Space – Page 17

SpaceX’s latest Dragon mission will breathe more fire at the space station

Commercial space, dragon, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, spacex / Rejus Almole / August 25, 2025

“Our capsule’s engines are not pointed in the right direction for optimum boost,” said Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management. “So, this trunk module has engines pointed in the right direction to maximize efficiency of propellant usage.”

When NASA says it’s the right time, SpaceX controllers will command the Draco thrusters to ignite and gently accelerate the massive 450-ton complex. All told, the reboost kit can add about 20 mph, or 9 meters per second, to the space station’s already-dizzying speed, according to Walker.

Spetch said that’s roughly equivalent to the total reboost impulse provided by one-and-a-half Russian Progress cargo vehicles. That’s about one-third to one-fourth of the total orbit maintenance the ISS needs in a year.

“The boost kit will help sustain the orbiting lab’s altitude, starting in September, with a series of burns planned periodically throughout the fall of 2025,” Spetch said.

After a few months docked at the ISS, the Dragon cargo capsule will depart and head for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. SpaceX will recover the pressurized capsule to fly again, while the trunk containing the reboost kit will jettison and burn up in the atmosphere.

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft approaches the International Space Station for docking at 7: 05 am EDT (11: 05 UTC) on Monday. Credit: NASA TV/Ars Technica

While this mission is SpaceX’s 33rd cargo flight to the ISS under the auspices of NASA’s multibillion-dollar Commercial Resupply Services contract, it’s also SpaceX’s 50th overall Dragon mission to the outpost. This tally includes 17 flights of the human-rated Crew Dragon.

“With CRS-33, we’ll mark our 50th voyage to ISS,” Walker said. “Just incredible. Together, these missions have (carried) well over 300,000 pounds of cargo and supplies to the orbiting lab and well over 1,000 science and research projects that are not only helping us to understand how to live and work effectively in space… but also directly contributing to critical research that serves our lives here on Earth.”

Future Dragon trunks will be able to accommodate a reboost kit or unpressurized science payloads, depending on NASA’s needs at the space station.

The design of the Dragon reboost kit is a smaller-scale version of what SpaceX will build for a much larger Dragon trunk under a $843 million contract signed with NASA last year for the US Deorbit Vehicle. This souped-up Dragon will dock with the ISS and steer it back into the atmosphere after the lab’s decommissioning in the early 2030s. The deorbit vehicle will have 46 Draco thrusters—16 to control the craft’s orientation and 30 in the trunk to provide the impulse needed to drop the station out of orbit.

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Time is running out for SpaceX to make a splash with second-gen Starship

artemis, Commercial space, elon musk, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, super heavy, texas / Tim Belzer / August 25, 2025

SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch after three straight disappointing test flights.

SpaceX’s 10th Starship rocket awaits liftoff. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

STARBASE, Texas—A beehive of aerospace technicians, construction workers, and spaceflight fans descended on South Texas this weekend in advance of the next test flight of SpaceX’s gigantic Starship rocket, the largest vehicle of its kind ever built.

Towering 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall, the rocket was supposed to lift off during a one-hour launch window beginning at 6: 30 pm CDT (7: 30 pm EDT; 23: 30 UTC) Sunday. But SpaceX called off the launch attempt about an hour before liftoff to investigate a ground system issue at Starbase, located a few miles north of the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX didn’t immediately confirm when it might try again to launch Starship, but it could happen as soon as Monday evening at the same time.

It will take about 66 minutes for the rocket to travel from the launch pad in Texas to a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. You can watch the test flight live on SpaceX’s official website. We’ve also embedded a livestream from Spaceflight Now and LabPadre below.

This will be the 10th full-scale test flight of Starship and its Super Heavy booster stage. It’s the fourth flight of an upgraded version of Starship conceived as a stepping stone to a more reliable, heavier-duty version of the rocket designed to carry up to 150 metric tons, or some 330,000 pounds, of cargo to pretty much anywhere in the inner part of our Solar System.

But this iteration of Starship, known as Block 2 or Version 2, has been anything but reliable. After reeling off a series of increasingly successful flights last year with the first-generation Starship and Super Heavy booster, SpaceX has encountered repeated setbacks since debuting Starship Version 2 in January.

Now, there are just two Starship Version 2s left to fly, including the vehicle poised for launch this week. Then, SpaceX will move on to Version 3, the design intended to go all the way to low-Earth orbit, where it can be refueled for longer expeditions into deep space.

A closer look at the top of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, tail number Ship 37, showing some of the different configurations of heat shield tiles SpaceX wants to test on this flight. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Starship’s promised cargo capacity is unparalleled in the history of rocketry. The privately developed rocket’s enormous size, coupled with SpaceX’s plan to make it fully reusable, could enable cargo and human missions to the Moon and Mars. SpaceX’s most conspicuous contract for Starship is with NASA, which plans to use a version of the ship as a human-rated Moon lander for the agency’s Artemis program. With this contract, Starship is central to the US government’s plans to try to beat China back to the Moon.

Closer to home, SpaceX intends to use Starship to haul massive loads of more powerful Starlink Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit. The US military is interested in using Starship for a range of national security missions, some of which could scarcely be imagined just a few years ago. SpaceX wants its factory to churn out a Starship rocket every day, approximately the same rate Boeing builds its workhorse 737 passenger jets.

Starship, of course, is immeasurably more complex than an airliner, and it sees temperature extremes, aerodynamic loads, and vibrations that would destroy a commercial airplane.

For any of this to become reality, SpaceX needs to begin ticking off a lengthy to-do list of technical milestones. The interim objectives include things like catching and reusing Starships and in-orbit ship-to-ship refueling, with a final goal of long-duration spaceflight to reach the Moon and stay there for weeks, months, or years. For a time late last year, it appeared as if SpaceX might be on track to reach at least the first two of these milestones by now.

The 404-foot-tall (123-meter) Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster stand on SpaceX’s launch pad. In the foreground, there are empty loading docks where tanker trucks deliver propellants and other gases to the launch site. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Instead, SpaceX’s schedule for catching and reusing Starships, and refueling ships in orbit, has slipped well into next year. A Moon landing is probably at least several years away. And a touchdown on Mars? Maybe in the 2030s. Before Starship can sniff those milestones, engineers must get the rocket to survive from liftoff through splashdown. This would confirm that recent changes made to the ship’s heat shield work as expected.

Three test flights attempting to do just this ended prematurely in January, March, and May. These failures prevented SpaceX from gathering data on several different tile designs, including insulators made of ceramic and metallic materials, and a tile with “active cooling” to fortify the craft as it reenters the atmosphere.

The heat shield is supposed to protect the rocket’s stainless steel skin from temperatures reaching 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). During last year’s test flights, it worked well enough for Starship to guide itself to an on-target controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, halfway around the world from SpaceX’s launch site in Starbase, Texas.

But the ship lost some of its tiles during each flight last year, causing damage to the ship’s underlying structure. While this wasn’t bad enough to prevent the vehicle from reaching the ocean intact, it would cause difficulties in refurbishing the rocket for another flight. Eventually, SpaceX wants to catch Starships returning from space with giant robotic arms back at the launch pad. The vision, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, is to recover the ship, quickly mount it on another booster, refuel it, and launch it again.

If SpaceX can accomplish this, the ship must return from space with its heat shield in pristine condition. The evidence from last year’s test flights showed engineers had a long way to go for that to happen.

Visitors survey the landscape at Starbase, Texas, where industry and nature collide. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

The Starship setbacks this year have been caused by problems in the ship’s propulsion and fuel systems. Another Starship exploded on a test stand in June at SpaceX’s sprawling rocket development facility in South Texas. SpaceX engineers identified different causes for each of the failures. You can read about them in our previous story.

Apart from testing the heat shield, the goals for this week’s Starship flight include testing an engine-out capability on the Super Heavy booster. Engineers will intentionally disable one of the booster’s Raptor engines used to slow down for landing, and instead use another Raptor engine from the rocket’s middle ring. At liftoff, 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines will power the Super Heavy booster off the pad.

SpaceX won’t try to catch the booster back at the launch pad this time, as it did on three occasions late last year and earlier this year. The booster catches have been one of the bright spots for the Starship program as progress on the rocket’s upper stage floundered. SpaceX reused a previously flown Super Heavy booster for the first time on the most recent Starship launch in May.

The booster landing experiment on this week’s flight will happen a few minutes after launch over the Gulf of Mexico east of the Texas coastline. Meanwhile, six Raptor engines will fire until approximately T+plus 9 minutes to accelerate the ship, or upper stage, into space.

The ship is programmed to release eight Starlink satellite simulators from its payload bay in a test of the craft’s payload deployment mechanism. That will be followed by a brief restart of one of the ship’s Raptor engines to adjust its trajectory for reentry, set to begin around 47 minutes into the mission.

If Starship makes it that far, that will be when engineers finally get a taste of the heat shield data they were hungry for at the start of the year.

This story was updated at 8: 30 pm EDT after SpaceX scrubbed Sunday’s launch attempt.

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.

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US military’s X-37B spaceplane stays relevant with launch of another mission

Boeing, falcon 9, laser communications, launch, military space, quantum sensing, Science, Space, spaceplane, spacex, US Space Force, X-37b / Tim Belzer / August 23, 2025

“Quantum inertial sensors are not only scientifically intriguing, but they also have direct defense applications,” said Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep, an Air Force engineer who manages the DIU’s emerging technology portfolio. “If we can field devices that provide a leap in sensitivity and precision for observing platform motion over what is available today, then there’s an opportunity for strategic gains across the DoD.”

Teaching an old dog new tricks

The Pentagon’s twin X-37Bs have logged more than 4,200 days in orbit, equivalent to about 11-and-a-half years. The spaceplanes have flown in secrecy for nearly all of that time.

The most recent flight, Mission 7, ended in March with a runway landing at Vandenberg after a mission of more than 14 months that carried the spaceplane higher than ever before, all the way to an altitude approaching 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers). The high-altitude elliptical orbit required a boost on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

In the final phase of the mission, ground controllers commanded the X-37B to gently dip into the atmosphere to demonstrate the spacecraft could use “aerobraking” maneuvers to bring its orbit closer to Earth in preparation for reentry.

