SpaceX this evening successfully placed 28 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 26th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
94 SpaceX
39 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 94 to 68.
Click for video, cued to just before launch.
The first launch of the Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space’s Eris rocket ended in failure today when the rocket started drifting sideways after rising about 150 feet and then crashing near the launchpad.
The picture to the right is a screen capture from an independent live steam of the launch posted on youtube by Aussienaut, captured about 20 seconds after liftoff. The red dot indicates the location of the launchpad where the rocket took off to make clear the rocket’s sideways motion. Ten seconds after this, the rocket fell to the ground and exploded.
This launch attempt was the first ever by a private commercial Australian rocket company, so the failure itself is not surprising. It was also the first orbital test launch from a privately owned Australian spaceport. Whether the company has the resources to recover remains to be seen, but I suspect it will try again.
The Starlab design in 2025. Click
for original image.
The consortium designing the commercial Starlab space station has now signed a partnership deal with the interior design company Journey for the latter to design the station’s habitable interior.
Journey brings a deep portfolio of globally recognized projects, including the Sphere in Las Vegas, the Empire State Building observatory in New York City and the Sun Princess Dome for Princess Cruises. The agency will be working closely with Hilton, one of the original strategic partners in the Starlab program, designing the Starlab hospitality and crew experience. Journey’s role adds a vital layer of design and experiential innovation, shaping a space that reflects both function and humanity.
Much of the press release is similar blather. It is good that Starlab is thinking about making the living space in its station “both a cutting-edge research platform and a welcoming, livable habitat,” but this deal doesn’t include any actual design work. Apparently nothing concrete will be done until Starlab wins the big NASA construction project — assuming it does so. Thus, I still rank Starlab low in my rankings of the four commercials stations being built or proposed, but this deal has convinced me to raise its ranking above Orbital Reef. Both have built little, but Starlab is at least making a lot of partnership deals with others, strengthening the quality of its team.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
The rocket startup and lunar lander company Firefly yesterday posted details about its initial public stock offering, designed to hopefully raise more than $600 million.
Firefly Aerospace, a market leading space and defense technology company, today announced that it has launched the roadshow for its proposed initial public offering of 16,200,000 shares of its common stock. In addition, Firefly intends to grant the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase an additional 2,430,000 shares of its common stock at the initial public offering price, less underwriting discounts and commissions. The initial public offering price is expected to be between $35.00 and $39.00 per share.
The company stated it would use the money “to repay outstanding borrowings under its credit agreement, pay any accrued and unpaid dividends on certain series of its preferred stock, and for general corporate purposes.”
The company has not yet announced the date when this stock offering will become available for purchase.
The Chinese pseudo-company Ispace successfully placed a classified payload into orbit today, its solid-fueled Hyperbola-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
This was the first launch by Ispace since July 2024, following a launch failure. Not only did China’s state-run press say nothing about the payload, no information about where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China was provided.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
93 SpaceX
39 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 93 to 68.
Capitalism in space: South Korea’s space agency KARI has now completed the transfer of its government-built Nuri rocket to the private South Korea company Hanwha Aerospace.
The transfer includes a total of 16,050 technical documents. While some 2 trillion won ($1.45 billion) in public funds was invested in developing the Nuri rocket, the two sides agreed on a technology transfer fee of 24 billion won, based on direct research and development costs. The agreement comes nearly two years and 10 months after Hanwha Aerospace was selected as the preferred negotiator.
Under the contract, Hanwha Aerospace has secured exclusive rights to lead Nuri production until 2032, which coincides with the government’s target for the next-generation Korean launch vehicle. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted phrase is important, as it shows that this transfer is not completely shifting space development and ownership from the government to the private sector. Hanwha is going to operate the rocket, but it does not appear to own it, nor is it clear it will be allowed to market it to others for profit. Furthermore, it is not Hanwha but KARI that will be developing the next-generation rocket, using government funds.
The dominance of the South Korean government is also reflected in the cost, as the article notes that the Nuri rocket costs “per kilogram … about 10 times that of SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9.” Like all governments, KARI was not focused on profit in developing Nuri, so it built a rocket uncompetitive in the present launch market.
Still, this deal indicates the South Korean government’s recognition that it must foster a robust private sector aerospace industry if it truly wishes to enter the space age. This deal is thus just a first step.
There were two more launches last night and today. First, SpaceX put another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 19th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
Next, China today successfully launched another five satellites in its planned Guiwang (“king”) internet constellation of 13,000 satellites, its Long March 6 rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northern China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.
This launch brought the total number of operational satellites in orbit for this constellation to 39, all launched since December 2024. At this pace it will take many years for China to complete this constellation, though it likely can begin selling the service in China with an incomplete constellation. Its international licence requires it to launch 10% by 2029 and 50% by 2032.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
93 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 93 to 67.
