LAUNCH at 0112 UTC Aug 16 of a Falcon 9 from Canaveral with eight Globalstar-2R comms sats LAUNCH at 0150 UTC of a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg with USSF-366, an unknown number of comms sats for the US Space Force LAUNCH at 0410 UTC of a CZ-12 from Hainan with Xingwang Digui Grp 24

Emerging from the shadows. This is an H-2A rocket body, captured by HEO during a close flyby. A characteristic of H-2A rocket bodies is that they are gravity-gradient stabilised, naturally aligning themselves with Earth's gravity like a pen balancing on its tip. Direct imagery from space helps verify these behaviours, giving operators a new layer of insight into the objects sharing Earth's orbit. Non-Earth Imaging at 5 cm/pixel from 12 km away.

Today astronauts Meir and Menon carried out a spacewalk from the ISS Quest airlock, with airlock depressurization at 1224 UTC and repressurization at 1900 UTC. They installed a solar array mod kit on the 3B solar array mast canister

On January 15, 2025, Falcon 9 successfully deployed Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s RESILIENCE lunar landers on a trajectory to the Moon from pad 39A in Florida. For most of our missions, we plan a controlled deorbit of the Falcon second stage so it safely reenters over the ocean. For higher energy missions like those to a lunar transfer orbit, nearly all performance on the vehicle is devoted to successfully placing the payload in the intended orbit, and a controlled disposal maneuver is not always possible. We actively work to be as responsible as possible with hardware left in space to ensure space safety, including for more complex missions. In this case, over time, solar activity and gravity led the second stage toward the Moon. Impacts like this are rare, but they can happen with objects in these types of orbits, and we worked with NASA on the optimal disposal solution. Our focus remains on advancing reliable access to space while working toward even more sustainable operations with Starship in the future. As a fully reusable vehicle, Starship is designed to eliminate expendable upper stages entirely, reducing hardware left in orbit and enabling even more missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

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.

The three SpaceMobile sats launched today have been cataloged by US Space Force. Two are in the expected 523 x 530 km x 53 deg orbit; the third is shown in a more elliptical orbit but that may just be bad initial data, will look for updates tomorrow.