Space

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Rocket Report: ULA investigating SRB anomaly; Europa Clipper is ready to fly

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US Space Force payloads will ride on the first flight of Impulse Space’s cryogenic space tug.

Impulse Space is assembling its first methane-fueled Deneb engine, a 15,000-pound-thrust power plant that will propel the company’s Helios space tug. Credit: Impulse Space

Welcome to Edition 7.15 of the Rocket Report! It’s a big week for big rockets, with SpaceX potentially launching its next Starship test flight and a Falcon Heavy rocket with NASA’s Europa Clipper mission this weekend. And a week ago, United Launch Alliance flew its second Vulcan rocket, which lost one of its booster nozzles in midair and amazingly kept going to achieve a successful mission. Are you not entertained?

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.

PLD Space is aiming high. Spanish launch provider PLD Space has revealed a family of new rockets that it plans to introduce beyond its Miura 5 rocket, which is expected to make its inaugural flight in 2025, European Spaceflight reports. The company also revealed that it was working on a crew capsule called Lince (Spanish for Lynx). PLD Space introduced its Miura Next, Miura Next Heavy, and Miura Next Super Heavy launch vehicles, designed in single stick, triple core, and quintuple core configurations with reusable boosters. At the high end of the rocket family’s performance, the Miura Next Super Heavy could deliver up to 53 metric tons (nearly 117,000 pounds) of payload to low-Earth orbit. The Lince capsule could become Europe’s first human-rated crew transportation spacecraft.

Still a year away from reaching space … These are lofty ambitions for a company that has yet to launch anything to space, but it’s good to think big. PLD Space launched a high-altitude test flight of its Miura 1 rocket last year, but it didn’t cross the boundary of space. The first launch campaign for Miura 5, PLD Space’s orbital-class rocket sized for small satellites, is on course to begin by the end of 2025, the company said. The Miura Next family would begin flying by 2030, followed by the heavier rockets a few years later. In April, PLD Space said it had raised 120 million euros ($131 million) from private investors and the Spanish government. This is probably enough to get Miura 5 to the launch pad, but PLD Space will need a lot of technical and financing successes to bring its follow-on vehicles online. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Impulse Space wins Space Force contract. Fresh on the heels of a massive funding round, Impulse Space has landed a $34.5 million contract from the Space Force for two ultra-mobile spacecraft missions, TechCrunch reports. Under the Space Force’s Tactically Responsive Space (TacRS) program, the two missions will demonstrate how highly maneuverable spacecraft can help the military rapidly respond to threats in space. Both missions will use Impulse’s Mira orbital transfer vehicle, which can host experiments and payloads while moving into different orbits around the Earth.

Looking for an advantage … Mira completed its first test flight earlier this year. The payloads on the two Space Force demonstration flights will perform space domain awareness missions, the military service said in a statement. The first mission, called Victus Surgo, will combine the Mira transfer vehicle with Impulse’s higher-power Helios cryogenic methane-fueled kick stage on its first use in orbit. Helios will boost Mira into a high-altitude geostationary transfer orbit after launching on a Falcon 9 rocket. The second mission, called Victus Salo, will send a second Mira spacecraft into low-Earth orbit on a SpaceX rideshare mission. Impulse was founded by rocket scientist Tom Mueller, who was a founding employee at SpaceX before leaving in 2020. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

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The launch campaign begins for Vega C’s return to flight. Days after a crucial test-firing of its redesigned second stage motor, a European Vega C rocket is now being stacked on its launch pad in French Guiana for a return to flight mission scheduled for December 3. Photos released by the French space agency, CNES, show the Vega C’s solid-fueled first stage moving into position on the launch pad. The Vega C launcher is an upgraded version of the Vega rocket that completed its career with a successful launch in September.

A lot of t(h)rust … Vega C made a successful debut in July 2022, then failed on its second flight five months later, destroying a pair of high-value commercial Earth-imaging satellites owned by Airbus. Engineers traced the failure to the second stage motor’s nozzle, prompting a redesign that grounded the Vega C rocket for two years. There is a queue of European space missions waiting for launch on Vega C, and first to go will be the Sentinel 1C radar imaging satellite for the European Commission’s flagship Copernicus program.

Australian launch company rehearses countdown. Gilmour Space still thinks it has a chance to conduct the maiden launch of its Eris rocket sometime this year, despite no launch license from the Australian Space Agency (ASA), having to go hunting for more money, and a wet dress rehearsal throwing up issues that will take several weeks to fix, Space & Defense Tech and Security News reports. Gilmour’s Eris rocket, capable of hauling cargoes up to 672 pounds (305 kilograms) to orbit, would become the first homegrown Australian-built orbital-class rocket.

WDR … The Australian Space Agency has worked on Gilmour’s launch license for around two years, but has yet to give the company the green light to fly the Eris rocket, despite approving licenses for two companies operating privately owned launch ranges elsewhere in Australia. At the beginning of the year, Gilmour targeted a first launch of the Eris rocket in March, but there were delays in getting the vehicle to the launch pad. The rocket went vertical for the first time in April to begin a series of ground tests, culminating in the launch rehearsal at the end of September, in which the company loaded propellants into the rocket and ran the countdown to T-10 seconds. The test uncovered valve and software issues Gilmour must fix before it can fly Eris. (submitted by mryall)

Falcon 9 launches European asteroid mission. The European Space Agency’s Hera mission lifted off Monday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, heading into the Solar System to investigate an asteroid smashed by NASA two years ago, Ars reports. It will take two years for Hera to travel to asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos, a binary pair, and survey the aftermath of the impact by NASA’s DART spacecraft on Dimorphos in September 2022. DART was NASA’s first planetary defense experiment, demonstrating how a kinetic impactor could knock an asteroid off course if it was on a path to hit Earth. Fortunately, these two asteroids are harmless, but DART proved a spacecraft could deflect an asteroid, if necessary. Coming in at high speed, DART got only a fleeting glimpse of Didymos and Dimorphos, so Hera will take more precise measurements of the asteroids’ interior structure, mass, and orbit to determine exactly how effective DART was.

Falcon soars again … The liftoff Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was the first flight of a Falcon 9 in nine days, since an upper stage anomaly steered the rocket off its intended reentry corridor after an otherwise successful launch. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the Falcon 9 while SpaceX investigated the problem, but the regulator approved the launch of Hera because the Falcon 9’s upper stage won’t come back to Earth. Instead, it departed into deep space along with the Hera asteroid probe. As of Thursday, all other commercial Falcon 9 missions remain grounded. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Emiratis go with Japan. A UAE mission to travel to the asteroid belt reached a milestone on Wednesday, when an agreement was signed to provide services for the 2028 launch of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Explorer spacecraft, The National reports. Emirati officials selected the Japanese H3 rocket from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) to launch the asteroid explorer. The UAE is a repeat customer for MHI, which also launched the Emirati Hope spacecraft toward Mars in 2020. The mission will see the Mohammed Bin Rashid Explorer perform close flybys of six asteroids to gather data before landing on a seventh asteroid, Justitia.

H3 racking up wins … Japan’s new H3 rocket is taking a slice of the international commercial launch market after achieving back-to-back successful flights this year. The H3, which replaces Japan’s workhorse H-IIA rocket, is primarily intended to ensure Japanese autonomous access to space for national security missions, scientific probes, and resupply flights to the International Space Station. But, somewhat surprisingly, the H3 now has several customers outside of Japan, including the UAE, Eutelsat, and Inmarsat. Perhaps some satellite operators, eager for someone to compete with SpaceX in the launch business, are turning to the H3 as an alternative to United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan, Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket, or Blue Origin’s New Glenn. All of these rockets are under pressure to launch numerous payloads for their domestic governments and Amazon’s Kuiper megaconstellation.

China launches mystery satellite. China launched a new communications satellite toward geostationary orbit Thursday, although its precise role remains undisclosed​, Space News reports. The satellite lifted off aboard a Long March 3B rocket, and China’s leading state-owned aerospace contractor identified the payload as High orbit Internet satellite-03 (Weixing Hulianwan Gaogui-03). This is the third satellite in this series, following launches in February and August. The lack of publicly available information raises speculation about its potential uses, which could include military applications.

Shortfall … This was China’s 47th space launch of the year, well short of the 100 missions Chinese officials originally projected for 2024. This launch rate is on pace to come close to China’s numbers the last three years. Around 30 of these 100 projected launches were supposed to be with rockets from Chinese commercial startups. China’s commercial launch industry encountered a setback in June, when a rocket broke free of its restraints during a first stage static fire test, sending the fully fueled booster on an uncontrolled flight near populated areas before a fiery crash to the ground.

Vulcan’s second flight was successful but not perfect. United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, under contract for dozens of flights for the US military and Amazon’s Kuiper broadband network, lifted off from Florida on its second test flight October 4, suffered an anomaly with one of its strap-on boosters, and still achieved a successful mission, Ars reports. This test flight, known as Cert-2, was the second certification mission for the new Vulcan rocket, a milestone that paves the way for the Space Force to clear ULA’s new rocket to begin launching national security satellites in the coming months.

Anomalous plume … What happened 37 seconds after launch was startling and impressive. The exhaust nozzle from one of Vulcan’s two strap-on solid rocket boosters failed and fell off the vehicle, creating a shower of sparks and debris. The launcher visibly tilted along its axis due to asymmetrical thrust from the twin boosters, but Vulcan’s guidance system corrected its trajectory, and the rocket’s BE-4 engines vectored their exhaust to keep the rocket on course. The engines burned somewhat longer than planned to make up for the shortfall in power from the damaged booster, and the rocket still reached its target orbit. However, ULA and Northrop Grumman, the booster manufacturer, must determine what happened with the nozzle before Vulcan can fly again. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Starship could launch this weekend. We may not have to wait as long as we thought for the next test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket. The world’s most powerful launcher could fly again from South Texas as soon as Sunday, assuming the Federal Aviation Administration grants approval, Ars reports. The last public statement released from the FAA suggested the agency didn’t expect to determine whether to approve a commercial launch license for SpaceX’s next Starship test flight before late November. There’s some optimism at SpaceX that the FAA might issue a launch license much sooner, perhaps in time for Starship to fly this weekend.

Going for the catch … “The fifth flight test of Starship will aim to take another step towards full and rapid reusability,” SpaceX wrote in an update posted on its website. “The primary objectives will be attempting the first ever return to launch site and catch of the Super Heavy booster and another Starship reentry and landing burn, aiming for an on-target splashdown of Starship in the Indian Ocean.” For the Starship upper stage, this means it will follow pretty much the same trajectory as the last test flight in June. But the most exciting thing about the next flight is the attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster, which will come back to the launch site in Texas at supersonic speed before braking to a hover over the launch pad. Then, mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” will try to grapple the rocket in midair.

Europa Clipper is ready to fly. As soon as this weekend, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will lift off from Kennedy Space Center, carrying NASA’s $4.25 billion Europa Clipper spacecraft, Ars reports. This mission is unlikely to definitively answer the question of whether life exists in the liquid water ocean below the icy crust of Jupiter’s icy moon Europa, but it will tell us whether it could, and it will answer so many more questions. The best part is the unknown wonders it will discover. We cannot begin to guess at those, but we can be certain that if all goes well, Clipper will be a thrilling and breathtaking mission. Europa Clipper will zip by Europa 49 times in the early 2030s, probing the frozen world with a sophisticated suite of instruments to yield the best-ever data about any moon of another planet.

