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Musk, SpaceX sued by former employees alleging harassment, retaliation - NBC News
"We got something for the skating rink in Ituna and that's what it was always about." No Dinky Rink
Earlier this year, massive piecesof a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that had delivered four astronauts to the International Space Station came crashing down on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, Canada.
Farmer Barry Sawchuk, who stumbled upon the chunks of space junk, promised at the time to sell the unusual treasure to raise money for a hockey rink that's being built in the town of Ituna, Saskatchewan, where he was born and raised.
And as the CBC now reports, Sawchuk can now make good on his promise. Two SpaceX employees showed up at his farm in a U-Haul truck to cart the pieces away, without offering any comment.
While Sawchuk didn't reveal how much money he had gotten in return, he's still excited to share the proceeds with his community.
"We got something for the skating rink in Ituna and that's what it was always about," he told the CBC, a heartening conclusion to an almost excessively Canadian tale.
According to Sawchuk, five local farmers found at least eight pieces of space junk in the area, northeast of Saskatchewan's capital Regina.
While the pieces are designed to burn up in the atmosphere, they survived their fiery reentry largely intact, something that experts warn could set a dangerous precedent.
"I was hoping they would tell us a little bit more about just why they're here and what they're going to do with the pieces," University of Regina astronomy professor Samantha Lawler told the CBC. "SpaceX is doing nothing to educate the general public about how they're changing the sky for everyone in the world."
Lawler also warned that future space junk "will cause damage. It will cause deaths. It needs to be better regulated."
While there haven't been any reported deaths so far, there have been plenty of near misses. Earlier this year, a piece of the International Space Station crashed through Naples, Florida native Alejandro Otero's roof, narrowly missing his son who was sleeping two rooms away.
"It's really just luck," Lawler told the CBC back in May after Sawchuk made his discovery. "If that had hit in the middle of Regina or, yeah, New York City, it very easily could have killed someone."
More on the saga: Giant Piece of Space Junk Crashes Down on Farm of Canadian, Who Intends to Sell It and Spend Money on Hockey Rink
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Editor's update for 5:51 pm ET: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carrying 22 new Starlink satellites suffered a last-second abort while attempting to lift off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 14. A new launch date will be announced when the rocket is again ready, SpaceX has said.
SpaceX is scheduled to launch 22 more of its Starlink broadband satellites to orbit from Florida's Space Coast on Friday (June 14) after a series of weather delays.
The Starlink satellites will lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station during a just over three -hour window that opens at 5:07 p.m. EDT (2107 GMT). SpaceX will stream the action live via its account on X, beginning about five minutes before launch. The company has until 8:19 p.m. EDT (0019 GMT) to launch the mission.
SpaceX had planned to launch the mission on Wednesday (June 12) and then again Thursday (June 13), but pushed the try back by another 24 hours due to poor weather conditions. The company also has a backup launch day on Saturday (June 15), if needed.
The Falcon 9's first stage will come back to Earth about 8.5 minutes after launch, if all goes according to plan, landing on the droneship Just Read the Instructions in the Atlantic Ocean.
It will be the 16th launch and landing for this particular booster, according to a SpaceX mission description.Ten of its 15 flights to date have been Starlink missions. The remaining five missions were commercial flights to loft the SES-22 satellite, ispace's private Hakuto-R Mission 1 moon lander, the Amazonas-6 communications satellite, CRS-27 cargo mission for NASA and Bandwagon-1 multi-payload rideshare flight, SpaceX said.
The Falcon 9's upper stage, meanwhile, will continue carrying the 22 Starlink satellites to low Earth orbit, deploying them about 53 minutes after liftoff.
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SpaceX has launched 60 orbital missions so far in 2024, which works out to an average of one liftoff every 2.7 days.
Forty-three of these launches have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, which currently consists of nearly 6,100 operational spacecraft.
Editor's note: This story was updated at 8:30 p.m. ET on June 13 with the new target launch date of June 14.
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SpaceX to launch 22 new Starlink satellites from Florida soon after weather delays - Space.com
SpaceX is targeting Friday, June 14 for a Falcon 9 launch of 22 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Liftoff is targeted for 4:35 p.m. ET with opportunities available until 8:19 p.m. ET.
Originally the SpaceX launch of 22 more of its Starlink broadband satellites that were to orbit from Floridas Space Coast was set for June 12. That was scrubbed and rolled over to June 13, and now, due to inclimate Florida weather again, Thursday is scrubbed and is tentatively planned for Friday, June 14, Flag Day.
A live webcast of this mission will begin on X @SpaceX about five minutes prior to liftoff. Watch live.
This is the 16th flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched SES-22, ispaces HAKUTO-R MISSION 1, Amazonas-6, CRS-27, Bandwagon-1, and 10 Starlink missions. Following stage separation, the first stage will land on the Just Read the Instructions droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
The 45th Weather Squadronis forecasting a 95% chance of creating a Range Violation Thursday, meaning a mere 5% chance of acceptable conditions throughout the launch window. On Thursday, conditions improve slightly: 15% Go, with an 85% Probability of Violation.
