Welcome to Edition 7.26 of the Rocket Report! Let's pause and reflect on how far the rocket business has come in the last 10 years. On this date in 2015, SpaceX made the first attempt to land a Falcon 9 booster on a drone ship positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Not surprisingly, the rocket crash-landed. In less than a year and a half, though, SpaceX successfully landed reusable Falcon 9 boosters onshore and offshore, and now has done it nearly 400 times. That was remarkable enough, but we're in a new era now. Within a few days, we could see SpaceX catch its second Super Heavy booster and Blue Origin land its first New Glenn rocket on an offshore platform. Extraordinary.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Our annual ranking of the top 10 US launch companies. You can easily guess who made the top of the list: the company that launched Falcon rockets 134 times in 2024 and launched the most powerful and largest rocket ever built on four test flights, each accomplishing more than the last. The combined 138 launches is more than NASA flew the Space Shuttle over three decades. SpaceX will aim to launch even more often in 2025. These missions have far-reaching impacts, supporting Internet coverage for consumers worldwide, launching payloads for NASA and the US military, and testing technology that will take humans back to the Moon and, someday, Mars.
Knowledge Graphs have long been a cornerstone of organizing structured information, yet their potential in Web3 has remained largely untapped. That changes today with The Graph’s launch of Geo Genesis, a groundbreaking application designed to make Knowledge Graphs accessible and […]
As CES 2025 enters its third day, one of Asia’s standout edtech startups is grabbing attention with a fresh take on reading. South Korea’s Woongjin ThinkBig introduced “Booxtory” on Wednesday, an AI-powered platform that transforms how books are experienced. “Booxtory” […]
Soon, running your own AI model at home could be as routine as using a laptop, thanks to Nvidia’s latest breakthrough in AI supercomputing. On Monday at CES 2025, the company unveiled Project Digits, a personal AI supercomputer priced at […]
At about 3 p.m. local time, a large metallic ring weighing about 1,100 pounds and measuring 8 feet in diameter crash-landed in the village, the Kenya Space Agency said in a statement.
Space debris like this is designed to burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
Citizen TV via Reuters
The agency said no one was injured, and that the space debris poses no immediate risk.
Maj. Alois Were, an officer with the Kenya Space Agency, told Citizen TV, a Kenyan news station, that the ring-like object is "possibly from a rocket separation stage."
Kenya officials collected samples of the debris for additional analysis.
Citizen TV via Reuters
However, it's unclear whose rocket the ring might belong to. Officials said they had collected pieces from the impact site for further analysis to determine its origins.
The debris is under KSA custody.
Citizen TV via Reuters
Were said that once they determine the owner, the space agency will use the "existing legal mechanisms under international law" to hold the person or organization accountable.
Space debris is usually designed to either burn up in Earth's atmosphere before reaching the ground or land in unpopulated areas, like the ocean. This doesn't always happen, though.
For example, in May 2024, a piece of SpaceX debris as large as a car hood crash-landed on a trail at a mountaintop resort just outside Asheville, North Carolina.
Debris from the Dragon Capsule landed in the middle of a trail at the Glamping Collective, a mountaintop resort in North Carolina.
Photos by Brett Tingley, courtesy of the Glamping Collective
If it had landed on a person hiking the trail that day, it would have certainly killed them, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and leading space debris expert, told Business Insider in July.
To date, no one has died from space debris raining from the skies. Perhaps the closest call was in March, when a two-pound piece of debris slightly smaller than a soda can fell from the International Space Station, crashing through a family's roof in Florida. The family is suing NASA over the incident.
Ever since humans started launching objects into space in the late 1950s, there has been a risk that some might fall back to Earth in an unexpected place. As humans launch more objects into space, however, that risk is growing.
Space debris hit the space shuttle Endeavour’s radiator after one of its missions. The entry hole is about 0.25 inches wide, and the exit hole is twice as large.
NASA
Between 2008 and 2017, global space organizations launched an average of 82 orbital rockets a year. That number jumped to an average of about 130 launches a year between 2018 and 2022, according to the US International Trade Commission. In 2024, there were about 250 launches — a new record.
This poses risks on Earth and adds to a long-existing problem in space: space clutter and collisions. There's a lot of trash in space, from dead satellites and astronaut gloves to tiny bits no larger than a grape.
