Four Russian military satellites burned through their fuel reserves this week to stalk a Western radar satellite that's feeding imagery to Ukraine — and they're now as close as 500 meters away.
SpaceX's Starship V3 Made a Planned Fiery Splashdown in the Indian Ocean
The latest Starship prototype — the V3 Ship — executed a controlled, fiery descent into the Indian Ocean, completing what SpaceX intended as a high-stakes test of the vehicle's atmospheric re-entry systems. The splashdown was planned, not a failure, and every second of that descent feeds engineers data on how the world's most ambitious rocket holds together under extreme heat and pressure.
Starship is designed to carry heavy cargo and crew on missions to the Moon and Mars, and SpaceX's approach has always been to fly, learn, and iterate fast — even when "learning" means watching hardware hit the ocean. The V3 Ship test continues that pattern, pushing re-entry performance to its limits before the vehicle is trusted with astronauts or irreplaceable payloads.
Gobble's Take: A rocket that survives orbital re-entry once is a prototype; one that survives it reliably is a spaceship — SpaceX is still running that gap.
Source: Space.com
Four Russian Satellites Are Now Orbiting Between 500 Meters and 22 Kilometers of a Satellite Feeding Imagery to Ukraine
Greg Gillinger, a retired U.S. Air Force space intelligence officer, noticed something troubling in open-source orbital tracking data last week: four Russian military satellites had quietly moved their orbits to match that of ICEYE-X36, a commercial radar surveillance satellite operated by the Finnish-American company ICEYE. ICEYE provides all-weather overhead radar imagery to the U.S. military, European governments, and Ukraine's armed forces. ICEYE's co-founder and CEO Rafal Modrzewski met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy last year.
The four satellites — designated Kosmos 2610 through 2613, launched together on April 16 aboard a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia — each executed what's called a "plane change" maneuver, shifting the angle of their orbits relative to the equator by less than a degree. That sounds trivial, but it's extraordinarily expensive in orbital mechanics: the fuel required for a plane change of that magnitude is equivalent to the delta-v needed to raise a satellite's altitude by more than 100 miles. You don't burn that much fuel by accident.
The result is that all four satellites now pass routinely near ICEYE-X36, at cross-track distances ranging from roughly 500 meters to 22 kilometers, all of it unfolding in polar orbit at about 340 miles above Earth. According to Gillinger, the Russian satellites are now positioned to close in further with only minor additional adjustments. As he noted in his Integrity Flash newsletter: "This capability is not common for satellites conducting typical missions."
Gobble's Take: Russia just spent a small fortune in rocket fuel to park four military satellites next to the eyes feeding Ukraine's battlefield — the war in space is no longer a metaphor.
Source: r/space
Rocket Lab Is Burning $103 Million a Year to Build a Rocket That Has to Be Perfect
Rocket Lab — America's second-most-active orbital launch company — generated $436 million in revenue in 2024, a 78% increase year-over-year. On paper, that's a rocket company firing on all cylinders. In practice, it's a company betting its $25 billion market valuation on a single vehicle it hasn't flown yet.
That vehicle is Neutron, a medium-lift rocket currently transitioning from development into production. Rocket Lab burns $103 million annually in free cash flow while funding Neutron's development, sits on $419 million in cash against $475 million in debt, and trades at 57 times its annual sales — a valuation that, according to an analysis by Serma Karevich, prices in "flawless execution on every front" and sits 62% above its DCF-derived intrinsic value. Neutron's pad arrival was expected in Q1 2026, with a mid-2026 launch as the inflection point that will determine whether the stock's premium is visionary or delusional.
The company's core business — Electron small-satellite launches at $8.4 million per flight, plus a Space Systems division selling spacecraft components and complete satellite platforms — is genuinely strong, with gross margins of 29% and a $1.06 billion backlog. But 33% of revenue comes from government contracts, and the top five customers account for 51% of total revenue, leaving the company dangerously exposed if Neutron stumbles or a key client walks.
Gobble's Take: Rocket Lab has built a real, profitable business — and then bet the entire thing on a rocket that hasn't left the ground yet.
Source: Serma Karevich / Substack
Quick Hits
- SpaceX pivots to lunar focus: According to HardTech Reads, SpaceX has shifted its near-term strategic emphasis toward lunar missions, with Starship's development increasingly oriented around NASA's Artemis program before any Mars push. HardTech Reads
- Largest-ever satellite deploys in LEO: HardTech Reads notes that the largest satellite ever built has been deployed into low Earth orbit, though full mission details are still emerging. HardTech Reads
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