An evening pause: Someday relatively soon, this prototype will be available for purchase, though at present it does not appear to me to be ready for prime time.. Where would you go this weekend if you had one?
Hat tip Cotour, who adds, “I bet you did not know that there is now a flying barbeque. I like mine medium rare.”
While much of the entire “controversy” over the decision by Cracker Barrel to change and then restore its old logo seemed to me to be a tempest in a teapot, the fact that the firestorm itself quickly forced Cracker Barrel to back down tells us something far more important: The alternative press (mostly conservative) is no longer confined to the fringes of culture, but now has real reach throughout society.
This cultural change can’t be underlined enough. For most of my long life, conservative news and cultural outlets had little impact on the general culture. They would make their points, often cogently and based on facts, and find themselves generally ignored. Only a decade ago, when conservatives complained about the leftward drift by major corporations or universities into racial quotas, bigotry, blacklists, censorship, and totalitarian Marxism, few noticed and more significantly, the companies or universities shrugged off the criticisms nonchalantly, as if the complaints were nothing more than a tiny gnat flying about in the air.
I speak from experience, because a decade ago I was posting regularly about this drift in both universities and corporations, was getting my posts picked up by many conservative news aggregates, and yet those posts had no impact at all. Nothing changed. If anything, the corporations and universities cited actually accelerated their racial quotas and their emphasis on bigotry, blacklists, censorship, and totalitarian Marxism.
No more. In the past four years the general culture and how it gets its information has fundamentally changed. That culture now listens to the right, and the result is fast and immediate change.
The Cracker Barrel kerfuffle proves this. Cracker Barrel proudly announced its logo change on August 19, 2025. In less than 24 hours numerous conservatives across the entire internet were lambasting the company about it, accusing the company of abandoning its past and going woke. This comment was quite typical:
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Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
The American lunar lander startup Astrobotic (which is now also a rocket startup) has signed a launch deal with Norway’s Andoya spaceport, where the company intends to launch its proposed reusable Xodiac rocket.
Astrobotic will perform their initial European Xodiac launch campaign operations from Andøya Space starting in 2026. Andøya Space will provide various services, including ground operations, flight preparation, and infrastructure support.
It will be wise to remain skeptical about Astrobotic’s rocket. The company owns the rights and technology of the vertical take-off-and-landing hopper developed and successfully tested by Masten Space System (which Astrobotic took over in 2022), but it also claimed in 2024 it would begin flying an upgraded suborbital version by 2025. No such flights appear on the horizon at this moment.
At the same time, developing a new rocket always involves delays. It will be quite exciting if Astrobotic succeeds in entering the launch market in the next year or so.
As for the Andoya spaceport, it continues to be in the lead among the four spaceports proposed surrounding the Norwegian Sea. Norway has made its licensing arrangement smooth and easy, the spaceport is well located, and it already has another launch contract with the German rocket startup Isar Aerospace, which attempted its first launch there earlier this year (albeit a failure). Moreover, Andoya has signed an agreement with the U.S. allowing American commercial companies to launch there, which is likely why Astrobotic made its deal.
Esrange’s location in the interior places it at a disadvantage, while red tape have badly stymied the two spaceports proposed in the United Kingdom.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
A British company is selling a very simple phone device for young children that allows them to stay in contact with their parents, including GPS location, without giving them a touchscreen and any access to the web.
The Messenger, from London-based outfit Karri, is meant to help kids aged 5-13 become more independent, while giving their parents peace of mind. It’s designed entirely around voice messaging, so you can chat with your child one-on-one, or connect them with other family members in a group conversation.
This is actually the company’s second-generation Messenger with an improved design over the first from 2023. It features a dot matrix display, a speaker, and most importantly, a “slide to talk” button in the center. Slide it down to listen to a voice message you’ve just received, slide up and hold to record a reply, and short slide up to send it off.
Considering the increasing evidence that smartphones do real damage to kids during their development ages, this kind of option makes sense. So does a simple flip phone, but this device provides a simpler and more limited alternative.
Amazon yesterday signed up its first airline customer, JetBlue, the airline agreeing to provide in-flight WiFi to its passengers using the Kuiper constellation.
Amazon’s satellite internet service, Project Kuiper, will partner with JetBlue to provide in-flight Wi-Fi starting in 2027. It’s Project Kuiper’s first deal with an airline as it aims to keep up with the SpaceX-owned Starlink, which has already snagged satellite internet agreements with United Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Air France, and several others.
