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 12th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leader board in the 2025 launch race.
160 SpaceX (a new record)
77 China
15 Rocket Lab
15 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 160 to 129.
UPDATE: Elon Musk has posted on X that this story is “not accurate.”
According to reports yesterday, SpaceX is about to launch another secondary private stock sale that double the value of the company.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is initiating a secondary share sale that would give the company a valuation of up to $800 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
SpaceX is also telling some investors it will consider going public possibly around the end of next year, the report said.
At the elevated price, Musk’s aerospace and defense contractor would be valued above ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which wrapped up a share sale at a $500 billion valuation in October.
At $800 billion, SpaceX would be the world’s most valuable private company.
As for going public, nothing is confirmed. Musk has made some comments suggesting he is considering the idea, but at the same time has noted the problems such a act would cause him.
Musk recently discussed whether SpaceX would go public during Tesla’s annual shareholders meeting last month. Musk, who is the CEO of both companies, said he doesn’t love running publicly traded businesses, in part because they draw “spurious lawsuits,” and can “make it very difficult to operate effectively.”
It seems to me it would be a big mistake for Musk to do this. As a public stock-trading company, Musk would lose the freedom he presently has with SpaceX.
Meanwhile, this new private stock offering has done wonders for the value of Echostar’s stock, now that the company’s own stake in SpaceX after selling it some of its FCC licensed spectrum.
China today successfully launched the 14th set of the Guowang internet of things satellites (also called SatNet), its Long March 8A rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.
China’s state-run press made no mention of the number of satellites launched. Based on previous launches by the Long March 8A, it was probably nine, bringing the total number of Guowang satellites in orbit to about 114, after fourteen launches. The final plan calls for a constellation of 13,000. Should take awhile to complete.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
159 SpaceX
77 China (a new record)
15 Rocket Lab
15 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 159 to 129.
The space subcommittee of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee yesterday held a hearing on space, one day after the Senate held its own hearing on the nomination of Jared Isaacman as NASA administrator.
The House hearing however was not about Isaacman, but was apparently staged to highlight what appears to be strong reservations within Congress about NASA’s Artemis program, as presently structured. Its timing, just after the Isaacman hearing, was clearly aimed at garnering as much publicity as possible.
Video of the hearing can be seen here.
The focus of the hearing was also on China, and how there is real fear in Congress that its space program is outstripping NASA’s. Both the Republican committee chairman and the ranking Democrat stressed these concerns, and the need to beat China to the Moon and beyond.
More important, all four witnesses pushed the same point.
The rallying cry at this hearing as well as yesterday’s is the “race” with China.
…Foushee asked each of the witnesses for one-word answers to the question: is NASA on track to get back to the Moon before Chinese taikonauts arrive?
Not all succeeded with one word, but their sentiment was similar. Cheng replied “no, I am very pessimistic.” Swope: “worried.” Besha: “maybe.” Griffin: “no possible way…with the present plan.”
Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin was the most blunt in his criticism of NASA.
» Read more
In what is a major coup for one of China’s planned large constellations, Airbus yesterday agreed to use the Qianfan or Spacesail constellation to provide Wi-Fi service on its airplanes.
At a satellite internet industry ecology conference in east China’s Shanghai on Thursday, Airbus signed a market cooperation agreement on the satellite internet service with Shanghai Spacesail Technologies Co., Ltd. The Spacesail Constellation will provide high-speed, low-latency broadband satellite services via the high-speed connectivity system on aircraft, enhancing the in-flight experience for passengers.
The two parties will also work together to meet the needs of airlines, and promote the development of intelligent, personalized services based on low-orbit broadband communication technology.
Starsail is a direct competitor to Starlink. China has so far launched 119 satellites out of a planned first phase constellation of 648. Later phases could increase the constellation to as many as 10,000 satellites.
It seems puzzling why Airbus went with this Chinese constellation, rather than either Starlink or Amazon’s Leo (formerly Kuiper). Starlink is far more developed, while Leo has more satellites in orbit (154 to 119) than Spacesail. And both are private companies from the capitalistic west, not pseudo-companies controlled by the Chinese communists.