Delayed for weather … The launch of Europa Clipper was supposed to happen Thursday, but NASA and SpaceX suspended launch preparations earlier this week as Hurricane Milton approached Florida. The spacecraft is already attached to the Falcon Heavy rocket inside SpaceX’s hangar. Once teams are cleared to return to the space center for work after the storm, they will ready Falcon Heavy to roll to the launch pad. NASA says the launch is currently targeted for no earlier than Sunday.

Next three launches

Oct. 13: Starship/Super Heavy | Flight 5 | Starbase, Texas | 12: 00 UTC

Oct. 13: New Shepard | NS-27 uncrewed flight | Launch Site One, Texas | 13: 00 UTC

Oct. 13: Falcon Heavy | Europa Clipper | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 16: 12 UTC

Photo of Stephen Clark

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: ULA investigating SRB anomaly; Europa Clipper is ready to fly Read More »

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In a rare disclosure, the Pentagon provides an update on the X-37B spaceplane

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“When it’s close to the Earth, it’s close enough to the atmosphere to turn where it is,” she said. “Which means our adversaries don’t know—and that happens on the far side of the Earth from our adversaries—where it’s going to come up next. And we know that that drives them nuts. And I’m really glad about that.”

Breaking the silence

The Pentagon rarely releases an update on the X-37B spaceplane in the middle of a mission. During previous flights, military officials typically provided some basic information about the mission before its launch, then went silent until the X-37B returned for landing. The military keeps specifics about the spaceplane’s activities in orbit a secret.

This made the Space Force’s announcement Thursday somewhat of a surprise. When the seventh flight of the X-37B launched, there were indications that the spacecraft would soar into a much higher orbit than it did on any of its six prior missions.

In February, a sleuthing satellite tracking hobbyist spotted the X-37B in orbit by observing sunlight reflected off of the spacecraft as it flew thousands of miles above Earth. Follow-up detections confirmed the discovery, allowing amateur observers to estimate that the X-37B was flying in a highly elliptical orbit ranging between roughly 300 and 38,600 miles in altitude (186-by-23,985 miles). The orbit was inclined 59.1 degrees to the equator.

On its previous missions, the X-37B was confined to low-Earth orbit a few hundred miles above the planet. When it became apparent that the latest mission was cruising at a significantly higher altitude, analysts and space enthusiasts speculated on what the secret spaceplane was doing and how it would come back to Earth. A direct reentry into the atmosphere from the spaceplane’s elliptical orbit would expose the craft’s heat shield to hotter temperatures than any of its previous returns.

Now, we have an answer to the latter question.

As for what it’s doing up there, the Space Force said the spaceplane on this mission has “conducted radiation effect experiments and has been testing space domain awareness technologies in a highly elliptical orbit.” The orbit brings the X-37B through the Van Allen radiation belts and crosses several orbital regimes populated by US and foreign communications, navigation, and surveillance satellites.

Military officials have said previous X-37B flights have tested a Hall-effect ion thruster and tested other experimental space technologies without elaborating on their details. X-37Bs have also secretly deployed small military satellites in orbit.

In a rare disclosure, the Pentagon provides an update on the X-37B spaceplane Read More »

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SpaceX’s next Starship launch—and first catch—could happen this weekend

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The FAA is still reviewing plans for the fifth Starship test flight, but could approve it soon.

SpaceX’s fully-stacked Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage at the company’s launch site in South Texas. Credit: SpaceX

We may not have to wait as long as we thought for the next test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket.

The world’s most powerful launcher could fly again as soon as Sunday, SpaceX says, assuming the Federal Aviation Administration grants approval. The last public statement released from the FAA suggested the agency didn’t expect to determine whether to approve a commercial launch license for SpaceX’s next Starship test flight before late November.

There’s some optimism at SpaceX that the FAA might issue a launch license much sooner, perhaps in time for Starship to fly this weekend. The launch window Sunday opens at 7 am CDT (8 am EDT; 12: 00 UTC), about a half-hour before sunrise at SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in South Texas.

“The fifth flight test of Starship will aim to take another step towards full and rapid reusability,” SpaceX wrote in an update posted on its website. “The primary objectives will be attempting the first ever return to launch site and catch of the Super Heavy booster and another Starship reentry and landing burn, aiming for an on-target splashdown of Starship in the Indian Ocean.”

Stacked together, the Super Heavy booster, or first stage, and the Starship upper stage stand nearly 400 feet (121 meters) tall. The Super Heavy booster—itself bigger than the fuselage of a 747 jumbo jet—will vertically return to the Starbase launch pad guided by cold gas thrusters, aerodynamic grid fins, and propulsive maneuvers with its methane-fueled Raptor engines.

Once the booster’s Raptor engines slow it to a hover, mechanical arms on the launch pad tower will close in around the rocket and capture it in midair. If you’re into rockets, or just want to spice up your morning, you don’t want to miss this. We’ll have a more detailed story before the launch previewing the timeline of events.

Safety measures

The FAA has been reviewing SpaceX’s plans to bring the Super Heavy booster back to the Starbase launch pad for months.

Most recently, the agency’s review of SpaceX’s proposed flight plan has focused on the effects of the rocket’s sonic boom as it comes back to Earth. The FAA and other agencies are also studying how a disposable section of the booster, called a hot-staging ring, might impact the environment when it falls into the sea just offshore from Starbase, located on the Gulf Coast east of Brownsville.

During SpaceX’s most recent Starship test flight in June, the Super Heavy booster completed a control descent to a predetermined location in the Gulf of Mexico, giving engineers enough confidence to try a return to the launch site on the next mission.

SpaceX protested the length of time the FAA said it needed to review the flight plan, after the federal regulator previously told SpaceX it expected to make a license determination in September.

“Unfortunately, instead of focusing resources on critical safety analysis and collaborating on rational safeguards to protect both the public and the environment, the licensing process has been repeatedly derailed by issues ranging from the frivolous to the patently absurd,” SpaceX wrote in a statement last month.

“I think the two-month delay is necessary to comply with the launch requirements, and I think that’s an important part of safety culture,” said Michael Whitaker, the FAA administrator, in a congressional hearing September 24.

The FAA is responsible for ensuring commercial space launches do not endanger the public and comport with the US government’s national security and foreign policy interests. Earlier this year, SpaceX was also fined by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency for alleged violations of environmental regulations related to the launch pad’s water system, which cools a steel flame deflector under the 33 main engines of Starship’s Super Heavy booster.

Ars contacted an FAA spokesperson Tuesday about the status of the agency’s review of the Starship launch license request, but did not receive a response.

Artist’s illustration of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster coming in for a catch by the launch pad’s mechanical arms.

Credit: SpaceX

Artist’s illustration of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster coming in for a catch by the launch pad’s mechanical arms. Credit: SpaceX

Teams at Starbase completed two partial propellant loading tests on the fully stacked Starship rocket in recent days. Early Tuesday, SpaceX tested the water deluge system at the launch pad two times, presumably to check the system’s ability to activate minutes apart to protect the pad during launch and recovery of the Super Heavy booster.

Later Tuesday, SpaceX removed the Starship upper stage from the Super Heavy booster. This is required for technicians to perform one of the final tasks to prepare for launch—installing the rocket’s flight termination system, which would destroy the rocket if it veers off course.

“We accept no compromises when it comes to ensuring the safety of the public and our team, and the return will only be attempted if conditions are right,” SpaceX said.

SpaceX outlined additional human-in-the-loop safety criteria for the upcoming Starship flight. SpaceX launches are typically fully automated from liftoff through the end of the mission.

“Thousands of distinct vehicle and pad criteria must be met prior to a return and catch attempt of the Super Heavy booster, which will require healthy systems on the booster and tower and a manual command from the mission’s flight director,” SpaceX wrote. “If this command is not sent prior to the completion of the boostback burn, or if automated health checks show unacceptable conditions with Super Heavy or the tower, the booster will default to a trajectory that takes it to a landing burn and soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Recovering the Super Heavy booster back at the launch pad is critical for SpaceX’s ambition to rapidly reuse the rocket. Eventually, SpaceX will also recover and reuse the Starship portion of the rocket, but for now, the company is sticking to water landings for the ship.

Extensive upgrades

SpaceX teams in Texas have beefed up the launch tower and catch arms in the last few months, working around the clock to add structural stiffeners and test the arms’ load-carrying capability.

“Extensive upgrades ahead of this flight test have been made to hardware and software across Super Heavy, Starship, and the launch and catch tower infrastructure at Starbase,” SpaceX said. “SpaceX engineers have spent years preparing and months testing for the booster catch attempt, with technicians pouring tens of thousands of hours into building the infrastructure to maximize our chances for success.”

It will take about seven minutes for the Super Heavy booster to climb to the edge of space, separate from the Starship upper stage, and return to Starbase for recovery. While the booster comes back to the ground, Starship will fire its six engines to accelerate to near orbital velocity, fast enough to complete a half-lap around Earth before gravity pulls it toward an atmospheric reentry over the Indian Ocean.

This is a similar trajectory to the one Starship flew in June, when it survived a fiery reentry for a controlled splashdown. It was the first time SpaceX completed an end-to-end Starship test flight.

After analyzing the results from the June mission, SpaceX engineers decided to rework the heat shield for the next Starship vehicle. The company said its technicians spent more than 12,000 hours replacing the entire thermal protection system with new-generation tiles, a backup ablative layer, and additional protections between the ship’s flap structures.

Onboard cameras showed fragments of the heat shield falling off Starship when it reentered the atmosphere in June.

“This massive effort, along with updates to the ship’s operations and software for reentry and landing burn, will look to improve upon the previous flight and bring Starship to a soft splashdown at the target area in the Indian Ocean,” SpaceX said.

Starship won’t attempt to reignite its Raptor engines in space on the upcoming test flight. This is one of the next things SpaceX needs to demonstrate for Starship to soar into a stable orbit around Earth and guide itself to a controlled reentry to ensure it doesn’t become stranded in space or fall over a populated area. SpaceX wanted to relight a Raptor engine in space on Starship’s third test flight in March, but aborted the maneuver.

The business end of Starship’s Super Heavy booster during a launch in March.

Credit: SpaceX

The business end of Starship’s Super Heavy booster during a launch in March. Credit: SpaceX

Once Starship is able to sustain a flight in low-Earth orbit, SpaceX can begin experiments with in-space refueling, which is required to support future Starship flights to the Moon, Mars, and other deep space destinations. Starship is a foundational element of SpaceX’s vision to create a settlement on the red planet.

NASA has a contract with SpaceX to develop a human-rated Starship to land astronauts on the Moon as part of the agency’s Artemis program. NASA’s official schedule calls for the first Artemis crew landing in September 2026. Realistically, the landing will probably happen later in the decade because the Starship lander and new lunar spacesuits likely won’t be ready in two years.

