Low Darts – My Old School
An evening pause: Great cover by a group of high school students of this Steely Dan song.
Hat tip Cotour.
Tag: commercial
Two lawsuits against SpaceX, claiming company operations damage local homes
Starship and Superheavy ascending during October test flight.
SEE UPDATE BELOW for info on 2nd lawsuit.
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In what appears to be another frivolous lawsuit aimed at SpaceX, about 80 homeowners located from five to ten miles away from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site at Boca Chica have now sued the company, claiming Starship launches have damaged their homes.
The 53 homes are in small towns between 5 and 10 miles from SpaceX’s launch complex near Boca Chica Beach outside Brownsville with 43 in Port Isabel and the others in Laguna Vista, Laguna Heights and South Padre Island.
The lawsuit doesn’t describe the specific damage incurred by each homeowner, but there have been reports of houses shaking, items falling off shelves and broken windows after previous launches and landings of Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket.
“SpaceX has repeatedly subjected the surrounding areas to extraordinary amounts of acoustic energy including noise, vibrations, and sonic booms,” it said of the flights, which can produce multiple sonic booms in addition to the sustained noise of launch, depending on the mission. Starship operations have subjected the plaintiffs’ homes “to repeated intense and damaging acoustic events,” the lawsuit said. [emphasis mine]
In other words, the launches are noisy, and might have caused some things to fall off shelves and might have broken windows. Note too that in Florida the safety zone around launches is three miles, and comparable rockets to Superheavy/Starship (Saturn-1B, Saturn-5, the Space Shuttle and SLS) have repeatedly launched there without causing any noticeable damage. I myself watched a shuttle launch from five miles away and found the sound of the launch actually disappointing. It certainly wasn’t going to cause damage to anything at that distance.
This lawsuit therefore appears simply to be a case of some lawyer trying to blackmail a big company for some ready cash. Its origin might also stem from the insane leftwing hate of Musk because he had to gall to support the election of Donald Trump in 2024. Note too that the author of the article at the link, Brandon Lingle, seems to be one of those insane anti-Musk haters, as he never has anything good to say about SpaceX, and treats all environmentalists like saints.
UPDATE: It appears the same law firm behind the lawsuit above has filed a second lawsuit for 80 other landowners in the vicinity of SpaceX’s MacGregor test site near Waco, claiming the static fire engine tests there are causing them unspecified problems as well. As with the lawsuit above, it appears the claims are mostly an attempt to squeeze money from SpaceX, with some of that effort fueled by anti-Musk hatred.
Lockheed Martin joins partnership to build off-shore launch platform
Artist’s rendering of Seagate platform. Click for original.
According to a post yesterday by Johnathon Caldwell, a vice president and general manager at Lockheed Martin, the company will be joining the partnership of Seagate and Firefly to build an off-shore launch platform from which Firefly hopes to launch its Alpha rocket.
The three companies will work together on mission‑application concepts and flight‑demonstration projects that leverage Seagate’s Gateway offshore launch platform. This sea‑based launch facility, combined with Firefly’s responsive Alpha launch vehicle, will provide rapid, flexible access to space from diverse locations, an essential capability for tactical payloads and national‑security missions.
Seagate only went public with this project in late March. Firefly signed on in April. Now Lockheed Martin has joined. It appears the concept has great potential for it to attract so much interest so quickly. Nor should this be surprising. The Chinese have been very successful in the past two years with its own sea platform, and the concept was proven years ago with Sea Launch.
Though Firefly presently launches Alpha from Vandenberg, the company also has deals with Sweden’s Esrange spaceport and a lease for a pad at Cape Canaveral. It has also been studying launching from a proposed commercial spaceport in northern Japan. This partnership with Seagate might allow it to abandon all these land-based sites, or supplement them.
Lockheed Martin in the past has invested heavily in new rocket companies, including Rocket Lab, ABL, Orbex, and X-Bow. Of these, only Rocket Lab has succeeded. With this deal Lockheed is looking for another option for getting its commercial and military payloads into orbit, with a much greater launch flexibility.
Blue Origin’s 1st unmanned lunar lander completes ground testing
Blue Origin’s unmanned Blue Moon MK-1 lunar lander
in test chamber. Click for original image.
Blue Origin’s 1st unmanned lunar lander, dubbed Blue Moon Mark-1 (MK-1) or “Endurance,” has completed ground testing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, prior to its planned launch before the end of this year.
