China today successfully put three satellites into orbit, including a Pakistani Earth observation satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
No word on where the rocket’s lower stage’s crashed within China carrying very toxic hypergolic fuel.
The 2025 launch race:
8 SpaceX
3 China
1 Blue Origin
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
After years of delays and multiply approvals that in the end turned out to be meaningless, the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) announced today that it has finally issued a launch license to the German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg to do an orbital test launch from the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands.
The license however is not entirely without strings.
The licence is effective immediately, but a number of conditions need to be met before a launch can take place — including insurance arrangements and international agreements. The company is also required to give the CAA 60 days’ notice before launching.
Rocket Factory had hoped to launch last year, but it lost its RFA-1 rocket during a static fire test in August. It was planning a subsequent launch on the assumption the CAA would approve its licence in 2024. That assumption was wrong however. Even if the rocket had not been destroyed and was ready to go, the CAA was not, and continued to twiddle its thumbs until 2025. It is this twiddling that caused another German rocket startup, Hyimpulse, to abandon its plans to do launches from Saxavord, and switch to a new spaceport in Australia.
Rocket Factory now says it will attempt its first launch before the end of this year. Let’s see if the CAA lets that happen.
Blue Ghost selfie. Click for original.
Firefly has announced that all is well with its Blue Ghost lunar lander, now in an ever expanding Earth orbit on its way to the Moon. Engineers have acquired signal and completed its on-orbit commissioning.
With a target landing date of March 2, 2025, Firefly’s 60-day mission is now underway, including approximately 45 days on-orbit and 14 days of lunar surface operations with 10 instruments as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
…Firefly’s Blue Ghost will spend approximately 25 days in Earth orbit, four days in lunar transit, and 16 days in lunar orbit, enabling the team to conduct robust health checks on each subsystem, calibrate the propulsion system in preparation for critical maneuvers, and begin payload science operations.
NASA today released the first picture downloaded from the spacecraft, shown to the right. The view looks across the top deck of the lander, with two NASA science instruments on the horizon.
Once it lands it is designed to operate for about two weeks, during the lunar day. It will attempt to further gather some data during the long two-week long lunar night, but is not expected to survive to the next day.
India’s space agency ISRO today announced that its engineers had successfully completed the autonomous docking of its two Spadex satellites, the chase vehicle making proper contact with the target vehicle and then linking together.
Manoeuvre from 15m to 3m hold point completed. Docking initiated with precision, leading to successful spacecraft capture. Retraction completed smoothly, followed by rigidisation for stability. Docking successfully completed
The docking needed to be completed before January 20th or the lighting conditions would have caused a delay until March.
Next engineers will demonstrate the spacecraft have linked electronically. Eventually they will then undock and spend up to two more years in orbit operating separately.
India’s Spadex mission, launched to test autonomous unmanned docking procedures necessary for many of that country’s future space plans, now faces a possible two month delay in orbit before the final docking can take place.
On January 11, 2025 the chase vehicle completed its closest proximity maneuver, getting within three meters of the target vehicle, after which it backed away as planned. ISRO engineers are presently analyzing the data before proceeding with the actual docking.
The problem is that this docking must occur by January 20, 2025. After that the lighting conditions will not allow another attempt until March.
It seems ISRO is not concerned about this situation, and would rather get things right, even if it means that delay.
Though nothing is certain yet as the fires still rage, it appears that the facilities of JPL, including its Deep Space Network mission control that manages communications with all of America’s interplanetary probes have survived the Los Angeles fires that have destroy large swaths of that city.
The fires required a full evacuation of the facility, leaving that mission control unoccupied for the first time in sixty years. It appears however that the organization used work-arounds to maintain contact and operations with those probes.
How long the facility will remain in this state remains unclear. Some of the fires remain uncontrolled, and until that happens, there can be no return to any sense of normalcy in LA.
According to monthly images taken by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) of China’s Yutu-2 lunar rover on the far side of the Moon, it has not moved since March 2024, suggesting it is no longer functioning.
“Up to about February 2023 the rover was moving about 7 or 8 metres every drive and typically about 40 m per lunar day. Suddenly the drives dropped to about 3 or 4 m each and only about 8 or 10 m per lunar day,” Stooke said in an email.
“That lasted until about October 2023, and then drives dropped to only 1 or 2 m each. In March 2024 Yutu 2 was resting just southwest of a 10 m diameter crater, and it’s been there ever since, as revealed by LRO images,” Stooke added.
