Starship Flight 14 has a more definite launch date and time

It was just 10 days ago when Starship Flight 14 was listed as flying September 15th but with no launch time. I think I remember seeing the date of September 18, three days later, and the "next Friday" to us, but without a launch time. That mystery disappeared and the flight now has both: Tuesday September 22, at 8:15 AM EDT. 

This is going to be a BIG test flight. Exactly what's going to go on is hard to pin down, but there are a couple of interesting side notes going around. The least important of them is that this launch will carry the first batch of version 3 Starlink satellites. That means it's a commercial flight, one in which SpaceX is both the launch contractor and the customer whose payloads are going into orbit. That makes their financial situation look a bit better, but not incredibly better.

Another interesting side note is that the booster for Flight 15 is being prepared now. That raises the question of "why?" The simple explanation is that SpaceX needs to increase their Starship flight cadence but the more interesting explanation is that they need to start making progress on their orbital refueling technology that they've been working on for years. 

They need more than one Starship for that, one to be the on-orbit "fuel depot" and the other(s) to bring fuel to it. Depending on the mission that needs the fuel, it almost certainly needs more than one fuel transfer loaded onto it. In the past, I've seen posts saying on the order of ten to a dozen Starships would be required to fill one Starship as the fuel depot and that much fuel would be required for a lunar mission.

The logistics of doing the "10+" flights to fill a tanker in orbit which will fuel the SpaceX HLS (Human Landing Ship) are mind-boggling - some models talk about launching ten Starships in ten days, or even less time. That's never been done before. There are also rumors and reports all over about new designs for the Human Landing System and how it's going to be much easier to get to the moon with this new one. Obviously, this test would only be two Starships but they don't really need to load enough fuel to send a Starship to the moon. Lots will be learned from docking and transferring enough fuel to get started. 

Blue Origin infographic about the differences between the lunar Starship (HLS) and their National Team lander. Reduced file size, more detail in the source version at Reddit. File is dated 2021 - image at that Reddit link.

Another big question is whether or not the booster is coming back to Starbase to be readied for reuse. I've seen arguments both ways and I can only say to stand by because we're likely to find out before the launch. Things like the need for "ten Starship (flights) in ten days" has a huge impact on the need for rapid reusability. A commercial airplane doesn't need days between flights, and a rapidly reusable Starship and SuperHeavy booster could eliminate the need for a fleet of "ten Starships and ten boosters" - or at least drop it from ten Starships and boosters to "a few". 

Stoke Space sets another milestone

Remember Stoke Space? They developed a novel way of making a rocket's stages steerable that depended on regulating the fuel flow to the engines on a ring, so that instead of moving the engine bells in angles to the vertical, the engines are fixed and the fuel flow is varied. 

Shown here are the upper stage engines of their first test vehicle, named Hopper 2, which flew in September of 2023. The difference between this ring and a conventional array of engines steered by changing the directions they point kinda jumps off the page at you. There are no engine bells, just spots on the ring that appears to be flat. Above each plume you can make out what appears to be the rest of the engine. 

The Kent, Washington-based company just raised $1 billion via its"Series E" capital campaign, bringing Stoke’s total investor haul to $2.3 billion. The Sept. 8 announcement provided a development update for Stoke’s fully reusable Nova Pathfinder launch vehicle and included plans for its never-before-seen Nova Block 2 rocket, a more powerful system designed to be able to deliver up to 15 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO). 

Stoke is actively developing two launch vehicles: the Nova Pathfinder and Nova Block 2. Pathfinder will be the first one to be test flown and results from the testing figures to be incorporated into Nova Block 2.

The initial version of Nova is planned to have a lift capacity of 3 metric tons in fully reusable mode and up to 7 tons in a fully expendable configuration. The rocket’s first stage is powered by seven Zenith engines, with a combined thrust of 700,000 pounds. The novel upper stage features a ring of 24 thrusters that surround a regeneratively cooled heat shield to protect the rocket during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere.

After completing an extensive set of structural tests earlier this summer on the first stage, CEO Andy Lapsa said Stoke will ship this stage “pretty soon” to the company’s launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. After additional testing there, the vehicle will undergo a static fire test before being mated with the upper stage.

Nova Pathfinder upper stage flight article 1. (Image credit: Stoke Space)

The upper stage will soon be shipped to Stoke’s test site at Moses Lake, Washington, for its own set of structural tests, followed by a hot fire test. Then the upper stage will also be shipped to Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

For the first time since Stoke was founded in 2020, Lapsa publicly put out a target launch date for Nova, saying the company is aiming for “early” 2027 to launch. Of course, he is fully aware that problems can, and often do, occur during stage testing and final integration of the vehicles.

“I feel good about that launch date,” he said. “I think that’s pretty realistic. But as you know, in our industry, we’ll go when we’re ready.” 

The Block 2 version of the Nova rocket will use their methane-liquid-oxygen-fueled Zenith engines although there will be more of them. The upper stage will similarly use hydrogen and liquid oxygen for propellant. Probably the biggest change in the Block 2 version is that it gets rid of that triangular shape for the upper stage and goes over to the much more prevalent cylindrical shapes

Stoke is targeting 2029 for the first launches of the Block 2 Nova rockets.

Odds & Ends

Looks like Isar got their batch of firsts today.

Their announced 4:00 PM liftoff got delayed a couple of times and it lifted off at 4:12, but this time they wrote their name in the record books. Not just Isar's first successful orbital launch, but the first rocket to reach orbit after being launched from Europe.

"This is right now making history — making history for Spectrum, making history for Isar, making history for Europe,” Nikolaos Perakis, Spectrum chief engineer at Isar, said during today's launch webcast, which the company produced in collaboration with NASASpaceflight. "I'm incredibly proud of this massive achievement."

I started looking for the expected coverage at 3:30 and quickly found it was being hosted by NASASpaceflight - and they provided a nice video summary later in the afternoon. The video isn't minute by minute coverage of the launch, but a summary or even like a highlight video. 

About that refrigerator repair post

Yeah, the one from this past Wednesday. There were a couple of comments essentially saying to be careful about the drain tube, such as: "Check the drain line from the drip area in the back of the freezer to the tray under the fridge." I wrote that post pretty badly because I didn't plainly say that I didn't have much confidence that the refrigerator was really fixed and the problem was gone for good, I just figured it would be a few days of "keep an eye on it" before the next failure was evident. Thursday morning the thing seemed fine, but Friday morning there was fresh ice on the bottom of the freezer section, which was the first big symptom of things being all wrong. There was a small additional amount of ice this morning. 

