The beat goes on. SpaceX early this morning successfully placed another 28 Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
121 SpaceX
54 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 121 to 93.
SpaceX this morning successfully launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
120 SpaceX
54 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 120 to 93.
The planned return trajectories for both
Superheavy and Starship
The FAA today released [pdf] a new draft of the environmental assessment of SpaceX’s Superheavy/Starship operations at Boca Chica that will allow for full orbital flights as well as for both to return to that launchpad.
The two maps to the right show the two planned return paths for Superheavy (top) and Starship (bottom) as it comes back from orbit. In both cases the ships will return to Boca Chica to be caught by tower chopsticks. The reassessment analyzed the impacts of these trajectories, including its impact on aviation traffic, and concluded the proposal was acceptable. From its conclusion:
The 2022 PEA [Programmatic Environmental Assessment] and April 2025 Tiered EA [environmental assessment] examined the potential for significant environmental impacts from Starship-Super Heavy launch operations at the Boca Chica Launch Site and defined the regulatory setting for impacts associated with Starship-Super Heavy. The areas evaluated for environmental impacts in this Tiered EA include aviation emissions and air quality; noise and noise-compatible land use; hazardous materials; and socioeconomics. In each of these areas, the FAA has concluded that no significant impacts would occur as a result of the Proposed Action. [emphasis mine]
This approval is still only a draft. It must go through a public comment period, ending October 20, 2025. There will also be a virtual public meeting on October 7, 2025. Information about submitting comments or participating in that virtual meeting can be found here.
Such meetings are likely to see the leftist anti-Musk crowd come out in droves, screeching how we are all gonna die if these launches are allowed. The FAA will nod its head, and then ignore the Chicken Littles and approve this plan.
The plan itself tells us that SpaceX is definitely gearing up the first orbital flights of Starship next year, along with the first attempts to catch it with the tower chopsticks.
SpaceX very early this morning successfully launched another 28 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its seventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
119 SpaceX
54 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 119 to 93.
The federal district court judge for the District of Columbia yesterday dismissed entirely the environmental lawsuit that had been filed against SpaceX and the FAA by anti-Musk activists following the first orbital test launch of Starship/Superheavy.
More details here. The lawsuit itself [pdf] was filed in 2023, claiming that the FAA’s environmental assessment of SpaceX’s activities at Boca Chica would do no harm to the environment were wrong.
SpaceX activities authorized in the FONSI/ROD [the environmental reassessment issued last year] have and will adversely affect the surrounding wildlife habitat and communities. In addition to harm from construction activities and increased vehicle traffic, rocket launches result in intense heat, noise, and light pollution. Furthermore, the rocket launches and testing result in explosions which spread debris across surrounding habitat and cause brush/forest fires — including one that recently burned 68 acres of adjacent National Wildlife Refuge. The FAA calls these explosions “anomalies,” but in fact they occur frequently, with at least 8 over the past 5 years. FAA acknowledged that many more such “anomalies” are expected over the next 5 years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has found that prior SpaceX rocket explosions harmed protected wildlife and designated habitat in violation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
At the time I noted this:
In other words, rockets and launch sites should never be placed inside wildlife refuges, because such activity is detrimental to wildlife.
A more false statement cannot be made. Under this conclusion the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, which have been operating in the middle of a wildlife refuge now for more than six decades, should be shut down immediately. All the wildlife there must certainly be dead!
We have almost three-quarters of a century of empirical data in both Florida and California that spaceports are clearly beneficial to wildlife, because they actually create the refuge by reserving large areas where development cannot occur. This court decision merely confirms reality, something it appears increasingly the left doesn’t have much grasp of.
According to several major news sources, Starlink was down for about an hour last night globally, impacting several tens of thousands in the U.S. alone.
More than 37,000 US users were reporting issues with the internet service Monday at 12:30 a.m. ET, according to the website Downdetector.com. By 1:30 a.m., that number had fallen into the hundreds. The internet service owned by Musk’s SpaceX stopped working on “the entire frontline in Ukraine” around 7:30 a.m. Kyiv time (12.30 a.m. ET), said Maj. Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, the commander of Ukraine’s unmanned systems force, on Telegram. As of 8:00 a.m., service was gradually being restored, he said.
