Space

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Lunar Gateway’s skeleton is complete—its next stop may be Trump’s chopping block

Science, Space / /

Officials blame changing requirements for much of the delays and rising costs. NASA managers dramatically changed their plans for the Gateway program in 2020, when they decided to launch the PPE and HALO on the same rocket, prompting major changes to their designs.

Jared Isaacman, Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, declined to commit to the Gateway program during a confirmation hearing before the Senate Commerce Committee on April 9. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the committee’s chairman, pressed Isaacman on the Lunar Gateway. Cruz is one of the Gateway program’s biggest backers in Congress since it is managed by Johnson Space Center in Texas. If it goes ahead, Gateway would guarantee numerous jobs at NASA’s mission control in Houston throughout its 15-year lifetime.

“That’s an area that if I’m confirmed, I would love to roll up my sleeves and further understand what’s working right?” Isaacman replied to Cruz. “What are the opportunities the Gateway presents to us? And where are some of the challenges, because I think the Gateway is a component of many programs that are over budget and behind schedule.”

The pressure shell for the Habitation and Logistics Outpost (HALO) module arrived in Gilbert, Arizona, last week for internal outfitting. Credit: NASA/Josh Valcarcel

Checking in with Gateway

Nevertheless, the Gateway program achieved a milestone one week before Isaacman’s confirmation hearing. The metallic pressure shell for the HALO module was shipped from its factory in Italy to Arizona. The HALO module is only partially complete, and it lacks life support systems and other hardware it needs to operate in space.

Over the next couple of years, Northrop Grumman will outfit the habitat with those components and connect it with the Power and Propulsion Element under construction at Maxar Technologies in Silicon Valley. This stage of spacecraft assembly, along with prelaunch testing, often uncovers problems that can drive up costs and trigger more delays.

Ars recently spoke with Jon Olansen, a bio-mechanical engineer and veteran space shuttle flight controller who now manages the Gateway program at Johnson Space Center. A transcript of our conversation with Olansen is below. It is lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Ars: The HALO module has arrived in Arizona from Italy. What’s next?

Olansen: This HALO module went through significant effort from the primary and secondary structure perspective out at Thales Alenia Space in Italy. That was most of their focus in getting the vehicle ready to ship to Arizona. Now that it’s in Arizona, Northrop is setting it up in their facility there in Gilbert to be able to do all of the outfitting of the systems we need to actually execute the missions we want to do, keep the crew safe, and enable the science that we’re looking to do. So, if you consider your standard spacecraft, you’re going to have all of your command-and-control capabilities, your avionics systems, your computers, your network management, all of the things you need to control the vehicle. You’re going to have your power distribution capabilities. HALO attaches to the Power and Propulsion Element, and it provides the primary power distribution capability for the entire station. So that’ll all be part of HALO. You’ll have your standard thermal systems for active cooling. You’ll have the vehicle environmental control systems that will need to be installed, [along with] some of the other crew systems that you can think of, from lighting, restraint, mobility aids, all the different types of crew systems. Then, of course, all of our science aspects. So we have payload lockers, both internally, as well as payload sites external that we’ll have available, so pretty much all the different systems that you would need for a human-rated spacecraft.

Ars: What’s the latest status of the Power and Propulsion Element?

Olansen: PPE is fairly well along in their assembly and integration activities. The central cylinder has been integrated with the propulsion tanks… Their propulsion module is in good shape. They’re working on the avionics shelves associated with that spacecraft. So, with both vehicles, we’re really trying to get the assembly done in the next year or so, so we can get into integrated spacecraft testing at that point in time.

Ars: What’s in the critical path in getting to the launch pad?

Olansen: The assembly and integration activity is really the key for us. It’s to get to the full vehicle level test. All the different activities that we’re working on across the vehicles are making substantive progress. So, it’s a matter of bringing them all in and doing the assembly and integration in the appropriate sequences, so that we get the vehicles put together the way we need them and get to the point where we can actually power up the vehicles and do all the testing we need to do. Obviously, software is a key part of that development activity, once we power on the vehicles, making sure we can do all the control work that we need to do for those vehicles.

[There are] a couple of key pieces I will mention along those lines. On the PPE side, we have the electrical propulsion system. The thrusters associated with that system are being delivered. Those will go through acceptance testing at the Glenn Research Center [in Ohio] and then be integrated on the spacecraft out at Maxar; so that work is ongoing as we speak. Out at ESA, ESA is providing the HALO lunar communication system. That’ll be delivered later this year. That’ll be installed on HALO as part of its integrated test and checkout and then launch on HALO. That provides the full communication capability down to the lunar surface for us, where PPE provides the communication capability back to Earth. So, those are key components that we’re looking to get delivered later this year.

Jon Olansen, manager of NASA’s Gateway program at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Credit: NASA/Andrew Carlsen

Ars: What’s the status of the electric propulsion thrusters for the PPE?

Olansen: The first one has actually been delivered already, so we’ll have the opportunity to go through, like I said, the acceptance testing for those. The other flight units are right on the heels of the first one that was delivered. They’ll make it through their acceptance testing, then get delivered to Maxar, like I said, for integration into PPE. So, that work is already in progress. [The Power and Propulsion Element will have three xenon-fueled 12-kilowatt Hall thrusters produced by Aerojet Rocketdyne, and four smaller 6-kilowatt thrusters.]

Ars: The Government Accountability Office (GAO) outlined concerns last year about keeping the mass of Gateway within the capability of its rocket. Has there been any progress on that issue? Will you need to remove components from the HALO module and launch them on a future mission? Will you narrow your launch windows to only launch on the most fuel-efficient trajectories?

Olansen: We’re working the plan. Now that we’re launching the two vehicles together, we’re working mass management. Mass management is always an issue with spacecraft development, so it’s no different for us. All of the things you described are all knobs that are in the trade space as we proceed, but fundamentally, we’re working to design the optimal spacecraft that we can, first. So, that’s the key part. As we get all the components delivered, we can measure mass across all of those components, understand what our integrated mass looks like, and we have several different options to make sure that we’re able to execute the mission we need to execute. All of those will be balanced over time based on the impacts that are there. There’s not a need for a lot of those decisions to happen today. Those that are needed from a design perspective, we’ve already made. Those that are needed from enabling future decisions, we’ve already made all of those. So, really, what we’re working through is being able to, at the appropriate time, make decisions necessary to fly the vehicle the way we need to, to get out to NRHO [Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit, an elliptical orbit around the Moon], and then be able to execute the Artemis missions in the future.

Ars: The GAO also discussed a problem with Gateway’s controllability with something as massive as Starship docked to it. What’s the latest status of that problem?

Olansen: There are a number of different risks that we work through as a program, as you’d expect. We continue to look at all possibilities and work through them with due diligence. That’s our job, to be able to do that on a daily basis. With the stack controllability [issue], where that came from for GAO, we were early in the assessments of what the potential impacts could be from visiting vehicles, not just any one [vehicle] but any visiting vehicle. We’re a smaller space station than ISS, so making sure we understand the implications of thruster firings as vehicles approach the station, and the implications associated with those, is where that stack controllability conversation came from.

The bus that Maxar typically designs doesn’t have to generally deal with docking. Part of what we’ve been doing is working through ways that we can use the capabilities that are already built into that spacecraft differently to provide us the control authority we need when we have visiting vehicles, as well as working with the visiting vehicles and their design to make sure that they’re minimizing the impact on the station. So, the combination of those two has largely, over the past year since that report came out, improved where we are from a stack controllability perspective. We still have forward work to close out all of the different potential cases that are there. We’ll continue to work through those. That’s standard forward work, but we’ve been able to make some updates, some software updates, some management updates, and logic updates that really allow us to control the stack effectively and have the right amount of control authority for the dockings and undockings that we will need to execute for the missions.

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Trump White House budget proposal eviscerates science funding at NASA

NASA, Science, Space / /

This week, as part of the process to develop a budget for fiscal-year 2026, the Trump White House shared the draft version of its budget request for NASA with the space agency.

This initial version of the administration’s budget request calls for an approximately 20 percent overall cut to the agency’s budget across the board, effectively $5 billion from an overall topline of about $25 billion. However, the majority of the cuts are concentrated within the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, which oversees all planetary science, Earth science, astrophysics research, and more.

According to the “passback” documents given to NASA officials on Thursday, the space agency’s science programs would receive nearly a 50 percent cut in funding. After the agency received $7.5 billion for science in fiscal-year 2025, the Trump administration has proposed a science topline budget of just $3.9 billion for the coming fiscal year.

Detailing the cuts

Among the proposals were: A two-thirds cut to astrophysics, down to $487 million; a greater than two-thirds cut to heliophysics, down to $455 million; a greater than 50 percent cut to Earth science, down to $1.033 billion; and a 30 percent cut to Planetary science, down to $1.929 billion.

Although the budget would continue support for ongoing missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope, it would kill the much-anticipated Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, an observatory seen as on par with those two world-class instruments that is already fully assembled and on budget for a launch in two years.

“Passback supports continued operation of the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes and assumes no funding is provided for other telescopes,” the document states.

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“What the hell are you doing?” How I learned to interview astronauts, scientists, and billionaires

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The best part about journalism is not collecting information. It’s sharing it.

Inside NASA's rare Moon rocks vault (2016)

Sometimes the best place to do an interview is in a clean room. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

Sometimes the best place to do an interview is in a clean room. Credit: Lee Hutchinson

I recently wrote a story about the wild ride of the Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station last summer. It was based largely on an interview with the commander of the mission, NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore.

His account of Starliner’s thruster failures—and his desperate efforts to keep the vehicle flying on course—was riveting. In the aftermath of the story, many readers, people on social media, and real-life friends congratulated me on conducting a great interview. But truth be told, it was pretty much all Wilmore.

Essentially, when I came into the room, he was primed to talk. I’m not sure if Wilmore was waiting for me specifically to talk to, but he pretty clearly wanted to speak with someone about his experiences aboard the Starliner spacecraft. And he chose me.

So was it luck? I’ve been thinking about that. As an interviewer, I certainly don’t have the emotive power of some of the great television interviewers, who are masters of confrontation and drama. It’s my nature to avoid confrontation where possible. But what I do have on my side is experience, more than 25 years now, as well as preparation. I am also genuinely and completely interested in space. And as it happens, these values are important, too.

Interviewing is a craft one does not pick up overnight. During my career, I have had some funny, instructive, and embarrassing moments. Without wanting to seem pretentious or self-indulgent, I thought it might be fun to share some of those stories so you can really understand what it’s like on a reporter’s side of the cassette tape.

March 2003: Stephen Hawking

I had only been working professionally as a reporter at the Houston Chronicle for a few years (and as the newspaper’s science writer for less time still) when the opportunity to interview Stephen Hawking fell into my lap.

What a coup! He was only the world’s most famous living scientist, and he was visiting Texas at the invitation of a local billionaire named George Mitchell. A wildcatter and oilman, Mitchell had grown up in Galveston along the upper Texas coast, marveling at the stars as a kid. He studied petroleum engineering and later developed the controversial practice of fracking. In his later years, Mitchell spent some of his largesse on the pursuits of his youth, including astronomy and astrophysics. This included bringing Hawking to Texas more than half a dozen times in the 1990s and early 2000s.

For an interview with Hawking, one submitted questions in advance. That’s because Hawking was afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease and lost the ability to speak in 1985. A computer attached to his wheelchair cycled through letters and sounds, and Hawking clicked a button to make a selection, forming words and then sentences, which were sent to a voice synthesizer. For unprepared responses, it took a few minutes to form a single sentence.

George Mitchell and Stephen Hawking during a Texas visit.

Credit: Texas A&M University

George Mitchell and Stephen Hawking during a Texas visit. Credit: Texas A&M University

What to ask him? I had a decent understanding of astronomy, having majored in it as an undergraduate. But the readership of a metro newspaper was not interested in the Hubble constant or the Schwarzschild radius. I asked him about recent discoveries of the cosmic microwave background radiation anyway. Perhaps the most enduring response was about the war in Iraq, a prominent topic of the day. “It will be far more difficult to get out of Iraq than to get in,” he said. He was right.

When I met him at Texas A&M University, Hawking was gracious and polite. He answered a couple of questions in person. But truly, it was awkward. Hawking’s time on Earth was limited and his health failing, so it required an age to tap out even short answers. I can only imagine his frustration at the task of communication, which the vast majority of humans take for granted, especially because he had such a brilliant mind and so many deep ideas to share. And here I was, with my banal questions, stealing his time. As I stood there, I wondered whether I should stare at him while he composed a response. Should I look away? I felt truly unworthy.

In the end, it was fine. I even met Hawking a few more times, including at a memorable dinner at Mitchell’s ranch north of Houston, which spans tens of thousands of acres. A handful of the world’s most brilliant theoretical physicists were there. We would all be sitting around chatting, and Hawking would periodically chime in with a response to something brought up earlier. Later on that evening, Mitchell and Hawking took a chariot ride around the grounds. I wonder what they talked about?

Spring 2011: Jane Goodall and Sylvia Earle

By this point, I had written about science for nearly a decade at the Chronicle. In the early part of the year, I had the opportunity to interview noted chimpanzee scientist Jane Goodall and one of the world’s leading oceanographers, Sylvia Earle. Both were coming to Houston to talk about their research and their passion for conservation.

I spoke with Goodall by phone in advance of her visit, and she was so pleasant, so regal. By then, Goodall was 76 years old and had been studying chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania for five decades. Looking back over the questions I asked, they’re not bad. They’re just pretty basic. She gave great answers regardless. But there is only so much chemistry you can build with a person over the telephone (or Zoom, for that matter, these days). Being in person really matters in interviewing because you can read cues, and it’s easier to know when to let a pause go. The comfort level is higher. When you’re speaking with someone you don’t know that well, establishing a basic level of comfort is essential to making an all-important connection.

A couple of months later, I spoke with Earle in person at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. I took my older daughter, then nine years old, because I wanted her to hear Earle speak later in the evening. This turned out to be a lucky move for a couple of different reasons. First, my kid was inspired by Earle to pursue studies in marine biology. And more immediately, the presence of a curious 9-year-old quickly warmed Earle to the interview. We had a great discussion about many things beyond just oceanography.

President Barack Obama talks with Dr. Sylvia Earle during a visit to Midway Atoll on September 1, 2016.

Credit: Barack Obama Presidential Library

President Barack Obama talks with Dr. Sylvia Earle during a visit to Midway Atoll on September 1, 2016. Credit: Barack Obama Presidential Library

The bottom line is that I remained a fairly pedestrian interviewer back in 2011. That was partly because I did not have deep expertise in chimpanzees or oceanography. And that leads me to another key for a good interview and establishing a rapport. It’s great if a person already knows you, but even if they don’t, you can overcome that by showing genuine interest or demonstrating your deep knowledge about a subject. I would come to learn this as I started to cover space more exclusively and got to know the industry and its key players better.

September 2014: Scott Kelly

To be clear, this was not much of an interview. But it is a fun story.

I spent much of 2014 focused on space for the Houston Chronicle. I pitched the idea of an in-depth series on the sorry state of NASA’s human spaceflight program, which was eventually titled “Adrift.” By immersing myself in spaceflight for months on end, I discovered a passion for the topic and knew that writing about space was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was 40 years old, so it was high time I found my calling.

As part of the series, I traveled to Kazakhstan with a photographer from the Chronicle, Smiley Pool. He is a wonderful guy who had strengths in chatting up sources that I, an introvert, lacked. During the 13-day trip to Russia and Kazakhstan, we traveled with a reporter from Esquire named Chris Jones, who was working on a long project about NASA astronaut Scott Kelly. Kelly was then training for a yearlong mission to the International Space Station, and he was a big deal.

Jones was a tremendous raconteur and an even better writer—his words, my goodness. We had so much fun over those two weeks, sharing beer, vodka, and Kazakh food. The capstone of the trip was seeing the Soyuz TMA-14M mission launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Kelly was NASA’s backup astronaut for the flight, so he was in quarantine alongside the mission’s primary astronaut. (This was Butch Wilmore, as it turns out). The launch, from a little more than a kilometer away, was still the most spectacular moment of spaceflight I’ve ever observed in person. Like, holy hell, the rocket was right on top of you.