Starships will likely fly many dozens of times, if not more, before NASA approves it to land astronauts on the Moon. These flights will test the rocket’s ability to repeatedly and reliably fly to space and back, transfer cryogenic propellants in orbit, and safely land on the lunar surface without a crew.

As we’ve seen with SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, rapidly reusing elements of a launch vehicle can enable rapid-fire launch cadences. Validating the architecture for recovering the Super Heavy booster directly on the launch pad, as SpaceX intends to do quite soon, is a key step on this path.

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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.

SpaceX’s next Starship launch—and first catch—could happen this weekend Read More »

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SpaceX launches Europe’s Hera asteroid mission ahead of Hurricane Milton

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The launch of another important mission, NASA’s Europa Clipper, is on hold due to Hurricane Milton.

The European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft flies away from the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage a little more than an hour after liftoff Monday. Credit: SpaceX

Two years ago, a NASA spacecraft smashed into a small asteroid millions of miles from Earth to test a technique that could one day prove useful to deflect an object off a collision course with Earth. The European Space Agency launched a follow-up mission Monday to go back to the crash site and see the damage done.

The nearly $400 million (363 million euro) Hera mission, named for the Greek goddess of marriage, will investigate the aftermath of a cosmic collision between NASA’s DART spacecraft and the skyscraper-size asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022. NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission was the first planetary defense experiment, and it worked, successfully nudging Dimorphos off its regular orbit around a larger companion asteroid named Didymos.

But NASA had to sacrifice the DART spacecraft in the deflection experiment. Its destruction meant there were no detailed images of the condition of the target asteroid after the impact. A small Italian CubeSat deployed by DART as it approached Dimorphos captured fuzzy long-range views of the collision, but Hera will perform a comprehensive survey when it arrives in late 2026.

“We are going to have a surprise to see what Dimorphos looks like, which is, first, scientifically exciting, but also important because if we want to validate the technique and validate the model that can reproduce the impact, we need to know the final outcome,” said Patrick Michel, principal investigator on the Hera mission from Côte d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France. “And we don’t have it. With Hera, it’s like a detective going back to the crime scene and telling us what really happened.”

Last ride before the storm

The Hera spacecraft, weighing in at 2,442 pounds (1,108 kilograms), lifted off on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 10: 52 am EDT (14: 52 UTC) Monday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Officials weren’t sure the weather conditions at Cape Canaveral would permit a launch Monday, with widespread rain showers and a blanket of cloud cover hanging over Florida’s Space Coast. But the conditions were just good enough to be acceptable for a rocket launch, and the Falcon 9 lit its nine kerosene-fueled engines to climb away from pad 40 after a smooth countdown.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with ESA’s Hera mission.

Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, with ESA’s Hera mission. Credit: SpaceX

This was probably the final opportunity to launch Hera before the spaceport shutters in advance of Hurricane Milton, a dangerous Category 5 storm taking aim at the west coast of Florida. If the mission didn’t launch Monday, SpaceX was prepared to move the Falcon 9 rocket and the Hera spacecraft back inside a hangar for safekeeping until the storm passes.

Meanwhile, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center a few miles away, SpaceX is securing a Falcon Heavy rocket with the Europa Clipper spacecraft to ride out Hurricane Milton inside a hangar at Launch Complex 39A. Europa Clipper is a $5.2 billion flagship mission to explore Jupiter’s most enigmatic icy moon, and it was supposed to launch Thursday, the same day Hurricane Milton will potentially move over Central Florida.

NASA announced Sunday that it is postponing Europa Clipper’s launch until after the storm.

“The safety of launch team personnel is our highest priority, and all precautions will be taken to protect the Europa Clipper spacecraft,” said Tim Dunn, senior launch director at NASA’s Launch Services Program. “Once we have the ‘all-clear’ followed by facility assessment and any recovery actions, we will determine the next launch opportunity for this NASA flagship mission.”

Europa Clipper must launch by November 6 in order to reach Jupiter and its moon Europa in 2030. ESA’s Hera mission had a similarly tight window to get off the ground in October and arrive at asteroids Didymos and Dimorphos in December 2026.

Returning to flight

The Falcon 9 did its job Monday, accelerating the Hera spacecraft to a blistering speed of 26,745 mph (43,042 km/hr) with successive burns by its first stage booster and upper stage engine. This was the highest-speed payload injection ever achieved by SpaceX.

SpaceX did not attempt to recover the Falcon 9’s reusable booster on Monday’s flight because Hera needed all of the rocket’s oomph to gain enough speed to escape the pull of Earth’s gravity.

“Good launch, good orbit, and good payload deploy,” wrote Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, on X.

This was the first Falcon 9 launch in nine days—an unusually long gap between SpaceX missions—after the rocket’s upper stage misfired during a maneuver to steer itself out of orbit following an otherwise successful launch September 28 with a two-man crew heading for the International Space Station.

The upper stage engine apparently “over-burned,” and the rocket debris fell into the atmosphere short of its expected reentry corridor in the Pacific Ocean, sources said. The Federal Aviation Administration grounded the Falcon 9 rocket while SpaceX investigates the malfunction, but the FAA granted approval for SpaceX to launch the Hera mission because its trajectory would carry the rocket away from Earth, rather than back into the atmosphere for reentry.

“The FAA has determined that the absence of a second stage reentry for this mission adequately mitigates the primary risk to the public in the event of a reoccurrence of the mishap experienced with the Crew-9 mission,” the FAA said in a statement.

Members of the Hera team from ESA and its German prime contractor, OHB, pose with the spacecraft inside SpaceX’s payload processing facility in Florida.

Credit: SpaceX

Members of the Hera team from ESA and its German prime contractor, OHB, pose with the spacecraft inside SpaceX’s payload processing facility in Florida. Credit: SpaceX

This was the third time the FAA has grounded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket fleet in less than three months, following another upper stage failure in July that caused the destruction of 20 Starlink Internet satellites and the crash-landing of a Falcon 9 booster on an offshore drone ship in August. Federal regulators are responsible for ensuring commercial rocket launches don’t endanger the public.

These were the first major anomalies on any Falcon 9 launch since 2021.

It’s not clear when the FAA will clear SpaceX to resume launching other Falcon 9 missions. However, the launch of the Europa Clipper mission on a Falcon Heavy rocket, which uses essentially the same upper stage as a Falcon 9, is not licensed by the FAA because it is managed by NASA, another government agency. NASA will have final authority on whether to give the green light for the launch of Europa Clipper.

Surveying the damage

ESA’s Hera spacecraft is on course for a flyby of Mars next March to take advantage of the red planet’s gravity to slingshot itself on a trajectory to intercept its twin target asteroids. Near Mars, Hera will zoom relatively close to the planet’s asteroid-like moon, Deimos, to obtain rare closeups.

Then, Hera will approach Didymos and Dimorphos a little more than two years from now, maneuvering around the binary asteroid system at a range of distances, eventually moving as close as about a half-mile (1 kilometer) away.

Italy’s LICIACube spacecraft snapped this image of asteroids Didymos (lower left) and Dimorphos (upper right) a few minutes after the impact of DART on September 26, 2022.

Credit: ASI/NASA

Italy’s LICIACube spacecraft snapped this image of asteroids Didymos (lower left) and Dimorphos (upper right) a few minutes after the impact of DART on September 26, 2022. Credit: ASI/NASA

Dimorphos orbits Didymos once every 11 hours and 23 minutes, roughly 32 minutes shorter than the orbital period before DART’s impact in 2022. This change in orbit proved the effectiveness of a kinetic impactor in deflecting an asteroid that threatens Earth.

Dimorphos, the smaller of the two asteroids, has a diameter of around 500 feet (150 meters), while Didymos measures approximately a half-mile (780 meters) wide. Neither asteroid poses a risk to Earth, so NASA chose them as the objective for DART.

The Hubble Space Telescope spotted a debris field trailing the binary asteroid system after DART’s impact. Astronomers identified at least 37 boulders drifting away from the asteroids, material ejected when the DART spacecraft slammed into Dimorphos at a velocity of 14,000 mph (22,500 kmh).

Scientists will use Hera, with its suite of cameras and instruments, to study how the strike by DART changed the asteroid Dimorphos. Did the impact leave a crater, or did it reshape the entire asteroid? There are “tentative hints” that the asteroid’s shape changed after the collision, according to Michael Kueppers, Hera’s project scientist at ESA.

“If this is the case, it would also mean that the cohesion of Dimorphos is extremely low; that indeed, even an object the size of Dimorphos would be held together by its weight, by its gravity, and not by cohesion,” Kueppers said. “So it really would be a rubble pile.”

Hera will also measure the mass of Dimorphos, something DART was unable to do. “That is important to measure the efficiency of the impact… which was the momentum that was transferred from the impacting satellite to the asteroid,” Kueppers said.

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the asteroid Dimorphos was taken on December 19, 2022, nearly three months after the asteroid was impacted by NASA’s DART mission. Hubble’s sensitivity reveals a few dozen boulders knocked off the asteroid by the force of the collision.

Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)

This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image of the asteroid Dimorphos was taken on December 19, 2022, nearly three months after the asteroid was impacted by NASA’s DART mission. Hubble’s sensitivity reveals a few dozen boulders knocked off the asteroid by the force of the collision. Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)

The central goal of Hera is to fill the gaps in knowledge about Didymos and Dimorphos. Precise measurements of DART’s momentum, coupled with a better understanding of the interior structure of the asteroids, will allow future mission planners to know how best to deflect a hazardous object threatening Earth.

“The third part is to generally investigate the two asteroids to know their physical properties, their interior properties, their strength, essentially to be able to extrapolate or to scale the outcome of DART to another impact should we really need it one day,” Kueppers said.

Hera will release two briefcase-size CubeSats, named Juventas and Milani, to work in concert with ESA’s mothership. Juventas carries a compact radar to probe the internal structure of the smaller asteroid and will eventually attempt a landing on Dimorphos. Milani will study the mineral composition of individual boulders around DART’s impact site.

“This is the first time that we send a spacecraft to a small body, which is actually a multi-satellite system, with one main spacecraft and two CubeSats doing closer proximity operations,” Michel said. “This has never been done.”

Artist’s illustration of the Hera spacecraft with its two deployable CubeSats, Juventas and Milani, in the vicinity of the Didymos binary asteroid system. The CubeSats will communicate with ground teams via radio links with the Hera mothership.

Credit: ESA-Science Office

Artist’s illustration of the Hera spacecraft with its two deployable CubeSats, Juventas and Milani, in the vicinity of the Didymos binary asteroid system. The CubeSats will communicate with ground teams via radio links with the Hera mothership. Credit: ESA-Science Office

One source of uncertainty, and perhaps worry, about the environment around Didymos and Dimorphos is the status of the debris field observed by Hubble a few months after DART’s impact. But this is not likely to be a problem, according to Kueppers.

“I’m not really worried about potential boulders at Didymos,” he said, recalling the relative ease with which ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft navigated around an active comet from 2014 through 2016.

Ignacio Tanco, ESA’s flight director for Hera, doesn’t share Kuepper’s optimism.

“We didn’t hit the comet with a hammer,” said Tanco, who is responsible for keeping the Hera spacecraft safe. “The debris question for me is actually a source of… I wouldn’t say concern, but certainly precaution. It’s something that we’ll need to approach carefully once we get there.”

“That’s the difference between an engineer and a scientist,” Kuepper joked.

Scientists originally wanted Hera to be in the vicinity of the Didymos binary asteroid system before DART’s arrival, allowing it to directly observe the impact and its fallout. But ESA’s member states did not approve funding for the Hera mission in time, and the space agency only signed the contract to build the Hera spacecraft in 2020.

ESA first studied a mission like DART and Hera more than 20 years ago, when scientists proposed a mission called Don Quijote to get an asteroid deflection. But other missions took priority in Europe’s space program. Now, Hera is on course to write the final chapter of the story of humanity’s first planetary defense test.

“This is our contribution of ESA to humanity to help us in the future protect our planet,” said Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director general.

Photo of Stephen Clark

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.

SpaceX launches Europe’s Hera asteroid mission ahead of Hurricane Milton Read More »

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Rocket Report: Falcon 9 second stage stumbles; Japanese rocket nears the end

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“I’m pretty darn confident I’m going to have a good day on Friday.”

United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket sits on the pad at Space Launch Complex-41 (at Cape Canaveral at sunset in advance of the Cert-2 flight test. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Welcome to Edition 7.14 of the Rocket Report! For readers who don’t know, my second book was published last week. It’s titled Reentry, and tells the story behind the story of SpaceX’s development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. The early reviews are great, and it made USA Today’s bestseller list this week. If you’re interested in rockets, and since you’re reading this newsletter we already know the answer to that, the book is probably up your alley.

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.

Vega C cleared for next launch in November. Italian rocket firm Avio successfully tested a redesigned Zefiro-40 solid rocket motor for the second time on Thursday, the European Space Agency said. This second firing follows an initial firing test of the motor in May 2024 and concludes the qualification tests for the new engine nozzle design of the Zefiro-40. This rocket motor powers the second stage of the Vega C rocket.

Flight three almost ready … The redesign of the motor was necessitated by the failure of a Vega C rocket in December 2022, which was just the second flight of the launch vehicle. Then, in June 2023, a test to re-certify the motor for flight also failed. Now that the second-stage issue appears to be resolved, Vega C is on the launch calendar for November of this year, although there’s the possibility the third mission of the rocket could slip a bit further. The rocket will be carrying the Sentinel-1C satellite to Sun-synchronous orbit. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Impulse Space raises $150 million. Los Angeles-based space startup Impulse Space, which is led by renowned rocket scientist Tom Mueller, has raised $150 million in a new fundraising round led by venture capital firm Founders Fund, CNBC reports. Impulse is scaling a product line of orbital transfer vehicles, and so far is building two, the smaller Mira and the larger Helios. While rockets get satellites and payloads into orbit, like an airplane carrying passengers to a metro area, space tugs deliver them to specific destinations, like taxis taking those passengers home from the airport.

Taking the next step after launch … Mueller, who founded Impulse Space three years ago, said the funds will fuel growth of the company. “This means that we’re sufficiently funded through the development of Helios and the upgraded version Mira and out past the first flights of both of these products,” Mueller told the publication. Impulse flew its first mission, called LEO Express-1, with a Mira vehicle carrying and deploying a small satellite, last November. In Mueller’s view, while SpaceX reduced the cost to launch mass to orbit, the in-space delivery systems on the market are lacking. (submitted by Tom Nelson and Ken the Bin)

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s space reporting is to sign up for his newsletter, we’ll collect his stories in your inbox.

Polish company receives ESA support. Did you know there is a launch startup in Poland? Until this week, I confess I did not. However, that changed when the European Space Agency awarded 2.4 million euros to Poland’s SpaceForest for further development of its Perun rocket. SpaceForest has developed an 11.5-meter-tall sounding rocket capable of carrying payloads of up to 50 kilograms to an altitude of 150 kilometers, European Spaceflight reports.

Boosting up commercial companies … To date, the company has completed two test flights, one reaching an altitude of 22 kilometers and another topping out at 13 kilometers. With the new funding from ESA, SpaceForest will implement upgrades to the combustion chamber of its in-house developed SF1000 paraffin-powered hybrid rocket engine. ESA awarded the funding as part of the agency’s Boost! initiative. Adopted by member states in 2019, Boost! aims to foster the development of new commercial space transportation services. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

A new take on a kinetic launch system. Longshot Space is developing a straight-line kinetic launch system that will gradually accelerate payloads to hypersonic speeds before launching them to orbit, TechCrunch reports. The startup is betting it can achieve very, very low costs to orbit compared to a rocket, possibly as low as $10 per kilogram. The company raised $1.5 million in a pre-seed round in April 2023 and now, nearly 18 months later, Longshot closed a little over $5 million in combined venture capital and funding from the US Air Force’s TACFI program.

Pulling some serious Gs … The new capital will be used to build a large, 500-meter-long gun in the Nevada desert to push 100-kilogram payloads to Mach 5. The system has to be so long in order to keep acceleration forces low, which is better for both the vehicle and payload. For eventual space missions, Longshot is aiming to keep the maximum gravitational forces to 500–600 times the force of gravity. The company’s name serves a dual purpose, as its technology requires a longshot to reach space, and its prospects for success are probably a longshot. Nevertheless, it’s great to see someone trying new ideas. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Falcon 9 rocket upper stage misfires. SpaceX is investigating a problem with the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage that caused it to reenter the atmosphere and fall into the sea outside of its intended disposal area after a launch last Saturday with a two-person crew heading to the International Space Station, Ars reports. The upper stage malfunction occurred after the Falcon 9 successfully deployed SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission. Hague and Gorbunov safely arrived at the space station Sunday to begin a five-month stay at the orbiting research complex.

Returning to flight shortly? … Safety warnings issued to mariners and pilots before the launch indicated the Falcon 9’s upper stage was supposed to fall somewhere in a narrow band stretching from southwest to northeast in the South Pacific east of New Zealand. Most of the rocket was expected to burn up during reentry, but SpaceX targeted a remote part of the ocean for disposal because some debris was likely to survive and reach the sea. This is the third time SpaceX has grounded the Falcon 9 rocket in less than three months, ending a remarkable run of flawless launches. A return to flight is expected as early as October 7 with the European Space Agency’s Hera spacecraft.

New Zealand seeks to reduce rocket regulations. New Zealand plans to implement a new “red tape-cutting” strategy for space and aviation by the end of 2025, the New Zealand Herald reports. “We have committed to having a world-class regulatory environment by the end of 2025,” Space Minister Judith Collins told the NZ Aerospace Summit recently. “To do that we’re introducing a light-touch regulatory approach that will significantly free up innovators to test their technology and ideas.”

Kiwis have a different attitude … The goal of reducing regulations is to allow companies to focus more on innovation and less on paperwork. New Zealand officials are motivated by concerns that Australia may seek to lure some of its space and aviation industries. Among the space companies with a significant presence in New Zealand are Rocket Lab, Dawn Aerospace, as well as smaller firms such as Astrix Astronautics. The move comes as US-based firms such as SpaceX, Varda, and others are pushing the country’s launch regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration, to be more nimble.

H2A nears the end of the road. Japan launched the classified IGS-Radar 8 satellite early Thursday with the second-to-last H-2A rocket, Space News reports. Developed and operated by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the H-2A rocket debuted in 2001 and has flown 49 times with a single failure, suffered in 2003. It has been a reliable medium-lift launch vehicle for Japan’s national space interests, as well as a handful of commercial space customers.

The rocket’s 50th launch will be its last … The final H-2A core stage is now completed and is scheduled for shipment to the Tanegashima Space Center. That launch, expected in late 2024, will carry the Global Observing SATellite for Greenhouse gases and Water cycle satellite. The H3 will succeed the H-2A. The new generation H3 had a troubled start, with its first flight in March 2023 suffering a second-stage engine failure. However, the new rocket has since flown successfully twice. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Russians can invest in SpaceX now? Da. One of the odder stories this week concerns a Russian broker apparently offering access to privately held shares of SpaceX. An article in the Russian newspaper Kommersant suggests that a Moscow-based financial services company, Finam Holdings, managed to purchase a number of shares from a large foreign investment fund. The article says the minimum investment for Russians interested in buying into SpaceX is $10,000.

On bonds and broomsticks … Honestly, I have no idea about the legality of all this, but it sure smells funny. SpaceX, of course, periodically sells shares of the privately held company to investors. In addition, employees who receive shares in the company can sometimes sell their holdings. Given the existing sanctions on Russia due to the war on Ukraine and the potential for additional sanctions, it seems like these shareholders are definitely taking some risk.

ULA chief “supremely confident” in Vulcan’s second launch. The second flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, planned for Friday morning, has a primary goal of validating the launcher’s reliability for delivering critical US military satellites to orbit. Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, told reporters Wednesday that he is “supremely confident” the Vulcan rocket will succeed in accomplishing that objective, Ars reports. “As I come up on Cert-2, I’m pretty darn confident I’m going to have a good day on Friday, knock on wood,” Bruno said. “These are very powerful, complicated machines.”

A lengthy manifest to fly … The Vulcan launcher, a replacement for ULA’s Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, is on contract to haul the majority of the US military’s most expensive national security satellites into orbit over the next several years. If Friday’s test flight goes well, ULA is on track to launch at least one—and perhaps two—operational missions for the Space Force by the end of this year. The Space Force has already booked 25 launches on ULA’s Vulcan rocket for military payloads and spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. Including the launch Friday, ULA has 70 Vulcan rockets in its backlog, mostly for the Space Force, the NRO, and Amazon’s Kuiper satellite broadband network.

NASA’s mobile launcher is on the move. NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program at Kennedy Space Center in Florida began moving the mobile launcher 1 from Launch Complex 39B along a 4.2-mile stretch back to the Vehicle Assembly Building this week. First motion of the mobile launcher, atop NASA’s crawler-transporter 2, occurred early on the morning of October 3, the space agency confirmed. Teams rolled the mobile launcher out to Kennedy’s Pad 39B in August 2023 for upgrades and a series of ground demonstration tests in preparation for the Artemis II mission.

Stacking operations when? … After arriving outside the Vehicle Assembly Building later on Thursday, the launch tower will be moved into High Bay 3 on Friday. This is all in preparation for stacking the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission, which is nominally scheduled for September 2025 but may slip further. NASA has not publicly said when stacking operations will begin, and this depends on when the space agency makes a final decision on whether to fly the Orion spacecraft with its heat shield as-is or adopt a different plan. Stacking will take several months.

Next three launches

Oct. 4: Vulcan | Cert-2 mission | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 10: 00 UTC

Oct. 7: Falcon 9 | Hera | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 14: 52 UTC

Oct. 9: Falcon 9 | OneWeb-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 06: 03 UTC

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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 second stage stumbles; Japanese rocket nears the end Read More »

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ULA’s second Vulcan rocket lost part of its booster and kept going

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The US Space Force says this test flight was critical for certifying Vulcan for military missions.

United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, under contract for dozens of flights for the US military and Amazon’s Kuiper broadband network, lifted off from Florida on its second test flight Friday, suffered an anomaly with one of its strap-on boosters, and still achieved a successful mission, the company said in a statement.

This test flight, known as Cert-2, is the second certification mission for the new Vulcan rocket, a milestone that paves the way for the Space Force to clear ULA’s new rocket to begin launching national security satellites in the coming months.

While ULA said the Vulcan rocket continued to hit its marks during the climb into orbit Friday, engineers are investigating what happened with one of its solid rocket boosters shortly after liftoff.

After a last-minute aborted countdown earlier in the morning, the 202-foot-tall (61.6-meter) Vulcan rocket lit its twin methane-fueled BE-4 engines and two side-mounted solid rocket boosters to climb away from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, at 7: 25 am EDT (11: 25 UTC) Friday.

A little tilt

As the rocket arced east from Cape Canaveral, a shower of sparks suddenly appeared at the base of the Vulcan rocket around 37 seconds into the mission. The exhaust plume from one of the strap-on boosters, made by Northrop Grumman, changed significantly, and the rocket slightly tilted on its axis before the guidance system and main engines made a steering correction.

Videos from the launch show the booster’s nozzle, the bell-shaped exhaust exit cone at the bottom of the booster, fall away from the rocket.

“It looks dramatic, like all things on a rocket,” Bruno wrote on X. “But it’s just the release of the nozzle. No explosions occurred.”

During the ascent of the Vulcan rocket on the #Cert2 mission, there appeared to be an issue with the solid rocket booster on the right side of the vehicle as seen from the KSC Press Site. However, the Centaur was able to reach orbit.https://t.co/3iwWLVWZHp

📹: @ABernNYC pic.twitter.com/5h06ffNMXr

— Spaceflight Now (@SpaceflightNow) October 4, 2024

The Federal Aviation Administration, which licenses commercial space launches in the United States, said in a statement that it assessed the booster anomaly and “determined no investigation is warranted at this time.” The FAA is not responsible for regulating launch vehicle anomalies unless they impact public safety.

The Vulcan rocket comes in several configurations, with zero, two, four, or six solid-fueled boosters clustered around the liquid-fueled core stage. ULA can tailor the configuration based on the parameters of each mission, such as payload mass and target orbit.

The boosters, which Northrop Grumman calls graphite epoxy motors, are 63 inches (1.6 meters) in diameter and 72 feet (22 meters) long. Their nozzles are made of a composite heat-resistant carbon-phenolic material.

Bruno added that the rest of the damaged booster’s composite casing held up fine during its roughly 90-second burn, but the anomaly caused “reduced, asymmetric thrust” that the rocket compensated for during the rest of its ascent into space.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial space launches, is not immediately requiring an investigation into the booster anomaly. The FAA said it is “assessing the operation and will issue an updated statement if the agency determines an investigation is warranted.”

Remarkably, the Vulcan rocket soldiered on and jettisoned both strap-on boosters to fall into the Atlantic Ocean. They’re not designed for recovery, so ULA and Northrop Grumman engineers will have to piece together what happened from imagery and performance data beamed down from the rocket in flight.

The BE-4 main engines, supplied by Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, appeared to work flawlessly for the first five minutes of the flight. The core stage shut down its engines and separated from Vulcan’s Centaur upper stage, which ignited two Aerojet Rocketdyne RL10 engines to propel the rocket into orbit.

The second Vulcan rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, powered by two methane-fueled BE-4 engines and two solid rocket boosters.

Credit: United Launch Alliance

The second Vulcan rocket lifts off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, powered by two methane-fueled BE-4 engines and two solid rocket boosters. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Live data displayed on ULA’s webcast of the launch suggested the RL10 engines fired for approximately 20 seconds longer than planned, apparently to compensate for the lower thrust from the damaged booster during the first phase of the flight. The Centaur upper stage completed a second burn about a half-hour into the mission.

The rocket did not carry a real satellite. Earlier this year, ULA decided to launch a dummy payload to simulate the mass of a spacecraft, when it became clear the original payload for Vulcan’s second flight—Sierra Space’s first Dream Chaser spaceplane—would not be ready to fly this fall. ULA says it self-funded most of the cost of the Cert-2 test flight, which Bruno suggested was somewhere below $100 million.

Bullseye insertion

“Orbital insertion was perfect,” Bruno wrote on X.

The Centaur engines were supposed to fire a third time later Friday to send the rocket on a trajectory to escape Earth orbit and head into the Solar System. ULA also planned to perform experiments with the Centaur upper stage to demonstrate technologies and capabilities for longer-duration missions that could eventually last days, weeks, or months. The company did not provide an update on the results of these experiments.

Friday morning’s launch follows the debut test flight of the Vulcan rocket on January 8, which sent a commercial lunar lander from Astrobotic on a trajectory toward the Moon. The launch in January was nearly perfect.

ULA is a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which merged their rocket divisions to form a single company in 2006. SpaceX, with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, is ULA’s main competitor in the market for launching large US military satellites into orbit.

In 2020, the Pentagon awarded ULA and SpaceX multibillion-dollar “Phase 2” contracts to share responsibilities for launching dozens of national security space missions through 2027. Defense officials selected ULA’s Vulcan rocket to launch 25 national security missions, the majority of the launches up for competition. The rest went to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, which started delivering on its Phase 2 contract in January 2023.

Later this year, the Space Force is expected to select up to three companies—almost certainly ULA, SpaceX, and perhaps Blue Origin with its soon-to-debut New Glenn rocket—in a fresh competition to be eligible for contracts to launch the military’s largest spacecraft through 2029.

The Space Force required ULA to complete two successful Vulcan test flights before clearing the new rocket for launching military satellites. Despite the booster malfunction, ULA officials clearly believe the Vulcan rocket did enough Friday for the Space Force to certify it.

“The success of Vulcan’s second certification flight heralds a new age of forward-looking technology committed to meeting the ever-growing requirements of space launch and supporting our nation’s assured access to space,” Bruno said in a statement. “We had an observation on one of our solid rocket boosters (SRBs) that we are reviewing, but we are overall pleased with the rocket’s performance and had a bullseye insertion.”

A closer view of the Vulcan rocket’s BE-4 main engines and twin solid-fueled boosters.

Credit: United Launch Alliance

A closer view of the Vulcan rocket’s BE-4 main engines and twin solid-fueled boosters. Credit: United Launch Alliance

In a press release after Friday’s launch, the Space Force hailed the test flight as a “certification milestone.”

“This is a significant achievement for both ULA and an important milestone for the nation’s strategic space lift capability,” said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, Space Systems Command’s program executive officer for assured access to space. “The Space Force’s partnership with launch companies, such as ULA, are absolutely critical in deploying on-orbit capabilities that protect our national interests.

“We are already starting to review the performance data from this launch, and we look forward to Vulcan meeting the certification requirements for a range of national security space missions,” Panzenhagen said in a statement.

The Space Force is eager for Vulcan to become operational. Some of the military’s most critical reconnaissance, communications, and missile warning satellites are slated to fly on Vulcan rockets.

Ramping up

Going into Friday’s test flight, ULA and the Space Force hoped to launch one or two more Vulcan rockets by the end of the year, both with US Space Force payloads. The timing of the next Vulcan launch, assuming the Space Force certifies the new rocket, will likely hinge on the outcome of the investigation into the booster anomaly.

ULA has already transported all major components of the next Vulcan rocket from its factory in Alabama to Cape Canaveral for final launch preparations. The company has a backlog of 69 Vulcan flights, counting missions for the Space Force, the National Reconnaissance Office, Amazon’s Kuiper network, and Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser spaceplane to resupply the International Space Station.

In a prelaunch briefing with reporters, Bruno said ULA aims to launch up to 20 times next year. Roughly half of that number will be Vulcan flights, and the rest will be Atlas V rockets, which ULA is retiring in favor of Vulcan.

There are 15 Atlas V rockets left to fly, primarily for Amazon and Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule. The nozzle failure Friday may also affect the schedule for Atlas V launches because the soon-to-retire rocket uses a similar booster design from Northrop Grumman.

ULA eventually wants to launch up to 25 Vulcan rockets per year from its launch pads at Cape Canaveral and at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The launch provider is outfitting a second assembly building in Florida to stack Vulcan rockets, a capability that will shorten the time between liftoffs. ULA is modifying its Atlas V launch pad in California to support Vulcan flights there next year.

ULA announced the Vulcan rocket in 2015 to replace the Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, which had stellar success records but were not cost-competitive with SpaceX’s partially reusable Falcon 9. The Atlas V also uses a Russian main engine, a situation that became politically untenable after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and more so after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The final Russian engines for the Atlas V arrived in the United States in 2021.

The Vulcan rocket is somewhat less expensive than the Atlas V, and significantly cheaper than the Delta IV, but still more costly than SpaceX’s Falcon 9. There is a closer price parity between Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket.

Bruno hinted at the cost of developing the rocket in his roundtable discussion with reporters earlier this week.

“Developing a rocket, and then the infrastructure to develop a new space launch vehicle, the rule of thumb is it costs you somewhere between $5 billion and $7 billion,” Bruno said. “Vulcan is not outside the rule of thumb.”

Updated at 5: 15 pm EDT (21: 15 UTC) with new FAA statement.

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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.

ULA’s second Vulcan rocket lost part of its booster and kept going Read More »

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ULA hasn’t given up on developing a long-lived cryogenic space tug

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On Friday’s launch, United Launch Alliance will test the limits of its Centaur upper stage.

United Launch Alliance’s second Vulcan rocket underwent a countdown dress rehearsal Tuesday. Credit: United Launch Alliance

The second flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, planned for Friday morning, has a primary goal of validating the launcher’s reliability for delivering critical US military satellites to orbit.

Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, told reporters Wednesday that he is “supremely confident” the Vulcan rocket will succeed in accomplishing that objective. The Vulcan’s second test flight, known as Cert-2, follows a near-flawless debut launch of ULA’s new rocket on January 8.

“As I come up on Cert-2, I’m pretty darn confident I’m going to have a good day on Friday, knock on wood,” Bruno said. “These are very powerful, complicated machines.”

The Vulcan launcher, a replacement for ULA’s Atlas V and Delta IV rockets, is on contract to haul the majority of the US military’s most expensive national security satellites into orbit over the next several years. The Space Force is eager to certify Vulcan to launch these payloads, but military officials want to see two successful test flights before committing one of its satellites to flying on the new rocket.

If Friday’s test flight goes well, ULA is on track to launch at least one—and perhaps two—operational missions for the Space Force by the end of this year. The Space Force has already booked 25 launches on ULA’s Vulcan rocket for military payloads and spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. Including the launch Friday, ULA has 70 Vulcan rockets in its backlog, mostly for the Space Force, the NRO, and Amazon’s Kuiper satellite broadband network.

The Vulcan rocket is powered by two methane-fueled BE-4 engines produced by Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, and ULA can mount zero, two, four, or six strap-on solid rocket boosters from Northrop Grumman around the Vulcan’s first stage to propel heavier payloads to space. The rocket’s Centaur V upper stage is fitted with a pair of hydrogen-burning RL10 engines from Aerojet Rocketdyne.

The second Vulcan rocket will fly in the same configuration as the first launch earlier this year, with two strap-on solid-fueled boosters. The only noticeable modification to the rocket is the addition of some spray-on foam insulation around the outside of the first stage methane tank, which will keep the cryogenic fuel at the proper temperature as Vulcan encounters aerodynamic heating on its ascent through the atmosphere.

“This will give us just over one second more usable propellant,” Bruno wrote on X.

There is one more change from Vulcan’s first launch, which boosted a commercial lunar lander for Astrobotic on a trajectory toward the Moon. This time, there are no real spacecraft on the Vulcan rocket. Instead, ULA mounted a dummy payload to the Centaur V upper stage to simulate the mass of a functioning satellite.

ULA originally planned to launch Sierra Space’s first Dream Chaser spaceplane on the second Vulcan rocket. But the Dream Chaser won’t be ready to fly its first mission to resupply the International Space Station until next year. Under pressure from the Pentagon, ULA decided to move ahead with the second Vulcan launch without a payload at the company’s own expense, which Bruno tallied in the “high tens of millions of dollars.”

Heliocentricity

The test flight will begin with liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, during a three-hour launch window opening at 6 am EDT (10: 00 UTC). The 202-foot-tall (61.6-meter) Vulcan rocket will head east over the Atlantic Ocean, shedding its boosters, first stage, and payload fairing in the first few minutes of flight.

The Centaur upper stage will fire its RL10 engines two times, completing the primary mission within about 35 minutes of launch. The rocket will then continue on for a series of technical demonstrations before ending up on an Earth escape trajectory into a heliocentric orbit around the Sun.

“We have a number of experiments that we’re conducting that are really technology demonstrations and measurements that are associated with our high-performance, longer-duration version of Centaur V that we’ll be introducing in the future,” Bruno said. “And these will help us go a little bit faster on that development. And, of course, because we don’t have an active spacecraft as a payload, we also have more instrumentation that we’re able to use for just characterizing the vehicle.”

The Centaur V upper stage for the Vulcan rocket.

The Centaur V upper stage for the Vulcan rocket. Credit: United Launch Alliance

ULA engineers have worked on the design of a long-lived upper stage for more than a decade. Their vision was to develop an upper stage fed by super-efficient cryogenic liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants that could generate its own power and operate in space for days, weeks, or longer rather than an upper stage’s usual endurance limit of several hours. This would allow the rocket to not only deliver satellites into bespoke high-altitude orbits but also continue on to release more payloads at different altitudes or provide longer-term propulsion in support of other missions.

The concept was called the Advanced Cryogenic Evolved Stage (ACES). ULA’s corporate owners, Boeing and Lockheed Martin, never authorized the full development of ACES, and the company said in 2020 that it was no longer pursuing the ACES concept.

The Centaur V upper stage currently used on the Vulcan rocket is a larger version of the thin-walled, pressure-stabilized Centaur upper stage that has been flying since the 1960s. Bruno said the Centaur V design, as it is today, offers as much as 12 hours of operating life in space. This is longer than any other existing rocket using cryogenic propellants, which can boil off over time.

ULA’s chief executive still harbors an ambition for regaining some of the same capabilities promised by ACES.

“What we are looking to do is to extend that by orders of magnitude,” Bruno said. “And what that would allow us to do is have a in-space transportation capability for in-space mobility and servicing and things like that.”

Space Force leaders have voiced a desire for future spacecraft to freely maneuver between different orbits, a concept the military calls “dynamic space operations.” This would untether spacecraft operations from fuel limitations and eventually require the development of in-orbit refueling, propellant depots, or novel propulsion technologies.

No one has tried to store large amounts of super-cold propellants in space for weeks or longer. Accomplishing this is a non-trivial thermal problem, requiring insulation to keep heat from the Sun from reaching the liquid cryogenic propellant, stored at temperatures of several hundred degrees below zero.

Bruno hesitated to share details of the experiments ULA plans for the Centaur V upper stage on Friday’s test flight, citing proprietary concerns. He said the experiments will confirm analytical models about how the upper stage performs in space.

“Some of these are devices, some of these are maneuvers because maneuvers make a difference, and some are related to performance in a way,” he said. “In some cases, those maneuvers are helping us with the thermal load that tries to come in and boil off the propellants.”

Eventually, ULA would like to eliminate hydrazine attitude control fuel and battery power from the Centaur V upper stage, Bruno said Wednesday. This sounds a lot like what ULA wanted to do with ACES, which would have used an internal combustion engine called Integrated Vehicle Fluids (IVF) to recycle gasified waste propellants to pressurize its propellant tanks, generate electrical power, and feed thrusters for attitude control. This would mean the upper stage wouldn’t need to rely on hydrazine, helium, or batteries.

ULA hasn’t talked much about the IVF system in recent years, but Bruno said the company is still developing it. “It’s part of all of this, but that’s all I will say, or I’ll start revealing what all the gadgets are.”

A comparison between ULA’s legacy Centaur upper stage and the new Centaur V.

A comparison between ULA’s legacy Centaur upper stage and the new Centaur V. Credit: United Launch Alliance

George Sowers, former vice president and chief scientist at ULA, was one of the company’s main advocates for extending the lifetime of upper stages and developing technologies for refueling and propellant depot. He retired from ULA in 2017 and is now a professor at the Colorado School of Mines and an independent aerospace industry consultant.

In an interview with Ars earlier this year, Sowers said ULA solved many of the problems with keeping cryogenic propellants at the right temperature in space.

“We had a lot of data on boil-off, just from flying Centaurs all the way to geosynchronous orbit, which doesn’t involve weeks, but it involves maybe half a day or so, which is plenty of time to get all the temperatures to stabilize at deep space levels,” Sowers said. “So you have to understand the heat transfer very well. Good models are very important.”

ULA experimented with different types of insulation and vapor cooling, which involves taking cold gas that boiled off of cryogenic fuel and blowing it on heat penetration points into the tanks.

“There are tricks to managing boil-off,” he said. “One of the tricks is that you never want to boil oxygen. You always want to boil hydrogen. So you size your propellant tanks and your propellant loads, assuming you’re going to have that extra hydrogen boil-off. Then what you can do is use the hydrogen to keep the oxygen cold to keep it from boiling.

“The amount of heat that you can reject by boiling off one kilogram of hydrogen is about five times what you would reject by boiling off one kilogram of oxygen. So those are some of the thermodynamic tricks,” Sowers said. “The way ULA accomplished that is by having a common bulkhead, so the hydrogen tank and the oxygen tank are in thermal contact. So hydrogen keeps the oxygen cold.”

ULA’s experiments showed it could get the hydrogen boil-off rate down to about 10 percent per year, based on thermodynamic models calibrated by data from flying older versions of the Centaur upper stage on Atlas V rockets, according to Sowers.

“In my mind, that kind of cemented the idea that distribution depots and things like that are very well in hand without having to have exotic cryocoolers, which tend to use a lot of power,” Sowers said. “It’s about efficiency. If you can do it passively, you don’t have to expend energy on cryocoolers.”

“We’re going to go to days, and then we’re going to go to weeks, and then we think it’s possible to take us to months,” Bruno said. “That’s a game changer.”

However, ULA’s corporate owners haven’t yet fully bought into this vision. Bruno said the Vulcan rocket and its supporting manufacturing and launch infrastructure cost between $5 billion and $7 billion to develop. ULA also plans to eventually recover and reuse BE-4 main engines from the Vulcan rocket, but that is still at least several years away.

But ULA is reportedly up for sale, and a well-capitalized buyer might find the company’s long-duration cryogenic upper stage more attractive and worth the investment.

“There’s a whole lot of missions that enables,” Bruno said. “So that’s a big step in capability, both for the United States and also commercially.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

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.

ULA hasn’t given up on developing a long-lived cryogenic space tug Read More »

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SpaceX launches mission to bring Starliner astronauts back to Earth

commercial crew, Commercial space, crew dragon, dragon, falcon 9, human spaceflight, international space station, launch, NASA, roscosmos, russia, Science, Space, spacex, starliner / /

Ch-ch-changes —

SpaceX is bringing back propulsive landings with its Dragon capsule, but only in emergencies.

– Updated

SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft climbs away from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Saturday atop a Falcon 9 rocket.

Enlarge / SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft climbs away from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Saturday atop a Falcon 9 rocket.

NASA/Keegan Barber

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov lifted off Saturday from Florida’s Space Coast aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, heading for a five-month expedition on the International Space Station.

The two-man crew launched on top of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket at 1: 17 pm EDT (17: 17 UTC), taking an advantage of a break in stormy weather to begin a five-month expedition in space. Nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines powered the first stage of the flight on a trajectory northeast from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, then the booster detached and returned to landing at Cape Canaveral as the Falcon 9’s upper stage accelerated SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft into orbit.

“It was a sweet ride,” Hague said after arriving in space. With a seemingly flawless launch, Hague and Gorbunov are on track to arrive at the space station around 5: 30 pm EDT (2130 UTC) Sunday.

Empty seats

This is SpaceX’s 15th crew mission since 2020, and SpaceX’s 10th astronaut launch for NASA, but Saturday’s launch was unusual in a couple of ways.

“All of our missions have unique challenges and this one, I think, will be memorable for a lot of us,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations.

First, only two people rode into orbit on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, rather than the usual complement of four astronauts. This mission, known as Crew-9, originally included Hague, Gorbunov, commander Zena Cardman, and NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson.

But the troubled test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft threw a wrench into NASA’s plans. The Starliner mission launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Boeing’s spacecraft reached the space station, but thruster failures and helium leaks plagued the mission, and NASA officials decided last month it was too risky to being the crew back to Earth on Starliner.

NASA selected SpaceX and Boeing for multibillion-dollar commercial crew contracts in 2014, with each company responsible for developing human-rated spaceships to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX flew astronauts for the first time in 2020, and Boeing reached the same milestone with the test flight that launched in June.

Ultimately, the Starliner spacecraft safely returned to Earth on September 6 with a successful landing in New Mexico. But it left Wilmore and Williams behind on the space station with the lab’s long-term crew of seven astronauts and cosmonauts. The space station crew rigged two temporary seats with foam inside a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the outpost, where the Starliner astronauts would ride home if they needed to evacuate the complex in an emergency.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov in their SpaceX pressure suits.

Enlarge / NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov in their SpaceX pressure suits.

NASA/Kim Shiflett

This is a temporary measure to allow the Dragon spacecraft to return to Earth with six people instead of the usual four. NASA officials decided to remove two of the astronauts from the next SpaceX crew mission to free up normal seats for Wilmore and Williams to ride home in February, when Crew-9 was already slated to end its mission.

The decision to fly the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without its crew had several second order effects on space station operations. Managers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston had to decide who to bump from the Crew-9 mission, and who to keep on the crew.

Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov ended up keeping their seats on the Crew-9 flight. Hague originally trained as the pilot on Crew-9, and NASA decided he would take Zena Cardman’s place as commander. Hague, a 49-year-old Space Force colonel, is a veteran of one long-duration mission on the International Space Station, and also experienced a rare in-flight launch abort in 2018 due to a failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket.

NASA announced the original astronaut assignments for the Crew-9 mission in January. Cardman, a 36-year-old geobiologist, would have been the first rookie astronaut without test pilot experience to command a NASA spaceflight. Three-time space shuttle flier Stephanie Wilson, 58, was the other astronaut removed from the Crew-9 mission.

The decision on who to fly on Crew-9 was a “really close call,” said Bowersox, who oversees NASA’s spaceflight operations directorate. “They were thinking very hard about flying Zena, but in this situation, it made sense to have somebody who had at least one flight under their belt.”

Gorbunov, a 34-year-old Russian aerospace engineer making his first flight to space, moved over to take pilot’s seat in the Crew Dragon spacecraft, although he remains officially designated a mission specialist. His remaining presence on the crew was preordained because of an international agreement between NASA and Russia’s space agency that provides seats for Russian cosmonauts on US crew missions and US astronauts on Russian Soyuz flights to the space station.

Bowersox said NASA will reassign Cardman and Wilson to future flights.

NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, seen in their Boeing flight suits before their launch.

Enlarge / NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, seen in their Boeing flight suits before their launch.

Operational flexibility

This was also the first launch of astronauts from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX’s busiest launch pad. SpaceX has outfitted the launch pad with the equipment necessary to support launches of human spaceflight missions on the Crew Dragon spacecraft, including a more than 200-foot-tall tower and a crew access arm to allow astronauts to board spaceships on top of Falcon 9 rockets.

SLC-40 was previously based on a “clean pad” architecture, without any structures to service or access Falcon 9 rockets while they were vertical on the pad. SpaceX also installed slide chutes to give astronauts and ground crews an emergency escape route away from the launch pad in an emergency.

SpaceX constructed the crew tower last year and had it ready for the launch of a Dragon cargo mission to the space station in March. Saturday’s launch demonstrated the pad’s ability to support SpaceX astronaut missions, which have previously all departed from Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a few miles north of SLC-40.

Bringing human spaceflight launch capability online at SLC-40 gives SpaceX and NASA additional flexibility in their scheduling. For example, LC-39A remains the only launch pad configured to support flights of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX is now preparing LC-39A for a Falcon Heavy launch October 10 with NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which only has a window of a few weeks to depart Earth this year and reach its destination at Jupiter in 2030.

With SLC-40 now certified for astronaut launches, SpaceX and NASA teams are able to support the Crew-9 and Europa Clipper missions without worrying about scheduling conflicts. The Florida spaceport now has three launch pads certified for crew flights—two for SpaceX’s Dragon and one for Boeing’s Starliner—and NASA will add a fourth human-rated launch pad with the Artemis II mission to the Moon late next year.

“That’s pretty exciting,” said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator. “I think it’s a reflection of where we are in our space program at NASA, but also the capabilities that the United States has developed.”

Earlier this week, Hague and Gorbunov participated in a launch day dress rehearsal, when they had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with SLC-40. The launch pad has the same capabilities as LC-39A, but with a slightly different layout. SpaceX also test-fired the Falcon 9 rocket Tuesday evening, before lowering the rocket horizontal and moving it back into a hangar for safekeeping as the outer bands of Hurricane Helene moved through Central Florida.

Inside the hangar, SpaceX technicians discovered sooty exhaust from the Falcon 9’s engines accumulated on the outside of the Dragon spacecraft during the test-firing. Ground teams wiped the soot off of the craft’s solar arrays and heat shield, then repainted portions of the capsule’s radiators around the edge of Dragon’s trunk section before rolling the vehicle back to the launch pad Friday.

“It’s important that the radiators radiate heat in the proper way to space, so we had to put some some new paint on to get that back to the right emissivity and the right reflectivity and absorptivity of the solar radiation that hit those panels so it will reject the heat properly,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability.

Gerstenmaier also outlined a new backup ability for the Crew Dragon spacecraft to safely splash down even if all of its parachutes fail to deploy on final descent back to Earth. This involves using the capsule’s eight powerful SuperDraco thrusters, normally only used in the unlikely instance of a launch abort, to fire for a few seconds and slow Dragon’s speed for a safe splashdown.

A hover test using SuperDraco thrusters on a prototype Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2015.

Enlarge / A hover test using SuperDraco thrusters on a prototype Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2015.

SpaceX

“The way it works is, in the case where all the parachutes totally fail, this essentially fires the thrusters at the very end,” Gerstenmaier said. “That essentially gives the crew a chance to land safely, and essentially escape the vehicle. So it’s not used in any partial conditions. We can land with one chute out. We can land with other failures in the chute system. But this is only in the case where all four parachutes just do not operate.”

When SpaceX first designed the Crew Dragon spacecraft more than a decade ago, the company wanted to use the SuperDraco thrusters to enable the capsule to perform propulsive helicopter-like landings. Eventually, SpaceX and NASA agreed to change to a more conventional parachute-assisted splashdown.

The SuperDracos remained on the Crew Dragon spacecraft to push the capsule away from its Falcon 9 rocket during a catastrophic launch failure. The eight high-thrust engines burn hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants that combust when making contact with one another.

The backup option has been activated for some previous commercial Crew Dragon missions, but not for a NASA flight, according to Gerstenmaier. The capability “provides a tolerable landing for the crew,” he added. “So it’s a true deep, deep contingency. I think our philosophy is, rather than have a system that you don’t use, even though it’s not maybe fully certified, it gives the crew a chance to escape a really, really bad situation.”

Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said the emergency propulsive landing capability will be enabled for the return of the Crew-8 mission, which has been at the space station since March. With the arrival of Hague and Gorbunov on Crew-9—and the extension of Wilmore and Williams’ mission—the Crew-8 mission is slated to depart the space station and splash down in early October.

This story was updated after confirmation of a successful launch.

SpaceX launches mission to bring Starliner astronauts back to Earth Read More »

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The war of words between SpaceX and the FAA keeps escalating

Commercial space, Federal Aviation Administration, launch, Science, Space, spacex, starship, texas / /
Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, has called for the resignation of the FAA administrator.

Enlarge / Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, has called for the resignation of the FAA administrator.

The clash between SpaceX and the Federal Aviation Administration escalated this week, with Elon Musk calling for the head of the federal regulator to resign after he defended the FAA’s oversight and fines levied against the commercial launch company.

The FAA has said it doesn’t expect to determine whether to approve a launch license for SpaceX’s next Starship test flight until late November, two months later than the agency previously communicated to Musk’s launch company. Federal regulators are reviewing changes to the rocket’s trajectory necessary for SpaceX to bring Starship’s giant reusable Super Heavy booster back to the launch pad in South Texas. This will be the fifth full-scale test flight of Starship but the first time SpaceX attempts such a maneuver on the program.

This week, SpaceX assembled the full Starship rocket on its launch pad at the company’s Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas. “Starship stacked for Flight 5 and ready for launch, pending regulatory approval,” SpaceX posted on X.

Apart from the Starship regulatory reviews, the FAA last week announced it is proposing 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.

Michael Whitaker, the FAA’s administrator, discussed the agency’s ongoing environmental and safety reviews of SpaceX’s Starship rocket in a hearing before a congressional subcommittee in Washington Tuesday. During the hearing, which primarily focused on the FAA’s oversight of Boeing’s commercial airplane business, one lawmaker asked Whitaker the FAA’s relationship with SpaceX.

Public interest

“I think safety is in the public interest and that’s our primary focus,” said Michael Whitaker, the FAA administrator, in response to questions from Rep. Kevin Kiley, a California Republican. “It’s the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters,” he said, referring to the FAA’s fines.

The stainless-steel Super Heavy booster is larger than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet. SpaceX says the flight path to return the first stage of the rocket to land will mean a “slightly larger area could experience a sonic boom,” and a stainless-steel ring that jettisons from the top of the booster, called the hot-staging ring, will fall in a different location in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from the rocket’s launch and landing site.

The FAA, which is primarily charged with ensuring rocket launches don’t endanger the public, is consulting with other agencies on these matters, along with issues involving SpaceX’s discharge of water into the environment around the Starship launch pad in Texas. The pad uses water to cool a steel flame deflector that sits under the 33 main engines of Starship’s Super Heavy booster.

SpaceX says fines levied against it this year by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) related to the launch pad’s water system were “entirely tied to disagreements over paperwork” and not any dumping of pollutants into the environment around the Starship launch site.

SpaceX installed the water-cooled flame deflector under the Starship launch mount after the engine exhaust rocket’s first test flight excavated a large hole in the ground. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, summed up her view of the issue in a hearing with Texas legislators in Austin on Tuesday.

“To protect that from happening again, we built this kind of upside-down shower head to basically cool the flame as the rocket was lifting off,” she said. “That was licensed and permitted by TCEQ. The EPA came in afterwards and didn’t like the license or the permit that we had for that, and wanted to turn it into a federal permit, which we are working on now.”

“We work very closely with organizations such as TCEQ,” Shotwell said. “You may have read a little bit of nonsense in the papers recently about that, but we’re working quite well with them.”

The war of words between SpaceX and the FAA keeps escalating Read More »

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In the room where it happened: When NASA nearly gave Boeing all the crew funding

Boeing, commercial crew, Features, reentry, Space, spacex / /

The story behind the story —

“In all my years of working with Boeing I never saw them sign up for additional work for free.”

–

But for a fateful meeting in the summer of 2014, Crew Dragon probably never would have happened.

Enlarge / But for a fateful meeting in the summer of 2014, Crew Dragon probably never would have happened.

SpaceX

This is an excerpt from Chapter 11 of the book REENTRY: SpaceX, Elon Musk and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age by our own Eric Berger. The book will be published on September 24, 2024. This excerpt describes a fateful meeting 10 years ago at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC, where the space agency’s leaders met to decide which companies should be awarded billions of dollars to launch astronauts into orbit.

In the early 2010s, NASA’s Commercial Crew competition boiled down to three players: Boeing, SpaceX, and a Colorado-based company building a spaceplane, Sierra Nevada Corporation. Each had its own advantages. Boeing was the blue blood, with decades of spaceflight experience. SpaceX had already built a capsule, Dragon. And some NASA insiders nostalgically loved Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser space plane, which mimicked the shuttle’s winged design.

This competition neared a climax in 2014 as NASA prepared to winnow the field to one company, or at most two, to move from the design phase into actual development. In May of that year Musk revealed his Crew Dragon spacecraft to the world with a characteristically showy event at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne. As lights flashed and a smoke machine vented, Musk quite literally raised a curtain on a black-and-white capsule. He was most proud to reveal how Dragon would land. Never before had a spacecraft come back from orbit under anything but parachutes or gliding on wings. Not so with the new Dragon. It had powerful thrusters, called SuperDracos, that would allow it to land under its own power.

“You’ll be able to land anywhere on Earth with the accuracy of a helicopter,” Musk bragged. “Which is something that a modern spaceship should be able to do.”

A few weeks later I had an interview with John Elbon, a long-time engineer at Boeing who managed the company’s commercial program. As we talked, he tut-tutted SpaceX’s performance to date, noting its handful of Falcon 9 launches a year and inability to fly at a higher cadence. As for Musk’s little Dragon event, Elbon was dismissive.

“We go for substance,” Elbon told me. “Not pizzazz.”

Elbon’s confidence was justified. That spring the companies were finalizing bids to develop a spacecraft and fly six operational missions to the space station. These contracts were worth billions of dollars. Each company told NASA how much it needed for the job, and if selected, would receive a fixed price award for that amount. Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada wanted as much money as they could get, of course. But each had an incentive to keep their bids low, as NASA had a finite budget for the program. Boeing had a solution, telling NASA it needed the entire Commercial Crew budget to succeed. Because a lot of decision-makers believed that only Boeing could safely fly astronauts, the company’s gambit very nearly worked.

Scoring the bids

The three competitors submitted initial bids to NASA in late January 2014, and after about six months of evaluations and discussions with the “source evaluation board,” submitted their final bids in July. During this initial round of judging, subject-matter experts scored the proposals and gathered to make their ratings. Sierra Nevada was eliminated because their overall scores were lower, and the proposed cost not low enough to justify remaining in the competition. This left Boeing and SpaceX, with likely only one winner.

“We really did not have the budget for two companies at the time,” said Phil McAlister, the NASA official at the agency’s headquarters in Washington overseeing the Commercial Crew program. “No one thought we were going to award two. I would always say, ‘One or more,’ and people would roll their eyes at me.”

Boeing's John Elbon, center, is seen in Orbiter Processing Facility-3 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2012.

Boeing’s John Elbon, center, is seen in Orbiter Processing Facility-3 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 2012.

NASA

The members of the evaluation board scored the companies based on three factors. Price was the most important consideration, given NASA’s limited budget. This was followed by “mission suitability,” and finally, “past performance.” These latter two factors, combined, were about equally weighted to price. SpaceX dominated Boeing on price.

Boeing asked for $4.2 billion, 60 percent more than SpaceX’s bid of $2.6 billion. The second category, mission suitability, assessed whether a company could meet NASA’s requirements and actually safely fly crew to and from the station. For this category, Boeing received an “excellent” rating, above SpaceX’s “very good.” The third factor, past performance, evaluated a company’s recent work. Boeing received a rating of “very high,” whereas SpaceX received a rating of “high.”

While this makes it appear as though the bids were relatively even, McAlister said the score differences in mission suitability and past performance were, in fact, modest. It was a bit like grades in school. SpaceX scored something like an 88, and got a B; whereas Boeing got a 91 and scored an A. Because of the significant difference in price, McAlister said, the source evaluation board assumed SpaceX would win the competition. He was thrilled, because he figured this meant that NASA would have to pick two companies, SpaceX based on price, and Boeing due to its slightly higher technical score. He wanted competition to spur both of the companies on.

In the room where it happened: When NASA nearly gave Boeing all the crew funding Read More »

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NASA is ready to start buying Vulcan rockets from United Launch Alliance

launch, military space, NASA, Science, Space, united launch alliance, US Space Force, vulcan / /

Full stack —

The second test flight of the Vulcan rocket is scheduled for liftoff on October 4.

–

The first stage of ULA's second Vulcan rocket was raised onto its launch platform August 11 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Enlarge / The first stage of ULA’s second Vulcan rocket was raised onto its launch platform August 11 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

United Launch Alliance is free to compete for NASA contracts with its new Vulcan rocket after a successful test flight earlier this year, ending a period where SpaceX was the only company competing for rights to launch the agency’s large science missions.

For several years, ULA was unable to bid for NASA launch contracts after the company sold all of its remaining Atlas V rockets to other customers, primarily for Amazon’s Project Kuiper Internet network. ULA could not submit its new Vulcan rocket, which will replace the Atlas V, for NASA to consider in future launch contracts until the Vulcan completed at least one successful flight, according to Tim Dunn, senior launch director at NASA’s Launch Services Program.

The Vulcan rocket’s first certification flight on January 8, called Cert-1, was nearly flawless, demonstrating the launcher’s methane-fueled BE-4 engines built by Blue Origin and an uprated twin-engine Centaur upper stage. A second test flight, known as Cert-2, is scheduled to lift off no earlier than October 4 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Assuming the upcoming launch is as successful as the first one, the US Space Force aims to launch its first mission on a Vulcan rocket by the end of the year.

The Space Force has already booked 25 launches on ULA’s Vulcan rocket for military payloads and spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. But these missions won’t launch until Vulcan completes its second test flight, clearing the way for the Space Force to certify ULA’s new rocket for national security missions.

Back in the game

NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP) is responsible for selecting and overseeing launch providers for the agency’s robotic science missions. NASA’s near-term options for launching large missions include SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, ULA’s Vulcan, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher.

However, only SpaceX’s rockets have been available for NASA bids since 2021, when ULA sold all of its remaining Atlas V rockets to Amazon. For example, ULA did not submit proposals for the launch of a GOES weather satellite or NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, two of the more lucrative launch contracts the agency has awarded in the last couple of years. NASA selected SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, the only eligible rocket, for both missions.

This is a notable role reversal for SpaceX and ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that was the sole launch provider for large NASA science missions and military satellites for nearly a decade. SpaceX launched its first mission for NASA’s Launch Services Program in January 2016.

The situation changed with the first flight of the Vulcan rocket in January.

“They certainly demonstrated a huge success earlier this year flying Cert-1,” Dunn told Ars in an interview. “They needed a successful flight to then bid for future missions, so that allowed them to be in a position to bid on our missions.”

NASA has not yet formally certified the Vulcan rocket to launch one of the agency’s science missions, but that would not stop NASA from selecting Vulcan for a contract. Some of NASA’s next big science missions up for launch contract awards include the nuclear-powered Dragonfly mission to explore Saturn’s moon Titan and an asteroid-hunting telescope named NEO Surveyor.

The second Vulcan flight next month will move ULA’s rocket toward certification by the Space Force and NASA.

“A second Cert flight that will then demonstrate a few other capabilities of the rocket allows more data for our certification team that is working in concert with the US Space Force’s certification team,” Dunn said. “We’re doing a lot of shared, intergovernmental collaborations in the certification work, so it allows us all more data, more confidence in that launch vehicle to meet all the needs that we believe we will have in the coming decade-plus.”

Two strap-on solid-fueled boosters and twin BE-4 main engines on ULA's second Vulcan rocket.

Enlarge / Two strap-on solid-fueled boosters and twin BE-4 main engines on ULA’s second Vulcan rocket.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn could also compete for contracts to launch NASA’s larger, more expensive missions after it completes at least one successful flight. Blue Origin is currently eligible for bids to launch NASA’s smaller missions, such as the ESCAPADE mission to Mars already assigned to New Glenn. NASA is willing to accept more risk for launching these types of lower-cost missions.

ULA capped off the assembly of its second Vulcan rocket at Cape Canaveral on Saturday when technicians lifted the launcher’s payload fairing atop Vulcan’s first-stage booster and Centaur upper stage. For its second launch, Vulcan will carry a dummy payload instead of a real satellite. The second Vulcan flight was initially supposed to launch Sierra Space’s first Dream Chaser spaceplane to the International Space Station, but Dream Chaser isn’t ready, and the Space Force is eager for ULA to get moving and finish the certification process.

The head of Space Systems Command, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, told Ars last week that he is “optimistic” ULA will be in a position to launch its first Space Force missions with the Vulcan rocket by the end of this year. ULA has already delivered Vulcan rocket parts for the next two missions to Cape Canaveral, but the Cert-2 launch needs to go off without a hitch.

“We’re working very closely with ULA on that, as well as the manifest for the following missions,” Garrant said. “All of the rocket parts are at the launch locations, ready to go, but clearly the priority is the certification flight and making sure that the launch vehicle is certified. But we are optimistic that we’re going to get those launches off.”

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Satellite images suggest test of Russian “super weapon” failed spectacularly

Military, nuclear, Plesetsk Cosmodrome, russia, Sarmat, Science, Space / /

  • The Sarmat missile silo seen before last week’s launch attempt.

    Maxar Technologies

  • A closer view of the Sarmat missile silo before last week’s launch attempt.

    Maxar Technologies

  • Fire trucks surround the Sarmat missile silo in this view from space on Saturday, September 21.

    Maxar Technologies

Late last week, Russia’s military planned to launch a Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on a test flight from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Imagery from commercial satellites captured over the weekend suggest the missile exploded before or during launch.

This is at least the second time an RS-28 Sarmat missile has failed in less than two years, dealing a blow to the country’s nuclear forces days after the head of the Russian legislature issued a veiled threat to use the missile against Europe if Western allies approved Ukraine’s use of long-range weapons against Russia.

Commercial satellite imagery collected by Maxar and Planet show before-and-after views of the Sarmat missile silo at Plesetsk, a military base about 500 miles (800 kilometers) north of Moscow. The view from one of Maxar’s imaging satellites Saturday revealed unmistakable damage at the launch site, with a large crater centered on the opening to the underground silo.

The crater is roughly 200 feet (62 meters) wide, according to George Barros, a Russia and geospatial intelligence analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. “Extensive damage in and around the launch pad can be seen which suggests that the missile exploded shortly after ignition or launch,” Barros wrote on X.

“Additionally, small fires continue to burn in the forest to the east of the launch complex and four fire trucks can be seen near the destroyed silo,” Barros added.

An RS-28 Sarmat missile fires out of its underground silo on its first full-scale test flight in April 2022.

Enlarge / An RS-28 Sarmat missile fires out of its underground silo on its first full-scale test flight in April 2022.

Russian Ministry of Defense

The Sarmat missile is Russia’s largest ICBM, with a height of 115 feet (35 meters). It is capable of delivering nuclear warheads to targets more than 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) away, making it the longest-range missile in the world. The three-stage missile burns hypergolic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants, and is built by the Makeyev Design Bureau. The Sarmat, sometimes called the Satan II, replaces Russia’s long-range R-36M missile developed during the Cold War.

“According to Russian media, Sarmat can reportedly load up to 10 large warheads, 16 smaller ones, a combination of warheads and countermeasures, or hypersonic boost-glide vehicle,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies writes on its website.

The secret is out

Western analysts still don’t know exactly when the explosion occurred. Russia issued warnings last week for pilots to keep out of airspace along the flight path of a planned missile launch from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome. Russia published similar notices before previous Sarmat missile tests, alerting observers that another Sarmat launch was imminent. The warnings were canceled Thursday, two days before satellite imagery showed the destruction at the launch site.

“It is possible that the launch attempt was undertaken on September 19th, with fires persisting for more than 24 hours,” wrote Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva, on his Russian Nuclear Forces blog site. “Another possibility is that the test was scrubbed on the 19th and the incident happened during the subsequent defueling of the missile. The character of destruction suggests that the missile exploded in the silo.”

James Acton, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote on X that the before-and-after imagery of the Sarmat missile silo was “very persuasive that there was a big explosion.”

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