Enlarge/ Illustration of the SpaceX Dragon XL as it is deployed from the Falcon Heavy’s second stage in high Earth orbit on its way to the Gateway in lunar orbit.
SpaceX
NASA has awarded an $843 million contract to SpaceX to develop a “US Deorbit Vehicle.” This spacecraft will dock to the International Space Station in 2029 and then ensure the large facility makes a controlled reentry through Earth’s atmosphere before splashing into the ocean in 2030.
“Selecting a US Deorbit Vehicle for the International Space Station will help NASA and its international partners ensure a safe and responsible transition in low Earth orbit at the end of station operations,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for Space Operations, in a statement. “This decision also supports NASA’s plans for future commercial destinations and allows for the continued use of space near Earth.”
NASA has a couple of reasons for bringing the space station’s life to a close in 2030. Foremost among these is that the station is aging. Parts of it are now a quarter of a century old. There are cracks on the Russian segment of the space station that are spreading. Although the station could likely be maintained beyond 2030, it would require increasing amounts of crew time to keep flying the station safely.
Additionally, NASA is seeking to foster a commercial economy in low-Earth orbit. To that end, it is working with several private companies to develop commercial space stations that would be able to house NASA astronauts, as well as those from other countries and private citizens, by or before 2030. By setting an end date for the station’s lifetime and sticking with it, NASA can help those private companies raise money from investors.
Do we have to sink the station?
The station, the largest object humans have ever constructed in space, is too large to allow it to make an uncontrolled return to Earth. It has a mass of 450 metric tons and is about the size of an American football field. The threat to human life and property is too great. Hence the need for a deorbit vehicle.
The space agency considered alternatives to splashing the station down into a remote area of an ocean. One option involved moving the station into a stable parking orbit at 40,000 km above Earth, above geostationary orbit. However, the agency said this would require 3,900 m/s of delta-V, compared to the approximately 47 m/s of delta-V needed to deorbit the station. In terms of propellant, NASA estimated moving to a higher orbit would require 900 metric tons, or the equivalent of 150 to 250 cargo supply vehicles.
NASA also considered partially disassembling the station before its reentry but found this would be much more complex and risky than a controlled deorbit that kept the complex intact.
The NASA announcement did not specify what vehicle SpaceX would use to perform the deorbit burn, but we can draw some clues from the public documents for the contract procurement. For example, NASA will select a rocket for the mission at a later date, but probably no later than 2026. This would support a launch date in 2029, to have the deorbit vehicle docked to the station one year before the planned reentry.
Enlarge/ The first stage of Ariane 6 rocket Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou in the French overseas department of Guiana, on March 26, 2024.
LUDOVIC MARIN/AFP via Getty Images
There was a panel discussion at a space conference in Singapore 11 years ago that has since become legendary in certain corners of the space industry for what it reveals about European attitudes toward upstart SpaceX.
The panel included representatives from a handful of launch enterprises, including Europe-based Arianespace, and the US launch company SpaceX. At one point during the discussion, the host asked the Arianespace representative—its chief of sales in Southeast Asia, Richard Bowles—how the institutional European company would respond to SpaceX’s promise of lower launch costs and reuse with the Falcon 9 rocket.
“What I’m discovering in the market is that SpaceX primarily seems to be selling a dream, which is good. We should all dream,” Bowles replied. “I think a $5 million launch or a $15 million launch is a bit of a dream. Personally, I think reusability is a dream. How am I going to respond to a dream? My answer to respond to a dream is, first of all, you don’t wake people up.”
To be fair to Bowles, at the time of his remarks, SpaceX had only launched the Falcon 9 five times by the middle of 2013. But his condescension was nevertheless something to behold.
Later in the discussion, Bowles added that he did not believe launching 100 times a year, something that SpaceX was starting to talk about, was “realistic.” Then, in a moment of high paternalism, he turned to the SpaceX official on the panel and said, “You shouldn’t present things that are not realistic.”
In response, Barry Matsumori, a senior vice president at SpaceX, calmly said he would let his company’s response come through its actions.
Actions do speak louder than words
Eleven years later, of course, SpaceX is launching more than 100 times a year. The company’s internal price for launching a Falcon 9 is significantly less than $20 million. And all of this is possible through the reuse of the rocket’s first stage and payload fairings, each of which have now proven capable of flying 20 or more times.
One might think that, in the decade since, European launch officials would have learned their lesson. After all, last year, the continent had to resort to launching its valuable Euclid Space Telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket. This year, because the new European Ariane 6 rocket was not yet ready after myriad delays, multiple Galileo satellites have been launched and will be launched on the Falcon 9 rocket.
Some officials have taken note. In a candid commentary last year, European Space Agency chief Josef Aschbacher acknowledged that the continent faced an “acute” launcher crisis amid the Ariane 6 delays and the rise of SpaceX as a launch competitor. “SpaceX has undeniably changed the launcher market paradigm as we know it,” Aschbacher wrote. “With the dependable reliability of Falcon 9 and the captivating prospects of Starship, SpaceX continues to totally redefine the world’s access to space, pushing the boundaries of possibility as they go along.”
But not everyone got the message, it seems.
Next month, the Ariane 6 rocket should finally make its debut. It will probably be successful. Europe has excellent technical capabilities in regard to launch. But from day one, the Ariane 6 launch vehicle will cost significantly more than the Falcon 9 rocket, which has similar capabilities, and offer no provision for reuse. Certainly, it will meet Europe’s institutional needs. But it likely will not shake up the market, nor realistically compete with a fully reusable Falcon 9.
