TechCrunch Space: It’s a bird, it’s a plane — it’s a rocket-powered aircraft!

Hello, and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend. On to the news.

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I had a chance to catch up with Dawn Aerospace co-founder and CEO Stefan Powell last week to hear all about the latest test campaign of the Mk-II Aurora aircraft. For those unfamiliar, Mk-II is essentially a rocket-powered aircraft, or, as the company puts it, “an aircraft with the performance of a rocket, not a rocket with wings.” Powell had some interesting things to say about nonconventional vehicles:

“I think common knowledge is that spaceplanes have been tried with the Shuttle, and that didn’t work, and it’s a dumb idea. And if not that then, things with wings are stupid because, look at Virgin Orbit, that didn’t work. Air launch is dumb. You have to get to quite a nuanced conversation before you actually understand the difference between what we’re trying to do and the rockets with wings that have flown before us, and how the path we’re on is very much an aircraft path, but there is still a path to making it have the performance of a rocket.”

I really enjoyed this longer read from The Wall Street Journal, which looked at Florida locals’ reactions to SpaceX’s proposed plans to launch Starship from there. As I reported last month, the company’s plans to launch Starship 44 times per year from Kennedy Space Center ruffled feathers — but it’s also considering a plan to fly the rocket 76 times from neighboring Cape Canaveral. That’s 120 times per year, a proposed cadence that has some Florida residents and business owners concerned.

On August 14, 1959, Earth observation was born. The Explorer 6 satellite took the first-ever image of Earth by a spacecraft. It’s, uh, not the most crisp image, but it depicts the north part of the Pacific Ocean near Mexico, and was transmitted to a ground station over a 40-minute (!) span.