Author: starpathwp-production
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Blue Origin continues rebuilding LC-36, prepares testing alternatives for New Glenn second stage
Two months after losing a New Glenn rocket to a pad explosion during a static fire test, Blue Origin is racing to return the vehicle to flight before 2026 ends. The company is rebuilding its Florida launch site around an entirely new concept of operations, and CEO Dave Limp is posting construction updates regularly as…
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China’s Commercial Space Sector: 2026 Mid-Year Review
China maintained a high launch cadence in the first half of 2026, while its commercial space sector built on the growth momentum of 2025 and continued to strengthen its industrial fundamentals. By the end of June, China had conducted 44 space launches and placed a total of 223 satellites into their designated orbits. The commercial…
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ArianeGroup Restarts Themis Test Campaign With Cryogenic Rehearsal in Sweden
The test was carried out by teams from ArianeGroup and SSC Space, the commercial entity that manages the Esrange Space Centre. ArianeGroup announced the milestone on 30 July, a full week after it took place. It marks the most significant publicly announced step in the Themis campaign since September 2025, when the T1H demonstrator was…
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K2 Space Raises $500 Million, Sets Sights on Building 100 Large Satellites a Year
K2 was valued at $3 billion in December, when it closed a $250 million Series C and reported $500 million in signed government and commercial contracts. It now puts that contract figure at more than $1 billion and says it has raised over $1 billion in total capital. Kleiner Perkins and ICONIQ led the new…
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Rocket Lab Books Three More Electron Launches for Japan’s iQPS, Third Deal in Under a Year
The contract continues iQPS’ build out of its Earth-imaging constellation using synthetic aperture radar, a technology that creates images from radio wave measurements and allows data collection at any time of day and under any weather conditions. Rocket Lab has served as iQPS’ primary launch provider since 2023. The three new dedicated launches are scheduled…
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Spent Falcon 9 Stage Set to Strike the Moon on August 5, Offering a Live Test for Impact Science
The stage is a leftover from the launch that carried Firefly’s Blue Ghost-1 lander to the moon on January 15, 2025. That same flight also carried the Hakuto-R Mission 2 lander, called Resilience, developed by the Japanese company ispace. An international team led by William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas,…
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Space Force-backed mission does its best impression of Top Gun in orbit
An ongoing military exercise happening hundreds of miles above Earth has—for the first time in an unclassified setting—demonstrated how future satellites might evade and pursue one another in a future conflict. That was the announcement Wednesday from True Anomaly, one of the companies involved in the exercise. True Anomaly’s Jackal satellite, also known as Panther,…
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AST SpaceMobile Schedules Launch of BlueBird 11, 12 and 13 Satellites
AST SpaceMobile, the company developing a space-based cellular broadband network accessible directly by smartphones, designed for both commercial and government applications, had announced that the launch of BlueBird 11, 12, and 13 satellites had been scheduled for Wednesday, August 5, 2026, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, aboard a Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff had…
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Sophia Space and Caltech Win Patent for Modular Space-Based Data Centers
The patent covers the architecture for a modular, scalable, passively cooled computing and data storage unit designed for assembly into large computing data centers powered by solar energy. Its roots lie in Caltech’s Space-based Solar Power Project, an internal research and development campaign to collect solar energy in space and transmit it to Earth. Based…
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Starlink’s Link Budget Comes up Short for the D2D Opportunity
SpaceX has identified a massive total addressable market (TAM) for Starlink Mobile … but many people have expressed doubts. Let’s look at the technical issues that matter. A detailed analysis of the link budget shows that the Starlink Direct-to-Cellular service will be significantly impaired for indoor services, and also for service in vehicles like cars…