Al Kooper & friends – Something going on
An evening pause: A blues piece performed live 1994.
Hat tip Alec Gimarc, who adds that “Al Kooper was the creative force behind Blood Sweat & Tears.”
Tag: commercial
Honda’s grasshopper rocket successfully completes vertical take-off and landing
Honda today successfully completed the first test of its own grasshopper prototype rocket, with the rocket reaching a height of 890 feet before landing vertically 56 seconds after launch.
I have embedded the video of the flight below.
Honda had announced this project back in 2021, but since then had published no updates of note. This flight indicates that project is real and is on going.
In 2021 the company said it was targeting the first orbital flights by 2030. Today’s update says it will be doing suborbital flights in 2029, which suggests the orbital flights will not occur in 2030.
» Read more
Under Trump FCC shifts from regulating satellite construction and de-orbit to streamlining red tape
According to a Space News article yesterday, the FCC’s regulatory focus since January and the advent of the Trump administration has shifted significantly from its focus during the Biden administration.
The article describes in detail the present focus to streamline regulations and speed license approvals.
One early result of this push is a reduction in the FCC’s licensing backlog. Schwarz said the space bureau has reduced pending applications by 35 percent since January, including those for new space stations and ground infrastructure.
Modernizing regulations for non-geostationary satellite systems is another priority. The FCC is considering revising so-called “power limit” rules aimed at preventing interference between low-orbit constellations and traditional geostationary satellites and earth stations. Schwarz said these reforms could help pave the way for higher-throughput services that rival terrestrial broadband.
This focus appears correctly centered on the FCC’s actual legal statutory authority to regulate the limited bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum to avoid conflicts in its use.
Under Biden, the FCC instead focused on expanding its power beyond that statutory authority, claiming it had the right to determine how satellites were built, when they would be de-orbited, and in what manner. None of those activities have anything to do with bandwidth and the FCC’s legal responsibilities.
There was some legislative push back from Congress during the Biden administration, but it was slow and relatively weak. Now that push back has become unnecessary, because the FCC under Trump is back to doing its actual job instead of trying to build empires of regulation.
The agency also appears, for the moment, to have ended its partisan abuse of red tape for political reasons. Under Biden it used its regulatory power against SpaceX in retaliation to Elon Musk’s decision to publicly support Biden’s political opponents. It appears the present effort to speed license approvals for everyone has ended this practice.
Rocket Lab gets a quick launch contract from unnamed customer
Rocket Lab today announced it has been awarded a launch contract from an unnamed “confidential commercial customer” calling for two launches before the end of this year, with the first to occur only four days from today.
Launching from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, the first dedicated mission on Electron – named “Symphony In The Stars” – will take place no earlier than June 20, 2025 to deploy a single spacecraft to a 650km circular Earth orbit. A second dedicated launch on Electron to meet those same mission requirements is scheduled for launch before the end of 2025.
That the customer name is classified suggests these are both military launches, and are designed to demonstrate Rocket Lab’s ability to launch something fast under short notice. The new contract also increases the chances that Rocket Lab will manage two dozen launches in 2025, a pace of twice a month.
SpaceX launches 26 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX last night successfully placed 26 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its third flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
A comparison between this launch of SpaceX’s Starlink with Amazon’s scrubbed ULA launch of 27 Kuiper satellites yesterday is worth noting. This launch of 26 Starlink satellites was utterly routine, and just one of four in just the past week, all of which put 98 satellites into orbit. Thousands of such satellites have been launched since the first launch in 2018.
Amazon’s attempt to launch 27 Kuiper satellites was scrubbed, and would have only been the second launch total, separated by about six weeks. The constellation only has 27 satellites in orbit, and its launches are anything but routine, despite signing launch contracts with four different rocket companies. And yet, Amazon proposed Kuiper at almost the same time SpaceX proposed Starlink, in the mid-2010s.
I will let my readers draw their own conclusions from this comparison.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
75 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 75 to 55.
Emilio Piano & Lucie – Maison
An evening pause: The opening lyric sets the tone, asking questions about life. A translation:
Where are we going?
When we no longer have a home?
The flowers under the concrete,
Mom,
Tell me,
Where are we going?
Hat tip Judd Clark.
Spinlaunch signs deal to build its spin launch facility on island in Alaska
Spinlaunch has now confirmed that it has signed a deal to build its spin launch facility on Adak island in the far western extent of the Alaskan island chain.
The facility will be a scaled up version of its spin launch test facility in New Mexico, shown to the right, that was used for tests back in 2022, hurling payloads 35,000 feet into the sky up by spinning them up.
