China today successfully launched a new Tianzhou cargo ship to its Tiangong-3 space station, its Long March 7 rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.
The freighter subsequently docked with the station about three hours later.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
86 SpaceX
37 China
10 Rocket Lab
8 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 86 to 64.
A third state in India, Andhra Pradesh, has now released its own space policy, designed to create what it calls “manufacturing clusters”, centered around India’s main spaceport at Sriharikota.
The A.P. Space Policy (4.0) 2025-30 is valid for five years from the date of issue (July 13, 2025), or till a new policy is announced. A technical committee will be constituted under the Commissioner of Industries to vet and process applications for land allotment in the Space Cities proposed to be developed along the Hyderabad-Bengaluru Industrial Corridor in Sri Sathya Sai district and in Tirupati (Routhasuramala).
The government will form an SPV, ‘AP Space City Corporation’, which will drive all initiatives related to the development of the above Space Cities, and serve as the central agency to coordinate infrastructure development, raise start-up funds, attract investments, facilitate industry partnerships, build partnerships to attract global demand, and liaise with all GoI [Government of India] entities for tapping the domestic demand.
The previous two state space policies in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, announced in April, had similar goals aimed at promoting the establishment of private aerospace companies within their regions.
Whether Andhra Pradesh’s policy will work carries uncertainties. Its advantage is that it is linked to India’s primary spaceport. Its disadvantage lies in the complex bureaucracy the state is creating in conjunction with these “Space Cities.” Such bureaucracies are rarely helpful for new businesses.
The Middle East, showing the location of
Oman’s proposed spaceport at Duqm.
A suborbital test launch from Oman’s Duqm spaceport was scrubbed yesterday due to” a technical issue” with the rocket.
DUQM: Etlaq Spaceport’s highly anticipated experimental rocket launch mission “Duqm-2” was aborted due to a technical issue on Sunday, July 13, 2025. Consequently, the launch has been postponed until “a replacement solution is developed,” it stated.
This was the second attempt launch scrubbed at Duqm, officially labeled the Etlaq Spaceport. The first, an attempt by a Middle East startup to do a vertical take-off and landing of a prototype small rocket, was scrubbed in April due to weather and technical issues. No new launch date has been scheduled.
The spaceport had announced in April a schedule of five launches before the end of the year. Two have now been scrubbed. All appear to have major financing from the Oman government. I suspect all have been pushed too hard and too fast by the government for PR reasons, which explains the two scrubs and the lack of a new launch schedule.
After spending 18 days in space, 14 on ISS, the Dragon capsule early this morning undocked from ISS with a splashdown scheduled for early tomorrow.
The mission was financed by the space station company Axiom, and was commanded by former NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, now employed by Axiom as a professional astronaut. The three paying passengers were all government astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary.
The capsule, dubbed Grace, is the newest addition to SpaceX’s fleet of five manned reusable capsules, flying on its first mission.
Splashdown is scheduled for the wee hours of July 15th tomorrow off the coast of California. The live stream can be found here.
SpaceX tonight successfully launched a geosynchronous satellite for unnamed customer, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its thirteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The fairings completed their fourteenth and eighteenth flights respectively. No information about the satellite was released, including ending the live stream right after the first stage landed while providing no information about the satellite’s orbit after stage separation.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
86 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
8 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 86 to 63.
The first suborbital launch of the Taiwan rocket startup Tispace failed today shortly after lift-off from a new commercial spaceport on the northern island of Hokkaido in Japan.
The rocket took off from Hokkaido Space Port at 11:40 a.m. local time, but it was soon seen drifting, with smoke escaping. Footage of the launch was shown by NHK News on its website.
Nobody was reported injured in the incident, and the rocket was not carrying any payload. The first launch of a foreign-made rocket from Hokkaido served to test its engine’s capabilities, the report said.
The rocket startup was formed in 2016 and originally wanted to launch from Taiwan. After legal issues blocked that launch site it then attempted to arrange a launch from Australia. It appears similar red tape issues forced it to switch to Japan.
Varda’s third capsule, on the ground in Australia.
Click for original image.
The in-space manufacturing startup Varda has now raised another $187 million in private investment capital, bringing the total cash the company has raised to $329 million.
The $187 million fundraise was led by Natural Capital and Shrug Capital, with participation from Founders Fund, Peter Thiel, Khosla Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Lux Capital, and Also Capital. Since launching their first mission, W-1, in 2023, Varda has completed three successful launch and return missions, with a fourth, W-4, currently in orbit and a fifth expected to launch before the end of the year.
…”With this capital, Varda will continue to increase our flight cadence and build out the pharmaceutical lab that will deliver the world’s first microgravity-enabled drug formulation,” said Varda CEO Will Bruey.
Varda has expanded its footprint terrestrially as well, opening an office in Huntsville, Ala. and a new 10,000 square foot laboratory space in El Segundo, which will allow its pharmaceutical scientists to begin working on developing processes to crystallize biologics, such as monoclonal antibodies. As of 2022, the market size for monoclonal antibodies is estimated to be $210.06 billion.
As I have noted previously, a real market for pharmaceuticals produced in weightlessness has existed for decades. It appears Varda is now well placed to be the first to make money doing so, using its returnable capsules.