Expedition 43 NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly walks from the Zvjozdnyj Hotel to the Cosmonaut Hotel for additional training, Thursday, March 19, 2015, in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Expedition 43 NASA Astronaut Scott Kelly walks from the Zvjozdnyj Hotel to the Cosmonaut Hotel for additional training, Thursday, March 19, 2015, in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Immediately after the launch, which took place at 1: 25 am local time, Kelly was freed from quarantine. This must have been liberating because he headed straight to the bar at the Hotel Baikonur, the nicest watering hole in the small, Soviet-era town. Jones, Pool, and I were staying at a different hotel. Jones got a text from Kelly inviting us to meet him at the bar. Our NASA minders were uncomfortable with this, as the last thing they want is to have astronauts presented to the world as anything but sharp, sober-minded people who represent the best of the best. But this was too good to resist.

By the time we got to the bar, Kelly and his companion, the commander of his forthcoming Soyuz flight, Gennady Padalka, were several whiskeys deep. The three of us sat across from Kelly and Padalka, and as one does at 3 am in Baikonur, we started taking shots. The astronauts were swapping stories and talking out of school. At one point, Jones took out his notebook and said that he had a couple of questions. To this, Kelly responded heatedly, “What the hell are you doing?”

Not conducting an interview, apparently. We were off the record. Well, until today at least.

We drank and talked for another hour or so, and it was incredibly memorable. At the time, Kelly was probably the most famous active US astronaut, and here I was throwing down whiskey with him shortly after watching a rocket lift off from the very spot where the Soviets launched the Space Age six decades earlier. In retrospect, this offered a good lesson that the best interviews are often not, in fact, interviews. To get the good information, you need to develop relationships with people, and you do that by talking with them person to person, without a microphone, often with alcohol.

Scott Kelly is a real one for that night.

September 2019: Elon Musk

I have spoken with Elon Musk a number of times over the years, but none was nearly so memorable as a long interview we did for my first book on SpaceX, called Liftoff. That summer, I made a couple of visits to SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, interviewing the company’s early employees and sitting in on meetings in Musk’s conference room with various teams. Because SpaceX is such a closed-up company, it was fascinating to get an inside look at how the sausage was made.

It’s worth noting that this all went down a few months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In some ways, Musk is the same person he was before the outbreak. But in other ways, he is profoundly different, his actions and words far more political and polemical.

Anyway, I was supposed to interview Musk on a Friday evening at the factory at the end of one of these trips. As usual, Musk was late. Eventually, his assistant texted, saying something had come up. She was desperately sorry, but we would have to do the interview later. I returned to my hotel, downbeat. I had an early flight the next morning back to Houston. But after about an hour, the assistant messaged me again. Musk had to travel to South Texas to get the Starship program moving. Did I want to travel with him and do the interview on the plane?

As I sat on his private jet the next day, late morning, my mind swirled. There would be no one else on the plane but Musk, his three sons (triplets, then 13 years old) and two bodyguards, and me. When Musk is in a good mood, an interview can be a delight. He is funny, sharp, and a good storyteller. When Musk is in a bad mood, well, an interview is usually counterproductive. So I fretted. What if Musk was in a bad mood? It would be a super-awkward three and a half hours on the small jet.

Two Teslas drove up to the plane, the first with Musk driving his boys and the second with two security guys. Musk strode onto the jet, saw me, and said he didn’t realize I was going to be on the plane. (A great start to things!) Musk then took out his phone and started a heated conversation about digging tunnels. By this point, I was willing myself to disappear. I just wanted to melt into the leather seat I was sitting in about three feet from Musk.

So much for a good mood for the interview.

As the jet climbed, the phone conversation got worse, but then Musk lost his connection. He put away his phone and turned to me, saying he was free to talk. His mood, almost as if by magic, changed. Since we were discussing the early days of SpaceX at Kwajalein, he gathered the boys around so they could hear about their dad’s earlier days. The interview went shockingly well, and at least part of the reason has to be that I knew the subject matter deeply, had prepared, and was passionate about it. We spoke for nearly two hours before Musk asked if he might have some time with his kids. They spent the rest of the flight playing video games, yucking it up.

April 2025: Butch Wilmore

When they’re on the record, astronauts mostly stick to a script. As a reporter, you’re just not going to get too much from them. (Off the record is a completely different story, of course, as astronauts are generally delightful, hilarious, and earnest people.)

Last week, dozens of journalists were allotted 10-minute interviews with Wilmore and, separately, Suni Williams. It was the first time they had spoken in depth with the media since their launch on Starliner and return to Earth aboard a Crew Dragon vehicle. As I waited outside Studio A at Johnson Space Center, I overheard Wilmore completing an interview with a Tennessee-based outlet, where he is from. As they wrapped up, the public affairs officer said he had just one more interview left and said my name. Wilmore said something like, “Oh good, I’ve been waiting to talk with him.”

That was a good sign. Out of all the interviews that day, it was good to know he wanted to speak with me. The easy thing for him to do would have been to use “astronaut speak” for 10 minutes and then go home. I was the last interview of the day.

As I prepared to speak with Wilmore and Williams, I didn’t want to ask the obvious questions they’d answered many times earlier. If you ask, “What was it like to spend nine months in space when you were expecting only a short trip?” you’re going to get a boring answer. Similarly, although the end of the mission was highly politicized by the Trump White House, two veteran NASA astronauts were not going to step on that landmine.

I wanted to go back to the root cause of all this, the problems with Starliner’s propulsion system. My strategy was simply to ask what it was like to fly inside the spacecraft. Williams gave me some solid answers. But Wilmore had actually been at the controls. And he apparently had been holding in one heck of a story for nine months. Because when I asked about the launch, and then what it was like to fly Starliner, he took off without much prompting.

Butch Wilmore has flown on four spacecraft: the Space Shuttle, Soyuz, Starliner, and Crew Dragon.

Credit: NASA/Emmett Given

Butch Wilmore has flown on four spacecraft: the Space Shuttle, Soyuz, Starliner, and Crew Dragon. Credit: NASA/Emmett Given

I don’t know exactly why Wilmore shared so much with me. We are not particularly close and have never interacted outside of an official NASA setting. But he knows of my work and interest in spaceflight. Not everyone at the space agency appreciates my journalism, but they know I’m deeply interested in what they’re doing. They know I care about NASA and Johnson Space Center. So I asked Wilmore a few smart questions, and he must have trusted that I would tell his story honestly and accurately, and with appropriate context. I certainly tried my best. After a quarter of a century, I have learned well that the most sensational stories are best told without sensationalism.

Even as we spoke, I knew the interview with Wilmore was one of the best I had ever done. A great scientist once told me that the best feeling in the world is making some little discovery in a lab and for a short time knowing something about the natural world that no one else knows. The equivalent, for me, is doing an interview and knowing I’ve got gold. And for a little while, before sharing it with the world, I’ve got that little piece of gold all to myself.

But I’ll tell you what. It’s even more fun to let the cat out of the bag. The best part about journalism is not collecting information. It’s sharing that information with the world.

Photo of Eric Berger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next three launches

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

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

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

Photo of Stephen Clark

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

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

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Here are the reasons SpaceX won nearly all recent military launch contracts

Donald Trump, elon musk, Space, spacex, united launch alliance / /

“I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws.”

President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, speak to the press as they stand next to a Tesla vehicle on the South Portico of the White House on March 11, 2025. Credit: Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP

In the last week, the US Space Force awarded SpaceX a $5.9 billion deal to make Elon Musk’s space company the Pentagon’s leading launch provider, and then it assigned the vast majority of this year’s most lucrative launch contracts to SpaceX.

On top of these actions, the Space Force reassigned the launch of a GPS navigation satellite from United Launch Alliance’s long-delayed Vulcan rocket to fly on SpaceX’s Falcon 9. ULA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is SpaceX’s chief US rival in the market for military satellite launches.

Given the close relationship between Musk and President Donald Trump, it’s not out of bounds to ask why SpaceX is racking up so many wins. Some plans floated by the Trump administration involving SpaceX in recent months have raised concerns over conflicts of interest.

Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, doesn’t seem too worried in his public statements. In a roundtable with reporters this week at the annual Space Symposium conference in Colorado, Bruno was asked about Musk’s ties with Trump.

“We have not been impacted by our competitor’s position advising the president, certainly not yet,” Bruno said. “I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws, and so we’re behaving that way.”

It’s a separate concern whether the Pentagon should predominantly rely on a single provider for access to space, be it a launch company like SpaceX led by a billionaire government insider or a provider like ULA that, so far, hasn’t proven its new Vulcan rocket can meet the Space Force’s schedules.

Military officials are unanimous in the answer to that question: “No.” That’s why the Space Force is keen on adding to the Pentagon’s roster of launch providers. In the last 12 months, the Space Force has brought Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, and Stoke Space to join SpaceX and ULA in the mix for national security launches.

Results matter

The reason Bruno can say Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration so far hasn’t affected ULA is simple. SpaceX is cheaper and has a ready-made line of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets available to launch the Pentagon’s satellites. ULA’s Vulcan rocket is now certified to launch military payloads, but it reached this important milestone years behind schedule.

The Pentagon announced Friday that SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin—Jeff Bezos’ space company—won contracts worth $13.7 billion to share responsibilities for launching approximately 54 of the military’s most critical space missions from 2027 through 2032. SpaceX received the lion’s share of the missions with an award for 28 launches, while ULA got 19. Blue Origin, a national security launch business newcomer, will fly seven missions.

This comes out to a 60-40 split between SpaceX and ULA, not counting Blue Origin’s seven launches, which the Space Force set aside for a third contractor. It’s a reversal of the 60-40 sharing scheme in the last big military launch competition in 2020, when ULA took the top award over SpaceX. Space Force officials anticipate Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket will be certified for national security missions next year, allowing it to begin winning launch task orders.

Tory Bruno, president and CEO of United Launch Alliance, speaks with reporters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 6, 2024. Credit: Paul Hennessy/Anadolu via Getty Images

Bruno said he wasn’t surprised with the outcome of this year’s launch competition, known as Phase 3 of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program. “We’re happy to get it,” he said Monday.

“I felt that winning 60 percent the first time was a little bit of an upset,” Bruno said of the 2020 competition with SpaceX. “I believe they expected to win 60 then … Therefore, I believed this time around that they would compete that much harder, and that I was not going to price dive in order to guarantee a win.”

While we know roughly how many launches each company will get from the Space Force, the military hasn’t determined which specific missions will fly with ULA, SpaceX, or Blue Origin. Once per year, the Space Force will convene a “mission assignment board” to divvy up individual task orders.

Simply geography

Officials announced Monday that this year’s assignment board awarded seven missions to SpaceX and two launches to ULA. The list includes six Space Force missions and three for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

SpaceX’s seven wins are worth a combined $845.8 million, with an average price of $120.8 million per launch. Three will fly on Falcon 9 rockets, and four will launch on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.

  • NROL-97 on a Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral
  • USSF-15 (GPS IIIF-3) on a Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral
  • USSF-174 on a Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral
  • USSF-186 on a Falcon Heavy from Cape Canaveral
  • USSF-234 on a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral
  • NROL-96 on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg
  • NROL-157 on a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg

The Space Force’s two orders to ULA are valued at $427.6 million, averaging $213.8 million per mission. Both missions will launch from Florida, one with a GPS navigation satellite to medium-Earth orbit and another with a next-generation geosynchronous missile warning satellite named NGG-2.

  • USSF-49 (GPS IIIF-2) on a Vulcan from Cape Canaveral
  • USSF-50 (NGG-2) on a Vulcan from Cape Canaveral

So, why did ULA only get 22 percent of this year’s task orders, instead of something closer to 40 percent? It turns out ULA was not eligible for two of these missions because the company’s West Coast launch pad for the Vulcan rocket is still under construction at Vandenberg Space Force Base. The Space Force won’t assign specific West Coast missions to ULA until the launch pad is finished and certified, according to Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, chief of the Space Force’s “Assured Access to Space” office.

Vandenberg, a military facility on the Southern California coast, has a wide range of open ocean to the south, perfect for rockets delivering payloads into polar orbits. Rockets flown out of Cape Canaveral typically fly to the east on trajectories useful for launching satellites into the GPS network or into geosynchronous orbit.

“A company can be certified for a subset of missions while it continues to work on meeting the certification criteria for the broader set of missions,” Panzenhagen said. “In this case, ULA was not certified for West Coast launches yet. They’re working on that.”

Because of this rule, SpaceX won task orders for the NROL-96 and NROL-157 missions by default.

The Space Force’s assignment of the USSF-15 mission to SpaceX makes some sense, too. Going forward, the Space Force wants to have Vulcan and Falcon Heavy as options for adding to the GPS network. This will be the first GPS payload to launch on Falcon Heavy, allowing SpaceX engineers to complete a raft of up-front analysis and integration work. Engineers won’t have to repeat this work on future Falcon Heavy flights carrying identical GPS satellites.

From monopoly to niche

A decade ago, ULA was the sole launch provider to deploy the Pentagon’s fleet of surveillance, communication, and navigation satellites. The Air Force certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket for national security missions in May 2015, opening the market for competition for the first time since Boeing and Lockheed Martin merged their rocket divisions to create ULA in 2006.

ULA’s monopoly, which Bruno acknowledged, has now eroded into making the company a niche player in the military launch market.

“A monopoly is not healthy,” he said. “We were one for a few years before I came to ULA, and that was because no one else had the capability, and there weren’t that many missions. There weren’t enough to support many providers. There are now, so this is better.”

There are at least a couple of important reasons the Space Force is flying more missions than 10 or 20 years ago.

One is that Pentagon officials believe the United States is now in competition with a near-peer great power, China, with a rapidly growing presence in space. Military leaders say this requires more US hardware in orbit. Another is that the cost of launching something into space is lower than it was when ULA enjoyed its dominant position. SpaceX has led the charge in reducing the cost of accessing space, thanks to its success in pioneering reusable commercial rockets.

Many of the new types of missions the Space Force plans to launch in the next few years will go to low-Earth orbit (LEO), a region of space a few hundred miles above the planet. There, the Space Force plans to deploy hundreds of satellites for a global missile detection, missile tracking, and data relay network. Eventually, the military may place hundreds or more space-based interceptors in LEO as part of the “Golden Dome” missile defense program pushed by the Trump administration.

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

Traditionally, the military has operated missile tracking and communications satellites in much higher geosynchronous orbits some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) over the equator. At that altitude, satellites revolve around the Earth at the same speed as the planet’s rotation, allowing a spacecraft to maintain a constant vigil over the same location.

The Space Force still has a few of those kinds of missions to launch, along with mobile, globe-trotting surveillance satellites and eavesdropping signals intelligence spy platforms for the National Reconnaissance Office. Bruno argues ULA’s Vulcan rocket, despite being more expensive, is best suited for these bespoke missions. So far, the Space Force’s awards seem to bear it out.

“Our rocket has a unique niche within this marketplace,” Bruno said. “There really are two kinds of missions from the rocket’s standpoint. There are ones where you drop off in LEO, and there are ones where you drop off in higher orbits. You design your rockets differently for that. It doesn’t mean we can’t drop off in LEO, it doesn’t mean [SpaceX] can’t drop off in a higher energy orbit, but we’re more efficient at those because we designed for that.”

There’s some truth in that argument. The Vulcan rocket’s upper stage, called the Centaur V, burns liquid hydrogen fuel with better fuel efficiency than the kerosene-fueled engine on SpaceX’s upper stage. And SpaceX must use the more expensive Falcon Heavy rocket for the most demanding missions, expending the rocket’s core booster to devote more propellant toward driving the payload into orbit.

SpaceX has launched at a rate nearly 34 times higher than United Launch Alliance since the start of 2023, but ULA has more experience with high-energy missions, featuring more complex maneuvers to place military payloads directly into geosynchronous orbit, and sometimes releasing multiple payloads at different locations in the geosynchronous belt.

This is one of the most challenging mission profiles for any rocket, requiring a high-endurance upper stage, like Vulcan’s Centaur V, capable of cruising through space for eight or more hours.

SpaceX has flown a long-duration version of its upper stage on several missions by adding an extended mission kit. This gives the rocket longer battery life and a custom band of thermal paint to help ensure its kerosene fuel does not freeze in the cold environment of space.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket rolls to the launch pad in Florida in June 2024. The rocket’s upper stage sports a strip of gray thermal paint to keep propellants at the proper temperature for a long-duration cruise through space. Credit: SpaceX

On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of SpaceX’s missions target low-Earth orbit, where Falcon 9 rockets deploy Starlink Internet satellites, send crews and cargo to the International Space Station, and regularly launch multi-payload rideshare missions. These launches maximize the Falcon 9’s efficiencies with booster recovery and reuse. SpaceX is proficient and prolific with these missions, launching them every couple of days. Launch, land, repeat.

“They tend to be more efficient at the LEO drop-offs, I’ll be honest about that,” Bruno said. “That means there’s a competitive space in the middle, and then there’s kind of these end cases. So, we’ll keep winning when it’s way over in our space, they will win when it’s way over in theirs, and then in the middle it’s kind of a toss-up for any given mission.”

Recent history seems to support Bruno’s hypothesis. Last year, SpaceX and ULA competed head-to-head for nine specific launch contracts, or task orders, in a different Space Force competition. The launches will place national security satellites into low-Earth orbit, and SpaceX won all nine of them. Since 2020, ULA has won more Space Force task orders than SpaceX for high-energy missions, although the inverse was true in this year’s round of launch orders.

The military’s launch contracting strategy gives the Space Force flexibility to swap payloads between rockets, add more missions, or deviate from the 60-40 share to SpaceX and ULA. This has precedent. Between 2020 and 2024, ULA received 54 percent of military launches, short of the 60 percent anticipated in their original contract. This amounted to ULA winning three fewer task orders, or a lost value of about $350 million, because of delays in development of the Vulcan rocket.

That’s the cost of doing business with the Pentagon. Military officials don’t want their satellites sitting on the ground. The national policy of assured access to space materialized after the Challenger accident in 1986. NASA grounded the Space Shuttle for two-and-a-half years, and the military had no other way to put its largest satellites into orbit, leading the Pentagon to accelerate development of new versions of the Atlas, Delta, and Titan rockets dating back to the 1960s.

Military and intelligence officials were again stung by a spate of failures with the Titan IV in the 1990s, when it was the only heavy-lift launcher in the Pentagon’s inventory. Then, ULA’s Delta IV Heavy rocket was the sole heavy-lifter available to the military for nearly two decades. Today, the Space Force has two heavy-lift options, and may have a third soon with Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

This all has the added benefit of bringing down costs, according to Col. Doug Pentecost, deputy director of the Space Force’s Assured Access to Space directorate.

“If you bundle a bunch of missions together, you can get a better price point,” he said. “We awarded $13.7 billion. We thought this was going to cost us 15.5, so we saved $1.7 billion with this competition, showing that we have great industry out there trying to do good stuff for us.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

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

Here are the reasons SpaceX won nearly all recent military launch contracts Read More »

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NASA nominee asks why lunar return has taken so long, and why it costs so much

jared isaacman, NASA, Space / /

WASHINGTON, DC—Over the course of a nearly three-hour committee hearing Wednesday, the nominee to lead NASA for the Trump administration faced difficult questions from US senators who sought commitments to specific projects.

However, maneuvering like a pilot with more than 7,000 hours in jets and ex-military aircraft, entrepreneur and private astronaut Jared Isaacman dodged most of their questions and would not be pinned down. His basic message to members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation was that NASA is an exceptional agency that does the impossible, but that it also faces some challenges. NASA, he said, receives an “extraordinary” budget, and he vowed to put taxpayer dollars to efficient use in exploring the universe and retaining the nation’s lead on geopolitical competitors in space.

“I have lived the American dream, and I owe this nation a great debt,” said Isaacman, who founded his first business at 16 in his parents’ basement and would go on to found an online payments company, Shift4, that would make him a billionaire. Isaacman is also an avid pilot who self-funded and led two private missions to orbit on Crew Dragon. Leading NASA would be “the privilege of a lifetime,” he said.

The hearing took place in the Russell Senate Office building next to the US Capitol on Wednesday morning, in an expansive room with marbled columns and three large chandeliers. There was plenty of spaceflight royalty on hand, including the four astronauts who will fly on the Artemis II mission, as well as the six private citizens who flew with Isaacman on his two Dragon missions. 

“This may be the most badass assemblage we’ve had at a Senate hearing,” said US Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, chair of the committee, commenting on the astronauts in the room.

Committed to staying at the Moon?

However, when the meeting got down to brass tacks, there were sharp questions for Isaacman.

Cruz opened the hearing by stating his priorities for NASA clearly and explicitly: He is most focused on ensuring the United States does not cede any of its preeminence to China in space, and this starts with low-Earth orbit and the Moon.

“Make no mistake, the Chinese Communist Party has been explicit in its desire to dominate space, putting a fully functional space station in low-Earth orbit and robotic rovers on the far side of the Moon,” he said. “We are not headed for the next space race; it is already here.”

Cruz wanted Isaacman to commit to not just flying human missions to the Moon, but also to a sustained presence on the surface or in cislunar space.

In response, Isaacman said he would see that NASA returns humans to the Moon as quickly as possible, beating China in the process. This includes flying Artemis II around the Moon in 2026, and then landing the Artemis III mission later this decade. 

The disagreement came over what to do after this. Isaacman, echoing the Trump administration, said the agency should also press onward, sending humans to Mars as soon as possible. Cruz, however, wanted Isaacman to say NASA would establish a sustained presence at the Moon. The committee has written authorizing legislation to mandate this, Cruz reminded Isaacman.

“If that’s the law, then I am committed to it,” Isaacman said.

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, left, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen watch as Jared Isaacman testifies on Wednesday.

Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, left, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen watch as Jared Isaacman testifies on Wednesday. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Cruz also sought Isaacman’s commitment to flying the International Space Station through at least 2030, which is the space agency’s current date for retiring the orbital laboratory. Isaacman said that seemed reasonable and added that NASA should squeeze every possible bit of research out of it until then. However, when Cruz pressed Isaacman about the Lunar Gateway, a space station NASA is developing to fly in an elliptical orbit around the Moon, Isaacman would not be drawn in. He replied that he would work with Congress and space agency officials to determine which programs are working and which ones are not.

The Gateway is a program championed by Cruz since it is managed by Johnson Space Center in Texas. Parochial interests aside, a lot of space community stakeholders question the value of the Gateway to NASA’s exploration plans.

Ten centers and the future of SLS

One of the most tense interactions came between Isaacman and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who wanted commitments from Isaacman that he would not close any of NASA’s 10 field centers, and also that the space agency would fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions on the Space Launch System rocket. 

Regarding field centers, there has been discussion about making the space agency more efficient by closing some of them. This is a politically sensitive topic, and naturally, politicians from states where those centers are located are protective of them. At the same time, there is a general recognition that it would be more cost-effective for NASA to consolidate its operations as part of modernization.

Isaacman did not answer Cantwell’s question about field centers directly. Rather, he said he had not been fully briefed on the administration’s plans for NASA’s structure. “Senator, there’s only so much I can be briefed on in advance of a hearing,” he said. In response to further prodding, Isaacman said, “I fully expect to roll up my sleeves” when it came to ideas to restructure NASA.

Cantwell and other Senators pressed Isaacman on plans to use NASA’s Space Launch System rocket as part of the overall plan to get astronauts to the lunar surface. Isaacman sounded as if he were on board with flying the Artemis II as envisioned—no surprise, then, that this crew was in the audience—and said he wanted to get a crew of Artemis III to the lunar surface as quickly as possible. But he questioned why it has taken NASA so long, and at such great expense, to get its deep space human exploration plans moving.