Who really needs to be woken up?
And what about Starship? If and when SpaceX can deliver it to the market, the next-generation rocket will offer a fully reusable booster with five times the lift capacity of the Ariane 6 rocket for half its cost or less. How can Europe hope to compete with that? The European Space Agency’s director of space transportation, Toni Tolker-Nielsen—who works for Aschbacher, it should be noted—said he’s not concerned.
“Honestly, I don’t think Starship will be a game-changer or a real competitor,” he said in an interview with Space News. “This huge launcher is designed to fly people to the Moon and Mars. Ariane 6 is perfect for the job if you need to launch a four- or five-ton satellite. Starship will not eradicate Ariane 6 at all.”
In one sense, Tolker-Nielsen is correct. Starship will not change how Europe gets its small and medium-sized satellites into space. Made and launched in Europe, the Ariane 6 rocket will be a workhorse for the continent. Indeed, some European officials are going so far as to press for legislation mandating that European satellites launch on European rockets.
But to say Starship will not be a game-changer represents the same head-in-the-sand attitude displayed by Bowles a decade ago with his jokes about not waking the deluded dreamers up. In hindsight, it’s clear that the dreamers were not SpaceX or its customers. Rather, they were European officials who had lulled themselves into thinking their dominance in commercial launch would persist without innovation.
While they slumbered, these officials ignored the rise of reusability. They decided the Ariane 6 rocket should look like its expendable predecessors, with solid rocket boosters. Meanwhile, following the rise of the Falcon 9, nearly all new rocket projects have incorporated a significant reusability component. It’s no longer just SpaceX founder Elon Musk saying companies need to pursue reuse or perish. Almost everyone is.
Enlarge/ NASA astronaut Christina Koch (right) poses for a portrait with fellow Expedition 61 Flight Engineer Jessica Meir, who is inside a US spacesuit for a fit check.
NASA
Almost exactly two years ago, as it prepared for the next generation of human spaceflight, NASA chose a pair of private companies to design and develop new spacesuits. These were to be new spacesuits that would allow astronauts to both perform spacewalks outside the International Space Station as well as walk on the Moon as part of the Artemis program.
Now, that plan appears to be in trouble, with one of the spacesuit providers—Collins Aerospace—expected to back out, Ars has learned. It’s a blow for NASA, because the space agency really needs modern spacesuits.
NASA’s Apollo-era suits have long been retired. The current suits used for spacewalks in low-Earth orbit are four decades old. “These new capabilities will allow us to continue on the ISS and allows us to do the Artemis program and continue on to Mars,” said the director of Johnson Space Center, Vanessa Wyche, during a celebratory news conference in Houston two years ago.
The two winning teams were led by Collins Aerospace and Axiom Space, respectively. They were eligible for task orders worth up to $3.5 billion—in essence NASA would rent the use of these suits for a couple of decades. Since then, NASA has designated Axiom to work primarily on a suit for the Moon and the Artemis Program, and Collins with developing a suit for operations in-orbit, such as space station servicing.
Collins exits
This week, however, Collins said it will likely end its participation in the Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services, or xEVAS, contract. On Tuesday morning Chris Ayers, general manager at Collins Aerospace, met with employees to tell them about the company’s exit from the program. A NASA source confirmed decision.
“Unfortunately Collins has been significantly behind schedule,” a person familiar with the situation told Ars. “Collins has admitted they have drastically underperformed and have overspent on their xEVAS work, culminating in a request to be taken off the contract or renegotiate the scope and their budget.”
NASA and Collins Aerospace acknowledged a request for comment sent by Ars early on Tuesday morning but as of the afternoon did not provide substantive replies to questions about this action, nor steps forward.
The agency has been experiencing periodic problems with the maintenance of the suits built decades ago, known as the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, which made its debut in the 1980s. NASA has acknowledged the suit has exceeded its planned design lifetime. Just this Monday the agency had to halt a spacewalk after the airlock had been de-pressurized and hatch opened due to a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of Tracy Dyson’s spacesuit.
As a result of this problem, NASA will likely only be able to conduct a single spacewalk this summer, after initially planning three, to complete work outside the International Space Station.
Increased pressure on Axiom
During the bidding process for the commercial spacesuit program, which unfolded in 2021 and 2022, just two bidders ultimately emerged. A unit of Raytheon Technologies, Collins was the bidder with the most experience in spacesuits, having designed the original Apollo suits, and it partnered with experienced providers ILC Dover and Oceaneering. Axiom is a newer company that, until the spacesuit competition, was largely focused on developing a private space station.
As they evaluated bids, NASA officials raised some concerns about Collins’ approach, noting that the proposal relied on “rapid acceleration of technology maturation and resolution of key technical trade studies to achieve their proposed schedule.” However, in its source selection statement, the agency concluded that it had a “high level of confidence” that Collins would be able to deliver on its spacesuits.
It is not clear what NASA will do now. One person suggested that NASA would not seek to immediately re-compete the xEVAS because it could signal to private investors that Axiom is not capable of delivering on its spacesuit contracts. (Like a lot of other companies in this capital-constrained era, Axiom Space, according to sources, has been struggling to raise a steady stream of private investment.)
