Starship Flight 9 was launched on May 27 using Booster 14 (on its second flight and Ship 35.

Launch was at about 2336:29 UTC. Booster 14 completed its ascent burn and Ship hot-staged (ignited and then separated) at about T+2m40s. Booster successfully separated in a controlled direction for the first time.
The SpaceX webcast provided less info than previously but the booster likely reached an
apogee of about 95 km. It made a controlled descent towards the Gulf of Mexico but
reignition of the engines for the landing burn at about T+6m17s resulted in destruction of the
vehicle, for reasons that are not yet publicly known.

WOOHOO! THANK YOU EVERYONE - I HAVE REACHED THE $100K GOAL. Thanks especially to the generous folks at @COMSPOC and to the other large donor who prefers to be anonymous, but also to every single one of you. This will help a LOT. HOWEVER - I just got back from a week of property-hunting in the UK. Alas, I will not be able to acquire the particular place I had in mind - I got outbid and there would have been planning reg issues anyway. I've found a few other possibilities and am continuing to look.

Back from an intense week at the American Astronomical Society meeting. Much to report and much still to catch up on, but I'll start tonight with an update on the Starship flight Starship Flight 7 was launched at 2237 UTC Jan 16 from Starbase, Texas, but failed to reach orbit. I will assign designation 2025-F01 to the launch. Super Heavy Booster 14 reached an apogee of 91 km, performed a boostback burn, and was caught by the launch tower.

The planned trajectory of the North Korean satellite launch, as estimated by me based on debris warning areas, passes 500 km above the Okinawa region - higher than the International Space Station. The only landmass it goes directly over is the uninhabited island of Irisuna-jima. It is possible that the second stage could shut down early, or that the yaw manuever prior to stage 2 ignition could go off course, so it is not completely *impossible* for debris from the launch to hit the Okinawa region. But it is very, very unlikely.

Thanks to a tip from @martyn_williams I took a look at the warning areas for the upcoming (NET May 31) North Korean recon sat launch.
The map below shows the launch site, polygonal warning areas and (orange lines) my fit to the trajectories. (1/n)... @martyn_williams I think the first and second warning areas correspond to first stage and nose fairing impact zones, and correspond to a -5650 x 150 km x 93.9 deg (sub)orbit (apogee not well constrained).

On Tuesday at 2pm I'll be in room 205 for the "Space as an Environment" splinter session which will include an update on the issue of satellite constellations affecting ground based astronomy That topic will be continued on Wed at 10am, room 201/202, for the "Space as an Environment" open house, where I'll be tabling and available for informal discussion about the satcon and other space env issues #AAS241

The Japanese space agency JAXA is preparing to deploy 3 cubesats from the ISS.
The cubesats are stored in the J-SSOD #24 deployer, which was brought to ISS on Dragon CRS-26 and transferred internally to the Kibo module. The Japanese JRMS robot arm has extracted J-SSOD #24 from the Kibo airlock and is now holding the deployer out against the direction of ISS motion so that the ejected sats will not recontact ISS.

OK, it's Sunday night and I'm going to get technical on you. You may be familiar with the Lagrange Points - specifically Sun-Earth L1 and L2 (SEL1 and SEL2), which are 1.5 million km towards noon and towards midnight respectively.

LAUNCH of Falcon 9 at 2248 UTC Dec 16 from Cape Canaveral LC40 with two O3b-mPOWER communications satellites 20 first-gen O3b satellites were launched to 8000 km equatorial orbits in 2013 to 2019. They had a mass of 700 kg.
The new O3b mPOWER sats are Boeing 702X satellites with a . mass of 1700 kg each. I believe their size is around 1.5 x 3.0 x 3.0 m with about 27m solar panel span

12 objects made lunar flybys this morning, and we haven't heard detailed information on most of their fates.

Allow me to enumerate: 1. Artemis I Orion
- Flyby at 1257 UTC
- Planned result: Lunar DRO
- Actual result: success so far
- Orbit: available on JPL Horizons

@AbainzaRalph @AerospaceCorp @NASA Very interesting. This is actually NOT the CZ-5B core stage which reentered on Jul 30. It's a piece of the nose fairing that was jettisoned during launch on Jul 24. @AbainzaRalph @AerospaceCorp @NASA You can see the Chinese flag and CMS blue markings on the top of the fairing in this image

OK, we now have reports - some convincing - of CZ-5B debris found on the island of Borneo, on both the Indonesian and Malaysian sides of the border. A report from Batu Niah
shows this object - I can't tell if this is space debris or not. There are other reports of debris in locations close to Batu Niah

Good morning from Boston. The CZ-5B Y3 rocket stage is approaching reentry; new Aerospace Corp and US Space Force estimates narrow the reentry window to two hours and @Marco_Langbroek's estimate overlaps but is slightly longer. @Marco_Langbroek I am going to use the @AerospaceCorp estimate for now, which predicts reentry between 1615 and 1815 UTC. This reentry window opens in three hours from now.

The public are excited by the images, but astronomers are as excited by the spectra, like this one. I want to talk about why The data are the white wiggly line which show the amout of light at each precise color. There are particular spikes where there's more lightm for example the one marked 'hydrogen' at 4.61 or so.

Slightly better res version showing the lensing arcs clearly We're looking at a cluster of galaxies 5 billion light years away, and images of even more distant galaxies behind it that are distorted and magnified by the gravity of the cluster

LAUNCH of Falcon 9 with Starlink Group 3-1 at 0139 UTC Stage 1 sep, fairing sep, Stage 2 ignition, vehicles in space

The correct name for the first object in this list is SMACS J0723.3-7327. It's a cluster of galaxies at a redshift of z=0.39 in the southern constellation Volans and was discovered in 2011 by the Planck survey as PLCKESZ G284.99-23.70 (lots of objects have multiple names, alas)

https://twitter.com/NASAWebb/status/1545413807996129280

WASP-96b is a planet orbiting the 12th magnitude G8 star 2MASS 00041112-4721382, in the constellation Phoenicis

Some statistics on the topical subject of uncontrolled reentries of rocket stages, from my database.
I assume that stages with dry masses less than 1500 kg ("small stages") burn up completely on reentry, and more massive ones ("big stages") may have bits that hit the ground So I will focus on big stages that made uncontrolled reentries. These can happen from 12 hour after launch to many years after launch (active or targeted reentries always happen at less than 12 hours).

The Axiom-1 mission jettisoned Dragon's trunk just prior to their deorbit burn on Apr 25. After three weeks in orbit the trunk reentered at 0902 UTC May 14. Meanwhile Sandia Labs' MTI (Multispectral Thermal Imager) satellite, launched in Mar 2000, reentered at 0115 UTC May 14. The satellite was still operating in 2013 but I'm not sure when it lasted until; perhaps @SandiaLabs can tell us

Yet another Russian SOZ ullage motor has disintegrated in high orbit. This one is from the 2007 launch of three Glonass navigation satellites.

https://twitter.com/18thSDS/status/1521519056578224130

The SOZ motors were part of the Blok DM type upper stage that was used on Proton rockets until recently. The DM makes two burns to deliver the payload to its final orbit, in this case a 19130 x 19130 km x 64.8 deg orbit used by GLONASS; (cont)

LAUNCH of @RocketLab Electron mission 26 from Mahia LC1A with 33 satellites and one attached payload, at 2249:52 UTC May 2 @RocketLab Stage 1 shutdown and separation, stage 2 ignition