In 2011, NASA retired the Space Shuttle, leaving the ISS without its primary American supply line. May 2012 marked SpaceX’s Dragon as the first commercial spacecraft to rendezvous and berth with the ISS, delivering about 1,200 pounds of cargo and later returning roughly 1,300 pounds. October 2012’s CRS-1 mission launched the first official NASA Commercial…
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NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Mike Fincke, Kimiya Yui, and Oleg Platonov launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 with nine Merlin engines from Kennedy Space Center at 11:43 a.m. EDT on August 1, 2025, on the Crew Dragon Endeavour for NASA’s Crew-11 mission. The Crew-11 Dragon capsule separated from the Falcon 9’s second stage less than 10…
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SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launched NASA’s TRACERS mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base on July 23 at 2:13 p.m. EDT. The Falcon 9 first stage was on its 16th flight and performed a pinpoint landing at Vandenberg, marking SpaceX’s 479th booster recovery. TRACERS, Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, consists of two 200-kg satellites to…
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SpaceX achieved its 500th Falcon 9 mission in early July 2025, with an overnight Starlink launch featuring a booster on its 29th reuse. By July 2, 2025, SpaceX had conducted 83 Falcon 9 missions in 2025, including 61 Starlink deployments. In June 2025, the United States saw 21 commercial launches across four providers, with SpaceX…
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Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet constellation, now has over 5 million customers in 125 countries, with rivals including Eutelsat OneWeb, Globalstar, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper and government-led IRIS2 and QianFan programs. Vodafone and AST SpaceMobile formed SatCo, a Luxembourg-based joint venture aiming to deliver direct-to-device satellite connectivity across Europe by 2026, integrating with 4G/5G networks. MTG-S1,…
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Summary of Recent Developments (Mid-2025) SpaceX’s Starship vehicle lifting off on its ninth test flight from Starbase, Texas in May 2025. Starship is the company’s next-generation, fully-reusable rocket system under development. In summary, by mid-2025 SpaceX is breaking launch records, advancing Starship’s development amid regulatory hurdles, expanding its Starlink network, and securing a growing share…
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ESA’s Biomass satellite, the first with a P-band SAR, released its initial high-resolution images and enables 3D mapping of forest structure for carbon accounting. Rocket Lab’s 67th Electron launch deployed four satellites—three HawkEye 360 Cluster 12 microsatellites and the experimental Kestrel-0A—marking the ninth Electron mission in 2024. Amazon’s Project Kuiper added 27 satellites to reach…
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The space-based solar power (SBSP) concept was proposed in 1968 by Peter Glaser to place satellites in orbit and beam power to Earth. In 2023 Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1) conducted three beaming tests in May, June, and July 2023 using the MAPLE flexible array to show ground reception of orbital power. In June…
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Delphi is Lux Aeterna’s flagship fully reusable satellite bus designed to launch, operate in orbit, return to Earth, be refurbished, and relaunched. The Delphi demonstrator weighs about 200 kg and will carry a customer payload to low Earth orbit before re-entering and landing for recovery. Lux Aeterna has raised $4 million in pre-seed funding, led…
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QUICK³ is a 3U CubeSat weighing 4 kg, led by Germany’s Technical University of Munich, and it launched on 23 June 2025 aboard SpaceX’s Transporter‑14 from Vandenberg SFB. It carries the first true single-photon source flown, a laser-pumped hexagonal boron nitride chip on a 10 × 10 × 15 cm photonic chip. True single photons…
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