JetBlue must have gotten a truly great deal to go with Kuiper. It could start providing Starlink to passengers now if it wished, instead of waiting until 2027 with Kuiper. And even that date remains uncertain, considering how few satellites Amazon has so far launched (just over a hundred) when it needs at least 1,600 by next July to meet its FCC license requirements.
SpaceX in the wee hours last night successfully placed another 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Centery in Florida.
The first stage completed its 27th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. SpaceX now has one booster with 30 flights and three with 27 flights, putting these stages in the same league with the three most flown space shuttles, Discovery (39), Atlantis (33), and Columbia (28). Expect these boosters to all pass Discovery in the near future, with several more Falcon 9 boosters about to enter this league as well.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
113 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 113 to 85.
An evening pause: Performed live 2015. Stay with it. Though the opening is less appealing, it gets far better.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Ted Cruz, a typical Congressional porkmeister
The Senate hearing that was held yesterday, entitled “There’s a Bad Moon on the Rise: Why Congress and NASA Must Thwart China in the Space Race”, was clearly organized by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to promote a continuation of the SLS, Orion, and Lunar Gateway parts of NASA’s Artemis program. And he was able to do so because senators from both parties felt the same way. They all want to continue this pork, and don’t really care whether those expensive assets can really accomplish what they promise.
Furthermore, the hearing was also structured to allow these politicians to loudly proclaim their desire to beat China back to the Moon, using this pork. They want the U.S. first, but they are almost all want to do this through a government-run program.
As such, the choice of witnesses and the questions put to them were carefully orchestrated to push this narrative. To paraphrase: “We have to beat China to the Moon! And we have make sure a NASA program runs the effort! And above all, we mustn’t let Donald Trump cut any of NASA’s funding, anywhere!”
It was therefore not surprising that the most newsworthy quote from the hearing was the comments by former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine about Starship and how its choice as a manned lunar lander was a bad one, and that it was likely going to the prime reason China will put humans back on the Moon ahead of us.
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The Spanish startup Orbital Paradigm today announced it has signed up three customers for the first flight of a subscale version of its Kestrel returnable capsule.
As it prepares for the inaugural flight of its return capsule, Orbital Paradigm has developed a subscale prototype to validate key technologies that will be used aboard Kestrel. According to the company, the prototype was built in less than a year for under €1 million.
In a 4 September announcement, Orbital Paradigm stated that its KID demonstrator will carry payloads for ALATYR (France), Leibniz University Hannover (Germany), and an undisclosed third customer. While the 4 September announcement did not include details about the Leibniz University Hannover payload or that of the undisclosed customer, ALATYR CEO Emeric Lhomme said his company’s payloads would demonstrate its robotic laboratory technology, which is designed to support microgravity research and production.
The company is also planning a second test flight with another subscale test spacecraft. Once operational in the 2030s, the company hopes to fly Kestrel monthly on three month missions.
The returnable capsule industry is certainly heating up. The American company Varda might have been first to do this in 2023-2024, but since then the field has gotten very crowded. In the U.S. we now have Inversion Space, Sierra Space, and even SpaceX using Starship.
In Europe we have The Exploration Company in France with its Nyx capsule, the German startup Atmos with its Phoenix capsule, the Spanish startup PLD with its Lince capsule, and the Luxembourg startup Space Cargo with its Bentobox capsule.
In addition, both China and Russia have recently flown returnable capsules, though it is not clear either has profit in mind.
This flood of startups strongly suggests there is great interest in the investment community for manufacturing products in space. While it is likely some of these startups will go belly-up, their number tells us that there is money to be made in this area, now that the cost of launch has dropped so significantly. With the expected advent of new rocket companies in the next two years, that cost will lower even further.
After several years of paperwork, the FAA yesterday approved SpaceX’s request to double its launch rate at the Space Force’s Cape Canaveral spaceport.
In addition to the annual launch increase from 50 launches to up to 120, the Federal Aviation Administration’s environmental review also approved a new on-site landing zone that could accommodate up to 34 booster landings per year. These boosters are the reusable first-stage portions of Falcon 9 rockets that SpaceX lands and refurbishes for future flights.
The review, finalized on Wednesday, found what’s known as a “Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact,” meaning the proposed changes “would not significantly impact the quality of the human environment” under federal law, with impacts reduced by specific protective measures. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted words illustrate the absurdity of these environmental reviews. We know without doubt and without any major review that rocket launches do no harm to the environment or wildlife. We have seven decades of data in Florida proving it.
According to the article both the FAA and the Space Force still need to issue further approvals before this request can go forward. Expect the Space Force to agree, without much bother. The FAA needs to amend SpaceX’s launch licenses, and this should also happen relatively quick, especially with Trump as president.
