#spacelaunch — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #spacelaunch, aggregated by home.social.
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Weekly output: facial recognition at airports, seeing space launches, smart-glasses detection
Somehow, we’ve now traveled more than a quarter of a century since Sept. 11, 2001. I thought about writing something about that millstone of a milestone here, but I didn’t know what I’d want to add to what I wrote on the 20th anniversary of that awful day. (Besides, I guess, speculating about how little a narrow plurality of American voters might have learned from the last 25 years before choosing to return Donald Trump to the White House.) I did, however, appreciate reading the 25th-anniversary testimonies of friends and strangers, and a Reddit post asking what D.C. was like on 9/11 persuaded me to post my own short recap there.
I also feel that I did not do Friday justice by failing to fly on Sept. 11 as I have so many times over the last 15 years. But I will be back in the air Friday to make my second pilgrimage to LAX for Cranky Dorkfest, the wonderful avgeek meetup that I finally checked out (and then wrote up) last year.
9/7/2026: These Airport Execs Are All-In on Facial Recognition, But Not Necessarily for the Reasons You’d Think, PCMag
I watched this panel at the Identity Week conference in D.C. on Thursday of the previous week but didn’t file my recap until Saturday afternoon. In the meantime, feedback on my Bluesky posts recounting that panel convinced me there would be some reader interest in the topic.
9/8/2026: Let’s Fly: How to Watch a Rocket Launch From Florida’s Space Coast, PCMag
I updated the post I’d written in the fall of 2024 with insights from seeing a Falcon Heavy launch from the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex and updates about SpaceX’s reduced Florida launch cadence. Other updates to this post included fixing an embarrassing-to-me error that nobody else had called out: I had referred to the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as the Cape Canaveral Space Force Center.
9/10/2026: Worried About Snooping Smart Glasses? This Startup’s Tech Detects Nearby Specs, PCMag
Enterprise-software news doesn’t always strike as PCMag material, but the widespread resentment of camera-equipped connected eyewear–“pervert glasses,” as some skeptics put it–made me think this item was different.
#911 #airportSecurity #BastilleNetworks #biometricAuthentication #biometricIdentity #CapeCanaveral #connectedGlasses #facialRecognition #IdentityWeek #kennedySpaceCenter #ksc #pervertGlasses #rocketLaunch #Sept11 #smartGlasses #SpaceCoast #spaceLaunch -
↗️ NEXT LAUNCH:
🛰️ Mission: Sentinel-3C & FLEX
🚀 Launcher: Vega-C
🕒 Scheduled for: Tue, 15 Sep 2026 1:21:07 UTC
Current T-0 confirmed by official or reliable sources.
🏗️ Launch Provider: Avio S.p.A → [2 launches this year]
🌍 Launch Site: Ariane Launch Area 1 (ELV) at Guiana Space Centre, French Guiana 🇬🇫
📡 Mission Description:
Sentinel-3C is the third satellite in the Sentinel-3 constellation, which provides high-accuracy optical, radar and altimetry data for marine and land services.The Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX) satellite is a part of ESA's Earth Explorer program. The satellite will map vegetation fluorescence to quantify photosynthetic activity.
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⏮️ JUST LAUNCHED: Launch in Flight
🛰️ Mission: O3b mPower 11-13 [Communications]
🕒 Launched on: Sun, 13 Sep 2026 18:49:00 UTC
☄️ Status: The launch vehicle has lifted off from the launchpad.
🚀 Launcher: Falcon 9 Block 5
🏗️ Launch Provider: SpaceX → [109 launches this year]
🌍 Launch Site: Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral SFS, FL, USA 🇺🇸
📺 Watch Live: 1📡 Mission Description:
3 high-throughput communications satellites in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) built by Boeing and operated by SES. -
The next space telescope is launching in ~40 minutes. It's the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Grace_Roman_Space_Telescope ).
There are several places to watch the launch:
NASASpaceflight (third-party channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8yDQhVgypw
NASA official stream: on YouTube ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wq3VHsL_bE ), or on Twitch ( https://www.twitch.tv/nasa )
Everyday Astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6Ww6kQN4Qw -
October ended with my least-scheduled week of the entire month, a break I needed after all of this month’s travel. My sole outside-my-home work event happened Tuesday, an Ars Technica event about AI that let me catch up with some friends from that outstanding publication. I went from that directly to the Kamala Harris rally at the Ellipse–the first presidential-campaign event I’d attended since going to an Obama rally in 2012.
Patreon readers got an extra post from me this week: an essay unpacking the Washington Post’s shameful and self-destructive decision not to run a presidential endorsement and comparing that to other reasons newsroom reporters can resent their paper’s editorial page.
10/28/2024: Apple Finally Replaces Lightning With USB-C on Keyboards, Mice, Trackpads, PCMag
This is a post I should have been able to write years ago, but with less than two months left before a European Union mandate to switch to USB-C for peripherals, Apple finally killed off Lightning on its mice, trackpads and most of its keyboards. Which means I can finally replace the antique mouse that came with the iMac that I bought in 2009, which I’ve kept long after replacing that computer just because it runs on AA batteries.
10/31/2024: Google Announces Play Store Tweaks to Entice More of Your Attention and Money, PCMag
When a company gives me an advance copy of its news, I try to add some context to my own writeup so I’m not just recapping their PR. In this case, that context was the “service fees” that Google charges developers and the court cases challenging them and Google’s control over Android apps.
10/31/2024: Passkey Adoption Reaches a New Milestone, Even With Uneven Support, PCMag
The context I added to this post: how late and spotty passkey support from companies holds back this authentication standard, and how out-of-date directories of passkey support make it harder for people to find companies that do offer this stronger, easier sign-in option.
11/2/2024: Let’s Fly: How to Watch a Rocket Launch From Florida’s Space Coast, PCMag
This is a post I’d had in mind for years, but I couldn’t write it as a proper how-to until I’d finally watched a launch from a part of the Kennedy Space Center open to the general public–which I did when I traveled to Florida to see the Sept. 12 launch of AST SpaceMobile’s first five production satellites.
#Falcon9 #FIDO #GooglePlay #kennedySpaceCenter #ksc #Lightning #MagicKeyboard #MagicMouse #passkey #passkeys #passwordlessSecurity #PlayStore #rocketLaunch #SpaceCoast #spaceLaunch #USBC