The beat goes on! SpaceX successfully launched another 28 Starlink satellites early this morning, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
76 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 76 to 55.
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.
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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 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 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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Two stories today suggest that Kazakhstan is shifting its politics away from Russia and towards the west, albeit carefully and with an eye to avoid poking the bear that lives so close by.
First, the government’s tourism agency announced plans to develop tourism at its Baikonur spaceport.
Participants discussed infrastructure upgrades, the creation of new travel routes, brand strengthening, investment attraction and partnerships to support long-term development.
According to Kazakh Tourism Сhairman Kairat Sadvakasov, the concept focuses on building a sustainable tourism ecosystem during the periods between rocket launches. The goal is to integrate Baikonur into Kazakhstan’s cultural, educational and scientific agenda.
Both the Soviet and Russian governments have always treated Baikonur as a classified military installation, and forbid such visitation, including vetoing public viewing areas areas. Kazakhstan has likely seen the cash earned by India and U.S. by allowing such spaceport tourism, and wants some for itself. Evidently it now thinks the Russians no longer have the clout to stop it from doing so.
Next, Kazakhstan’s government announced it has signed a deal with SpaceX to introduce Starlink into the country.
The agreement ensures that Starlink will comply with Kazakhstan’s legal and regulatory requirements, including those related to information security and communications. Until now, Starlink operated in the country only on a pilot basis, providing internet access exclusively to schools.
The upcoming launch will allow citizens to legally purchase, register, and use Starlink terminals. The service aims to improve high-speed internet access in remote and hard-to-reach regions, supporting rural schools, healthcare centers, mobile units, and infrastructure sites – particularly in areas where laying fiber-optic networks is not feasible.
This deal also suggests a change in Kazakhstan’s relationship with Russia. Starlink is blocked from Russia due to its invasion on the Ukraine. Yet the service is now available to both Kazakhstan and the Ukraine, formerly part of the Soviet Union and directly adjacent to Russia. That Kazakhstan is publicly permitting Starlink in is a clear statement that it wants the same technology as the Ukraine to better protect it from a Russian invasion.
It also suggests a decline in Russia’s influence inside Kazakhstan. Previously if the Russians said jump, the Kazakhstan government would ask, “How high?” Now it appears it is willing to act more independently, and in ways that are not necessarily in Russia’s interests.
One wonders if this shift could go as far as Kazakhstan trying to sell Baikonur as a launch site for other commercial entities, such as from India, China, and Europe. I doubt many would buy the service (Baikonur is not well located compared to other spaceports), but the very offer would signal a major political shift in this part of the world.
SpaceX this evening successfully placed 26 more Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its fifteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
73 SpaceX
33 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 73 to 54.
The Starlab design in 2025. Click
for original image.
The space station startup Voyager Technologies has now raised $383 million during its first public stock offering this week, with the possibility of more investment capital to come.
The six-year-old provider of mission-critical space and defense technology solutions sold 12.35 million shares at $31 each, pricing above the $26–$29 range it marketed last week. The Denver-based company had initially planned to offer 11 million shares.
Underwriters also have a 30-day option to purchase up to 1.85 million additional shares of the company’s Class A common stock, up from 1.65 million, trading under the ticker symbol VOYG.
Of the four private commercial space stations under development, Voyager is the only one to have so far built nothing. Its station, dubbed Starlab, is conceived as a single large module launched on SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket. Though the company has obtained a $217.5 million development grant from NASA, and is partnering with Airbus, Northrop Grumman, and the European Space Agency, it has focused so far all of its work on design.
We must assume the company intends to use this additional public capital to begin some construction. It likely needs to if it is to have any chance of winning NASA’s major contract for building the station itself, since all of its other competitors are doing so. My present rankings for these four projects:
