University (ONU) sent campus police to Dr. Scott Gerber’s classroom — while he was teaching a class — and had him physically removed from the campus, without warning or explanation. In firing Gerber no legal due process was followed, with the university violating in every manner its own employment policies. Even months later university officials refused to give any reason for his firing. The timing of its action though strongly suggested the university administration objected to his opinions, as he had that same week published an op-ed opposing the school’s DEI policies.

Gerber sued, hiring the pro-bono legal firm America First Legal (AFL) to defend him. (You can read the full complaint here [pdf]. The college’s actions were clearly unconscionable.)

Now two years later, AFL announced yesterday that it has won a full settlement victory for Gerber.
» Read more

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Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

European Union proposes new space law to supersede national space rules

9:47 am

The European Union

The European Union (EU) has now released its proposed Space Act that would impose European-wide regulations on the space industries of all its partnering nations, superseding their own regulations and policies.

The press release claims, at the start, that this space act would “cut red tape, protect space assets, and create a fair, predictable playing field for businesses,” but in reading the act itself [pdf], it appears to do the exact opposite. It imposes new environmental, safety, and cybersecurity regulations on the design of satellites and spacecraft in a manner that will likely slow development and competition in Europe significantly. And it applies these regulations not only to European companies but to the rest of the world’s space industry, should it do any operations at all in Europe.

This European Union space law was initially supposed to be released last year, but was delayed because it appeared there was strong opposition to it from many of the union’s member nations.

The proposed law appears to have been reshaped to limit the areas the EU can regulate space, but my appraisal of these regulations is that they are designed to quickly expand to cover everything, while adding an unneeded layer of red tape across Europe’s space industry that will only cause it to founder.

It must also be noted once again that there is no one in the bureaucracy of the EU qualified to impose these regulations on the space industry. The EU launches nothing. Its bureaucracy knows nothing about space technology. All it can do is say no to anyone that wants to achieve anything, just because it thinks it knows better.

It will be interesting to see if this space law passes. It still must be approved by European Parliament and the European Commission. I expect there to be significant opposition from several different member states, most especially Germany, Spain, and Italy, each of which have a newly emerging space industry. We should also expect opposition from the member nations formerly part of the Soviet bloc, as their past totalitarian experience makes them very skeptical of this kind of bureaucratic power play.

At the same time, the political structure of the European Union is designed to encourage the passage of such laws, which is one reason there is a rising movement in many member nations to leave the union. If the law passes, expect it to cause more fragmentation within Europe, rather than unifying the continent as it claims it will do.

4 comments

OSHA investigating the collapse of a crane at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility

9:13 am

OSHA has now opened an investigation into the collapse of a crane at SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility on June 24, 2025, captured by one of the commercial live streams that track activities there continually for the general public.

I have embedded the video of that collapse below.

A SpaceX crane collapse at the company’s Starbase, Texas facility on Tuesday has prompted an investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency told CNBC in an email.

The crane collapse was captured in a livestream by Lab Padre on YouTube, a SpaceX-focused channel. Clips from Lab Padre were widely shared on social media, including on X, which is owned by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether any SpaceX workers were injured as a result of the incident. Musk and other company executives didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The article at the link provides no additional information, instead focusing on what appears to be an anti-SpaceX screed. It never mentions that cranes such as this are almost certainly not owned by SpaceX, and are likely rented and operated for SpaceX by other independent crane companies. Thus, this failure is likely a failure of that crane company, not SpaceX directly.
» Read more

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June 26,2025 Quick space links

3:45 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.

  • Another new Chinese pseudo-company, Welight, touts a reusable rocket
    Jay notes, “I love the comment: ‘Every other month we get to see a new Chinese Space company'”. I note that the Xi government requires all of its rocket pseudo-companies to share data, which means anyone in that government can steal this information to form their own pseudo-company, and use their position of power to get favored treatment when it comes time to compete for government contracts. It is therefore not surprising that so many new pseudo-companies keep popping up.
16 comments

Rocket Lab launches four radio surveillance satellites

3:17 pm

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.

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The sagging flank of one of Mars’ giant volcanoes

1:51 pm

The sagging flank of Elysium Mons
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.
» Read more

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Nozzle blows off of Northrop Grumman SLS solid rocket booster during static fire test

1:05 pm

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.
» Read more

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French startup Latitude to spend $9.3 million on building its French Guiana launch facility

9:52 am

French Guiana spaceport
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.

2 comments

Webb takes infrared image of exoplanet

9:32 am

Webb's image of exoplanet

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.

2 comments

Mexican president threatens action against SpaceX at Boca Chica

9:08 am

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.

22 comments

Axiom’s manned mission docks with ISS

8:56 am

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.

