LAUNCH at 0635 UTC Jul 18 of Skyroot Aerospace's Vikram-1 from Satish Dhawan Space Centre. Skyroot reports the vehicle reached orbit and deployed two cubesats.

Starship Flight 13 aborted at booster ignition at 2245:29 UTC. No launch occurred, scrub for today, safe engine shutdown.

Phew, the ISP has rebooted it, all seems well.

My server planet4589.org is down for currently unknown reasons - apologies. Investigating.

LAUNCH at 2032 UTC Jul 16 of a Falcon 9 with the T1TL-E mission of 21 York Space Systems comms sats for the US Space Development Agency

Well. now a month since I came back to the UK. The frustrating construction saga continues and the library will have to stay in storage a few months more. But I am starting to engage more with life here, and next week I look forward to seeing friends in the UK astro communuity at the NAM meeting!

For the first time, we have the name of a #Maya mathematician-astronomer! Read the original research in Antiquity 🆓 doi.org/10.15184/aqy... Check out the project: www.xultun.org 🏺 #Archaeology

LAUNCH at 1447 Jul 14 of the Soyuz MS-29 spaceship carrying Petr Dubrov and Anna Kikina of Roskosmos and Anil Menon of NASA.

LAUNCH at 0910 UTC Jul 14 of Starlink Group 10-45 from Canaveral

LAUNCH at 0128 UTC Jul 14 of Starlink Group 15-14 from Vandenberg

Much better news on this: although the new registrations are not available by the UN OOSA web site, they can be found by guessing the document ID string on the main UN documents site documents.un.org - so it's a pain but not a total roadblock

OK - someone showed me how to get around this issue with the old docs, but it's painful. I will eventually be able to get the English versions and add them to the site

The situation with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) website is even worse than I thought. Not only are new registrations not being published, but most of the links to the *old* docs are broken. Except for the versions in Russian; for some reason you can get those ok.

GCAT planet4589.org/space/gcat updated with the newly cataloged S100000 Saramago satellite in the file planet4589.org/space/gcat/d... which contains US catalog numbers 100000 and up.

New extreme Trans-Neptunian Object 2025 LS2 just dropped JPL orbit Semimajor axis = 523 ± 88 au Orbital period = 11963 ± 3031 years Perihelion distance = 43.2 ± 0.4 au Inclination = 12.6 degrees Absolute magnitude = 6.4 ± 0.3 Minor Planet Electronic Circular N55

With the launch of Starlink Group 17-48 we are now up to catalog number 69998. Expecting the rollover to catalog 100000 later today. (70000 to 99999 are used by Space Force as 'scratch space' , temporary IDs for objects not yet identified etc etc)

LAUNCH at 0300 UTC Jul 11 of Starlink Group 17-48 from Vandenberg

Space Force orbit data for CX-26 and the CZ-10B second stages in 804 x 812 km x 50.0 deg and 540 x 819 km x 50.0 deg orbits. I understand a payload adapter is also being tracked, likely in a similar orbit to CX-26.

This is a hell of a piece of writing from an essay by German Philosopher Jurgen Habermas,

SpaceX continues to reconfigure its Starlink constellation, moving the satellites to lower orbits. In this thread by 'high' I will mean sats at 500-600 km, 'medium' 400-500 km and 'low' 300-400 km.

US FCC: “let’s do a consultation on how the community feels about this” Community: “we hate it, don’t do it, it’s real bad, this will impact a lot of people — astronomers, biodiversity, Indigenous communities, more” x 1800 responses FCC: “lol, we don’t care. APPROVED.”

A list of global space launches designed to calm Cold War tensions and promote transparency has been missing from the UN's website for months. Experts warn it makes the world a less predictable and safe place. www.newscientist.com/article/2533...

This means you @nuclearanthro.bsky.social

One of the most interesting payloads on the recent Transporter 17 launch is BOHR, from Miami-based City Labs. It is a 1U cubesat with a tritium battery. The mildly radioactive tritium (12 yr half life) spits out energetic electrons which hit a semiconductor target. (1/n)

LAUNCH at 0415 UTC Jul 10 of the first Chang Zheng 10B from Hainan Commercial Launch Site. Stage 1 is kerolox and landed successfully on a downrange barge. Stage 2 is methalox and placed a so-far-unidentified payload in orbit.

Summary of new NGSO filings on July 6, 2026. fccprod.servicenowservices.com/icfs?id=ibfs...

