LAUNCH at 1318 UTC Dec 28 of a Soyuz-2-1b/Fregat from Vostochniy on a rideshare mission putting Aist-2T Nos. 1 and 2 and fifty small satellites in orbit.

It appears the Russian Defense Ministry's Olimp-K (Luch, 2014-058A) sat has finally been retired, after visting 30 separate geostationary locations during its suspected eavesdropping mission. The orbit was raised to the graveyard from Oct 7 to Oct 22. The plot shows the sat's orbit height history

Initial TLEs now out for BlueBird 6 and the LVM3 upper stage, confirming 506 x 520 km x 53.0 deg orbit for BB6. China's FY-4C metsat and upper stage also cataloged in geotransfer 191 x 35844 km x 28.5 deg.

LAUNCH at 1609 UTC Dec 26 of the Fengyun-4C geosync weather satellite on a CZ-3B from Xichang

Obzor-R (2025-310A) and Soyuz third stage cataloged in a 217 x 633 km x 98.0 deg, 06:00 LTDN sun-synch orbit. For some odd reason still no @S4S_SDA TLEs for 2025-309 (BlueBird/LVM3)

Space Force after a gap of some days has identified the dead Starlink 35956 again, showing its decaying orbit

LAUNCH at about 2325 UTC Dec 25 of a Chang Zheng 8A from Hainan Commercial Launch Site, probably with the SatNet LEO Group 17 satellites

LAUNCH at 0325 UTC Dec 24 of India's LVM3 flight M6 with the 6-tonne AST Space Mobile BlueBird-6 satellite

The CZ-12A second stage has been cataloged in a 203 x 241 km x 69.7 deg orbit, confirming successful launch.

I think the report I found of 2 sats deployed was a translation error for 'stage 2 in orbit' - please disregard it. Apparently just stage 2 in orbit with a dummy payload attached

CZ-12A reported to have reached orbit with 2 unnamed satellites deployed.

LAUNCH at 0200 UTC Dec 23 of the first Chang Zheng 12A from Jiuquan. CZ-12A is a two stage methalox orbital launch vehicle. The first stage is designed to be recoverable, but on this flight recovery has reportedly failed. Waiting to hear if the second stage made orbit

The HANBIT-NANO launch appeared to explode about a minute after launch, possibly impacting the ground at that time.

LAUNCH of Innospace (S Korea)'s HANBIT NANO from Alcantara (Brazil) at 0113 UTC

Observations from Chile suggest that Japan's H3 survived the first orbit and reentered at second perigee, circa 0400 UTC, somewhere over S America along the track shown here

I am going to assume for now that the Space Force elset is accurate, and guess that H3/QZS reentered at first perigee over the S Atlantic at around 0250 UTC.

Space Force just released an "analyst elset" with catalog 85420 for an object in a 109 x 441 km x 30.1 deg orbit that's consistent with the Tanegashima launch.

The perigee of the QZS-5/H3 is hard to estimate given currently available data. Somewhere between -250 and +350 km, but I am currently leaning towards +200-ish

Possible problem with the H3 launch, looks like the second burn of stage 2 may have shut down early. Waiting for confirmation one way or the other

LAUNCH at 0151 UTC Dec 22 of the Michibiki-5 navigation satellite by a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries H3 from Tanegashima

The damaged Starlink satellite, S-35956, has been imaged from a Vantor satellite and shown to be largely intact, despite the detection of debris from it.

Electron 79 payload Sukunami-I (QPS SAR 15) cataloged in a 569 x 483 km x 42.0 deg orbit, confirming successful launch.

LAUNCH at 0636 UTC Dec 21 of Rocket Lab Electron with iQPS' QPS-SAR-15 radar satellite スクナミ-Ⅰ

112 of 115 expected objects from Transporter-15 (launched Nov 28) now have Space Force orbital data. 56 of the objects are identified, including all the Planet, OHB-I IRIDE and ICEYE payloads. None of the 13 payloads from the Nov 26 Nuri launch are yet identified.

China's TJS 22, launched on Dec 9, is now being tracked in GEO at 66.5E.

