Crew-11 scrubbed by weather, ready to try Friday morning

At just about T minus one minute in this morning's countdown to the launch of the Crew-11 mission to the International Space Station, SpaceX called a scrub due to weather, as a dense cumulus cloud going almost exactly overhead violated launch criteria.  Despite the launch being "just up the road" we were watching online because it was cloudier and looked worse around here.  

"Unfortunately, the weather is just not playing alongside with today's excitement on the launch for NASA SpaceX's Crew-11," NASA commentator Derrol Nail said during today's launch coverage. 

"We could literally see the clouds kind of going over top of our heads, getting close to the pad, and the standoff area is a 10-mile radius around the pad for these dark clouds, cumulous clouds, and that is a safety factor," Nail added. "That is because you don't want to send a rocket through a tall cloud like that — that could generate some energy from the rocket passing through it."

Screen capture from the video posted at Space.com Image credit: SpaceX

As of this evening, they've completed the weather review for Friday's launch window and have been cleared to try again on Friday.  

NASA and SpaceX continue to target 11:43 a.m. EDT Friday, Aug. 1, for launch of the Crew-11 mission to the International Space Station from the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

After the launch attempt was scrubbed Thursday for weather, mission teams completed a weather review for the next opportunity, and conditions around the launch pad are forecast at 75% favorable for liftoff. However, conditions along the flight path of Dragon remain a watch item. Acceptable weather conditions at both the launch site and along the Dragon flight path are required for a “go” for liftoff.

India launches top end radar satellite for NASA

After more than a decade of development, NASA's science leadership traveled to India this week for the launch of the world's most expensive Earth-observation satellite.

The mission, a $1.5 billion synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite, a joint project between NASA and the Indian space agency ISRO, successfully launched into orbit on Wednesday aboard India's GSLV or Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle, a medium-lift rocket. 

The mission, named NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar), was subsequently deployed into its intended orbit 464 miles (747 km) above the Earth's surface. From this Sun-synchronous orbit, it will collect data about the planet's land and ice surfaces two times every 12 days, including the infrequently visited polar regions in the Southern Hemisphere.

The description of the SAR is that it's dual band, S-band and L-band.  Those frequency bands are adjacent to each other and not at all completely dedicated to SAR use.  L-band is broadly defined as 1 to 2 GHz (1000 to 2000 MHz) while S-band is equally broadly defined as 2 to 4 GHz (2000 to 4000 MHz).  For example, L-band contains satellite downlinks, aviation services such as TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System), transponder, ADS-B and GPS, while S-band includes the 2.4 GHz WiFi we're so dependent on, Bluetooth, microwave ovens, and many consumer radio controlled devices. 

Broadly, telling us the radar is dual band, using S-band and L-band, is telling us only the tiniest amount of information. 

The satellite combines two main instruments that, unlike optical telescopes, can gather data through clouds and at night. NASA provided the L-band synthetic aperture radar, which is efficient at measuring soil moisture, forests, and the movement of land and ice on the surface of the planet. India contributed an S-band radar that is useful for measuring agricultural changes, as well as grasslands and human-built structures.

NASA and other spaceflight organizations have been developing and flying synthetic aperture radar for decades, but the NISAR spacecraft is one of the first missions to combine two different bands onto a single vehicle. This should provide a more comprehensive view of how the planet's surface is changing on a real-time basis.

The NISAR spacecraft - in the middle - is integrated with its Indian GSLV launch vehicle. Image Credit: ISRO

As is usually the case, the satellite will spend a while getting calibrated and more thoroughly tested, once it's in the preferred orbit.  That process of getting readied for its mission is expected to take three months.  

During this time NISAR will deploy a very large antenna reflector that is 39 feet (12 meters) in diameter. This reflector will send and receive microwaves from the two radars and use differences to measure the surface below. 

The mission is notable for both its complexity and its cost (those usually come together, after all).  

The US and Indian space agencies signed the partnership agreement on September 30, 2014, to design and build the spacecraft.  At the time, launch was targeted for 2024, so missing that deadline by less than a year is quite respectable. 

Small Space News Story Roundup 63

Because something big doesn't happen EVERY day

Australia's first orbital launch fails, rocket destroyed 

Back in March, as the first quarter of the year was coming to a close, I did an article on launches that were possibly coming before the start of April and the second quarter of the year.  I had seen mention of a rocket called Eris from an Australian company called Gilmour Space.  I found it interesting because I know nothing about the company or Australia's efforts to join the space age.  So I started keeping an eye out for it. 

As March turned into April, and April into May, there was precious little information.  And then came word of a launch attempt on Thursday, May 15. Then I learned that the nose cone fell off the rocket hours before it was supposed to launch.  The preparations for launch were aborted.

Back to keeping an eye out for info again.  Until NextSpaceflight started reporting they were going to try to launch again "real soon now," and that eventually morphed into trying again today (local time, which I think was October 37th in Australia).

This time was worse.  The vehicle lifted off the launch pad, drifted a little, while gaining virtually zero altitude, then fell to the ground.  Video here.  That video is over an hour long, but set to start playing 1hr: 29: 10.  Launch happens quickly, but not instantly.  Overall, the flight failure is reminiscent of the Astra launch in Alaska that I've considered the strangest mission abort I've ever seen. 

SpaceX moves Flight Test 10 Starship to test area 

Tuesday morning (today as I write) SpaceX rolled the Starship for Flight Test 10 to the launch pad for static fire testing.  There isn't an announced date for this test flight, but things are falling into place for it possibly being "soon."

SpaceX has not announced a target date for Flight 10, but it could happen soon: On July 14, company founder and CEO Elon Musk said the liftoff will occur in "about three weeks." On Monday, he provided an updated, yet more vague, prediction: "next month." 

As a perfunctory reminder, "next month" starts Friday.  I just tend to think later in the month rather than that soon. 

Flight 10's Starship rolls to the launch pad in preparation for static testing.  Image Credit: SpaceX via X

As is often the case, there has been a lot of buzz going around about modifications to Starship and the SuperHeavy booster.  The problem is it's hard to be sure what's really going to be flying for IFT 10.  There has been talk of an entirely different heat shield covering Starship, and massive internal modifications to SuperHeavy along with the Raptor engines.  Then there are aspects like a static firing of the booster for IFT 10 having been carried out at the start of June - and any static testing done before major changes to the booster is irrelevant. 

