President Asks For 1000 Launches, SpaceX Promise 10,000 Launches! Deep Space Updates August 31st Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:04 Hello, it's Scott Manley. It is August 31st. I'm finally back home after a week learning how to fix aircraft. And really, it is time for me to get down with a whole bunch of deep space updates. And so, we go and look back at the launches we've had in the last few weeks. So, back on 16th of August, we had a Falcon 9 launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base carrying Starshield Group 1-4 15.

00:30 this was also known as USSF 366. And it contains uh apparently 23 modified Starshields, which are believed to be part of the new space data network. And then, somebody pointed out there was like a government publication, which specifically referred to Starshield support for military aircraft. So, that sounds like US military aircraft are now going to have the equivalent of Starlink, albeit over the Starshield network.

00:56 That's sort of unrelated to this launch, but I thought it was interesting that the Department of Defense will now have in-flight Wi-Fi. 16th of August, we have a Long March 12 launching out of Wenchang carrying SatNet Leo Group 4 24. That is the 24th batch of satellites in Guo Wang, which is of course aiming for like 13,000 satellites. They have a long way to go.

01:18 And note, by the way, this is different from the 12A and the 12B, which are aiming for reusability. This was the non-reusable version. 18th of August in China, Zhuque-3 launched from Jiuquan uh carrying Honghu-3. And this was China's first successful booster landing using landing legs. Because of course, the last The first one we had was a Long March 10, which was caught by some wires and hooks and all sorts of cool stuff.

01:43 Now, uh this was um this was the second attempt by LandSpace to perform this with their Zhuque-3. So, Zhuque-3 is like a um 4 and 1/2 m stainless steel, about 570 tons, 66 m tall, has nine engines on the first stage, it runs methalox, you know, liquid oxygen. And it aims to be about 20 tons to low Earth orbit. Now, that puts it very comparable to a Falcon 9, and definitely it looks very similar, albeit more shiny in stainless steel.

02:17 So, anyway, yeah, after about 2 minutes of flight, first stage separated, and it performed its sort of casual flip maneuver as it headed downrange to a landing site about 400 km away. And this time it actually landed successfully on those landing legs. Now, apparently they changed the landing profile a bit compared to the previous flight, they used fewer engines, which meant that they end up using more propellant, but they had a bit more margin for error on this.

02:46 The previous attempt was a failure, and we'd only ever seen the wreckage from this in the odds. Still, this time, after the success, they felt comfortable sharing some more video of the failure that previously happened. And that was a pretty spectacular failure, you know, booster exploding, a whole bunch of wreckage landing on the ground. And I'm really happy to see that LandSpace shared that.

03:05 Now, after landing, there was apparently a bit of a fire, and we can see the little robot servicing robots driving up to try to deal with the fire, and it then cut away. And we weren't sure what happened. Well, in the meantime, a bunch of news outlets reported that LandSpace were planning to re-fly this booster in 6 months. I suspect that is not true because we've actually seen images of it, and it is now land lying on its side.

03:34 One of the legs failed. But regardless, this is China's first successful landing of an orbital class booster on legs, and so yeah, respect for that. It is interesting that since they have a fixed landing pad, unlike a drone ship, that will constrain what inclinations they can hit with this, but that might work just fine if they're say launching a constellation like Starlink.

03:58 Speaking of which, uh 19th of August, we have a Starlink launch out of Vandenberg Space Force Base. 20th August out of Mahia, we have Rocket Lab launching the Electron carrying QPS-SAR-18, the Lightning Gods defends. This is the eighth of 17 launches to support a IQPS uh synthetic aperture radar constellation. 21st of August out of Slick 40, we had a Falcon 9 carrying Starlink.

04:24 22nd of August in Russia out of Plesetsk, we had a Soyuz 2.1B with a Fregat tug stage carrying GLONASS-K-19L. So, that is a uh you know, medium Earth orbit radio navigation satellite part of the GLONASS constellation. It was apparently uh this launch was also sort of kept secret. There wasn't any airspace closure announcements because of course, they are concerned about uh you know, Ukrainian drones penetrating that far through Russian airspace and hitting these launches.

04:57 Anyway, um 15th of August, a Long March 6C launch out of Taiyuan. Uh and that carried six uh small satellites for various educational institutes apparently. There was a Bio 4 which was a uh CubeSat from the Harbin Institute. There was one called uh Jam-X-1 which is a radio science experiment from Shanghai Youth Center. There was a one called Lingqiao-9 for Thailand which was actually built by Galaxy Sat uh which is you know, you know, obviously a Chinese organization.

