Tag: commercial

An interesting look at why the British government decided to eliminate its space agency

8:55 am

Gone, and likely soon to be forgotten
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.
» Read more

6 comments

South Korea’s space agency requests big 15% budget increase

9:28 am

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.

0 comments

SpaceX launches another 28 Starlink satellites

8:59 am

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.

4 comments

SpaceX launches 24 more Starlink satellites

10:08 pm

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.

0 comments

Idealized Science Institute – Which ramp reaches highest final speed?

6:01 pm

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!

7 comments

SpaceX launches 28 more Starlink satellites while setting a new reuse record for a Falcon 9 1st stage

12:42 am

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.

4 comments

SpaceX gets major tax credit for the jobs its new Starship factory will create.

1:29 pm

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.

1 comment

Texas brewery tries brewing beer and growing barley on ISS

1:19 pm

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.

11 comments

Study: Car design has worsened, increasing blindspots which cause accidents

9:21 am

The view out of a modern car
The view out of a modern car

Our present dark age: According to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), in the past two decades the design of cars has drastically decreased the visibility for drivers so that blindspots are larger, resulting in an increase in accidents.

Puzzled by traffic accident data showing that fatalities for cyclists and pedestrians had risen over the past 25 years, while car passenger deaths had come down, IIHS researchers wondered whether drivers might be finding it harder to see those more vulnerable road users.

And they discovered that successive versions of long-running popular cars had obstructed, more and more, a driver’s view of the 10 meters (33 ft) of space they were about to drive into. That near-car view, from the eye point of the average male driver, had shrunk on every one of six long-running models tested, IIHS testing showed, when an early (1997-plus) version was compared with the version on sale in 2023.

In the case of traditional cars, the near-car viewable area had contracted only slightly, the 7-8% reductions from the Honda Accord and Toyota Camry possibly even attributable to measurement error.

When it came to SUVs, however, the shrinkage was dramatic. The driver of a 1997 Honda CR-V could see 68% of a forward half-circle whose perimeter was 10 meters (33 ft) from their eye point – slightly more, in fact, than from the sedans that were tested. The driver of a 2023 CR-V could see just 28% of that semi-circle. In relative terms, the driver of the 2023 CR-V could see only 42% of what they would see from a 1997 model.

You can read the IIHS study here.

Why are designers doing this? One theory is that they are increasingly relying on cameras and software to replace the driver’s sight, and thus feel free to add obstructions to the car body that make it look cool. The problem is that these mechanical non-human solutions simply don’t work as well as the human brain, and thus drivers are hitting things more often.

But don’t worry. Soon AI will soon make it possible for cars will drive themselves! We will even be able to eliminate the windows entirely so that car travel will be an utterly private thing!

20 comments

SpaceX launches X-37B for Space Force

9:11 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched the Space Force’s X-37B mini-shuttle, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

This is the eighth mission for the Space Force’s two X-37Bs. It appears this flight is fourth for this particular X-37B, but this is not confirmed. Nor do we know how long this particular will last in orbit.

SpaceX’s first stage completed its sixth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The fairing halves completed their first and second flights respectively.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

102 SpaceX
47 China
11 Rocket Lab
11 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 102 to 82.

0 comments

Avio gets 10-year lease from France to launch its Vega-C from French Guiana

9:44 am

The Italian rocket company Avio has now signed a 10-year lease with France to continue to launch its Vega-C from that nation’s French Guiana spaceport.

In a press release published on 19 August, the French Ministry of the Economy, Finance, and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty confirmed that, in line with the Seville agreement, Avio had been granted a ten-year licence.

…Avio will make use of the ELV launch complex at the Guiana Space Centre for the launch of its Vega C rockets. The pad was previously used for the original Vega rocket, which was officially retired in September 2024.

This deal is part of Europe’s move away from its centralized government-run Arianespace operations to the capitalism model. It has already shifted control of French Guiana from Arianespace back to France’s space agency CNES, which has begun to sign multiple similar deals with other European rocket startups. It is now in the process of shifting control of the Vega-C from Arianespace back to its builder, Avio, a shift that should be completed by the end of this year.

At that time, Avio will market the rocket commercially worldwide. Arianespace will no longer be a government middleman. This launchpad deal solidifies its access to a launch site, which it also plans to use for its next Vega upgrade, the Vega-E.

0 comments

Firefly studying feasibility of launching from northern Japanese spaceport

9:07 am

Japan's spaceports
Japan’s spaceports indicated by red dots.

Firefly and the commercial Japanese Hokkaido spaceport in the north of Japan have begun a feasibility study for launching Firefly’s Alpha rocket there.

Establishing an memorandum of understanding with the Hokkaido Spaceport means that the two entities can flesh out a more concrete launch complex design and figure out all of the logistics to bring Alpha launch capabilities to Japan.

In the past Hokkaido has been the location for a number of suborbital launches, but no orbital launches as yet. For example, the Japanese startup Interstellar used this site for its suborbital test flights in 2018, and hopes to use it for future orbital flights.

Firefly meanwhile has launched its Alpha rocket multiple times from Vandenberg in California. The company is also building a launchpad at Wallops Island in Virginia, and has signed a deal with the Esrange spaceport in Sweden. The Swedish launch site however is questionable because any orbital launch from there would have to cross over land of other countries, and so far it appears permission for such a thing has not been arranged. Firefly might therefore be looking at Hookaiddo for precisely this reason.

0 comments
1 … 38 39 40 41 42 … 539