I'll try to get more details.  

The secretive X-37B space plane to launch NET August 21

Ordinarily launches of the X-37B space plane and its various missions stay wrapped in the secrecy veil of the mission and don't get much press coverage.  Next month's launch of one of the Space Force's two X-37B space planes is looking to be an exception.  

On Monday, the Space Force announced that it will fly the small, Space Shuttle-shaped vehicle on the program's eighth mission next month. The launch of the vehicle, on a Falcon 9 rocket, is scheduled to occur no earlier than August 21 from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

There are two active X-37Bs in the Space Force fleet, both built by Boeing. The first made its debut flight in April 2010. Since then, the two uncrewed spacecraft have made a succession of longer flights.
...
It's likely that the first of these two vehicles, both of which are about 29 feet (9 meters) long and roughly one-quarter the length of one of NASA's Space Shuttle orbiters, will launch next month.

While, as most people who follow space flight will vouch, Space Force and Air Force research labs are being more open than usual about this mission, called OTV-8.  The mission's goals include tests of "high-bandwidth inter-satellite laser communications technologies." 

Communications by lasers over rather long ranges is hardly new, and it has become well established in the private space programs, too.  The Psyche mission, still en route to the asteroid bearing that name, tested laser communications at 10 million miles, 40 times the average Earth-moon distance of 250,000 miles.  But even that isn't what the OTV-8 mission is all about. 

The Space Force news says the test will be of a new navigation technology based on electromagnetic wave interference.  The news release characterizes this as the "highest-performing quantum inertial sensor ever tested in space." 

Boeing has previously tested a quantum inertial measurement unit, which detects rotation and acceleration using atom interferometry, on conventional aircraft. Now, an advanced version of the technology is being taken to space to demonstrate its viability. The goal of the in-space test is to demonstrate precise positioning, navigation, and timing in an environment where GPS services are not available.

"Bottom line: testing this tech will be helpful for navigation in contested environments where GPS may be degraded or denied," [US Space Force General Chance] Saltzman said in a social media post Monday, describing the flight.

Quantum inertial sensors could also be used near the Moon, where there is no comparable GPS capability, or for exploration further into the Solar System.

The X-37B at Kennedy Space Center, November 12, 2022. USSF Photo

Like virtually all earlier missions, the X-37B is hitching a ride to orbit on a plain, medium lift, Falcon 9. During its most recent flight that ended in March, the space plane launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time. This allowed the X-37B to fly beyond low-Earth orbit and reach an elliptical high-Earth orbit.

As we approach the busy part of hurricane season

The Atlantic hurricane season has its typical peak of the season in early September - the 10th.  While "first of the season" storms in May are not unheard of, which is before the season has actually started, those tend to be weaker storms, close to the US - things that develop around cold fronts coming offshore the continental US (CONUS).  We've had a couple of those this year, and one of them (Barry) came ashore out of the Pacific environment, crossed over Mexico and ended up being implicated in feeding the moisture that ended up in the horrific Texas floods earlier in July.  

But the peak of the season is approaching, and numbers of storms tend to start going up in August, as the development area moves from close to the US over to the tropical, low-latitude Atlantic.  "Low latitude" isn't a precise description and different graphics you'll find of it will show different latitudes.  Forecasters refer to this as the Main Development Region or MDR.  

Storms that start developing close to land in the US, including much of the Gulf, get good radar as well as good satellite observation.  There has been some hoopla about some satellites becoming unavailable to weather forecasters among the people that spend their lives looking for more "everyone is going to die" stories.  One of those is on Space.com today, "Hurricane forecasters are losing 3 key satellites ahead of peak storm season - a meteorologist explains why it matters."

The story is focused on the east end of the MDR, so close Africa.  It's too far for Hurricane Hunter planes to fly, so storms in the eastern MDR have been largely examined with satellite-based radars. 

On June 25, 2025, the Trump administration issued a service change notice announcing that the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, DMSP, and the Navy’s Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center would terminate data collection, processing and distribution of all DMSP data no later than June 30. The data termination was postponed until July 31 following a request from the head of NASA’s Earth Science Division. 

These DMSP satellites are the best platform for examining storms out there.  

The three satellites orbit Earth 14 times per day with special sensor microwave imager/sounder instruments, or SSMIS. These let meteorologists look inside the clouds, similar to how an MRI in a hospital looks inside a human body. With these instruments, meteorologists can pinpoint the storm’s low-pressure center and identify signs of intensification.

Precisely locating the center of a hurricane improves forecasts of the storm’s future track. This lets meteorologists produce more accurate hurricane watches, warnings and evacuations.

It turns out that the best tool for locating the center of the storm is apparently the SSMIS sensor they talk about.  They report that hurricane track predictions have improved "by up to 75%" since 1990 and while they talk about improvement in predictions of intensification, they don't give a number like that.  

The problem, though, is that this is being blamed on budget cuts, not on the fact that planned replacements haven't been built or put up in orbit, yet.  

The DMSP satellites were launched between 1999 and 2009 and were designed to last for five years. They have now been operating for more than 15 years. The United States Space Force recently concluded that the DMSP satellites would reach the end of their lives between 2023 and 2026, so the data would likely have gone dark soon. 

There are other Satellites in orbit that can conceivably get useful data over the MDR: NOAA-20, NOAA-21 and Suomi NPP all have a microwave instrument known as the advanced technology microwave sounder.  More satellites are planned to use this ATMS, which can provide data similar to the currently used SSMIS, but at a lower resolution.  We've probably all seen low and high resolution images enough to imagine a blocky-chunky looking image of a hurricane from both kinds of resolution - we just don't know "how low is low" and just how degraded it is.  That last link ("at a lower resolution") is a substack article that provides a useful image which I changed from two images stacked vertically to being two side-by-side.

I puzzle over why the guys specifying the instruments (apparently) voluntarily went from the high resolution image on the left to the one on the right. 

The major question is still why are the current satellites in the 15th year of a five year mission?  It has been known since before the first one flew that they'd need to be replaced by now, so why didn't they build replacements immediately, so they could have launched in five years if need be?  Or wait a little and launch after 10 years. Based on the image quality between the old DMSP satellites and the newer one, they either think they don't need the better resolution or they simply can't decide what they need.

