Two launches this week delivered 61 more satellites to orbit for the Amazon Leo broadband network.
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Rocket Report: Falcon Heavy is back; Russia’s Soyuz-5 finally debuts
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It was great to see a Falcon Heavy launch again. Sure SH/SS is cool and all, but watching that rocket lift off, its as cool today as when I watched the first.
I understand (maybe) the why of offsetting the booster landings today, but nothing will ever match seeing those two side boosters land at the same time on the first RTL shot.
Nothing was mentioned, but as I recall, the center booster is always tossed away because they could not fit legs around the support struts?
Hopefully we'll see SH/SS V3 fly in May. It would be great if SpaceX gets past testing and is ready for even LEO heavy lifting (or pushing heavy science packages out into the solar system.
I understand (maybe) the why of offsetting the booster landings today, but nothing will ever match seeing those two side boosters land at the same time on the first RTL shot.
Nothing was mentioned, but as I recall, the center booster is always tossed away because they could not fit legs around the support struts?
Hopefully we'll see SH/SS V3 fly in May. It would be great if SpaceX gets past testing and is ready for even LEO heavy lifting (or pushing heavy science packages out into the solar system.
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The first 2 FH flights attempted to recover the centre core, but they couldn't fully stick the landing on the drone ship. Ever since then they've discarded it.
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The center core is likely to always be tossed away, but that wasn't the initial plan. SpaceX did equip early falcon heavy center cores with legs, and even landed one on a drone ship. That one tipped over on the way back to port though.
The reason recovery of the center core is unlikely is that it's just going so much faster than the side cores (or a normal F9 core) are, so reentry is way hotter and more damaging.
Also overnight at starbase, the Ship transport ring was rolled to the launch site for some alignment testing. I saw the road closure for this posted yesterday as I was flying home from Starbase, so I was annoyed at first because I thought the closure might have been for a booster rollout. Missing that by 1 day would have sucked
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SpaceX previously attempted recovering the center stage but there are two issues. The first is their success rate was poor. Unless lifting huge payloads to LEO (not ever used) the center core comes in a lot hotter than the side boosters. They only ever recovered one center core and it was later lost as sea so no center core has ever reflown. The second factor is that for many payloads the center core needs to be expended intentionally. As F9 got more powerful the gap between a reusable F9 and a fully reusable FH continued to shrink and there were less FH flights than originally expected.
Due to the low success, high recovery cost and minimal opportunities for recovery it just wasn't worth it to plan for center core recoveries. So from flight 5? onward they just dropped center core recovery regardless of payload mass or orbit. All future FH flights will involve intentionally expending the center core and priced as such.
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Worth noting is that they have started working the problem from the other direction, new center cores have been flown single stick on missions that don't require a lot of performance. This lets them amortize that shiny new booster a little before they ditch it on a heavy mission.
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This Week's Additional Launches
Very unusually these days, there are only three launches scheduled in the next week. I'm so old I can remember when three launches in a month was remarkable.
Very unusually these days, there are only three launches scheduled in the next week. I'm so old I can remember when three launches in a month was remarkable.
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Is this correct? I could have sworn I read it was only the side boosters they were "converting" (to/from single core usage) as the center core required significant structural changes. I thought the center cores were always new.
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They've done it with one core. B1091 has flown 2 Kuiper (Amazon Leo) missions and a Bandwagon mission. The 1091 Kuiper flights carried the same number of satellites as other Kuiper launches (24), so it probably only makes sense to use it where the payload is limited by volume rather than mass.
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But that one hasn't launched in center core config yet, correct? I see on Wikipedia that it is the plan to reuse it, but I don't see it dedicated yet.
Going to be especially interesting to watch that launch when it happens.
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It has not yet. Once they use it, it will be expended. SpaceX probably doing the calculus on how many missions can be done with the reduce performance FH core in F9 config vs upcoming FH flights.
The FH launch should be routine. The unusual flights have already happened. In case it isn't clear this isn't a F9 core that will be later converted to FH core specs. This is a FH core built as a FH core flying as a F9 which reduces performance relative to a baseline F9 due to higher dry mass.
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I noticed on the Falcon Heavy live stream that the Viasat-3 was deployed at around 0.25kps out past 30,000km after the 3rd and final burn, as opposed to 3kps which I think is the usual speed at geo. Does this mean that it was deployed in a GTO and the satellite has to use its own thrusters to get the additional 2.75kps?
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It was deployed to GTO but speed at GTO (apogee) and GEO are the same. Both are zero relative to Earth's surface. SpaceX (and most all? launch providers) show velocity relative to the surface of the Earth. This is easier to understand during the initial launch but is a pretty useless frame of reference once at or near orbital velocities.
