Month: June 2024

Enlarge / What can I say? It was tough putting the Brompton C Line Electric through its paces. Finding just the right context for it. Grueling work. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

There’s never been a better time to ride a weird bike.

That's especially true if you live in a city where you can regularly see kids being dropped off at schools from cargo bikes with buckets, child seats, and full rain covers. Further out from the urban core, fat-tire e-bikes share space on trails with three-wheelers, retro-style cruisers, and slick roadies. And folding bikes, once an obscurity, are showing up in more places, especially as they’ve gone electric.

So when I got to try out the Brompton Electric C Line (in a six-speed model), I felt far less intimidated riding, folding, and stashing the little guy wherever I went than I might have been a few years back. A few folks recognized the distinctively small and British bike and offered a thumbs-up or light curiosity. If anyone was concerned about the oddity of this quirky ride, it was me, mostly because I obsessed over whether I could and should lock it up outside or not.

Enlarge / The fourth full-scale test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket took off from Starbase, the company's privately-owned spaceport near Brownsville, Texas.

Welcome to Edition 6.47 of the Rocket Report! The monumental news of late is that Boeing's Starliner spacecraft not only successfully launched on an Atlas V rocket, but then subsequently docked with the International Space Station. Congratulations to all involved. It's been a long road to get here.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly lands massive launch contract. Firefly Aerospace announced Wednesday that it has signed a multi-launch agreement with Lockheed Martin for 25 launches on Firefly’s Alpha rocket through the end of this decade. This agreement commits Lockheed Martin to 15 launch reservations and 10 optional launches. Alpha will launch Lockheed Martin spacecraft into low-Earth orbit from Firefly’s facilities on the West and East Coast. The first mission will launch on Alpha flight 6, from Firefly’s SLC-2 launch site at the Vandenberg Space Force Base later this year.