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June 25, 2025 Quick space links

3:22 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.

9 comments

Astronomers look at the Andromeda Galaxy in many wavelengths

3:11 pm

Andromeda across many wavelengths
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.

3 comments

Curiosity’s future travels uphill

10:06 am

The view uphill
Click for full resolution. For original images go here and here.

Overview map
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.

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German rocket startup Isar Aerospace secures $174 million in financing

9:23 am

The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace announced today that it has obtained $174 million in new financing from a Miami-based investment firm.

This news report adds these details:

On 25 July 2025, Isar Aerospace announced that it had signed a €150 million convertible-bond agreement with Eldridge Industries. The instrument provides the company with funding in the short term, and the debt can later be converted into equity in the form of shares, typically at a pre-agreed valuation during a future financing round or an IPO.

That Isar needed to go to an American investment firm suggests there was a lack of interest in Europe to invest in this European rocket startup. The nature of the deal also suggests the possibility that some ownership rights will shift to Eldridge over time.

In March Isar first launch attempt of its Spectrum rocket from Norway’s Andoya spaceport failed 30 seconds after lift-off. It is building two more rockets, and will use this new capital to expand its production and launch facilities.

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Rocket Lab wins launch contract from the European Space Agency

9:09 am

The American rocket company Rocket Lab announced today that it has been awarded a launch contract from the European Space Agency (ESA) to place two European-built GPS-type test satellites into orbit.

Rocket Lab will launch two “Pathfinder A” spacecraft for ESA, provided by European satellite prime contractors Thales Alenia Space and GMV, from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 no earlier than December 2025. The spacecraft will be deployed to a 510km low Earth orbit as part of a mission to test a new approach of providing location, direction, and timing services from satellites in low orbit – otherwise called LEO-PNT (Low Earth Orbit Positioning, Navigation, and Timing). ESA’s LEO-PNT demonstration mission will assess how a low Earth orbit fleet of satellites can work in combination with the Galileo and EGNOS constellations in higher orbits that provide Europe’s own global navigation system.

That ESA gave Rocket Lab this contract illustrates the failure of this government agency’s own commercial rocket division, Arianespace, as well as the slowly emerging new commercial rocket startups in Europe. ESA likely rejected Arianespace’s Ariane-6 and Vega-C rockets as too expensive. These rockets were also likely unable to meet the required launch time table. It also could not pick any independent private European companies, because none have yet to successfully launch.

And ESA did this even as top government officials in Europe have been loudly demanding that Europe only launch its satellites on European rockets. That demand might make a nice sound bite, but reality trumps nice sound bites every time.

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SpaceX launches Axiom’s fourth commercial manned mission to ISS

8:45 am

SpaceX last night successfully launched Axiom’s fourth commercial manned mission to ISS, dubbed Ax-4, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The first stage completed its second flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The Dragon capsule, the newest and fifth ship in SpaceX’s fleet of manned capsule, was dubbed “Grace,” as announced by Axiom mission commander and former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson. The three paying passengers are government astronauts from India, Hungary, and Poland.

The capsule will dock with ISS tomorrow (Thursday) at 7 am (Eastern), where it and its crew will spend about one to two weeks before returning to Earth.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

79 SpaceX
35 China
8 Rocket Lab
7 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 79 to 58.

The overall lack of excitement about this manned space mission speaks directly to how successful SpaceX has become as a private commercial rocket company. Its rockets and capsules work routinely well, with almost no problems, making these manned space missions seem as boring as an airline trip from New York to Washington.

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June 24, 2025 Quick space links

3:02 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 link below.

Slow day. No other quick links.

2 comments

A graceful spiral galaxy

2:35 pm

A graceful spiral galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a project to study galaxies with very active central supermassive black holes.

What sets UGC 11397 apart from a typical spiral lies at its centre, where a supermassive black hole containing 174 million times the mass of the Sun is growing. As a black hole ensnares gas, dust, and even entire stars from its vicinity, this doomed matter heats up and puts on a fantastic cosmic light show. Material trapped by the black hole emits light from gamma rays to radio waves and can brighten and fade without warning. But in some galaxies, including UGC 11397, thick clouds of dust hide much of this energetic activity from view in optical light. Despite this, UGC 11397’s actively growing black hole was revealed through its bright X-ray emission — high-energy light that can pierce the surrounding dust. This led astronomers to classify it as a Type 2 Seyfert galaxy, a category used for active galaxies whose central regions are hidden from view in visible light by a doughnut-shaped cloud of dust and gas.

To me what sets this galaxy apart is its natural beauty. It also reminds me of the universe’s vastness. Located about 250 million light years away, those hazy spiral arms represent millions of stars, many of which likely harbor planets and maybe even life.

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