China's TJS 23 satellite and its CZ-5 rocket stage cataloged in 210 x 45721 km x 16.4 deg and 238 x 41662 km x 16.4 deg orbits, confirming successful launch to supersync geotransfer

Suborbital LAUNCH at 1415:02 UTC of New Shepard NS-37 to about 107 km apogee with space travellers 767 to 772: Bruce Milch, Michi Benthaus, Hans Koenigsmann, Adonis Pourolis, Jason Stansell, and Joseph Hyde. Flight time 10m20s.

LAUNCH at 1230 UTC Dec 20 of a Chang Zheng 5 with the large TJS-23 geostationary satellite, probably for signals intel

LeoLabs says they see hundreds of debris objects from the Starlink failure event

On Nov 8 China launched three Shiyan-32 satellites to a 440 km orbit with an unknown mission. On Dec 18, Shiyan 32-02 (object C) raised its orbit from 421 x 439 km to 444 x 456 km and appears to have released a debris object, cataloged as 67225. I'll have to monitor further to see what's up.

Hmm - this is odd. After the ONE data point showing S-35956 in a lower orbit, Space Force is now showing it back in the original orbit. Suggests that the low orbit was a mistake - perhaps a debris object and not the main body of the satellite.

DiskSats cataloged in a 541 x 554 km x 45.0 deg orbit, confirming successful launch

According to SpaceX, on Dec 17 one of the Group 11-30 satellites, Starlink 35956 (66629, 2025-271N), suffered a failure with venting of the propulsion tank and release of some debris objects. This is reflected in a 3km dip in the orbit tracking seen here

LAUNCH at 0503:00 UTC of Electron from Pad 0C at the Mid Atlantic Regional Spaceport, Wallops Island, Virginia with the STP-S30 payload, the Aerospace Corp.'s four DiskSats

planet4589.org is back up on the new server, appears working ok from where I am

Notice: planet4589.org is moving to a new server. Things may be rocky until the new address propagates through DNS.

LAUNCH at 1527 UTC Dec 17 of Starlink Group 15-13 from Vandenberg

LAUNCH at 0501 UTC Dec 17 of two EU Galileo navigation satellites on Ariane 6 from Kourou. LAUNCH at 1342 UTC Dec 17 of Starlink Group 6-99 from Kennedy Space Center

I note that Amazon uses the spelling "Amazon Leo", not "Amazon LEO", completing the semantic/orthographic shift from the abbreviation LEO (Low Earth Orbit) to a proper noun "Leo" meaning low Earth orbit (and etymologically unrelated to the homographic constellation name).

LAUNCH at 0828 UTC Dec 16 of ULA's Atlas V 551 flight AV-111 from Canaveral with 27 Amazon Leo satellites (formerly known as Kuiper)

LAUNCH at 0317 UTC Dec 16 of the Ziyuan 3-04 imaging satellite by Chang Zheng 4B from Taiyuan

I looked at @jfoust.bsky.social 's story on the rendezvous between LEO Express 1 and 2. It appears that there were two periods of close approach, on Oct 30-31 and Nov 15-16. Note: the TLEs are only good to a km or so.

The number of active satellites in orbit has now passed the 14000 mark according to my estimates:

LAUNCH at 0549 UTC Dec 14 of Starlink Group 15-12 from Vandenberg

LAUNCH at 0309 UTC Dec 14 of a Rocket Lab Electron from Mahia, placing JAXA's RAISE-4 satellite in orbit.

LAUNCH at 0108 UTC Dec 13 of a Kuaizhou-11 from Jiuquan with the Dier-5 microgravity spacecraft and Xiwang-5-2, probably an amateur radio sat, to a 41 deg orbit.

Interim updates made to GCAT and the Satcon pages; still some details to fill in over the next couple days.

Completed a successful visit to London, making slow but steady progress on my relocation project. Back in Boston tomorrow, will update the web site over the weekend.

Warmest congrats to my friend Prof Sera Markoff, whose career I've been privileged to follow since its early days. She now follows in the footsteps of Airy, Challis, G.Darwin, Eddington, Hoyle, Rees and others as the 17th Plumian Prof of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy (best job title ever).

I won't be doing regular updates for the next two weeks while I'm on travel - I recommend nasaspaceflight.com and spacenews.com and novosti-kosmonavtiki.ru/news/ for launch updates while I'm away