The refrigerator is an LG dated 2008, and I got the owner's manual as a pdf from LG this week. It has nothing on even where the water from the defrost and just general use drains to. It has a pan in the base that water supposedly evaporates from but nothing on exactly where it is or how to get to it. I did a search on YouTube with the model number and a couple of descriptions of the problem and there's a large collection of such videos. I looked at a couple, one at 15 minutes long and a short one at around 3 minutes. It looks like it's going to have to be done sitting on the floor and reaching forward to the back wall of the freezer. As Ren and Stimpy used to say, "joy!" 

My mobility and flexibility is probably above average for a 72 year old dude, and I do work on keeping them, but it looks uncomfortable at best and complicated by not having any spare parts around. Which is mostly due to not knowing what I'm most likely to need. We do have an appliance guy we've relied on before, so it's just largely a question of saving cost by doing it versus the convenience of getting it resolved once and for all. Most likely. It's not like pros don't make mistakes that require coming out again.

Awkward confession time about AI 

I really have paid just about zero attention to the various models that are out there and available for use, so while I don't know for sure this is available, I'm looking for a model to help me do a search and I hear they're good at that. In particular, I went to see my primary care doctor last week and was handed a letter saying he was leaving his practice and not going to see patients by the end of the year. The practice closes on December 1. 

A primary care MD or DO (as this one is) shouldn't be that hard to find, but this guy is going to be harder to replace than his predecessor. I want to get a few names together and see if I can interview them, at least spend a few minutes and ask a few questions. It would be handy if a really good search engine could find a few for me to interview and choose from. Even better would be if the search finds the questions I want to ask have been answered already.

Anybody familiar enough with them to say which of the AI engines would be good for this? 

The 8 year mission to Mercury of BepiColombo began a new phase

The program called BepiColombo is a joint mission between the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) that was first launched on its convoluted and difficult journey to Mercury in October of 2018. Today, the spacecraft, consisting of three separate modules, began preparing for its final arrival at Mercury today, at around 8AM EDT. This diagram shows the major events and their dates over the next seven months. 

UPDATE for Sept. 3: BepiColombo mission to Mercury successfully began its arrival sequence at the innermost planet with two spacecraft, one from Europe and the other from Japan, separating from its Mercury Transport Module. 

The confirmation that the first (leftmost) step in this series of major steps succeeded wasn't communicated back by BepiColombo until closer to 10:00AM EDT - two hours after the maneuver was scheduled. 

Mercury holds the dubious honor of being the least explored planet of the solar system inside the orbit of Saturn. Only Uranus, Neptune and Pluto have had fewer satellites monitoring them (one visit to each planet). Mercury had Mariner 10 making a three flybys between 1974 and 1975, and vastly increasing our knowledge of the smallest planet in the solar system. The next visitor was almost 40 years later when NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft arrived in 2011. Both the Mariner and MESSENGER missions dramatically improved our knowledge of the little planet, but they also had strong points and weak points - meaning there were gaps in this knowledge, too.

As you can tell in the mission plan or schedule above, by March, the two BepiColombo modules will be orbiting Mercury and getting ready to start gathering data.

Europe's Mercury Planetary Orbiter, or MPO, will focus on the planet proper. It's packed with 11 science instruments that will map the terrain, minerals in the crust, and the gravity field, investigate the hollows and volcanic deposits, and observe how the barrage of charged particles from the sun affects this innermost planet.

Japan's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, or Mio, meanwhile, will focus on the planet's surroundings — its magnetosphere and wispy atmosphere, as well as the dust cluttering up its neighborhood. 

After eight years to get to this point, the researchers are excited about being this close to actually getting the data they've been working toward getting. Space.com has several articles on this mission and the milestone they accomplished today. The articles seem to overlap, and quite a bit in some places. If this is your kind of stuff, you might find it worthwhile to go read. 

• https://www.space.com/astronomy/mercury/2-spacecraft-will-soon-reach-mercury-after-8-years-in-space-heres-what-bepicolombo-can-do  
• https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/a-new-mission-starting-today-8-years-after-launch-bepicolombo-begins-mercury-arrival 
• https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/bepicolombo-mission-begins-mercury-arrival-phase-esa-jaxa 

Flying over Mercury's north pole gave BepiColombo's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) a unique opportunity to peer down into the shadowy polar craters on Jan. 8, 2025. (Image credit: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM)

SpaceX, NASA delay crew-13 mission due to a leak in Dragon

The Crew-13 flight to the Space Station for a crew change out had been scheduled for Wednesday, September 12, but on Saturday, August 29, it was announced that an oxidizer leak in Dragon’s propulsion system had been detected during standard prelaunch spacecraft processing. NASA and SpaceX quickly announced the launch date was being cancelled while the system is undergoing troubleshooting. 

"Joint NASA and SpaceX teams are performing additional tests and data review and will complete any necessary rework prior to launch," NASA officials wrote in an update on Saturday. "A new target date will be announced once available."

The mission name, of course, doesn't mean the 13th crew swap in the life of the ISS; it's just the 13th crew that SpaceX has lifted to the ISS since they began flying the crew dragon spacecraft for NASA.  

The four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station display their mission plaque inside a training mockup of a space station module. From left: Commander Jessica Watkins and Pilot Luke Delaney, both from NASA, and Mission Specialists Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos. (Image credit: NASA/Morgan Gridley)

"We expect a very busy mission with lots of station maintenance, both internal and external, with a few EVAs [extravehicular activities, or spacewalks] on the docket," Watkins said during an Aug. 3 press conference.

There will also be "visiting vehicle capture and stowage operations, lots of science — very interesting science experiments that will be flying with us as well — and plenty of outreach," she added.

The launch will be from SLC-40 (usually just called "slick 40") on the Space Force Station side of Cape Canaveral rather than LC-39 on the Kennedy Space Center side. The first Crew Dragon missions were from LC-39 but SpaceX modernized the SLC-40 hardware to accommodate manned flights. The first crewed flight from SLC-40 was in September of 2024, while the first crewed Dragon launch was the May 2020 first flight of the spacecraft. 

It's hard not to talk about the NGRST launch

It's easy to get used to how smoothly and flawlessly these missions are tending to go these days. I had my alarm set to 7:00 AM specifically so that I wouldn't sleep so long I'd miss the coverage, and woke up closer to 6:30. Once I fed the boss, it was plain I wasn't going back to bed and it gave me plenty  of time to grab a coffee and watch the last half hour of the countdown. 