The NASA press release however said nothing about the results of that testing.
Testing in NASA Johnson’s Chamber A, one of the world’s largest thermal vacuum test facilities, enabled engineers to model the vacuum of space and the extreme temperature conditions the spacecraft would experience during flight. By recreating these conditions on the ground, teams evaluated system performance and verified structural and thermal integrity prior to launch. NASA and Blue Origin will incorporate lessons learned from MK1’s design, integration, and testing to support NASA’s future Artemis missions that will return American astronauts to the Moon.
Normally when such testing is completed the press release touts their success. The vagueness in the language above is to my instincts somewhat concerning. Did they find something in that testing that needs modification prior to launch? If so, getting this lander off the ground before the end of the year is going to be questionable, as those fixes will have to be incorporated and then tested again.
Any delay such as this would in turn impact the first test in orbit of Blue Origin’s manned Blue Moon MK-2 lunar lander, scheduled for late 2027 during the Artemis-3 manned mission, where NASA wishes to test rendezvous and docking for both Blue Origin’s lander and SpaceX’s Starship.
Some clarity here would be reassuring.
Gilligan’s Island, if done today
An evening pause: As expected, this silly 1960s comedy has to become a predictable formula horror vehicle, filled with lots of AI and CGI slop. Quite funny, until you think about it for awhile.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Is SpaceX buying a 200-plus square mile patch of Louisiana?
According to a real estate agent in Louisiana, there is credible but unconfirmed evidence that SpaceX is in the process of buying a 136,000 acre plot of land owned by Exxon on the coast of Louisiana west of New Orleans, near the unincorporated town of Pecan Island.
The rumor — repeated in private group chats, in coffee shops in Abbeville, and in hunting camps from Forked Island to Grand Chenier — is that SpaceX has acquired or is in the process of acquiring approximately 136,000 acres of coastal Louisiana marshland straddling Pecan Island and Freshwater City in Vermilion Parish. The footprint reportedly stretches from south of Highway 82 down to the Gulf of America, encompassing some of the most ecologically rich and economically untouched wetlands in North America.
If true, this would be the single largest private land acquisition in the modern history of Vermilion Parish. To put it in perspective: 136,000 acres is roughly 212 square miles — bigger than the entire city of New Orleans. SpaceX’s existing Boca Chica/Starbase facility in South Texas, which has reshaped Brownsville’s economy and real estate market in just five years, is built on a footprint of less than 100 acres. A 136,000-acre Louisiana site would not be a launch pad. It would be an industrial campus on a scale never before seen in American aerospace.
I must emphasize that this agent is speculating, and that there is no confirmed evidence that SpaceX is the rumored buyer. At the same time, the agent has done his homework. This purchase by SpaceX would make sense on multiple levels. It would give it a very large facility smack dab between Boca Chica and Florida, on the Gulf, so that if Starships are manufactured here they could be easily shipped both east and west to those launch sites. This facility would also give SpaceX to option of shifting more of its operations out of unfriendly California and to a more friendly state, something Elon Musk has been doing since the Covid panic.
It would allow for the construction of larger data centers and satellite manufacturing factories, without much opposition from local communities.
Finally, there is the possibility this location could also serve as a spaceport, though it would only work well for polar orbits.
Stay tuned. If this speculation is true we should find out momentarily.
Hat tip reader Steve Golson.
SpaceX launches South Korean Earth imaging satellite plus 44 other smallsats
SpaceX at about midnight tonight successfully launched a South Korean Earth imaging satellite as well as 44 other smallsats, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. As of posting the satellites had not yet been deployed.
The first stage (B1071) completed its 33rd flight, landing back at Vandenberg, 50 days after its previous flight. With this flight, the booster moves into a third place tie with the Atlantis shuttle shuttle in the rankings of the most reused launch vehicles:
39 Discovery space shuttle
34 Falcon 9 booster B1067
33 Atlantis space shuttle
33 Falcon 9 booster B1071
32 Falcon 9 booster B1063
31 Falcon 9 booster B1069
28 Columbia space shuttle
27 Falcon 9 booster B1077
27 Falcon 9 booster B1078
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
54 SpaceX
23 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 54 to 44.
EAA – Warbird From Scratch: A Homebuilt Spitfire
An evening pause: The builder is a guy from Arizona, Bob DeFord.
Hat tip Cotour.
$2 bill that Gene Cernan carried on three missions sells for more than $90K
The $2 bill that astronaut Gene Cernan carried on all three of his space missions in 60s and 70s has now sold at auction for $91,519.