An X-37B spaceplane is ready for encapsulation inside the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing. Credit: US Space Force

Now, on Mission 8, the spaceplane heads back to low-Earth orbit hosting quantum navigation and laser communications experiments. Few people, if any, envisioned these kinds of missions flying on the X-37B when it first soared to space 15 years ago. At that time, quantum sensing was confined to the lab, and the first laser communication demonstrations in space were barely underway. SpaceX hadn’t revealed its plans for the Falcon Heavy rocket, which the X-37B needed to get to its higher orbit on the last mission.

The laser communications experiments on this flight will involve optical inter-satellite links with “proliferated commercial satellite networks in low-Earth orbit,” the Space Force said. This is likely a reference to SpaceX’s Starlink or Starshield broadband satellites. Laser links enable faster transmission of data, while offering more security against eavesdropping or intercepts.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s chief of space operations, said in a statement that the laser communications experiment “will mark an important step in the US Space Force’s ability to leverage proliferated space networks as part of a diversified and redundant space architectures. In so doing, it will strengthen the resilience, reliability, adaptability and data transport speeds of our satellite communications architecture.”

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Rocket Report: Pivotal Starship test on tap, Firefly wants to be big in Japan

rocket report, Space / Tim Belzer / August 22, 2025

All the news that’s fit to lift

Starship returns to the launch pad for the first time in three months.

SpaceX released this new photo of the Starbase production site, with a Starship vehicle, on Thursday. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 8.07 of the Rocket Report! It’s that time again: another test flight of SpaceX’s massive Starship vehicle. In this week’s report, we have a review of what went wrong on Flight 9 in May and a look at the stakes for the upcoming mission, which are rather high. The flight test is presently scheduled for 6: 30 pm local time in Texas (23: 30 UTC) on Sunday, and Ars will be on hand to provide in-depth coverage.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets and a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly looks at possibility of Alpha launches in Japan. On Monday, Space Cotan Co., Ltd., operator of the Hokkaido Spaceport, announced it entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Texas-based launch company to conduct a feasibility study examining the practicality of launching Firefly’s Alpha rocket from its launch site, Spaceflight Now reports. Located in Taiki Town on the northern Japanese Island of Hokkaido, the spaceport bills itself as “a commercial spaceport that serves businesses and universities in Japan and abroad, as well as government agencies and other organizations.” It advertises launches from 42 degrees to 98 degrees, including Sun-synchronous orbits.

Talks are exploratory for now … “We look forward to exploring the opportunity to launch our Alpha rocket from Japan, which would allow us to serve the larger satellite industry in Asia and add resiliency for US allies with a proven orbital launch vehicle,” said Adam Oakes, vice president of launch at Firefly Aerospace. All six of Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket launches so far took off from Space Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The company is slated to launch its seventh Alpha rocket on a mission for Lockheed Martin, but a date hasn’t been announced while the company continues to work through a mishap investigation stemming from its sixth Alpha launch in April. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Chinese methane rocket fails. A flight test of one of Chinese commercial rocket developer LandSpace Technology’s methane-powered rockets failed on Friday after the carrier rocket experienced an “anomaly,” Reuters reports. The Beijing-based startup became the world’s first company to launch a methane-liquid oxygen rocket with the successful launch of Zhuque-2 in July 2023. This was the third flight of an upgraded version of the rocket, known as Zhuque-2E Y2.

Comes as larger vehicle set to make debut … The launch was carrying four Guowang low-Earth orbit Internet satellites for the Chinese government. The failure was due to some issue with the upper stage of the vehicle, which is capable of lofting about 3 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. LandSpace, one of China’s most impressive ‘commercial’ space companies, has been working toward the development and launch of the medium-lift Zhuque-3 vehicle. This rocket was due to make its debut later this year, and it’s not clear whether this setback with a smaller vehicle will delay that flight.

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Avio gains French Guiana launch license. The French government has granted Italian launch services provider Avio a 10-year license to carry out Vega rocket operations from the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana, European Spaceflight reports. The decision follows approval by European Space Agency Member States of Italy’s petition to allow Avio to market and manage Vega rocket launches independently of Arianespace, which had overseen the rocket’s operations since its introduction.

From Vega to Vega … With its formal split from Arianespace now imminent, Avio is required to have its own license to launch from the Guiana Space Centre, which is owned and operated by the French government. Avio will make use of the ELV launch complex at the Guiana Space Centre for the launch of its Vega C rockets. The pad was previously used for the original Vega rocket, which was officially retired in September 2024. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

First space rocket launch from Canada this century. Students from Concordia University cheered and whistled as the Starsailor rocket lifted off on Cree territory on August 15, marking the first of its size to be launched by a student team, Radio Canada International reports. The students hoped Starsailor would enter space, past the Kármán line, which is at an altitude of 100 kilometers, before coming back down. But the rocket separated earlier than expected. The livestream can be seen here.

Persistence is thy name … This was Canada’s first space launch in more than 25 years, and the first to be achieved by a team of students, according to the university. Originally built for a science competition, the 13-meter tall rocket was left without a contest after the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, the team, made up of over 700 members since 2018, pressed forward with the goal of making history and launching the most powerful student-built rocket. (submitted by ArcticChris, durenthal, and CD)

SpaceX launches its 100th Falcon 9 of the year. SpaceX launched its 100th Falcon 9 rocket of the year Monday morning, Spaceflight Now reports. The flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base carried another batch of Starlink optimized V2 Mini satellites into low-Earth orbit. The Starlink 17-5 mission was also the 72nd SpaceX launch of Starlink satellites so far in 2025. It brings the total number of Starlink satellites orbited in 2025 to 1,786.

That’s quite a cadence … The Monday morning flight was a notable milestone for SpaceX. It is just the second time in the company’s history that it achieved 100 launches in one calendar year, a feat so far unmatched by any other American space company, and it is ahead of last year’s pace. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, said on the social media site X, “For reference on the increase in launch rate from last year, we hit 100 on Oct 20th in 2024. SpaceX is likely to launch more Falcon 9s this year than the total number of Space Shuttle missions NASA flew in three decades. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

X-37B launch set for Thursday night. The US Department of Defense’s reusable X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle is about to make its eighth overall flight into orbit, NASASpaceflight.com reports. Vehicle 1, the first X-37B to fly, is scheduled to launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 from the Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A on Thursday at 11: 50 pm ET (03: 50 UTC on Friday, August 22). The launch window is just under four hours long.

Will fly for an unspecified amount of time … Falcon 9 will follow a northeast trajectory to loft the X-37B into a low-Earth orbit, possibly a circular orbit at 500 km altitude inclined 49.5 degrees to the equator. The Orbital Test Vehicle 8 mission will spend an unspecified amount of time in orbit, with missions lasting hundreds of days in orbit before landing on a runway. The booster supporting this mission, B1092-6, will perform a return-to-launch-site landing and touchdown on the concrete pad at Landing Zone 2. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Report finds SpaceX pays few taxes. SpaceX has received billions of dollars in federal contracts over its more than two-decade existence, but it has most likely paid little to no federal income taxes since its founding in 2002, The New York Times reports. The rocket maker’s finances have long been secret because the company is privately held. But the documents reviewed by the Times show that SpaceX can seize on a legal tax benefit that allows it to use the more than $5 billion in losses it racked up by late 2021 to offset paying future taxable income.

Use of tax benefit called ‘quaint’ … Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a group that investigates corruption and waste in the government, said the tax benefit had historically been aimed at encouraging companies to stay in business during difficult times. It was “quaint” that SpaceX was using it, she said, as it “was clearly not intended for a company doing so well.” It may be quaint, but it is legal. And the losses are very real. Since its inception, SpaceX has invested heavily in its technology and poured revenues into further advances. This has been incredibly beneficial to NASA and the Department of Defense. (submitted by Frank OBrien)

There’s a lot on the line for Starship’s next launch. In a feature, Ars reviews the history of Starbase and its production site, culminating in the massive new Starfactory building that encompasses 1 million square feet. The opening of the sleek, large building earlier this year came as SpaceX continues to struggle with the technical development of the Starship vehicle. Essentially, the article says, SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine. But what about the machine?

Three failures in a row … SpaceX has not had a good run of things with the ambitious Starship vehicle this year. Three times, in January, March, and May, the vehicle took flight. And three times, the upper stage experienced significant problems during ascent, and the vehicle was lost on the ride up to space, or just after. Sources at SpaceX believe the upper stage issues can be resolved, especially with a new “Version 3” of Starship due to make its debut late this year or early in 2026. But the acid test will only come on upcoming flights, beginning Sunday with the vehicle’s tenth test flight.

China tests lunar rocket. In recent weeks, the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030, Ars reports. Among these efforts, last Friday, the space agency and its state-operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, successfully conducted a 30-second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket’s center core with its seven YF-100K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen.

A winner in the space race? … The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. As part of China’s plan to land astronauts on the Moon “before” 2030, this rocket will be used for a crewed mission and lunar lander. Recent setbacks with SpaceX’s Starship vehicle—one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA, alongside Blue Origin’s Mark 2 lander—indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go. Ars concludes that it is now probable that China will “beat” NASA back to the Moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race.

Why did Flight 9 of Starship fail? In an update shared last Friday ahead of the company’s next launch, SpaceX identified the most probable cause for the May failure as a faulty main fuel tank pressurization system diffuser located on the forward dome of Starship’s primary methane tank. The diffuser failed a few minutes after launch, when sensors detected a pressure drop in the main methane tank and a pressure increase in the ship’s nose cone just above the tank, Ars reports.

Diffusing the diffuser … The rocket compensated for the drop in main tank pressure and completed its engine burn, but venting from the nose cone and a worsening fuel leak overwhelmed Starship’s attitude control system. Finally, detecting a major problem, Starship triggered automatic onboard commands to vent all remaining propellant into space and “passivate” itself before an unguided reentry over the Indian Ocean, prematurely ending the test flight. Engineers recreated the diffuser failure on the ground during the investigation and then redesigned the part to better direct pressurized gas into the main fuel tank. This will also “substantially decrease” strain on the diffuser structure, SpaceX said.

