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China launches second carrier rocket at sea

China successfully conducted its second sea launch mission with Long March-11 from waters in the Yellow Sea off the coast of East China’s Shandong Province on Tuesday, sending 9 satellites into orbit at the same time.

Compared to the first launch, developers have further optimized and streamlined its sea launch capabilities by deploying a new launch vessel and putting a new coastal spaceport into operation, laying a solid foundation for more frequent and regular sea missions in the future.

The launch mission from sea successfully sent a group of nine commercial remote sensing satellites, all belonging to the Jilin-1 03 family, into the 535-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO).

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Oracle has won a deal

Oracle has reportedly won a deal to manage TikTok’s US cloud operations. Oracle had been rumored to be part of the bidding process to acquire TikTok, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has been selected as a “trusted tech partner” instead. This is different from an outright sale, and appears to suggest Oracle will be helping run TikTok’s US operations with its own cloud technologies.

If Trump agrees to this, Tik Tok is poised to explode much bigger and it will open the door to more Chinese companies operating in the West. My guess is “not likely”.

  • Hawley calls for US to reject Oracle’s TikTok deal. The deal is currently awaiting a recommendation from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), but it has received praise from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, who chairs the committee. In an open letter to Mnuchin, Hawley calls on the secretary to take a more skeptical look at the proposal.
  • Rubio has sent a letter to the Trump Administration urging it to reject the proposed Oracle-TikTok deal, which would leave TikTok as an independent, US-based company, because ByteDance, TikTok’s parent, will retain a majority stake.
  • Ted Cruz has joined Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley and others in opposing the deal, penning his own letter claiming that any deal that doesn’t 100% address national security concerns should be rejected.