05:30 And Zhongqi 14 and 15, they're like synthetic aperture radar satellites with significant onboard compute capabilities which is important if you're sort of trying to be rapid and responsive in terms of the data and stuff you're finding. And uh yeah, there also Beijing Normal University launched a pair of satellites called MeDuOw. 1A and 1B. So, anyway, though, that was all great.

05:53 Those satellites went into orbit. And then, about 10-11 days later, LeoLabs found that the stage which had been left in orbit had exploded and shattered into tens, if not hundreds, of fragments and space debris. So, that will be up around 400 to 480 km. These fragments are going to take a while to filter out. They are potentially crossing space station orbits at those altitudes.

06:22 And guessing this is not the first time this has happened to a 6C. And, you know, China has guidelines that rocket stages should be deorbited where possible. And I'm guessing that since Long March 6C isn't deorbiting, it's not capable and therefore isn't a very good rocket. That's what I'm going to say. If your stages keep blowing up and you can't deorbit them, you're not a very good rocket.

06:45 Moving onwards, we have quite a surprise. It is a Starlink launch. Now, I know you're saying, "Wait a second, another Starlink launch series? What's surprising about that?" Well, this was launched out of Slick 40 in the East Coast out of Florida. And this was also the first booster 1067 to fly 37 missions. But also, this is apparently the last Starlink launch on a Falcon 9 out of Florida.

07:09 Which, I'm going to say, seems pretty premature to me. But SpaceX apparently thinks that they can start launching enough spacecraft, enough Starlinks, on a Starship to start, you know, making a difference. And well, we'll talk more about that later. But they are going to be using these in fairly expendable mode for a while. Anyway, yeah, 26th of August was another Starlink out of Vandenberg.

07:31 Vandenberg is going to keep launching Starlinks for the foreseeable future cuz it can reach latitudes, sorry, inclinations that Starship will not be able to get to. Uh, 27th of August, we have Ariane 62 launching MTG, Magic the Gathering, obviously. No. Um, Meteosat 14, right? Which is a geostationary weather satellite. It's the third satellite in the third generation program, and this is going to cover Europe and Africa from its position 9° east of the meridian.

08:00 It's a 3.8-ton satellite. And this is un- interestingly the first GEO satellite launched by Ariane 6. And I was kind of surprised by that, because Ariane 5 was the GEO workhorse. From their launch site in Kourou, they were very close to the equator, and they would deliver satellites with the most excess propellant because they didn't need to perform these plane change maneuvers, or not nearly as large a maneuver.

08:29 So, the fact that Ariane 6, this is the first GEO satellite, just shows how much the market for GEO satellites has dropped off. Now, granted, SpaceX are still launching a few of those, and I think we've had some on Atlas and stuff, but you know, again, Ariane 5 used to do this all the time, and I think this is really showing that the communication satellite market has lost a bunch of applications that would otherwise go to GEO satellites.

08:54 They're now going to LEO satellites. But anyway, that was successful and in nevertheless. Uh, finally, 30th August, we had perhaps the most important launch of the last few weeks, Falcon Heavy launching out of slick 39A carrying the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This is This satellite was It was called WFIRST for a long time, Wild Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

09:21 This began as spy satellite hardware, which didn't quite satisfy the NRO's requirement. They tried a project which was going to do some new things. Turned out those new things weren't going to deliver what they wanted, so the satellite the spacecraft with their mirrors and hardware, whatever, they were donated to NASA and said, "Hey, you know, you can probably make this into a space telescope since that's what you did with Hubble, right?"

09:45 Well, uh yeah, this successfully launched uh and uh it's on its way to the Lagrange point at L2. I say Lagrange point, it's more like a giant Lagrange zone zone. It is humongous volume of space. You could put tons of satellites up there and they would not come close to each other. Uh so, anyway, it's going to take about 100 days to get there. They're going to start their commissioning after about 10 days.

10:06 By the time it gets there, they should have done all their setup and they should be ready to start science right away. We've already heard that they have completed successfully their first uh course correction burn that will take them in the correct direction. And uh yeah, I mean, so this was a return to launch site where the boosters came back. Unfortunately, someone at NASA didn't get the memo and had the camera pointing at the wrong landing site, so we only see one booster with the other booster being off elsewhere.

10:34 Also, interestingly, is uh this mission, this project um well well, during the press conference, Jared Isaacman gets a call on his cell phone and he gets up to take it and he comes in and it's like, "Yeah, President Trump saying, yes, we you really appreciate the work NASA's doing on this. We thank for all your success." I don't know the exact words, but look, I'm happy to have a president who is very happy to be engaged in space stuff and promoting it, but I would have preferred he didn't try to cancel this project

11:03 three times through the presidential budget, right? So, this thing did launch early, ahead of schedule, and it just shows you know that NASA is capable of doing these things if it's you given the right opportunities, the right management, the right incentives. So, anyway, I'm very excited to see what we get out of this. It will obviously be looking at you know, um it's it's got an amazing coronagraph.

11:26 That's the thing I'm actually most excited about because this thing will be able to very carefully put a shade over the light of a star so that it can see objects nearby such as exoplanets. And this is going to have the most capable uh spacecraft to do this. Anyway, so yeah. That were all That was all the launches. Um as I said, SpaceX, you know, they've had an interesting few days.

11:48 First of all, we've heard about how there's no Starlink launches now going forward from slip 40. The Starship launch, which we were expecting at some point later this month, we had a Starship 41 had its test fire and so did uh the booster, all 33 engines. Um we've now heard that they will be carrying live Starlink satellites to operational orbits. But now they've stepped back and they say they are not going to attempt a catch of Starship back at Boca Chica.

12:22 And uh you know, that was That's contrary to previous statements. I suspect it's because Starship has to come out over Mexico and they have to come to an agreement presumably with that because, you know, there's there's some sort of you know, international agreements that need to go on with that. Um but that does sort of dovetail nicely with SpaceX announcing that it is taking is it's setting up a new spaceport in Louisiana of all places.

12:46 Now, uh a lot of people looked at this site and they are confused because what they see is that it only has south coast available. It's not really They don't think it's going to be able to handle like launches you know, to the east. They're like, "Oh, shouldn't launch sites be able to launch with the rotation of the earth?" Well, this place can't do this.

13:05 So anyway, this is in uh Vermilion parish parish. Uh it's like a whole bunch of swamp land. I think we call it swamp port. Instead of starport, we'll call it swamp port. Or swamp base one. It's SpaceX say the aim is to launch a thousand times per year from the Actually, no, sorry. They want to launch 10 times per day here. 30 times per day. Wait a second.

13:30 These numbers just keep on go Look, they're just going to be launching all the rockets from here. They're going to have 10 launch pads. They're going to be 20 or five five launch pads with twin launches, whatever. They are going to be able to throw rockets out of here. And because it sits on the South Coast, they can actually launch into medium inclination orbits by heading east.

13:51 And then, you know, a little later, the Starships will be able to come out of the west from the same angle. They'll be able to stay way above 100 km until they get over this landing site. So, they should be able to reliably launch over water and return over water. And I think this actually makes more sense than landing at Boca Chica or landing in Florida, where the launch approach corridor will keep them over land for a long time.

14:19 Now, granted, SpaceX will hope to achieve the kind of reliability where they can do this, but, you know, sonic booms and chances of failure mean that flying in over the ocean is probably going to be more acceptable initially. Also, Louisiana has a strong links to the Gulf, you know, oil industry, and they need lots of methane, lots of hydrocarbons to fuel these things.

14:44 So, it also works like that. They have existing port facilities, which are being dredged as we speak. This is going to be an absolute monster Starship. It's going to do I mean, it sounds like if they get their 10 pads going and they really can deliver that kind of cadence, you know, this could be launching more than Kennedy Space Center or Cape Canaveral.

15:05 Anyway, we'll see what happens. As for right now, Starship 40, of course, is getting recovered, and it's it has now finally been picked up out of the water by the the 40, which is a recovery ship. It was a semi-submersible. It's designed to carry big ships. Starship is a whole lot smaller, but I do find it amusing that they picked up Starship 40 by a ship named Forte.

15:28 Or you know, and and you there's a subtle pronunciation in there, right? And if you can't tell the difference, well, I guess understanding my accent isn't your forte. Whatever. I found it was kind of funny that they had both very similar names. So, that is going to be coming home. The course has been set apparently for Brownsville, but it looks like it's going to go east from Christmas Island around the Cape of Good Hope, probably.

15:53 They're staying away from the sewers, uh and that'll get them there. And by the time they get there, they should have launched flight 14. So, maybe flight 14 will be the first one to actually go around the world. Otherwise, uh this isn't going around the world. Well, never mind. Okay, let's take a look. See what else is going on out there. Firefly, uh they have announced that they are tackling the survive the night challenge that uh NASA has set.

16:19 This is like there's incentive payments for some of the clips missions if they can demonstrate payload and spacecraft survival through the night. Obviously, 14 days of darkness is a a tall order. It's really tough on spacecraft, especially with modern electronics and stuff. Uh so, they have got a payload radioisotope heating element from a company called Zeno, which is going to use americium americium americium, right?

16:51 Americium 241, and that's going to produce like about 5 W of thermal energy. It's not much, but it's probably enough to keep the electronic heart of Blue Ghost 2 alive. So, Zeno's a new company that's aiming to sell these kind of radioisotope heating systems. They use americium because uh it's it doesn't generate it doesn't have nearly the energy density of plutonium 238.

17:18 Uh because it's decay rate, sorry, it's half-life is way longer. It also generates a bit more gamma rays and x-rays, so it's a little bit harsher. But, making plutonium 238 requires like pulling out plutonium after short amount of time, isolating some neptunium, and sticking that back. It is a whole very complicated process. Whereas this americium, whatever you want to call it, recovering that is actually like a standard It's almost like you can reprocess that from regular nuclear, you know, spent nuclear fuel.

17:47 So, it's a lot easier to get that, and it makes a bit more sense if you want to offer an alternate path for radioisotope electric generators. So, anyway, yeah, Blue Ghost may survive the night. That's its plan. A company called HEO, you've seen a few posts from me about them. They basically take photographs of satellites in orbit, and they have announced that they are teaming up with Planet, you know, or Planet Labs, I tend to call them.

18:10 They used to be Planet Labs, now they're Planet. And they're going to use Planet satellites to perform non-Earth imaging. Now, it's interesting. I sort of never had realized that HEO's model is that they actually use other people's satellites most of the time. You know, they've previously used like Black Sky to take photos of satellites, and I've now now I understand that what they do is they essentially say, "Well, we've got all these spy satellites, all these observation satellites up there.

18:39 We want to get an image of this particular spacecraft." So, they can go through the entire catalog and figure out when one of these you know, Earth imaging satellites is going to be in the right place. They can work with the owner of that satellite, task it, and then get that image. So, this means that they can much more quickly get these images. They obviously need to do some processing on it and all that.

19:01 But, uh they do actually own their own satellites as well, but that's one that can do very specific tasks and can make uh some maneuvers. But anyway, yeah, they're are to be working with Planet going forwards. Okay. Another uh on-orbit rendezvous which was supposed to be much more planned is it's going to happen, but it's not going to have the outcome that we all hoped.

19:23 The Swift rescue mission is now the Swift get one last look at it mission. So, Catalyst Space I actually visited them a couple of days before this announcement and you know, they told me then, but it was all sworn to secrecy. So, yeah, this was this amazing Hail Mary plan to spend a only $30 million, develop a satellite, a spacecraft in a very short time window, launch it and then save this one-of-a-kind space asset.

19:50 Now, they got to space. They were maneuvering and then they had technical problem which led to the safe mode being activated which actually led to damage to the uh momentum wheels, the reaction wheels. And ultimately, they were able to save the spacecraft and get it back under control and they are going to be able to perform a rendezvous, but they used too much propellant during that recovery process and they are unable they want if even if they were able to dock with Swift, they would not be able to raise this the

20:23 orbit sufficiently. And that is unfortunate. Uh you know, we all we all knew this was a long shot and I you know, respect to the team at Catalyst for getting this far, for getting a spacecraft, for handling its various trials and tribulations. Even if you fall short, I think it's an an amazing achievement. It's unfortunate that Swift is not going to survive.

20:44 So, for the last few months, Swift had stopped operating in science mode and had taken an attitude which was like low drag. It is now back in science mode. It's it's going YOLO. It's getting the last bits of science out of it before it actually burns up and maybe we'll get some close-up shots off it even if they can't save the spacecraft. Um okay, elsewhere.

21:07 So, I mentioned Trump earlier talking phoning into the uh into the press conference of the Nancy Grace Roman. Well, uh there's a couple of executive orders that come out. First of all, there's a new like national space transportation policy which has been updated. The last time this was updated was 2013. And the new one basically sets the goal of 1,000 launches per year from the US.

21:32 Which SpaceX will probably manage just fine. I directs like NASA, you know, Department of Defense, uh Pentagon, sorry, Department of Transportation. Basically to identify new launch site locations, develop new scheduling criteria, integrate launches with the national airspace system, and develop new re-entry locations. All that. The other thing that came out was Trump signed an executive order creating a commission to study the creation of a federal space academy.

22:00 Right? US Space Academy. Now, interesting, the way he spoke about it was it made it sound it was more like Space Force, and it could definitely feed into Space Force, but the text of the thing that was signed made it clear that this is a NASA-led thing. So, more like civilian. And this is actually very similar to something that was in Jared's Project Athena stuff that was leaked.