The cargo Dragon that docked with ISS in late August successfully completed yesterday an engine burn lasting more than five minutes to see if it could raise ISS’s orbit.
On Wednesday, Sept. 3, SpaceX’s Dragon completed an initial burn to test the spacecraft’s new capability to help maintain the altitude of the International Space Station. Two Draco engines located in the trunk of Dragon, which contains an independent propellant system, were used to adjust the space station’s orbit through a maneuver lasting five minutes, three seconds. The initial test burn increased the station’s altitude by around one mile at perigee, or low point of station’s orbit, leaving the station in an orbit of 260.9 x 256.3 miles. The new boost kit in Dragon will help sustain the orbiting lab’s altitude through a series of longer burns planned periodically throughout the fall of 2025.
The Dragon will remain docked with ISS until December. It is expected it will do additional test burns during that time.
NASA wishes to get this capability from its own spacecraft so as to no longer have to rely entirely on the Russians, who have traditionally done these orbital adjustments using its Progress cargo freighters. SpaceX likely also wants to do these tests as an adjunct to its contract to build the de-orbit vehicle that will bring ISS down, after it is retired.
An evening pause: From the original 1960s television show, which was actually quite funny and original (unlike the turgid 1991 movie).
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
France’s space agency CNES has awarded a €31 million contract to France startup Univity to build a demo satellite to demonstrate internet and phone-to-satellite capabilities, as part a longer term plan to build a constellation that can compete with both SpaceX’s Starlink and AST SpaceMobile constellation, both already launched and in operation.
Founded in 2022 under the name Constellation Technologies & Operations, UNIVITY aims to develop a very low Earth orbit constellation to provide global high-speed, low-latency internet services. A prototype of the company’s regenerative 5G mmWave payload was part of a 23 June SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission, hosted aboard the D-Orbit SpaceBound ION mission. The company expects to launch a pair of prototype satellites in 2027, followed by the deployment of its full constellation between 2028 and 2030.
This deal likely puts the final nail in the coffin of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) own government IRIS satellite constellation, which has been delayed, is expected to be very expensive and take a long time to get launched, and has already faced disinterest from many partners in ESA. That France is now going it alone likely ends any chance that IRIS will be funded.
Both Israel and SpaceX completed new launches during the evening hours yesterday. First, Israel placed an Ofek radar surveillance satellite into orbit, its small solid-fueld Shavit-2 rocket lifting off from an undisclosed location within the country, likely its Palmachim Airbase on the Mediterranean coast south of Tel Aviv. The launch occurred about the same time as SpaceX’s Starlink launch from Vandenberg, already reported last night.
This was Israel’s first launch in 2025, and the first since 2023. Since 2008 the country has launched seven military surveillance satellites, one about every two to four years or so.
Several hours later, in the wee hours of the morning, SpaceX completed another launch, placing 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage completed its fourteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
112 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 112 to 85.
SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage was new, successfully completing its first flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
111 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 111 to 84.
An evening pause: This “music” video intentionally illustrates why I prefer live performances over most “official” music videos that show a fake visual story under the music, as if that story and the music have something to do with each other, when they never really do. This video instead shows us what the music video would sound like if you focused instead on this fake story. Quick funny at times.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette, who writes, “Great concept! What happens when you take a Music Video and de-emphasize the music & band performance, and concentrate on the story being told in the background?”
Gone, and likely soon to be forgotten
Link here. The article depends almost entirely on anonymous sources, but unlike most propaganda news stories which typically use such sources to push one pro-government perspective, this article includes sources from a range of viewpoints.
According to those sources who wanted the UK Space Agency (UKSA) gone, the agency was eliminated last month because it simply had not been very effective in building up Great Britain’s space industry. First, it was too focused on doing what the European Space Agency wanted.
The U.K. has had a different approach to space than its European counterparts, such as Germany, France and Italy, the source explained. Historically, the U.K. has dedicated most of its resources to the European Space Agency (ESA) rather than pursuing a multipronged approach involving a strong domestic space program and bilateral partnerships independent of ESA. Therefore, over 80% of UKSA’s budget has been placed into ESA. The perception in the government was that UKSA was acting more in line with ESA’s wishes than with the U.K. government’s needs, the source added.
Second, it not only did nothing to alleviate the red tape hampering the industry, its existence added a layer that made things worse. Numerous studies and hearings before Parliament in the past five years have bewailed the situation. The inability of the rocket companies to get launch licenses — for years — proved their correctness.
Meanwhile, the anonymous sources opposing the agency’s elimination argued that without it Great Britain will be in a weaker position negotiating with its ESA partners as well as projecting itself internationally in the space field.