He noted, correctly, that presidential administrations dating back to 1989 have been releasing plans for sending humans to the Moon or Mars, and that significantly more than $100 billion has been spent on various projects over nearly four decades. For all of that, Isaacman and his private Polaris Dawn crewmates remain the humans to have flown the farthest from Earth since the Apollo Program. They did so last year.

“Why is it taking us so long, and why is it costing us so much to go to the Moon?” he asked.

In one notable exchange, Isaacman said NASA’s current architecture for the Artemis lunar plans, based on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, is probably not the ideal “long-term” solution to NASA’s deep space transportation plans. The smart reading of this is that Isaacman may be willing to fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions as conceived, given that much of the hardware is already built. But everything that comes after this, including SLS rocket upgrades and the Lunar Gateway, could be on the chopping block. Ars wrote more about why this is a reasonable path forward last September.

Untangling a relationship with SpaceX

Some of the most intelligent questions came from US Sen. Andy Kim, D-New Jersey. During his time allotment, Kim also pressed Isaacman on the question of a sustained presence on the Moon. Isaacman responded that it was critical for NASA to get astronauts on the Moon, along with robotic missions, to determine the “economic, scientific, and national security value” of the Moon. With this information, he said, NASA will be better positioned to determine whether and why it should have an enduring presence on the Moon.

If this were so, Kim subsequently asked what the economic, scientific, and national security value of sending humans to Mars was. Not responding directly to this question, Isaacman reiterated that NASA should do both Moon and Mars exploration in parallel. NASA will need to become much more efficient to afford that, and some of the US Senators appeared skeptical. But Isaacman seems to truly believe this and wants to take a stab at making NASA more cost-effective and “mission focused.”

Throughout the hearing, Isaacman appeared to win the approval of various senators with his repeated remarks that he was committed to NASA’s science programs and that he was eager to help NASA uphold its reputation for making the impossible possible. He also said it is a “fundamental” obligation of the space agency to inspire the next generation of scientists.

A challenging moment came during questioning from Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., who expressed his concern about Isaacman’s relationship to SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Isaacman was previously an investor in SpaceX and has paid for two Dragon missions. In a letter written in March, Isaacman explained how he would disentangle his “actual and apparent” conflicts of interest with SpaceX.

However, Markey wanted to know if Isaacman would be pulling levers at NASA for Musk, and for the financial benefit of SpaceX. Markey pressed multiple times on whether Musk was in the room at Mar-A-Lago late last year when Trump offered Isaacman the position of NASA administrator. Isaacman declined to say, reiterating multiple times that his meeting was with Trump, not anyone else. Asked if he had discussed his plans for NASA with Musk, Isaacman said, “I have not.”

Earlier in the hearing, Isaacman sought to make clear that he was not beholden to Musk in any way.

“My loyalty is to this nation, the space agency, and its world-changing mission,” Isaacman said. Yes, he acknowledged he would talk to contractors for the space agency. It is important to draw on a broad range of perspectives, Isaacman said. But he wanted to make this clear: NASA works for the nation, and the contractors, he added, “work for us.”

A full committee vote on Isaacman is expected later this month after April 15, and if successful, the nomination would pass to the full Senate. Isaacman could be confirmed late this month or in May.

NASA nominee asks why lunar return has taken so long, and why it costs so much Read More »

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A military satellite waiting to launch with ULA will now fly with SpaceX

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For the second time in six months, SpaceX will deploy a US military satellite that was sitting in storage, waiting for a slot on United Launch Alliance’s launch schedule.

Space Systems Command, which oversees the military’s launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA’s Vulcan rocket to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force’s fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world.

The Space Force booked the Vulcan rocket to launch this spacecraft in 2023, when ULA hoped to begin flying military satellites on its new rocket by mid-2024. The Vulcan rocket is now scheduled to launch its first national security mission around the middle of this year, following the Space Force’s certification of ULA’s new launcher last month.

The “launch vehicle trade” allows the Space Force to launch the GPS III SV-08 satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida, as soon as the end of May, according to a press release.

“Capability sitting on the ground”

With Vulcan now cleared to launch military missions, officials are hopeful ULA can ramp up the rocket’s flight cadence. Vulcan launched on two demonstration flights last year, and ULA eventually wants to launch Vulcan twice per month. ULA engineers have their work cut out for them. The company’s Vulcan backlog now stands at 89 missions, following the Space Force’s announcement last week of 19 additional launches awarded to ULA.

Last year, the Pentagon’s chief acquisition official for space wrote a letter to ULA’s owners—Boeing and Lockheed Martin—expressing concern about ULA’s ability to scale the manufacturing of the Vulcan rocket.

“Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays,” Frank Calvelli, the Pentagon’s chief of space acquisition, wrote in the letter.

Vulcan may finally be on the cusp of delivering for the Space Force, but there are several military payloads in the queue to launch on Vulcan before GPS III SV-08, which was complete and in storage at its Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado.

Col. Jim Horne, senior materiel leader of launch execution, said in a statement that the rocket swap showcases the Space Force’s ability to launch in three months from call-up, compared to the typical planning cycle of two years. “It highlights another instance of the Space Force’s ability to complete high-priority launches on a rapid timescale, which demonstrates the capability to respond to emergent constellation needs as rapidly as Space Vehicle readiness allows,” Horne said.

A military satellite waiting to launch with ULA will now fly with SpaceX Read More »

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SpinLaunch—yes, the centrifuge rocket company—is making a hard pivot to satellites

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Outside of several mentions in the Rocket Report newsletter dating back to 2018, Ars Technica has not devoted too much attention to covering a novel California space company named SpinLaunch.

That’s because the premise is so outlandish as to almost not feel real. The company aims to build a kinetic launch system that spins a rocket around at speeds up to 4,700 mph (7,500 km/h) before sending it upward toward space. Then, at an altitude of 40 miles (60 km) or so, the rocket would ignite its engines to achieve orbital velocity. Essentially, SpinLaunch wants to yeet things into space.

But the company was no joke. After being founded in 2014, it raised more than $150 million over the next decade. It built a prototype accelerator in New Mexico and performed a series of flight tests. The flights reached altitudes of “tens of thousands” of feet, according to the company, and were often accompanied by slickly produced videos.

SpinLaunch goes quiet

Following this series of tests, by the end of 2022, the company went mostly quiet. It was unclear whether it ran out of funding, had hit some technical problems in trying to build a larger accelerator, or what. Somewhat ominously, SpinLaunch’s founder and chief executive, Jonathan Yaney, was replaced without explanation last May. The new leader would be David Wrenn, then serving as chief operating officer.

“I am confident in our ability to execute on the company’s mission and bring our integrated tech stack of low-cost space solutions to market,” Wrenn said at the time. “I look forward to sharing more details about our near- and long-term strategy in the coming months.”

Words like “tech stack” and “low-cost space solutions” sounded like nebulous corporate speak, and it was not clear what they meant. Nor did Wrenn immediately deliver on that promise, nearly a year ago, to share more details about the company’s near- and long-term strategy.

SpinLaunch—yes, the centrifuge rocket company—is making a hard pivot to satellites Read More »

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With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military’s top launch provider

blue origin, falcon 9, falcon heavy, launch, military space, new glenn, Science, Space, spacex, united launch alliance, US Space Force, vulcan / /

The military’s stable of certified rockets will include Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Vulcan, and New Glenn.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off on June 25, 2024, with a GOES weather satellite for NOAA. Credit: SpaceX

The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon’s most critical military to orbit into the early 2030s.

These missions will launch the government’s heaviest national security satellites, like the National Reconnaissance Office’s large bus-sized spy platforms, and deploy them into bespoke orbits. These types of launches often demand heavy-lift rockets with long-duration upper stages that can cruise through space for six or more hours.