Stop me if you've heard this before: NASA wants a cheaper SLS

What a surprise.  We've only been talking like this for years including reaching the uncomfortable conclusion that we're trapped with SLS and no way out.  The latest tweak to the idea is centered on the Exploration Upper Stage - which has still never been built and tested - and replacing it with something cheaper but "close enough" instead of the original Artemis mission plans. 

Not surprisingly, Congress is pushing back against the Trump administration's proposal to cancel the Space Launch System, the behemoth rocket NASA has developed to propel astronauts back to the Moon.

Spending bills making their way through both houses of Congress reject the White House's plan to wind down the SLS rocket after two more launches, but the text of a draft budget recently released by the House Appropriations Committee suggests an openness to making some major changes to the program.  

The current situation is that Artemis II is in pre-launch preparations, with the booster stacked and work proceeding.  Artemis II will be the first Americans to fly around the moon since the Apollo days.  Long talked about as flying late this year with some talk about September of '25, it's now looking more like '26.  Artemis III, the first Americans to land on the moon since Apollo, is looking to be '27 - and if you believe that, nothing in SLS or Artemis has stayed on its schedule given this far out. 

After Artemis III, the official policy of the Trump administration is to terminate the SLS program, along with the Orion crew capsule designed to launch on top of the rocket. The White House also proposed canceling NASA's Gateway, a mini-space station to be placed in orbit around the Moon. NASA would instead procure commercial launches and commercial spacecraft to ferry astronauts between the Earth and the Moon, while focusing the agency's long-term gaze toward Mars.

At the moment, both House and Senate budget proposals keep SLS, Orion, and the (IMO: totally worthless) Gateway.  Note that the House version has an interesting paragraph directing NASA to explore cheaper, faster options for a new SLS upper stage, currently intended to be the Exploration Upper Stage by Artemis IV, the second moon landing in '28.  As usual, the EUS is behind schedule 

The House version of NASA's fiscal year 2026 budget raises questions about the long-term future of the Exploration Upper Stage. In one section of the bill, House lawmakers would direct NASA to "evaluate alternatives to the current Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) design for SLS." The committee members wrote the evaluation should focus on reducing development and production costs, shortening the schedule, and maintaining the SLS rocket's lift capability.

"NASA should also evaluate how alternative designs could support the long-term evolution of SLS and broader exploration goals beyond low-Earth orbit," the lawmakers wrote. "NASA is directed to assess various propulsion systems, stage configurations, infrastructure compatibility, commercial and international collaboration opportunities, and the cost and schedule impacts of each alternative."

Ars Technica's Eric Berger wrote last year about the possibility of flying the Centaur V upper stage on SLS missions.  The first problem is that using the Centaur V wouldn't maintain the SLS rocket's lift capability: the EUS is more powerful.  The second stage of Blue Origin's New Glenn could conceivably fly on the SLS, but Blue's stage would be a more challenging match for SLS for several reasons, but primarily its 7-meter (23-foot) diameter, which is too wide to be a drop-in replacement for the planned EUS.  ULA's Centaur V is much closer in size to the existing upper stage.  Interstage adapters to bigger or smaller stages are pretty common features across the industry, so it doesn't seem like an impossible dream to call one out here.  

In the big picture sense, there's too much going on here to assume a design change will be decided and added to schedule for a while.  It's my understanding the house and Senate are closing for August - or parts of it, if not the whole month.  It seems safe to say this isn't going to be resolved any time soon.

Artist's illustration of the Boeing-developed Exploration Upper Stage, with four hydrogen-fueled RL10 engines. Credit: NASA

ESA Launching five Earth observing satellites Friday night

A carbon dioxide-mapping satellite and four other Earth-observing spacecraft are scheduled to launch tonight (July 25) by the European Space Agency from their facilities in Kourou, French Guiana.  The launch vehicle will be their four-stage, 115-foot-tall (35 meters) Vega C rocket.

The launch is scheduled for 10:03 PM EDT and coverage on YouTube will begin at  9:40 PM.  I realize most of you will miss launch time but I'm expecting that link to replay the launch video. 

The "headline" payload is called MicroCarb, a project led by the French space agency CNES.  

This 400-pound (180-kilogram) satellite "is designed to map sources and sinks of carbon dioxide (CO2) — the most important greenhouse gas — on a global scale," CNES officials wrote in a mission description.

MicroCarb will be able to determine CO2 concentrations with a precision of one part per million. The satellite will operate in sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 404 miles (650 kilometers), for at least five years, if all goes to plan.

The other four satellites will make up the CNES' CO3D ("Constellation Optique en 3D") Earth-observing constellation.  Each spacecraft in the quartet weighs about 550 pounds (250 kg) and will operate in sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 312 miles (502 km) for at least six years, according to CNES.  

The satellites, which were built by Airbus, "have a unique optical instrument with a spatial resolution of approximately 50 cm [20 inches] in the red, green and blue visible bands and in the near-infrared," CNES wrote in a mission description. "After processing on the ground, their data will yield 3D maps of all of Earth’s land surfaces between -60 degree and +70 degree latitudes."

The CO3D satellites will be deployed around an hour after liftoff, and MicroCarb will be deployed 44 minutes after the four.

This will be the fifth launch overall for the Vega C, and the third since an anomaly in the rocket's second stage caused a mission failure in December 2022. The first two launches after the anomaly were successful. 

Artist's conception of the MicroCarb satellite from the mission description:  Image credit: CNES

A Day Late ... NASA's TRACERS mission is getting started

You might have heard about the strange issue near Vandenberg Space Force Base on Tuesday, that caused the delay not just the SpaceX rideshare mission carrying the TRACERS mission, but the complete shutdown of air traffic off the coast of southern California.  Afterwards, the FAA issued the following statement.

“A regional power outage in the Santa Barbara area disrupted telecommunications at the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center, which manages air traffic over the Pacific Ocean,” an FAA spokesperson said in a statement. “As a result, the FAA postponed the SpaceX Falcon 9 TRACERS launch on Tuesday, July 22. The FAA took this action to ensure the safety of the traveling public.”  

Since the launch window was closed for the day, everyone agreed to try again on Wednesday, July 23.  The launch was by the book, including recovering the booster and deploying the payloads.  

