Space Stuff and Launch Info

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Themis completes a wet dress rehearsal
This is Europe's reusable rocket test article. At 28 meters, it's already as large as some orbital rocket boosters.

Starship in space, seen from one of the Starlink satellites it deployed:



Alternative with music, and in case the above link doesn't play:

https://xcancel.com/SpaceX/status/2083335902705934423

It's a composite of four cameras with different settings, leading to the different brightness in the four quadrants.

Starlink satellites looking at each other:

 
Starship is being towed
The video is made by a shipping channel. The water type of ship.
At the moment they are very slow, this is likely just to investigate the ship's behavior and to stabilize its orientation in the water. At the ~1 knot discussed in the video they would need a month to reach Australia.

The Roman Space Telescope will be launched by a Falcon Heavy on August 30. It will need around one month to reach the Earth/Sun Lagrange point L2 and will enter a wide halo orbit around it, just like JWST. It looks similar to Hubble but it has a 100 times larger field of view (by solid angle). Instead of focusing on individual objects, it'll mostly be used to gather statistics about many objects. It also has a coronagraph to block the light of individual stars in order to study exoplanets directly.
 
Satellite images of Starship being towed

You can just buy satellite images for a news article these days. Costs a few hundred dollars or so. Anywhere in the world, including the middle of the ocean. The images don't have the same resolution as military spy satellites, but they are good enough to see what is going on. It looks like they put something under the engine section to lift it up a bit, and the ship is getting towed engine-first with a long line trailing behind the ship to create more drag and keep it aligned.
 
Good news from the New Glenn investigation:


Wanted to give an update on the hotfire anomaly investigation. Progress continues. The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections. Extensive component-level and engine hotfire tests have been conducted to understand the failure mode better and inform mitigations. The path forward is clear. We're making small modifications to the valve that can be quickly retrofitted to existing engines. We’re manufacturing the updated hardware, which will be ready by the end of this month. In parallel, we're working through the remaining fault tree analysis.

That means Vulcan in its usual configuration* is now grounded because (a) its solid rocket motors keep exploding and (b) its core engine exploded in a different rocket.

* before the cause of the New Glenn explosion was known, there were some ideas to fly it without solid rocket motors for a while. It comes with a massive performance reduction, however.

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Looks like no one caught any video where the Falcon 9 upper stage hitting the Moon was visible. We should get images of the crater (expected to be ~20 m) from one of the spacecraft orbiting the Moon at some point.

Here is some spectroscopy, finding sodium and lithium in the plume.
 
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New video of the ship swimming in the ocean, with a bunch of floating things around it. The sky looks incredible.


Unfortunately, ship recovery is not looking good right now.

Nonetheless, we were able to obtain close-up photos of critical regions of the heat shield and engines for future upgrades.