SpaceX launches its 100th, no, 101st, no
- wait, 102nd Falcon 9 of the year
Don't wait too long or you'll miss more.
SpaceX launched its 100th Falcon 9 rocket of the year Monday morning, 101st was the USSF-36 (launch of the X-37B) on the 21st from Cape Canaveral SFS, SLC-40; 102nd was this morning (the 22nd) from SLC-4E at Vandenberg. 103 will be Sunday morning at 2:45 AM.
You get the picture.
That's quite a cadence ... The Monday morning flight was a notable milestone for SpaceX. It is just the second time in the company’s history that it achieved 100 launches in one calendar year, a feat so far unmatched by any other American space company, and it is ahead of last year's pace. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, said on the social media site X, "For reference on the increase in launch rate from last year, we hit 100 on Oct 20th in 2024. SpaceX is likely to launch more Falcon 9s this year than the total number of Space Shuttle missions NASA flew in three decades.
This is the 34th week of 2025, so I won't count Sunday morning's 103rd launch of the year. Their 102 launches in 34 complete weeks is 3 launches per week. This is Falcon 9s and doesn't include Falcon Heavy or Starship test launches.
Canadian University Students Carry Out Canada's first launch in this century
It's very easy to think a country like Canada has an active space program; they're technologically advanced, all of us old enough to remember the Canada remote arm on the shuttles know they've done things that went to space. I was a bit surprised to read a team of college students launched a suborbital mission - which didn't actually succeed.
Students from Concordia University cheered and whistled as the Starsailor rocket lifted off on Cree territory on August 15, marking the first of its size to be launched by a student team, Radio Canada International reports. The students hoped Starsailor would enter space, past the Kármán line, which is at an altitude of 100 kilometers, before coming back down. But the rocket separated earlier than expected. The livestream can be seen here.
Persistence is thy name ... This was Canada's first space launch in more than 25 years, and the first to be achieved by a team of students, according to the university. Originally built for a science competition, the 13-meter tall rocket was left without a contest after the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the team, made up of over 700 members since 2018, pressed forward with the goal of making history and launching the most powerful student-built rocket.
A solar eclipse two years from now has started making headlines
I just want to put this out there in case you haven't heard of this, but the solar eclipse on August 2nd, 2027 is starting to attract attention. Why? It will have the longest totality in the 21st century, peaking at 6 minutes and 23 seconds at the best point along the path. (I've seen 6:22, 6:23 and 6:27 for the duration. I went with the "Willie Nelson" version - the one in the middle.) The longest period of totality is on the centerline of the path, and this map shows the center line and peak eclipse (in red).
It may be hard to read this but if you click it to embiggen it, you can see the peak looks to be in Southern Egypt.
If traveling to southern Egypt is something you might want to do you should probably start looking into this some more. The first place I saw an article on this (sorry - don't remember when/where) had links to several places that are arranging tours, and I expect that field to enlarge as progressively more people find out about this eclipse.
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