Maybe this deal is preliminary to a major purchase of Airbus airplanes by China. China wanted its system on those planes, and so Airbus agreed to go along.
Regardless, this deal tells us that this Chinese internet constellation is going to be a major competitor to both Starlink and Leo.
China today successfully placed two experimental communications satellites into orbit, its solid-fueled Kuaizhou-1a rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
China’s state-run press provided no information on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed. The rocket is supposedly owned and operated by a Chinese pseudo-company, but its solid-fueled heritage clearly comes from military missiles, and thus could only have been developed and used under the full supervision of China’s military.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
159 SpaceX
76 China (a new record)
15 Rocket Lab
15 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 159 to 128.
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 4th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
159 SpaceX (a new record)
75 China
15 Rocket Lab
15 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 159 to 127.
It turns out that one week after a judge approved a plea deal in early November between Boeing and the Justice Department that would allows the company to avoid a criminal prosecution for its malfeasance and fraud that led to two 737-Max airplane crashes that killed a total of 346 people — thus dismissing the pending criminal charges — the families of the victims filed an appeal, asking a higher court to overturn that deal.
The families had argued before U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor that the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) non-prosecution agreement violated the judicial review provisions, which was reached behind closed doors without the families’ statutory right to confer. The writ of mandamus argues that no substantive proceedings before Judge O’Connor were held before he made his decision in favor of Boeing.
…DOJ initially presented Judge O’Connor with a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) that he rejected. Instead of coming back with something more stringent, DOJ presented Boeing with the lesser punishment of an NPA in which Boeing would merely pay a $243.6 million penalty, give $444.5 million to be divided amongst the 346 families, and make additional investments in its safety and compliance. In exchange, the DOJ agreed to dismiss the criminal charge against Boeing. On November 6, Judge O’Connor approved this revised NPA and granted the government’s motion to dismiss.
The families now look forward to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse this decision through its writ of mandamus. In the writ, Paul Cassell, pro bono, attorneys for the families and professor of the S.J. Quinney College of Law at the University of Utah, argued on behalf of the families’ that the government’s NPA with Boeing would not provide sufficient oversight of Boeing and failed to account for the fact that Boeing’s criminal behavior was found to have caused the deaths of 346 crash victims. Boeing’s CEO and its lawyers had admitted to the fraud in a guilty plea issued four years ago.
In 2021 Boeing itself pleaded guilty to malfeasance and corruption charges, and was given three years to clean up its act or face criminal prosecution. When after three years Justice found Boeing had instead lied to it while doing little to fix things, it first proceeded with prosecution, only to suddenly back off and make this plea deal.
Thus, the families’ case is strong. Boeing is an admitted criminal and has also done nothing to change its behavior. Whether the families can get the plea deal overturned, however, remains unknown. The legal system no longer can be trusted when it comes to big government contractors like Boeing. The government acts routinely to protect them (as Justice is doing here), and thus there will be heavy political pressure on the courts to turn down this appeal.
The French Guiana spaceport. The Diamant launchsite is labeled “B.”
Click for full resolution image. (Note: The Ariane-5 pad is now the
Ariane-6 pad.)
France’s space agency CNES, which has taken back management from Arianespace of the French Guiana spaceport it owns, has now been found liable for destroying a protected habitat as it began construction to upgrade the old abandoned Diamant rocket launch site into a pad for several of Europe’s new commercial rocket startups.
In March 2022, the regional environmental authority of French Guiana (DGTM) formally informed CNES that it could not begin demolition or earthworks at the Diamant site without first securing the legally required species and water-law authorisations. Despite this, the agency leveled the area in the preceding weeks, with the environmental NGO CERATO discovering the destruction in April 2022.
In August 2022, the DGTM carried out an unannounced inspection of the Diamant site and found further destruction of protected habitats linked to the agency’s PV2 solar farm project. In October 2022, the PV2 project manager informed DGTM that CNES had known about the presence of protected species on the PV2 site since 1 July 2022, yet began earthworks anyway.