Click for source.
In what can only be seen by anyone with any objectivity as a political payoff that has no chance of ever producing anything worthwhile, the Texas Space Commission (TSC) has given the Midland International Air and Space Port a $5 million grant to develop its proposed spaceport for vertical rockets in the middle of west Texas.
The spaceport is one of three facilities — along with ILC Aerospace in Houston and SylLab Systems in Plano — that received grant funding as part of the Space Exploration and Aeronautics Research Fund (SEARF). The SEARF provides funding to eligible companies, including government entities that the TSC is partnered with, to fund such purposes as technology development, research, workforce training, curation of materials and development of infrastructure. In its history, the SEARF fund has provided $126 million worth of grant money to 22 different projects.
…Although requested and managed by the city of Midland, the vertical launch site will be in Balmorhea in Reeves County, around the same site as the International Rocket Engineering Competition earlier this summer. The area can currently support suborbital rocket launches, but the vertical launch site is expected to support orbital flight, which will complement their horizontal launch system and high speed corridor for hypersonic flight.
The map to the right shows the location of Midland and Balmorhea. As you can see, this site makes no sense for vertical rocket launches, unless every rocket launched from the site is completely reusable. Even then, it faces major political hurdles to get permission to fly rockets over all the neighboring communities and states. The FAA would certainly have doubts.
In other words, this $5 million grant is a nice pay-off from one government agency to another, with its only purpose to spread some graft around.
That the Hearst-owned Midland Reporter-Telegram news article at the link recognizes none of this, and simply and naively spouts the propaganda put forth by government officials, once again illustrates the bankruptcy of our so-called “mainstream” press.
Both Europe and SpaceX successfully completed launches in the early morning hours today.
First Arianespace, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) commercial arm, used Avio’s Vega-C rocket lifting off from French Guiana to put five satellites into orbit, including four high resolution Earth observation satellites and one climate satellite. This was only the third launch for Arianespace in 2025, two of which were of the Vega-C.
Next, SpaceX placed 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its 22nd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
92 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 92 to 66, with another Starlink launch scheduled for tonight.
Dassault’s proposed Vortex mini-shuttle. Click for original.
The French aerospace company Dassault is now lobbying the European Space Agency to help finance its proposed Vortex reusable mini-shuttle, comparable in concept to Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spacecraft.
The company had first announced this project in June.
While the June announcement included few details, a 25 June hearing of the French National Assembly’s Committee on National Defence and the Armed Forces revealed that the mission is expected to be launched in 2027 aboard a Rocket Lab Electron rocket. The hearing also disclosed that the demonstration mission has a total budget of €70 million, with Dassault providing more than half of the funding and the remainder coming from the French government.
Dassault is now attempting to get more funding from ESA. In June it had signed an agreement with ESA to partner on building a demonstrator, but it was not clear that agreement included funding. It certainly did not include funding for the full scale operational mini-shuttle.
Overall, the structure of funding and the design of the project is good, and demonstrates again Europe’s sharp shift to the capitalism model in the past two years. Dassault will design, build, and (most importantly) own the shuttle, allowing it to market it to many customers. It is also committing a significant amount of its own funds to the project. The funding from France and possibly ESA appears mostly that of a customer buying the services of this product from the company.
In what is a rare event, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation was out of service yesterday for about 2.5 hours “due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network.”
Starlink experienced an outage Thursday afternoon that went on for 2.5 hours and took down at least tens of thousands of people’s satellite internet service. “Starlink is currently in a network outage and we are actively implementing a solution. We appreciate your patience, we’ll share an update once this issue is resolved,” Starlink posted on X at 1:05 p.m. PT/4:05 p.m. ET.
Though Starlink has yet to confirm that services are fully up and running again, Downdetector showed reports of issues had dropped to just 1,600 as of 4:30 p.m PT after they’d spiked to around 60,000 at about 1 p.m. PT
CNBC incorrectly tried to pin this internet outage to the start yesterday of T-Mobile’s new cellphone-to-Starlink text and emergency subscription, but that makes no sense, since the two use different Starlink satellites.
Since the constellation began offering customers its service several years ago the number of such global outages has been very rare. If anything, Starlink has been far more reliable than almost all comparable land line internet services.
Russia today successfully placed two weather satellites into orbit, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Vostochny spaceport in eastern Russia.
Video of the launch here. This was the second launch for this new constellation of satellites. The rocket flew north from Vostochny, crossing Russia with its lower stages and four strap-on boosters falling in designated drop zones inside Russia. No word if anything landed near habitable areas.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
91 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 91 to 65.