Sorry - that is 100,000 (one hundred thousand)

SpaceX have filed for a 100,00 satellite "Gen3 NGSO" system. Presumably Starlink Gen3, but they don't call it that. The sats are 2000-2500 kg, area 300 to 400 sq m. Orbits 320-480 km at various inclinations. Have added to my page at www.planet4589.org/space/con/co...

I think this is pretty serious: for several months the UNOOSA (UN Office of Outer Space Affairs) has not been making public new sat registrations apparently because of an IT policy issue. A month or two I could accept, but at this point it's a failure of the international space governance regime

LAUNCH at 0925 UTC Jun 9 of Starlink Group 10-42 from Canaveral

The AMC-14 satellite, which was sold to the USAF in 2008, started behaving oddly in May 2025 - this steady period change punctuated by rare manuevers is not something I've seen in other geosats. Not sure if it's failed or a new mission for the sat.

J Interesting paper on arxiv today arxiv.org/abs/2607.04216 by Forbes et al (including my friends @astrokiwi.bsky.social and @chrislintott.bsky.social ) about interstellar comets that originally came from here but got perurbed back to us again

LAUNCH at 0712 UTC Jul 7 of the Transporter 17 rideshare mission on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg

Although my report used the warning areas issued by China, new reports indicate the launch may actually have used an alternate route launching from the South China Sea east of Hainan. I am seeking clarification.

Torifune is about 450m across with a mass of 180 million tonnes; Kamo'oalewa is about 20m across with a mass of only 7000 tonnes.

Suborbital launch at 0401 UTC Jul 6 of a Chinese JL-2 or JL-3 submarine missile from the Bohai Sea to the Pacific. From NOTAMs provided by a correspondent I fit an approx -3900 x 1050 km x 44 deg orbit with impact about 0428 UTC near 174E 6S

LAUNCH at 1343 UTC Jul 5 of a Chang Zheng 8A from Hainan with the Qianfan Jigui Group 15 satellites. It is not yet clear how many sats were on this flight. www.news.cn/20260705/c5b...

Another take on my deep space launch dataset: objects launched to deep space coded by owner country, with commmercially owned objects in magenta. The change post 1990 is dramatic.

LAUNCH at 1050 UTC Jul 5 of Starlink Group 10-50 from Canaveral

Similarly, number of *objects* launched to deep space (including things like landers and heat shields that separated later) in 5 year bins, coded with: did it stay in deep Earth orbit, enter the lunar Hill sphere, or leave the Sun-Earth Hill sphere?

Number of launches to deep space (beyond 150000 km) versus time in 5 year bins. We're not back to Apollo levels yet...

Space Force has cataloged LINK (the Swift reboost spacecraft) in a 362 x 392 km x 20.6 deg orbit, confirming successful launch. TLEs consistent with the launch NOTAM areas

China's Tianwen-2 probe is matching orbits with space rock (469219) Kamo'oalewa, in a 0.90 x 1.10 AU x 7. 8 deg solar orbit. The rock is about 20 meters across and has a mass around 7000 tonnes, and is the smallest asteroid so far to have been visited by a spacecraft

Launch at 0930 UTC Jul 4 of Qianfan Jigui Group 13 on a Chang Zheng 6A from Taiyuan

On Sunday at 18:30 JST, Hayabusa2 will attempt flyby observations of asteroid Torifune on an Extended Mission after delivering the samples from asteroid Ryugu to Earth 🛰️. Hayabusa2 was designed for rendezvous observations, so must get pretty close to the asteroid for good data 🔭. Cross everything 🤞

LAUNCH at 0836 UTC Jul 3 of the LINK spacecraft aboard a Pegasus rocket on the SWIFT Reboost Mission. Stargazer took off from Kwajalein at about 0739 UTC and dropped the Pegasus near 166.W 7.5N. science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/...

Excited to see the official publication of the European study on Atmospheric Impacts of Re-entry and Launch (AIRL), I've been waiting for this for a while: zenodo.org/records/2083...

There's occasionally still some worthwhile insights at the other place

Another delay for reboosting Swift, this time because of a problem with the Pegasus rocket after the L-1011 lifted off. Teams are reviewing data before setting a new launch date. science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/...

🚨 Beyond the limit 🚨  New ESO study finds that current proposals to launch 1.7+ million satellites into orbit would have devastating consequences for astronomy. The most extreme proposals come from SpaceX & Reflect Orbital  🔭 🧪 ☄️ #DarkSkies #SatelliteConstellations 1/4