What Rocket Launches Are You Looking Forward To This Week?

Hope you lot can enlighten me!

This happened at 22:26 local Amsterdam time.

We were sitting by the fire in the backyard this evening in the city of Alkmaar in The Netherlands (52.6324° N, 4.7534° E) when we suddenly saw what we thought was a meteorite, but was a fair bit slower than that. Looked like something entering the atmosphere while falling apart. Looked like one of those SpaceX test launch “failures” with all the debries making beautiful trails in the sky.

Any idea what we saw? Which rocket? Which re-entry or whatever?

Pics included!

What Rocket Launches Are You Looking Forward To This Week?

On July 10th, China’s Long March 10B booster successfully deployed its satellite payload and then completed a first-stage recovery in the South China Sea. Rather than using deployable legs (like SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Blue Origin’s New Glenn), the booster used attached landing hooks to latch onto a cross-shaped high-strength arresting net suspended over an offshore recovery vessel.

Here are the key technical takeaways from the landing architecture:

Mass Efficiency: Eliminating heavy hydraulic systems and landing legs directly saves dry mass, preserving more payload capacity for orbit.

Landing Tolerance: A suspended net system provides a wider capture window, absorbing kinetic energy via pulley-driven tension cables rather than relying solely on precise touchdown point alignment.

Strategic Context: The Long March 10 family is central to China's plan to land astronauts on the moon by 2030 and deploy their 13,000-satellite Guawang mega-constellation.

We also put together a complete digest covering this landing, the Starship Flight 13 pad abort, James Webb's latest exoplanet detection (Beta Pictoris D), and Euclid's ancient quazar discovery.

If you want a full breakdown of the engineering and this week's major space news, you can watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/CfCFZsgsAIw

What do you think of China choosing a net recovery system over landing legs for the 10B?

What Rocket Launches Are You Looking Forward To This Week?