Like virtually all SpaceX launches, every event called out in the schedule was exactly on time. One of the guys would say something, like "booster 1 will get its fueling start call soon" and most of the time the call out happened either during the last few seconds of what he was saying or a few seconds right after. We started watching right after 0700 and that accuracy held for the entire time we were watching. The view outside was good, minimal thin clouds and good visibility the whole time. Our usual approach is to watch until just after the boosters are dropped and begin their approach to their landing destination. By the time we walk into the house and sit down, it's less than a minute from the booster landing.

The first rumble, the one that seems to come from the launch and gets here pretty much at the same time as Booster Engine Cut Off (BECO) happens, wasn't very impressive, but it got louder and shook things more noticeably a bit later. I didn't make note of the time, but it might have been a minute or two after BECO and the boosters being dropped to start their return trip to the KSC to land for reuse.  

A "standard" liftoff view photo found on Space.com. 

SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches with NASA’S Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope onboard from Launch Complex 39A, Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

And an artsy view that I also got from Space.com. 

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying NASA's Roman Space Telescope crosses the sun during launch from Pad 39A of NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Florida on Aug. 30, 2026. (Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner)

I started this off saying that it's easy to get used to how smoothly and flawlessly these missions are tending to go these days. That's leaving out that part of that "smoothly and flawlessly" is things like landing the boosters back on the Cape, and that has been at industrial scale for only a few years. It's so easy to take success like that for granted. 

It's a news day for Europe's Ariane 6

If you tend to always look at when news events line up to wonder if it's coincidence or pre-planned, especially if you're oriented toward watching the European Space Agency, today's your day to ask yourself the big questions. 

The bigger news item is even hard to pick, but today the Ariane 6 launched its first payload to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO), a large weather satellite called the MTG-I2, from their Kourou, French Guiana launch facilities. Liftoff was at 4:10 PM EDT in the US or 2010 UTC.

The Ariane 6 successfully released the MTG-I2 into its GTO 36 minutes after liftoff. 

The 8,400-pound (3,800 kilograms) MTG-I2 is the second imaging satellite in the Meteosat Third Generation network (hence the name). It will complete the three-spacecraft constellation in geostationary orbit, which lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth.

Its companions, MTG-I1 and MTS-S1, launched in December 2022 and July 2025, respectively. MTG-I1 is an imaging craft and MTS-S1 is a "sounder," using an infrared instrument to probe different layers of Earth's atmosphere. 

Note that the MTG-I1 launch was on the Ariane 5, not 6, and the MTS-S1 launch was on a Falcon 9. 

An Ariane 6 rocket launches the MTG-I2 weather satellite from Kourou, French Guiana on Aug. 27, 2026. (Image credit: Arianespace)

Today's launch was the ninth to date for the Ariane 6, which can deliver up to 12.7 tons (11.5 metric tons) to GTO in its burliest configuration. For comparison, SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket has a GTO payload capacity of 9.15 tons (8.3 metric tons).

For the rest of the day's story, we need to switch to European Spaceflight which informs us that a group of planned upgrades to the Ariane 6 called Block 3 have been shelved. 

The European Space Agency has confirmed to European Spaceflight that it is no longer considering the Ariane 6 Block 3 evolution, saying there is “no programme need or justification” for the evolution at this time.

Questions regarding the scrapping of the Block 3 upgrades arose earlier this month after SpaceScout reported that an ESA study team had been told Ariane 6 Block 2 would be the rocket’s final major version, forcing it to rework a proposed Enceladus mission, a planned probe to Saturn’s icy moon, that had been based on the more capable Block 3 variant of the four-booster Ariane 64 rocket. A key element of this now-scrapped evolution of Ariane 6 was the ICARUS lightweight upper stage.

The big picture gets a bit less clear as you keep reading, presumably because it talks about Ariane 6 features and plans that (as an "outsider") I have never heard of. Their conclusions, in two successive sentences are, "Ariane 6 would “not be developed further,”" and "“Ariane 6 will continue to evolve whenever new mission requirements justify further developments.”" 

Today's mission certainly seems to have been successful, although we have no reports on the MTG-I2 itself, but it seems that the rocket did everything it should have done, so if there are failures in the weather satellite, it's the satellite's design and construction that are in question and not the Ariane 6. At the moment. Probably. 

Some background on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

I've mentioned a couple of times that NASA's next big telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is launching Sunday morning on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26AM EDT, but I suppose I was quietly assuming that everyone has an idea about what that telescope is. 

I've been covering the NGRST since I first heard of it in February of 2022, and I thought maybe the good thing to do would be repost important parts of what I've covered. Rather than just post links to older posts, I'll "cut and paste" the important stuff.  

From NASA's Next Big Space Telescope 

I stumbled across a story today of an instrument that I should have known about but that had undergone a name change.  It was first referred to as the WFIRST, Wide Field Infra Red Space Telescope, a long but descriptive name for its mission.  It was recently renamed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope by NASA; the name pays tribute to the late NASA executive and first Chief Astronomer who was one of the driving forces in getting the Hubble Space Telescope program through its hurdles.  

The telescope was named in a poll of astronomers as the next most important space telescope behind the James Webb Space Telescope.  Why?  The old name said wide field and that's the telescope's feature. 

That graphic gives the impression that the NGRST can capture 2,000 square degrees of sky in one shot, compared to 1.6 square degrees from the Hubble Space Telescope.  That's not quite right.  The NGRST's field of 2,000 degrees divided by the 1.6 of the HST says NGRST is 1,250 times bigger.  The NGRST website's FAQ says it's field of view is 100 times larger:

It has a primary mirror that is 2.4 meters in diameter (7.9 feet), and is the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror. The mirror has the same sensitivity as Hubble’s primary mirror but will only be one fifth the weight, showcasing an advancement in telescope technology. It will have the sensitivity and resolution comparable to Hubble, but with a field of view 100 times larger, combining excellent image quality with survey power.

Like the JWST, the NGRST will be sent to orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, about 930,000 miles away from earth in the direction radially away from Earth.  The mission is focused on the search for dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets, and will only carry two instruments:

The Roman Space Telescope will have two instruments, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) technology demonstration. The WFI provides wide field imaging and spectroscopy, with performance characteristics optimized for cosmology and exoplanet surveys. The CGI provides high contrast imaging and spectroscopy for observations of exoplanets and debris disks. The WFI is a 288-megapixel multi-band near-infrared camera, providing a sharpness of images comparable to that achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope over a 0.28 square degree field of view, 100 times larger than that of Hubble. The Coronagraphic Instrument is a high-contrast, small field of view camera and spectrometer covering visible and near-infrared wavelengths using novel starlight-suppression technology.