Behind the scenes everything switches to an Earth Centered Inertial frame that is velocity relative to the center of the Earth ignoring the rotation of the Earth around its axis. I don't know exactly when but at MECO would make sense. The velocity of the booster relative to the surface is important even for expendable boosters but the upper stage only cares about its orbital velocity.
I assume they use velocity relative to the surface for viewers because otherwise you have other weird things that look "wrong" like the rocket having velocity before launch. Surface frame of reference keeps things simple to avoid confusion. It does end up doing exactly that for people more interested in what is actually happening beyond number go up.
On edit: same thing happened on Blue failed launch as well. The surface reference values lead to all kinds of later proven incorrect ideas on what went wrong.
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It's always an earth centered reference frame (there isn't a switch), but the reference velocity is the ground speed projected out to the altitude the spacecraft is at. So during launch this is something like 400 m/s/1440 kph (give or take), which is pretty small potatoes next to orbital velocity in LEO. At GEO altitude it is 3 km/s/10800 kph (at the 32000 km of viasat 3 deployment more like 2.7 km/s). So when the spacecraft velocity appear to 'slow down' from 5700 to 900 kph during that final burn, it is actually accelerating to within about 900 kph/250 m/s of the local ground speed.
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It's impressive they've limped along long enough to get a delta ship close to finished (though they aren't there yet). Blue origin ending NS flights was a gift to VG, there is definitely demand for the service and they are the sole provider now. They obviously don't have unlimited resources, so it will depend greatly on if they can manage to fly delta profitably. In addition to figuring out if they actually fixed the structure issues with the ships and added enough performance to fly more passengers, I wonder what kind of cadence the existing carrier aircraft can support. If they can't get their flight rate up it will continue to be a money pit and will assuredly die quickly.
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I've never understood where they are getting the money for its development. They have no revenue and I've never heard of them doing any of the usual corporate fundraising. What, have they got a tunnel into Fort Knox?
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They have the small amount of cash left over from selling stock (whose value has dropped 99.5%). At current burn rate they will be out of cash by next year.
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Berger just posted a new article on just this subject:
https://meincmagazine.com/space/2026/05/the-suborbital-space-tourism-industry-is-on-life-support/
https://meincmagazine.com/space/2026/05/the-suborbital-space-tourism-industry-is-on-life-support/
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What are we seeing in the time-lapse of the Falcon Heavy launch in the article? Why the darker middle section at the bottom of the image, and what are the three darker rings, one per streak, just at the top of the dark section?
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Updated schedule of ISS flights from NASA. Crew-13 is now NET September.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacesta...international-space-station-2026-flight-plan/
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/spacesta...international-space-station-2026-flight-plan/
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Nice shot from the on-board camera - you can see the shadow of the plume on the ocean.
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I'll be that guy...
Hydrologically speaking, the space center at Kourou is located hundreds of kilometers outside the Amazon basin.
Ecologically speaking, practically all of Guiane is [or was] "Amazonian rainforest", which leads to some confusion.
Hydrologically speaking, the space center at Kourou is located hundreds of kilometers outside the Amazon basin.
Ecologically speaking, practically all of Guiane is [or was] "Amazonian rainforest", which leads to some confusion.
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It seems there are more Starlink launches from Vandenberg than from the Florida pads lately. I know they have moved 39A over to FH and SS launches but it still seems like there are more CA launches lately. Is there a reason for this other than SpaceX getting the upgraded permit like a better orbital profile or something?
Not that I am complaining, as I prefer CA launches since I have a good chance to watch them
Not that I am complaining, as I prefer CA launches since I have a good chance to watch them
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So far this year, it looks like there have been 21 Starlink launches from Florida, and 22 from California. However, Florida jumped to a 5-0 lead at the start of the year, so California has had to do some catching up since then.It seems there are more Starlink launches from Vandenberg than from the Florida pads lately. I know they have moved 39A over to FH and SS launches but it still seems like there are more CA launches lately. Is there a reason for this other than SpaceX getting the upgraded permit like a better orbital profile or something?
Not that I am complaining, as I prefer CA launches since I have a good chance to watch them
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Dave Limp confirms that BO were doing fairing recovery work in the NG-3 flight.
Dave Limp said:
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The side boosters is where it started. But they can now make cores designed to be used as an eventually discarded center FH core operate as a lower performance reusuable F9 core to get more life out of it
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Thank you for this btw.
I try to track what's going on at Vandenberg, and you've caught some that I missed.
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Re: New Glenn
Aspirational (at best) schedule aside, isn't this a strategy shift for 9x4? My recollection from when they announced the bigger variant back in November was that it was planned to be a minority of their launches, for unusual payloads that either needed something very heavy delivered to LEO or something moderately heavy to TLI/etc. Taking this story seriously seems to suggest they anticipate using 9x4 for high cadence operations, mass deployments of big constellations and so forth.
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