It is possible the rover is not entirely dead, but there is no way to be sure. China is not generally forthcoming when things fail. For example, it has never acknowledged the shut down of its Zhurong Mars rover, which it had hoped would survive its first Martian winter. When that winter ended however no reports from Zhurong were released by China, which suggested it was no longer functioning. China however did not report this. It simply made believe the rover no longer existed.
It could be China is now doing the same with Yutu-2.
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.
The Australian rocket startup Gilmour Space originally expected to complete its first test launch of its three-stage Eris rocket off the east coast of Australia in April 2022.
At that time it thought the approvals for the licenses for its rocket, its Bowen spaceport, and the launch were just weeks away.
Hah! It is now two years later, and the company is still awaiting that launch license. According to the company’s head Adam Gilmour he is now hopeful the license is only weeks away.
“There is a lot of goodwill at CASA [Civil Aviation Safety Authority], and we recognise that they have been working very hard to get it done,” Mr Gilmour said. “We know they have been working towards it. It’s just that this is the first time for everyone involved, and it is quite complex. To give you an idea, we have had Zoom calls with literally 30 people on the call.”
Based on wait periods, if the CASA permit is approved (which comes with regulatory input from Airservices Australia), the earliest Gilmour could conduct the Eris Testflight One mission would be the middle of February. It is possible the permit will be granted as early as this week.
Gilmour however has been making the same exact statements about CASA now for two years. They are great! They are working hard! They want to approve!
Yet nothing happens.
I suspect that approval is close, but this long delay suggests other rocket startups in Australia are going to face the same governmental head winds. The government there seems uninterested in allowing freedom and competition to function. Instead, it sees itself as god, deciding who can do what when, and heaven forbid you challenge it in any way. (Which by the way explains Gilmour’s kow-towing in all his statements.)
Hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay.
China on January 13, 2025 (Chinese time) completed its second launch in 2025, its Smart Dragon-3 (Jielong-3) solid-fueled rocket lifting off from a launch platform off the coast near the city of Haiyang.
Little information was released describing the payload, other than it was “the satellite group CentiSpace-01.”
The 2025 launch race:
5 SpaceX
2 China
Sara Foster sees the light
In my essay yesterday describing how the wildfires in the Los Angeles area appear to finally be making conservatives out of a lot of partisan knee-jerk Democrats, I used a quote that I think is important because it illustrates a major cultural change in a way that is not obvious at first. It also demonstrates a new political reality that the Democratic Party has not yet grasped.
The quote was from a tweet on X by actress Sara Foster. This is what she wrote:
We pay the highest taxes in California. Our fire hydrants were empty. Our vegetation was overgrown, brush not cleared. Our reservoirs were emptied by our governor because tribal leaders wanted to save fish. Our fire department budget was cut by our mayor. But thank god drug addicts are getting their drug kits. @MayorOfLA @GavinNewsom RESIGN. Your far left policies have ruined our state. And also our party.
Note the facts this clearly partisan Democrat cites.
» Read more
In a interview with a local news outlet in Texas, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) revealed that the state’s bureaucracy is stymieing SpaceX at Boca Chica in another unexpected way, getting the road to the facility repaired and upgraded.
“SpaceX has offered to invest their own money to improve the highway, and the problem is they’re running into permitting obstacles, environmental permitting obstacles that is slowing it down,” Senator Cruz said.
Cruz is the new Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. There are steps he says he can take to fix these roads, even if it is not something that will directly address the issue. “As chairman of the Commerce Committee, I am very focused on permitting, on reducing the barriers of permitting, on speeding up the ability to do things like improve and expand State Highway Four,” Cruz said.
In a statement, Texas Department of Transportation spokesman Ray Pedraza said, “TxDOT is currently providing upgrades and pavement improvements for the existing SH 4 between Brownsville and Starbase Texas (SpaceX). TxDOT is also working with SpaceX on further planning and environmental efforts to achieve additional widening on SH 4 in the future.”
I think Cruz did this interview to apply some public pressure on the Texas Transportation Department. Hopefully it will get the tortoise moving.
India’s space agency ISRO has announced that it now moving ahead with the autonomous docking of its two Spadex spacecraft presently in orbit, but it will wait until after the docking to post when it had occurred.
With the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (Isro) SpaDeX space docking experiment missing two publicly announced schedules on January 7 and January 9, the space agency has decided to complete docking before making a public announcement.
Isro had earlier announced that the docking would be a public event but after two consecutive postponements, a senior Isro official said that the docking “is on track” but the space agency will now “dock and inform” the public about the exercise.
I suspect they realized the uncertainty of the real docking schedule made making the schedule public too difficult. This remains a test, and so many things can occur along the way to slow things down.