The $170 million mission TRACERS mission is to better study a phenomenon of space weather that has eluded researchers since the dawn of the Space Age. 

The twin spacecraft are part of the NASA-funded TRACERS mission, which will spend at least a year measuring plasma conditions in narrow regions of Earth's magnetic field known as polar cusps. As the name suggests, these regions are located over the poles. They play an important but poorly understood role in creating colorful auroras as plasma streaming out from the Sun interacts with the magnetic field surrounding Earth.

The same process drives geomagnetic storms capable of disrupting GPS navigation, radio communications, electrical grids, and satellite operations. These outbursts are usually triggered by solar flares or coronal mass ejections that send blobs of plasma out into the Solar System. If one of these flows happens to be aimed at Earth, we are treated with auroras but vulnerable to the storm's harmful effects.  

The Solar Storms of May 2024 were the strongest Geomagnetic storms of not just Cycle 25, but the strongest since 1989.  Storms like this may offer beautiful aurora displays or cause radio conditions entertaining to those of us who play in the VHF ham bands, but they also can cause damages that cost real money.  Lots of money.  The May storms degraded GPS navigation signals, resulting in more than $500 million in economic losses in the agriculture sector as farms temporarily suspended spring planting.  That isn't even scratching the surface of the damages and costs.  Remember that this has been going on for as long as the Earth and Sun have been here. 

TRACERS, short for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, will study a process known as magnetic reconnection. As particles in the solar wind head out into the Solar System at up to 1 million mph, they bring along pieces of the Sun's magnetic field. When the solar wind reaches our neighborhood, it begins interacting with Earth's magnetic field.

The high-energy collision breaks and reconnects magnetic field lines, flinging solar wind particles across Earth's magnetosphere at speeds that can approach the speed of light. Earth's field draws some of these particles into the polar cusps, down toward the upper atmosphere. This is what creates dazzling auroral light shows and potentially damaging geomagnetic storms.

The problem is that nobody understands how these storms work.  That's a big part of why there are two satellites that are precisely spaced with respect to each other.  

That's because magnetic reconnection is a dynamic process, and a single satellite would provide just a snapshot of conditions over the polar cusps every 90 minutes. By the time the satellite comes back around on another orbit, conditions will have changed, but scientists wouldn't know how or why, according to David Miles, principal investigator for the TRACERS mission at the University of Iowa.

"You can't tell, is that because the system itself is changing?" Miles said. "Is that because this magnetic reconnection, the coupling process, is moving around? Is it turning on and off, and if it's turning on and off, how quickly can it do it? Those are fundamental things that we need to understand... how the solar wind arriving at the Earth does or doesn't transfer energy to the Earth system, which has this downstream effect of space weather." 

This is why the tandem part of the TRACERS name is important.  The novel part of this mission is that it features two identical spacecraft, each about the size of a washing machine flying at an altitude of 367 miles (590 kilometers). Over the next few weeks, the TRACERS satellites will drift into a formation with one trailing the other by about two minutes as they zip around the world at nearly five miles per second. This positioning will allow the satellites to sample the polar cusps one right after the other, instead of forcing scientists to wait another 90 minutes for a data refresh.

With TRACERS, scientists hope to pick apart smaller, fast-moving changes with each satellite pass. Within a year, TRACERS should collect 3,000 measurements of magnetic reconnections, a sample size large enough to start identifying why some space weather events evolve differently than others.

One of the two TRACERS satellites undergoes launch preparations at Millennium Space Systems, the spacecraft's manufacturer.  Image Credit: Millennium Space Systems

There is broader knowledge to be gained with TRACERS.  Magnetic reconnection is ubiquitous throughout the Universe, and the same physical processes produce solar flares and coronal mass ejections from the Sun.

Trump Admin orders review of environmental rules for rocket launches

The administration has ordered a review of rules intended to protect the public and environment during rocket launches, according to a report by Propublica published on Ars Technica yesterday. 

A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more launches or even more launch sites—known as spaceports—along their coastlines.

The order is a step toward the rollback of federal oversight that Musk, who has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, and others have pushed for.  Commercial rocket launches have grown exponentially more frequent in recent years.

This is undoubtedly going to "trigger" the people opposed to launches essentially anytime or anywhere because Secretary of Transportation Duffy is also serving as NASA administrator and critics would argue that he has a conflict of interest. 

Because they fly so much more than any other launch service provider, SpaceX and Elon Musk have been at the center of this storm.  Musk has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, as well as the things other launch providers have pushed for. 

As you'd expect the advocates for fewer launches have started showing up.  

Critics warn such a move could have dangerous consequences.

“It would not be reasonable for them to be rescinding regulations that are there to protect the public interest, and the public, from harm,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that works to protect animals and the environment. “And that’s my fear here: Are they going to change things in a way that puts people at risk, that puts habitats and wildlife at risk?”

Naturally, that's assuming the regulations are properly constructed with no mistakes either in creating or implementing them, and are written in a perfect compromise between the desire to do no damage to anything and the need get things into space. 

It's reported that documents show the draft order also seeks to restrict the authority of state coastal officials who have challenged commercial launch companies.  It could lead to federal officials interfering with state efforts to enforce their environmental rules when they conflict with the construction or operation of spaceports.  They seem to be afraid the Federal government will order states or territories to build spaceports instead of whatever the states want to build.  I'm fairly certain that has never happened and it seems hard to think it would happen now. 

The changes outlined in the order would greatly benefit SpaceX, which launches far more rockets into space than any other company in the US. But it would also help rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and California-based Rocket Lab. The companies have been pushing to pare down oversight for years, warning that the US is racing with China to return to the moon—in hopes of mining resources like water and rare earth metals and using it as a stepping stone to Mars—and could lose if regulations don’t allow US companies to move faster, said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, a trade group that represents eight launch companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Rocket Lab.

“It sounds like they’ve been listening to industry, because all of those things are things that we’ve been advocating for strongly,” Cavossa said when asked about the contents of the draft order.

I hope the author at Pro Publica understands the talk about mining water on the moon, is for use on the moon, not to send back down to Earth.  Same with rare earth metals - they're for use on the moon.  

