CThe Space Force just put a number on something that's been building for years: they want a THIRD launch range by 2030.
MA third? We have the Cape and Vandenberg. What's wrong with the two coasts?
CCapacity. Lieutenant General Philip Garrant — he runs Space Systems Command — says the ranges are running out of room, and he's being very honest that 2030 is... aspirational.
MAspirational is usually code for 'we have no idea where the money's coming from.' Where would it even go?
CThat's the fun part. Texas leaders are reportedly 'very aggressive' about it. One X user immediately suggested the Brownsville area, right next to Starbase.
MOf course they are. Why wade through federal red tape when you can just camp next to the guy building the biggest rockets on Earth?
CHere's the number that actually matters: those two ranges did 175 launches last year. They're projecting up to 700 missions by 2036.
M700? That's not growth. That's a traffic jam in orbit.
CIt's Starlink, it's Kuiper, it's the military's proliferated constellations. Everyone wants up, and nobody wants to wait for a launch window.
MAnd this isn't just convenience. The Space Force is saying, out loud, that they don't want the Pentagon dependent on two sites. They want geographic resiliency.
CRight — if a storm hits the Cape, the whole country stops launching. That's a single point of failure at the national security level.
MBut wait — which launches would move there? The heavy stuff? The super heavies?
CGarrant specifically says this is for medium and heavy launch. You can't just put a full stack anywhere. You need the right geography, the right pad infrastructure, and a range safety system that can track everything.
MAnd that's the real constraint, Chris. It's not free real estate. It's a multi-billion dollar instrumented range, and Congress has already put a billion three into upgrading the two we have.
CSo you're saying a third site is a fantasy?
MI'm saying the Space Force needs a third site the way I need a third car. It'd be great, but the budget and the coastline disagree.
CBut here's where I push back. The White House already released a policy saying we could hit a thousand launches a year by 2030. That's not me being optimistic — that's the administration.
MAnd how many of those are SpaceX, do you think? Because if it's most of them, the range is the least of our problems.
CIt's not just SpaceX. Blue Origin's lunar lander program, Rocket Lab's Electron, Firefly, Stoke... everyone's cadence is climbing.
MAnd a third coastal range takes a decade of environmental review before you pour concrete. 2030 is not aspirational — it's a PowerPoint.
CMatilda, the general called it aspirational himself. He knows. But the planning team exists NOW because if we wait until 2030 to start, we're launching from a beach in 2040.
MAnd I actually want this. I want a third site. I just think we're going to watch this die in committee, same as every big space infrastructure idea.
CThen let me tell you one thing: Air Force Secretary Troy Meink said the Pentagon's own study found we 'probably need' another heavy and super heavy capable site.
M'Probably need' means the study's in and the answer's yes. Fine. But show me a state willing to host it, and I'll show you five lawsuits.
CDifferent topic on the lunar side, and this one's got a timeline question mark.
MNASA's posted milestones for the SpaceX and Blue Origin lunar landers, trying to get astronauts back on the Moon for the first time since '72.
CThe post says SpaceX is targeting an uncrewed landing test. The details beyond that? NASA's been quiet. This is one to watch, not one to verify yet.
MTranslation: NASA's legendary 'notional schedule.' I've seen missions slip from 'uncrewed test' to 'rendering' faster than a Starlink deploy.
CAnd speaking of Starlink, one post this week made the rounds comparing all the other private launchers to a single Starship mission.
MOne Starship flight put 26 Starlink V3 satellites in orbit. That's more than 40 tons, if the poster's numbers hold.
CThey claim all of Rocket Lab, Firefly, Blue Origin, Stoke, and Relativity combined have launched about three tons all year. Three tons total, versus 40 in one flight.
MI could not independently confirm those tonnage figures, so treat them as ballpark. But the gap they're describing? That's real. Everybody else is sending up cubesats and experiments, and SpaceX is sending up the ISS.
CThe fun part is Blue Origin's lunar lander is in that small-tonnage club for now. But nobody's building a Moon architecture on Electron launches.
MNo, but Rocket Lab's building the satellite backbone for the Pentagon's reconnaissance layer, so let's not bury them yet. And Marslink — did you see this?
CSpaceX's proposed Starlink-style network for Mars. It showed up in a 2024 NASA presentation. Satellites around Mars using optical links to talk to rovers, orbiters, Earth.
MThis is one of those ideas that sounds like sci-fi until you remember there's a Starship program specifically to reach Mars. Why not build the Wi-Fi for the planet before you show up?
CIt's the same playbook as Starlink: get infrastructure up, then make the demand. Only this time there's no ground station with a router.
MMeanwhile, entirely different corner of tech: an agent cloud startup called Daytona just hit a billion-dollar valuation. TechCrunch reports the founders of Stripe, Perplexity, Datadog, and Mercor are all angel investors.
CThe pitch is giving every AI agent its own isolated computer in the cloud. It's like renting a laptop for each bot so they don't trip over each other.
MThat's actually clever, because the dirty secret of agent software is that they fight over files, browsers, environment variables. This sandboxes it.
CBut a billion-dollar valuation for a cloud infrastructure play? That's a lot of laptops. The who's-who of angels makes me think this is as much a bet on the team as the product.
MExactly. FirstMark led it, and the angels are all people who've run hyperscale infrastructure companies before. They know what the marginal cost of a sandbox is.
COne health story to note quickly. Quest Diagnostics confirmed patient data was compromised in a breach.
MThat's the lab testing giant. Personal and health data exposed. They join a series of healthcare tech hacks in recent months. Not the details anyone wants to hear on a Friday, but it's the reality.