The First Launches of 2025 All Slipped Later

On New Year's Eve, I posted a screen capture of the first three launches of the year from Next Spaceflight to show the first three launches of the year. I'll just repost it here.

All three of those launches have shifted later. We just watched the Thuraya 4-NGS launch from the backporch here south of the Cape. Instead of being at the earliest time that would be called Jan. 2nd, it was about 3-1/2 hours less than two full days late. 

The Starlink 6-71 mission is bumped from Sunday afternoon at 12:10 PM to Monday, Jan. 6 at 11:44 AM.  Since it's launching from the same complex as tonight's flight, I figure there must be some amount of time allowed to recycle everything between launches.  

New Glenn is currently set for Weds. Jan. 8 at 1:00 AM.

A new Starlink mission, Group 12-11 which will be launched from Pad 39A, is now inserted between Sunday's Starlink 6-71 and New Glenn early Wednesday morning.  This new group 12-11 mission will launch NET Tues. Jan 7 @ 10:51 AM EST.

And if you can keep all that straight without going reflexively back and forth to NextSpaceflight, you're doing better than me! 

The first launch of 2025, tonight's Falcon 9 launch from SLC-40 on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Screen capture from the NSF (NASA Spaceflight) video. 

There are reports or rumors that SpaceX has set their goal for this year at around 180 launches. I've also seen 188 mentioned as the goal, and I don't know of an official place to see that. So pick one or the other of those and divide 365 days by that number of launches.  You'll get a number close to two, which implies a launch every other day.  Last year, SpaceX launched more than every other launch provider on Earth, combined.  I don't see that as likely to change.

Small Space News Story Roundup 49

Because there's still nothing big going on, where big is defined as more than one news service talking about it.  

Parker Solar Probe Updates for the Second Time

On Dec. 27, I updated the previous story to add the Parker solar probe was in contact, downloading the status that it had successfully conducted (and survived!) its close approach to the sun.

In that same story, it was mentioned that a more detailed report would be sent back to Earth on January 1st.  That data came down as expected on New Year's Day. 

On Wednesday (Jan. 1), mission control at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland began receiving the Parker Solar Probe's first telemetry — or housekeeping data — that confirms Parker's systems and science instruments are "healthy and operating normally" after its historic rendezvous with the sun, NASA shared in an update on Thursday (Jan. 2).

"All is looking good with the spacecraft systems and instrument operations," Michael Buckley, a spokesperson at JHUAPL, which oversees the Parker Solar Probe mission, told Space.com in an email. "It really is a remarkable spacecraft!"

Briefly, the probe survived with no problems at all; the data indicates every instrument behaved properly, the spacecraft had executed the commands that had been programmed into its flight computers before the flyby and all instruments report being healthy. 

The measured data is still to be downloaded but no source I could find would say when to expect that. 

A visualization of the Parker Solar Probe in front of the sun. (Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben)

Update to SpaceX Flight to be the First Crewed Orbital Mission over the Poles

Remember talk about this mission?  On August 12, SpaceX announced they will provide launch and space hardware for the first human flight that will go into a polar orbit. The private mission is being led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years.  The projected launch date back in August was said to be "around the solstice" but not exactly which solstice.

We learned today from the Payload newsletter that the mission has the mission, called Fram2, is expecting to launch No Earlier Than this spring.  To be pedantic, that's an equinox not a solstice:

The crew of Fram2 from left to right: Rabea Rogge, Eric Philips, Chun Wang, and Jannicke Mikkelsen. Image credit: Fram2 on X.

(as an aside, I had completely forgotten that Fram2 is the mission name, and that it's named after a Norwegian research ship named Fram. I honestly thought "it's named after an oil filter brand?"

That Payload Newsletter is worth taking a look at. It's a couple of screens of "What to Expect in 2025"

Very Little Space News Today

You'd think it was some sort of holiday observed in most of the world or something. 

The only thing I saw reported that was pretty much new was the SpaceNews (dot com!) article on the record year that the US Space Force had at Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center.  

Florida’s Space Coast capped off a record-breaking year with 93 launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, up from 74 launches in 2023.

Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, commander of the Eastern Range and Space Delta 45, credited the accelerated pace to innovations by both Space Launch Delta 45 and the private sector. “We’ve been able to reach these crazy numbers by leveraging automation, modernizing infrastructure, and streamlining processes,” Panzenhagen told SpaceNews.

The interesting thing General Panzenhagen pointed out was of those 93 launches, 88 were SpaceX.  The other five were United Launch Alliance.  

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All that out of the way, two memes that have been on my mind. The first one is just a simple observation.

The second one is an observation that seems obvious to me.

I think Candace Owens is absolutely right: those people being against Tulsi is as good an endorsement as  you'll see.  I guess I'm assuming this is either exactly the same group that covered up Hunter's laptop and called it Russian disinformation or there's a lot of overlap.  A favorite observation I came across years ago is that the biggest benefit of true Freedom of Speech is that it makes it easier to know who the assholes are.  If everyone is censored, it's harder.  In this case, by giving their names publicly, they've made it easier to identify who the corrupt operators are so they can be gotten rid of faster.