Next three launches

August 22: Falcon 9 | X-37B space plane | Kennedy Space Center, Fla. | 03: 50 UTC

August 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-6 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 17: 02 UTC

August 23: Electron | Live, Laugh, Launch | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 22: 30 UTC

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

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SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine. But what about the machine?

boca chica, Features, Space, spacex, Starbase, starfactory / Mike M. / August 21, 2025

SpaceX has built an impressive production site in Texas. Will Starship success follow?

A Starship upper stage is moved past the northeast corner of Starfactory in July 2025. Credit: SpaceX

STARBASE, Texas—I first visited SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas a decade ago. Driving down the pocked and barren two-lane road to its sandy terminus, I found only rolling dunes, a large mound of dirt, and a few satellite dishes that talked to Dragon spacecraft as they flew overhead.

A few years later, in mid-2019, the company had moved some of that dirt and built a small launch pad. A handful of SpaceX engineers working there at the time shared some office space nearby in a tech hub building, “Stargate.” The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley proudly opened this state-of-the-art technology center just weeks earlier. That summer, from Stargate’s second floor, engineers looked on as the Starhopper prototype made its first two flights a couple of miles away.

Over the ensuing years, as the company began assembling its Starship rockets on site, SpaceX first erected small tents, then much larger tents, and then towering high bays in which the vehicles were stacked. Starbase grew and evolved to meet the company’s needs.

All of this was merely a prelude to the end game: Starfactory. SpaceX opened this truly massive facility earlier this year. The sleek rocket factory is emblematic of the new Starbase: modern, gargantuan, spaceship-like.

To the consternation of some local residents and environmentalists, the rapid growth of Starbase has wiped out the small and eclectic community that existed here. And that brand new Stargate building that public officials were so excited about only a few years ago? SpaceX first took it over entirely and then demolished it. The tents are gone, too. For better or worse, in the name of progress, the SpaceX steamroller has rolled onward, paving all before it.

Starbase is even its own Texas city now. And if this were a medieval town, Starfactory would be the impenetrable fortress at its heart. In late May, I had a chance to go inside. The interior was super impressive, of course. Yet it could not quell some of the concerns I have about the future of SpaceX’s grand plans to send a fleet of Starships into the Solar System.

Inside the fortress

The main entrance to the factory lies at its northeast corner. From there, one walks into a sleek lobby that serves as a gateway into the main, cavernous section of the building. At this corner, there are three stories above the ground floor. Each of these three higher levels contains various offices, conference rooms and, on the upper floor, a launch control center.

Large windows from here offer a breathtaking view of the Starship launch site two miles up the road. A third-floor executive conference room has carpet of a striking rusty, reddish hue—mimicking the surface of Mars, naturally. A long, black table dominates the room, with 10 seats along each side, and one at the head.

An aerial overview of the Starship production site in South Texas earlier this year. The sprawling Starfactory is in the center. Credit: SpaceX

But the real attraction of these offices is the view to the other end. Each of the upper three floors has a balcony overlooking the factory floor. From there, it’s as if one stands at the edge of an ocean liner, gazing out to sea. In this case, the far wall is discernible, if only barely. Below, the factory floor is crammed with all manner of Starship parts: nose cones, grid fins, hot staging rings, and so much more. The factory emitted a steady din and hum as work proceeded on vehicles below.

The ultimate goal of this factory is to build one Starship rocket a day. This sounds utterly mad. For the entire Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA built 15 Saturn V rockets. Over the course of more than three decades, NASA built and flew only five different iconic Space Shuttles. SpaceX aims to build 365 vehicles, which are larger, per year.

Wandering around the Starfactory, however, this ambition no longer seems undoable. The factory measures about 1 million square feet. This is two times as large as SpaceX’s main Falcon 9 factory in Hawthorne, California. It feels like the company could build a lot of Starships here if needed.

During one of my visits to South Texas, in early 2020 just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, SpaceX was building its first Starship rockets in football field-sized tents. At the time, SpaceX founder Elon Musk opined in an interview that building the factory might well be more difficult than building the rocket.

Here’s a view of SpaceX’s Starship production facilities, from the east side, in late February 2020. Credit: Eric Berger

“If you want to actually make something at reasonable volume, you have to build the machine that makes the machine, which mathematically is going to be vastly more complicated than the machine itself,” he said. “The thing that makes the machine is not going to be simpler than the machine. It’s going to be much more complicated, by a lot.”

Five years later, standing inside Starfactory, it seems clear that SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine—or at least it’s getting close.

But what happens if that machine is not ready for prime time?

A pretty bad year for Starship

SpaceX has not had a good run of things with the ambitious Starship vehicle this year. Three times, in January, March, and May, the vehicle took flight. And three times, the upper stage experienced significant problems during ascent, and the vehicle was lost on the ride up to space, or just after. These were the seventh, eighth, and ninth test flights of Starship, following three consecutive flights in 2024 during which the Starship upper stage made more or less nominal flights and controlled splashdowns in the Indian Ocean.

It’s difficult to view the consecutive failures this year—not to mention the explosion of another Starship vehicle during testing in June—as anything but a major setback for the program.

There can be no question that the Starship rocket, with its unprecedentedly large first stage and potentially reusable upper stage, is the most advanced and ambitious rocket humans have ever conceived, built, and flown. The failures this year, however, have led some space industry insiders to ask whether Starship is too ambitious.

My sources at SpaceX don’t believe so. They are frustrated by the run of problems this year, but they believe the fundamental design of Starship is sound and that they have a clear path to resolving the issues. The massive first stage has already been flown, landed, and re-flown. This is a huge step forward. But the sources also believe the upper stage issues can be resolved, especially with a new “Version 3” of Starship due to make its debut late this year or early in 2026.

The acid test will only come with upcoming flights. The vehicle’s tenth test flight is scheduled to take place no earlier than Sunday, August 24. It’s possible that SpaceX will fly one more “Version 2” Starship later this year before moving to the upgraded vehicle, with more powerful Raptor engines and lots of other changes to (hopefully) improve reliability.

SpaceX could certainly use a win. The Starship failures occur at a time when Musk has become embroiled in political controversy while feuding with the president of the United States. His actions have led some in government and private industry to question whether they should be doing business with SpaceX going forward.

It’s often said in sports that winning solves a lot of problems. For SpaceX, success with Starship would solve a lot of problems.

Next steps for Starship

The failures are frustrating and publicly embarrassing. But more importantly, they are a bottleneck for a lot of critical work SpaceX needs to do for Starship to reach its considerable potential. All of the technical progress the Starship program needs to make to deploy thousands of Starlink satellites, land NASA astronauts on the Moon, and send humans to Mars remains largely on hold.

Two of the most important objectives for the next flight require the Starship vehicle to fly a nominal mission. For several flights now, SpaceX engineers have dutifully prepared Starlink satellite simulators to test a Pez-like dispenser in space. And each Starship vehicle has carried about two dozen different tile experiments as the company attempts to build a rapidly reusable heat shield to protect Starship during atmospheric reentry.

The engineers are still waiting for the results of their experiments.

In the near term, SpaceX is hyper-focused on getting Starship working and starting the deployment of large Starlink satellites that will have the potential to unlock significant amounts of revenue. But this is just the beginning of the work that needs to happen for SpaceX to turn Starship into a deep-space vehicle capable of traveling to the Moon and Mars.

These steps include:

Reuse: Developing a rapidly reusable heat shield and landing and re-flying Starship upper stages
Prop transfer: Conducting a refueling test in low-Earth orbit to demonstrate the transfer of large amounts of propellant between Starships
Depots: Developing and testing cryogenic propellant depots to understand heating losses over time
Lunar landing: Landing a Starship successfully on the Moon, which is challenging due to the height of the vehicle and uneven terrain
Lunar launch: Demonstrating the capability of Starship, using liquid propellant, to launch safely from the lunar surface without infrastructure there
Mars transit: Demonstrating the operation of Starship over months and the capability to perform a powered landing on Mars.

Each of these steps is massively challenging and at least partly a novel exercise in aerospace. There will be a lot of learning, and almost certainly some failures, as SpaceX works through these technical milestones.

Some details about the Starship propellant transfer test, a key milestone that NASA and SpaceX had hoped to complete this year but now may tackle in 2026. Credit: NASA

SpaceX prefers a test, fly, and fix approach to developing hardware. This iterative approach has served the company well, allowing it to develop rockets and spacecraft faster and for less money than its competitors. But you cannot fly and fix hardware for the milestones above without getting the upper stage of Starship flying nominally.

That’s one reason why the Starship program has been so disappointing this year.

Then there are the politics

As SpaceX has struggled with Starship in 2025, its founder, Musk, has also had a turbulent run, from the presidential campaign trail to the top of political power in the world, the White House, and back out of President Trump’s inner circle. Along the way, he has made political enemies, and his public favorability ratings have fallen.

Amid the fallout between Trump and Musk this spring and summer, the president ordered a review of SpaceX’s contracts. Nothing happened because government officials found that most of the services SpaceX offers to NASA, the US Department of Defense, and other federal agencies are vital.

However, multiple sources have told Ars that federal officials are looking for alternatives to SpaceX and have indicated they will seek to buy launches, satellite Internet, and other services from emerging competitors if available.

Starship’s troubles also come at a critical time in space policy. As part of its budget request for fiscal year 2026, the White House sought to terminate the production of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and spacecraft after the Artemis III mission. The White House has also expressed an interest in sending humans to Mars, viewing the Moon as a stepping stone to the red planet.

Although there are several options in play, the most viable hardware for both a lunar and Mars human exploration program is Starship. If it works. If it continues to have teething pains, though, that makes it easier for Congress to continue funding NASA’s expensive rocket and spacecraft, as it would prefer to do.

What about Artemis and the Moon?

Starship’s “lost year” also has serious implications for NASA’s Artemis Moon Program. As Ars reported this week, China is now likely to land on the Moon before NASA can return. Yes, the space agency has a nominal landing date in 2027 for the Artemis III mission, but no credible space industry officials believe that date is real. (It has already slipped multiple times from 2024). Theoretically, a landing in 2028 remains feasible, but a more rational over/under date for NASA is probably somewhere in the vicinity of 2030.