Rendering of NGRST, from NASA

Let me bounce back to the present to throw in that the one thing that stood out to me in that first article was that it said, "target date for launch is currently set for May of '27 and they claim to be on schedule" and, of course, August of '26 is pretty far ahead of "on schedule" when they said it would be ready to fly by May of '27. Fortuitously, they had to schedule the launch on the Falcon Heavy because when they were getting bids, nothing else was available. I've always thought that if you called Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX CEO, to arrange a launch like this, you'd give her all the details and she'd come back with something like "gee, it's too big for a Falcon 9... how about next month?" or something that knocked your socks off like that. 

Moving up to a recent post from this April, The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is complete

Here's where it gets wild. The September launch for the NGRST is eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget. When's the last time you heard something like that? I'm not sure I ever have.

According to NASA, Roman's primary mirror measures about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, which is similar to Hubble's. However, Roman has the ability to take images that capture a patch of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can.

"Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. "What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them."

To put that into context, over its approximately 35 years of service so far, Hubble has gathered about 400 terabytes of data; once fully operational at its workstation in space, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data per year.

The collection of different space telescopes; the Hubble, James Webb, and more, allow ground based astronomers to choose the right instrument for the objects they want to study in the sky.

Compared to the JWST, Roman's images — taken with its aptly named Wide Field Instrument (WFI) — will be 50 times wider but more shallow, because Roman doesn't need to access the deep universe the way the JWST does. As we discussed, it can't see infrared like the JWST can and therefore would be wasted in looking too far back.

More specifically, WFI is composed of a 300-megapixel visible-to-near-infrared imaging camera and slitless spectrometer (a special tool that allows scientists to capture light dispersion of objects in a field of view). But there is something uniquely special about that shallow, panoramic view.

The wide and shallow field will be well suited to surveying space, not getting too much information from things that it can't look closer at. 

They can just survey and hope to find a cool lead to zoom in on. This offers Roman the ability to catch events that transpire very quickly, such as fast radio bursts, and increases the chances that scientists can witness remarkable supernovas, colliding neutron stars and other easy-to-miss phenomena right as they happen.

---

Well, as the kids used to say, whoomp there it is. I think that's more science on the NGRST than you're going to get anywhere else.

SpaceX sets B1067's new record and then turns the world upside down

... at least the world around the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was turned upside down in the afternoon. 

As mentioned in yesterday's post, booster B1067 flew for the 37th time setting a new corporate record for the number of missions it has flown. When I read about these milestones being set, there's a common comparison to Space Shuttle Discovery having flown 39 times. I don't particularly think that's a meaningful comparison for a few reasons. The biggest is that Shuttle missions were always manned while Falcon 9 missions are only manned rarely, and the rework to fly a manned mission vehicle is always done more carefully than non-manned. Still, if they're trying to break Discovery's 39 flights record, that means that three more flights of B1067 sets a new world record for spacecraft reusability. I have regularly wondered if SpaceX has that as an explicit goal inside the company. 

As (bad) luck would have it, my side note of probably sleeping through the launch rather than going out in the yard to watch it turned into reality, but worse than that in a way. I was up at the launch time but it was because I was having a bad allergy attack (itchy, burning eyes, runny nose, sneezing...) While lying in bed trying to decide what to do, I suddenly heard the launch. By the time the noise gets here it's close to three minutes after launch and the chance of seeing anything approaches zero, unless you have a pretty solid idea of where to look. 

But, as noted at the start, the real big change of the day was in the afternoon. 

SpaceX made Florida’s Space Coast home to the world’s busiest spaceport for a decade, but that will change this year. The company is significantly cutting the number of launches from Florida until Starship arrives, a senior SpaceX official confirmed Tuesday. 

Last year, the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station provided 165 Falcon 9 launches, pretty much three flights per week—and about 75 percent of them carried Starlink satellites. To borrow the saying, "that was last year, this is now." So far Vandenberg Space Force Base has launched more Falcon 9 missions than Cape Canaveral, and it looks as if that will continue for the rest of the year. 

Kiko Dontchev, the company’s vice president of launch, said today that this morning's launch from the Cape was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral until SpaceX begins flying Starship missions from Florida. A quick search of NextSpaceflight.com shows it to be the case. There are launches from CCSFS, the manned Crew-13 flight on September 12th, the O3b mPOWER 11, 12 & 13 satellites on Sept. 19th (and satellites with names in the "O3b mPOWER" world have launched here before). There are no missions labelled Starlink. 

It's easy to overlook that while launches have been categorized as "Starlink" that those satellites have gotten bigger in every generation - and we can expect that to continue. The coming Starlink Version 3 sats won't be a reasonable payload for Falcon 9, much more reasonable for Starship, but for at least the remainder of the year, instead of the two (and sometimes three) Falcon 9 launches per week, that will drop to perhaps two per month. Starlink V3 satellites have not been launched yet because the Falcon 9 can only carry a few

It wasn’t long ago when two launches per month was the norm, an indication just how quickly SpaceX’s launch cadence has grown. Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center sit on adjoining property and share the same range on Florida’s east coast, so it is worth considering them a single spaceport. The last time the Florida spaceport did not lead the world in space launches was in 2015.
...
Starship is sized to launch up to 60 Starlink Version 3 satellites, which are larger, heavier, and more powerful than the Starlink V2s flying on Falcon 9. SpaceX plans to use the next test flight of Starship, designated Flight 14, to launch the first Starlink V3s into low-Earth orbit from Starbase, Texas, as soon as next month.

The upper stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket flies over Lower Manhattan in New York City on Tuesday morning. Credit: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

Of course, this doesn't impact anything else launching from the CCSFS and KSC - it probably makes life easier for Blue Origin and ULA by reducing crowding. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches this Sunday on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26AM EDT. The next SpaceX mission is the Crew-13 mission to the ISS on Saturday, September 12.

EDIT 08/28 3:20  PM EDT to Add:  While I linked to a source article on Ars Technica, I first learned about SpaceX's announcement to halt Falcon 9 launches of Starlink satellites from comments to Monday's post and especially from this anonymous comment down with info from BillB

 

 

SpaceX going for yet another Falcon 9 reuse record

It's early for all US time zones, but tomorrow morning at 0533 AM, the one booster that I've written about long enough for it to feel like a friend, B1067, will be taking its 37th flight, launching Starlink group 10-49. B1067's last flight was July 9, for a 47 day turnaround. It will also be the 100th Falcon 9 launch of the year - their 100th launch of everything for the year was three launches ago on August 19th. 