In response to repeated flouting of DGTM procedures, the Prefect of French Guiana, the top regional authority, issued a stop-work order requiring CNES to halt all works at both sites.
It appears this stop-work order has contributed to delays in construction. The news now is that the case appears to have been settled.
The agency has been ordered to repair the damage within three years or face a fine of €50,000. It will also be required to finance ecological compensation actions elsewhere on the grounds of the Guiana Space Centre. The conclusion of the lawsuit will allow the agency to fully resume construction at the site, which it had been ordered to stop in late 2022.
In other words, CNES has been told to spend money elsewhere at the spaceport to make the local environmental authorities happy. It remains unclear how these delays have or even will impact the plans of the Spanish rocket startup PLD, which hopes to do the first orbital launch of its Miura-5 rocket from this site in 2026. PLD expects the first flight-worthy Miura-5 to be delivered to French Guiana early next year, so the delays in French Guiana have not yet effected its plans. That might now change if the site won’t be ready as planned.
This whole story however does indicate a fundamental problem within all of Europe’s space regulatory infrastructure that in the future is likely to hinder the development of its new commercial space industry. Europe’s leadership likes its red tape, and has done nothing to reduce it as it has shifted from the government-run model (where it controls and owns everything) to the capitalism model (where it buys what it needs from an independent competing private sector).
Screen capture from China’s
state-run press
The methane-fueled Zhuque-3 rocket built by China’s Landspace pseudo-company successfully reached orbit today on its first launch, though the attempt to land the first stage vertically for later reuse failed when it crashed near its landing zone.
The reusable rocket, designed by the Beijing-based commercial space company LandSpace, was launched from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in China’s northwest at noon on Wednesday. After reaching a low-Earth orbit, the first stage of the rocket – the lower section that lifts the vehicle off the ground – appeared to catch fire in the air before crashing near the target recovery site.
I think a video of that failed landing can be seen here, though I cannot be sure, as it appeared to go up on youtube immediately at launch time, almost too soon.
For the Landspace pseudo-company, getting this rocket to orbit on the first try is a major success. It plans several more launches in the coming months, with each attempting a similar landing. Based on SpaceX’s history in this matter, it should not take it long to achieve its first landing success.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
158 SpaceX
75 China (a new record)
15 Rocket Lab
15 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 158 to 127.
SpaceX today successfully launched another 29 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 25th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. With this flight, this booster, B1077, has now tied the space shuttle Endeavour in reuses, and is only three behind the Columbia shuttle.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
158 SpaceX (a new record)
74 China
15 Rocket Lab
15 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 158 to 126.
ISS as presently configured. Click for original.
For the first time in its more than quarter century history, all eight docking ports on ISS are occupied, as shown in the graphic to the right.
For the first time in International Space Station history, all eight docking ports aboard the orbital outpost are occupied following the reinstallation of Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus XL cargo spacecraft to the Earth-facing port of the station’s Unity module. The eight spacecraft attached to the complex are: two SpaceX Dragons, Cygnus XL, JAXA’s (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) HTV-X1, two Roscosmos Soyuz crew spacecraft, and two Progress cargo ships.
This milestone follows the reattachment of the Cygnus XL spacecraft, supporting the Northrop Grumman-23 commercial resupply services mission for NASA, which was removed last week by the robotics officer at the agency’s Mission Control Center in Houston using the space station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm. The Cygnus XL movement was coordinated between NASA, Northrop Grumman, and Roscosmos to provide appropriate clearance for the arriving crewed Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft on Nov. 27.
Cygnus will remain attached to the orbiting laboratory until no earlier than March 2026, when it is scheduled to safely depart and dispose of up to 11,000 pounds of trash and unneeded cargo when it harmlessly burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.
This situation will not last of course, and in fact it may never happen again before the station is retired around 2030. First, Cygnus will leave in March. Second, one Russian Soyuz capsule will leave shortly, as the presence of two simply indicates a crew rotation is underway.
Third, it is presently unclear when the Russians will be able to launch further Soyuz or Progress capsules. » Read more