Another source, however, suggested that NASA likely would seek to bring a new partner on board to compete with Axiom. The space agency did something similar in 2007 with its Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program to provide cargo to the space station. When Rocketplane Kistler could not deliver on its commitments, the agency recompeted the contract and ultimately selected Orbital Sciences. If NASA were to re-open competition, one of the bidders could be SpaceX, which has already designed a basic spacesuit to support the private Polaris Dawn mission.
Since the awards two years ago, Axiom has been making comparatively better technical progress on its spacesuit, which is based on the Extravehicular Mobility Unit design that NASA has used for decades. However, the Houston-based company has yet to complete the critical design review process, which can be demanding. Axiom is also battling a difficult supply chain environment—which is especially problematic given that NASA has not built new suits for such a long time.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner capsule lifts off aboard United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket.
In an update released late Friday evening, NASA said it was “adjusting” the date of the Starliner spacecraft’s return to Earth from June 26 to an unspecified time in July.
The announcement followed two days of long meetings to review the readiness of the spacecraft, developed by Boeing, to fly NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to Earth. According to sources, these meetings included high-level participation from senior leaders at the agency, including Associate Administrator Jim Free.
This “Crew Flight Test,” which launched on June 5 atop an Atlas V rocket, was originally due to undock and return to Earth on June 14. However, as engineers from NASA and Boeing studied data from the vehicle’s problematic flight to the International Space Station, they have waved off several return opportunities.
On Friday night they did so again, citing the need to spend more time reviewing data.
“Taking our time”
“We are taking our time and following our standard mission management team process,” said Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, in the NASA update. “We are letting the data drive our decision making relative to managing the small helium system leaks and thruster performance we observed during rendezvous and docking.”
Just a few days ago, on Tuesday, officials from NASA and Boeing set a return date to Earth for June 26. But that was before a series of meetings on Thursday and Friday during which mission managers were to review findings about two significant issues with the Starliner spacecraft: five separate leaks in the helium system that pressurizes Starliner’s propulsion system and the failure of five of the vehicle’s 28 reaction-control system thrusters as Starliner approached the station.
The NASA update did not provide any information about deliberations during these meetings, but it is clear that the agency’s leaders were not able to get comfortable with all contingencies that Wilmore and Williams might encounter during a return flight to Earth, including safely undocking from the space station, maneuvering away, performing a de-orbit burn, separating the crew capsule from the service module, and then flying through the planet’s atmosphere before landing under parachutes in a New Mexico desert.
Spacecraft has a 45-day limit
Now, the NASA and Boeing engineering teams will take some more time. Sources said NASA considered June 30 as a possible return date, but the agency is also keen to perform a pair of spacewalks outside the station. These spacewalks, presently planned for June 24 and July 2, will now go ahead. Starliner will make its return to Earth sometime afterward, likely no earlier than the July 4 holiday.
“We are strategically using the extra time to clear a path for some critical station activities while completing readiness for Butch and Suni’s return on Starliner and gaining valuable insight into the system upgrades we will want to make for post-certification missions,” Stich said.
In some sense, it is helpful for NASA and Boeing to have Starliner docked to the space station for a longer period of time. They can gather more data about the performance of the vehicle on long-duration missions—eventually Starliner will fly operational missions that will enable astronauts to stay on orbit for six months at a time.
However, this vehicle is only rated for a 45-day stay at the space station, and that clock began ticking on June 6. Moreover, it is not optimal that NASA feels the need to continue delaying the vehicle to get comfortable with its performance on the return journey to Earth. During a pair of news conferences since Starliner docked to the station, officials have downplayed the overall seriousness of these issues—repeatedly saying Starliner is cleared to come home “in case of an emergency.” But they have yet to fully explain why they are not yet comfortable with releasing Starliner to fly back to Earth under normal circumstances.
The piece of debris that fell through Alejandro Otero’s roof (right) came from a support bracket jettisoned from the International Space Station.
The owner of a home in southwestern Florida has formally submitted a claim to NASA for damages caused by a chunk of space debris that fell through his roof in March.
The legal case is unprecedented—no one has evidently made such a claim against NASA before. How the space agency responds will set a precedent, and that may be important in a world where there is ever more activity in orbit, with space debris and vehicles increasingly making uncontrolled reentries through Earth’s atmosphere.
Alejandro Otero, owner of the Naples, Florida, home struck by the debris, was not home when part of a battery pack from the International Space Station crashed through his home on March 8. His son Daniel, 19, was home but escaped injury. NASA has confirmed the 1.6-pound object, made of the metal alloy Inconel, was part of a battery pack jettisoned from the space station in 2021.
An attorney for the Otero family, Mica Nguyen Worthy, told Ars that she has asked NASA for “in excess of $80,000” for non-insured property damage loss, business interruption damages, emotional and mental anguish damages, and the costs for assistance from third parties.
“We intentionally kept it very reasonable because we did not want it to appear to NASA that my clients are seeking a windfall,” Worthy said.
The family has not filed a lawsuit against NASA, at least not yet. Worthy said she has been having productive conversations with NASA legal representatives. She said the Otero family wants to be made whole for their losses, but also to establish a precedent for future victims. “This is truly the first legal claim that is being submitted for recovery for damages related to space debris,” Worthy said. “How NASA responds will, in my view, be foundational for how future claims are handled. This is really changing the legal landscape.”
Who, exactly, is liable for space debris?