Currently, the FAA’s environmental reviews look at 14 types of potential impacts that include air and water quality, noise pollution, and land use, and provide details about the launches that are not otherwise available. They have at times drawn big responses from the public.

When SpaceX sought to increase its Starship launches in Texas from five to 25 a year, residents and government agencies submitted thousands of comments. Most of the nearly 11,400 publicly posted comments opposed the increase, a ProPublica analysis found. The FAA approved the increase anyway earlier this year. After conducting an environmental assessment for the May launch of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 9 from Texas, the FAA released documents that revealed as many as 175 airline flights could be disrupted and Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport would need to close during the launch.

Since SpaceX is launching more than anyone on Earth, it seems fitting to leave the closing comments to him.

Musk helped lead the charge. Last September, he told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.” 

In the background, a Falcon 9 rocket climbs away from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, while in the foreground another Falcon 9 stands on Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center awaiting its opportunity to fly.

A Last Look at Apollo 11 and the Apollo Program Itself

Not exactly Apollo 11 itself, but rather the Apollo program itself in a couple of "big picture" ways.  

One of the things I don't understand at all is the lunar landing deniers; it's such a stupid thing to wrap one's belief system up in.  I understand that with big conspiracy theories like this, there's simply no way to disprove them.  There's no piece of evidence we could show a true believer that would have them say, "Gosh! You're right!  We did go!" For the last 30 years, I believe it has polled consistently that 6% of the population believes we never went.  There's another group, I believe of a similar size,who just claims they're not sure.  

When I worked for Major Southeast Defense Contractor, there was a graybeard Mechanical Engineer whom I became friends with. His first job out of college was with Grumman Aerospace doing support for the Lunar Modules. He talked about being called into a Tiger Team to solve an issue on Apollo 14 because one of the astronauts had tripped over a cable, pulling the cable out of one of the science packages. For some of you, if I say Mil-38999 connectors, you'll get a visceral nausea at the thought of rewiring and crimping the pins on one of them. In 1/6 G wearing gloves with fingers as wide as small Caribbean islands. They told the 14 crew to abandon it. If you look up how many people worked on the program, sources will say over 400,000 people in 20,000 companies worked on the Apollo program. This friend was just one. 

There's so much evidence that a landing denier has to make it a life goal to not see it and truly examine it.  "My mind is made up.  Don't talk to me about it!"  Fast Company magazine (of all places) ran a story back in July of 2019 with just a few of the reasons why it's such a silly idea.  He starts out philosophically, a really good place to my way of thinking, by asking how do we know anything?  To borrow a few sentences: 

It’s a little like asking how we know there was a Revolutionary War. Where’s the evidence? Maybe it’s just made up by the current government to force us to think about America in a particular way.

How do we know there was a Titanic that sank?

And by the way, when I go to the battlefields at Gettysburg—or at Normandy, for that matter—they don’t look much like battlefields to me. Can you prove we fought a Civil War? World War II?

In my first iteration of college, I had to take a "mandatory elective" in the Philosophy of Science and questions like this were the entire class. Let's say you went to bed one night, and by the morning, everything in the universe had doubled in size. How would you know? People in class would inevitably talk about measuring things, but if the rulers and every length standard had doubled in size, too, the measurements would say the same things. How could you know?  Similarly, it's not possible to derive a way to prove the entire universe didn't spring into existence, just the way it is mere moments ago, with our memories and experiences fully formed the way they are and all the evidence we use to conclude it's billions of years old came into existence moments ago, as well.

This applies to everything. How do we know that things we observe in other galaxies are the way we say they are? We assume that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the universe, but that's just an assumption because we can't get there to check. Without those assumptions there's precious little we can say about the things we observe, and we like to be able to think we really understand everything we see. 

The thing to remember about the space race was that it was a race.  Remember there was a Soviet Union, who entered the 60s well in front of the US space efforts, and who had the capability to monitor things on the moon as well as we could. Don't forget they wanted to win that race. If they had any indications that the missions to the moon were faked, don't they think the Soviets would have made it known? They would have pounced on and revealed any fraud in the blink of an eye, and not just without hesitation, but with great joy and satisfaction. 

In fact, the Russians did just the opposite. The Soviet Union was one of the few places on Earth (along with China, and North Korea) where ordinary people couldn’t watch the landing of Apollo 11 and the Moon walk in real time. It was real enough for the Russians that they didn’t let their own people see it.

Books could be written on why the Soviets didn't make it to the moon; the story I think has the most weight (and I haven't been able to find it lately) is that some of the brightest minds in their space program were killed in a pad disaster that took out the launch structures and those scientists/engineers.  They never recovered from that loss, but they continued the race.  Not everyone recalls that at the time 11's LM landed on the moon, there was a Soviet probe on the surface (Luna 15) - a mission that was supposed to show the world "we can return moon rocks to earth for study without sending humans".  The mission failed. 

With the latest generation of satellites prospecting the moon, we can see the landers and marks on the surface.  These are from later missions, but can we assume that if they faked Apollo 11 they would have faked them all?  

Apollo 14's landing site. The dark lines between the Antares (lunar lander) descent stage and the ALSEP are footprints. (ALSEP = Apollo Lunar Science Exploration Package)

Apollo 17's site.

Of all the arguments that we regularly read from lunar landing deniers, one has an element of truth to it.  They say the Van Allen radiation belts would have fried the astronauts. Saying "fried" is wrong by orders of magnitude, but there is a measurable effect.  It turns out the astronauts who went through the belts to the moon had a significantly higher rate of cardiovascular disease than astronauts who never went to orbit or those who only went to low earth orbit. 

The primary purpose of this study was to determine whether mortality rates due to cardiovascular disease (CVD), cancer, accidents and all other causes of death differ in (1) astronauts who never flew orbital missions in space, (2) astronauts who flew only in low Earth orbit (LEO), and (3) Apollo lunar astronauts, the only humans to have traveled beyond Earth’s magnetosphere. Results show there were no differences in CVD mortality rate between non-flight (9%) and LEO (11%) astronauts. However, the CVD mortality rate among Apollo lunar astronauts (43%) was 4–5 times higher than in non-flight and LEO astronauts.

The looming issue here is that they can't conclusively say it was the Van Allen belts, just that it was something to do with leaving Earth's protective magnetosphere, but they only left the magnetosphere briefly; Apollo 11 was four to five days (I'm guessing here) but other missions were longer.   That brings more concern to a Mars mission, as well as doing work on the moon.   