Since then the company changed its leadership and shifted focus to building a satellite constellation that will at least initially will be launched by conventional rockets. This new agreement, actually signed in October 2024 but kept secret until now, suggests that it has not yet abandoned its spin launch technology.
» Read more
ULA scrubs 2nd Kuiper constellation launch due to technical issue
ULA today scrubbed its second Atlas-5 launch to place 27 more of Amazon’s Kuiper constellation satellites into orbit due to “an engineering observation of an elevated purge temperature within the booster engine.”
At the moment no new launch date has been scheduled.
So far Amazon has only placed 27 operational Kuiper satellites into orbit, on a single Atlas-5 launch in April. According to its FCC license, it must have 1,600 satellites in orbit by July 2026. Though it has contracts to launch these satellites 46 times on ULA rockets (8 on Atlas-5 and 36 on Vulcan), 27 times on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 18 times on ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, and 3 times on SpaceX’s Falcon-9, except for SpaceX all these companies have had problems getting off the ground.
Whether Amazon can meet the FAA licence requirement by next year is becoming increasingly questionable.
Axiom manned flight to ISS rescheduled; NASA attempts to clarify ISS leak situation
In a NASA update today, it announced a new launch date of June 19, 2025 for Axiom’s fourth manned flight to ISS while also attempting to clarify ISS leak situation that caused this last and more extended delay.
On June 12, NASA and Axiom Space delayed the mission as the agency continued to work with Roscosmos to understand the most recent repair efforts to seal small leaks. The leaks, located in the aft (back) most segment of the International Space Station’s Zvezda service module, have been monitored by flight controllers for the past few years.
Following the most-recent repair, pressure in the transfer tunnel has been stable. Previously, pressure in this area would have dropped. This could indicate the small leaks have been sealed. Teams are also considering the stable pressure could be the result of a small amount of air flowing into the transfer tunnel across the hatch seal from the main part of space station. By changing pressure in the transfer tunnel and monitoring over time, teams are evaluating the condition of the transfer tunnel and the hatch seal between the space station and the back of Zvezda.
It appears, though NASA doesn’t say so directly, that the Russians did not wish to change the situation at ISS with another docking — even if it was a docking on the American half of the station — while it was evaluating these leak repairs. It now appears they have gotten enough data to allow NASA to set a new launch date later this week.
If the repairs have managed to stop the leaks this is excellent news. At the same time, it doesn’t reduce the risks of a catastrophic failure of Zvezda, since the existence of these numerous stress fractures in its hull suggest a chronic long term failure that can only worsen with time.
The sudden delay of Axiom’s AX-4 last week also indicates poor coordination between NASA and Roscosmos. It was as if NASA had no idea the repair work was occurring, either because it wasn’t paying attention to what the Russians were doing or because the Russians had kept this work secret until it was completed. In either case, this is not how such a partnership should operate.
Brian Cox – The world’s biggest vacuum chamber
An evening pause: Watch another demonstration of Galileo’s Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment where he proved gravity worked the same on all objects regardless of weight.
May everyone have a great weekend.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
SpaceX launches 23 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX this morning successfully placed 23 Starlink satellites into orbit (including 13 with phone-to-satellite capabilities), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 21st flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlanta.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
74 SpaceX
33 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 74 to 54.
French startup The Exploration Company launches its own recovery ship
The French startup, The Exploration Company, has now launched its own ship designed to recover its next prototype test cargo capsule, set to launch on a Falcon 9 on June 21, 2025.
In an 11 June update, The Exploration Company announced that the recovery vessel tasked with retrieving the Mission Possible capsule after splashdown had departed the previous day from a harbour in Alaska. The vessel, named Makushin Bay, is a 40-metre salvage and rescue ship owned and operated by US-based maritime logistics company Resolve Marine. Two members of The Exploration Company’s team will accompany the vessel on its mission. Over the next week, it will make its way to the expected splashdown zone in the central Pacific Ocean. According to The Exploration Company, current weather conditions appear favourable for both splashdown and recovery operations.
The company aims to provide cargo to the commercial space stations under development using its proposed Nyx capsule. As part of its own development program it has flown a smaller prototype already on the first launch of Europe’s Ariane-6 rocket, but was unable to test its re-entry capability because of a failure in that rocket’s upper stage. This second larger prototype will try again, and this time has a better shot at completing its test because it if flying on SpaceX’s very reliable Falcon 9. Thus, the launch of this recovery vessel.