If space debris from another country—say, a Chinese or Russian rocket upper stage—were to strike a family in the United States, the victims would be entitled to compensation under the Space Liability Convention agreed to by space powers half a century ago. Under this treaty, a launching state is “absolutely” liable to pay compensation for damage caused by its space objects on the surface of the Earth or to aircraft, and liable for damage due to its faults in space. In an international situation, NASA or some other US government agency would negotiate on the victim’s behalf for compensation.
However, in this case the debris came from the International Space Station: an old battery pack that NASA was responsible for. NASA completed a multi-year upgrade of the space station’s power system in 2020 by installing a final set of new lithium-ion batteries to replace aging nickel-hydrogen batteries that were reaching end-of-life. During a spacewalk, this battery pack was mounted on a cargo pallet launched by Japan.
Officials originally planned to place pallets of the old batteries inside a series of Japanese supply freighters for controlled, destructive reentries over the ocean. But due to a series of delays, the final cargo pallet of old batteries missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries to make an unguided reentry. NASA incorrectly believed the batteries would completely burn up during the return through the atmosphere.
Enlarge/ This cylindrical object, a few inches in size, fell through the roof of Alejandro Otero’s home in Florida in March.
Because this case falls outside the Space Liability Convention, there is no mechanism for a US citizen to seek claims from the US government for damage from space debris. So the Otero family is making a first-ever claim under the Federal Torts Claim Act for falling space debris. This torts act allows someone to sue the US government if there has been negligence. In this case, the negligence could be that NASA miscalculated about the survival of enough debris to damage property on Earth.
NASA provided a form to the Otero family to submit a claim, which Worthy said they did at the end of May. NASA now has six months to review the claim. The space agency has several options. Legally, it could recompense the Otero family up to $25,000 for each of its claims based on the Federal Torts Claim Act (see legal code). If the agency seeks to pay full restitution, it would require approval from the US attorney general. Finally, NASA could refuse the claims or make an unacceptable settlement offer—in which case the Otero family could file a federal lawsuit in Florida.
Ars has sought comment from NASA about the claims made and will update this story when we receive one.
Enlarge/ An up-close view of LEAP 71’s autonomously designed keralox rocket engine.
LEAP 71
Welcome to Edition 6.49 of the Rocket Report! I want to open this week’s report with a hearty congratulations to Rocket Lab for the company’s 50th launch since Electron’s debut in 2017. This is a fine achievement for a company founded in New Zealand, a country with virtually no space program.
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.
Electron celebrates its 50th. On Thursday, Rocket Lab launched its 50th Electron mission, “No Time Toulouse.” The mission successfully deployed five Internet-of-Things satellites for the French company Kinéis. This is a nice milestone for the company founded by Peter Beck in New Zealand. With this mission, Rocket Lab becomes the fastest company to go from one launch to 50 launches of a privately developed rocket, surpassing even SpaceX. The company’s first Electron mission came about seven years ago.
A rare feat… “The launch industry is not an easy or forgiving one. Making it to your first launch is not a given, so reaching 50 Electron launches is an enormous achievement and a rare feat in the history of spaceflight,” Beck said. Ars will have more about this feat, the past, and the future of Rocket Lab in a forthcoming article based on a recent interview with Beck.
Isar raises $70 million more. Germany-based small launch vehicle developer Isar Aerospace has raised more than 65 million euros ($70 million) in an extension of an earlier funding round, Space News reports. The company said Thursday that its “extended” Series C round was now valued at 220 million euros, bringing its total fundraising to date to 400 million euros. This is more than any other launch startup in Europe. It’s an impressive total.
Lighting up the spectrum... Among the participants in the latest round is the NATO Innovation Fund, a new venture fund backed by 24 of NATO’s 32 member states. The company said the additional funding will go toward efforts to scale up production of its Spectrum small launch vehicle. Isar is advancing toward stage testing of the Spectrum rocket, which is intended to carry 1 metric ton to low-Earth orbit. The vehicle’s debut launch may occur next year. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)
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Rocket Lab inks big Electron contract. The launch company said this week it has signed the largest Electron deal in its history with the Japanese Earth observation company Synspective. The Japanese firm agreed to purchase an additional 10 launches on Electron. Rocket Lab has been the sole launch provider for Synspective since 2020, successfully launching four missions for the company to date. (This announcement explains why, when I interviewed Rocket Lab chief Peter Beck this week, he was in Japan.)
A positive experience on Electron… In addition to the 10 new dedicated launches signed this week, another two launches for Synspective have already been booked and are scheduled to fly this year from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. The launches in the new deal will take place from 2025 to 2027. “This agreement gives us a solid foundation and confidence, as Rocket Lab is an innovative launch provider,” said Motoyuki Arai, the founder and chief executive of Synspective. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Matthew Brown to be taken down? The US Securities and Exchange Commission has sued a self-proclaimed venture capitalist, Matthew Brown, for making a “bogus offer” to acquire Virgin Orbit in the weeks before the launch company went bankrupt. According to the lawsuit filed Monday and reported by Bloomberg, Matthew Brown “made false and misleading statements and omissions about his investment experience and funds available to make such an offer.” The SEC asserted that Brown sent Virgin Orbit a fabricated screenshot of his company’s bank account, claiming it held $182 million when, in reality, it had a balance of less than $1.