SpaceX is building the lunar lander for the Artemis III mission, a modified version of Starship. There is so much we don’t really know yet about this vehicle. For example, how many refuelings will it take to load a Starship with sufficient propellant to land on the Moon and take off? What will the vehicle’s controls look like, and will the landings be automated?

And here’s another one: How many people at SpaceX are actually working on the lunar version of Starship?

Publicly, Musk has said he doesn’t worry too much about China beating the United States back to the Moon. “I think the United States should be aiming for Mars, because we’ve already actually been to the Moon several times,” Musk said in an interview in late May. “Yeah, if China sort of equals that, I’m like, OK, sure, but that’s something that America did 56 years ago.”

Privately, Musk is highly critical of Artemis, saying NASA should focus on Mars. Certainly, that’s the long arc of history toward which SpaceX’s efforts are being bent. Although both the Moon and Mars versions of Starship require the vehicle to reach orbit and successfully refuel, there is a huge divergence in the technology and work required after that point.

It’s not at all clear that the Trump administration is seriously seeking to address this issue by providing SpaceX with carrots and sticks to move the lunar lander program forward. If Artemis is not a priority for Musk, how can it be for SpaceX?

This all creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty ahead of Sunday’s Starship launch. As Musk likes to say, “Excitement is guaranteed.”

Success would be better.

SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine. But what about the machine? Read More »

China’s Guowang megaconstellation is more than another version of Starlink

china, Features, guowang, launch, long march, megaconstellation, military space, satnet, Science, Space, starlink / Tim Belzer / August 20, 2025

“This is a strategy to keep the US from intervening… that’s what their space architecture is designed to do.”

Spectators take photos as a Long March 8A rocket carrying a group of Guowang satellites blasts off from the Hainan commercial launch site on July 30, 2025, in Wenchang, China. Credit: Liu Guoxing/VCG via Getty Images

US defense officials have long worried that China’s Guowang satellite network might give the Chinese military access to the kind of ubiquitous connectivity US forces now enjoy with SpaceX’s Starlink network.

It turns out the Guowang constellation could offer a lot more than a homemade Chinese alternative to Starlink’s high-speed consumer-grade broadband service. China has disclosed little information about the Guowang network, but there’s mounting evidence that the satellites may provide Chinese military forces a tactical edge in any future armed conflict in the Western Pacific.

The megaconstellation is managed by a secretive company called China SatNet, which was established by the Chinese government in 2021. SatNet has released little information since its formation, and the group doesn’t have a website. Chinese officials have not detailed any of the satellites’ capabilities or signaled any intention to market the services to consumers.

Another Chinese satellite megaconstellation in the works, called Qianfan, appears to be a closer analog to SpaceX’s commercial Starlink service. Qianfan satellites are flat in shape, making them easier to pack onto the tops of rockets before launch. This is a design approach pioneered by SpaceX with Starlink. The backers of the Qianfan network began launching the first of up to 1,300 broadband satellites last year.

Unlike Starlink, the Guowang network consists of satellites manufactured by multiple companies, and they launch on several types of rockets. On its face, the architecture taking shape in low-Earth orbit appears to be more akin to SpaceX’s military-grade Starshield satellites and the Space Development Agency’s future tranches of data relay and missile-tracking satellites.

Guowang, or “national network,” may also bear similarities to something the US military calls MILNET. Proposed in the Trump administration’s budget request for next year, MILNET will be a partnership between the Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). One of the design alternatives under review at the Pentagon is to use SpaceX’s Starshield satellites to create a “hybrid mesh network” that the military can rely on for a wide range of applications.

Picking up the pace

In recent weeks, China’s pace of launching Guowang satellites has approached that of Starlink. China has launched five groups of Guowang satellites since July 27, while SpaceX has launched six Starlink missions using its Falcon 9 rockets over the same period.

A single Falcon 9 launch can haul up to 28 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit, while China’s rockets have launched between five and 10 Guowang satellites per flight to altitudes three to four times higher. China has now placed 72 Guowang satellites into orbit since launches began last December, a small fraction of the 12,992-satellite fleet China has outlined in filings with the International Telecommunication Union.

The constellation described in China’s ITU filings will include one group of Guowang satellites between 500 and 600 kilometers (311 and 373 miles), around the same altitude of Starlink. Another shell of Guowang satellites will fly roughly 1,145 kilometers (711 miles) above the Earth. So far, all of the Guowang satellites China has launched since last year appear to be heading for the higher shell.

This higher altitude limits the number of Guowang satellites China’s stable of launch vehicles can carry. On the other hand, fewer satellites are required for global coverage from the higher orbit.

A prototype Guowang satellite is seen prepared for encapsulation inside the nose cone of a Long March 12 rocket last year. This is one of the only views of a Guowang spacecraft China has publicly released. Credit: Hainan International Commercial Aerospace Launch Company Ltd.

SpaceX has already launched nearly 200 of its own Starshield satellites for the NRO to use for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. The next step, whether it’s the SDA constellation, MILNET, or something else, will seek to incorporate hundreds or thousands of low-Earth orbit satellites into real-time combat operations—things like tracking moving targets on the ground and in the air, targeting enemy vehicles, and relaying commands between allied forces. The Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile defense shield aims to extend real-time targeting to objects in the space domain.

In military jargon, the interconnected links to detect, track, target, and strike a target is called a kill chain or kill web. This is what US Space Force officials are pushing to develop with the Space Development Agency, MILNET, and other future space-based networks.

So where is the US military in building out this kill chain? The military has long had the ability to detect and track an adversary’s activities from space. Spy satellites have orbited the Earth since the dawn of the Space Age.

Much of the rest of the kill chain—like targeting and striking—remains forward work for the Defense Department. Many of the Pentagon’s existing capabilities are classified, but simply put, the multibillion-dollar satellite constellations the Space Force is building just for these purposes still haven’t made it to the launch pad. In some cases, they haven’t made it out of the lab.

Is space really the place?

The Space Development Agency is supposed to begin launching its first generation of more than 150 satellites later this year. These will put the Pentagon in a position to detect smaller, fainter ballistic and hypersonic missiles and provide targeting data for allied interceptors on the ground or at sea.

Space Force officials envision a network of satellites that can essentially control a terrestrial battlefield from orbit. The way future-minded commanders tell it, a fleet of thousands of satellites fitted with exquisite sensors and machine learning will first detect a moving target, whether it’s a land vehicle, aircraft, naval ship, or missile. Then, that spacecraft will transmit targeting data via a laser link to another satellite that can relay the information to a shooter on Earth.

US officials believe Guowang is a step toward integrating satellites into China’s own kill web. It might be easier for them to dismiss Guowang if it were simply a Chinese version of Starlink, but open-source information suggests it’s something more. Perhaps Guowang is more akin to megaconstellations being developed and deployed for the US Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office.

If this is the case, China could have a head start on completing all the links for a celestial kill chain. The NRO’s Starshield satellites in space today are presumably focused on collecting intelligence. The Space Force’s megaconstellation of missile tracking, data relay, and command and control satellites is not yet in orbit.

Chinese media reports suggest the Guowang satellites could accommodate a range of instrumentation, including broadband communications payloads, laser communications terminals, synthetic aperture radars, and optical remote sensing payloads. This sounds a lot like a mix of SpaceX and the NRO’s Starshield fleet, the Space Development Agency’s future constellation, and the proposed MILNET program.

A Long March 5B rocket lifts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China’s Hainan Province on August 13, 2025, with a group of Guowang satellites. (Photo by Luo Yunfei/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images.) Credit: Luo Yunfei/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images

In testimony before a Senate committee in June, the top general in the US Space Force said it is “worrisome” that China is moving in this direction. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Chief of Space Operations, used China’s emergence as an argument for developing space weapons, euphemistically called “counter-space capabilities.”

“The space-enabled targeting that they’ve been able to achieve from space has increased the range and accuracy of their weapon systems to the point where getting anywhere close enough [to China] in the Western Pacific to be able to achieve military objectives is in jeopardy if we can’t deny, disrupt, degrade that… capability,” Saltzman said. “That’s the most pressing challenge, and that means the Space Force needs the space control counter-space capabilities in order to deny that kill web.”

The US military’s push to migrate many wartime responsibilities to space is not without controversy. The Trump administration wants to cancel purchases of new E-7 jets designed to serve as nerve centers in the sky, where Air Force operators receive signals about what’s happening in the air, on the ground, and in the water for hundreds of miles around. Instead, much of this responsibility would be transferred to satellites.

Some retired military officials, along with some lawmakers, argue against canceling the E-7. They say there’s too little confidence in when satellites will be ready to take over. If the Air Force goes ahead with the plan to cancel the E-7, the service intends to bridge the gap by extending the life of a fleet of Cold War-era E-3 Sentry airplanes, commonly known as AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System).

But the high ground of space offers notable benefits. First, a proliferated network of satellites has global reach, and airplanes don’t. Second, satellites could do the job on their own, with some help from artificial intelligence and edge computing. This would remove humans from the line of fire. And finally, using a large number of satellites is inherently beneficial because it means an attack on one or several satellites won’t degrade US military capabilities.

In China, it takes a village

Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of US Space Forces in the Indo-Pacific region, told Ars last year that US officials are watching to see how China integrates satellite networks like Guowang into military exercises.

“What I find interesting is China continues to copy the US playbook,” Mastalir said. “So as as you look at the success that the United States has had with proliferated architectures, immediately now we see China building their own proliferated architecture, not just the transport layer and the comm layer, but the sensor layer as well. You look at their their pursuit of reusability in terms of increasing their launch capacity, which is currently probably one of their shortfalls. They have plans for a quicker launch tempo.”

A Long March 6A carries a group of Guowang satellites into orbit on July 27, 2025, from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China’s Shanxi Province. China has used four different rocket configurations to place five groups of Guowang satellites into orbit in the last month. Credit: Wang Yapeng/Xinhua via Getty Images

China hasn’t recovered or reused an orbital-class booster yet, but several Chinese companies are working on it. SpaceX, meanwhile, continues to recycle its fleet of Falcon 9 boosters while simultaneously developing a massive super-heavy-lift rocket and churning out dozens of Starlink and Starshield satellites every week.