In their discussion, the 45th Weather Squadron states, Daytime heating and the presence of the boundary will once again kick off numerous showers and storms by mid Friday afternoon with the exact location of activity dependent on how much north-northeasterly flow we see behind the boundary. Models continue to show the tendency for any activity to be inland of the Spaceport, especially heading further into the launch window. Anvil level flow will still be out of the west-northwest, though less robust than this evening, meaning that even with activity to the southwest anvil may still reach the Spaceport and these will remain the primary concern.
Anvils are of course thunderclouds they may or may not produce rain and/or thunder and lightning, but they do have enormous potential energy and rockets are well known to create lightning strikes. That in mind, the 45th and launch providers wont launch if one is within a given distance of the launch pad. The risk of a lightning bolt creating a bad day is too high.
SpaceXs bad hat trick of three scrubs in a row as Thursdays launch was called due to weather again
Originally the SpaceX launch of 22 more of its Starlink broadband satellites that were to orbit from Floridas Space Coast was set for June 12. That was scrubbed and rolled over to June 13, and now, due to inclimate Florida weather again, Thursday is scrubbed and is tentatively planned for Friday, June 14, Flag Day.
SpaceX is targeting Friday, June 14 for a Falcon 9 launch of 22 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Liftoff is targeted for 4:35 p.m. ET with opportunities available until 8:19 p.m. ET.
A live webcast of this mission will begin on X @SpaceX about five minutes prior to liftoff. Watch live.
This is the 16th flight for the first stage booster supporting this mission, which previously launched SES-22, ispaces HAKUTO-R MISSION 1, Amazonas-6, CRS-27, Bandwagon-1, and 10 Starlink missions. Following stage separation, the first stage will land on the Just Read the Instructions droneship, which will be stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX scrubbed Wednesdays launch and will attempt on Thursday batch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station after a scrub on Wednesday. The delay is due to weather conditions that remained poor. Tropical downpours deluged Florida and a possibility of 4-6 inches in some Central Florida areas.
This next liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket is now scheduled for 4:46 p.m. at Space Launch Complex 40.
The forecast noted that the storms will be keeping things wet and unsettled through the remainder of the week with perhaps another scrub on Thursday.
The first-stage booster being used in the mission will make its 16th flight, having previously gone up with Bandwagon-1, CRS-27, Amazonas-6 and 10 Starlink launches among others, SpaceX said.
Wednesday, June 12, 2:08 PM 6:36 PM PDT from Cape Canaveral, Florida, SpaceX will launch a batch of satellites for the Starlink mega-constellation SpaceXs project for space-based Internet communication system.
Space Launch Complex 40 has launched 247 rockets, including 247 orbital launch attempts, while Cape Canaveral, Florida, has been the site for 959 rocket launches.
SpaceX will add Starlink v2 Mini satellites to the Starlink constellation with the second batch of Group 10 satellites to orbit.
The booster will land on one of SpaceXs two autonomous droneships approximately 600 km downrange. Neither the booster nor the support vessels are known at this time.
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SpaceX hopes better weather for Flag Day Starlink launch of 22 smallsats SatNews - SatNews
Watching Starship come back to Earth last week was perhaps even more exciting than seeing it rise off the pad.
SpaceX launched its Starship megarocket for the fourth time ever on June 6, sending the giant vehicle into space from its Starbase site in South Texas.
The flight plan called for both of Starship's stages the Super Heavy first-stage booster and the 165-foot-tall (50 meters) upper stage, called Starship, or just Ship to steer themselves back to Earth for ocean splashdowns. Super Heavy was supposed to come down in the Gulf of Mexico, and Ship targeted the Indian Ocean. Both stages managed to stick their landings, and we got great looks at Super Heavy's homecoming.
On Saturday (June 8), SpaceX posted on X a 25-second video of the final stages of Super Heavy's descent through Earth's atmosphere. The video, which combines footage from a boat or drone with that captured by Super Heavy's onboard cameras, captures the roar of the booster's Raptor engines as they fire in a landing burn just above the waves.
Super Heavy looked to be more or less intact, which you couldn't quite say for Ship. The upper stage went much higher, faster and farther than Super Heavy, so its reentry was more fiery and dramatic. It lost many heat-shield tiles, for example, and one of its flaps nearly burned through from frictional heating, but Ship managed to hold together until it hit the water.
Related: SpaceX's Starship 4th flight test looks epic in these stunning photos
Starship's performance has improved on each of its four test flights, all of which have occurred in the past 14 months. On Flight 1, for instance, Starship's two stages failed to separate as planned, and SpaceX detonated the tumbling vehicle about four minutes after launch.
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Stage separation occurred on Flight 2, but it too was relatively short, ending just eight minutes in. Flight 3 lasted nearly 50 minutes, but neither Super Heavy nor Ship made it to their planned splashdown zones; both vehicles broke apart while coming back to Earth.
SpaceX is gearing up for the fifth launch of Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. But we may have already seen the last Super Heavy ocean splashdown; shortly after the June 6 launch, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk suggested that the company might try to catch the returning booster with the "chopstick" arms of the giant launch tower at Starbase.
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Watch SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy booster splash down in this epic video - Space.com