Brown intends to fight the allegations… “The SEC’s complaint is filled with egregious errors, fabrications, and biased allegations that undeniably favor the culprit, Virgin Orbit’s Management,” a statement from a representative for Brown and his companies said. Brown’s intervention came in the final days before Virgin Orbit declared bankruptcy, as the small launch company sought to find a buyer to preserve its LauncherOne rocket. Dan Hart, the former chief executive officer of Virgin Orbit, told the publication that the Brown bid was “an unneeded distraction” when the leadership team was “trying to find a path forward for the company.” Ultimately, no such path could be found.
Autonomously designed engine is fired up. A Dubai-based company, LEAP 71, says it has developed a “Large Computational Engineering Model” that can autonomously design rocket engines. To that end, LEAP 71 co-founder Lin Kayser said the company’s engineering model autonomously designed a small rocket engine in two weeks. Then the kerosene-liquid oxygen engine was 3D printed in copper and test fired. With 1,124 pounds of thrust, the engine generated 20,000 horsepower and completed all of its tests, including a long-duration burn, the company said.
Putting the rapid in rapid iteration… “Each new design iteration takes only about 15 minutes and is ready to print again,” Kayser told Ars in an email. “The idea is to reduce engineering time and maximize testing iterations. Most rocket startups are still stuck in the long process of reengineering when they get their test results; we hope to eliminate that.” Notably, the company also claims this is the first liquid-fueled rocket engine to be developed in the United Arab Emirates.
Last week, during our inaugural Ars Live event, Quilty Space director of research Caleb Henry joined Ars space editor Eric Berger for a discussion of SpaceX’s Starlink and other satellite internet systems. We discussed Starlink’s rapid road to profitability—it took just five years from the first launch of operational satellites—and the future of the technology.
One of the keys to Starlink’s success is its vertical integration as a core business at SpaceX, which operates the world’s only reusable rocket, the Falcon 9. This has allowed the company not just to launch a constellation of 6,000 satellites—but to do so at relatively low cost.
“At one point, SpaceX had publicly said that it was $28 million,” Henry said of the company’s target for a Falcon 9 launch cost. “We believe today that they are below $20 million per launch and actually lower than that… I would put it in the mid teens for how much it costs them internally. And that’s going down as they increase the reuse of the vehicle. Recently, they’ve launched their 20th, maybe 21st, use of a first-stage rocket. And as they can amortize the cost of the booster over a greater number of missions, that only helps them with their business case.”
SpaceX was founded as a launch company in 2002, first with the Falcon 1 and then the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. But it is clear today that a significant portion of the company’s revenue, if not a majority, comes from its Starlink satellite internet business. So is it still primarily a rocket company?
“I think today they’re a satellite communications company,” Henry said of SpaceX. “I think it’s interesting that Stéphane Israël from Arianespace—in the early days, like 2015, 2016 when Starlink was just announced—would try to court customers and say, ‘Do you want to fund your competitor?’ And no one really took him seriously. Now people are taking him very seriously. [SpaceX is] the largest satellite operator in the world. They have literally more than doubled the number of consumer subscribers for satellite internet in the world.. This is a humongous, nearly unrivaled impact that they’ve had on the industry.”
Please find our entire discussion in the video above, complete with a transcript.
Enlarge/ Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft approaches the International Space Station on Thursday.
NASA TV
NASA and Boeing will take an additional four days to review all available data about the performance of the Starliner spacecraft before clearing the vehicle to return to Earth, officials said Tuesday.
Based on the new schedule, which remains pending ahead of final review meetings later this week, Starliner would undock at 10: 10 pm ET on Tuesday, June 25, from the International Space Station (02: 10 UTC on June 26). This would set up a landing at 4: 51 ET on June 26 (08: 51 UTC) at the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico.
During a news conference on Tuesday, the program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, Steve Stich, said the four-day delay in the spacecraft’s return would “give our team a little bit more time to look at the data, do some analysis, and make sure we’re really ready to come home.”
Working two major issues
NASA is still trying to clear two major hardware issues that occurred during the spacecraft’s flight to the International Space Station nearly two weeks ago: five separate leaks in the helium system that pressurizes Starliner’s propulsion system and the failure of five of the vehicle’s 28 reaction-control system thrusters as Starliner approached the station.
Since then, engineers from NASA and Boeing have been studying these two problems. They took an important step toward better understanding both on Saturday, June 15, when Starliner was powered up for a thruster test.
During this test, engineers found that helium leak rates inside Starliner’s Service Module were lower than the last time the vehicle was powered on. Although the precise cause of the leak is not fully understood—it is possibly due to a seal in the flange between the thruster and manifold—the lower leak rate gave engineers confidence they could manage the loss of helium. Even before this decrease in the leak, Starliner had large reserves of helium, officials said.
The test of the reaction control system thrusters also went well, Stich said. Four of the five thrusters operated normally, and they are expected to be available for the undocking of Starliner later this month. These thrusters, which are fairly low-powered, are primarily used for small maneuvers. They will also be needed for the de-orbit burn that will set Starliner on its return path to Earth. Starliner can perform this burn without a full complement of thrusters, but Stich did not say how many could be safely lost.
First operational mission when?
NASA is being cautious about Starliner because this is the first crewed flight of the vehicle, which NASA funded to provide transportation services to the International Space Station. The goal is to provide regular flights of four astronauts to the space station for six-month rotations. This initial test flight, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, is intended to provide data to certify the vehicle for operational missions.