China doesn’t have its own version of SpaceX. In China, it’s taken numerous commercial and government-backed enterprises to reach a launch cadence that, so far this year, is a little less than half that of SpaceX. But the flurry of Guowang launches in the last few weeks shows that China’s satellite and rocket factories are picking up the pace.

Mastalir said China’s actions in the South China Sea, where it has taken claim of disputed islands near Taiwan and the Philippines, could extend farther from Chinese shores with the help of space-based military capabilities.

“Their specific goals are to be able to track and target US high-value assets at the time and place of their choosing,” he said. “That has started with an A2AD, an Anti-Access Area Denial strategy, which is extended to the first island chain and now the second island chain, and eventually all the way to the west coast of California.”

“The sensor capabilities that they’ll need are multi-orbital and diverse in terms of having sensors at GEO (geosynchronous orbit) and now increasingly massive megaconstellations at LEO (low-Earth orbit),” Mastalir said. “So we’re seeing all signs point to being able to target US aircraft carriers… high-value assets in the air like tankers, AWACs. This is a strategy to keep the US from intervening, and that’s what their space architecture is designed to do.”

China’s Guowang megaconstellation is more than another version of Starlink Read More »

After recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the Moon

artemis, china, NASA, Space, space race / Paul Patrick / August 19, 2025

An expert explains why this will be enormously bad for the United States.

China’s Long March-10 rocket conducts its first static fire test at the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on August 15, 2025. Credit: VCG via Getty Images

In recent weeks, the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030.

On August 6, the China Manned Space Agency successfully tested a high-fidelity mockup of its 26-ton “Lanyue” lunar lander. The test, conducted outside of Beijing, used giant tethers to simulate lunar gravity as the vehicle fired main engines and fine control thrusters to land on a cratered surface and take off from there.

“The test,” said the agency in an official statement, “represents a key step in the development of China’s manned lunar exploration program, and also marks the first time that China has carried out a test of extraterrestrial landing and takeoff capabilities of a manned spacecraft.”

As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the Moon “before” 2030.

Then, last Friday, the space agency and its state-operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, successfully conducted a 30-second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket’s center core with its seven YF-100K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen. The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.

These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Mengzhou spacecraft in June. A version of this spacecraft is planned for lunar missions.

On track for 2030

Thus, China’s space program is making demonstrable progress in all three of the major elements of its lunar program: the large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft, which will carry humans to lunar orbit, plus the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back. This work suggests that China is on course to land on the Moon before the end of this decade.

For the United States and its allies in space, there are reasons to be dismissive of this. For one, NASA landed humans on the Moon nearly six decades ago with the Apollo Program. Been there, done that.

Moreover, the initial phases of the Chinese program look derivative of Apollo, particularly a lander that strikingly resembles the Lunar Module. NASA can justifiably point to its Artemis Program and say it is attempting to learn the lessons of Apollo—that the program was canceled because it was not sustainable. With its lunar landers, NASA seeks to develop in-space propellant storage and refueling technology, allowing for lower cost, reusable lunar missions with the capability to bring much more mass to the Moon and back. This should eventually allow for the development of a lunar economy and enable a robust government-commercial enterprise.

China’s Lanyue lander undergoes tests in early August. Credit: CCTV

But recent setbacks with SpaceX’s Starship vehicle–one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA, alongside Blue Origin’s Mark 2 lander—indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go. So it’s now probable that China will “beat” NASA back to the Moon this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race.

To put this into perspective, Ars connected with Dean Cheng, one of the most respected analysts on China, space policy, and the geopolitical implications of the new space competition. He was also a researcher at the Heritage Foundation for 13 years, where he focused on China. (He was not involved with Project 2025.) Now “sort of” retired, in his own words, Cheng is presently a non-resident fellow at the George Washington University Space Policy Institute.

The implications of this for the West

Ars: How significant was the Lanyue lander demonstration? Does this indicate the Chinese space program remains on track to land humans on the Moon by or before 2030?

Dean Cheng: The Lanyue lander is significant because it’s part of the usual Chinese “crawl-walk-run” approach to major space (and other scientific) projects. The [People’s Republic of China] can benefit from other people’s experiences (much of NASA’s information is open), but they still have to build and operate the spacecraft themselves. So the test of the Lanyue lander, successful or not, is an important part of that process.

Note that the Chinese also this week had a successful static test of the LM-10, which is their lunar SLV (satellite launch vehicle). This, along with the Lanyue, indicates that the Chinese lunar program is pushing ahead. The LM-10, even more than the Lanyue, is significant because it’s a new launch vehicle, in the wake of problems with the LM-5 and the cancellation of the LM-9 (which was probably their Saturn-V equivalent).

Ars: How likely is it that China lands humans on the Moon before NASA can return there with the Artemis Program?

Cheng: At the rate things are going, sadly, it seems quite likely that the Chinese will land on the Moon before NASA can return to the Moon.

Ars: What would the geopolitical impact be if China beats the United States back to the Moon?

Cheng: The geopolitical impact of the Chinese beating the US to the Moon (where we are returning) would be enormous.

Ars: How so?

Cheng: It means the end of American exceptionalism. One of the hallmarks of the post-1969 era was that only the United States had been able to land someone on the Moon (or any other celestial body). This was bound to end, but the constant American refrain of “We’ve put a man on the Moon, we can do anything” will certainly no longer resonate.

It means China can do “big” things, and the United States cannot. The US cannot even replicate projects it undertook 50 (or more) years ago. The optics of “the passing of the American age” would be evident—and that in turn would absolutely affect other nations’ perceptions of who is winning/losing the broader technological and ideological competition between the US and the PRC.

A few years back, there was talk of “The Beijing Consensus” as an alternative to the “Washington Consensus.” The Washington Consensus posited that the path forward was democracy, pluralism, and capitalism. The Beijing consensus argued that one only needed economic modernization. That, in fact, political authoritarianism was more likely to lead to modernization and advancement. This ideological element would be reinforced if Beijing can do the “big” things but the US cannot.

And what will be the language of cis-lunar space? The Chinese are not aiming to simply go to the Moon. Their choice of landing sites (most likely the South Pole) suggests an intent to establish longer-term facilities and presence. If China regularly dispatches lunar missions (not just this first one), then it will rightfully be able to argue that Chinese should be a language, if not the language, of lunar/cis-lunar space traffic management. As important, China will have an enormous say over technical standards, data standards, etc., for cis-lunar activities. The PRC has already said it will be deploying a lunar PNT (positioning, navigation, and timing) network and likely a communications system, (given the BeiDou’s dual capabilities in this regard).

Ars: Taking the longer view, is the United States or China better positioned (i.e., US spending on defense, reusable in-space architecture vs Chinese plans) to dominate cislunar space between now and the middle of this century?

Cheng: On paper, the US has most of the advantages. We have a larger economy, more experience in space, extant space industrial capacity for reusable space launch, etc. But we have not had programmatic stability so that we are consistently pursuing the same goal over time. During Trump-1, the US said it would go to the Moon with people by 2024. Here we are, halfway through 2025. Trump-2 seems to once again be swinging wildly from going (back) to the Moon to going to Mars. Scientific and engineering advances don’t do well in the face of such wild swings and inconstancy.

By contrast, the Chinese are stable, systematic. They pursue a given goal (e.g., human spaceflight, a space station) over decades, with persistence and programmatic (both budgetarily and in terms of goals) stability. So I expect that the Chinese will put a Chinese person on the Moon by 2030 and follow that with additional crewed and unmanned facilities. This will be supported by a built-out infrastructure of lunar PNT/comms. The US will almost certainly put people on the Moon in a landing in the next several years, but then what? Is Lunar Gateway going to be real? How often will the US go to the Moon, as the Chinese go over and over?

Ars: Do you have any advice for the Trump administration in order to better compete with China in this effort to not only land on the Moon but have a dominant presence there?

Cheng: The Trump administration needs to make a programmatic commitment to some goal, whether the Moon or Mars. It needs to mobilize Congress and the public to support that goal. It needs to fund that goal, but as important, it also needs to have a high-level commitment and oversight, such as the VP and the National Space Council in the first Trump administration. There is little/no obvious direction at the moment for where space is going in this administration, and what its priorities are.

This lack of direction then affects the likelihood that industry, whether big business or entrepreneurs, can support whatever efforts do emerge. If POTUS wants to rely more on entrepreneurial business (a reasonable approach), he nonetheless needs to provide indications of this. It would help to also provide incentives, e.g., a follow-on to the Ansari and X-prizes, which did lead to a blossoming of innovation.

After recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the Moon Read More »

SpaceX reveals why the last two Starships failed as another launch draws near

Commercial space, Federal Aviation Administration, launch, Science, Space, spacex, starship / Tim Belzer / August 16, 2025

“SpaceX can now proceed with Starship Flight 10 launch operations under its current license.”

SpaceX completed a six-engine static fire of the next Starship upper stage on August 1. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX is continuing with final preparations for the 10th full-scale test flight of the company’s enormous Starship rocket after receiving launch approval Friday from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Engineers completed a final test of Starship’s propulsion system with a so-called “spin prime” test Wednesday at the launch site in South Texas. Ground crews then rolled the ship back to a nearby hangar for engine inspections, touchups to its heat shield, and a handful of other chores to ready it for liftoff.

SpaceX has announced the launch is scheduled for no earlier than next Sunday, August 24, at 6: 30 pm local time in Texas (23: 30 UTC).

Like all previous Starship launches, the huge 403-foot-tall (123-meter) rocket will take off from SpaceX’s test site in Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border. The rocket consists of a powerful booster stage named Super Heavy, with 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines. Six Raptors power the upper stage, known simply as Starship.

With this flight, SpaceX officials hope to put several technical problems with the Starship program behind them. SpaceX is riding a streak of four disappointing Starship test flights from January through May, and and the explosion and destruction of another Starship vehicle during a ground test in June.

These setbacks followed a highly successful year for the world’s largest rocket in 2024, when SpaceX flew Starship four times and achieved new objectives on each flight. These accomplishments included the first catch of a Super Heavy booster back at the launch pad, proving the company’s novel concept for recovering and reusing the rocket’s first stage.