You'll note I haven't said a word about one of the most frequent complaints I've seen from landing deniers, about the photography. Not seeing stars; seeing land that isn't as perfectly smooth and straight as they seem to expect it to be.  Anybody who learned photography in the film days knows how empty those arguments are the minute they hear them. If you think that the stars should be visible with the foreground as brightly lit as peak afternoon sun on a beach, you don't understand the first thing about the brightness ranges films - or our own eyes, for that matter - can handle. I've honestly never seen a single argument about a photograph that has stood up to casual knowledge of film photography. 

With current technology mission plans, called "boost and coast", a Martian trip is a long undertaking.  Mars and Earth reach opposition (closest point) roughly every two years (it varies).  Launched around opposition, a trip to Mars takes about seven months.  After that, as Earth continues to advance ahead of Mars, the return trip takes longer.  A quick stay on Mars turns into seven months to get there and ten months to a year coming back.  If one is going to travel for 18 months, a year and a half, it makes a reasonable argument to stay longer.  Seven months to Mars, then explore 16 months until Earth is approaching for a shorter return?

A potential solution is nuclear powered spacecraft.  I've been talking about this for years, but a nuclear powered engine can accelerate the first half of the way there and decelerate the second half the way.  There are designs for engines that "burn" low yield atomic explosions - impulse power - for thrust.  Some designs that have been investigated would allow 60 day trips to Mars instead of seven months.  By now everyone has heard of the bone loss, edema and other problems astronauts on the ISS face.  Those can be solved by artificial gravity on the spacecraft, like the science fiction books used to say.  Yes, it will make the spacecraft heavier and the mission more expensive.   Nobody ever suggested there was anything remotely easy about it.  Judging by reading what Elon Musk seems to think an exploratory trip to Mars requires and the many Starship cargo loads he's talking about, I think Elon gets it. We're in good hands.  

Building habitats on Mars without bringing every little thing

If mankind is truly going to become a multiplanetary species as a lot of us aspire to, conventional ideas involve hauling tons of supplies from Earth to the Red Planet to establish civilization there.  It is, without a doubt, a rough mission that requires exceptional people to go with all the risks that come with the mission.  Comparatively, migrating between places on Earth is nothing.  The air is safe to breathe, or more correctly, if you know how to treat the air in one hemisphere, you know how to treat it everywhere else on Earth.   On Mars you don't even have air.  Then there's building shelter.  There are no trees on Mars so something like a log cabin isn't possible.  Can something like concrete be made there, and buildings made from that?  Bricks of some sort?

So what if early astronauts, early settlers, could bring something that's light but could create materials that can be built into useful things?  

In a potential milestone for space exploration, scientists have successfully grown algae under simulated Martian conditions using equipment made from biodegradable bioplastics — a step that could bring long-term space colonization closer to reality.

As interest in human missions to Mars grows, scientists are focusing on how to sustain life in space without constant resupply from Earth. A team of researchers led by Robin Wordsworth of Harvard University demonstrated that green algae can not only survive but thrive inside bioplastic chambers designed to mimic the extreme environment of the Red Planet. 

The idea is using bioplastics to grow more bioplastics that can be used to make useful things.  Wordsworth puts it like this: "If you have a habitat that is composed of bioplastic, and it grows algae within it, that algae could produce more bioplastic.  So you start to have a closed-loop system that can sustain itself and even grow through time."  Mars missions don't need to transport supplies, the algae grows from CO2 in the Martian atmosphere.  

In laboratory tests, Wordsworth and his team cultivated a common type of green algae called Dunaliella tertiolecta inside a 3D-printed chamber made from polylactic acid, which is a biodegradable plastic derived from natural sources. The chamber was engineered to replicate the thin, carbon dioxide–rich atmosphere of Mars, which has a surface pressure less than 1% that of Earth.

Despite these extreme conditions, the algae were able to perform photosynthesis, according to the statement.

Close-up of bioplastic habitat with algae growth. (Image credit: Harvard University)

The latest proof of concept experiment builds on earlier work by Wordsworth’s team, which showed that silica aerogels could replicate Earth’s greenhouse effect to support life in cold, low-pressure environments. By combining algae chambers for bioplastic production with aerogels for heat and pressure regulation, the researchers say they are making real progress toward self-sustaining space habitats.

The answer to not having forests to harvest wood from is to make your own wood from cellulose harvested from little Erlenmeyer flasks like this one.

56 Years Ago Today - "The Eagle Has Landed"

This morning at 9:27 EDT, Buzz Aldrin crawled into the Lunar Module Eagle and began the lengthy process of powering things up for the short mission life of the module.  An hour later, Neil Armstrong joined Buzz in the LM.  

A little over three hours after that, 1:47 PM, they released the latches and separated from the Command Module. At 2:12, Michael Collins fired thrusters on the CM moving it two miles away from the LM. Except for that small altitude difference, both vehicles remained in their initial orbit from yesterday's lunar orbit insertion until 3:08 PM when Armstrong fired the descent engine to lower the Eagle's orbit.

What follows is a 20 minute video depicting the landing which is easily the best modern reconstruction of the landing that I've seen. It combines video from the window as Armstrong would have seen it with the audio traffic from Mission Control. The first three minutes gives a modern simulation and animation of how it all worked; after that, it goes to the view recorded on the LM with spacecraft communication on the left speaker and mission control intercom on the right. Yes, I think it's worth the time.

The LM touches down at 4:18PM EDT.

At 6:00 PM, Armstrong radios down to mission control that he recommends they start the EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) sooner than planned; at 9 PM.  Although they don't make the 9PM goal, the 10:39 beginning of the EVA is still five hours earlier than the mission plans.

As I've mentioned before, this was the last vacation I would ever take with my parents. July of 1969 was the summer between my 9th and 10th grade years of school, and I was 15 years old.  My older brother, 18, had graduated high school in June and couldn't vacation with us.  Like millions of people around the world, I hung by the front of the black and white TV; this one in my uncle's house in New York City (The Bronx, for those who know).  We watched intently but I don't recall exactly how much we saw or if we watched until 1:11 tomorrow morning when the EVA officially concluded. It's a sobering thought how many of the family members there on that historic day and night have passed away. Both of my parents, my uncle and aunt, and I'm simply not sure how many else.  Of the people I've mentioned, only my older brother survives to this anniversary. 