The first opportunity for Boeing to fly one of these operational missions is early 2025, likely in February or March. NASA will soon need to decide whether to give this slot to Starliner or SpaceX’s Dragon vehicle for the Crew-10 mission—NASA’s 10th operational flight on Dragon.
Given the technical problems that cropped up on the current test flight, it seems likely that NASA will push Starliner’s operational mission to the next available slot, likely in August or September of 2025. However, Stich said Tuesday no decision has been made and that NASA needs to study the results of this test flight.
“We haven’t looked too much ahead to Starliner-1,” he said. “We’ve got to go address the helium leaks. We’re not gonna go fly another mission like this with the helium leaks, and we’ve got to go understand what the rendezvous profile is doing that’s causing the thrusters to have low thrust, and then be deselected by the flight control team.”
Although Starliner’s first crewed flight has challenged NASA and Boeing, Stich said the process has not been frustrating. “I would not characterize it as frustration,” he said Tuesday. “I would characterize it as learning.”
Enlarge/ Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket on the launch pad for testing earlier this year.
After years of lobbying, protests, and bidding, Jeff Bezos’s space company is now a military launch contractor.
The US Space Force announced Thursday that Blue Origin will compete with United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for at least 30 military launch contracts over the next five years. These launch contracts have a combined value of up to $5.6 billion.
This is the first of two major contract decisions the Space Force will make this year as the military seeks to foster more competition among its roster of launch providers and reduce its reliance on just one or two companies.
For more than a decade following its formation from the merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin rocket programs, ULA was the sole company certified to launch the military’s most critical satellites. This changed in 2018, when SpaceX started launching national security satellites for the military. In 2020, despite protests from Blue Origin seeking eligibility, the Pentagon selected ULA and SpaceX to continue sharing launch duties.
The National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program is in charge of selecting contractors to deliver military surveillance, navigation, and communications satellites into orbit.
Over the next five years, the Space Force wants to tap into new launch capabilities from emerging space companies. The procurement approach for this new round of contracts, known as NSSL Phase 3, is different from the way the military previously bought launch services. Instead of grouping all national security launches into one monolithic contract, the Space Force is dividing them into two classifications: Lane 1 and Lane 2.
The Space Force’s contract announced Thursday was for Lane 1, which is for less demanding missions to low-Earth orbit. These missions include smaller tech demos, experiments, and launches for the military’s new constellation of missile-tracking and data-relay satellites, an effort that will eventually include hundreds or thousands of spacecraft managed by the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency.
This fall, the Space Force will award up to three contracts for Lane 2, which covers the government’s most sensitive national security satellites, which require “complex security and integration requirements.” These are often large, heavy spacecraft weighing many tons and sometimes needing to go to orbits thousands of miles from Earth. The Space Force will require Lane 2 contractors to go through a more extensive certification process than is required in Lane 1.
“Today marks the beginning of this innovative, dual-lane approach to launch service acquisition, whereby Lane 1 serves our commercial-like missions that can accept more risk and Lane 2 provides our traditional, full mission assurance for the most stressing heavy-lift launches of our most risk-averse missions,” said Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration.
Meeting the criteria
The Space Force received seven bids for Lane 1, but only three companies met the criteria to join the military’s roster of launch providers. The basic requirement to win a Lane 1 contract was for a company to show its rocket can place at least 15,000 pounds of payload mass into low-Earth orbit, either on a single flight or over a series of flights within a 90-day period.
The bidders also had to substantiate their plan to launch the rocket they proposed to use for Lane 1 missions by December 15 of this year. A spokesperson for Space Systems Command said SpaceX proposed using their Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, and ULA offered its Vulcan rocket. Those launchers are already flying. Blue Origin proposed its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, slated for an inaugural test flight no earlier than September.
“As we anticipated, the pool of awardees is small this year because many companies are still maturing their launch capabilities,” said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for the Space Force’s assured access to space division. “Our strategy accounted for this by allowing on-ramp opportunities every year, and we expect increasing competition and diversity as new providers and systems complete development.”
Enlarge/ A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Trevor Mahlmann/Ars Technica
The Space Force plans to open up the first on-ramp opportunity for Lane 1 as soon as the end of this year. Companies with medium-lift rockets in earlier stages of development, such as Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Firefly Aerospace, and Stoke Space, will have the chance to join ULA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin in the Lane 1 pool at that time. The structure of the NSSL Phase 3 contracts allow the Pentagon to take advantage of emerging launch capabilities as soon as they become available, according to Calvelli.
In a statement, Panzenhagen said having additional launch providers will increase the Space Force’s “resiliency” in a time of increasing competition between the US, Russia, and China in orbit. “Launching more risk-tolerant satellites on potentially less mature launch systems using tailored independent government mission assurance could yield substantial operational responsiveness, innovation, and savings,” Panzenhagen said.
More competition, theoretically, will also deliver lower launch prices to the Space Force. SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets are partially reusable, while ULA eventually plans to recover and reuse Vulcan main engines.
Over the next five years, Space Systems Command will dole out fixed-price “task orders” to ULA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin for groups of Lane 1 missions. The first batch of missions up for awards in Lane 1 include seven launches for the Space Development Agency’s missile tracking mega-constellation, plus a task order for the National Reconnaissance Office, the government’s spy satellite agency. However, military officials require a rocket to have completed at least one successful orbital launch to win a Lane 1 task order, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn doesn’t yet satisfy this requirement.