Starship’s record so far in 2025 is another story. The rocket’s inability to make it through an entire suborbital test flight has pushed back future program milestones, such as the challenging tasks of recovering and reusing the rocket’s upper stage, and demonstrating the ability to refuel another rocket in orbit. Those would both be firsts in the history of spaceflight.

These future tests, and more, are now expected to occur no sooner than next year. This time last year, SpaceX officials hoped to achieve them in 2025. All of these demonstrations are vital for Elon Musk to meet his promise of sending numerous Starships to build a settlement on Mars. Meanwhile, NASA is eager for SpaceX to reel off these tests as quickly as possible because the agency has selected Starship as the human-rated lunar lander for the Artemis Moon program. Once operational, Starship will also be key to building out SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink broadband network.

A good outcome on the next Starship test flight would give SpaceX footing to finally take a step toward these future demos after months of dithering over design dilemmas.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, presented an update on Starship to company employees in May. This chart shows the planned evolution from Starship Version 2 (left) to Version 3 (middle), and an even larger rocket (right) in the more distant future.

The FAA said Friday it formally closed the investigation into Starship’s most recent in-flight failure in May, when the rocket started leaking propellant after reaching space, rendering it unable to complete the test flight.

“The FAA oversaw and accepted the findings of the SpaceX-led investigation,” the federal regulator said in a statement. “The final mishap report cites the probable root cause for the loss of the Starship vehicle as a failure of a fuel component. SpaceX identified corrective actions to prevent a reoccurrence of the event.”

Diagnosing failures

SpaceX identified the most probable cause for the May failure as a faulty main fuel tank pressurization system diffuser located on the forward dome of Starship’s primary methane tank. The diffuser failed a few minutes after launch, when sensors detected a pressure drop in the main methane tank and a pressure increase in the ship’s nose cone just above the tank.

The rocket compensated for the drop in main tank pressure and completed its engine burn, but venting from the nose cone and a worsening fuel leak overwhelmed Starship’s attitude control system. Finally, detecting a major problem, Starship triggered automatic onboard commands to vent all remaining propellant into space and “passivate” itself before an unguided reentry over the Indian Ocean, prematurely ending the test flight.

Engineers recreated the diffuser failure on the ground during the investigation, and then redesigned the part to better direct pressurized gas into the main fuel tank. This will also “substantially decrease” strain on the diffuser structure, SpaceX said.

The FAA, charged with ensuring commercial rocket launches don’t endanger public safety, signed off on the investigation and gave the green light for SpaceX to fly Starship again when it is ready.

“SpaceX can now proceed with Starship Flight 10 launch operations under its current license,” the FAA said.

“The upcoming flight will continue to expand the operating envelope on the Super Heavy booster, with multiple landing burn tests planned,” SpaceX said in an update posted to its website Friday. “It will also target similar objectives as previous missions, including Starship’s first payload deployment and multiple reentry experiments geared towards returning the upper stage to the launch site for catch.”

File photo of Starship’s six Raptor engines firing on a test stand in South Texas. Credit: SpaceX

In the aftermath of the test flight in May, SpaceX hoped to fly Starship again by late June or early July. But another accident June 18, this time on the ground, delayed the program another couple of months. The Starship vehicle SpaceX assigned to the next flight, designated Ship 36, exploded on a test stand in Texas as teams filled it with cryogenic propellants for an engine test-firing.

The accident destroyed the ship and damaged the test site, prompting SpaceX to retrofit the sole active Starship launch pad to support testing of the next ship in line—Ship 37. Those tests included a brief firing of all six of the ship’s Raptor engines August 1.

After Ship 37’s final spin prime test Wednesday, workers transported the rocket back to a hangar for evaluation, and crews immediately got to work transitioning the launch pad back to its normal configuration to host a full Super Heavy/Starship stack.

SpaceX said the explosion on the test stand in June was likely caused by damage to a high-pressure nitrogen storage tank inside Starship’s payload bay section. This tank, called a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, or COPV, violently ruptured and led to the ship’s fiery demise. SpaceX said COPVs on upcoming flights will operate at lower pressures, and managers ordered additional inspections on COPVs to look for damage, more proof testing, more stringent acceptance criteria, and a hardware change to address the problem.

Try, try, try, try again

This year began with the first launch of an upgraded version of Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, in January. But the vehicle suffered propulsion failures and lost control before the upper stage completed its engine burn to propel the rocket on a trajectory carrying it halfway around the world to splash down in the Indian Ocean. Instead, the rocket broke apart and rained debris over the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands more than 1,500 miles downrange from Starbase.

That was followed in March by another Starship launch that had a similar result, again scattering debris near the Bahamas. In May, the ninth Starship test flight made it farther downrange and completed its engine burn before spinning out of control in space, preventing it from making a guided reentry to gather data on its heat shield.

Mastering the design of Starship’s heat shield is critical the future of the program. As it has on all of this year’s test flights, SpaceX has installed on the next Starship several different ceramic and metallic tile designs to test alternative materials to protect the vehicle during its scorching plunge back into Earth’s atmosphere. Starship successfully made it through reentry for a controlled splashdown in the sea several times last year, but sensors detected hot spots on the rocket’s stainless steel skin after some of the tiles fell off during launch and descent.

Making the Starship upper stage reusable like the Super Heavy booster will require better performance from the heat shield. The demands of flying the ship home from orbit and attempting a catch at the launch pad far outweigh the challenge of recovering a booster. Coming back from space, the ship encounters much higher temperatures than the booster sees at lower velocities.

Therefore, SpaceX’s most important goal for the 10th Starship flight will be gathering information about how well the ship’s different heat shield materials hold up during reentry. Engineers want to have this data as soon as possible to inform design decisions about the next iteration of Starship—Version 3 or Block 3—that will actually fly into orbit. So far, all Starship launches have intentionally targeted a speed just shy of orbital velocity, bringing the vehicle back through the atmosphere halfway around the world.

Other objectives on the docket for Starship Flight 10 include the deployment of spacecraft simulators mimicking the size of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. Like the heat shield data, this has been part of the flight plan for the last three Starship launches, but the rocket never made it far enough to attempt any payload deployment tests.

Thirty-three Raptor engines power the Super Heavy booster downrange from SpaceX’s launch site near Brownsville, Texas, in January. Credit: SpaceX

Engineers also plan to put the Super Heavy booster through the wringer on the next launch. Instead of coming back to Starbase for a catch at the launch pad—something SpaceX has now done three times—the massive booster stage will target a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico east of the Texas coast. This will give SpaceX room to try new things with the booster, such as controlling the rocket’s final descent with a different mix of engines to see if it could overcome a problem with one of its three primary landing engines.

SpaceX tried to experiment with new ways of landing of the Super Heavy booster on the last test flight, too. The Super Heavy exploded before reaching the ocean, likely due to a structural failure of the rocket’s fuel transfer tube, an internal pipe where methane flows from the fuel tank at the top of the rocket to the engines at the bottom of the booster. SpaceX said the booster flew a higher angle of attack during its descent in May to test the limits of the rocket’s performance. It seems engineers found the limit, and the booster won’t fly at such a high angle of attack next time.

SpaceX has just two Starship Version 2 vehicles in its inventory before moving on to the taller Version 3 configuration, which will also debut improved Raptor engines.

“Every lesson learned, through both flight and ground testing, continues to feed directly into designs for the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy,” SpaceX said. “Two flights remain with the current generation, each with test objectives designed to expand the envelope on vehicle capabilities as we iterate towards fully and rapidly reusable, reliable rockets.”

SpaceX reveals why the last two Starships failed as another launch draws near Read More »

NASA’s acting chief calls for the end of Earth science at the space agency

Earth science, NASA, Sean Duffy, Space / Paul Patrick / August 15, 2025

Sean Duffy, the acting administrator of NASA for a little more than a month, has vowed to make the United States great in space.

With a background as a US Congressman, reality TV star, and television commentator, Duffy did not come to the position with a deep well of knowledge about spaceflight. He also already had a lot on his plate, serving as the secretary of transportation, a Cabinet-level position that oversees 55,000 employees across 13 agencies.

Nevertheless, Duffy is putting his imprint on the space agency, seeking to emphasize the agency’s human exploration plans, including the development of a lunar base, and ending NASA’s efforts to study planet Earth and its changing climate.

Duffy has not spoken much with reporters who cover the space industry, but he has been a frequent presence on Fox News networks, where he previously worked as a host. On Thursday, he made an 11-minute appearance on “Mornings with Maria,” a FOX Business show hosted by Maria Bartiromo to discuss NASA.

NASA should explore, he says

During this appearance, Duffy talked up NASA’s plans to establish a permanent presence on the Moon and his push to develop a nuclear reactor that could provide power there. He also emphasized his desire to end NASA’s focus on studying the Earth and understanding how the planet’s surface and atmosphere are changing. This shift has been a priority of the Trump Administration at other federal agencies.

“All the climate science, and all of the other priorities that the last administration had at NASA, we’re going to move aside, and all of the science that we do is going to be directed towards exploration, which is the mission of NASA,” Duffy said during the appearance. “That’s why we have NASA, to explore, not to do all of these Earth sciences.”

NASA’s acting chief calls for the end of Earth science at the space agency Read More »

Rocket Report: Ariane 6 beats Vulcan to third launch; China’s first drone ship

ariane 6, Arianespace, artemis II, china, human spaceflight, NASA, rocket report, Science, Space, space launch system, spacex, united launch alliance, vulcan / Tim Belzer / August 15, 2025

Why is China’s heavy-lift Long March 5B able to launch only 10 Guowang satellites at a time?

Wearing their orange launch and reentry spacesuits, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman (bottom) and pilot Victor Glover (top) walk out of an emergency egress basket during nighttime training at Launch Complex 39B.

