An evening pause: Peter Jacoby is conducting (?) Orchestra X. For those who are unaware, PDQ Bach is the stage name used by Peter Schickele in performing his comedic music. Fans of both classical music and sports will really enjoy this.
Hat tip to Alex Gimarc.
It appears the Kazakhstan government is making multiple internet satellite constellations available to its citizens in an effort to increase competition and lower costs.
Kazakhstan first engaged with Starlink in 2023, following government frustration over the slow pace of domestic telecom expansion. The project initially connected 2,000 rural schools, and by mid-2024 nearly 1,800 had access to satellite internet.
Authorities briefly considered banning satellite internet services operated from abroad late last year, citing national security concerns, but withdrew the proposal after a public backlash.
Meanwhile, competition in the country’s nascent satellite internet market is heating up. In September 2024, Kazakhstan signed an agreement with Amazon to bring its Project Kuiper satellite network to the country, setting up a future rival to Starlink. Prime Minister Olzhas Bektenov said the move would help improve affordability and service quality. Chinese firm Spacesail Kazakhstan, a subsidiary of Spacesail International, has also registered at the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC) with $17mn in capital, positioning itself as another potential player in the mega-constellation internet sector.
When Kazakhstan opened Starlink to all its citizens in June 2025, I noted how this deal indicated the country’s move away from Russia. Its willingness now to add Kuiper and Spacesail deals accelerates that move, in numerous ways. It not only wants its citizens to have capabilities that Russia cannot control, it wants to encourage competition to lower costs for those citizens. What a concept!
Like the Ukraine, Kazakhstan is working hard to exceed Russia in technology, in order to make it much harder for its big and very power-hungry neighbor to dominate or even invade it.
The Italian rocket company Avio has now signed deals with both Lockheed Martin and Raytheon to provide each with solid-fueled rocket motors for U.S. missiles, built at its planned American-based factory, expected to begin operations in 2028.
Under the arrangement with Lockheed Martin, “Lockheed Martin will have preferred access to a portion of the Avio USA plant production capacity to meet future demand for its products,” according to Avio. Tim Cahill, president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, said the collaboration “positions us to increase production of essential capabilities and deliver them to our customers faster as global demand grows.”
Raytheon will receive similar preferred access to production capacity under a comparable agreement. The deal follows a July 2024 contract between the companies for preliminary engineering work on a tactical rocket motor for Raytheon’s Standard missile program for the U.S. Navy. Bob Butz, vice president of operations, supply chain and quality at Raytheon, said the agreement “will help establish an additional supplier of solid rocket motors within the U.S.”
In both cases, these solid-fueled motors will be used in U.S. missiles.
Since Avio regained control of its rockets and engines from Arianespace — the government-controlled commercial arm of the European Space Agency (ESA) – it has been moving very fast to obtain customers worldwide. Under ESA control, Arianespace was focused on doing business in Europe, so establishing a factory in the U.S. to garner U.S. business was never even considered. Avio is not hindered by such restrictions, and it is therefore looking for profits wherever it can find them. It has committed almost a half billion dollars to build this U.S. factory, and has begun signing up international satellite companies for its Vega-C rocket. It is also begun work on a Grasshopper-type test vehicle, with plans to incorporate this concept into Vega-C, making its first stage reusable.
The above deal also indicates that Avio is grabbing market share from the established American makers of solid fueled rockets, especially Northrop Grumman. Apparently those American companies aren’t providing manufacturing capacity required by the Pentagon.
Launch platforms proposed for North Sea
The German company OHB has now formed a new subsidiary, The European Spaceport Company, to consolidate its various spaceport projects, its proposed North Sea offshore launch platform as well as the launchpads it is building at French Guiana.
According to an 11 November OHB press release, the initial goals of the new European Spaceport Company, which will be based in Bremen, are the “realisation of a European offshore spaceport and the expansion of launch capacities at the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana to include a launch complex that can be used for various rocket types.”
The home port for the offshore spaceport, dubbed the Offshore Spaceport Alliance, will be in Bremen, as shown by the map to the right. The launch facilities the company is building in French Guiana are for the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg as well as Arianespace’s Ariane-6 rocket.
The North Sea launch platform appears to be an attempt to give the three German rocket startups, Rocket Factory, Isar Aerospace, and Hyimpulse, a German-based launchpad close to Europe, rather than have to rely on the new spaceports in the United Kingdom, Norway, and Sweden that surround the Norwegian Sea to the north.