I link to CNN, but numerous other outlets thought this story significant enough to give it front page coverage. That this is considered news, however, illustrates perfectly how well Starlink functions normally. A brief outage lasting less than an hour makes the cover of every news outlet in the world, because normally Starlink works without problems for its more than six million subscribers.
SpaceX has not as yet provided any information about the cause of the outage. I suspect we are seeing the result of a hacker attack, possibly by Russia, but that is pure speculation. Even if not, it is in SpaceX’s interest to outline in detail what happened. This has been its policy in the past, but in the previous outage in July the company was not forthcoming. That lack of transparency has not served the company well.
SpaceX today successfully launched Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter with more than five tons of cargo, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The two fairing halves completed their 3rd and 6th flights respectively. Cygnus is expected to be berthed to ISS using the robot arm on September 24, 2025. This is also the first flight of the stretched version of Cygnus, capable of carrying more cargo.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
118 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 118 to 92. China also had its own launch scheduled for this evening, but no information about it has yet been released.
The beat goes on. Since yesterday afternoon there have been two more global rocket launches, by Russia and SpaceX.
First, Russia launched the sixth GPS-type satellite as part of its next generation Glonass constellation, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in northeast Russia. The rocket’s lower stage fell several different drop zones in Russia. No word if they landed near any habitable areas.
Next, SpaceX this morning launched another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 28th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
117 SpaceX
53 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 117 to 92.
As for the rankings for the most reuse by a rocket, this is the present leader board:
39 Discovery space shuttle
33 Atlantis space shuttle
30 Falcon 9 booster B1067
28 Columbia space shuttle
28 Falcon 9 booster B1071
27 Falcon 9 booster B1069
27 Falcon 9 booster B1063
SpaceX tonight successfully launched an Indonesian commercial communications/broadband satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 23rd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairings completed their 16th and 24th flights respectively.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
116 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
12 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 116 to 91.
SpaceX early today successfully launched a classified military payload for the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its sixth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
I did not post this in the morning because there was a second SpaceX launch scheduled for the afternoon, and I planned on posting both launches in one post. That launch however was scrubbed and rescheduled for tomorrow.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
115 SpaceX
53 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 115 to 90.
Superheavy after the October 2024 flight,
safely captured during the very first attempt
Link here. The update comes from a presentation given this week by Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s executive in charge of build and flight reliability, at the American Astronautical Society’s Glenn Space Technology Symposium in Cleveland.
Lots of new details. First, almost no tiles fell off during this flight. More significant, they found that the use of metal tiles won’t work. They tested three, and found that “The metal tiles… didn’t work so well.”
Gestenmaier also outlined how the flight provided the necessary data for sealing the gaps between the tiles better.
Gerstenmaier pointed to a patch of white near the top of Starship’s heat shield. This, he said, was caused by heat seeping between gaps in the tiles and eroding the underlying material, a thermal barrier derived from the heat shield on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft. Technicians also intentionally removed some tiles near Starship’s nose to test the vehicle’s response.
“It’s essentially a white material that sits on Dragon and it ablates away, and when it ablates, it creates this white residue,” Gerstenmaier said. “So, what that’s showing us is that we’re having heat essentially get into that region between the tiles, go underneath the tiles, and this ablative structure is then ablating underneath. So, we learned that we need to seal the tiles.”
They hope to do the 11th test flight in October, repeating the same suborbital configuration of previous flights, using the same version 2 of Starship. The plan will then be to follow up with a first suborbital flight of version 3 in 2026, followed quickly by orbital flights. During one of those orbital flights they will also try to do a chopstick catch of Starship. They also hope to do the first refueling tests next year.
All in all, it appears the test program is proceeding as hoped, and is about to accelerate significantly.
EchoStar today announced it has sold two of its spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $17 billion, in a deal that will also allow EchoStar’s customers to access Starlink.
EchoStar has entered into a definitive agreement with SpaceX to sell the company’s AWS-4 and H-block spectrum licenses for approximately $17 billion, consisting of up to $8.5 billion in cash and up to $8.5 billion in SpaceX stock valued as of the entry into the definitive agreement. Additionally, the definitive agreement provides for SpaceX to fund an aggregate of approximately $2 billion of cash interest payments payable on EchoStar debt through November of 2027.
In connection with the transaction, SpaceX and EchoStar will enter into a long-term commercial agreement, which will enable EchoStar’s Boost Mobile subscribers – through its cloud-native 5G core – to access SpaceX’s next generation Starlink Direct to Cell service.