The Falcon 9 is by far the busiest rocket in operation today. Last year, it flew 165 missions — more than all of the world's other orbital rockets combined. And all 165 of those flights were fully successful.

Clearly the rocket is well-designed and the crews that work on them are very well practiced. The "secret sauce" of the Falcon 9 is obviously its reusability. The rest of the world is turned on to this, as we've seen in the reports of China reporting two successes with landing two very different boosters for reuse in this month alone. Long-opposed to it, the European Space Agency is talking about reusability now.

But neither one of those newcomers has made it back to the pad for a second flight. SpaceX, meanwhile, has six Falcon 9 boosters with at least 30 flights under their belts, led by B1067's 36. (The others are B1077 and B1078 with 30, B1069 with 32, B1063 with 34 and B1071 with 35). 

While SpaceX has established many records for re-use and number of flights, they've always said that some orbits that customers will want will use every ounce of thrust and every second of fuel that the booster can manage. Back in July, one mission's requirements pushed the booster beyond the point where reuse was possible. The booster was B1069 on its 32nd flight - mentioned in that Space.com article's paragraph.

The combination of the time and direction of the launch (toward the NE) may make me lean toward staying in bed and watching a replay later in the morning. Launches to the NE tend to stay behind neighbors' trees and barely even light the sky. They tend to be more likely to be visible in the winter when the trees are "thinner." 

B1067 flies for the 35th time on the Starlink 9-35 mission the morning of June 8, 2026, a few minutes before sunrise. Image credit: SpaceX

NASA and Katalyst end the Swift rescue mission

NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on the robotic mission to save the Swift gamma-ray telescope.  

The last update I saw and posted was back on August 7th, and while the complete loss of attitude control that had occurred has been reduced to lower levels, Katalyst said that “ongoing attitude control issues” will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. While the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory and LINK rescue satellite remain close to each other in orbit, they won't try to rescue Swift, leaving it to re-enter the atmosphere. NASA had estimated they need to boost Swift before its orbit decays to lower than 186 miles, and estimated that will happen "by October." 

The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link’s remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite’s close-in navigation system.

“While the mission will not have the ending we originally intended, NASA and Katalyst are assessing what milestones remain ahead,” Katalyst said in a statement. “We will continue working to extract technical and operational value from the spacecraft.”

While the rescue will not be attempted, the two spacecraft are still close to each other in orbit, and LINK will still attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with Swift to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration. 

The Swift rescue was always a risky program, and was developed on an unprecedentedly short schedule compared to other NASA missions: NASA awarded Katalyst the $30 million contract less than a year ago to build and launch the Link satellite, by no later than early July - and the launch was July 3rd. A more typical contract for a new satellite for a mission that has never been attempted before would have been "several" years. 

“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future. We are going to learn everything we can from LINK’s rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow.” 
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“We knew this was a high-risk, high-reward mission – a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun’s activity,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We were all hoping for more science from Swift. But we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way, and we have gained so much through the series of accomplishments up to this point.”

Swift itself is a remarkable mission, launched on a planned two year mission to observe gamma ray bursts, some of the most energetic explosions in the universe. The two year mission launched in 2004. Nobody wants to see Swift burn up and get destroyed on reentry, but I think getting 22 years of results out of a two year mission is a pretty good return on investment. NASA has used this opportunity to advance U.S. spacecraft servicing technology,

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, shown in this artist’s concept, has orbited Earth for more than 20 years, studying the ever-changing universe. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Another Chinese company successfully lands a booster

It looks like booster reuse has landed in China, if you'll pardon the expression, and we can expect many more attempts and possibly even going full tilt into operational status. 

Back on last Monday (8/10) in the coverage of China's Long March 7A's inflight explosion and loss of vehicle there was mention in the source materials of a coming flight of a totally different vehicle, called a Zhuque-3 that was expected to be launched soon but after the explosion, they expected maybe the rocket would re-checked again, but the coverage included an expectation they'd try to recover the booster.  

The Zhuque-3 flew last December (12/3 local) and the rocket attained orbit but missed the booster landing. In that way, the overall picture resembles many other attempts at recovery we've seen, from early attempts with the Falcon 9 in 2014 and '15 to, well, pretty much everyone else on their first attempts to land. 

Meanwhile the engineers working on the rocket kept at it and while another Chinese rocket, the Long March 10B, landed its booster into a capture net on a vehicle offshore, they finally were ready to try the Zhuque-3 again today.  

The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, rocket lifted off from a commercial launch zone at China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:35 pm EDT (23:35 UTC) Tuesday, about an hour after sunrise Wednesday at the spaceport in the Gobi Desert. Nine methane-fueled engines powered the 216-foot-tall (66-meter) rocket on a course southeast from Jiuquan, then the rocket’s upper stage took over the task of placing a single satellite into orbit.

The rocket’s first stage, made of stainless steel, soared to the edge of space, then maneuvered toward a prepared landing zone some 240 miles (390 kilometers) downrange, settling to a propulsive touchdown on four extendable landing legs. LandSpace, founded in 2015, declared the mission a total success.

NOTE: This is a screen grab, not the video and the "Continue watching on X" box is not a link. If you want to go to see the full video here's the link. 

While this Zhuque-3 isn't exactly a copy of a Falcon 9, it certainly looks like one, and the specifications look a lot like a Falcon 9's specs as well. The fact that the second flight of this booster successfully landed is the advantage to not developing everything first. And even watching SpaceX's "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" video. 

The Zhuque-3 is the design of what's called a private company named LandSpace (I'm skeptical there are any private companies in the PRC). There was a smaller Zhuque-2 that became the world’s first methane-fueled launcher to reach orbit in 2023, but has been replaced by this more powerful booster. 

The Zhuque-3’s basic design can place a payload of more than 17,600 pounds (8 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit after accounting for the fuel reserves required for booster recovery. LandSpace eventually plans to debut an upgraded Zhuque-3 carrying more propellant and using more powerful engines, raising its payload capacity to more than 40,000 pounds (18.3 metric tons) in reusable mode or a few tons more with an expendable booster. 

LandSpace says they intend to do a thorough inspection of this booster and fly it again ASAP. They claim they're aiming for "at least 20" flights for each booster.

This the strongest contender for competition for the Falcon 9 so far.  

It's one-half day

Not one half of a day, one-half day. 8/16, as we write the date as a fraction, reduces to 1/2. 

Sorry.

Around here in East Central Florida, also called the Space Coast, our highlight for this evening is we have a Falcon 9 launch from Cape Canaveral SFS. The launch is for the Globalstar 2-R Mission. The launch time is 9:12 PM EDT. 