Artist’s rendering of Neutron’s first stage fairings opening
to deploy the payload with the second stage engine.
Despite a concerted effort in the past year to achieve the first launch of its new reusable larger Neutron rocket before the end of 2025, Rocket Lab this week revealed that the company is now targeting a 2026 launch instead.
Sir Peter Beck, the CEO of Rocket Lab, announced the shift in plans during the third quarter earnings call with investors on Nov. 10. He said that the company’s goal is to get the rocket out to Launch Complex 3 at the Virginia Spaceport Authority’s (VSA) Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) within the first quarter of 2026 “with first launch thereafter.”
“As always, this is a rocket program that’s been completed at a pace and a cost that nobody has achieved before and the financial and long-term impacts are insignificant to take a little bit more time to get it right,” Beck told investors on the call.
During the call officials also made clear that there would be no attempt to recover the first stage on that first flight, as the landing barge won’t be ready by then. It hopes a landing attempt will occur on the second flight.
Finally, officials revealed that the company has spent a bit more to develop Neutron then the originally planned cost of between $250 to $300 million. Right now it expects to spend about $360 million by the end of 2025.
This delay or the increased cost are relatively inconsequential when looked at in context. Rocket Lab had only started this project in 2021. To create a new rocket in less than five years for only about a quarter of a billion dollars is quite unprecedented.
Note: My original post mistated the time of launch. Below is a corrected text:
SpaceX tonight at 10:21 pm (Eastern) successfully launched another 29 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its third flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
I specify the launch time because it occurred just outside the FAA’s so-called curfew banning all launches from 6 am to 10 pm local time, due to the government shutdown and a shortage of air traffic controllers to coordinate aviation and rocket launches. Though the Senate today voted to end the shutdown, that shutdown has not yet ended, and won’t until the House passes the Senate budget version and Trump signs it.
Thus, it appears Blue Origin has negotiated an exemption for its now planned launch of New Glenn on November 12, 2025 in the afternoon.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
147 SpaceX (a new record)
70 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 147 to 115.
Note that I had made an error in entering my numbers earlier this week in regards to China, and have now corrected the mistake, thus revising the numbers in the last few launch reports.
An evening pause: Performed live on the Dean Martin Show, 1966.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
The beat goes on: Since yesterday there were three launches globally, two by China and one by SpaceX, with a fourth launch scheduled by Blue Origin only a few hours hence. UPDATE: Blue Origin launch scrubbed due to weather].
First China’s solid-fueled Long March 11 rocket placed three classified military test satellites into orbit, lifting off from an ocean platform off China’s northeastern coast.
Next, China’s solid-fueled Kinetica-1 (Lijian-1) rocket placed two “technical satellites” into orbit, lifting off from the “commercial” launchpad at the Jiuquan spaceport in the country’s northwest. As is normal, China’s press provided no information about the satellites, nor where Kinetica-1’s lower stages crashed inside China. The rocket itself is supposedly commercial, but it is built by a government agency, the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Finally, in the early morning hours today SpaceX placed 29 more Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The first stage (B1069) completed its 28th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. With this launch this booster tied the space shuttle Columbia for the number of reuses by a launch vehicle. As the rankings for the most reused launch vehicles below show, SpaceX now has four boosters close to becoming the most reused rockets ever.
39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
31 Falcon 9 booster B1067
29 Falcon 9 booster B1071
29 Falcon 9 booster B1063
28 Falcon 9 booster B1069
28 Columbia space shuttle
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
146 SpaceX (a new record)
69 China (a new record)
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 146 to 114.
Blue Origin hopes to launch two NASA smallsat Mars orbiters later today from Cape Canaveral, using its New Glenn rocket. That launch is scheduled for 2:35 pm (Eastern). The company will once again attempt to land the first stage on a platform in the Atlantic. I have embedded the live stream below.
UPDATE: Launch scrubbed due to weather. The negotiations with the FAA (see below) now take on greater importance.
This will be the second launch of New Glenn, eleven months after its maiden flight in January. As has been the company’s culture for the past decade, it has moved very slowly from that first launch to this second. This pace however must accelerate soon, as Blue Origin has a 27-launch contract with Amazon to launch part of its Kuiper satellites. Amazon only has 154 satellites in orbit, and needs to get about 1,600 in place by July 2016 to meet the requirements of its FCC license. It also has launch contracts with ULA (46 launches, three of which have been completed) and ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6 (18 launches), but neither can on their own launch enough to do the job.
