On Tuesday, A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched, “the company’s 12th rideshare mission to a sun-synchronous orbit. Onboard are a variety of customer satellites, including 35 satellites integrated by Exolaunch along with 36 SuperDoves and Pelican-2 from Planet Labs PBC.”

On Wednesday, SpaceX launches its “sixth, suborbital flight test of its fully integrated Starship rocket, a combination of the Ship upper stage (S33) and the Super Heavy booster (B14). SpaceX plans to catch the Super Heavy booster using the chopsticks on the launch tower, but will make a final determination on the catch following liftoff and stage separation.”

On Thursday, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket will launch the company’s previously delayed Blue Ring spacecraft, which is capable of both hosting and deploying multiple payloads.

(Source: spaceflightnow.com See update at bottom of this page.)

Also on Tuesday, space and security expert Dr. Nancy K. Hayden discussed the future of outer space and the increasingly heavy and chaotic traffic that is shooting out of planet Earth like hair plugs out of Elon Musk’s head.

Her talk for the i3: ideas that inform and inspire‘s Conversations with Big Thinkers lecture series at La Casona Event Center was first promoted as “Space: Brave New World or Wild Wild West?”  Somewhere along the line, out of respect for the growing congestion on the extraterrestrial freeways surrounding Earth, she added a third possibility — “Close Encounters” — to that title.