The Globalstar global mobile communications network offers global, digital, real-time voice, data, and fax via a constellation of minisatellites. The constellation operates in a 1410 km orbit inclined at 52 degrees.

In early 2022, Globalstar contracted with MDA for the construction of 17 new 2nd generation refresh satellites to replenish the existing constellation. Rocket Lab is sub-contracted to build the satellites' buses and the launch dispensers. 

The launch will be the 14th flight of B1090, and the booster will return to the launch site and we're being "warned" that sonic booms will be heard around here. 

"But that's not all" There's a second launch tonight, this time from Vandenberg SFB and this one's launch time is 9:50 PM EDT. This is the launch of a US Space Force classified payload, and the booster is B1088 on its 18th flight.

USSF-366 is a classified mission for the United States Space Force. It is possibly a batch of classified LEO satellites for a US government entity based on SpaceX’s Starshield satellite bus, based on locations of rocket stage drop zones being exact fits with previous Starlink Group 15 launches. 

Because it's from the other side of the country, this isn't one we can go outside to see, but the 38 minute time delay between the east and west coast launches means we'll be able to watch both on NASA Spaceflight's YouTube Channel. 

“A few moments later ...” OK, an hour later...

Now those two are over, both successful, both fully as expected. The launch itself induced a long-lasting rumble causing a rattle that I could hear in the house, and a the sonic boom from the booster returning to launch site was audible - like someone kicked the back door. 

Of course this isn't from tonight's missions; not with the sun low on the horizon like that. It's a picture I have on file, from Starlink 10-50 mission on July 5, 2026. 

A very slow news day

It's really a very slow news day with nothing particular visibly going on any of sites I typically scan for news. 

In the sorta-news out there, Blue Origin is starting operations of a new ground network called Quartz, reminiscent of NASA's first "deep sky network" - three ground stations spread more or less equally around the globe to receive downlinks from different satellites. More satellites are in the plans. 

Phase one of the Quartz ground stations feature 3.7-meter aperture antennas supporting S-band and X-band frequencies for low Earth orbit (LEO) operations. Blue Origin's Global Network Operations Center provides continuous oversight and incident response across all sites, resulting in a ground communications architecture with no third-party dependencies. Quartz was designed with security in mind and supports radiometric tracking, signal intelligence, and Space Domain Awareness capabilities across all sites.

For those unfamiliar with satellite communications, 3.7 meters (12' 1.6") isn't even remotely big for antennas used for satellite downlinks. 3.7 meters is about the size of the old Satellite TV antennas we had in the early 1980s. Back when they were much bigger than the little dishes we see now. On the other end of the scale, the big dishes of NASA's Deep Sky Network (DSN), used to listen to the Voyager satellites out in interstellar space are 70 meters (240 feet) in diameter. Which is not to compare the jobs they're designed for, just to show that they're like everyday size dishes as opposed to really big dishes. 

An interesting people-related story is on the retirement of Michael Fincke, a NASA astronaut for 30 years. We know him from the Starliner fiasco in the second half of '24. He got delayed from a trip to the ISS due to shuffling crew and ships to fly to the ISS on the Crew-11 mission with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Kimiya Yui, NASA astronaut Zena Cardman and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov on Aug. 1, 2025. That mission was ended earlier than intended when Fincke had a medical emergency. What's interesting in that article is that it contains two videos that total an hour of watching time, and those two videos are said to describe just how "eff-ed up" that Starliner mission was. And, no, I haven't watched those two videos - yet. 

Really, those are the only two moderately interesting stories I've come across today. 

Around "Castle Graybeard" things are pretty much as usual except for yesterday. As I've commented many other times over the years, if there's a movie we want to see, we tend to go to a weekday morning or midday matinee, and yesterday we went to see "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" primarily based on hearing it was doing exceptionally well in theaters, and secondarily because we've seen all of the other Spider-Man movies with this group: Tom Holland as Spidey, Zendaya as MJ and Jacob Batalan as their friend Ned. I'm happy to add they've all gotten better onscreen personas as they've grown. 

I have vague memories of reading the early '70s Spider-Man comics, but I'm sure we started watching the modern Marvel Universe version first trilogy with Tobey Maguire as Spidey, and the next trilogy with Andrew Garfield. When Tom Holland popped up in the last trilogy, I'd never heard of him, but thought he came across well. Since then, I've seen him in other movies and thought he did well in all of them. I think I've read that in almost all the spider-man movies, the guy playing Spidey and the girl playing MJ ended up in some sort of off-screen relationship for a while. I think Holland and Zendaya are the only two who actually got married in real life. I ran across something yesterday that gave me the impression they're both 30. Someone somewhere (Tyrus on "Gutfeld!" I think) conditioned me to react to this by saying they're both grown-ass adults so good luck to both of them. 

I know many readers are anxiously waiting for my review, although most readers have shut down the blog and are reading somewhere else, so let me tell you that I'll give it an 8 out of 10. I think there's a lot going on in the movie and I just got the feeling we're being clued in to a lot of movies yet to come. For example, one of the characters in this movie is named Jean Gray (played by Sadie Sink - whom I've never heard of), and she was a character in the X-Men movies. Is that a lead-in to another X-Men series? Or crossover between the X-Men and other Marvel movies? You know everything I know. 

NASA’s Crew-11 mission members stand inside the Space Vehicle Mockup Facility at the agency’s Johnson Space Center in Houston on Nov. 13, 2024. From left are Mission Specialist Kimiya Yui from JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency), Commander NASA astronaut Zena Cardman, Mission Specialist Oleg Platonov of Roscosmos, and Pilot NASA astronaut Mike Fincke. Image: NASA/Josh Valcarcel

Japan launches a big one; China loses one early in flight

China led the day's rocket launches - at least these two - with the 8:00 AM (EDT here, 1200 UTC) launch of the Long March 7A rocket, from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, in the country's Hainan province.  

The mission was short-lived, though. About 85 seconds into the flight, rather close to when other vehicles are going through Max Q, or the maximum dynamic pressure the vehicle will experience, the Long March 7A first stage exploded generating a massive fireball with a cloud of smoke and debris.

A Long March 7A rocket carrying the ChinaSat 4B satellite explodes shortly after launching from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Aug. 10, 2026. (Image credit: Meng Zhongde/VCG via Getty Images)

The Long March 7A is a vehicle that has flown before, this was the 18th flight, under the name of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). It's important to note that this doesn't mean this particular rocket flew even once because they're not reusable. Every flight is unused hardware. 