These millions of bits of debris are racing around our planet faster than a bullet. It's gotten so bad thatabout 1,000 warnings of possible impending collisions are issued daily to satellite operators, physicistThomas Berger said in a press briefing at December's annual American Geophysical Union meeting.
Berger said a major collision could generate "an unstoppable chain reaction of further collisions, ultimately resulting in a completely filled-up space environment."
It’s been some time since we last featured KuCoin, one of the best cryptocurrency exchanges known for enabling trades in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and over 700 altcoins. In recent months, the KuCoin team has been quietly working on its new offerings, […]
Forget about ChatGPT. A new free AI large language model is taking the internet by storm. This new AI model doesn’t come from OpenAI, Meta, Google, or any familiar name. Meet DeepSeek, a free open-source AI developed by a Chinese […]
OpenAI has announced its latest AI reasoning models, o3 and o3-mini, which aim to tackle complex problems with greater precision and efficiency. These models represent a significant leap in AI capabilities, building on the foundation set by the o1 series […]
OpenAI has introduced a new way to access ChatGPT, blending retro charm with modern convenience. With the launch of 1-800-CHATGPT, users can now dial in from a landline or smartphone to interact with the AI assistant, opening up accessibility to […]
NVIDIA on Tuesday unveiled the Jetson Orin Nano Super, a compact AI and robotics processor that delivers impressive performance in a small package. Dubbed “the world’s most affordable generative AI computer,” the processor has the ability to handle 70 trillion […]
The first batch of Internet satellites for China's Guowang megaconstellation launched Monday on the country's heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket.
The satellites are the first of up to 13,000 spacecraft a consortium of Chinese companies plans to build and launch over the next decade. The Guowang fleet will beam low-latency high-speed Internet signals in an architecture similar to SpaceX's Starlink network, although Chinese officials haven't laid out any specifics, such as target markets, service specifications, or user terminals.
The Long March 5B rocket took off from Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, at 5:00 am EST (10:00 UTC) Monday. Ten liquid-fueled engines powered the rocket off the ground with 2.4 million pounds of thrust, steering the Long March 5B on a course south from Wenchang into a polar orbit.
Email has been a cornerstone of communication for decades, but it’s no secret that using it often feels more frustrating than it should. Whether it’s tangled conversation threads, messy formatting, or bloated features, platforms like Gmail haven’t evolved to match […]
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI announced on Saturday that the latest version of its Grok-2 chatbot is now available at no cost to all users of the social media platform X. “Over the past few weeks we have been quietly testing […]
Grammarly has long been the go-to for grammar and style assistance, with millions relying on it for everything from clarity improvements to plagiarism checks. But on Tuesday, OpenAI officially introduced Canvas, a new collaborative split-screen writing tool, making it available […]
Google has unveiled Willow, its latest quantum chip, marking a significant leap in quantum computing. This breakthrough chip addresses one of the field’s biggest hurdles: reducing errors as systems scale up. With Willow, Google claims to have solved a 30-year […]
Ten months after first teasing Sora, OpenAI’s innovative video-generation model, the company has officially launched it. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the launch of Sora, stating that the platform is now available alongside a new product designed to complement it. In […]
Russia holds about 8% of the world’s uranium resources, yet it mines only around 5% of the global supply, as of 2021. Despite its smaller production scale, Russia dominates more critical stages of the nuclear fuel cycle. Currently, it stands […]
Two spacecraft developed by the European Space Agency launched on top of an Indian rocket Thursday, kicking off a mission to test novel formation flying technologies and observe a rarely seen slice of the Sun's ethereal corona.
ESA's Proba-3 mission is purely experimental. The satellites are loaded with sophisticated sensors and ranging instruments to allow the two spacecraft to orbit the Earth in lockstep with one another. Proba-3 will attempt to achieve millimeter-scale precision, several orders of magnitude better than the requirements for a spacecraft closing in for docking at the International Space Station.
"In a nutshell, it’s an experiment in space to demonstrate a new concept, a new technology that is technically challenging," said Damien Galano, Proba-3's project manager.
Just three months after rolling out a new line of AI models designed to process information more thoughtfully, OpenAI has introduced O1. Described as “the smartest model in the world,” O1 is not only faster but also packed with new […]