Welcome to Edition 8.06 of the Rocket Report! Two of the world’s most storied rocket builders not named SpaceX achieved major successes this week. Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket launched from French Guiana on its third flight Tuesday night with a European weather satellite. Less than 20 minutes later, United Launch Alliance’s third Vulcan rocket lifted off from Florida on a US military mission. These are two of the three big rockets developed in the Western world that have made their orbital debuts in the last two years, alongside Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher. Ariane 6 narrowly won the “race” to reach its third orbital flight, but if you look at it another way, Ariane 6 reached its third flight milestone 13 months after its inaugural launch. It took Vulcan more than 19 months, and New Glenn has flown just once. SpaceX’s Super Heavy/Starship rocket has flown nine times but has yet to reach orbit.

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.

Sixth success for sea-launched Chinese rocket. Private Chinese satellite operator Geespace added 11 spacecraft to its expanding Internet of Things constellation on August 8, aiming to boost low-power connectivity in key emerging markets, Space News reports. The 11 satellites rode into orbit aboard a solid-fueled Jielong 3 (Smart Dragon 3) rocket lifting off from an ocean platform in the Yellow Sea off the coast of Rizhao, a city in eastern China’s Shandong province. This was the sixth flight of the Jielong 3, a rocket developed by a commercially oriented spinoff of the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

Mistaken for a meteor … The fourth stage of the Jielong 3 rocket, left in orbit after deploying its 11 satellite payloads, reentered the atmosphere late Sunday night. The fiery and destructive reentry created a fireball that streaked across the skies over Spain, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports. Many Spanish residents identified the streaking object as a meteor associated with the Perseid meteor shower. But it turned out to be a piece of China’s Jielong 3 rocket. Any debris that may have survived the scorching reentry likely fell into the Mediterranean Sea.

Sign Me Up!

Portugal green-lights Azores spaceport. The Portuguese government has granted the Atlantic Spaceport Consortium a license to build and operate a rocket launch facility on the island of Santa Maria in the Azores, European Spaceflight reports. The Atlantic Spaceport Consortium (ASC) was founded in 2019 with the goal of developing a commercial spaceport on Santa Maria, 1,500 kilometers off the Portuguese mainland. In September 2024, the company showcased the island’s suitability as a launch site by launching two small solid-fuel amateur-class rockets that it developed in-house.

What’s on deck? … The spaceport license granted by Portugal’s regulatory authorities does not cover individual launches themselves. Those must be approved in a separate licensing process. It’s likely that the launch site on Santa Maria Island will initially host suborbital launches, including flights by the Polish rocket company SpaceForest. The European Space Agency has also selected Santa Maria as the landing site for the first flight of the Space Rider lifting body vehicle after it launches into orbit, perhaps in 2027. (submitted by claudiodcsilva)

Why is Jeff Bezos buying launches from Elon Musk? Early Monday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from its original launch site in Florida. Remarkably, it was SpaceX’s 100th launch of the year. Perhaps even more notable was the rocket’s payload: two-dozen Project Kuiper satellites, which were dispensed into low-Earth orbit on target, Ars reports. This was SpaceX’s second launch of satellites for Amazon, which is developing a constellation to deliver low-latency broadband Internet around the world. SpaceX, then, just launched a direct competitor to its Starlink network into orbit. And it was for the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who owns a rocket company of his own in Blue Origin.

Several answers … So how did it come to this—Bezos and Elon Musk, competitors in so many ways, working together in space? There are several answers. Most obviously, launching payloads for customers is one of SpaceX’s two core business areas, alongside Starlink. SpaceX sells launch services to all comers and typically offers the lowest price per kilogram to orbit. There’s immediate revenue to be made if a company with deep pockets like Amazon is willing to pay SpaceX. Second, the other options to get Kuiper satellites into orbit just aren’t available at the volume Amazon needs. Amazon has reserved the lion’s share of its Kuiper launches with SpaceX’s competitors: United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Jeff Bezos’ own space company Blue Origin. Lastly, SpaceX could gain some leverage by providing launch services to Amazon. In return for a launch, SpaceX has asked other companies with telecom satellites, such as OneWeb and Kepler Communications, to share spectrum rights to enable Starlink to expand into new markets.

Trump orders cull of commercial launch regulations. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday directing government agencies to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses, Ars reports. The FAA, part of the Department of Transportation, is responsible for granting the licenses after ensuring launch and reentries don’t endanger the public, comply with environmental laws, and comport with US national interests. The drive toward deregulation will be welcome news for companies like SpaceX, led by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk; SpaceX conducts nearly all of the commercial launches and reentries licensed by the FAA.

Deflecting scrutiny? … The executive order does several things, and not all of them will be as controversial as the potential elimination of environmental reviews. The order includes a clause directing the government to reevaluate, amend, or rescind a slate of launch-safety regulations written during the first Trump administration. The FAA published the new regulations, known as Part 450, in 2020, and they went into effect in 2021, but space companies have complained that they are too cumbersome and have slowed down the license approval process. The Biden administration established a committee last year to look at reforming the regulations in response to industry’s outcry. Another part of the order that will likely lack bipartisan support is a call for making the head of the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division a political appointee. This job has historically been held by a career civil servant.

Ariane 6 launches European weather satellite. Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket successfully launched for a third time on Tuesday night, carrying a satellite into orbit for weather forecasting and climate monitoring, Euronews reports. “The success of this second commercial launch confirms the performance, reliability, and precision of Ariane 6,” said Martin Sion, CEO of ArianeGroup, operator of the rocket. “Once again, the new European heavy-lift launcher meets Europe’s needs, ensuring sovereign access to space,” Sion added. It marks the second commercial flight of the rocket, which has been in development for almost a decade with the European Space Agency (ESA). It is significant as it gives Europe independent access to space and reduces its reliance on Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Eumetsat returns to Europe … The polar-orbiting weather satellite launched by the Ariane 6 rocket this week is owned by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, or Eumetsat. Headquartered in Germany, Eumetsat is a multinational organization that owns and operates geostationary and polar-orbiting weather satellites, watching real-time storm development over Europe and Africa, while feeding key data into global weather and climate models. Just last month, Eumetsat’s newest geostationary weather satellite launched from Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket because of delays with the Ariane 6 program.

Rocket Lab isn’t giving up on 2025 yet. Rocket Lab continues to push for a first launch of its medium-lift Neutron rocket before the end of the year, but company executives acknowledge that schedule has no margin for error, Space News reports. It may seem unlikely, but Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, Peter Beck, said in a conference call with investment analysts last week that the company has a “green light” schedule to debut the Neutron rocket within the next four-and-a-half months. There’s still much work to do to prepare for the first launch, and the inaugural flight seems almost certain to slip into 2026.

Launch pad nearly complete … Rocket Lab plans to host a ribbon-cutting at the Neutron rocket’s new launch pad on Wallops Island, Virginia, on August 28. This launch pad is located just south of the spaceport’s largest existing launch facility, where Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket lifts off on resupply missions to the International Space Station. Rocket Lab has a small launch pad for its light-class Electron launcher co-located with the Antares pad at Wallops.

Chinese company reveals drone ship. The Chinese launch company iSpace has released the first photos of an ocean-going recovery ship to support the landings of reusable first-stage boosters. The company hosted a dedication ceremony in Yangzhou, China, earlier this month for the vessel, which looks similar to SpaceX’s rocket landing drone ships. In a press release, iSpace said the ship, named “Interstellar Return,” is China’s first marine rocket recovery ship, and the fifth such vessel in the world. SpaceX has three drone ships in its fleet for the Falcon 9 rocket, and Blue Origin has one for the New Glenn booster.

Rocket agnostic … The recovery ship will be compatible with various medium- and large-sized reusable rockets, iSpace said. But its main use will be as the landing site for the first stage booster for iSpace’s own Hyperbola 3 rocket, a medium-lift launcher with methane-fueled engines. The company has completed multiple vertical takeoff and landing tests of prototype boosters for the Hyperbola 3. The recovery ship measures about 100 meters long and 42 meters wide, with a displacement of 17,000 metric tons, and it has the ability to perform “intelligent unmanned operations” thanks to a dynamic positioning system, according to iSpace.

Vulcan’s first national security launch. United Launch Alliance delivered multiple US military satellites into a high-altitude orbit after a prime-time launch Tuesday night, marking an important transition from development to operations for the company’s new Vulcan rocket, Ars reports. This mission, officially designated USSF-106 by the US Space Force, was the first flight of ULA’s Vulcan rocket to carry national security payloads. Two test flights of the Vulcan rocket last year gave military officials enough confidence to certify it for launching the Pentagon’s medium-to-large space missions.

Secrecy in the fairing … The Vulcan rocket’s Centaur upper stage released its payloads into geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator roughly seven hours after liftoff. One of the satellites deployed by the Vulcan rocket is an experimental navigation testbed named NTS-3. It will demonstrate new technologies that could be used on future GPS navigation satellites. But the Space Force declined to disclose any information about the mission’s other payloads.

Artemis II crew trains for nighttime ops. The four astronauts training to fly around the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission next year have been at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. One of the reasons they were at Kennedy was to run through a rehearsal for what it will be like to work at the launch pad if the Artemis II mission ends up lifting off at night. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen put on their spacesuits and rehearsed emergency procedures at Launch Complex 39B, replicating a daytime simulation they participated in last year.

Moving forward … The astronauts also went inside the Vehicle Assembly Building to practice using egress baskets they would use to quickly escape the launch pad in the event of a prelaunch emergency. The baskets are fastened to the mobile launch tower inside the VAB, where technicians are assembling and testing the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission. Later this year, the astronauts will return to Kennedy for a two-part countdown demonstration test. First, the crew members will board their Orion spacecraft once it’s stacked atop the SLS rocket inside the VAB. Then, in part two, the astronauts will again rehearse emergency evacuation procedures once the rocket rolls to the launch pad.

China’s Long March 5B flies again. China is ramping up construction of its national satellite-Internet megaconstellation with the successful deployment of another batch of Guowang satellites by a heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket on Wednesday, Space.com reports. Guowang, whose name translates as “national network,” will be operated by China SatNet, a state-run company established in 2021. The constellation will eventually consist of about 13,000 satellites if all goes to plan.