Is Europe moving to manned spaceflight?

That's what Eric Berger at Ars Technica is thinking, based on a mission we talked about in June when the Exploration Company's first test flight of their Mission Possible capsule was lost during reentry.  

You might recall having read about Mission Possible and founder Hélène Huby because they were featured in a story back in last November.  In an interview then, Huby said Mission Possible was developed at a cost of about $20 million in 2.5 years, in addition to $10 million for the rideshare launch on the Falcon 9 rocket.  The test craft was lost at 26 km above the planet, as the spacecraft slowed to Mach one.  Huby was unsure how this loss would be received back in Europe.  It turned out to not be worth worrying about.

"What was interesting is the feedback I got in Europe," Huby said in an interview this week at the company's offices in Houston. "The German Space Agency, the French space agency, the European Space Agency said, OK, that's a great achievement. For the time and money we spent, performing 80 percent of that mission was a good investment." 

The Mission Possible vehicle is seen during assembly. Image credit: The Exploration Company

While the spacecraft was lost so they couldn't do a postmortem on it, the downlinked data from the flight leaves Huby and staff "99%" sure it was a parachute system problem.  You see, they never did any drop tests of any kind with the parachute system they purchased for Mission Possible.  That would have been a complication adding both mission delay and cost and Hélène Huby's background is in economics.  

"We made a mistake, basically, to underestimate the risks," she said. In retrospect, Huby added, the company could have done more testing on the ground.  

This puts them in a bit of mess figuring out where they go from here.  Do they go with a duplicate of Mission Possible, adding more testing, or do they say that phase of getting started is over and work on their next goal, a considerably bigger spacecraft called Nyx.  

This larger spacecraft is quite ambitious. It is similar in size to SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, perhaps even a bit bigger. The initial version is intended to fly cargo into low-Earth orbit. Huby said the vehicle is being designed with crew in mind, however. For example, the initial version will use four parachutes, which is overkill for cargo but necessary for astronauts.

One reason Huby was in the United States this week was to work with NASA on requirements. That's because the company aspires to fly Nyx to the International Space Station as early as 2028, two years before the orbiting laboratory is due to be retired. At this point, in talking to Huby, the company seems likely to move directly into Nyx development and flying to the space station on its first mission. 

This leads one to wonder if the Space Station isn't even going to be there much longer than their 2028 goal, what are the chances they make that goal and are able to fly a test mission with a couple of test pilots/astronauts?

One thing that has changed in recent months, Huby said, is that there is increasing support in Europe for the development of a crew spacecraft.

"In Europe, there is additional support to go fast to crew," she said. "One year ago, this was out of the discussion. I think this is clearly a consequence of geopolitics."

Those geopolitics, of course, include the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US President and his attitude toward allies in Europe, proposed budget cuts that would end NASA participation in space programs important to Europe, and the fact that the only way European astronauts can get to space today is on board Dragon vehicles built by SpaceX.

So there is a clear lane for a European company to build both cargo and crew spacecraft. Clear though it may be, however, it is a long and difficult technical lane to traverse. Huby and The Exploration Company have their work cut out for them.

The Exploration Company's bigger idea, their Nyx spacecraft, comparable to SpaceX's Dragon capsule with a cargo and crewed version. Image credit: the Exploration Company

Eric Berger's conclusion that "... it is a long and difficult technical lane to traverse. Huby and The Exploration Company have their work cut out for them" is certainly true.  Given their performance in getting this far, I don't think it's a good idea to count them out. 

Johnson Atoll becomes a "do not use" land preserve

Johnson Atoll is an unincorporated US territory and Pacific island wildlife refuge located about 860 miles southwest of Hawaii, which has been used for many military projects of different types over the last 90 years.  

[T]he island hosted an airfield during World War II before operating as a launch site for atmospheric nuclear tests during the 1950s and 1960s, some of which resulted in plutonium contamination at the atoll. The US government then requisitioned the area for chemical weapons experiments with similar consequences before ultimately cordoning it as a remote storage depot for the same deadly biological agents.

This year, the Atoll was announced as being under consideration for testing the elements of a new military cargo system based around the idea of shipping tons of cargo anywhere quickly.  

Those decades of progress appeared in jeopardy earlier this year. In March, the Air Force first announced intentions to once again requisition the unincorporated US territory, this time for its Research Laboratory’s Rocket Cargo Vanguard Program. The US Space Force-affiliated endeavor aims to establish a system to deliver as much as 100 tons of cargo to anywhere on Earth in less than 90 minutes.

“In the event of conflict or humanitarian crisis, the Space Force will be able to provide our national leadership with an independent option to achieve strategic objectives from space,” Chief of Space Operations Gen. John W. “Jay ” Raymond said during the program’s announcement. 

SpaceX is the only launch provider mentioned, presumably for Starship and SuperHeavy which SpaceX has talked about as launching suborbital flights like this: that is, trips between any two points on Earth in 90 minutes.  Another possibility is that linked story is published in Popular Science and it must be considered that SpaceX is mentioned because they don't expect their readers to know Blue Origin's New Glenn, or ULA's Vulcan by name and they're using SpaceX to get more clicks.  

The Department of the Air Force’s confirmation, first provided to Stars and Stripes, came ahead of a planned environment assessment and amid mounting pressure from conservationists.

“The Department of the Air Force has elected to hold the preparation of the Johnston Atoll Environmental Assessment for a proposed rocket cargo landing demonstration on Johnston Atoll in abeyance while the service explores alternative options for implementation,” Air Force spokesperson Laurel Falls said in the email.

The article explains the situation in language you see regularly when conservation groups don't want a particular place to become environmentally spoiled - that is, made less pretty to them.  The big story is the place being ruined by the new controllers of the now-spoiled island, and a "noble savage" hurt by the new users.  

Johnson Atoll is home to 14 different species of tropical birds.  Image credit: Credit: USFWS / Tor Johnson

Small Space News Roundup 62

A couple of big guys confirm stories being told about them.  "Big guys" in the space company sense.  