22:19 Uh where they basically said talked about setting up a US Starfleet Academy. I'm not sure those exact terms were used, but hey, I would I'd Starfleet Academy, I'm all about it. I would totally teach there if it was in San Francisco if they would let me. Um you know, come on, it's the future that we want. Starfleet Academy, right? Anyway, that will create that the idea is that yeah, you'll have an academy where people can learn, and you know, there will be some sort of agreement for public service as well coming out of

22:47 that. Um speaking of public service, one person's public service who's ending, uh well, at least with the astronaut corps, is Johnny Kim, who you know, astronaut, seal, medic, doctor, whatever. He is a stepping back from his astronaut role. He's returning to the military to finish up his last year as like a helicopter trainer in the the air wing. So, yeah, he only flew once.

23:13 245 days across Expedition 72 and 73. He was on a Soyuz, returned in December 2025, and announced that he's basically retiring as an astronaut. So, I don't know. I think he's looking to add some other career to his boot because he seems to have done everything in astronaut is clearly he's been there, done that. He's probably got something else awesome lined up at some point in the future.

23:35 Also, Michael Fincke, if you remember, he was the one behind the emergency medical evacuation. He also has retired as an astronaut in the last couple of weeks, too. So, when I ended last week's or last previous episode, I said the thing to look forward to would be Chang'e 7. Well, that launch was expected to happen. It was rolled out to the pad. They were getting prepped for launch.

24:01 There was some concern about a typhoon, Typhoon Noru, which was in the area generating some bad weather. And after one launch delay was scrubbed, they scrubbed a second time, and they said that they were delaying it for much longer and have rolled the booster back. Now, we are still not clear about when the launch window might be, but some sources are suggesting that the next time that they can launch to this trajectory needed for their polar landing site will be early 2027.

24:31 And that's really interesting because this spacecraft was really going to be the first spacecraft to land near Shackleton crater. This is one of these permanently shadowed craters near the South Pole. Obviously, an important place if you're looking for water deposits. The US also plans to land all sorts of stuff near Shackleton crater, and we thought that China were going to get this before the US, especially when New Glenn exploded since the spacecraft that was going to go there was going to be um you know the Blue

25:02 Moon number one. So anyway, uh it looks like this is being pushed back by several months. We don't know if it's for the weather or some other reason. But yeah, landing at Shackleton crater remains uh you know a goal to be achieved by someone. Chang'e 7 is a very impressive, very capable spacecraft. It's going to do sample return. It's going to have like an orbiter.

25:24 It's going to have like a hopper. And uh yeah, it was like again iterating on China's moon missions. Obviously building up towards their idea of having a lunar base, the International Lunar Research Station on the South Pole. Uh okay, elsewhere. Ursa Major, they make rocket engines, but they really only have one flying engine right now, the Hadley, which is used by Stratolaunch on their Talon.

25:46 It's also supposed to be powering the upper stage of Astra's Rocket 4. Well, um yeah, they're going public via a SPAC deal for $2.3 billion. And you might think that's a lot for a company that only has one rocket engine that really flies. Well, they also have their Draper engine, which is a small storable propellant rocket engine, which may be used for munitions.

26:10 And they're also developing a line of solid rocket motors. So this feels very much like we're going to do a lot of defense, and that's where the value is. Crew 13, we were expecting them to launch on September 12th. Now we have heard that that mission uh is being pushed back because there was an oxygen leak on the Dragon capsule. This mission is going to carry Jessica Watkins, Luke Delaney, Josh Kutryk of um Canada, and Sergey Teteryan Teterya Teterya I can't get the Y and the A to go together.

26:45 Teteryanit skov. I'm sure it like he's a Russian dude, right? So that he that that was going to launch. It's going to be pushed back. We're not sure how far back, but obviously then we'll be looking to Dragon coming home. And that is the end of my note. Another final thing is that Burning Man is happening this week in the Black Rock Desert, and I'm not going to be there, but I know a lot of people who are.

27:05 But I like showers too much. But if there's a space adjacent event, sculpture, installation, somebody set up a row of lights which will pulse in the exact sequence to illustrate the rotation of the Earth and just how darn fast that is. I think that's pretty cool. I'm sure we'll see some images of that. If anyone gets it from the air, it'll be kind of neat.

27:24 But looking forward, what are we going to what you know, what's cool happening? Well, Isar Aerospace, they are going to attempt to launch Spectrum again. The current launch window is 4th to 10th of September from Andøya out in Norway. Maybe this will fly this time. Who knows? The other one, of course, that's looming is Starship flight 14. That is currently middle of September. We don't know for sure, but yeah, that could well happen before we get another one of these deep space updates. I'm Scott Manley. Fly safe.