The Space Force will pay Blue Origin $5 million for an “initial capabilities assessment” for Lane 1. SpaceX and ULA, the military’s incumbent launch contractors, will each receive $1.5 million for similar assessments.
ULA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin are also the top contenders to win Lane 2 contracts later this year. In order to compete in Lane 2, a launch provider must show it has a plan for its rockets to meet the Space Force’s stringent certification requirements by October 1, 2026. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are already certified, and ULA’s Vulcan is on a path to achieve this milestone by the end of this year, pending a successful second test flight in the next few months. A successful debut of New Glenn by the end of this year would put the October 2026 deadline within reach of Blue Origin.
Enlarge/ The payload fairing for the first test flight of Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket has been positioned around the small batch of satellites that will ride it into orbit.
Welcome to Edition 6.48 of the Rocket Report! Fresh off last week’s dramatic test flight of SpaceX’s Starship, teams in Texas are wasting no time gearing up for the next launch. Ground crews are replacing the entire heat shield on the next Starship spacecraft to overcome deficiencies identified on last week’s flight. SpaceX has a whole lot to accomplish with Starship in the next several months if NASA is going to land astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2026.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Virgin Galactic won’t be flying again any time soon. After an impressive but brief flurry of spaceflight activity—seven human spaceflights in a year, even to suborbital space, is unprecedented for a private company—Virgin Galactic will now be grounded again for at least two years, Ars reports. That’s because Colglazier and Virgin Galactic are betting it all on the development of a future “Delta class” of spaceships modeled on VSS Unity, which made its last flight to suborbital space Saturday. Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, now finds itself at a crossroads as it chases profitability, which VSS Unity had no hope of helping it achieve despite two decades of development and billions of dollars spent.
An uncertain future … Now, Virgin Galactic’s already anemic revenue numbers will drop to near zero as the company spends more capital to bring two Delta-class spaceships online. The goal is to start flying them in 2026. These vehicles are designed to be more easily reusable and carry six instead of four passengers. This timeline seems highly ambitious given that, at this point, the company is only developing tooling for the vehicles and won’t begin major parts fabrication until later this year. Virgin Galactic is betting on the Delta-class ships as its stock price has precipitously fallen over the last couple of years. In fact, Virgin Galactic announced a reverse stock split this week in a bid to maintain its listing on the New York Stock Exchange. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Unpacking North Korea’s advancements in rocketry. Late last month, North Korea signaled it has made—or more accurately, is still trying to make—a pretty big leap in rocket technology. The isolated totalitarian state’s official news agency said it tested a new type of satellite launcher on May 27 powered by petroleum fuel and cryogenic liquid oxygen propellant. This is a radical change in North Korea’s rocket program, and it took astute outside observers by surprise. Previous North Korean rockets used hypergolic propellants, typically hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, or solid fuels, which are also well-suited for military ballistic missiles. Kerosene and liquid oxygen, on the other hand, aren’t great propellants for missiles but are good for a pure space launcher.
Who’s helping?… The May 27 launch failed shortly after liftoff, while the unnamed rocket was still in first stage flight over the Yellow Sea. But there is tangible and circumstantial evidence that Russia played a role in the launch. The details are still murky, but North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited a Russian spaceport last September and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who suggested Russian help for the North’s satellite launch program was on the agenda at the summit. South Korean defense officials said Russian experts visited North Korea in the run-up to the May 27 launch. If Russia exported a kerosene-fueled rocket engine, or perhaps an entire booster, to North Korea, it wouldn’t be the first time Russia has shipped launch technology to the Korean Peninsula. Russia provided South Korea’s nascent space launch program with three fully outfitted rocket boosters for test flights in 2009, 2010, and 2023 before the South developed a fully domestic rocket on its own.
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ABL signs deal with a new launch customer. ABL Space Systems, which is still trying to get its light launcher into orbit, has a new customer. Scout Space announced this week it has signed a launch agreement with ABL for the launch of a small spacecraft called “Owlet-01” on the third flight of ABL’s RS1 rocket, Space News reports. Scout Space, which describes itself as focused on space security and comprehensive space domain awareness, develops optical sensors to monitor the space environment. Owlet-01 will fly a telescope designed to detect other objects in space, a capability highly sought by the US military.
Still waiting on Flight 2 … The launch agreement between ABL and Space Scout is contingent on the outcome of the second flight of the RS1 rocket, which ABL has been preparing for the last few months. ABL hasn’t provided any public updates on the status of the second RS1 test flight since announcing in March that pre-flight preparations were underway at Kodiak Island, Alaska. The first RS1 rocket fell back on its launch pad in Alaska a few seconds after lifting off in January 2023. The RS1 is capable of hauling a payload of more than 1.3 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Enlarge/ Illustration of the Apollo lunar lander Eagle over the Moon.
On Friday, a retired software engineer named Martin C. Martin announced that he recently discovered a bug in the original Lunar Lander computer game’s physics code while tinkering with the software. Created by a 17-year-old high school student named Jim Storer in 1969, this primordial game rendered the action only as text status updates on a teletype, but it set the stage for future versions to come.
The legendary game—which Storer developed on a PDP-8 minicomputer in a programming language called FOCAL just months after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their historic moonwalks—allows players to control a lunar module’s descent onto the Moon’s surface. Players must carefully manage their fuel usage to achieve a gentle landing, making critical decisions every ten seconds to burn the right amount of fuel.