Essentially, in exchange for the spectrum EchoStar is investing in SpaceX.
EchoStar also today canceled a contract it had signed in early August with the satellite company MDA to build its own 100 satellite constellation designed to provide direct-to-cellphone service, competing with Starlink and AST SpaceMobile. EchoStar will no longer build a rival constellation.
Wall Street apparently liked this deal, as EchoStar’s stock value quickly rose about 19%. It also appears the deal resolves questions the FCC had raised about EchoStar recent activities.
As expected, SpaceX and China completed launches today.
First SpaceX launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. The first stage completed its 20th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacitic.
Next, China placed an unspecified “group” of “remote sensing” satellites into orbit, its Long March 6A rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northeast China. No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
114 SpaceX
51 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 114 to 88.
SpaceX in the wee hours last night successfully placed another 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Centery in Florida.
The first stage completed its 27th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. SpaceX now has one booster with 30 flights and three with 27 flights, putting these stages in the same league with the three most flown space shuttles, Discovery (39), Atlantis (33), and Columbia (28). Expect these boosters to all pass Discovery in the near future, with several more Falcon 9 boosters about to enter this league as well.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
113 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 113 to 85.
After several years of paperwork, the FAA yesterday approved SpaceX’s request to double its launch rate at the Space Force’s Cape Canaveral spaceport.
In addition to the annual launch increase from 50 launches to up to 120, the Federal Aviation Administration’s environmental review also approved a new on-site landing zone that could accommodate up to 34 booster landings per year. These boosters are the reusable first-stage portions of Falcon 9 rockets that SpaceX lands and refurbishes for future flights.
The review, finalized on Wednesday, found what’s known as a “Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact,” meaning the proposed changes “would not significantly impact the quality of the human environment” under federal law, with impacts reduced by specific protective measures. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted words illustrate the absurdity of these environmental reviews. We know without doubt and without any major review that rocket launches do no harm to the environment or wildlife. We have seven decades of data in Florida proving it.
According to the article both the FAA and the Space Force still need to issue further approvals before this request can go forward. Expect the Space Force to agree, without much bother. The FAA needs to amend SpaceX’s launch licenses, and this should also happen relatively quick, especially with Trump as president.
The cargo Dragon that docked with ISS in late August successfully completed yesterday an engine burn lasting more than five minutes to see if it could raise ISS’s orbit.
On Wednesday, Sept. 3, SpaceX’s Dragon completed an initial burn to test the spacecraft’s new capability to help maintain the altitude of the International Space Station. Two Draco engines located in the trunk of Dragon, which contains an independent propellant system, were used to adjust the space station’s orbit through a maneuver lasting five minutes, three seconds. The initial test burn increased the station’s altitude by around one mile at perigee, or low point of station’s orbit, leaving the station in an orbit of 260.9 x 256.3 miles. The new boost kit in Dragon will help sustain the orbiting lab’s altitude through a series of longer burns planned periodically throughout the fall of 2025.
The Dragon will remain docked with ISS until December. It is expected it will do additional test burns during that time.
NASA wishes to get this capability from its own spacecraft so as to no longer have to rely entirely on the Russians, who have traditionally done these orbital adjustments using its Progress cargo freighters. SpaceX likely also wants to do these tests as an adjunct to its contract to build the de-orbit vehicle that will bring ISS down, after it is retired.
Both Israel and SpaceX completed new launches during the evening hours yesterday. First, Israel placed an Ofek radar surveillance satellite into orbit, its small solid-fueld Shavit-2 rocket lifting off from an undisclosed location within the country, likely its Palmachim Airbase on the Mediterranean coast south of Tel Aviv. The launch occurred about the same time as SpaceX’s Starlink launch from Vandenberg, already reported last night.
This was Israel’s first launch in 2025, and the first since 2023. Since 2008 the country has launched seven military surveillance satellites, one about every two to four years or so.
Several hours later, in the wee hours of the morning, SpaceX completed another launch, placing 28 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage completed its fourteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
112 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 112 to 85.
SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage was new, successfully completing its first flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
111 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 111 to 84.
The beat goes on! SpaceX this morning successfully launched 28 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 23rd flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
110 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 110 to 84.
SpaceX this evening successfully launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its fifteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
109 SpaceX
48 China
12 Rocket Lab
11 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 109 to 84.