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South Korea’s space agency KASA today submitted its proposed budget for 2026 that included a 15% budget increase which would bring its funding to just under $8 billion.
According to the national space agency, the proposed funds will be concentrated in six major areas, which include the strengthening of space transportation capacity and new technology acquisition, advancing satellite-based communications, navigation and observation, as well as fostering future space industries through exploration.
The largest requested increases would be for developing new satellite constellations and rockets.
When the South Korean government established this agency in in 2024, it said its goal was to foster private enterprise. The agency itself repeated that assertion in January 2025 when it announced its long term plans. In both cases, however, I sensed a lack of sincerity in these assertions. The government wanted wanted to help build a prosperous aerospace industry, but it clearly wanted to do so with it in control.
Today’s budget request again reinforces my suspicions. KASA might want to encourage a commercial space industry, but it remains unclear whether it will let the private sector develop the satellites and rockets independently, or pay for the development while insisting it owns and controls everything.
Based on past history at NASA, my instincts say KASA will use this big budget to build an empire for its managers. Stay tuned to see if my instincts are correct.
The beat goes on! SpaceX this morning successfully launched 28 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 23rd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
110 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 110 to 84.
SpaceX this evening successfully launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its fifteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
109 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 109 to 84.
An evening pause: A science quiz I suspect most of my readers will get right. Regardless, this experiment illustrates some basic fundamentals of the scientific method: Don’t guess, make no assumptions, test by experimentation, and repeat those tests multiple times to confirm your results.
The Institute that made this video appears to be a great resource for homeschoolers.
Hat tip Cotour, who tells me he “got it correct!”
To everyone: Enjoy the Labor Day weekend!
SpaceX earlier today launched another 28 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first stage completed its 30th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. This is a new reuse record for a Falcon 9 first stage. At this moment only the space shuttles Discovery (39 flights) and Atlantis (33 flights) have flown more often.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
108 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 108 to 84.
An evening pause: Performed live on television 1975. Above these guys are musical showmen.
Hat tip Wamphyr.
An evening pause: Performed live c2016. The Peter Gunn showed aired in the late 1950s.
Hat tip Don Carrera.
Because SpaceX’s new Starship factory, dubbed Gigabay, will create more than 500 new jobs in the Boca Chica region, the Starbase city commission this week awarded the company a sales tax refund valued as much as $3.75 million.
Gigabay will create about 630 new jobs, according to information Barrera showed the City Commission. That number included 315 entry-level jobs, which pay nearly $50,000 a year; 277 staff jobs, which pay nearly $90,000 a year; and 26 manager positions, which pay about $164,000 a year. … At least 25% of the jobs must be filled by veterans, residents of the enterprise zone or people who are considered economically disadvantaged.
SpaceX may receive a sales tax refund of $7,500 per job if the company invests $250 million. The program is capped at 500 jobs, allowing SpaceX to receive a maximum of $3,750,000.
Once again, the opposition to SpaceX does not come from the general public, which overwhelming supports what the company is doing in south Texas because of the wealth it is bringing to the region. The only opposition comes from fringe and very tiny leftist activist groups who oppose anything new, and specifically hate Elon Musk because he backed Donald Trump in last year’s election.
Sadly, those fringe groups are also backed by the propaganda press, which gives them a loud bullhorn they don’t deserve. It is imperative that Texas politicians recognize these facts, and not let that bullhorn bully them into actions detrimental to their constituents.
A Texas brewery dubbed Starbase Brewing (no connection to SpaceX) has just completed an experiment on ISS where it tried to brew beer in weightlessness as well as grow barley in simulated Martian soil.
Starbase Brewing — unrelated to Elon Musk’s space company or its South Texas city of Starbase — sent its MicroBrew-1 and OASIS experiments to the International Space Station aboard a SpaceX mission Aug. 1. They came back aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that splashed down eight days later off the coast of California.
…OASIS, short for “Optimizing Agriculture in Simulated Interplanetary Soils,” is the result of a partnership between the beer maker, Texas A&M AgriLife and Jaguar Space, a Colorado bioastronautics firm. According to Argroves, who launched the company in 2020, the goal was to grow barley in a mixture of Martian soil simulant with a byproduct of beermaking called Brewer’s Spent Grain and microbes.
The MicroBrew-1 experiment attempted to ferment beer, mixing “eight containers loaded with half wort — the sugary liquid extracted from malted grains — and half yeast.”
The company is far from manufacturing space-grown beer, but its founder seems focused on being the first brewery selling beer on Mars.
