SpaceX scrubbed a planned launch of a Falcon 9 rocket on Aug 30th because of weather anxieties. It is rescheduled for today, September 1st. The SpaceX rocket will carry 60 Starlink broadband satellites from Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Launch time is scheduled for 09.29 am Florida time (13.29 GMT). […]
There are now three major would-be mega-constellation low Earth orbit satellite developers: Elon Musk’s Starlink, Jeff Bezos’ Project Kuiper and the UK/India joint-venture OneWeb (should it emerge from bankruptcy). The missing link for each of them is a very low-cost phased array antenna to bring satellite broadband to the mass market. Which is perhaps where […]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is planning two rocket launches over the next few days. The first, likely on August 28th, is an Earth observation satellite for Argentina, SAOCOM 1B. What will be unusual is that Musk’s team is hoping to bring the rocket’s first stage directly back to Earth and land the booster stage at Cape […]
SpaceX has generated some $1.9 billion of fresh funding during August, and according to reports, is still looking to raise more cash. The initial target was to raise $2.066 billion. The cash-raising exercise follows on from SpaceX raising $346 million in May. The news comes as Musk achieves 4th position as the world’s richest person […]
SpaceX launched a South Korean military satellite on July 20th, and just 8 minutes after launch brought down the Falcon 9’s first stage onto a textbook landing onto its floating barge (‘Just Read The Instructions’) positioned some 645 kms down range. This was the 12th launch this year for SpaceX. Not satisfied with recovering the […]
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has quite a lot of work on hand and consequently is currently delaying rocket launches. For example, a launch scheduled for July 14th (of Anasis-II) was scrubbed because of a need to take a closer look at the Falcon 9’s second stage and perhaps swapping out hardware, according to a SpaceX statement. […]
The UK government is widely reported to have joined a consortium that is bidding for bankrupt OneWeb’s satellite system. The UK reportedly put £500 million (or possibly $500 million) into the consortium for a bid on June 26th. The UK’s interest in OneWeb is for a potential alternate space system to the EU’s Galileo GPS […]
First it was bad weather at the Cape which slipped the June 23rd launch to June 25th, then June 26th, but then the Falcon 9 rocket with a cargo of 57 Starlink satellites – plus a few guest craft – was postponed again just 2 hours before the planned launch – even though the weather […]
In a filing made to the FCC, SpaceX said that its Starlink service would help bridge the digital divide using the 12 GHz satellite frequency band (Ku-band). The filing was made in a response to a filing made on May 26th by the Competitive Carriers Association (CCA) which argued that the 12 GHz band should […]