Blue Origin confirms ESCAPADE is the next New Glenn Mission

This afternoon, Blue Origin confirmed on X that the second mission of their New Glenn (NG-2) will be the ESCAPADE mission to Mars, as we talked about on June 30th.  

In addition to the two satellites headed for Mars, the New Glenn will carry  a technology demonstration from @Viasat in support of @NASASpaceOps' Communications Services Project.  I can't tell if that's also going to Mars or staying closer to home.

There was no mention of when that launch might be.  To borrow a comment from email edition of the Rocket Report:

Previously, the company has said this second launch will take place no earlier than August 15. However, that is less than one month away. Late September is probably the earliest realistic launch date, with October or November more likely for the second flight of the company's large rocket.

Boeing and NASA agree the next Starliner flight probably won't be manned 

Most everyone knows about the big story of Starliner's Crewed Flight Test 1 (CFT-1) that was going on a year ago - and the fact that it was still going on in mid-July instead of being over in mid-June is just one overall sign of what a dismal failure that mission was.  One of the posts about how bad it was is currently among my most read posts in the last year - and that was posted four months ago. 

One of the major problems in the mission was failure of thrusters.  It was worse than I knew and I'm guessing worse than anyone not actively involved in the mission knew.  That is, only Butch Wilmore, Suni Williams and a handful of other astronauts and engineers.

The story gets worse from there.  Wilmore adds: "And this is the part I'm sure you haven't heard. We lost the fourth thruster. Now we've lost 6DOF (6 Degrees of Freedom) control. We can't maneuver forward. I still have control, supposedly, on all the other axes."  

Now they simply could not control the Starliner to the degree they needed to.  The two of them realized they were in a very precarious situation, and it literally was just barely good enough to only probably not get them both killed. There was no need to talk about that with each other; they're both experienced enough as astronauts to know what the situation meant.  That's when the mission control in Houston came up with the scariest solution.  

Turn the entire system of thrusters off and back on again.  Really.  And some of them started working again.

As you know, the decision was made after two months of delays to return the Starliner unmanned, they bent several unstated rules (the "we always do it this way" kind of rules) and Butch and Suni's mission stretched until March 18th.  

The problematic thrusters are contained in boxes called doghouses and the efforts so far have concentrated on understanding why the problems happened.  It hasn't been spectacularly good or fast progress.  And it needs to be tested in the real environment. 

NASA crew rotations aboard the ISS typically last six to eight months, lining up two launches per year to ferry astronauts to and from the orbital laboratory. Slating the first crewed, operational Starliner mission for the end of 2026 likely means the spacecraft's next launch won't include any astronauts aboard. "There's a strong chance we'll fly a cargo flight first," Stich said.

"What we're really looking at is, can we test all the changes that we are making, to the doghouses in particular, and would we want to validate those in flight first?" he explained.

The CFT-1 Starliner Capsule on top of its Atlas V ride at the SLC-41 launch pad before the mission, May of '24.  Image Credit: ULA on Flickr

When it absolutely, positively has to be in orbit...

I'll go out a limb and say I bet most of you remember the old Federal Express commercials with the line, "when it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight."  I've always mixed that in mind with the Ghostbusters line, "who ya gonna call?" 

Nowadays that has turned into you've got to get a satellite - or 20 or 30 - into orbit.  They absolutely, positively have to be there ASAP.  Yesterday would have been late, don't ask about tomorrow.  Do you call the guys who launch roughly three times a week, or the guys who launch maybe three times a year, or three times a quarter?  Goes without saying doesn't it?  Not exactly a really tough decision.  

This morning at 2:30 AM EDT, SpaceX launched their second load of Amazon's Kuiper satellites, 24, into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  

With this launch, Amazon now has 78 Kuiper satellites in orbit. The full Kuiper constellation will consist of 3,232 satellites to provide broadband Internet service to most of the populated world, bringing Amazon in competition with SpaceX's Starlink network. 
...
Amazon has booked more than 80 launches to deploy the Kuiper constellation, but the company didn't turn to SpaceX until it had to. Amazon purchased 68 rocket flights from United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Blue Origin in 2022 to launch thousands of Kuiper satellites. At the time, ULA's Vulcan rocket, Arianespace's Ariane 6, and Blue Origin's New Glenn hadn't completed any launches, so Amazon reserved nine flights on ULA's Atlas V to support the initial series of Kuiper missions.

In the rest of the industrial world, I think hiring your competitor (in Amazon's case) or helping allow your competitor stay in business to compete against you in SpaceX's case is an odd situation.  In this case, SpaceX has helped not just Amazon but has launched for other competitors - at least in the "competitors on paper" sense.  Northrop Grumman comes immediately to mind: SpaceX has been launching their Cygnus cargo capsule to the ISS since they ran into issues related to their Antares rocket back in 2022.  It's reasonable to say this isn't as much helping their competitor as it is ensuring the cargo needed to keep the ISS functional will get there.  Practically, that's a public service mission. 

An interesting footnote to this discussion is that originally, Amazon didn't offer any contracts to SpaceX.   

A shareholder lawsuit filed in 2023 accused Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos and its board of directors of breaching their "fiduciary duty" by not considering SpaceX as an option for launching Kuiper satellites. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit alleged Amazon didn't consider the Falcon 9 due to an intense and personal rivalry between Bezos and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.

Amazon bowed to the allegations and announced a contract with SpaceX for three Falcon 9 launches in December 2023 to provide "additional capacity" for deploying the Kuiper network. 

With this launch, Amazon has 78 Kuiper satellites in orbit.  The full Kuiper constellation will consist of 3,232 satellites.  So far, SpaceX has launched more than 9,100 Starlink satellites, including satellites that had to be forced out of the the constellation due to various problems that made them not meet requirements.  The actual number of Starlink satellites in the constellation is (very roughly) around 8000.  About four hours before last night's Kuiper launch, another load of 28 Starlink satellites were launched from Vandenberg. 

Kuiper is an expensive undertaking, estimated at between $16.5 billion and $20 billion by the industry analytics firm Quilty Space. Quilty has concluded Amazon is spending $10 billion on launch alone, exceeding the company's original cost estimate for the entire program. 

A Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with 24 Kuiper satellites.  It was the first mission for this booster, landing successfully about eight minutes after liftoff. Credit: SpaceX