The contracts awarded Friday are part of the next phase of the military’s space launch program once dominated by United Launch Alliance, the 50-50 joint venture between legacy defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

After racking up a series of successful launches with its Falcon 9 rocket more than a decade ago, SpaceX sued the Air Force for the right to compete with ULA for the military’s most lucrative launch contracts. The Air Force relented in 2015 and allowed SpaceX to bid. Since then, SpaceX has won more than 40 percent of missions the Pentagon has ordered through the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program, creating a relatively stable duopoly for the military’s launch needs.

The Space Force took over the responsibility for launch procurement from the Air Force after its creation in 2019. The next year, the Space Force signed another set of contracts with ULA and SpaceX for missions the military would order from 2020 through 2024. ULA’s new Vulcan rocket initially won 60 percent of these missions—known as NSSL Phase 2—but the Space Force reallocated a handful of launches to SpaceX after ULA encountered delays with Vulcan.

ULA’s Vulcan and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets will launch the remaining 42 Phase 2 missions over the next several years, then move on to Phase 3, which the Space Force announced Friday.

Spreading the wealth

This next round of Space Force launch contracts will flip the script, with SpaceX taking the lion’s share of the missions. The breakdown of the military’s new firm fixed-price launch agreements goes like this:

  • SpaceX will get 28 missions worth approximately $5.9 billion
  • ULA will get 19 missions worth approximately $5.4 billion
  • Blue Origin will get seven missions worth approximately

That equates to a 60-40 split between SpaceX and ULA for the bulk of the missions. Going into the competition, military officials set aside seven additional missions to launch with a third provider, allowing a new player to gain a foothold in the market. The Space Force reserves the right to reapportion missions between the three providers if one of them runs into trouble.

The Pentagon confirmed an unnamed fourth company also submitted a proposal, but wasn’t selected for Phase 3.

Rounded to the nearest million, the contract with SpaceX averages out to $212 million per launch. For ULA, it’s $282 million, and Blue Origin’s price is $341 million per launch. But take these numbers with caution. The contracts include a lot of bells and whistles, pricing them higher than what a commercial customer might pay.

According to the Pentagon, the contracts provide “launch services, mission unique services, mission acceleration, quick reaction/anomaly resolution, special studies, launch service support, fleet surveillance, and early integration studies/mission analysis.”

Essentially, the Space Force is paying a premium to all three launch providers for schedule priority, tailored solutions, and access to data from every flight of each company’s rocket, among other things.

New Glenn lifts off on its debut flight. Credit: Blue Origin

“Winning 60% percent of the missions may sound generous, but the reality is that all SpaceX competitors combined cannot currently deliver the other 40%!,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, posted on X. “I hope they succeed, but they aren’t there yet.”

This is true if you look at each company’s flight rate. SpaceX has launched Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets 140 times over the last 365 days. These are the flight-proven rockets SpaceX will use for its share of Space Force missions.

ULA has logged four missions in the same period, but just one with the Vulcan rocket it will use for future Space Force launches. And Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company, launched the heavy-lift New Glenn rocket on its first test flight in January.

“We are proud that we have launched 100 national security space missions and honored to continue serving the nation with our new Vulcan rocket,” said Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, in a statement.

ULA used the Delta IV and Atlas V rockets for most of the missions it has launched for the Pentagon. The Delta IV rocket family is now retired, and ULA will end production of the Atlas V rocket later this year. Now, ULA’s Vulcan rocket will take over as the company’s sole launch vehicle to serve the Pentagon. ULA aims to eventually ramp up the Vulcan launch cadence to fly up to 25 times per year.

After two successful test flights, the Space Force formally certified the Vulcan rocket last week, clearing the way for ULA to start using it for military missions in the coming months. While SpaceX has a clear advantage in number of launches, schedule assurance, and pricing—and reliability comparable to ULA—Bruno has recently touted the Vulcan rocket’s ability to maneuver over long periods in space as a differentiator.

“This award constitutes the most complex missions required for national security space,” Bruno said in a ULA press release. “Vulcan continues to use the world’s highest energy upper stage: the Centaur V. Centaur V’s unmatched flexibility and extreme endurance enables the most complex orbital insertions continuing to advance our nation’s capabilities in space.”

Blue Origin’s New Glenn must fly at least one more successful mission before the Space Force will certify it for Lane 2 missions. The selection of Blue Origin on Friday suggests military officials believe New Glenn is on track for certification by late 2026.

“Honored to serve additional national security missions in the coming years and contribute to our nation’s assured access to space,” Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, wrote on X. “This is a great endorsement of New Glenn’s capabilities, and we are committed to meeting the heavy lift needs of our US DoD and intelligence agency customers.”

Navigating NSSL

There’s something you must understand about the way the military buys launch services. For this round of competition, the Space Force divided the NSSL program into two lanes.

Friday’s announcement covers Lane 2 for traditional military satellites that operate thousands of miles above the Earth. This bucket includes things like GPS navigation satellites, NRO surveillance and eavesdropping platforms, and strategic communications satellites built to survive a nuclear war. The Space Force has a low tolerance for failure with these missions. Therefore, the military requires rockets be certified before they can launch big-ticket satellites, each of which often cost hundreds of millions, and sometimes billions, of dollars.

The Space Force required all Lane 2 bidders to show their rockets could reach nine “reference orbits” with payloads of a specified mass. Some of the orbits are difficult to reach, requiring technology that only SpaceX and ULA have demonstrated in the United States. Blue Origin plans to do so on a future flight.

This image shows what the Space Force’s fleet of missile warning and missile tracking satellites might look like in 2030, with a mix of platforms in geosynchronous orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and low-Earth orbit. The higher orbits will require launches by “Lane 2” providers. Credit: Space Systems Command

The military projects to order 54 launches in Lane 2 from this year through 2029, with announcements each October of exactly which missions will go to each launch provider. This year, it will be just SpaceX and ULA. The Space Force said Blue Origin won’t be eligible for firm orders until next year. The missions would launch between 2027 and 2032.

“America leads the world in space launch, and through these NSSL Phase 3 Lane 2 contracts, we will ensure continued access to this vital domain,” said Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, Acting Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration. “These awards bolster our ability to launch critical defense satellites while strengthening our industrial base and enhancing operational readiness.”

Lane 1 is primarily for missions to low-Earth orbit. These payloads include tech demos, experimental missions, and the military’s mega-constellation of missile tracking and data relay satellites managed by the Space Development Agency. For Lane 1 missions, the Space Force won’t levy the burdensome certification and oversight requirements it has long employed for national security launches. The Pentagon is willing to accept more risk with Lane 1, encompassing at least 30 missions through the end of the 2020s, in an effort to broaden the military’s portfolio of launch providers and boost competition.

Last June, Space Systems Command chose SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin for eligibility to compete for Lane 1 missions. SpaceX won all nine of the first batch of Lane 1 missions put up for bids. The military recently added Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket and Stoke Space’s Nova rocket to the Lane 1 mix. Neither of those rockets have flown, and they will need at least one successful launch before approval to fly military payloads.

The Space Force has separate contract mechanisms for the military’s smallest satellites, which typically launch on SpaceX rideshare missions or dedicated launches with companies like Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace.

Military leaders like having all these options, and would like even more. If one launch provider or launch site is unavailable due to a technical problem—or, as some military officials now worry, an enemy attack—commanders want multiple backups in their toolkit. Market forces dictate that more competition should also lower prices.

“A robust and resilient space launch architecture is the foundation of both our economic prosperity and our national security,” said US Space Force Chief of Space Operations Gen. Chance Saltzman. “National Security Space Launch isn’t just a program; it’s a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

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

With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military’s top launch provider Read More »

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SpaceX just took a big step toward reusing Starship’s Super Heavy booster

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SpaceX is having trouble with Starship’s upper stage after back-to-back failures, but engineers are making remarkable progress with the rocket’s enormous booster.

The most visible sign of SpaceX making headway with Starship’s first stage—called Super Heavy—came at 9: 40 am local time (10: 40 am EDT; 14: 40 UTC) Thursday at the company’s Starbase launch site in South Texas. With an unmistakable blast of orange exhaust, SpaceX fired up a Super Heavy booster that has already flown to the edge of space. The burn lasted approximately eight seconds.