In 2009, just short of the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing, I set out to find the author of the original Lunar Lander game, which was then primarily known as a graphical game, thanks to the graphical version from 1974 and a 1979 Atari arcade title. When I discovered that Storer created the oldest known version as a teletype game, I interviewed him and wrote up a history of the game. Storer later released the source code to the original game, written in FOCAL, on his website.
Enlarge/ A scan of printed teletype output from the original Lunar Lander game, provided by Jim Storer.
Jim Storer
Fast forward to 2024, when Martin—an AI expert, game developer, and former postdoctoral associate at MIT—stumbled upon a bug in Storer’s high school code while exploring what he believed was the optimal strategy for landing the module with maximum fuel efficiency—a technique known among Kerbal Space Program enthusiasts as the “suicide burn.” This method involves falling freely to build up speed and then igniting the engines at the last possible moment to slow down just enough to touch down safely. He also tried another approach—a more gentle landing.
“I recently explored the optimal fuel burn schedule to land as gently as possible and with maximum remaining fuel,” Martin wrote on his blog. “Surprisingly, the theoretical best strategy didn’t work. The game falsely thinks the lander doesn’t touch down on the surface when in fact it does. Digging in, I was amazed by the sophisticated physics and numerical computing in the game. Eventually I found a bug: a missing ‘divide by two’ that had seemingly gone unnoticed for nearly 55 years.”
A matter of division
Enlarge/ Diagram of launch escape system on top of the Apollo capsule.
NASA
Despite applying what should have been a textbook landing strategy, Martin found that the game inconsistently reported that the lander had missed the Moon’s surface entirely. Intrigued by the anomaly, Martin dug into the game’s source code and discovered that the landing algorithm was based on highly sophisticated physics for its time, including the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation and a Taylor series expansion.
As mentioned in the quote above, the root of the problem was a simple computational oversight—a missing division by two in the formula used to calculate the lander’s trajectory. This seemingly minor error had big consequences, causing the simulation to underestimate the time until the lander reached its lowest trajectory point and miscalculate the landing.
Despite the bug, Martin was impressed that Storer, then a high school senior, managed to incorporate advanced mathematical concepts into his game, a feat that remains impressive even by today’s standards. Martin reached out to Storer himself, and the Lunar Lander author told Martin that his father was a physicist who helped him derive the equations used in the game simulation.
While people played and enjoyed Storer’s game for years with the bug in place, it goes to show that realism isn’t always the most important part of a compelling interactive experience. And thankfully for Aldrin and Armstrong, the real Apollo lunar landing experience didn’t suffer from the same issue.
You can read more about Martin’s exciting debugging adventure over on his blog.
Enlarge/ In this pool photo distributed by Sputnik agency, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un visit the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur region in 2023. An RD-191 engine is visible in the background.
Vladimir Smirnov/Pool/AFP/Getty Images
Russian President Vladimir Putin will reportedly visit North Korea later this month, and you can bet collaboration on missiles and space programs will be on the agenda.
The bilateral summit in Pyongyang will follow a mysterious North Korean rocket launch on May 27, which ended in a fireball over the Yellow Sea. The fact that this launch fell short of orbit is not unusual—two of the country’s three previous satellite launch attempts failed. But North Korea’s official state news agency dropped some big news in the last paragraph of its report on the May 27 launch.
The Korean Central News Agency called the launch vehicle a “new-type satellite carrier rocket” and attributed the likely cause of the failure to “the reliability of operation of the newly developed liquid oxygen + petroleum engine” on the first stage booster. A small North Korean military spy satellite was destroyed. The fiery demise of the North Korean rocket was captured in a video recorded by the Japanese news broadcaster NHK.
Petroleum almost certainly means kerosene, a refined petroleum fuel used on a range of rockets, including SpaceX’s Falcon 9, United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V, and Russia’s Soyuz and Angara.
“The North Koreans are clearly toying with us,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a nonproliferation expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “They went out of their way to tell us what the propellant was, which is very deliberate because it’s a short statement and they don’t normally do that. They made a point of doing that, so I suspect they want us to be wondering what’s going on.”
Surprise from Sohae
Veteran observers of North Korea’s rocket program anticipated the country’s next satellite launch would use the same Chollima-1 rocket it used on three flights last year. But North Korea’s official statement suggests this was something different, and entirely unexpected, at least by anyone without access to classified information.
Ahead of the launch, North Korea released warning notices outlining the drop zones downrange where sections of the rocket would fall into the sea after lifting off from Sohae Satellite Launching Station on the country’s northwestern coast.
A day before the May 27 launch, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported a “large number of Russian experts” entered North Korea to support the launch effort. A senior South Korean defense official told Yonhap that North Korea staged more rocket engine tests than expected during the run-up to the May 27 flight.
Then, North Korea announced that this wasn’t just another flight of the Chollima-1 rocket but something new. The Chollima 1 used the same mix of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants as North Korea’s ballistic missiles. This combination of toxic propellants has the benefit of simplicity—these liquids are hypergolic, meaning they combust upon contact with one another. No ignition source is needed.
Enlarge/ A television monitor at a train station in South Korea shows an image of the launch of North Korea’s Chollima-1 rocket last year.
Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Kerosene and liquid oxygen are nontoxic and more fuel-efficient. But liquid oxygen has to be kept at super-cold temperatures, requiring special handling and insulation to prevent boil-off as it is loaded into the rocket.
