Major Satellite Launches and Deployments (Aug 22–23, 2025) New Space Technologies and Innovations in Orbit Government Policy and Funding Developments Space Science and Astronomy Highlights International Collaboration and Space Industry Trends Sources: SpaceX/Space Force launch updates space.com space.com; Spaceflight Now spaceflightnow.com spaceflightnow.com; Space.com News space.com space.com; Keeptrack.space briefs keeptrack.space keeptrack.space; SatNews (Aug 19, 2025) news.satnews.com news.satnews.com; Business Insider…
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On Aug 7, SpaceX launched 24 Amazon Kuiper satellites on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral at 10:01 a.m. EDT, increasing the operational Kuiper fleet from 78 to 102 and with the first-stage booster landing on the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas. Rocket Lab’s Aug 5 Electron launch deployed the QPS-SAR-12 “Kushinada-I” SAR satellite…
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Apple launched Emergency SOS via satellite in late 2022 with the iPhone 14, becoming the first mainstream phone to offer satellite messaging. Apple’s satellite system uses Globalstar’s LEO satellites (about 1,400 km altitude) with custom hardware and extremely low bandwidth, delivering a few bytes per second and requiring the user to point and hold the…
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Spotify raised its Premium Individual plan price to €11.99 from €10.99 across Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, effective September, and shares jumped almost 8% on the news. Nintendo offered a late-July Switch 2 showcase, signaling more simultaneous third-party launches and no official release date yet. Figma debuted on July 31 with…
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NASA Worldview offers over 1,000 imagery layers from NASA and partner satellites, with a typical 60–125 minute delay after capture. NOAA GOES weather satellites update the continental United States every 5 minutes or less and the full hemisphere every 15 minutes, enabling near real-time weather loops. Landsat 8 imagery is available on the USGS server…
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Google Earth was downloaded over one billion times in its first six years. Google Earth’s Time Machine covers 1984 to 2022 in a 4D interactive map built from millions of satellite photos. The Landsat program began in 1972 and offers a 50+ year global land-surface data record, with Landsat 8 and 9 providing 30-meter resolution…
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From July 24 to July 25, 2025, Starlink endured one of its largest outages, knocking tens of thousands offline with more than 60,000 outage reports before service largely returned in about 2.5 hours. Starlink’s outage was attributed by VP of Engineering Michael Nicolls to a failure of key internal software services that operate the core…
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On July 25 at 1:54 a.m. ET, a Soyuz-2.1b from Russia’s Vostochny Cosmodrome lofted 21 satellites into orbit, including two Ionosfera-M space weather satellites, Iran’s Nahid-2, and 18 rideshares. The four Ionosfera-M satellites will provide three-dimensional near-Earth space coverage to study solar wind effects on radio communications and satellites, with the first two launched in…
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NASA’s ATLAS telescope identified the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, currently about 420 million miles from Earth, with closest approach to the Sun on October 30, 2025, and it will pass safely between Mars and Earth as the third confirmed interstellar visitor after 1I/ʻOumuamua and 2I/Borisov. July marks Aphelion Day, when Earth is about 94.5 million miles…
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During Operation Rising Lion in mid-June 2025, Israel ingested more than 12,000 fresh satellite images during the shooting phase from the Ofek optical and SAR constellation and commercial vendors, with tens of millions of square kilometers imaged day and night. The domestic space stack centers on Ofek-16 (optical) and Ofek-13 SAR, delivering 0.5 m visual…
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