The brightness of the plume varies dramatically, which is not surprising in a large hybrid. You're just spraying LOX down the center of a big lump of fuel, you have no control over the mixture ratio at any given instant.
Large hybrids are incredibly susceptible to combustion instability; Virgin Galactic spent years and years trying to get theirs to behave itself.
I've only ever seen one stable large hybrid and it was catalyzed peroxide. The cat pack was probably acting as an acoustic damper.
Those are screenshots from the launch webcast, launch is at 1:13 https://youtu.be/RqGZ1mS5FC0?t=4378
There's two frames of the explosion seen from the drone.
3rd party footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQpsGIQ9U1Y
The launch was from Alcântara Space Center in Brazil, which has been trying to attract commercial operators. It's another equatorial launch site, about two degrees from the equator. It has had a couple dozen suborbital launches but never a successful orbital launch, and VLS-1 V03 killed 21 people in 2003.
Korean commercial launch company Innospace had the first liftoff of their Hanbit-Nano rocket last night. It cleared the tower, but during the first stage burn it crashed and exploded.
The first stage is a hybrid motor, meaning it uses liquid oxygen like most rockets but solid paraffin wax as the fuel. Hybrids are generally terrible for a variety of reasons for which I could go on about at length. Australia also has a hybrid launcher that failed this year.
Would be interesting to see if any ground movement is detectable by space-based synthetic aperture radar.
One of the commercial SAR companies had a sales strategy that I never understood, of only selling raw data. The real value is the analysis and not everyone knows how to do that; sell a subscription to owners of infrastructure where they get a phone call if ground movement is detected.
UK had a second canal breach of the year. Their canal network is huge; it was a predecessor to rail, with aqueducts and tunnels and many places where it's a lot more than just a strip of ground dug out. There's little industrial use of it now, but people live on 7 foot wide, 70 feet long steel boats full-time.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2lvq0yk9dko
Because 2025, there were at least two YouTubers close by when it happened, https://youtu.be/6FuNqijdUDM?t=487 and https://youtu.be/X4DGXAPE_lA?t=374
Actually useful bit of machine learning: Garmin Autoland was used for real for the first time to get a King Air twin engine turboprop safely on the ground in Broomfield, CO without pilot input.
https://avbrief.com/autoland-saves-king-air-everyone-reported-safe/
ATC recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3Nl3LOZNjc
One more this morning on my walk to the train station, felt a bit “liminal spaces”.
M̴a̴n̴y̴ ̴B̴o̴t̴h̴a̴n̴s̴ ̴d̴i̴e̴d̴ I missed free hotel breakfast to find out that the Pristina-Skopje train is not running, despite the 2025 schedule posted on their website.
In the unlikely chance anyone finds this via search, the only train running in Kosovo is the Pristina-Peja 2x daily, as far as I can tell.
Kenya is looking to build a commercial spaceport. Their site idea actually looks pretty good compared to some of the proposed ones in the US; lightly populated, could launch polar with a moderate dog leg and to a middling range of lower inclinations. About 2.5 degrees below the equator, but demand for equatorial inclination has not historically been very high.
I've also heard that stuff in equatorial is very poorly tracked by the current array of space radars.