The 7A — a variant of China's Long March 7 rocket family — stands just over 197 feet (60 meters) tall and combines the first two Long March 7 stages with a hydrolox (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen)-powered third stage capable of launching up to 7 tons to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).

According to China National Radio, today's launch carried China's Zhongxing-4B spacecraft,, a communications satellite presumably bound for GTO. China's Zhongxing satellites provide telecommunications and broadband internet services and are also thought to provide services for China's military.

An interesting aside to this story is that a test flight of the Chinese Zhuque-3 rocket had been scheduled for Monday evening (presumably US EDT again).

That mission is scheduled to fly from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, more than 1,500 miles (2,415 kilometers) from Wenchang, at 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT; 7:45 a.m. local time), and is expected to feature a first-stage landing attempt.

The article these details come from on Space.com was posted this morning (EDT) and at the time there were no updates to details like that, or statements from CASC or any other Chinese source.

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Moving to the Japanese launch, that was a fully successful mission. The overview is that the Japanese H3 rocket launched a 10,800-pound navigation satellite to high Earth orbit.

Japan's H3 rocket flew for the ninth time ever this afternoon (Aug. 10).

The H3 lifted off from Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:23 p.m. EDT (1923 GMT; 4:23 a.m. on Aug. 11 local time), carrying the Michibiki 7 navigation satellite aloft.

The two-stage H3 is the successor to Japan's workhorse H-2A rocket, which retired last year after a total of 50 flights. 

The term "navigation satellite" brings GPS or the European Galileo satellites to mind. The Michibiki 7 will be part of Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), a homegrown navigation system that operates high above those satellite constellations in geosynchronous orbit. The QZSS is compatible with GPS.

"QZSS can be used even in the Asia-Oceania regions with longitudes close to Japan, so its usage will be expanded to other countries in these regions as well."
...
Michibiki 7 is carrying a payload for the United States as well — the Situational Awareness Camera Hosted Instrument (SÃCHI), which was developed for the U.S. Space Force by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. This is the second of two SACHIs to go up on a QZSS satellite; Michibiki 6, which launched atop an H3 in February 2025, hosts the other one. (Yes, Michibiki 6 launched before Michibiki 5.)

"This program will allow the United States to monitor satellite behavior within the GEO belt over a very interesting part of the world," Mark Huber, a technical staff member in the Lincoln Laboratory's Space Systems and Technology Division, said in a statement in December 2020.

"It is also a pathfinder in several ways," he added. "The U.S. team is blueprinting methods to allow sensitive data sharing between the United States and Japan."

Update on efforts to rescue the Swift rescue mission

The last update I saw and posted was this past Monday, Aug. 3, and I wasn't really expecting an update today, but just ran across it. This was linked from NASA Science's page, but that article isn't complete. Space.com has a good report if any of this post makes you say, "whut? WTF are you talking about?" 

It's a progress report. The mission isn't back to the expected conditions, but it's much improved and looking like it could be possible for the mission to meet its objectives. 

LINK originally was in a multi-axis spin rotating at about 9 degrees per second, which resulted in sporadic communications and impeded LINK’s progress toward Swift. Using a series of burns from one of LINK’s electric propulsion thrusters, the Katalyst team now has slowed that spin to about 1.47 degrees per second. Katalyst plans to keep LINK at that spin rate as it proceeds with next steps for the mission. This includes uploading a flight software update in the coming days with new attitude controllers designed to maintain LINK’s stability in its current configuration. These updates would allow LINK to begin maneuvering to align with Swift’s orbit.

Artist's illustration of Katalyst Space Technologies' LINK spacecraft (left) meeting up with NASA's Swift space telescope in Earth orbit. (Image credit: NASA)

As a reminder, the Katalyst LINK mission launched on July 3rd on a mission remarkable in many ways. It's a mission that has never been tried before: the LINK satellite will rendezvous with Swift, attach itself with robotic arms, and boost Swift's orbit back up. For a mission that has never been tried, add to the picture that they were working to an absurdly short schedule compared to virtually all NASA missions. NASA estimates they need to boost Swift before its orbit decays to lower than 186 miles, and further estimate that will happen "by October." They don't provide any input on October 1st vs. the 31st.  

The software updates mentioned above are scheduled to be beamed up to LINK "in the coming days," according to NASA. 

The Falcon 9 upper stage hit the moon - now the race starts

For the last several days, the web has been abuzz with talk about the Falcon 9 upper stage that was expected to crash into the moon. Much of the buzz has been wrong, or just trying to raise awareness (and funds), such as referring to it as a Falcon 9 rocket, when I think we all know that's just not how F9s work. The booster landed when this upper stage was making orbit (or about 8 minutes after liftoff, if you prefer). 

No, this was just the upper stage of the Falcon 9 that launched two private landers to the moon — Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost and Tokyo-based ispace's Resilience — launched to a high, moon-crossing Earth orbit in January 2025. The Falcon used up enough fuel that there wasn't enough to perform the usual maneuver to return to Earth. 

So the company performed a different maneuver to take care of this upper stage, Julianna Scheiman, director of NASA science and Dragon programs at SpaceX, said during a press conference on Aug. 3.

"For high-energy missions, we need to perform a different maneuver to ensure the second stage itself is safe per the appropriate rules and regulations, and so we did that here," she said.

The problem was reality had some other things in mind.

"What has happened is, essentially, a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path towards the moon," Scheiman said. 

The upper stage slammed into the moon at 2:35 a.m. EDT (0635 UTC). Because an exact impact spot wasn't known, they need to work with various other agencies to attempt to learn more, even if just before and after photos of the impact area. 

"NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and NASA’s ShadowCam instrument on the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will look for opportunities to capture before‑and‑after imagery of the impact site," NASA spokesperson Rob Garner, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, told Space.com. "Image availability depends on several factors, including the impact location, lighting conditions, and when each spacecraft’s orbit next carries it over the area, which may take a few days to receive any imagery." 

Today's impact occurred on the sunlit side of the moon, reducing chances of hobbyist observers seeing anything. A quick search for news like that turned up nothing. So far the only observatory that claims to be sure they saw the impact is the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and reported detections of a lunar plume from the impact.

"We can safely say that we measured a response from the rocket stage impact as a sodium and lithium gas plume a few 10’s of kilometers in size lasting between 5 and 10 minutes after impact," Carl Schmidt told Inside Outer Space's Leonard David.

I'm only vaguely aware of what to expect from a measurement to detect the minerals in the dust column rising from the impact, but the Lowell Observatory provides this photo. I see this as showing two different frequency (or color) lights for sodium and one for lithium. This looks like what I'd expect.