Signed and flight-certified by Cernan, the bill is encapsulated and graded by Paper Money Guaranty (PMG) as Choice Fine 15. The holder notes its provenance as having been flown aboard Gemini 9A (1966), Apollo 10 (1969), and Apollo 17 (1972), and traces its origin to Cernan’s personal collection.
A signed letter of provenance from Cernan states that the bill was originally owned by his father and later carried by the astronaut on each of his spaceflights. The letter documents its presence during low Earth orbit on Gemini 9A, lunar orbit on Apollo 10, and on the lunar surface during Apollo 17.
This auction was space-focused and realized a total of $1,764,603. It included items from a number of other Gemini and Apollo missions, including an American flag that astronaut Dave Scott flew on Gemini 8, the mission that achieved the first docking in space but then had to due an emergency splashdown because a thruster began firing uncontrollably. It sold for $47,406.
Hat tip reader Wayne DeVette.
No Starliner mission to ISS this year
Though in February 2026 NASA officials suggested there might be a Starliner cargo mission to ISS sometime in April 2026, the new schedule released today for ISS manned and cargo missions for the rest of this year shows no Starliner missions at all.
The press release hinted an extra Starliner mission could be added, but don’t but too much faith in this:
Launch opportunities for NASA’s uncrewed Boeing Starliner-1 cargo mission remain under review as teams continue working through technical issues discovered during the Crew Flight Test in 2024, as well as final actions from the Program Investigation Team report. The agency is assessing operational readiness and space station traffic to determine the earliest feasible launch window.
What I think is happening in NASA is that the agency under Isaacman wants a better assurance from Boeing that the problems with Starliner have been fixed, and Boeing is having trouble satisfying them. If so, it seems he is doing what I suggested in February, demand from Boeing the highest quality work or don’t buy anything from it at all. If so kudos to Isaacman.
It is also possible Isaacman doesn’t want to spend extra money paying Boeing for this extra cargo mission to prove out Starliner’s systems. Boeing’s contract for Starliner is fixed price, and the capsule’s multiple problems has now cost the company more than a billion dollars. It is unlikely it will have make a profit on it, which is why it wants NASA to pay for that cargo flight.
Either way, the first operational manned mission using Starliner continues to recede into the future, to the point where ISS might be gone before the capsule is finally okayed for manned flights.
SpaceX launches 29 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX today successfully placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The first stage (B1069) completed its 31st flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic, 63 days after its previous flight. It remains in 6th place in the rankings of the most reused launch vehicles:
39 Discovery space shuttle
34 Falcon 9 booster B1067
33 Atlantis space shuttle
32 Falcon 9 booster B1071
32 Falcon 9 booster B1063
31 Falcon 9 booster B1069
28 Columbia space shuttle
27 Falcon 9 booster B1077
27 Falcon 9 booster B1078
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
53 SpaceX
23 China
8 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, 53 to 44.
FCC approves new spectrum rules to give new constellations more capacity
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) yesterday approved new spectrum rules proposed by SpaceX that will increase the capacity of all the new low-Earth-orbit constellations by as much as seven times.
The commission introduced the new rules earlier this month before approving them at a Thursday meeting. The revamp targets the Equivalent Power Flux Density (EPFD) rules, which were developed in the late 1990s and limited the amount of energy satellite systems could transmit to and from ground equipment. The regulations were also designed to prevent radio signal interference between higher-orbiting geostationary satellites and lower-orbiting systems. But during the vote, Carr said the decades-old existing rules were “holding back” newer satellite internet offerings.
“Modern satellite designs make it far easier to share spectrum than what yesterday’s regulations assumed. We can do a lot better,” he said. Carr touted the 7x increase when the commission found the revamped rules could enable “eight satellites to provide service simultaneously in a given geographic area and frequency band, instead of being effectively limited to one satellite under current EPFD limits.”
The FCC was sold on this change after SpaceX conducted its own tests in orbit, using Starlink satellites, to demonstrate it could work. The rule change will benefit all the new constellations, which is why Amazon’s Leo constellation supported the change as well.
The speed in which the FCC acted on this matter must also be noted. It did not bother with long studies of its own. It quickly reviews SpaceX’s work, realized it made sense, and scheduled the vote at its very next meeting. This constrasts starkly with the FCC during the Biden administration, which routinely slow-walked or even opposed such suggestions.