Make this make sense … Guowang is a long way from that goal. Wednesday’s launch was the eighth overall for the network, but it was the fourth for the project in less than three weeks. Each mission lofts just five to 10 Guowang spacecraft, apparently because each satellite is quite large. For comparison, SpaceX launches 24 to 28 satellites on each mission to assemble its Starlink broadband megaconstellation, which currently consists of nearly 8,100 operational spacecraft. The Long March 5B is China’s most powerful operational rocket, with a lift capacity somewhat higher than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 but below that of the Falcon Heavy. It begs the question of just how big the Guowang satellites really are, and do they have a purpose beyond broadband Internet service?

Next three launches

Aug. 16: Kinetica 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 07: 35 UTC

Aug. 17: Long March 4C | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 09: 05 UTC

Aug. 17: Long March 6A | Unknown Payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 14: 15 UTC

Rocket Report: Ariane 6 beats Vulcan to third launch; China’s first drone ship Read More »

Trump orders cull of regulations governing commercial rocket launches

Commercial space, Donald Trump, executive order, FAA, launch, Science, Space, space policy, spacex, White House / Mike M. / August 14, 2025

The head of the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division will become a political appointee.

Birds take flight at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this 2010 photo. Credit: NASA

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), grants licenses for commercial launch and reentry operations. The FAA is charged with ensuring launch and reentries comply with environmental laws, comport with US national interests, and don’t endanger the public.

The drive toward deregulation will be welcome news for companies like SpaceX, led by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk; SpaceX conducts nearly all of the commercial launches and reentries licensed by the FAA.

Deregulation time

Trump ordered Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who also serves as the acting administrator of NASA, to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite… environmental reviews for… launch and reentry licenses and permits.” In the order signed by Trump, White House officials wrote that Duffy should consult with the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality and follow “applicable law” in the regulatory cull.

The executive order also includes a clause directing Duffy to reevaluate, amend, or rescind a slate of launch-safety regulations written during the first Trump administration. The FAA published the new regulations, known as Part 450, in 2020, and they went into effect in 2021, but space companies have complained they are too cumbersome and have slowed down the license approval process.

And there’s more. Trump ordered NASA, the military, and DOT to eliminate duplicative reviews for spaceport development. This is particularly pertinent at federally owned launch ranges like those at Cape Canaveral, Florida; Vandenberg Space Force Base, California; and Wallops Island, Virginia.

The Trump administration also plans to make the head of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation a political appointee. This office oversees commercial launch and reentry licensing and was previously led by a career civil servant. Duffy will also hire an advisor on deregulation in the commercial spaceflight industry to join DOT, and the Office of Space Commerce will be elevated to a more prominent position within the Commerce Department.

“It is the policy of the United States to enhance American greatness in space by enabling a competitive launch marketplace and substantially increasing commercial space launch cadence and novel space activities by 2030,” Trump’s executive order reads. “To accomplish this, the federal government will streamline commercial license and permit approvals for United States-based operators.”

News of the executive order was reported last month by ProPublica, which wrote that the Trump administration was circulating draft language among federal agencies to slash rules to protect the environment and the public from the dangers of rocket launches. The executive order signed by Trump and released by the White House on Wednesday confirms ProPublica’s reporting.

Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, criticized the Trump administration’s move.

“This reckless order puts people and wildlife at risk from private companies launching giant rockets that often explode and wreak devastation on surrounding areas,” Margolis said in a statement. “Bending the knee to powerful corporations by allowing federal agencies to ignore bedrock environmental laws is incredibly dangerous and puts all of us in harm’s way. This is clearly not in the public interest.”

Duffy, the first person to lead NASA and another federal department at the same time, argued the order is important to sustain economic growth in the space industry.

“By slashing red tape tying up spaceport construction, streamlining launch licenses so they can occur at scale, and creating high-level space positions in government, we can unleash the next wave of innovation,” Duffy said in a statement. “At NASA, this means continuing to work with commercial space companies and improving our spaceports’ ability to launch.”

Nipping NEPA

The executive order is emblematic of the Trump administration’s broader push to curtail environmental reviews for large infrastructure projects.

The White House has already directed federal agencies to repeal regulations enforcing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1969 law that requires the feds prepare environmental assessments and environmental impact statements to evaluate the effects of government actions—such as licensing approvals—on the environment.

Regarding commercial spaceflight, the White House ordered the Transportation Department to create a list of activities officials there believe are not subject to NEPA and establish exclusions under NEPA for launch and reentry licenses.

Onlookers watch from nearby sand dunes as SpaceX prepares a Starship rocket for launch from Starbase, Texas. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

The changes to the environmental review process might be the most controversial part of Trump’s new executive order. Another section of the order—the attempt to reform or rescind the so-called Part 450 launch and reentry regulations—appears to have bipartisan support in Congress.

The FAA started implementing its new Part 450 commercial launch and reentry regulations less than five years ago after writing the rules in response to another Trump executive order signed in 2018. Part 450 was intended to streamline the launch approval process by allowing companies to submit applications for a series of launches or reentries, rather than requiring a new license for each mission.

But industry officials quickly criticized the new regulations, which they said didn’t account for rapid iteration of rockets and spacecraft like SpaceX’s enormous Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle. The FAA approved a SpaceX request in May to increase the number of approved Starship launches from five to 25 per year from the company’s base in Starship, Texas, near the US-Mexico border.

Last year, the FAA’s leadership under the Biden administration established a committee to examine the shortcomings of Part 450. The Republican and Democratic leaders of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee submitted a joint request in February for the Government Accountability Office to conduct an independent review of the FAA’s Part 450 regulations.

“Reforming and streamlining commercial launch regulations and licensing is an area the Biden administration knew needed reform,” wrote Laura Forczyk, founder and executive director of the space consulting firm Astralytical, in a post on X. “However, little was done. Will more be done with this executive order? I hope so. This was needed years ago.”

Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, applauded the Trump administration’s regulatory policy.

“This executive order will strengthen and grow the US commercial space industry by cutting red tape while maintaining a commitment to public safety, benefitting the American people and the US government that are increasingly reliant on space for our national and economic security,” Cavossa said in a statement.

Specific language in the new Trump executive order calls for the FAA to evaluate which regulations should be waived for hybrid launch or reentry vehicles that hold FAA airworthiness certificates, and which requirements should be remitted for rockets with a flight termination system, an explosive charge designed to destroy a launch vehicle if it veers off its pre-approved course after liftoff. These are similar to the topics the Biden-era FAA was looking at last year.

The new Trump administration policy also seeks to limit the authority of state officials in enforcing their own environmental rules related to the construction or operation of spaceports.

This is especially relevant after the California Coastal Commission rejected a proposal by SpaceX to double its launch cadence at Vandenberg Space Force Base, a spaceport located roughly 140 miles (225 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles. The Space Force, which owns Vandenberg and is one of SpaceX’s primary customers, backs SpaceX’s push for more launches.

Finally, the order gives the Department of Commerce responsibility for authorizing “novel space activities” such as in-space assembly and manufacturing, asteroid and planetary mining, and missions to remove space debris from orbit.

This story was updated at 12: 30 am EDT on August 14 with statements from the Center for Biological Diversity and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

Trump orders cull of regulations governing commercial rocket launches Read More »

Space Force officials take secrecy to new heights ahead of key rocket launch

cape canaveral space force station, GPS, launch, military space, navigation, Science, Space, united launch alliance, US Space Force, vulcan / Kris Guyer / August 13, 2025

The Vulcan rocket checks off several important boxes for the Space Force. First, it relies entirely on US-made rocket engines. The Atlas V rocket it is replacing uses Russian-built main engines, and given the chilled relations between the two powers, US officials have long desired to stop using Russian engines to power the Pentagon’s satellites into orbit. Second, ULA says the Vulcan rocket will eventually provide a heavy-lift launch capability at a lower cost than the company’s now-retired Delta IV Heavy rocket.

Third, Vulcan provides the Space Force with an alternative to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, which have been the only rockets in their class available to the military since the last national security mission was launched on an Atlas V rocket one year ago.

Col. Jim Horne, mission director for the USSF-106 launch, said this flight marks a “pretty historic point in our program’s history. We officially end our reliance on Russian-made main engines with this launch, and we continue to maintain our assured access to space with at least two independent rocket service companies that we can leverage to get our capabilities on orbit.”

What’s onboard?

The Space Force has only acknowledged one of the satellites aboard the USSF-106 mission, but there are more payloads cocooned inside the Vulcan rocket’s fairing.

The $250 million mission that officials are willing to talk about is named Navigation Technology Satellite-3, or NTS-3. This experimental spacecraft will test new satellite navigation technologies that may eventually find their way on next-generation GPS satellites. A key focus for engineers who designed and will operate the NTS-3 satellite is to look at ways of overcoming GPS jamming and spoofing, which can degrade satellite navigation signals used by military forces, commercial airliners, and civilian drivers.

“We’re going to be doing, we anticipate, over 100 different experiments,” said Joanna Hinks, senior research aerospace engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s space vehicles directorate, which manages the NTS-3 mission. “Some of the major areas we’re looking at—we have an electronically steerable phased array antenna so that we can deliver higher power to get through interference to the location that it’s needed.”

Arlen Biersgreen, then-program manager for the NTS-3 satellite mission at the Air Force Research Laboratory, presents a one-third scale model of the NTS-3 spacecraft to an audience in 2022. Credit: US Air Force/Andrea Rael

GPS jamming is especially a problem in and near war zones. Investigators probing the crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 last December determined GPS jamming, likely by Russian military forces attempting to counter a Ukrainian drone strike, interfered with the aircraft’s navigation as it approached its destination in the Russian republic of Chechnya. Azerbaijani government officials blamed a Russian surface-to-air missile for damaging the aircraft, ultimately leading to a crash in nearby Kazakhstan that killed 38 people.

“We have a number of different advanced signals that we’ve designed,” Hinks said. “One of those is the Chimera anti-spoofing signal… to protect civil users from spoofing that’s affecting so many aircraft worldwide today, as well as ships.”

The NTS-3 spacecraft, developed by L3Harris and Northrop Grumman, only takes up a fraction of the Vulcan rocket’s capacity. The satellite weighs less than 3,000 pounds (about 1,250 kilograms), about a quarter of what this version of the Vulcan rocket can deliver to geosynchronous orbit.

Space Force officials take secrecy to new heights ahead of key rocket launch Read More »