Detections by the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, show evidence of a plume on the moon caused by the impact of a SpaceX rocket on Aug. 5, 2026. (Image credit: Carl Schmidt/Lowell Observatory)

Starship Flight Test 14 looks to be NET August

There just isn't an announced date for it, so I'm assuming Monday August 31. 

FT-14, of course, will be the next flight test after the enormously successful FT-13 back on July 24th. 

The big picture comes from coverage of SpaceX's first ever quarterly earnings report. Starship will achieve orbit and deploy fully operational payloads this time around, according to Elon Musk's talk at the earnings report.

"I'd say things look very good, and that's why we, assuming we receive regulatory approval to do so, will attempt to catch the Ship with the tower on the next flight, which is tentatively scheduled for the end of this month," Musk said during today's call.

The ship, as you know was recovered after its splashdown into the Indian Ocean west of Australia. It's the first Starship to be recovered after one of these flights. While from what we observers could see, the heat shield looked like it survived very well, except maybe to a couple of observers who expressed doubt immediately after the booster recovery, Elon appears to think it looks pretty good. 

"I don't want to jinx it or anything, but I think I'd consider the heat shield problem solved at this point," Musk said.

Both of the launch complexes at Starbase Boca Chica have the (pretty amazing, really) large "chopstick" arms that are designed to both stack the SuperHeavy booster and the ship before flight then to catch both of them in midair after the flight. SpaceX has already famously executed a tower catch of the SuperHeavy booster, but it has not yet tried to catch a Ship. That means Flight 14 could be momentous, provided SpaceX gets permission from regulators to make an attempt.

Flight 14 will also carry up a batch of SpaceX's V3 Starlink satellites, a larger and more capable version of the spacecraft that currently populate the company's broadband megaconstellation. Flight 13 toted 20 Starlink V3s, but Ship deployed them into suborbital space; the satellites will be placed into an operational orbit on the upcoming mission, if all goes to plan, Musk said.

Starship FT-12 within seconds after liftoff. It isn't exactly like FT-13 but I couldn't tell you what to look for to demonstrate that. Looks just like it to me. Image credit: SpaceX

To borrow that quote from Nils Bohr, “prediction is very difficult; especially about the future”. The predictions and reality of the AI "singularity" don't really seem to be in much agreement, and that has to apply in spades to SpaceX's orbital data centers. Still, SpaceX is working to being able to launch Starships at rates that are mind-boggling.

"We expect the cadence of flights to be increasing rapidly, and, probably a year from now, we will be doing at least one flight a day, possibly more," Musk said.

Did you see that the plan for them to expand into the Louisiana waterfront of the Gulf of America appears to be close to being agreed on. The more launch complexes they have to call on, the more realistic everyday launches become.

Update on SWIFT rescue mission

Back last Tuesday, the story broke that the reaction wheel attitude control system on the Link spacecraft sent up to rescue the Swift gamma ray observatory had apparently failed and the Link satellite was spinning out of control. Two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels, used for pointing, had stopped working.

Things didn't look good for the little spacecraft.

... Link was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with the ground and complicating efforts to arrest the spin. Two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels, used for pointing, also stopped working. Through sporadic radio contact, engineers discovered a problem with some of the spacecraft’s cold gas thrusters used for finer attitude control.

It's worth pointing out that Link had been working fine, and was out of communication for a while, something that typically happens for many satellites. 

Katalyst’s ground team, working from a control center near Denver, hurried to find a fix and recover the Link satellite. The good news was, the spacecraft’s other systems remained healthy, including its power supply, three xenon-fueled electric thrusters, and the rendezvous and robotics hardware the Link satellite needs to capture Swift.

Remember that, as pointed out last week, Link's electric thrusters are low powered for this sort of task which means they'll need to run them for a long period of time. As of Friday (the 31st), the spacecraft had cut its spin rate in half, from about 9 degrees per second to approximately 4 degrees per second. Naturally, they hope to reduce it much more so they can do the task Link was developed for. 

“Once we are in a more stable configuration, with much more high-bandwidth comms, we’ll be able to use that to downlink all the rich data (about the condition of the spacecraft),” Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst said. “We do know the states of the reaction wheels and the thrusters and things like that. So our GNC team—guidance, navigation, and control team—has been very hard at work with NASA, essentially remapping all of the control algorithms to be able to have an updated controller ready to go for when we are able to stabilize the spacecraft.” 

The Katalyst engineering team hopes to be able to stop the errant motions entirely and to recover the two reaction control wheels that seem to be completely dead. It would help if they knew exactly what was wrong. They don't really know why the wheels stopped working properly - whether it was a component problem of some sort in the Link satellite or even a collision with space junk of some kind. There are cameras on the Link satellite that can be steered around to look for evidence of what happened. Once the data links are running closer to capacity again. 

It's being considered that the automatic fault detection - a fancy version of turn it off and back on again - could be at least part of the cause.

Whatever the cause, Katalyst’s mission control team lost contact with Link for more than 24 hours after it spun out of control. The satellite then automatically reset itself, just as it was supposed to do.

“This was built-in fault protection logic saying, ‘Hey, if I haven’t heard from anybody in 24 hours, there must be something wrong. I’m going to toggle the power, turn it on and off again,’” Lee said. “It’s just built in. However, that shutdown mode is ungraceful. It basically pulls the plug on everything, and that creates some downstream effects for sensitive systems such as the reaction wheels.

“Basically, there was a big thermal spike that came about as a result of this that over-temperatured the upstream electronic circuits that control the reaction wheels, which ultimately led them to being inoperable,” Lee said.

While busy and this setback ensures they're not quite "there" yet, the Katalyst team is working to complete the rescue mission they contracted for.

“We’re very committed to pursuing this mission,” Lee said. “We’re working side by side with NASA. I just came from a technical working meeting with their controls team, where we’re reviewing the algorithms. It seems like there’s nothing that is preventing us from reestablishing three-axis control of the spacecraft with the remaining reaction wheel, with the remaining thrusters, as well as the electric propulsion.

“It’s not the original mode that we expected to control the spacecraft with, but it seems like we will have sufficient stability and controllability of the spacecraft,” Lee said. “With this, we believe we’ll be able to do the rendezvous with Swift. We believe that we’ll be able to go and do things like the inspection of Swift within a close approach of a few dozen meters. And as it stands right now, we have not made a formal assessment, but we believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards.”

A plume of plasma exhaust coming from one of the Link satellite’s xenon-fueled electric engines. Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies