rocket report

Rocket Report: “No man’s land” in rocket wars; Isaacman lukewarm on SLS

blue origin, falcon 9, falcon heavy, human spaceflight, international space station, launch, new glenn, rocket lab, rocket report, russia, Science, soyuz, Space, space launch system, spacex, united launch alliance, vulcan / Tim Belzer / April 13, 2025

China’s approach to space junk is worrisome as it begins launching its own megaconstellations.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket rolls to its launch pad in Florida in preparation for liftoff with 27 satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper broadband network. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Welcome to Edition 7.39 of the Rocket Report! Not getting your launch fix? Buckle up. We’re on the cusp of a boom in rocket launches as three new megaconstellations have either just begun or will soon begin deploying thousands of satellites to enable broadband connectivity from space. If the megaconstellations come to fruition, this will require more than a thousand launches in the next few years, on top of SpaceX’s blistering Starlink launch cadence. We discuss the topic of megaconstellations in this week’s Rocket Report.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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.

So, what is SpinLaunch doing now? Ars Technica has mentioned SpinLaunch, the company that literally wants to yeet satellites into space, in previous Rocket Report newsletters. This company enjoyed some success in raising money for its so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea of catapulting rockets and satellites into the sky, a concept SpinLaunch calls “kinetic launch.” But SpinLaunch is now making a hard pivot to small satellites, a move that, on its face, seems puzzling after going all-in on kinetic launch and even performing several impressive hardware tests, throwing a projectile to altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Ars got the scoop, with the company’s CEO detailing why and how it plans to build a low-Earth orbit telecommunications constellation with 280 satellites.

Traditional versus kinetic … The planned constellation, named Meridian, is an opportunity for SpinLaunch to diversify away from being solely a launch company, according to David Wrenn, the company’s CEO. We’ve observed this in a number of companies that started out as rocket developers before branching out to satellite manufacturing or space services. Wrenn said SpinLaunch could loft all of the Meridian satellites on a single large conventional rocket, or perhaps two medium-lift rockets, and then maintain the constellation with its own kinetic launch system. A satellite communications network presents a better opportunity for profit, Wrenn said. “The launch market is relatively small compared to the economic potential of satellite communication,” he said. “Launch has generally been more of a cost center than a profit center. Satcom will be a much larger piece of the overall industry.”

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Peter Beck suggests Electron is here to stay. The conventional wisdom is that the small launch vehicle business isn’t a big moneymaker. There is really only one company, Rocket Lab, that has gained traction in selling dedicated rides to orbit for small satellites. Rocket Lab’s launcher, Electron, can place payloads of up to a few hundred pounds into orbit. As soon as Rocket Lab had some success, SpaceX began launching rideshare missions on its much larger Falcon 9 rocket, cobbling together dozens of satellites on a single vehicle to spread the cost of the mission among many customers. This offers customers a lower price point than buying a dedicated launch on Electron. But Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, says his company has found a successful market providing dedicated launches for small satellites, despite price pressure from SpaceX, Space News reports. “Dedicated small launch is a real market, and it should not be confused with rideshare,” he argued. “It’s totally different.”

No man’s land … Some small satellite companies that can afford the extra cost of a dedicated launch realize the value of controlling their schedule and orbit, traits that a dedicated launch offers over a rideshare, Beck said. It’s easy to blame SpaceX for undercutting the prices of Rocket Lab and other players in this segment of the launch business, but Beck said companies that have failed or withdrawn from the small launch market didn’t have a good business plan, a good product, or good engineering. He added that the capacity of the Electron vehicle is well-suited for dedicated launch, whereas slightly larger rockets in the one-ton-to-orbit class—a category that includes Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha and Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rockets—are an ill fit. The one-ton performance range is “no man’s land” in the market, Beck said. “It’s too small to be a useful rideshare mission, and it’s too big to be a useful dedicated rocket” for smallsats. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

ULA scrubs first full-on Kuiper launch. A band of offshore thunderstorms near Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday night forced United Launch Alliance to scrub a launch attempt of the first of dozens of missions on behalf of its largest commercial customer, Amazon, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission will use an Atlas V rocket to deploy 27 satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper network. It’s the first launch of what will eventually be more than 3,200 operational Kuiper satellites beaming broadband connectivity from space, a market currently dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink. As of Thursday, ULA hadn’t confirmed a new launch date, but airspace warning notices released by the FAA suggest the next attempt might occur Monday, April 14.

What’s a few more days? … This mission has been a long time coming. Amazon announced the Kuiper megaconstellation in 2019, and the company says it’s investing at least $10 billion in the project (the real number may be double that). Problems in manufacturing the Kuiper satellites, which Amazon is building in-house, delayed the program’s first full-on launch by a couple of years. Amazon launched a pair of prototype satellites in 2023, but the operational versions are different, and this mission fills the capacity of ULA’s Atlas V rocket. Amazon has booked more than 80 launches with ULA, Arianespace, Blue Origin, and SpaceX to populate the Kuiper network. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Space Force swaps ULA for SpaceX. For the second time in six months, SpaceX will deploy a US military satellite that was sitting in storage, waiting for a slot on United Launch Alliance’s launch schedule, Ars reports. Space Systems Command, which oversees the military’s launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA’s Vulcan rocket to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force’s fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world. The move allows the GPS satellite to launch as soon as the end of May, the Space Force said. The military executed a similar rocket swap for a GPS mission that launched on a Falcon 9 in December.

Making ULA whole … The Space Force formally certified ULA’s Vulcan rocket for national security missions last month, so Vulcan may finally be on the cusp of delivering for the military. But there are several military payloads in the queue to launch on Vulcan before GPS III SV-08, which was already completed and in storage at its Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado. Meanwhile, SpaceX is regularly launching Falcon 9 rockets with ample capacity to add the GPS mission to the manifest. In exchange for losing the contract to launch this particular GPS satellite, the Space Force swapped a future GPS mission that was assigned to SpaceX to fly on ULA’s Vulcan instead.

Russia launches a former Navy SEAL to space. Jonny Kim, a former Navy SEAL, Harvard Medical School graduate, and now a NASA astronaut, blasted off with two cosmonaut crewmates aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket early Tuesday, CBS News reports. Three hours later, Kim and his Russian crewmates—Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky—chased down the International Space Station and moved in for a picture-perfect docking aboard their Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft. “It was the trip of a lifetime and an honor to be here,” Kim told flight controllers during a traditional post-docking video conference.

Rotating back to Earth … Ryzhikov, Zubritsky, and Kim joined a crew of seven living aboard the International Space Station, temporarily raising the lab’s crew complement to 10 people. The new station residents are replacing an outgoing Soyuz crew—Alexey Ovchinin, Ivan Wagner, and Don Pettit—who launched to the ISS last September and who plan to return to Earth aboard their own spacecraft April 19 to wrap up a 219-day stay in space. This flight continues the practice of launching US astronauts on Russian Soyuz missions, part of a barter agreement between NASA and the Russian space agency that also reserves a seat on SpaceX Dragon missions for Russian cosmonauts.

China is littering in LEO. China’s construction of a pair of communications megaconstellations could cloud low Earth orbit with large spent rocket stages for decades or beyond, Space News reports. Launches for the government’s Guowang and Shanghai-backed but more commercially oriented Qianfan (Thousand Sails) constellation began in the second half of 2024, with each planned to consist of over 10,000 satellites, demanding more than a thousand launches in the coming years. Placing this number of satellites is enough to cause concern about space debris because China hasn’t disclosed its plans for removing the spacecraft from orbit at the end of their missions. It turns out there’s another big worry: upper stages.

An orbital time bomb … While Western launch providers typically deorbit their upper stages after dropping off megaconstellation satellites in space, China does not. This means China is leaving rockets in orbits high enough to persist in space for more than a century, according to Jim Shell, a space domain awareness and orbital debris expert at Novarum Tech. Space News reported on Shell’s commentary in a social media post, where he wrote that orbital debris mass in low-Earth orbit “will be dominated by PRC [People’s Republic of China] upper stages in short order unless something changes (sigh).” So far, China has launched five dedicated missions to deliver 90 Qianfan satellites into orbit. Four of these missions used China’s Long March 6A rocket, with an upper stage that has a history of breaking up in orbit, exacerbating the space debris problem. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX wins another lunar lander launch deal. Intuitive Machines has selected a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch a lunar delivery mission scheduled for 2027, the Houston Chronicle reports. The upcoming IM-4 mission will carry six NASA payloads, including a European Space Agency-led drill suite designed to search for water at the lunar south pole. It will also include the launch of two lunar data relay satellites that support NASA’s so-called Near Space Network Services program. This will be the fourth lunar lander mission for Houston-based Intuitive Machines under the auspices of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

Falcon 9 has the inside track … SpaceX almost certainly offered Intuitive Machines the best deal for this launch. The flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket is reliable and inexpensive compared to competitors and has already launched two Intuitive Machines missions, with a third one set to fly late this year. However, there’s another factor that made SpaceX a shoe-in for this contract. SpaceX has outfitted one of its launch pads in Florida with a unique cryogenic loading system to pump liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the Intuitive Machines lunar lander as it sits on top of its rocket just before liftoff. The lander from Intuitive Machines uses these super-cold propellants to feed its main engine, and SpaceX’s infrastructure for loading it makes the Falcon 9 rocket the clear choice for launching it.

Time may finally be running out for SLS. Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, said Wednesday in a Senate confirmation hearing that he wants the space agency to pursue human missions to the Moon and Mars at the same time, an effort that will undoubtedly require major changes to how NASA spends its money. My colleague Eric Berger was in Washington for the hearing and reported on it for Ars. Senators repeatedly sought Isaacman’s opinion on the Space Launch System, the NASA heavy-lifter designed to send astronauts to the Moon. The next SLS mission, Artemis II, is slated to launch a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon next year. NASA’s official plans call for the Artemis III mission to launch on an SLS rocket later this decade and attempt a landing at the Moon’s south pole.

Limited runway … Isaacman sounded as if he were on board with flying the Artemis II mission as envisioned—no surprise, then, that the four Artemis II astronauts were in the audience—and said he wanted to get a crew of Artemis III to the lunar surface as quickly as possible. But he questioned why it has taken NASA so long, and at such great expense, to get its deep space human exploration plans moving. In one notable exchange, Isaacman said NASA’s current architecture for the Artemis lunar plans, based on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, is probably not the ideal “long-term” solution to NASA’s deep space transportation plans. The smart reading of this is that Isaacman may be willing to fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions as conceived, given that much of the hardware is already built. But everything that comes after this, including SLS rocket upgrades and the Lunar Gateway, could be on the chopping block.

Welcome to the club, Blue Origin. Finally, the Space Force has signaled it’s ready to trust Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, for launching the military’s most precious satellites, Ars reports. Blue Origin received a contract on April 4 to launch seven national security missions for the Space Force between 2027 and 2032, an opening that could pave the way for more launch deals in the future. These missions will launch on Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which had a successful debut test flight in January. The Space Force hasn’t certified New Glenn for national security launches, but military officials expect to do so sometime next year. Blue Origin joins SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in the Space Force’s mix of most-trusted launch providers.

A different class … The contract Blue Origin received last week covers launch services for the Space Force’s most critical space missions, requiring rocket certification and a heavy dose of military oversight to ensure reliability. Blue Origin was already eligible to launch a separate batch of missions the Space Force set aside to fly on newer rockets. The military is more tolerant of risk on these lower-priority missions, which include launches of “cookie-cutter” satellites for the Pentagon’s large fleet of missile-tracking satellites and a range of experimental payloads.

Why is SpaceX winning so many Space Force contracts? In less than a week, the US Space Force awarded SpaceX a $5.9 billion deal to make Elon Musk’s space company the Pentagon’s leading launch provider, replacing United Launch Alliance in the top position. Then, the Space Force assigned most of this year’s most lucrative launch contracts to SpaceX. As we mentioned earlier in the Rocket Report, the military also swapped a ULA rocket for a SpaceX launch vehicle for an upcoming GPS mission. So, is SpaceX’s main competitor worried Elon Musk is tipping the playing field for lucrative government contracts by cozying up to President Trump?

It’s all good, man … Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, doesn’t seem too worried in his public statements, Ars reports. In a roundtable with reporters this week at the annual Space Symposium conference in Colorado, Bruno was asked about Musk’s ties with Trump. “We have not been impacted by our competitor’s position advising the president, certainly not yet,” Bruno said. “I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws, and so we’re behaving that way.” The reason Bruno can say Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration so far hasn’t affected ULA is simple. SpaceX is cheaper and has a ready-made line of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets available to launch the Pentagon’s satellites. ULA’s Vulcan rocket is now certified to launch military payloads, but it reached this important milestone years behind schedule.

Two Texas lawmakers are still fighting the last war. NASA has a lot to figure out in the next couple of years. Moon or Mars? Should, or when should, the Space Launch System be canceled? Can the agency absorb a potential 50 percent cut to its science budget? If Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz get their way, NASA can add moving a space shuttle to its list. The Lone Star State’s two Republican senators introduced the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act” on Thursday, CollectSpace reports. If passed by Congress and signed into law, the bill would direct NASA to take the space shuttle Discovery from the national collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and transport it to Space Center Houston, a museum and visitor attraction next to Johnson Space Center, home to mission control and NASA’s astronaut training base. Discovery has been on display at the Smithsonian since 2012. NASA awarded museums in California, Florida, and New York the other three surviving shuttle orbiters.

Dollars and nonsense … Moving a space shuttle from Virginia to Texas would be a logistical nightmare, cost an untold amount of money, and would create a distraction for NASA when its focus should be on future space exploration. In a statement, Cruz said Houston deserves one of NASA’s space shuttles because of the city’s “unique relationship” with the program. Cornyn alleged in a statement that the Obama administration blocked Houston from receiving a space shuttle for political reasons. NASA’s inspector general found no evidence of this. On the contrary, transferring a space shuttle to Texas now would be an unequivocal example of political influence. The Boeing 747s that NASA used to move space shuttles across the country are no longer flightworthy, and NASA scrapped the handling equipment needed to prepare a shuttle for transport. Moving the shuttle by land or sea would come with its own challenges. “I can easily see this costing a billion dollars,” Dennis Jenkins, a former shuttle engineer who directed NASA’s shuttle transition and retirement program more than a decade ago, told CollectSpace in an interview. On a personal note, the presentation of Discovery at the Smithsonian is remarkable to see in person, with aerospace icons like the Concorde and the SR-71 spy plane under the same roof. Space Center Houston can’t match that.

Next three launches

April 12: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-17 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 01: 15 UTC

April 12: Falcon 9 | NROL-192 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 12: 17 UTC

April 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-73 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 01: 59 UTC

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Rocket Report: “No man’s land” in rocket wars; Isaacman lukewarm on SLS Read More »

Rocket Report: Stoke is stoked; sovereignty is the buzzword in Europe

artemis II, european space agency, falcon 9, isar aerospace, launch, NASA, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, Space, space launch system, spacex, united launch alliance / Rejus Almole / March 30, 2025

“The idea that we will be able to do it through America… I think is very, very doubtful.”

Stoke Space’s Andromeda upper stage engine is hot-fired on a test stand. Credit: Stoke Space

Welcome to Edition 7.37 of the Rocket Report! It’s been interesting to watch how quickly European officials have embraced ensuring they have a space launch capability independent of other countries. A few years ago, European government satellites regularly launched on Russian Soyuz rockets, and more recently on SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets from the United States. Russia is now non grata in European government circles, and the Trump administration is widening the trans-Atlantic rift. European leaders have cited the Trump administration and its close association with Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, as prime reasons to support sovereign access to space, a capability currently offered only by Arianespace. If European nations can reform how they treat their commercial space companies, there’s enough ambition, know-how, and money in Europe to foster a competitive launch industry.

Isar Aerospace aims for weekend launch. A German startup named Isar Aerospace will try to launch its first rocket Saturday, aiming to become the first in a wave of new European launch companies to reach orbit, Ars reports. The Spectrum rocket consists of two stages, stands about 92 feet (28 meters) tall, and can haul payloads up to 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) into low-Earth orbit. Based in Munich, Isar was founded by three university graduate students in 2018. Isar scrubbed a launch attempt Monday due to unfavorable winds at the launch site in Norway.

From the Arctic … Notably, this will be the first orbital launch attempt from a launch pad in Western Europe. The French-run Guiana Space Center in South America is the primary spaceport for European rockets. Virgin Orbit staged an airborne launch attempt from an airport in the United Kingdom in 2023, and the Plesetsk Cosmodrome is located in European Russia. The launch site for Isar is named Andøya Spaceport, located about 650 miles (1,050 kilometers) north of Oslo, inside the Arctic Circle. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A chance for competition in Europe. The European Space Agency is inviting proposals to inject competition into the European launch market, an important step toward fostering a dynamic multiplayer industry officials hope one day will mimic that of the United States, Ars reports. The near-term plan for the European Launcher Challenge is for ESA to select companies for service contracts to transport ESA and other European government payloads to orbit from 2026 through 2030. A second component of the challenge is for companies to perform at least one demonstration of an upgraded launch vehicle by 2028. The competition is open to any European company working in the launch business.

Challenging the status quo … This is a major change from how ESA has historically procured launch services. Arianespace has been the only European launch provider available to ESA and other European institutions for more than 40 years. But there are private companies across Europe at various stages of developing their own small launchers, and potentially larger rockets, in the years ahead. With the European Launcher Challenge, ESA will provide each of the winners up to 169 million euros ($182 million), a significant cash infusion that officials hope will shepherd Europe’s nascent private launch industry toward liftoff. Companies like Isar Aerospace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, MaiaSpace, and PLD Space are among the contenders for ESA contracts.

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Rocket Lab launches eight satellites. Rocket Lab launched eight satellites Wednesday for a German company that is expanding its constellation to detect and track wildfires, Space News reports. An Electron rocket lifted off from New Zealand and completed deploying its payload of eight CubeSats for OroraTech about 55 minutes later, placing them into Sun-synchronous orbits at an altitude of about 341 miles (550 kilometers). This was Rocket Lab’s fifth launch of the year, and the third in less than two weeks.

Fire goggles … OroraTech launched three satellites before this mission, fusing data from those satellites and government missions to detect and track wildfires. The new satellites are designed to fill a gap in coverage in the afternoon, a peak time for wildfire formation and spread. OroraTech plans to launch eight more satellites later this year. Wildfire monitoring from space is becoming a new application for satellite technology. Last month, OroraTech partnered with Spire for a contract to build a CubeSat constellation called WildFireSat for the Canadian Space Agency. Google is backing FireSat, another constellation of more than 50 satellites to be deployed in the coming years to detect and track wildfires. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Should Britain have a sovereign launch capability? A UK House of Lords special inquiry committee has heard from industry experts on the importance of fostering a sovereign launch capability, European Spaceflight reports. On Monday, witnesses from the UK space industry testified that the nation shouldn’t rely on others, particularly the United States, to put satellites into orbit. “The idea that we will be able to do it through America… certainly in today’s, you know, the last 50 days, I think is very, very doubtful. The UK needs access to space,” said Scott Hammond, deputy CEO of SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland.

Looking inward … A representative from one of the most promising UK launch startups agreed. “Most people who are looking to launch are beholden to the United States solutions or services that are there,” said Alan Thompson, head of government affairs at Skyrora. “Without having our own home-based or UK-based service provider, we risk not having that voice and not being able to undertake all these experiments or be able to manifest ourselves better in space.” The UK is the only nation to abandon an independent launch capability after putting a satellite into orbit. The British government canceled the Black Arrow rocket in the early 1970s, citing financial reasons. A handful of companies, including Skyrora, is working to restore the orbital launch business to the UK.

This rocket engine CEO faces some salacious allegations. The Independent published what it described as an exclusive report Monday describing a lawsuit filed against the CEO of RocketStar, a New York-based company that says its mission is “improving upon the engines that power us to the stars.” Christopher Craddock is accused of plundering investor funds to underwrite pricey jaunts to Europe, jewelry for his wife, child support payments, and, according to the company’s largest investor, “airline tickets for international call girls to join him for clandestine weekends in Miami,” The Independent reports. Craddock established RocketStar in 2014 after financial regulators barred him from working on Wall Street over a raft of alleged violations.

Go big or go home … The $6 million lawsuit filed by former CEO Michael Mojtahedi alleges RocketStar “is nothing more than a Ponzi scheme… [that] has been predicated on Craddock’s ability to con new people each time the company has run out of money.” On its website, RocketStar says its work focuses on aerospike rocket engines and a “FireStar Fusion Drive, the world’s first electric propulsion device enhanced with nuclear fusion.” These are tantalizing technologies that have proven elusive for other rocket companies. RocketStar’s attorney told The Independent: “The company denies the allegations and looks forward to vindicating itself in court.”

Another record for SpaceX. Last Thursday, SpaceX launched a batch of clandestine SpaceX-built surveillance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Spaceflight Now reports. This was the latest in a series of flights populating the NRO’s constellation of low-Earth orbit reconnaissance satellites. What was unique about this mission was its use of a Falcon 9 first stage booster that flew to space just nine days prior with a NASA astronomy satellite. The successful launch broke the record for the shortest span between flights of the same Falcon 9 booster, besting a 13.5-day turnaround in November 2024.

A mind-boggling number of launches … This flight also marked the 450th launch of a Falcon 9 rocket since its debut in 2010, and the 139th within a 365-day period, despite suffering its first mission failure in nearly 10 years and a handful of other glitches. SpaceX’s launch pace is unprecedented in the history of the space industry. No one else is even close. In the last Rocket Report I authored, I wrote that SpaceX’s steamroller no longer seems to be rolling downhill. That may be the case as the growth in the Falcon 9 launch cadence has slowed, but it’s hard for me to see anyone else matching SpaceX’s launch rate until at least the 2030s.

Rocket Lab and Stoke Space find an on-ramp. Space Systems Command announced Thursday that it selected Rocket Lab and Stoke Space to join the Space Force’s National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. The contracts have a maximum value of $5.6 billion, and the Space Force will dole out “task orders” for individual missions as they near launch. Rocket Lab and Stoke Space join SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin as eligible launch providers for lower-priority national security satellites, a segment of missions known as Phase 3 Lane 1 in the parlance of the Space Force. For these missions, the Space Force won’t require certification of the rockets, as the military does for higher-value missions in the so-called “Lane 2” segment. However, Rocket Lab and Stoke Space must complete at least one successful flight of their new Neutron and Nova rockets before they are cleared to launch national security payloads.

Stoked at Stoke … This is a big win for Rocket Lab and Stoke. For Rocket Lab, it bolsters the business case for the medium-class Neutron rocket it is developing for flights from Wallops Island, Virginia. Neutron will be partially reusable with a recoverable first stage. But Rocket Lab already has a proven track record with its smaller Electron launch vehicle. Stoke hasn’t launched anything, and it has lofty ambitions for a fully reusable two-stage rocket called Nova. This is a huge vote of confidence in Stoke. When the Space Force released its invitation for an on-ramp to the NSSL program last year, it said bidders must show a “credible plan for a first launch by December 2025.” Smart money is that neither company will launch its rockets by the end of this year, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Falcon 9 deploys spy satellite. Monday afternoon, a SpaceX Falcon 9 took flight from Florida’s Space Coast and delivered a national security payload designed, built, and operated by the National Reconnaissance Office into orbit, Florida Today reports. Like almost all NRO missions, details about the payload are classified. The mission codename was NROL-69, and the launch came three-and-a-half days after SpaceX launched another NRO mission from California. While we have some idea of what SpaceX launched from California last week, the payload for the NROL-69 mission is a mystery.

Space sleuthing … There’s an online community of dedicated skywatchers who regularly track satellites as they sail overhead around dawn and dusk. The US government doesn’t publish the exact orbital parameters for its classified spy satellites (they used to), but civilian trackers coordinate with one another, and through a series of observations, they can produce a pretty good estimate of a spacecraft’s orbit. Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archeologist and university lecturer on space situational awareness, is one of the best at this, using publicly available information about the flight path of a launch to estimate when the satellite will fly overhead. He and three other observers in Europe managed to locate the NROL-69 payload just two days after the launch, plotting the object in an orbit between 700 and 1,500 kilometers at an inclination of 64.1 degrees to the equator. Analysts speculated this mission might carry a pair of naval surveillance spacecraft, but this orbit doesn’t match up well with any known constellations of NRO satellites.

NASA continues with Artemis II preps. Late Saturday night, technicians at Kennedy Space Center in Florida moved the core stage for NASA’s second Space Launch System rocket into position between the vehicle’s two solid-fueled boosters, Ars reports. Working inside the iconic 52-story-tall Vehicle Assembly Building, ground teams used heavy-duty cranes to first lift the butterscotch orange core stage from its cradle, then rotate it to a vertical orientation and lift it into a high bay, where it was lowered into position on a mobile launch platform. The 212-foot-tall (65-meter) core stage is the largest single hardware element for the Artemis II mission, which will send a team of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon and back to Earth as soon as next year.

Looking like a go … With this milestone, the slow march toward launch continues. A few months ago, some well-informed people in the space community thought there was a real possibility the Trump administration could quickly cancel NASA’s Space Launch System, the high-priced heavy-lifter designed to send astronauts from the Earth to the Moon. The most immediate possibility involved terminating the SLS program before it flies with Artemis II. This possibility appears to have been overcome by circumstances. The rockets most often mentioned as stand-ins for the Space Launch System—SpaceX’s Starship and Blue Origin’s New Glenn—aren’t likely to be cleared for crew missions for at least several years. The long-term future of the Space Launch System remains in doubt.

Space Force says Vulcan is good to go. The US Space Force on Wednesday announced that it has certified United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket to conduct national security missions, Ars reports. “Assured access to space is a core function of the Space Force and a critical element of national security,” said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space, in a news release. “Vulcan certification adds launch capacity, resiliency, and flexibility needed by our nation’s most critical space-based systems.” The formal announcement closes a yearslong process that has seen multiple delays in the development of the Vulcan rocket, as well as two anomalies in recent years that were a further setback to certification.

Multiple options … This certification allows ULA’s Vulcan to launch the military’s most sensitive national security missions, a separate lot from those Rocket Lab and Stoke Space are now eligible for (as we report in a separate Rocket Report entry). It elevates Vulcan to launch these missions alongside SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. Vulcan will not be the next rocket that the company launches, however. First up is one of the company’s remaining Atlas V boosters, carrying Project Kuiper broadband satellites for Amazon. This launch could occur in April, although ULA has not set a date. This will be followed by the first Vulcan national security launch, which the Space Force says could occur during the coming “summer.”

Next three launches

March 29: Spectrum | “Going Full Spectrum” | Andøya Spaceport, Norway | 11: 30 UTC

March 29: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 16: 05 UTC

March 30: Alpha | LM-400 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 13: 37 UTC

Rocket Report: Stoke is stoked; sovereignty is the buzzword in Europe Read More »

Rocket Report: Falcon 9 may smash reuse record; Relativity roving to Texas?

rocket report, Space / Tim Belzer / March 23, 2025

All the news that’s fit to lift

“It is what he has always dreamt of.”

The Falcon 9 booster that launched Crew 10 is seen shortly after landing near its launch site in Florida. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.36 of the Rocket Report! Well, after nine months, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are finally back on Earth, safe and sound. This brings to conclusion one of the stranger and more dramatic human spaceflight stories in years. We’re glad they’re finally home, soon to be reunited with their families.

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.

Summary of 2024 launch activity. In its annual launch report, released earlier this month, Bryce Tech analyzed the 259 orbital launches conducted last year. Among the major trends the analysts found were: Nearly 60 percent of all launches were conducted by US providers, Commercial providers accounted for about 70 percent of launches, and Small satellites, primarily for communications, represented the majority of all spacecraft launched at 97 percent.

Trends dominated by Starlink launches … SpaceX conducted more than half of the launches last year (134), putting 2,390 spacecraft into orbit (the vast majority of which were Starlink satellites). The next closest competitor was China, with 48 launches and 186 spacecraft. The nearest US competitor to SpaceX was Rocket Lab, with 14 launches and 33 spacecraft. The competition in “upmass,” that is total kg lofted into orbit, was less close still. SpaceX put 1.86 million kg into space, followed by China (164,000 kg) and Roscosmos (76,000). The closest US competitor was United Launch Alliance, at 29,000 kg. Put another way, for every kilogram ULA put into orbit, SpaceX lofted 66.

MaiaSpace inks first commercial customer. MaiaSpace, a French subsidiary of ArianeGroup founded in 2022, signed an agreement to fly multiple missions for Exotrail’s SpaceVan orbital transfer vehicle beginning in 2027. The partnership with Exotrail provides an early vote of confidence that the reusable Maia rocket can increase Europe’s sovereign launch capabilities, Payload reports. This is one of several launch agreements signed recently by Exotrail.

Hitting the trail … Exotrail flew its first SpaceVan mission on SpaceX’s Transporter-9 flight in November 2023 and deployed the Endurosat-built “EXO-0” cubesat in LEO after three months in orbit. In November, the company signed a deal with Arianespace to launch Exotrail’s first SpaceVan mission to geostationary transfer orbit in the latter half of 2026. After leaving Ariane 64, SpaceVan will tow a customer satellite to GEO, demonstrating its ability to deliver satellites to the full range of orbital trajectories. (submitted by gma)

Sign Me Up!

Electron launches twice in three days. Rocket Lab completed the deployment of a constellation of Internet of Things satellites for French company Kinéis with an Electron launch on Monday. The launch was the fifth and final mission under a contract signed by the companies in 2021. Each launch carried five satellites, weighing 28 kilograms each, to complete a 25-satellite constellation.

Continuing to steadily increase cadence … For Rocket Lab, this was the second launch in a little more than 72 hours, after another Electron launched a radar imaging satellite for Japanese company iQPS March 14. It was the fourth launch so far this year for Rocket Lab, which previously stated it expects to perform more than 20 Electron launches, including the HASTE suborbital version, this year.

Pangea raises Series A funding. The Spanish startup announced this week that it has raised 23 million euros ($25 million) in Series A funding, European Spaceflight reports. This funding includes contributions from former ArianeGroup CEO André-Hubert Roussel. Founded in 2018, Pangea Aerospace initially aimed to develop Meso, a small rocket designed to deliver 400 kilograms to low-Earth orbit. The rocket was to be powered by a unique, in-house-developed methalox aerospike engine.

Twice the size … However, in early 2023, the company announced it had abandoned the development of Meso to focus on providing propulsion systems for rockets and in-orbit applications. Pangea is currently in the process of developing ARCOS, an aerospike engine designed for use aboard the booster and/or upper stage of a rocket. According to Pangea, the funding will be used to “accelerate its expansion in the European market,” aiming to grow its customer base. It will look to double its workforce and scale up its manufacturing, integration, and testing capabilities.

Relativity Space eyeing move to Texas. As he consolidates control over Relativity Space, new owner and chief executive Eric Schmidt is planning significant changes at the launch company, including a likely move to the Lone Star State, Ars reports. The company faces several major challenges as it seeks to bring the Terran R rocket to market, particularly in logistics. This is because Terran R is a large launch vehicle, too large to move across the country by highway.

Watching for Baytown … The company’s initial plan was to manufacture first stages at its massive factory in Long Beach, California, and ship them through the Panama Canal to a test site at the Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi. From there, they would be moved by barge again to the launch site in Florida. But this was expensive and time-consuming. Two sources have indicated that Relativity Space will likely move a significant portion of its Terran R manufacturing to Baytown, Texas, which is near Houston. Such a location would provide water access on the right side of the Panama Canal. Relativity has not made a formal announcement.

Crew-10 launches to ISS. A Falcon 9 rocket launched four astronauts safely into orbit on Friday evening, marking the official beginning of the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station. Friday’s launch came two days after an initial attempt was scrubbed on Wednesday evening, Ars reports. This was due to a hydraulic issue with the ground systems that handle the Falcon 9 rocket at Launch Complex 39A in Florida.

Smooth ride to orbit … There were no technical issues on Friday, and with clear skies, NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov rocketed smoothly into orbit. Although any crew launch into orbit is notable, this mission came with an added bit of importance as its success cleared the way for two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to finally return home from space after a saga spanning nine months. They did so on Tuesday evening.

SpaceX pushes Falcon 9 booster reuse record. On March 12 a Falcon 9 rocket first stage made its third launch, lofting the SPHEREx and PUNCH missions into low-Earth orbit for NASA. Following the successful launch, the first stage landed near the launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Now, this same stage could launch again on Thursday night from Vandenberg, carrying the NROL-57 mission for the US Space Force.

Rapid reuse is a thing … The launch is scheduled for 06: 49 UTC, and if it takes place it would be just nine days and four hours since the SPHEREx mission. This would shatter the company’s previous booster turnaround, set in November, of a little more than 13 days. The fast turnaround was no doubt enabled by landing the booster back near the launch site, speeding the process of inspecting and refurbishing the rocket. It’s also impressive that the Space Force greenlit such a fast turnaround time for a national security payload.

And launch pad turnaround, too. SpaceX launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at sunrise Saturday morning. The mission marked a record-breaking turnaround for launch operations at Space Launch Complex 40, Spaceflight Now reports. The launch of 23 Starlink Version 2 Mini satellites came two days, eight hours, 59 minutes, and 40 seconds after the launch of the Starlink 12-21 mission. This beat SpaceX’s previous turnaround time at that pad by nearly six hours.

Ever pushing forward … Recently, Ars covered a recent string of issues with the Falcon 9 rocket, notably with its upper stage. The principal reason is that SpaceX continues to push the envelope with even its mature products like the Falcon 9 rocket, which is now nearly 15 years old. While we can take note of issues, it’s also worth celebrating the incredibly hard work that goes into pushing cadence and turnaround times. Moreover, success with the Falcon 9 rocket supports the notion that, one day, SpaceX will be able to reach a high cadence of operations with Starship.

The Jeff and the Donald. Over the past year, Amazon and Blue Origin founder Bezos has executed a sharp public reversal in his relationship with President Trump—whom he previously criticized as a “threat to democracy”—that has surprised even longtime associates. An article in the Financial Times explores this change, and finds that it is likely due, at least in part, to Bezos’ interest in his space company. There are some spicy, and to my sense of things, accurate comments that explain why Bezos has sought to curry favor with Trump.

One longtime adviser cautions … “He cares most about Blue Origin. His chance of being the player he wants to become in space could be destroyed” if the world’s richest man (Elon Musk) and most powerful politician united against him. “The growth trajectory for the entire enterprise depends on the federal contract… otherwise Blue is dead in the water.” Another close associate says that any move by Trump to deprioritize lunar missions in favor of Musk’s aspirations to reach Mars would have a significant impact on the company’s viability and success. “It is what he has always dreamt of. Nothing will hurt Jeff financially—Blue is a money loser. It is more the opportunity to be involved.”

Next three launches

March 21: Falcon 9 | NROL-57 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 06: 49 UTC

March 23: Spectrum | Demo flight | Andøya Rocket Range, Norway | 11: 30 UTC

March 24: Falcon 9 | NROL-69 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17: 42 UTC

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

Rocket Report: Falcon 9 may smash reuse record; Relativity roving to Texas? Read More »

Rocket Report: Starship fails for a second time; what’s to blame for Vulcan delays?

rocket report, Space / Rejus Almole / March 9, 2025

“During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

The first commercial flight of Ariane 6, operated by Arianespace, lifts off on Thursday. Credit: Arianespace

Welcome to Edition 7.34 of the Rocket Report! What a day in space Thursday was. During the morning hours we saw the triumphant second flight of the Ariane 6 rocket, a pivotal moment for European sovereignty in space. Then Intuitive Machines had a partially successful landing on the Moon. And finally, on Thursday evening, SpaceX’s Starship failed during its second consecutive test flight.

Firefly sets date for next Alpha launch. Having completed a static-fire test, Firefly Aerospace has set a target date of March 15 for the launch of its “Message in a Booster” mission. The Alpha rocket will launch Lockheed Martin’s LM 400 spacecraft from Vandenberg Space Force Base, with the 52-minute launch window opening at 6: 25 am PT (14: 25 UTC). Lockheed is self-funding the demonstration mission of its new satellite bus, the LM 400, which it says can serve civil, military, and commercial customers.

A slow build … This is Alpha’s second launch for Lockheed Martin, and the first of Firefly’s multi-launch agreement with the company that includes up to 25 missions over the next five years. Alpha is capable of lifting 1 metric ton to low-Earth orbit, and this will be the rocket’s sixth launch since its debut in September 2021. The company has recorded one failure, two partial failures, and two successes during the time. It’s been a slow ramp up for Alpha, with the rocket having launched just a single time in 2024, in July.

Isar Aerospace wins Asian launch contract. A Japanese microgravity services startup named ElevationSpace has become the first Asian customer for Germany’s Isar Aerospace, Space News reports. ElevationSpace said Monday it has booked a launch during the second half of 2026 with Isar Aerospace for AOBA, a 200-kilogram spacecraft designed to test a recoverable platform for space-based experiments and manufacturing. This is a hopeful sign that European startups will have commercial appeal beyond the continent.

Spectrum rocket nearing debut launch … The Japanese firm cited Isar Aerospace’s direct injection capability into low Earth orbit and flexible launch scheduling as key factors in its decision to sign the contract. Isar Aerospace said last month that Spectrum, designed to deliver up to 1,000 kilograms to low-Earth orbit, has completed static-fire testing and is prepared for its first flight from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, pending final regulatory approval.

Sign Me Up!

A small launch site in French Guiana. The French space agency, CNES, has opened a public consultation period for the new multi-user micro-launcher facility at the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana, European Spaceflight reports. Last month, the first of four public consultation sessions into the construction of the new Multi-Launcher Launch Complex at the Guiana Space Centre was held at Kourou Town Hall. In March 2021, CNES announced plans to transform the old Diamant launch site into a new multi-use facility for commercial micro-launcher providers, supporting rockets with payloads of up to 1,500 kilograms.

Lots of potential users … The final mission launched from the Guiana Space Centre’s Diamant facility lifted off in 1976, after which it was abandoned and left to be reclaimed by the jungle. In 2019, the site was earmarked for revitalization to serve as a testing ground for the Callisto and Themis reusable rocket booster demonstrators. This testing was, however, always going to serve as a temporary justification for the launch facility’s rebirth. In July 2022, CNES pre-selected Avio, HyImpulse, Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, PLD Space, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Latitude to use the facility. However, MaiaSpace has since allocated the Guiana Space Centre’s old Soyuz launch pad for its partially reusable Maia rocket.

Firefly nets Earth science launch contract. Amid its successful lunar landing, forthcoming Alpha launch, and a new launch contract, Firefly is having one heck of a week. NASA revealed this week that it has selected Firefly Aerospace to launch a trio of Earth science smallsats that will study the formation of storms, Space News reports. The agency said March 4 that it awarded a task order through its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to Firefly to launch the three-satellite Investigation of Convective Updrafts mission.

Hello, Virginia … NASA did not disclose the value of the task order, a practice it has followed on other VADR awards. The three satellites will launch on a Firefly Alpha rocket from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. NASA did not disclose a launch date in its announcement, but Firefly, in its own statement, said the launch would take place as soon as 2026. Firefly said it will launch the mission from Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, which has been used by Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket and will also be used by Alpha and the future MLV rocket.

Ariane 6 delivers for Europe when it is needed. Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket lifted off Thursday from French Guiana and deployed a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the French military, notching a success on its first operational flight. “This is an absolute pleasure for me today to announce that Ariane 6 has successfully placed into orbit the CSO-3 satellite,” said David Cavaillolès, who took over in January as CEO of Arianespace, the Ariane 6’s commercial operator. “Today, here in Kourou, we can say that thanks to Ariane 6, Europe and France have their own autonomous access to space back, and this is great news.”

Can no longer rely on US rockets … This was the second flight of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket, following a mostly successful debut launch last July. The first test flight of the unproven Ariane 6 carried a batch of small, relatively inexpensive satellites. An auxiliary propulsion unit (APU)—essentially a miniature second engine—on the upper stage shut down in the latter portion of the inaugural Ariane 6 flight, after the rocket reached orbit and released some of its payloads. Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for research and higher education, says Ariane 6 is “proof of our space sovereignty,” as many European officials feel they can no longer rely on the United States.

US launch facilities are not prepared for a surge. Rocket firm executives warned this week that the nation’s primary launch facilities may soon be unable to handle the projected surge in rocket launches, potentially hampering America’s competitiveness in the rapidly expanding commercial space sector, Space News reports. “I don’t think that people realize how many rockets are going to be launching five or eight years from now,” Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, said at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Conference in Aurora, Colorado.

Support needed for multiple daily launches … Limp’s concerns were echoed by executives from SpaceX and United Launch Alliance during a panel discussion, where all three agreed that the industry must collectively prepare for a future where multiple daily launches become the norm. Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon launch vehicles, highlighted that even at Cape Canaveral, the busiest US spaceport, current protocols don’t allow simultaneous launches by different providers.

Falcon 9 first stage fails to land safely. After what appeared to be a routine Starlink mission on Sunday, a Falcon 9 first stage landed on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Shortly after the landing, however, a fire broke out in the aft end of the rocket. This damaged a landing leg and caused the rocket to topple over. Florida Today has video of the badly damaged rocket returning to Port Canaveral.

Space remains hard … The Starlink satellites safely reached orbit, so this did not impact the primary mission. However, Falcon 9 landings have become so seemingly routine, such a failure now stands out. This booster was relatively new, having launched three Starlink missions, GOES-U, and Maxar 3. It was only the first-stage booster’s fifth flight. To date, SpaceX has successfully flown a single booster 26 times.

India begins construction of a new launch site. The Indian space agency, ISRO, presently has two operational launch pads at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The space agency launches Indian and foreign satellites aboard rockets like PSLV and GSLV from here. As it seeks to expand its launch activities, ISRO officially began constructing a new launch site at Kulasekaranpattinam, in Tamil Nadu, this week, The National reports.

Avoiding the dogs … The Kulasekaranpattinam launch site is strategically located near the equator. With open seas to the south of it, the site allows for direct southward launches over the Indian Ocean. This will minimize fuel consumption and maximize payload capacity for small satellite launch vehicles, particularly beneficial for cost-effective commercial satellite launches. The site also avoids the need for complex “dogleg” maneuvers around Sri Lanka.

SpaceX launches Starship on its eighth flight. SpaceX launched the eighth full-scale test flight of its enormous Starship rocket on Thursday evening after receiving regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. The test flight sought a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to achieve on the previous Starship launch in January, when the rocket broke apart and showered debris over the Atlantic Ocean and Turks and Caicos Islands.

Alas … Unfortunately for SpaceX, the Starship upper stage failed again, in a similar location, with similar impacts. About a minute before reaching the cutoff of the vehicle’s engines en route to space, the upper stage spun out of control and broke apart. “During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost,” SpaceX said in a statement about an hour later. “Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.” Ars will have full coverage of what is a serious setback for the company.

Amazon culture comes to Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos has moved to introduce a tough Amazon-like approach to his rocket maker Blue Origin, as the world’s third-richest person seeks to revive a company that has lagged behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the Financial Times reports. The space company’s founder and sole shareholder has pushed to shift its internal culture with management hires from Amazon, while implementing policies akin to the e-commerce giant, including longer working hours and more aggressive targets.

Work-life balance, what? … Key to Bezos’s effort is chief executive Dave Limp. The former Amazon devices chief was appointed in late 2023 and has been followed in quick succession by several veterans from the $2.2 trillion tech giant, including supply chain chief Tim Collins, chief information officer Josh Koppelman, and chief financial officer Allen Parker. The changes in leadership have been accompanied by significant layoffs. In February, roughly 10 percent of Blue Origin’s more than 10,000-strong workforce was dismissed. Employees are now expected to work longer hours, and badge scanners have been introduced to track employee time similar to Amazon.

Space Force is to blame for Vulcan delays? The debut of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket was delayed more than four years, ultimately from 2019 to January 2024. The first flight went very well, but during the second certification mission in October 2024 there was an anomaly with one of the two solid rocket boosters powering the vehicle. Although the rocket reached its intended orbit, this issue necessitated an investigation. Vulcan has yet to fly again, and with the certification process still ongoing, it is now likely to launch no earlier than sometime this summer.

Spacecraft end up moving to the right … No one is more interested in seeing Vulcan fly than the US Space Force, which has dozens of missions lined up for the rocket. These missions were supposed to be launched between 2022 and 2026. To make up for lost time, the Space Force now hopes to launch 11 national security missions this year (this almost certainly won’t happen). In a curious comment to Space News, Bruno appeared to put some of the blame for delays on the Space Force, rather than Vulcan’s tardiness: Bruno pointed out there is inherent unpredictability in national security launch schedules, noting that “about half of the spacecraft end up needing to move right, and they move right by a lot.” It is a weird comment to make with a rocket that is years late.

Next three launches

March 9: Falcon 9 | SPHEREx & PUNCH | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 03: 09 UTC

March 9: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-21 | Cape Canaveral, Fla. | 04: 10 UTC

March 10: Electron | The Lightning God Reigns | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 00:oo UTC

Rocket Report: Starship fails for a second time; what’s to blame for Vulcan delays? Read More »

Rocket Report: A blue mood at Blue; Stoke Space fires a shot over the bow

rocket report, Space / Paul Patrick / February 15, 2025

All the news that’s fit to lift

“Rapid turnaround isn’t merely a goal, it’s baked into the design.”

A bottoms-up view of Stoke Space’s Andromeda upper stage. Credit: Stoke Space

Welcome to Edition 7.31 of the Rocket Report! The unfortunate news this week concerns layoffs. Blue Origin announced a 10 percent cut in its workforce as the company aims to get closer to breaking even. More broadly in the space industry, there is unease about what the Trump administration’s cuts to NASA and other federal agencies might mean.

We don’t have all the answers, but it does seem that NASA is likely to be subject to less deep cuts than some other parts of the government. We should find out sometime in March when the Trump White House submits its initial budget request. Congress, of course, will have the final say.

PLD Space continues to grow. The Spain-based launch company said this week that it now has more than 300 employees as it works toward an orbital launch attempt. “In this race for space supremacy, the amount of capital raised and the talent gathered have become key indicators of a company’s potential for success,” the company said. “While capital acts as the fuel for these ambitious initiatives, the talent behind it is the catalyst that drives them.”

Working to reach orbit … The average age of employees at PLD Space is 34, and the company is hiring 15 people a month as it works to develop the Miura 5 rocket. It’s unclear which of the commercial launch startups in Europe will succeed, but PLD Space has a decent chance to be among them. With luck, the Miura 5 launch vehicle will make its debut sometime in 2026.

Will NASA launch on a Transporter mission? NASA announced this week that it has selected SpaceX to launch a small exoplanet science mission as a rideshare payload as soon as September, Space News reports. The task order to launch the Pandora mission was made through the Venture-class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare launch services contract, intended for small missions with higher acceptance of risk.

Could fly on a Falcon 9 … Pandora is an ESPA Grande-class spacecraft, a category that includes spacecraft weighing up to 320 kilograms, and is designed to operate in a Sun-synchronous orbit. That suggests Pandora could launch on SpaceX’s Transporter series of dedicated rideshare missions that send payloads to such orbits, but neither NASA nor SpaceX disclosed specifics. The NASA announcement also did not disclose the value of the task order to SpaceX.

Sign Me Up!

Stoke Space dishes on Andromeda upper stage. The Washington-based launch company has revealed the name of its Nova rocket’s upper stage, Andromeda, and provided some new details about the design. Andromeda will incorporate hot staging, Stoke says, and will use fewer but larger thrusters—24 instead of 30. The upper stage is now mounted on Stoke’s test stand in Moses Lake, Washington, the company said.

Hot staging, hot talk … The new design is focused on rapid reusability, with easier access and serviceability to components of the engines and heat shield. “These changes further reduce complexity and allow the entire engine to be serviced—or even replaced—within hours or minutes. Rapid turnaround isn’t merely a goal, it’s baked into the design,” the company said. The upper stage will also incorporate “hot staging” to improve the capacity to orbit. You’ve got to appreciate the subtle dig at SpaceX’s Starship program, too: the design allows for hot staging “without the need for a heavy one-time-use interstage shield to protect Stage 1.” Shots fired!

European space commissioner worried about launch. During a keynote address at the Perspectives Spatiales 2025 event in Paris, European Commissioner for Defence Industry and Space Andrius Kubilius outlined the challenging position the continent’s space sector finds itself in, European Spaceflight reports. “Commercial sales are down. Exports are down. Profits are down. And this comes at a time when we need space more than ever. For our security. For our survival.”

Actions, not words, needed … Rhetorical language and bold declarations are inspiring, but when it comes to securing Europe’s place in the global space race, adopted policy and appropriated funding are where aspirations are tested, the European publication stated. Without concrete investments, streamlined regulations, and clear strategic priorities, Europe’s ambition to once again lead the global launch market is likely to amount to little.

Election set to create Starbase, the city. A Texas county on Wednesday approved holding an election sought by SpaceX that would let residents living around the company’s launch and production facilities in South Texas decide whether to formally create a new city called Starbase, ABC News reports. The election was set for May 3, and votes can only be cast by residents living near the launch site, which is currently part of an unincorporated area of Cameron County located along the US-Mexico border. Approval is expected.

A busy beehive … In December, more than 70 area residents signed a petition requesting an election to make Starbase its own municipality. Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño said the county reviewed the petition and found it met the state’s requirements for the incorporation process to move forward. Kathy Lueders, Starbase’s general manager, has previously said that the incorporation would streamline certain processes to build amenities in the area. More than 3,400 full-time SpaceX employees and contractors work at the site. (submitted by teb)

China taps into commercial space for station missions. China will launch a pair of low-cost space station resupply spacecraft this year on new commercial launch vehicles, Space News reports. The Haolong cargo space shuttle from the Chengdu Aircraft Design Institute will launch on Landspace’s Zhuque-3. The reusable stainless steel, methane-liquid oxygen Zhuque-3 rocket is due to have its first flight in the third quarter of this year. The reusable Haolong vehicle will be 10 meters in length, around 7,000 kilograms in mass, and capable of landing on a runway.

Following a commercial trail laid by NASA … Meanwhile, the Qingzhou cargo spacecraft from the Innovation Academy for Microsatellites of the Chinese Academy of Sciences will launch on the first flight of the CAS Space Kinetica-2 (Lijian-2) rocket no earlier than September. The development is analogous to NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services program, diversifying China’s options for supplying the Tiangong space station. If even one of these missions takes place successfully within the next year, it would represent a major step forward for China’s quasi-commercial space program. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

H3 rocket launches its fifth mission. Japan’s flagship H3 rocket successfully launched the Michibiki 6 navigation satellite early Sunday, enhancing the country’s regional GPS capabilities, Space News reports. The launch was Japan’s first of 2025 and suggests that the relatively new H3 rocket is starting to hit its stride.

Getting up to speed … The expendable launcher’s inaugural launch in March 2023, after numerous delays, suffered a second-stage engine failure, leading controllers to issue a destruct command to destroy the stage and its ALOS-3 payload. Since then, it has had a successful run of launches, most recently the Kirameki 3 communications satellite for defense purposes in November last year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin lays off 10 percent of its employees. A little less than a month after the successful debut of its New Glenn rocket, Blue Origin’s workforce will be trimmed by 10 percent, Ars reports. The cuts were announced during an all-hands meeting on Thursday morning led by the rocket company’s chief executive, Dave Limp. During the gathering, Limp cited business strategy as the rationale for making the cuts to a workforce of more than 10,000 people.

Growing too fast … “We grew and hired incredibly fast in the last few years, and with that growth came more bureaucracy and less focus than we needed,” Limp wrote in an email to the entire workforce after the meeting. Even before Thursday’s announcement, Blue Origin sought to control costs. According to sources, the company has had a hiring freeze for the last six months. And in January, it let the majority of its contractors go. Layoffs suck—here’s hoping that those let go this week find a soft landing.

Speaking of Blue, they’re targeting spring for next launch. Blue Origin expects to attempt its second New Glenn launch in late spring after correcting problems that prevented the booster from landing on the first launch last month, Space News reports. Speaking at the 27th Annual Commercial Space Conference on Wednesday, Dave Limp suggested a propulsion issue caused the loss of the New Glenn booster during its landing attempt on the Jan. 16 NG-1 launch.

Understanding the issues … “We had most of the right conditions in the engine but we weren’t able to get everything right to the engine from the tanks,” Limp said. “We think we understand what the issues are.” A second booster is in production. “I don’t think it’s going to delay our path to flight,” Limp said of the investigation. “I think we can still fly late spring.” June seems overly optimistic. One source with knowledge of the second booster’s production said October might be a more reasonable timeframe for the second launch.

Boeing warns of potential SLS workforce cuts. The primary contractor for the Space Launch System rocket, Boeing, is preparing for the possibility that NASA cancels the long-running program, Ars reports. Last Friday, with less than an hour’s notice, David Dutcher, Boeing’s vice president and program manager for the SLS rocket, scheduled an all-hands meeting for the approximately 800 employees working on the program. The apparently scripted meeting lasted just six minutes, and Dutcher didn’t take questions. Afterward, Ars learned that NASA was not informed the meeting would take place.

Waiting on the president’s budget request … During his remarks, Dutcher said Boeing’s contracts for the rocket could end in March and that the company was preparing for layoffs in case the contracts with the space agency were not renewed. The aerospace company, which is the primary contractor for the rocket’s large core stage, issued the notifications as part of the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (or WARN) Act. The timing of Friday’s hastily called meeting aligns with the anticipated release of President Trump’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, which should signal the administration’s direction on the SLS rocket.

Space Force is still waiting on Vulcan. Last October, United Launch Alliance started stacking its third Vulcan rocket on a mobile launch platform in Florida in preparation for a mission for the US Space Force by the end of the year. However, that didn’t happen, Ars reports. Now, ULA is still awaiting the Space Force’s formal certification of its new rocket, further pushing out delivery schedules for numerous military satellites booked to fly to orbit on the Vulcan launcher.

Falling short of ambitious goals … In fact, ULA has started to take the rocket apart. This involves removing the rocket’s Centaur upper stage, interstage adapter, and booster stage from its launch mount. Instead, ULA will now focus on launching a batch of Project Kuiper satellites for Amazon on an Atlas V rocket in the next couple of months before pivoting back to Vulcan. ULA hoped to launch as many as 20 missions in 2025, with roughly an even split between its new Vulcan rocket and the Atlas V heading for retirement. Clearly, this now won’t happen.

Next three launches

Feb. 15: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-8 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06: 14 UTC

Feb. 17: Falcon 9 | NROL-57 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 13: 18 UTC

Feb. 18: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-12 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 23: 00 UTC

Rocket Report: A blue mood at Blue; Stoke Space fires a shot over the bow Read More »

Rocket Report: Another hiccup with SpaceX upper stage; Japan’s H3 starts strong

ArianeGroup, Arianespace, blue origin, Commercial space, falcon 9, h3 rocket, Japan, launch, military space, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex, starship, vast / Kris Guyer / February 8, 2025

Vast’s schedule for deploying a mini-space station in low-Earth orbit was always ambitious.

A stack of 21 Starlink Internet satellites arrives in orbit Tuesday following launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.30 of the Rocket Report! The US government relies on SpaceX for a lot of missions. These include launching national security satellites, putting astronauts on the Moon, and global broadband communications. But there are hurdles—technical and, increasingly, political—on the road ahead. To put it generously, Elon Musk, without whom much of what SpaceX does wouldn’t be possible, is one of the most divisive figures in American life today.

Now, a Democratic lawmaker in Congress has introduced a bill that would end federal contracts for special government employees (like Musk), citing conflict-of-interest concerns. The bill will go nowhere with Republicans in control of Congress, but it is enough to make me pause and think. When the Trump era passes and a new administration takes the White House, how will they view Musk? Will there be an appetite to reduce the government’s reliance on SpaceX? To answer this question, you must first ask if the government will even have a choice. What if, as is the case in many areas today, there’s no viable replacement for the services offered by SpaceX?

Blue Origin flight focuses on lunar research. For the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has put its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship through a couple of minutes’ worth of Moon-level gravity, GeekWire reports. The uncrewed mission, known as NS-29, sent 30 research payloads on a 10-minute trip from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. For this trip, the crew capsule was spun up to 11 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the typical half-revolution per minute. The resulting centrifugal force was equivalent to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, which is what would be felt on the Moon.

Gee, that’s cool … The experiments aboard Blue Origin’s space capsule examined how to process lunar soil to extract resources and how to manufacture solar cells on the Moon for Blue Origin’s Blue Alchemist project. Another investigated how moondust gets electrically charged and levitated when exposed to ultraviolet light. These types of experiments in partial gravity can be done on parabolic airplane flights, but those only provide a few seconds of the right conditions to simulate the Moon’s gravity. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Orbex announces two-launch deal with D-Orbit. UK-based rocket builder Orbex announced Monday that it has signed a two-launch deal with Italian in-orbit logistics provider D-Orbit, European Spaceflight reports. The deal includes capacity aboard two launches on Orbex’s Prime rocket over the next three years. D-Orbit aggregates small payloads on rideshare missions (primarily on SpaceX rockets so far) and has an orbital transfer vehicle for ferrying satellites to different altitudes after separation from a launch vehicle. Orbex’s Prime rocket is sized for the small satellite industry, and the company aims to debut it later this year.

Thanks to fresh funding? … Orbex has provided only sparse updates on its progress toward launching the Prime rocket. What we do know is that Orbex suspended plans to develop a spaceport in Scotland to focus its resources on the Prime rocket itself. Despite little evidence of any significant accomplishments, Orbex last month secured a $25 million investment from the UK government. The timing of the launch agreement with D-Orbit begs the question of whether the UK government’s backing helped seal the deal. As Andrew Parsonson of European Spaceflight writes: “Is this a clear indication of how important strong institutional backing is for the growth of privately developed launch systems in Europe?” (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Sign Me Up!

Falcon 9’s upper stage misfires again. The second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket remained in orbit following a launch Saturday from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The rocket successfully deployed a new batch of Starlink Internet satellites but was supposed to reignite its engine for a braking maneuver to head for a destructive reentry over the Pacific Ocean. While airspace warning notices from the FAA showed a reentry zone over the eastern Pacific Ocean, publicly available US military tracking continued to show the upper stage in orbit this week. Sources also told Ars that SpaceX delayed two Falcon 9 launches this week by a day to allow time for engineers to evaluate the problem.

3 in 6 months … This is the third time since last July that the Falcon 9’s upper stage has encountered a problem in flight. On one occasion, the upper stage failed to reach its targeted orbit, leading to the destruction of 20 Starlink satellites. Then, an upper stage misfired during a deorbit burn after an otherwise successful launch in September, causing debris to fall outside of the pre-approved danger area. After both events, the FAA briefly grounded the Falcon 9 rocket while SpaceX conducted an investigation. This time, an FAA spokesperson said the agency won’t require an investigation. “All flight events occurred within the scope of SpaceX’s licensed activities,” the spokesperson told Ars.

Vast tests hardware for commercial space station. Vast Space has started testing a qualification model of its first commercial space station but has pushed back the launch of that station into 2026, Space News reports. In an announcement Thursday, Vast said it completed a proof test of the primary structure of a test version of its Haven-1 space station habitat at a facility in Mojave, California. During the testing, Vast pumped up the pressure inside the structure to 1.8 times its normal level and conducted a leak test. “On the first try we passed that critical test,” Max Haot, chief executive of Vast, told Space News.

Not this year … It’s encouraging to see Vast making tangible progress in developing its commercial space station. The privately held company is one of several seeking to develop a commercial outpost in low-Earth orbit to replace the International Space Station after its scheduled retirement in 2030. NASA is providing funding to two industrial teams led by Blue Origin and Voyager Space, which are working on different space station concepts. But so far, Vast’s work has been funded primarily through private capital. The launch of the Haven-1 outpost, which Vast previously said could happen this year, is now scheduled no earlier than May 2026. The spacecraft will launch in one piece on a Falcon 9 rocket, and the first astronaut crew to visit Haven-1 could launch a month later. Haven-1 is a pathfinder for a larger commercial station called Haven-2, which Vast intends to propose to NASA. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

H3 deploys Japanese navigation satellite. Japan successfully launched a flagship H3 rocket Sunday and put into orbit a Quasi-Zenith Satellite (QZS), aiming to improve the accuracy of global positioning data for various applications, Kyodo News reports. After separation from the H3 rocket, the Michibiki 6 satellite will climb into geostationary orbit, where it will supplement navigation signals from GPS satellites to provide more accurate positioning data to users in Japan and surrounding regions, particularly in mountainous terrain and amid high-rise buildings in large cities. The new satellite joins a network of four QZS spacecraft launched by Japan beginning in 2010. Two more Quasi-Zenith Satellites are under construction, and Japan’s government is expected to begin development of an additional four regional navigation satellites this year.

A good start … After a failed inaugural flight in 2023, Japan’s new H3 rocket has reeled off four consecutive successful launches in less than a year. This may not sound like a lot, but the H3 has achieved its first four successful flights faster than any other rocket since 2000. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket completed its first four successful flights in a little more than two years, and United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V logged its fourth flight in a similar timeframe. More than 14 months elapsed between the first and fourth successful flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. The H3 is an expendable rocket with no roadmap to reusability, so its service life and commercial potential are likely limited. But the rocket is shaping up to provide reliable access to space for Japan’s space agency and military, while some of its peers in Europe and the United States struggle to ramp up to a steady launch cadence. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Europe really doesn’t like relying on Elon Musk. Europe’s space industry has struggled to keep up with SpaceX for a decade. The writing was on the wall when SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster for the first time. Now, European officials are wary of becoming too reliant on SpaceX, and there’s broad agreement on the continent that Europe should have the capability to launch its own satellites. In this way, access to space is a strategic imperative for Europe. The problem is, Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket is just not competitive with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and there’s no concrete plan to counter SpaceX’s dominance.

So here’s another terrible idea … Airbus, Europe’s largest aerospace contractor with a 50 percent stake in the Ariane 6 program, has enlisted Goldman Sachs for advice on how to forge a new European space and satellite company to better compete with SpaceX. France-based Thales and the Italian company Leonardo are part of the talks, with Bank of America also advising on the initiative. The idea that some bankers from Goldman and Bank of America will go into the guts of some of Europe’s largest institutional space companies and emerge with a lean, competitive entity seems far-fetched, to put it mildly, Ars reports.

The FAA still has some bite. We’re now three weeks removed from the most recent test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which ended with the failure of the vehicle’s upper stage in the final moments of its launch sequence. The accident rained debris over the Atlantic Ocean and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and ordered an investigation into the accident on the day after the launch. This decision came three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who counts Musk as one of his top allies. So far, the FAA hasn’t budged on its requirement for an investigation, an agency spokesperson told Ars.

Debris field … In the hours and days after the failed Starship launch, residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos shared images of debris scattered across the islands and washing up onshore. The good news is there were no injuries or reports of significant damage from the wreckage, but the FAA confirmed one report of minor damage to a vehicle located in South Caicos. It’s rare for debris from US rockets to fall over land during a launch. This would typically only happen if a launch failed at certain parts of the flight. Before now, there has been no public record of any claims of third-party property damage in the era of commercial spaceflight.

DOD eager to reap the benefits of Starship. A Defense Department unit is examining how SpaceX’s Starship vehicle could be used to support a broader architecture of in-space refueling, Space News reports. A senior adviser at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) said SpaceX approached the agency about how Starship’s refueling architecture could be used by the wider space industry. The plan for Starship is to transfer cryogenic propellants between tankers, depots, and ships heading to the Moon, Mars, or other deep-space destinations.

Few details available … US military officials have expressed interest in orbital refueling to support in-space mobility, where ground controllers have the freedom to maneuver national security satellites between different orbits without worrying about running out of propellant. For several years, Space Force commanders and Pentagon officials have touted the importance of in-space mobility, or dynamic space operations, in a new era of orbital warfare. However, there are reports that the Space Force has considered zeroing out a budget line item for space mobility in its upcoming fiscal year 2026 budget request.

A small step toward a fully reusable European rocket. The French space agency CNES has issued a call for proposals to develop a reusable upper stage for a heavy-lift rocket, European Spaceflight reports. This project is named DEMESURE (DEMonstration Étage SUpérieur REutilisable / Reusable Upper Stage Demonstration), and it marks one of Europe’s first steps in developing a fully reusable rocket. That’s all good, but there’s a sense of tentativeness in this announcement. The current call for proposals will only cover the earliest phases of development, such as a requirements evaluation, cost estimation review, and a feasibility meeting. A future call will deal with the design and fabrication of a “reduced scale” upper stage, followed by a demonstration phase with a test flight, recovery, and reuse of the vehicle. CNES’s vision is to field a fully reusable rocket as a successor to the single-use Ariane 6.

Toes in the water … If you’re looking for reasons to be skeptical about Project DEMESURE, look no further than the Themis program, which aims to demonstrate the recovery and reuse of a booster stage akin to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Themis originated in a partnership between CNES and European industry in 2019, then ESA took over the project in 2020. Five years later, the Themis demonstrator still hasn’t flown. After some initial low-altitude hops, Themis is supposed to launch on a high-altitude test flight and maneuver through the entire flight profile of a reusable booster, from liftoff to a vertical propulsive landing. As we’ve seen with SpaceX, recovering an orbital-class upper stage is a lot harder than landing the booster. An optimistic view of this announcement is that anything worth doing requires taking a first step, and that’s what CNES has done here. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Feb. 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-9 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18: 52 UTC

Feb. 8: Electron | IoT 4 You and Me | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 20: 43 UTC

Feb. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 00: 03 UTC

Rocket Report: Another hiccup with SpaceX upper stage; Japan’s H3 starts strong Read More »

Rocket Report: SpaceX tosses away a Falcon 9; a Somalian spaceport?

rocket report, Space / Mike M. / February 1, 2025

All the news that’s fit to lift

“It was the perfect partnership and the biggest softball of all the opportunities.”

Falcon 9 launches the SpainSat NG I mission to orbit from Florida on Wednesday. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.29 of the Rocket Report! It may be difficult to believe, but we are already one full month into the new year. It will be hard to top this month in launch, however, given the historic debut of New Glenn, and fiery end of the seventh Starship flight test. And in truth, February does look a bit sleepier in terms of launch.

UK government injects $25 million into Orbex. As some European launch companies have struggled to raise funding, the United Kingdom government stepped up to make a significant investment in the Scotland-based launch firm Orbex, The Financial Times reports. As part of the company’s latest fundraising round, valued at $50 million (GBP 40 million), the UK government will become a shareholder in Orbex. The company is working to develop both a small- and medium-lift rocket. Phil Chambers, Orbex’s chief executive, said the UK support would be “a strong signal to other private investors, and to the European Space Agency and the EU, that we’re serious about being a part of the future of European launch.”

What’s the plan, fellas? … If we’re being frank, which is how we roll in the Rocket Report, some of Orbex’s recent activity does not inspire confidence. The company, for example, suspended plans to develop a spaceport at Sutherland in the Scottish Highlands to focus resources on developing the Prime microlauncher. And then it said it would develop the larger Proxima rocket as well. That seems pretty ambitious for what is, in the grand scheme of things, a relatively modest round of fundraising. Given that we have not seen a whole lot of hardware from Orbex, some skepticism is warranted. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Turkey may develop a spaceport in Somalia. Turkey has begun advancing plans to construct a rocket launch facility in Somalia, Space in Africa reports. Somali President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud said the project began in December. Mohamud emphasized the project’s potential benefits, highlighting its capacity to generate significant employment opportunities and revenue for the East Africa nation. “I believe that the importance of Somalia hosting a launchpad for Turkish satellites goes beyond the billions of dollars and opportunities the project will generate,” Mohamud said.

Nothing has been finalized yet … Located along the equator, Somalia fronts the Indian Ocean, offering an ideal launch location. The potential Somali launch site is part of Turkey’s broader aspirations to assert itself in the global space race, traditionally dominated by major powers. In 2021, Turkey unveiled a 10-year space road map that includes plans for missions to the moon, establishing a spaceport, and developing advanced satellite systems. Somalia, a key Turkish security partner since 2011, already hosts Turkey’s largest overseas training base.

Sign Me Up!

Firefly expands Alpha launch plans to Wallops and Sweden. Firefly Aerospace expects to start launching its Alpha rocket from launch sites in Virginia and Sweden as soon as 2026 to help the company avoid growing congestion at launch sites in Florida and California, Space News reports. So far, Alpha has only launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Firefly is planning five Alpha launches in 2025, all from Vandenberg. The company has performed five Alpha launches to date, going back to the failed inaugural launch in 2021.

Sweden, you say? … So what is up with those plans to launch from Sweden? Adam Oakes, vice president of launch vehicles at Firefly, said the Esrange Space Centre in Sweden was an ideal partner. “Esrange has basically done everything for the science community in space except an orbital rocket,” he said, citing the more than 600 sounding rocket launches there as well as experience with ground stations. “It was the perfect partnership and the biggest softball of all the opportunities out there.” It still feels a bit odd, as Vandenberg already offers polar launch corridors, as well as Alpha-size commercial European launch vehicles coming along soon. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

MaiaSpace targets 2026 for debut launch. A subsidiary of ArianeGroup that is developing a two-stage partially reusable rocket, MaiaSpace is one of the more interesting European launch startups. The company’s chief executive, Yohann Leroy, recently spoke with Europe in Space to discuss the company’s plans. The company will likely start off with a suborbital test flight of a launcher capable of boosting 500 kg to low-Earth orbit in reusable mode and 1,500 kg in expendable mode during the middle of next year.

Following an iterative design method … “Our approach is to test our rocket in flight as early as possible, following our test-and-learn iterative approach,” Leroy said. “We are convinced we will go faster this way, rather than spending time in the lab making sure the first flight reaches 100 percent of our performance targets. In short, we are ready to trade lift-off performance for time-saving, knowing that we will quickly recover our performance afterward. What’s important is to stick to our objective of starting commercial operations in the second half of 2026, and we’re on track to reach this goal.” (submitted by RB)

Arianespace inking deals for its new rocket. Arianespace currently has a backlog of 30 Ariane 6 launches, 18 of which are for Amazon’s Kuiper constellation. However, it has recently begun to add Europe-based launch contracts for the rocket. During signing events at the 17th European Space Conference in late January, Arianespace secured contracts for three Ariane 6 flights, European Spaceflight reports.

Getting into operations … The missions are the European Space Agency’s PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars (PLATO) mission, the Sentinel-1D Earth observation satellite that will replace Sentinel-1A, and a pair of second-generation Galileo satellites. After completing a largely successful debut flight last year, the first operational flight of Ariane is scheduled for February 26, carrying the CSO-3 reconnaissance satellite for the French Armed Forces. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX expends a Falcon 9 rocket. On Wednesday, SpaceX launched the SpainSat NG-1 satellite from Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A. The Falcon 9 first-stage booster used on this launch saw its 21st and final flight, Florida Today reports. SpaceX said the reason it was not trying to recover the booster was due to the extra power needed to reach the satellite’s intended orbit.

Into the drink … The well-traveled booster had launched a variety of missions during its lifetime: 13 Starlink missions, SES-22, ispace’s HAKUTO-R MISSION 1, Amazonas-6, CRS-27, Bandwagon-1, GSAT-20, and Thuraya-4. The Airbus-built satellite, known as SpainSat NG-1 (New Generation), is the first of two satellites for Hisdesat. It was developed under a partnership with the European Space Agency, making its launch on a Falcon 9 somewhat notable.

India marks first launch of 2025. India conducted its first launch of the year late Tuesday, sending a new-generation navigation satellite toward geostationary orbit, Space News reports. A Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle Mk II lifted off from Satish Dhawan Space Centre. Aboard was the NVS-02 satellite, sent into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The satellite is the second of five new-generation spacecraft for the Navigation with Indian Constellation.

A busy year planned … The mission was the first of 10 orbital launches planned by India in 2025, which would mark a domestic launch record. Major missions include a joint Earth science mission between NASA and ISRO, named NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar, expected to launch around March on a GSLV rocket, and an uncrewed test flight for the Gaganyaan human spaceflight program on a human-rated LVM-3 launcher. The first launch of the Vikram-1 for private company Skyroot Aerospace could also take place this year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

New Glenn represents a milestone moment for Blue Origin. In a feature, Ars Technica explores what the successful launch of the New Glenn rocket means for Blue Origin. The near-term step is clear: getting better at building engines and rockets and flying New Glenn regularly. In an interview, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos sounded a lot like SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who has spoken about “building the machine that builds the machine” over the last decade with respect to both Tesla vehicles and SpaceX rockets. Asked about Blue’s current priorities, Bezos responded, “Rate manufacturing and driving urgency around the machine that makes the machine.”

The tortoise and the hare … There are those who wonder why Blue Origin, which has a “tortoise” as its unofficial mascot, has moved so slowly when compared to SpaceX’s progress over the last quarter of a century. Bezos responded that the space age is just beginning. “It’s still absolutely day one,” he said. “There are going to be multiple winners. SpaceX is going to be successful. Blue Origin is going to be successful. And there are other companies who haven’t even been founded yet that are going to grow into fantastic, giant space companies. So the vision that I think people should have is that this is the absolute beginning.”

Space Force has big dreams for ULA this year. The US Space Force is projecting 11 national security launches aboard United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket in 2025, Space News reports. This ambitious schedule comes as the National Security Space Launch program continues to wait on Vulcan’s readiness. The heavy lift rocket, which debuted last year after prolonged schedule setbacks, is a cornerstone of the national security’s Phase 2 program, under which ULA was selected in 2020 as the primary launch provider for national security missions through 2027.

That seems like a lot … However, Vulcan remains under review, with certification expected in late February following its second demonstration flight in October 2024. There is a lot of pressure on ULA to execute with Vulcan, due not only to the need to fly out Phase 2 launches, but because the military is nearing a decision on how to award launch contracts under Phase 3 of the program. The more complex “Lane 2” missions are likely to be divided up between ULA and SpaceX. Reaching 11 national security launches on Vulcan this year seems like a stretch for ULA. The company probably will only launch two rockets during the first half of this year, one of which probably will be an Atlas V booster. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

April 2026 a “no later than” date for Artemis II. In a Space News article citing current contractors defending NASA’s Artemis plan to return humans to the Moon, a space agency official said the current timeline for Artemis II is achievable. April 2026 is actually a no-later-than date for the mission, Matt Ramsay, Artemis 2 mission manager at NASA, said during a panel discussion. “The agency has challenged us to do better, and we’re in the process of figuring out what better looks like,” he said, with a “work-to” launch date coming in the next few weeks.

NET or NLT? … This is interesting, because a good source told Ars about a month ago that the present date for the Artemis II mission to fly astronauts around the Moon has almost no schedule margin. However, Ramsay said the key factor driving the launch date will be work assembling the vehicle. Crews are currently stacking segments of the SLS’s twin solid rocket boosters, a process that should be complete in the next two to three weeks. This all assumes the Artemis II mission goes forward as designed. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Next three launches

Jan. 31: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-4 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 23: 11 UTC

Feb. 2: H3 | Demo Flight | Michibiki 6 | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 8: 30 UTC

Feb. 3: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-3 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 8: 54 UTC

Rocket Report: SpaceX tosses away a Falcon 9; a Somalian spaceport? Read More »

Rocket Report: Did China’s reusable rocket work?; DOT may review SpaceX fines

rocket report, Science, Space / Paul Patrick / January 25, 2025

Rocket Lab announced it will soon launch a batch of eight German-owned wildfire-detection satellites.

The Chinese Longxing-2 rocket is erected at Haiyang Dongfang Spaceport in Shandong province on January 13, 2025. This single stage booster lifted off January 19 on a high-altitude demonstration flight to test reusable rocket technology, but the outcome of the test remains unclear. Credit: Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Welcome to Edition 7.28 of the Rocket Report! After last week’s jam-packed action in the launch business, things are a bit quieter this week. Much of the space world’s attention has turned to Washington as the Trump administration takes the helm of the federal government. Some of the administration’s policy changes will likely impact the launch industry, with commercial spaceflight poised to become a beneficiary of actions over the next four years. As for the specifics, Ars has reported that NASA is expected to review the future of the Space Launch System rocket. Investments in the military space program could bring in more business for launch companies. And regulatory changes may reduce government oversight of commercial spaceflight.

What happened to China’s reusable rocket testbed? A Chinese state-owned company performed a rocket flight on January 18 (US time) aimed at testing reusable launch vehicle technology without announcing the outcome, Space News reports. The Longxing-2 test article lifted off from a makeshift launch area near Haiyang, Shandong province. The methane-fueled rocket was expected to fly to an altitude of 75 kilometers (about 246,000 feet) before performing a reentry burn and a landing burn to guide itself to a controlled splashdown in the Yellow Sea, replicating the maneuvers required to recover a reusable booster like the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This was China’s most ambitious reusable rocket demonstration flight to date.

State-sanctioned silence … Amateur footage near the launch area showed the rocket rise slowly from the tower and perform an ascent phase with no apparent anomalies. But the video ended before the rocket descended to Earth, and there have been no official updates on the results of the test flight from the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), the state-owned enterprise responsible for the demonstration. SAST published results and video footage of a previous reusable rocket demonstration to an altitude of 12 kilometers last year. The lack of official updates this time raises questions about the success of the test, which could indicate challenges during reentry or landing phases. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A timely launch for Rocket Lab. A dedicated flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron launcher will soon deploy eight small spacecraft for a German company building a constellation of wildfire-monitoring satellites. Rocket Lab announced the deal Wednesday, saying the mission will launch from the company’s spaceport in New Zealand. The eight satellites are owned by the German startup OroraTech. Rocket Lab said the launch will take place within “just a few weeks,” representing a relatively quick turnaround from contract signing to liftoff. This schedule will allow OroraTech to “meet the season-sensitive requirements of its wildfire-detection mission,” Rocket Lab said.

Infrared eyes … OroraTech’s satellites will host thermal infrared cameras to provide 24/7 monitoring of wildfires globally, supporting better and faster wildfire response to protect forests, people, and infrastructure, according to Rocket Lab. These eight satellites follow the launch of OroraTech’s first three prototype wildfire-detection spacecraft since 2022. The company plans to expand its constellation with up to 100 satellites by 2028. While this launch isn’t directly tied to the ongoing wildfire crisis in Southern California, OroraTech’s mission highlights the role of space-based detection for future firefighters. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Sign Me Up!

US green-lights space-related exports to Norway. The United States and Norway have signed an agreement to allow the export of American space hardware to Norway for launches there, Space News reports. The Technology Safeguards Agreement, or TSA, ensures the protection of US space technology exported to Norway. It allows for American satellites and potentially launch vehicles to operate from Andøya Spaceport, located on an island above the Arctic Circle in Norway.

A valuable alliance … There are no US companies with publicly known plans to launch from Andøya, but the US military has touted the value of allies in funding, launching, and operating space-based platforms for communications, navigation, and reconnaissance. This agreement, announced on January 16 in the final days of the Biden administration, follows similar space tech transfer agreements with New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. The German rocket startup Isar Aerospace is scheduled to launch its first Spectrum rocket from the Norwegian spaceport as soon as this year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Lunar lander test-fires uprated rocket engine. The Leros 4 rocket engine, developed by Nammo UK in Buckinghamshire, has successfully ignited in space, powering the Firefly Aerospace Blue Ghost lunar lander, European Spaceflight reports. This is a higher-thrust version of Nammo’s flight-proven Leros engine design that has provided propulsion for NASA probes to the planets and for numerous telecommunications satellites. Like other engines in the Leros line, the Leros 4 consumes a bipropellant mix of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, which combust when coming into contact with one another.

Thrusting toward the Moon … Firefly announced the successful main engine burn Sunday to begin raising the Blue Ghost spacecraft’s orbit around the Earth. Subsequent burns will further raise the craft’s altitude before eventually attaining enough speed to reach the Moon for a landing in early March. This is the first time a Leros 4 engine has fired in space. The variant flying on Blue Ghost is known as the “Leros 4-Extra Thrust” version, and it provides approximately 294 pounds of thrust (1,310 newtons), roughly double the power of Nammo’s next-largest engine. It’s designed specifically for interplanetary missions and is particularly well-suited for lunar landers because it can sustain thrust for lengthy burns or pulse at high frequency to control a spacecraft’s descent rate toward the Moon’s surface.

Trump’s DOT nominee says he’ll review FAA’s SpaceX fines. President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the US Transportation Department said he’d review penalties aviation regulators have proposed against SpaceX if confirmed for the role, Bloomberg reports. Transportation Secretary nominee Sean Duffy told senators during a hearing on January 15 that he’d also look into “what’s been happening at the FAA with regard to launches.” Last year, the FAA proposed more than $633,000 in fines on SpaceX due to alleged violations of the company’s launch license associated with two flights of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. It is rare for the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division to fine launch companies.

It’s about more than the money … In addition to the proposed fines related to SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, Elon Musk’s space company has also criticized regulators for taking too much time to review applications for launch licenses for the Starship mega-rocket. Some of the regulatory reviews were triggered by environmental concerns rather than public safety, which the FAA is responsible for ensuring during commercial rocket launches and reentries. Musk’s close relationship with Trump has led to speculation that the FAA will now have a lighter touch with SpaceX. So far, there’s no clear evidence of this happening, but it warrants observation. The FAA ordered a grounding of SpaceX’s Starship rocket after a failure of a test flight on January 16, and there’s been no announcement of a change in the agency’s posture regarding this test flight.

Falcon 9 flexes its muscles. SpaceX launched its latest batch of Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on Tuesday, and this time, the company set a new record by deploying 27 second-generation Starlinks on the same rocket, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission was delayed from Sunday after an aircraft strayed into a keep-out zone near the launch site. This launch included a new type of Starlink spacecraft bus, or chassis, called the Starlink V2 Mini Optimized version. These satellites are considerably lighter than the previous V2 Mini design but also debut upgrades, such as a new backhaul antenna with a SpaceX-designed and built dual-band chip and improved avionics, propulsion, and power systems.

29 at a time … This means SpaceX can launch up to 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites on a single Falcon 9 rocket. Before now, SpaceX never launched more than 24 V2 Mini satellites on a single flight. SpaceX has launched the V2 Mini satellite design since 2023. Initially, this design was supposed to be a stopgap until SpaceX began launching much larger Starlink V3 satellites on the Starship rocket. However, SpaceX has now launched more than 3,000 V2 Mini satellites, and the debut of the optimized version suggests SpaceX plans to keep the V2 Mini around for a while longer.

Coming together in Kourou. ArianeGroup has shared that the core stage and two solid-fueled boosters for the second flight of the Ariane 6 rocket have been assembled on the ELA-4 launch pad at the Guiana Space Center in South America, European Spaceflight reports. At the same time, the flight’s payload, the French military CSO-3 spy satellite, arrived at Félix Eboué airport in French Guiana aboard an Antonov transport plane. With the launch campaign in full swing in French Guiana, it’s likely that the liftoff of the second Ariane 6 flight is just a few weeks away. The most recent publicly available schedule showed the launch is slated for February 25, but this information is now a couple of months old.

What it was made for … This launch follows the largely successful inaugural flight of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket last July, in which the launcher deployed multiple CubeSats into an on-target orbit, but faltered before completing a deorbit burn to maneuver the upper stage toward reentry. Nevertheless, European officials are confident the issue that caused the upper-stage problem last year will not affect the upcoming launch of the French military’s newest surveillance satellite. This is the kind of mission the often-criticized Ariane 6 rocket was made for—launching a sensitive and costly European government payload to orbit with a European rocket from European territory. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Jan. 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-6 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 14: 07 UTC

Jan. 25: Long March 8A | Demo Flight | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 10: 00 UTC

Jan. 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-7 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 19: 21 UTC

Rocket Report: Did China’s reusable rocket work?; DOT may review SpaceX fines Read More »

Rocket Report: Starship experiences a RUD; Blue Origin nails its debut launch

rocket report, Space / Tim Belzer / January 18, 2025

“The computed numbers below prove that this is quite feasible with margins to spare.”

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launches from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station early on Thursday morning. Credit: Blue Origin

Welcome to Edition 7.27 of the Rocket Report! Thursday was an eventful day in super heavy lift launch, with Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket having a highly successful debut launch before dawn in Florida, at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Then, on Thursday afternoon, an upgraded Starship took flight from South Texas. The first stage performed well, but the Starship upper stage experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent. Ars will, of course, have full and ongoing coverage.

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.

RFA receives launch license. The UK Civil Aviation Authority has issued Rocket Factory Augsburg a vertical launch license to conduct the inaugural flight of its RFA ONE rocket from SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, European Spaceflight reports. The license is for the launch of the company’s RFA One rocket, which has an advertised payload of 1.3 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. RFA said it intends to complete the launch sometime this year.

A new era for BritSpace… The company might have launched sooner, but last year, a fire during testing destroyed the rocket’s first stage, forcing RFA to build a replacement before proceeding with the initial launch attempt. An orbital-class rocket has never launched in a vertical configuration before from the United Kingdom, and no rocket has ever successfully reached orbit from there. “This is a new era for aerospace, and granting the first vertical launch license from UK soil builds toward a historic milestone for the nation,” said Rob Bishton, chief executive of the civil authority. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Chinese rocket launches from sea platform. China launched a Jielong-3 solid rocket from a mobile sea platform late Sunday, successfully placing 10 Centispace navigation enhancement satellites into orbit, Space News reports. This was the fifth Jielong-3 (or Smart Dragon-3) solid propellant rocket, and it lifted off from a specially converted sea barge off the coast of Haiyang city in the Eastern province of Shandong.

Seeking to scale up quickly… The launch was carried out using facilities belonging to the Haiyang Eastern spaceport for sea launches. The spaceport plans more than 10 for 2025, having conducted six sea launches in 2024. The launch was China’s second orbital launch attempt of 2025 and the second success in as many tries.

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Utah considering a spaceport. State Sen. Jerry Stevenson has introduced a bill to form a committee that would investigate whether Utah should invest in a spaceport and what benefits it could bring to the state, KUTV Salt Lake City reports. The legislation would provide $500,000 for a committee to study the potential benefits of a launch site. Stevenson said the committee would look into both scientific uses and opportunities to expand Utah’s tourism industry, but questions remain over whether such a taxpayer-funded investment makes financial sense.

Something to build on… When asked how the state would get a return on its investment, Stevenson said the spaceport would align with Utah’s current industries and infrastructure. “We think that this fits very well into what’s going on in the state of Utah and what’s already here and what we can build on,” Stevenson said. Still, critics wondered if the state should focus on space tourism, especially given the potential costs, possibly on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Stoke Space goes nova in fundraising round. The Washington-based launch company announced Wednesday that it had raised $260 million in Series C funding, a significant capital raise at a time when it has become more difficult for some space companies to attract funding, Ars reports. “The market is tough, but I think what we’re doing is poised to go straight to the end state of the industry, and I think investors recognize that,” said Andy Lapsa, Stoke Space’s co-founder and chief executive officer.

Full reuse right out of the gate… By “end state of the industry,” Lapsa means that Stoke is developing a fully reusable medium-lift rocket named Nova. The vehicle’s first stage will land vertically, similar to a Falcon 9 rocket, and the second stage, which has a novel metallic heat shield and engine design, will also land back on Earth. Historically, it is unlikely for a company to move from engine testing to a first orbital launch attempt in the same year, so a Nova debut in 2026 seems more likely. Nevertheless, the new funding from investors signals confidence that Stoke is making credible technical progress on its vehicle development. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

The initial launch plan for Neutron. Rocket Lab is closing in on the completion of its Neutron rocket, and the company plans to launch the medium-lift booster for the first time later this year. With a capacity of 13 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, the rocket will be sold at a cost of $50 million to undersell SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket for megaconstellation launches. Falcon 9 can launch 17.5 metric tons to LEO in a reusable configuration, which is often a higher capability than the customer needs, Payload reports. So on a price-per-launch basis, if Neutron can deliver, it could provide credible competition.

A slow ramp-up… Rocket Lab intends to launch a single Neutron this year, followed by three rockets in 2026 and five in 2027. This may not be as flashy as saying the company will ramp up to a dozen rockets next year, but I appreciate the realism in launch cadence. Companies never increase their launch cadence as quickly as they say they will. However, speaking of realism, it’s realistic to question whether Neutron will actually make it to the launch pad this year. I’d bet no, but I’d love to be proven wrong.

Two lunar landers launch on Falcon 9. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday and deployed two commercial lunar landers on separate trajectories to reach the Moon in the next few months, Ars reports. It took about an hour and a half for the Falcon 9 rocket to release both payloads into two slightly different orbits, ranging up to 200,000 and 225,000 miles (322,000 and 362,000 kilometers) from Earth.

A lunar double shot… The two robotic lunar landers—one from Firefly Aerospace based near Austin, Texas, and another from the Japanese space company ispace—will use their own small engines for the final maneuvers required to enter orbit around the Moon in the coming months. Firefly and ispace reported that their landers, each about the size of an SUV, were healthy as ground teams in Texas and Japan activated the spacecraft soon after their separation from the Falcon 9 launch vehicle.

ArianeGroup completes Prometheus engine test. Although it was not revealed until January 9, ArianeGroup completed a successful hot fire test of the Prometheus rocket engine in late December 2024, European Spaceflight reports. European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher referred to the “very important” test during his annual press briefing. Afterward, an ESA spokesperson confirmed that the test had taken place on December 19 on the PF20 test bench at the ArianeGroup facilities in Vernon, France.

A nominal test… The test of the liquid oxygen and biomethane engine lasted for 41 seconds, with the engine reaching 100 percent of its thrust. Prometheus is slated to initially power the Themis reusable booster demonstrator, a project also being developed by ArianeGroup under an ESA contract. In addition to its use by Themis, Prometheus will also be utilized by ArianeGroup subsidiary MaiaSpace to power its partially reusable Maia rocket. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

The hidden MVP of SpaceX’s high cadence. On any given day, SpaceX is probably launching a Falcon 9 rocket, rolling one out to the launch pad, or bringing one back into port. With three active Falcon 9 launch pads and an increasing cadence at the Starbase facility in Texas, SpaceX’s teams are often doing all three. The company achieved another milestone last Friday with the 25th successful launch and landing of a single Falcon 9 booster. This rocket, designated B1067, launched a batch of 21 Starlink Internet satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Ars has reported on these rocket reuse milestones before, but SpaceX is breaking its own records so often that we’ve dialed back our coverage.

Building a lot of upper stages… SpaceX’s accomplishment of 25 flights offers an opportunity to step back and take in some context. Although everyone focuses on reuse, SpaceX is still building new second stages for every launch. The task of building so many spaceships in a year is a tall order. While SpaceX’s competency with reusing Falcon 9 boosters gets a lot of attention—landing a rocket is still incredible, even after seeing it nearly 400 times—the high-rate manufacturing of Falcon 9 upper stages is the secret MVP. It also suggests that the company’s goal to build 100 Starships a year is not crazy.

New Glenn makes a triumphant first flight. For the first time since its founding nearly a quarter of a century ago, Blue Origin has reached orbit. The long-awaited debut launch of the New Glenn rocket, a super-heavy lift vehicle developed largely with private funding, was a smashing success in its debut launch early on Thursday morning, Ars reports. The launch occurred a little more than one hour into the launch window. Liftoff was delayed, at first, by an unspecified issue with properly chilling the BE-4 engines ahead of launch. Then there was a wayward boat.

No landing, no problem… Ultimately, the rocket launched at 2: 03 am in the morning, local time, at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The first and second stages both appeared to perform nominally, and the Blue Ring pathfinder was put into its intended orbit. The only downer came a bit later when Blue Origin’s Ariane Cornell confirmed that the first stage did not successfully return to a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. But no one who really understands the difficulties of launching and landing rockets believed that Blue Origin would succeed in catching its first orbital booster, and the company deserves credit for making the attempt rather than criticism for failing to stick the landing.

How to do Artemis without SLS or Starship. There has been a lot of discussion about potential changes to the Artemis Program under the incoming Trump administration, including on Ars. In The Space Review, engineer Ajay Kothari offers an architecture that is based on the Falcon Heavy rocket rather than NASA’s Space Launch System or SpaceX’s Starship rocket. “The computed numbers below prove that this is quite feasible with margins to spare,” Kothari wrote about using Falcon Heavy to get Orion to the Moon. “Although three dockings in LEO would be required for the Orion, there is no refueling need and it is a much smaller number than the Starship HLS refueling estimates.”

There is a catch… Because there is always a catch, right? Kothari writes: “The lander would have to be built by NASA. It would be like the Apollo 17 Lunar Module, called Challenger, which carried two astronauts to the surface from LLO. It had a mass of 16.5 tons, so the new one here is bookkept at 18 tons wet mass, including higher consumable for a 6.5-day stay.” If we’re being realistic, if NASA were to put out a call for bids for a lunar lander tomorrow, it would not have one in hand before the end of the decade at the very earliest. So if NASA is going to the lunar surface in the 2020s, it’s likely Starship or bust.

Upgraded Ariane booster to undergo tests. The European Space Agency will begin testing the P160 solid-fuel booster in March 2025, European Spaceflight reports. The booster, which is to be strapped onto the Ariane 6 rocket, will replace the current P120 booster and will be a key element in enabling Arianespace to deliver on an 18-launch contract for Amazon. For 16 of its 18 missions for Amazon to launch Project Kuiper satellites, the Ariane 6 rocket will launch with four of the more powerful boosters.

Don’t forget about Vega… The P160 motor will replace the P120 booster currently in service. The upgraded boosters will increase the capacity of the Ariane 6 rocket by about 2 tons to low-Earth orbit. In addition to Ariane 6, the P160 boosters will also be utilized by Avio aboard the upgraded Vega C+ and the company’s next-generation Vega E rocket. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Jan. 18: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-8 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 15: 57 UTC

Jan. 21: Falcon 9 | Starlink 13-1 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 05: 13 UTC

Jan. 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-6 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 14: 38 UTC

Rocket Report: Starship experiences a RUD; Blue Origin nails its debut launch Read More »

Rocket Report: China launches refueling demo; DoD’s big appetite for hypersonics

blue origin, china, hypersonic vehicles, launch, military space, NASA, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex, starship / Tim Belzer / January 10, 2025

We’re just a few days away from getting a double-dose of heavy-lift rocket action.

Stratolaunch’s Talon-A hypersonic rocket plane will be used for military tests involving hypersonic missile technology. Credit: Stratolaunch

Welcome to Edition 7.26 of the Rocket Report! Let’s pause and reflect on how far the rocket business has come in the last 10 years. On this date in 2015, SpaceX made the first attempt to land a Falcon 9 booster on a drone ship positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Not surprisingly, the rocket crash-landed. In less than a year and a half, though, SpaceX successfully landed reusable Falcon 9 boosters onshore and offshore, and now has done it nearly 400 times. That was remarkable enough, but we’re in a new era now. Within a few days, we could see SpaceX catch its second Super Heavy booster and Blue Origin land its first New Glenn rocket on an offshore platform. Extraordinary.

Our annual ranking of the top 10 US launch companies. You can easily guess who made the top of the list: the company that launched Falcon rockets 134 times in 2024 and launched the most powerful and largest rocket ever built on four test flights, each accomplishing more than the last. The combined 138 launches is more than NASA flew the Space Shuttle over three decades. SpaceX will aim to launch even more often in 2025. These missions have far-reaching impacts, supporting Internet coverage for consumers worldwide, launching payloads for NASA and the US military, and testing technology that will take humans back to the Moon and, someday, Mars.

Are there really 10? … It might also be fairly easy to rattle off a few more launch companies that accomplished big things in 2024. There’s United Launch Alliance, which finally debuted its long-delayed Vulcan rocket and flew two Atlas V missions and the final Delta IV mission, and Rocket Lab, which launched 16 missions with its small Electron rocket this year. Blue Origin flew its suborbital New Shepard vehicle on three human missions and one cargo-only mission and nearly launched its first orbital-class New Glenn rocket in 2024. That leaves just Firefly Aerospace as the only other US company to reach orbit last year.

DoD announces lucrative hypersonics deal. Defense technology firm Kratos has inked a deal worth up to $1.45 billion with the Pentagon to help develop a low-cost testbed for hypersonic technologies, Breaking Defense reports. The award is part of the military’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) 2.0 program. The MACH-TB program, which began as a US Navy effort, includes multiple “Task Areas.” For its part, Kratos will be tasked with “systems engineering, integration, and testing, to include integrated subscale, full-scale, and air launch services to address the need to affordably increase hypersonic flight test cadence,” according to the company’s release.

Multiple players … The team led by Kratos, which specializes in developing airborne drones and military weapons systems, includes several players such as Leidos, Rocket Lab, Stratolaunch, and others. Kratos last year revealed that its Erinyes hypersonic test vehicle successfully flew for a Missile Defense Agency experiment. Rocket Lab has launched multiple suborbital hypersonic experiments for the military using a modified version of its Electron rocket, and Stratolaunch reportedly flew a high-speed test vehicle and recovered it last month, according to Aviation Week & Space Technology. The Pentagon is interested in developing hypersonic weapons that can evade conventional air and missile defenses. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

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ESA will modify some of its geo-return policies. An upcoming European launch competition will be an early test of efforts by the European Space Agency to modify its approach to policies that link contracts to member state contributions, Space News reports. ESA has long used a policy known as geo-return, where member states are guaranteed contracts with companies based in their countries in proportion to the contribution those member states make to ESA programs.

The third rail of European space … Advocates of geo-return argue that it provides an incentive for countries to fund those programs. This incentivizes ESA to lure financial contributions from its member states, which will win guaranteed business and jobs from the agency’s programs. However, critics of geo-return, primarily European companies, claim that it creates inefficiencies that make them less competitive. One approach to revising geo-return is known as “fair contribution,” where ESA first holds competitions for projects, and member states then make contributions based on how companies in their countries fared in the competition. ESA will try the fair contribution approach for the upcoming launch competition to award contracts to European rocket startups. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

RFA is building a new rocket. German launch services provider Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) is currently focused on building a new first stage for the inaugural flight of its RFA One rocket, European Spaceflight reports. The stage that was initially earmarked for the flight was destroyed during a static fire test last year on a launch pad in Scotland. In a statement given to European Spaceflight, RFA confirmed that it expects to attempt an inaugural flight of RFA One in 2025.

Waiting on a booster … RFA says it is “fully focused on building a new first stage and qualifying it.” The rocket’s second stage and Redshift OTV third stage are already qualified for flight and are being stored until a new first stage is ready. The RFA One rocket will stand 98 feet (30 meters) tall and will be capable of delivering payloads of up to 1.3 metric tons (nearly 2,900 pounds) into polar orbits. RFA is one of several European startups developing commercial small satellite launchers and was widely considered the frontrunner before last year’s setback. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Pentagon provides a boost for defense startup. Defense technology contractor Anduril Industries has secured a $14.3 million Pentagon contract to expand solid-fueled rocket motor production, as the US Department of Defense moves to strengthen domestic manufacturing capabilities amid growing supply chain concerns, Space News reports. The contract, awarded under the Defense Production Act, will support facility modernization and manufacturing improvements at Anduril’s Mississippi plant, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

Doing a solid … The Pentagon is keen to incentivize new entrants into the solid rocket manufacturing industry, which provides propulsion for missiles, interceptors, and other weapons systems. Two traditional defense contractors, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris, control almost all US solid rocket production. Companies like Anduril, Ursa Major, and X-Bow are developing solid rocket motor production capability. The Navy previously awarded Anduril a $19 million contract last year to develop solid rocket motors for the Standard Missile 6 program. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Relativity’s value seems to be plummeting. For several years, an innovative, California-based launch company named Relativity Space has been the darling of investors and media. But the honeymoon appears to be over, Ars reports. A little more than a year ago, Relativity reached a valuation of $4.5 billion following its latest Series F fundraising round. This was despite only launching one rocket and then abandoning that program and pivoting to the development of a significantly larger reusable launch vehicle. The decision meant Relativity would not realize any significant revenue for several years, and Ars reported in September on some of the challenges the company has encountered developing the much larger Terran R rocket.

Gravity always wins … Relativity is a privately held company, so its financial statements aren’t public. However, we can glean some clues from the published quarterly report from Fidelity Investments, which owns Relativity shares. As of March 2024, Fidelity valued its 1.67 million shares at an estimated $31.8 million. However, in a report ending November 29 of last year, which was only recently published, Fidelity’s valuation of Relativity plummeted. Its stake in Relativity was then thought to be worth just $866,735—a per-share value of 52 cents. Shares in the other fundraising rounds are also valued at less than $1 each.

SpaceX has already launched four times this year. The space company is off to a fast start in 2025, with four missions in the first nine days of the year. Two of these missions launched Starlink internet satellites, and the other two deployed an Emirati-owned geostationary communications satellite and a batch of Starshield surveillance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. In its new year projections, SpaceX estimates it will launch more than 170 Falcon rockets, between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, Spaceflight Now reports. This is in addition to SpaceX’s plans for up to 25 flights of the Starship rocket from Texas.

What’s in store this year?… Highlights of SpaceX’s launch manifest this year will likely include an attempt to catch and recover Starship after returning from orbit, a first in-orbit cryogenic propellant transfer demonstration with Starship, and perhaps the debut of a second launch pad at Starbase in South Texas. For the Falcon rocket fleet, notable missions this year will include launches of commercial robotic lunar landers for NASA’s CLPS program and several crew flights, including the first human spaceflight mission to fly in polar orbit. According to public schedules, a Falcon 9 rocket could launch a commercial mini-space station for Vast, a privately held startup, before the end of the year. That would be a significant accomplishment, but we won’t be surprised if this schedule moves to the right.

China is dipping its toes into satellite refueling. China kicked off its 2025 launch activities with the successful launch of the Shijian-25 satellite Monday, aiming to advance key technologies for on-orbit refueling and extending satellite lifespans, Space News reports. The satellite launched on a Long March 3B into a geostationary transfer orbit, suggesting the unspecified target spacecraft for the refueling demo test might be in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator.

Under a watchful eye … China has tested mission extension and satellite servicing capabilities in space before. In 2021, China launched a satellite named Shijian-21, which docked a defunct Beidou navigation satellite and towed it to a graveyard orbit above the geostationary belt. Reportedly, Shijian-21 satellite may have carried robotic arms to capture and manipulate other objects in space. These kinds of technologies are dual-use, meaning they have civilian and military applications. The US Space Force is also interested in satellite life extension and refueling tech, so US officials will closely monitor Shijian-25’s actions in orbit.

SpaceX set to debut upgraded Starship. An upsized version of SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week, Ars reports. The rocket could lift off as soon as Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase test facility in South Texas. This flight is the seventh full-scale demonstration launch for Starship. The rocket will test numerous upgrades, including a new flap design, larger propellant tanks, redesigned propellant feed lines, a new avionics system, and an improved antenna for communications and navigation.

The new largest rocket … Put together, all of these changes to the ship raise the rocket’s total height by nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters), so it now towers 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. With this change, SpaceX will break its own record for the largest rocket ever launched. SpaceX plans to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in Texas and will target a controlled splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean.

Blue Origin targets weekend launch of New Glenn. Blue Origin is set to launch its New Glenn rocket in a long-delayed, uncrewed test mission that would help pave the way for the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos to compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Washington Post reports. Blue Origin has confirmed it plans to launch the 320-foot-tall rocket during a three-hour launch window opening at 1 am EDT (06: 00 UTC) Sunday in the company’s first attempt to reach orbit.

Finally … This is a much-anticipated milestone for Blue Origin and for the company’s likely customers, which include the Pentagon and NASA. Data from this test flight will help the Space Force certify New Glenn to loft national security satellites, providing a new competitor for SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in the heavy-lift segment of the market. Blue Origin isn’t quite shooting for the Moon on this inaugural launch, but the company will attempt to reach orbit and try to land the New Glenn’s first stage booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Jan. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-12 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18: 11 UTC

Jan. 12: New Glenn | NG-1 Blue Ring Pathfinder | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06: 00 UTC

Jan. 13: Jielong 3 | Unknown Payload | Dongfang Spaceport, Yellow Sea | 03: 00 UTC

Rocket Report: China launches refueling demo; DoD’s big appetite for hypersonics Read More »

Rocket Report: Avio named top European launch firm; New Glenn may launch soon

rocket report, Space / Tim Belzer / January 4, 2025

“We are making it simpler for new competitors to get consistent access to the spectrum they need.”

A Falcon 9 rocket lofts a Starlink mission on Dec. 30, the final SpaceX mission of 2024, completing the company’s 134th orbital launch. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.25 of the Rocket Report! Happy New Year! It’s a shorter edition of the newsletter this week because most companies (not named Blue Origin, this holiday season) took things easier over the last 10 days. But after the break we’re back in the saddle for the new year, and eager to see what awaits us in the world of launch.

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.

Avio lands atop list of European launch firms. You know it probably was not a great year for European rocket firms when the top-ranked company on the continent is Avio, which launched a grand total of two rockets in 2024. The Italian rocket firm earned this designation from European Spaceflight after successfully completing the final flight of the Vega rocket in September and returning the Vega C rocket to flight in December.

Three European launches in 2024 … The only other firm to launch a rocket on the list was ArianeGroup, which had a single launch last year. Granted, it was an important flight, the successful debut of the Ariane 6 rocket. Germany-based Isar Aerospace came in third place, followed by a company I had never heard of, Germany-based Bayern-Chemie. It builds solid-fuel upper stages for sounding rockets. It’s hard to disagree with too much on the list, although it certainly demonstrates that Europe could do with more companies launching rockets, and fewer only talking about it.

India launches space docking demonstration mission. The Indian Space Research Organization launched a space docking experiment on a PSLV rocket at the end of the year, NASASpaceflight.com reports. This SpaDeX mission—yes, the name is a little confusing—will demonstrate the capability to rendezvous, dock, and undock in orbit. This technology is important for the country’s human spaceflight plans as well as future missions to the Moon.

Target and chaser … The SpaDeX experiment will be conducted around 10 days following launch when the two satellites, the SDX01 “Chaser” and the SDX02 “Target,” will be released with a small relative velocity between them. The pair will drift apart for around a day until they are separated by a distance of around 10 to 15 km. Once this is achieved, Target will eliminate the velocity difference between itself and Chaser using its propulsion system.

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HyPrSpace conducts hot-fire test. French launch services startup HyPrSpace has completed the first test of its second hot fire test campaign for its subscale Terminator stage demonstrator, European Spaceflight reports. HyPrSpace is developing a two-stage launch vehicle called Orbital Baguette One (OB-1) that will be capable of delivering up to 250 kilograms to low Earth orbit.

Like a finely baked bread … In July, the company completed an initial hot fire test campaign of Terminator, an eight-tonne demonstrator of a hybrid rocket stage. Over the course of this first test campaign, HyPrSpace completed a total of four hot fire tests. HyPrSpace CEO Alexandre Mangeot said the company achieved an average engine efficiency of 94 percent during the latest test. Mangeot added that this represented the “propulsive performance we need for our orbital launcher.”

A new annual record for orbital launches. The world set another record for orbital launches in 2024 in a continuing surge of launch activity driven almost entirely by SpaceX, Space News reports. There were 259 orbital launch attempts in 2024, a 17 percent increase from the previous record of 221 orbital launch attempts in 2023. That figure does not include suborbital launches, such as four SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy test flights or two launches of the HASTE suborbital variant of Rocket Lab’s Electron.

SpaceX v. world … That increase in overall launches matches the increase by SpaceX alone, which performed 134 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches in 2024, up from 96 in 2023. The company performed more orbital launches than the rest of the world combined. China performed 68 launches in 2024, breaking a record of 67 launches set in 2023. Russia performed 17 launches, followed by Japan (7), India (5), Iran (4), Europe (3) and North Korea (1).

Russian family of rockets reaches 2,000th launch. The Russian space program reached a significant milestone over the holidays with the 2,000th launch of a rocket from the “R-7” family of boosters. The launch took place on Christmas Day when an R-7 rocket lifted off, carrying a remote-sensing satellite from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Ars reports. This family of rockets has an incredible heritage dating back nearly six decades. The first R-7 vehicle was designed by the legendary Soviet rocket scientist Sergei Korolev. It flew in 1957 and was the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile.

Good and bad news … Although it’s certainly worth commemorating the 2,000th launch of the R-7 family of rockets, the fleet’s longevity also offers a cautionary tale. In many respects, the Russian space program continues to coast on the legacy of Korolev and the Soviet space feats of the 1950s and 1960s. That Russia has not developed a more cost-competitive and efficient booster in nearly six decades reveals the truth about its space program: It lacks innovation at a time when the rest of the space industry is rapidly sprinting toward reusability.

Overview of Chinese launch plans for 2025. New Long March rockets and commercially developed launch vehicles are expected to have their first flights in 2025, boosting China’s overall launch capabilities, Space News reports. The launchers will compete for contracts to launch satellites for China’s megaconstellation projects—Thousand Sails and Guowang—space station cargo missions and commercial and other contracts, helping to boost the country’s overall access to space and launch rate in the coming years.

Many new faces on the launch pad … Among the highlights for the coming year is the Long March 8A rocket, a variant of the existing Long March 8, but with a larger, more powerful second stage, boosting payload capacity to a 700-kilometer Sun-synchronous orbit from 5,000 kilograms to 7,000 kg. It is likely to be a workhorse for megaconstellation launches. The Long March 12A rocket could undergo vertical takeoff and landing tests. And the privately developed Zhuque-3 rocket could make its first orbital launch this year.

To deal with more launches, FCC adds spectrum. The Federal Communications Commission has formally allocated additional spectrum for launch applications, fulfilling a provision in a bill passed earlier this year, Space News reports. The FCC published December 31 a report and order that allocated spectrum between 2360 and 2395 megahertz for use in communications to and from commercial launch and reentry vehicles on a secondary basis. That band currently has a primary use for aircraft and missile testing communications.

Keep rockets talking to the ground … Both the FCC and launch companies have said the additional spectrum was needed to accommodate growth in launch activities. “By identifying more bandwidth for vital links to launch vehicles, we are making it simpler for new competitors to get consistent access to the spectrum they need,” Jessica Rosenworcel, chairwoman of the FCC, said in a December 19 statement calling for approval of the then-proposed report and order.

New Glenn completes static fire test. On Friday, December 27, Blue Origin successfully ignited the seven main engines on its massive New Glenn rocket for the first time, Ars reports. Blue Origin said it fired the vehicle’s engines for a duration of 24 seconds. They fired at full thrust for 13 of those seconds. Additionally, several hours before the test firing, the Federal Aviation Administration said it had issued a launch license for the rocket.

New Glenn wen? … These two milestones set up a long-anticipated launch of the New Glenn rocket in January. Although the company has yet to announce a date publicly, sources indicate that Blue Origin is working toward a launch time of no earlier than 1 am ET (06: 00 UTC) on Monday, January 6, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, though it could slip a few days. If all goes well with the debut flight of the vehicle, Blue Origin will also attempt to recover the first stage of the rocket on a drone ship down range in the Atlantic Ocean. (submitted by Jay5000001)

Next three launches

Jan. 4: Falcon 9 | Thuraya 4-NGS | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 01: 27 UTC

Jan. 6: New Glenn | Blue Ring pathfinder | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06: 00 UTC

Jan. 6: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-11 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 16: 19 UTC

Rocket Report: Avio named top European launch firm; New Glenn may launch soon Read More »

Rocket Report: ULA has a wild idea; Starliner crew will stay in orbit even longer

rocket report, Science, Space / Tim Belzer / December 20, 2024

ULA’s Vulcan rocket is at least several months away from flying again, and Stoke names its engine.

Stoke Space’s Zenith booster engine fires on a test stand at Moses Lake, Washington. Credit: Stoke Space

Welcome to Edition 7.24 of the Rocket Report! This is the last Rocket Report of the year, and what a year it’s been. So far, there have been 244 rocket launches to successfully reach orbit this year, a record for annual launch activity. And there are still a couple of weeks to go before the calendar turns to 2025. Time is running out for Blue Origin to launch its first heavy-lift New Glenn rocket this year, but if it flies before January 1, it will certainly be one of the top space stories of 2024.

Corkscrew in the sky. A Japanese space startup said its second attempt to launch a rocket carrying small satellites into orbit had been terminated minutes after liftoff Wednesday and destroyed itself again, nine months after the company’s first launch attempt in an explosion, the Associated Press reports. The startup that developed the rocket, named Space One, launched the Kairos rocket from a privately owned coastal spaceport in Japan’s Kansai region. Company executive and space engineer Mamoru Endo said an abnormality in the first stage engine nozzle or its control system is likely to have caused an unstable flight of the rocket, which started spiraling in mid-flight and eventually destroyed itself about three minutes after liftoff, using its autonomous safety mechanism.

0-for-2 … The launch failure this week followed the first attempt to launch the Kairos rocket in March, when the launcher exploded just five seconds after liftoff. An investigation into the failed launch in March concluded the rocket’s autonomous destruct system activated after detecting its solid-fueled first stage wasn’t generating as much thrust as expected. The Kairos rocket is Japan’s first privately funded orbital-class rocket, capable of placing payloads up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Jay500001, Ken the Bin, and EllPeaTea)

A fit check for Themis. ArianeGroup has brought the main elements of the Themis reusable booster demonstrator together for the first time in France during a “full-fit check,” European Spaceflight reports. This milestone paves the way for the demonstrator’s inaugural test, which is expected to take place in 2025. Themis, which is funded by the European Space Agency, is designed to test vertical launch and landing capabilities with a new methane-fueled rocket engine. According to ESA, the full-fit check is one of the final steps in the development phase of Themis.

Slow progress … ESA signed the contract with ArianeGroup for the Themis program in 2020, and at that time, the program’s schedule called for initial low-altitude hop tests in 2022. It’s now taken more than double the time officials originally projected to get the Themis rocket airborne. The first up-and-down hops will be based at the Esrange Space Center in Sweden, and will use the vehicle ArianeGroup is assembling now in France. A second Themis rocket will be built for medium-altitude tests from Esrange, and finally, a three-engine version of Themis will fly on high-altitude tests from the Guiana Space Center in South America. At the rate this program is proceeding, it’s fair to ask if Themis will complete a full-envelope launch and landing demonstration before the end of the decade, if it ever does. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Sign Me Up!

Baguette One is going critical. French launch startup HyPrSpace has announced that it has completed preliminary design reviews for its Baguette One and Orbital Baguette One (OB-1) rockets, European Spaceflight reports. Baguette One will be a suborbital demonstrator for the OB-1 rocket, designed to use a hybrid propulsion system that combines liquid and solid propellants and doesn’t require a turbopump. With the preliminary design complete, HyPrSpace said it is moving on to the critical design phase for both rockets, a stage of development where detailed engineering plans are finalized and components are prepared for manufacturing.

Heating the oven … HyPrSpace has previously stated the Orbital Baguette One rocket will be capable of delivering a payload of up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit. Last year, the startup announced it raised 35 million euros in funding, primarily from the French government, to complete the critical design phase of the OB-1 rocket and launch the Baguette One on a suborbital test flight. HyPrSpace has not provided an updated schedule for the first flight of either rocket. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

A new player on the scene. RTX weapons arm Raytheon and defense startup Ursa Major Technologies have completed two successful test flights of a missile propelled by a new solid rocket motor, Breaking Defense reports. The two test flights, held at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California, involved a Raytheon-made missile propelled by an Ursa Major solid rocket motor measuring less than 10 inches in diameter, according to Dan Jablonsky, Ursa Major’s CEO. Details about the missile are shrouded in mystery, and Raytheon officials referred questions on the matter to the Army.

Joining the club … The US military is interested in fostering the development of a third supplier of solid rocket propulsion for weapons systems. Right now, only Northrop Grumman and L3Harris’s Aerojet Rocketdyne are available as solid rocket vendors, and they have struggled to keep up with the demand for weapons systems, especially to support the war in Ukraine. Ursa Major is one of several US-based startups entering the solid rocket propulsion market. “There is a new player on the scene in the solid rocket motor industry,” Jablonsky said. “This is an Army program that we’ve been working on with Raytheon. In this particular program, we went from concept and design to firing and flight on the range in just under four months, which is lightning fast.” (submitted by Ken the Bin)

SpaceX’s rapid response. In a mission veiled in secrecy, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, sending a military Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite to a medium orbit about 12,000 miles above Earth, Space News reports. Named Rapid Response Trailblazer-1 (RRT-1), this mission was a US national security space launch and was also intended to demonstrate military capabilities to condense a typical two-year mission planning cycle to less than six months. The payload, GPS III SV-07, is the seventh satellite of the GPS III constellation, built by Lockheed Martin. The spacecraft was in storage awaiting a launch on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket.

Tightening the timeline … “We decided to pull SV-07 out of storage and try to get it to the launch pad as quickly as possible,” Col. James Horne, senior material leader for launch execution at the US Space Force’s Space Systems Command, told Space News. “It’s our way of demonstrating that we can be responsive to operator needs.” Rather than the typical mission cycle of two years, SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and the Space Force worked together to prep this GPS satellite for launch in a handful of months. Military officials decided to launch SV-07 with SpaceX as ULA’s Vulcan rocket faced delays in becoming certified to launch national security payloads. According to Space News, Horne emphasized that this move was less about Vulcan delays and more about testing the boundaries of the NSSL program’s flexibility. “This is a way for us to demonstrate to adversaries that we can be responsive,” he said. Because SV-07 was switched to SpaceX, ULA will get to launch GPS III SV-10, originally assigned to SpaceX. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

An update on Butch and Suni. NASA has announced that it is delaying the SpaceX Crew-10 launch, a move that will keep astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams—who already had their stay aboard the International Space Station unexpectedly extended—in orbit even longer, CNN reports. Williams and Wilmore launched to space in June, piloting the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Their trip, expected to last about a week, ballooned into a months-long assignment after their vehicle experienced technical issues en route to the space station and NASA determined it would be too risky to bring them home aboard the Starliner.

Nearly 10 months in orbit … The astronauts stayed aboard the space station as the Starliner spacecraft safely returned to Earth in September, and NASA shuffled the station’s schedule of visiting vehicles to allow Wilmore and Williams to come home on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft with two crewmates to end the Crew-9 mission in February, soon after the arrival of Crew-10. Now, Crew-10 will get off the ground at least a month later than expected because NASA and SpaceX teams need “time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission,” the space agency said. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Stoke Space names its engine. Stoke Space, the only other company besides SpaceX developing a fully reusable orbital rocket, has revealed the name of the methane-fueled engine that will power the vehicle’s booster stage. “Say hello to Zenith, our full-flow staged-combustion booster engine, built to power Nova to orbit,” Stoke Space wrote in a post on X. The naming announcement came a few days after Stoke Space said it hot-fired the “Block 2” or “flight layout” version of the main engine on a test stand in Moses Lake, Washington.

Stoked by the progress … “As we build towards the future of space mobility, we’re building on top of the pinnacle–the zenith–of rocket engine cycles: full-flow staged combustion,” Stoke Space said. Only a handful of rocket engines have been designed to use the full-flow staged combustion cycle, and only one has actually flown on a rocket: SpaceX’s Raptor. Seven Zenith engines will power the first stage of the Nova rocket when it takes off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A hydrogen-fueled propulsion system will power the second stage of Nova, which is designed to launch up to 5 metric tons (11,000 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit.

Upgrades coming for Vega. The European Space Agency (ESA) has signed 350 million euros in contracts with Avio to further evolve the Vega launcher family,” Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The contracts cover the development of the Vega-E and upgrades to the current Vega-C’s ground infrastructure to increase the launch cadence. Vega-E, scheduled to debut in 2027, will replace the Vega-C rocket’s third and fourth stages with a single methane-fueled upper stage under development by Avio. It will also offer a 30 percent increase in Vega’s payload lift capability, and will launch from a new complex to be built on the former Ariane 5 launch pad at the European-run Guiana Space Center in South America.

Adaptations … The fresh tranche of funding from ESA will also pay for Avio’s work to “adapt” the former Ariane 5 integration building at the spaceport in French Guiana, according to ESA. “This will allow technicians to work on two rockets being assembled simultaneously–one on the launch pad and one in the new assembly building–and run two launch campaigns in parallel,” ESA said. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

New Glenn coming alive. In a widely anticipated test, Blue Origin will soon ignite the seven main engines on its New Glenn rocket at Launch Complex-36 in Florida, Ars reports. Sources indicated this hot-fire test might occur as soon as Thursday, but it didn’t happen. Instead, Blue Origin’s launch team loaded cryogenic propellants into the New Glenn rocket on the launch pad, but stopped short of igniting the main engines.

Racing the clock … The hot-fire is the final test the company must complete before verifying the massive rocket is ready for its debut flight, and it is the most dynamic. This will be the first time Blue Origin has ever test-fired the BE-7 engines altogether. Theoretically, at least, it remains possible that Blue Origin could launch New Glenn this year—and the company’s urgency certainly speaks to this. On social media this week, some Blue Origin employees noted that they were being asked to work on Christmas Day this year in Florida.

China begins building a new megaconstellation. The first batch of Internet satellites for China’s Guowang megaconstellation launched Monday on the country’s heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket, Ars reports. The satellites are the first of up to 13,000 spacecraft a consortium of Chinese companies plans to build and launch over the next decade. The Guowang fleet will beam low-latency high-speed Internet signals in an architecture similar to SpaceX’s Starlink network, although Chinese officials haven’t laid out any specifics, such as target markets, service specifications, or user terminals.

No falling debris, this time … China used its most powerful operational rocket, the Long March 5B, for the job of launching the first 10 Guowang satellites this week. The Long March 5B’s large core stage, which entered orbit on the rocket’s previous missions and triggered concerns about falling space debris, fell into a predetermined location in the sea downrange from the launch site. The difference for this mission was the addition of the Yuanzheng 2 upper stage, which gave the rocket’s payloads the extra oomph they needed to reach their targeted low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Elon Musk’s security clearance under review. A new investigation from The New York Times suggests that SpaceX founder Elon Musk has not been reporting his travel activities and other information to the Department of Defense as required by his top-secret clearance, Ars reports. According to the newspaper, concerns about Musk’s reporting practices have led to reviews by three different bodies within the military: the Air Force, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and the Defense Department Office of Inspector General. However, none of the federal agencies cited in the Times article has accused Musk of disclosing classified material.

It won’t matter … Since 2021, Musk has failed to self-report details of his life, including travel activities, people he has met, and drug use, according to the Times. The government is also concerned that SpaceX did not ensure Musk’s compliance with the reporting rules. Musk’s national security profile has risen following his deep-pocketed and full-throated support of Donald Trump, who won the US presidential campaign in November and will be sworn into office next month. After this inauguration, Trump will have the power to grant security clearance to whomever he wishes.

ULA’s CEO has a pretty wild idea. Ars published a feature story last week examining the US Space Force’s new embrace of offensive weapons in space. In the story, Ars discusses concepts for different types of space weapons, including placing roving “defender” satellites into orbit, with the sole purpose of guarding high-value US satellites against an attack. Tory Bruno, CEO of United Launch Alliance, wrote about the defender concept in a Medium post earlier this month. He added more detail in a recent conversation with reporters, describing the defender concept as “a lightning-fast, long-range, lethal, if necessary, vehicle to defend our assets on orbit.” And guess what? The Centaur upper stage for ULA’s own Vulcan rocket could do the job just fine, according to Bruno.

Death throes or a smart pivot? … A space tug or upper stage like the Centaur could be left in orbit after a launch to respond to threats against US or allied satellites, Bruno said. These wouldn’t be able to effectively defend a spacecraft against a ground-based anti-satellite missile, which can launch without warning. But a space-based attack might involve an enemy satellite taking days or weeks to move close to a US satellite due to limitations in maneuverability and the tyranny of orbital mechanics. Several launch companies have recently pitched their rockets as solutions for weapons testing, including Rocket Lab and ABL. But the concept proposed by Bruno would take ULA far from its core business, where its efforts to compete with SpaceX have often fallen short. However, the competition is still alive, as shown by a comment from SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon launch vehicles, Jon Edwards. In response to Ars’s story, Edwards wrote on X: “The pivot to ‘interceptor’ or ‘target vehicle’ is a common final act of a launch vehicle in its death throes.” (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Vulcan is months away from flying again. Speaking of ULA, here’s an update on the next flight of the company’s Vulcan rocket. The first national security mission on Vulcan might not launch until April 2025 at the earliest, Spaceflight Now reports. This will be the third flight of a Vulcan rocket, following two test flights this year to gather data for the US Space Force to certify the rocket for national security missions. On the second flight, the nozzle fell off one of Vulcan’s solid rocket boosters shortly after liftoff, but the rocket successfully continued its climb into orbit. The anomaly prompted an investigation, and ULA says it is close to determining the root cause.

Stretching the timeline … The Space Force’s certification review of Vulcan is taking longer than anticipated. “The government team has not completed its technical evaluation of the certification criteria and is working closely with ULA on additional data required to complete this evaluation,” a Space Force spokesperson told Spaceflight Now. “The government anticipates completion of its evaluation and certification in the first quarter of calendar year 2025.” The spokesperson said this means the launch of a US military navigation test satellite on the third Vulcan rocket is now slated for the second quarter of next year. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Dec. 21: Falcon 9 | “Astranis: From One to Many” | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 03: 39 UTC

Dec. 21: Falcon 9 | Bandwagon 2 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 11: 34 UTC

Dec. 21: Electron | “Owl The Way Up” | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 13: 00 UTC

Rocket Report: ULA has a wild idea; Starliner crew will stay in orbit even longer Read More »