LAUNCH at 2113 UTC Nov 6 of Starlink 11-14 from Vandenberg

My take on the @methanesat.bsky.social shambles on @newsroom.co.nz -- paywalled for 24 hours.... newsroom.co.nz/2025/11/07/h...

LAUNCH at 0131 UTC Nov 6 of Starlink 6-81 from Canaveral

LAUNCH at 1951 UTC Nov 5 of a Rocket Lab Electron from Mahia with the QPS SAR 14 radar sat for Japan's iQPS

At 0935 UTC Nov 5 the US Air Force carried out test launch GT254 of a Minuteman 3 ICBM from Vandenberg Space Force Base (likely silo LF09 or LF10) to Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific.

NYT just called it for Mamdani

this is the most successful a CIA officer has been at toppling a government in years.

GCAT updates will be postponed for a few days while I have fun breaking - er I mean upgrading - the underlying software

Launch at 2102 UTC Nov 4 of an Ariane 6 from Kourou with the EU's Sentinel-1D radar satellite

Yaogan 46 cataloged in a 2548 x 7562 km x 20.0 deg orbit, suggesting it is related to Yaogan 45 and is not a geostationary mission as some had suggested

CMS-03/GSAT-7R and the LVM3 stage 2 rocket cataloged in a 179 x 26647 km x 21.3 deg transfer orbit.

I'm still trying to identify the reentry seen over Aruba at 0112 UTC Oct 31 - I suspect it was 65564 / 2025-202B CZ-7A Y14 stage 3, which did reenter that day and whose orbit seems to roughly match. Can someone with better reentry prediction tools check me?

LAUNCH at 0347 Nov 3 of a CZ-7A from Wenchang with the Yaogan 46 remote sensing satellite. Orbit not yet known.

I'm a bit puzzled that there are only 27 gaps in the US sat catalog (66178 to 66204) for the 28 objects from the Starlink Group 10-21 launch (2025-243). We're getting SpaceX ephem data for all 28 so I'm not sure what the 18thSDS are doing here. If anyone knows the answer let me know!

LAUNCH at 1156 UTC Nov 2 of India's LVM-3 from Sriharikota carrying the CMS-03 military comms sat for ISRO and the Indian Navy to a subsync geotransfer orbit.

LAUNCH at 0510 UTC Nov 2 of a Falcon 9 from Canaveral pad 40 with the Bandwagon-4 rideshare mission, including as primary payload the fourth Korean Project 425 military radar sat

I recommend this article by @meghanbartels.bsky.social and @leebillings.bsky.social for folks who are looking for *factual* information about why 3I/ATLAS is of interest to planetary astronomers: www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-...

The Chinese station made another orbit reboost on Oct 29, a couple of days before the Shenzhou-21 launch

Casey Handmer's rant on NASA's Orion capsule is worth a read. caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/n...

Are you a grad student interested in writing for Astrobites, or do you know one? We're recruiting! Apply by November 26 :) astrobites.org/2025/10/31/a...

LAUNCH of Starlink Group 11-23 at 2041 UTC Oct 31 from Vandenberg Space Force Base

Shenzhou-21 docked with the TIanhe forward docking port at 1922 UTC Oct 31

Exact T-0 was 15:44:46.441 UTC:

LAUNCH at 1544 UTC of Shenzhou 21 on a Chang Zheng 2F from Jiuquan carrying three astronauts to the Chinese Space Station.

3I/ATLAS is behaving just as a comet should. No shenanigans. Looking forward to the possibility of JUICE (a European spacecraft heading eventually to Jupiter) observing this object in the coming weeks!

Chinese astronauts Col. Zhang Lu, Maj. Wu Fei and Dr. Zhang Hongzhang are aboard the Shenzhou-21 spaceship scheduled for launch shortly (1544 UTC)

Starlink Group 10-37 launched at 1635 UTC Oct 29 from Canaveral. Japan's HTV-X1 cargo ship arrived at ISS Oct 29 and was berthed at the nadir port on Harmony at 1850 UTC

Astronauts Ryzhikov and Dubritskiy made spacewalk VKD-65 from the Poisk airlock on Oct 28, with hatch open from 1418 to 2112 UTC and depressurization from 1357 to 2115 UTC. Among other activities they installed the IPI-500 experiment on the Nauka module

The first 10 Lockheed Martin SDA T1TL-C sats launched on Oct 14 (out of 21 aboard) have been cataloged in Space-Track as SDA-1664 to SDA-1673

LAUNCH at 0043 UTC Oct 28 of Starlink Group 11-21 from Vandenberg

Three elsets now available for HTV-X1, showing it successively in a 302 x 334 km, 347 x 389 km and 406 x 412 km orbit.

Based on analysis of TLEs, the Chinese Space Station made a 3.2 m/s reboost on Oct 17 at about 0947 UTC

I suspect that 2025 US6 is actually SSN 60058, the Chinese DRO-B lunar probe, in a 144000 x 382000 km x 28.2 deg orbit

Three objects from China's GF14-02 launch cataloged in 477 x 491 km, 372 x 516 km, and 484 x 545 km sun sync orbits with 10:26 LTDN orbit plane. No orbit data yet for Japan's HTV-X1.

LAUNCH at 1500 UTC of Starlink 10-21 from Canaveral

LAUNCH at 0355 UTC Oct 26 of a CZ-3B from Xichang with the 高分十四号02星 (Gao Fen 14-02) topographic mapping satellite to sun-sync orbit.

LAUNCH at 0000 UTC Oct 26 of JAXA H3 flight F7 with the ISS-bound HTV-X1 cargo ship.

Space-Track has cataloged another payload deployed from the 2024-134 USSF-51 launch (which went up in July 2024). It's now clear that one of the three main USSF-51 payloads is an ESPA-class tug like the LDPE-2 one on 2022-144 with lots of subsats

LAUNCH at 1420 UTC Oct 25 of Starlink Group 11-12 from Vandenberg

Spacebook.com consolidates a comprehensive set of space object information and metadata. It draws upon a rich set of space object databases and historical archives, including Space-Track.org, CelesTrak, Jonathan McDowell’s (@planet4589.bsky.social) GCAT, and COMSPOC. (1/4)

New orbit data for Spainsat NG-II showing it in a 409 x 62984 km x 26.8 deg orbit.

One of two expected objects from the TJS-20 launch cataloged in a 178 x 41620 km x 16.4 deg geotransfer orbit. Spainsat NG-2 cataloged in a 32 x 60537 km x 26.7 deg supersync transfer orbit with very low (possibly spurious?) perigee height

Via ABC news, Planet imagery showing the change in the view from space of the White House over the past month

LAUNCH at 1430 UTC Oct 23 of a Chang Zheng 5 from Wenchang with the Tongxin Jishu Shiyan 20 sat, probably to geotransfer orbit. LAUNCH at 0130 UTC Oct 24 of Falcon 9 from Canaveral with the Spainsat NG-II comms sat for Hisdesat; stage 1 not to be recovered

LAUNCH at 1416 UTC Oct 22 of Starlink 11-5 from Vandenberg

North Korea's Manligyeong-1 F3 spy sat, launched in 2023, made another orbit reboost on Oct 2, showing that it is still working.

Nice review article in Nature Astronomy celebrating 25 years of the Chandra mission www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looks like the UA1093 incident is tentatively confirmed to be a balloon and not space debris, per this exchange on the other site

Alternative explanation for the UA1093 incident

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