One last note: For this launch, Blue Origin is trying to arrange an exemption from the FAA’s curfew on day launches that begins tomorrow, in case some issue causes a scrub today. No word as yet on whether the FAA will agree.
» Read more
An evening pause: This proves the value of having the right tools. Even so, you have to use your brain and know what you are doing.
It works to run this at 2x speed, by the way.
Hat tip Cotour.
Because of budget cuts by the Trump administration, the revenues of the satellite imaging company Blacksky fell in the third quarter of 2025, but the company expects to make up that loss with new income from international customers.
The administration’s fiscal 2026 budget proposal includes a one-third reduction to the National Reconnaissance Office’s commercial imagery procurement, a move that has rippled through companies like BlackSky that rely heavily on government intelligence contracts. The cuts specifically affect the Electro-Optical Commercial Layer (EOCL) program — an NRO initiative to buy satellite imagery from commercial providers.
BlackSky reported $19.6 million in third-quarter revenue, missing analyst expectations and down from the previous quarter. Chief Executive Brian O’Toole told analysts the reduction stemmed from adjustments to the company’s EOCL contract “to reflect the potential baseline budget submitted by the administration.”
Sound terrible, eh? Not so fast.
Despite the domestic headwinds, BlackSky is seeing a sharp uptick in overseas business. The company said international sales now account for about half of total revenue, up from 40% a year ago. O’Toole said foreign demand is “outpacing our U.S. government business” and that the company expects international sales to exceed U.S. sales for the first time in 2026.
Blacksky is of course blocked from selling its high resolution reconnaissance imagery to hostile powers, but there are plenty of American allies out there who want this data.
The situation is simple. When American companies are given the freedom to produce, they will create products of value. And the sky won’t fall if the federal government can no longer be their main customer.
Echostar announced this week that it has sold additional spectrum that had been licensed to it by the FCC to SpaceX, getting in return about $2.6 billion in SpaceX stock.
EchoStar has entered into an amended definitive agreement with SpaceX to sell the company’s unpaired AWS-3 licenses for approximately $2.6 billion in SpaceX stock valued as of September 2025. This transaction builds on the agreement the companies entered into in September. EchoStar’s unpaired AWS-3 licenses are nationwide and are part of 3GPP Band 70n (1695-1710 MHz uplink). “This transaction with SpaceX, in addition to our previously announced spectrum transactions and commercial agreements, will strengthen EchoStar’s ability to develop new business opportunities and growth in value for our shareholders,” said Hamid Akhavan, CEO, EchoStar Capital. “The combination of AWS-3 uplink, AWS-4 and H-block spectrum from EchoStar with the rocket launch and satellite manufacturing capabilities from SpaceX accelerates the realization of powerful and economical direct-to-cell service offerings for consumers and enterprises worldwide, including our Boost Mobile customers.”
In other words, Echostar was not making any money from this spectrum on its own. By partnering with SpaceX it can do so, because SpaceX has the satellites and rockets capable of making it happen, and a cost that is affordable.
Nor should the companies have much problem getting FCC approval. Echostar had previously been accused of under-utilizing its licensed spectrum. This deal with SpaceX helps solve that issue.
In other Starlink news, SpaceX has begun rolling out Starlink service in India, while also striking a deal with British Airlines to use Starlink on its airplanes.
SpaceX today successfully launched another 28 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its 8th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
ULA for the second day in a row was forced to scrub a launch of a Viasat communications satellite due to “a reoccurrence of the issue with the Atlas V booster liquid oxygen tank vent valve.” No new launch data has as yet been announced.
The contrast between these two rocket companies here is truly striking. In the past two days SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 has launched twice, like clockwork, while ULA can’t get off the ground because of a valve issue, the kind of niggling problem that routinely scrubs its launches. It is thus rare that ULA launches on time, on schedule, as planned.
SpaceX’s launch however sets a new record for successfully launches in a single year by the entire world, 257, breaking the record set last year. These numbers are two to five times what the global launch industry managed annually for most of the space age, and signal the renaissance in rocketry brought on by Elon Musk and SpaceX. Nor I think have we reached peak numbers. Not even close.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
145 SpaceX (a new record)
67 China
14 Rocket Lab
13 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 145 to 112.