One more note: These products and this industry could have been developed on ISS, but NASA has banned all profit-making commercial manufacturing projects there from the station’s beginning. You can do research, but you are forbidden to create any products for sale later on Earth. This strange policy is left over from before the station, when Reagan discontinued all commercial missions on the shuttle following the Challenger accident.
An evening pause: Some fascinating technology history, worth fast forwarding through the annoying commercial in the middle.
Hat tip Willi Kusche.
SpaceX today received the okay from Cameron County to build a plant at Boca Chica to produce oxygen from the atmosphere for use in its Superheavy/Starship rocket.
The commissioners voted, 3-1, to give Elon Musk’s rocket company a beachfront construction certificate and dune protection permit, allowing the company to build a modern-day factory akin to an oil refinery to produce gases needed for space flight launches.
The plant will consist of 20 structures on 1.66 acres. The enclosed site will include a tower that will reach 159 feet, or about 15 stories high, much shorter than the nearby launch tower, which stretches 480 feet high. It is set to be built about 280 feet inland from the line of vegetation, which is where the dunes begin. The factory will separate air into nitrogen and oxygen. SpaceX utilizes liquid oxygen as a propellant and liquid nitrogen for testing and operations.
By having the facility on site, SpaceX hopes to make the delivery of those gases more efficient by eliminating the need to have dozens of trucks deliver them from Brownsville. The company says they need more than 200 trucks of liquid nitrogen and oxygen delivered for each launch, a SpaceX engineer told the county during a meeting last week.
As usual, the same cranks who always complain about this stuff are given space by this news outlet to whine, but the truth is that the commission’s vote well reflects the attitude of the local community. It supports what SpaceX is doing, because of the prosperity the company is bringing to this formerly depressed region.
Moreover, this facility will not only save SpaceX money and make it easier to launch more frequently, it is likely environmentally beneficial. I suspect the facility will be relatively clean compared to the truck convoys it will replace.
Hat tip Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas.
The reason for Trump’s sudden decision yesterday to name Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator, replacing long-time NASA manager Janet Piro — who had held the job since Trump took office — remains unclear.
This article suggests the president wanted someone with more political clout who was also part of his inner circle.
Two articles (here and here) imply the decision was related to the recent clashes politically between Trump and Musk, adding that Duffy and Musk have been reported to be in conflict over air traffic controller issues. Picking Duffy thus directly reduces Musk’s influence at NASA.
The truth is that we really don’t know exactly what motives brought Trump to make this appointment. It could be that Trump wants someone in charge who will have the political clout to push through his proposed NASA cuts. It also could be Trump wants someone with that clout to review those cuts and change them.
The bottom line is that NASA remains a political football, a situation that in the end had done decades of harm to the American space industry. The sooner it can be made irrelevant and replaced by a commercial, competitive, and (most important) profitable space industry, the better.
We really don’t need a “space agency.” We didn’t have such a thing when we settled the American west.
You might get deja-vu from this story, since I have reported repeatedly in the past that SpaceX has finally gotten regulatory approval to sell Starlink in India.
However, India’s complex regulatory framework — leftover from the days of British rule and strengthened for decades after independence when the strongly socialist Congress Party ruled — ended up requiring SpaceX to leap multiple regulatory hurdles to get the Starlink approved. According to news reports today, that last licensing hurdle has now finally been leaped.
The final approval marks a crucial milestone that will pave the way for the Musk-led company to launch its commercial satellite operations in the country. The Elon Musk-led company has been waiting for regulatory approvals since 2022 to operate legally in India. With this approval, Starlink has become the third company to enter the satellite space in India after Reliance Jio and Eutelsat’s OneWeb, in which Bharti Airtel, led by Sunil Mittal, is a shareholder.
Does this mean SpaceX can now sell Starlink in India? Of course not:
The next step for Starlink is to secure spectrum from the government, which will likely be assigned in the coming months. It also needs to set up infrastructure on the ground. One of the most critical aspects of Starlink’s India foray will be its compliance with the country’s security rules.
Since Starlink doesn’t need a complex ground infrastructure, selling terminals directly to customers, the infrastructure mentioned in the quote likely involves partnering Starlink operations with the Indian telecommunications companies Airtell and Jio, so that they get a piece of the action.
Click for original image.
Today’s cool image takes us sightseeing in the region on Mars that SpaceX has chosen for its prime landing zone for its Starship spaceship. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 29, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows a 465-foot-high unusually shaped mesa in this region.
The full resolution inset at the bottom of the picture focuses at the strange tilted layers on the southern slope of this mesa. Apparently the layers at this spot were pushed sideways so they lie significantly angled to the horizontal. Though it isn’t clear from this picture, it is possible that the mesa itself is made up of similar tilted layers, hidden below the surface. We can see the tilt only on the mesa’s southern flank because erosion has apparently exposed it.
Note also the black stain that surrounds the mesa. Though this might be caused by wind distributing dust, such stains have also been seen at a location where scientists suspect an inactive hot spring might exist, as well as another location where there may have been relatively recent volcanic activity.
Is this stain caused by any of these processes? In situ exploration would probably be necessary to find out. And we may soon actually have spaceships landing here in the relatively near future with the capability to do this.
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