This was the first time SpaceX has test-fired a “flight-proven” Super Heavy booster, and it paves the way for this particular rocket—designated Booster 14—to fly again soon. SpaceX confirmed a reflight of Booster 14, which previously launched and returned to Earth in January, will happen on next Starship launch With Thursday’s static fire test, Booster 14 appears to be closer to flight readiness than any of the boosters in SpaceX’s factory, which is a short distance from the launch site.

SpaceX said 29 of the booster’s 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines are flight-proven. “The first Super Heavy reuse will be a step towards our goal of zero-touch reflight,” SpaceX wrote on X.

A successful reflight of the Super Heavy booster would be an important milestone for the Starship program, while engineers struggle with problems on the rocket’s upper stage, known simply as the ship.

What a difference

Super Heavy’s engines are capable of producing nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, twice the power of NASA’s Saturn V rocket that sent astronauts toward the Moon. Super Heavy is perhaps the most complex rocket booster ever built. It’s certainly the largest. To get a sense of how big this booster is, imagine the fuselage of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet standing on end.

SpaceX has now launched eight full-scale test flights of Starship, with a Super Heavy booster and Starship’s upper stage stacked together to form a rocket that towers 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. The booster portion of the rocket has performed well so far, with seven consecutive successful launches since a failure on Starship’s debut flight.

Booster 14 comes in for the catch after flying to the edge of space on January 16. Credit: SpaceX

Most recently, SpaceX has recovered three Super Heavy boosters in four attempts. SpaceX has a wealth of experience with recovering and reusing Falcon 9 boosters. The total number of Falcon rocket landings is now 426.

SpaceX reused a Falcon 9 booster for the first time in March 2017. This was an operational flight with a communications satellite on a mission valued at several hundred million dollars.

Ahead of the milestone Falcon 9 reflight eight years ago, SpaceX spent nearly a year refurbishing and retesting the rocket after it returned from its first mission. The rocket racked up more mileage on the ground than it did in flight, first returning to its Florida launch base on a SpaceX drone ship and then moving by truck to SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, for thorough inspections and refurbishment.

SpaceX just took a big step toward reusing Starship’s Super Heavy booster Read More »

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Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought

butch wilmore, Features, Space, starliner, suni williams / /

“Hey, this is a very precarious situation we’re in.”

NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore receives a warm welcome at Johnson Space Center’s Ellington Field in Houston from NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Woody Hoburg after completing a long-duration science mission aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz

NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore receives a warm welcome at Johnson Space Center’s Ellington Field in Houston from NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman and Woody Hoburg after completing a long-duration science mission aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz

As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner’s thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.

He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone’s throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission’s flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.

But what if it was not safe to come home, either?

“I don’t know that we can come back to Earth at that point,” Wilmore said in an interview. “I don’t know if we can. And matter of fact, I’m thinking we probably can’t.”

Starliner astronauts meet with the media

On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both of them.

Many of the questions concerned the politically messy end of the mission, in which the Trump White House claimed it had rescued the astronauts after they were stranded by the Biden administration. This was not true, but it is also not a question that active astronauts are going to answer. They have too much respect for the agency and the White House that appoints its leadership. They are trained not to speak out of school. As Wilmore said repeatedly on Monday, “I can’t speak to any of that. Nor would I.”

So when Ars met with Wilmore at the end of the day—it was his final interview, scheduled for 4: 55 to 5: 05 pm in a small studio at Johnson Space Center—politics was not on the menu. Instead, I wanted to know the real story, the heretofore untold story of what it was really like to fly Starliner. After all, the problems with the spacecraft’s propulsion system precipitated all the other events—the decision to fly Starliner home without crew, the reshuffling of the Crew-9 mission, and their recent return in March after nine months in space.

I have known Wilmore a bit for more than a decade. I was privileged to see his launch on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan in 2014, alongside his family. We both are about to become empty nesters, with daughters who are seniors in high school, soon to go off to college. Perhaps because of this, Wilmore felt comfortable sharing his experiences and anxieties from the flight. We blew through the 10-minute interview slot and ended up talking for nearly half an hour.

It’s a hell of a story.

Launch and a cold night

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft faced multiple delays before the vehicle’s first crewed mission, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on June 5, 2024. These included a faulty valve on the Atlas V rocket’s upper stage, and then a helium leak inside Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.

The valve issue, in early May, stood the mission down long enough that Wilmore asked to fly back to Houston for additional time in a flight simulator to keep his skills fresh. Finally, with fine weather, the Starliner Crew Flight Test took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It marked the first human launch on the Atlas V rocket, which had a new Centaur upper stage with two engines.

Suni Williams’ first night on Starliner was quite cold.

Credit: NASA/Helen Arase Vargas

Suni Williams’ first night on Starliner was quite cold. Credit: NASA/Helen Arase Vargas

Sunita “Suni” Williams: “Oh man, the launch was awesome. Both of us looked at each other like, ‘Wow, this is going just perfectly.’ So the ride to space and the orbit insertion burn, all perfect.”

Barry “Butch” Wilmore: “In simulations, there’s always a deviation. Little deviations in your trajectory. And during the launch on Shuttle STS-129 many years ago, and Soyuz, there’s the similar type of deviations that you see in this trajectory. I mean, it’s always correcting back. But this ULA Atlas was dead on the center. I mean, it was exactly in the crosshairs, all the way. It was much different than what I’d expected or experienced in the past. It was exhilarating. It was fantastic. Yeah, it really was. The dual-engine Centaur did have a surge. I’m not sure ULA knew about it, but it was obvious to us. We were the first to ride it. Initially we asked, ‘Should that be doing that? This surging?’ But after a while, it was kind of soothing. And again, we were flying right down the middle.”

After Starliner separated from the Atlas V rocket, Williams and Wilmore performed several maneuvering tests and put the vehicle through its paces. Starliner performed exceptionally well during these initial tests on day one.

Wilmore: “The precision, the ability to control to the exact point that I wanted, was great. There was very little, almost imperceptible cross-control. I’ve never given a handling qualities rating of “one,” which was part of a measurement system. To take a qualitative test and make a quantitative assessment. I’ve never given a one, ever, in any test I’ve ever done, because nothing’s ever deserved a one. Boy, I was tempted in some of the tests we did. I didn’t give a one, but it was pretty amazing.”

Following these tests, the crew attempted to sleep for several hours ahead of their all-important approach and docking with the International Space Station on the flight’s second day. More so even than launch or landing, the most challenging part of this mission, which would stress Starliner’s handling capabilities as well as its navigation system, would come as it approached the orbiting laboratory.

Williams: “The night that we spent there in the spacecraft, it was a little chilly. We had traded off some of our clothes to bring up some equipment up to the space station. So I had this small T-shirt thing, long-sleeve T-shirt, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m cold.’ Butch is like, ‘I’m cold, too.’ So, we ended up actually putting our boots on, and then I put my spacesuit on. And then he’s like, maybe I want mine, too. So we both actually got in our spacesuits. It might just be because there were two people in there.”

Starliner was designed to fly four people to the International Space Station for six-month stays in orbit. But for this initial test flight, there were just two people, which meant less body heat. Wilmore estimated that it was about 50° Fahrenheit in the cabin.

Wilmore: “It was definitely low 50s, if not cooler. When you’re hustling and bustling, and doing things, all the tests we were doing after launch, we didn’t notice it until we slowed down. We purposely didn’t take sleeping bags. I was just going to bungee myself to the bulkhead. I had a sweatshirt and some sweatpants, and I thought, I’m going to be fine. No, it was frigid. And I even got inside my space suit, put the boots on and everything, gloves, the whole thing. And it was still cold.”

Time to dock with the space station

After a few hours of fitful sleep, Wilmore decided to get up and start working to get his blood pumping. He reviewed the flight plan and knew it was going to be a big day. Wilmore had been concerned about the performance of the vehicle’s reaction control system thrusters. There are 28 of them. Around the perimeter of Starliner’s service module, at the aft of the vehicle, there are four “doghouses” equally spaced around the vehicle.

Each of these doghouses contains seven small thrusters for maneuvering. In each doghouse, two thrusters are aft-facing, two are forward-facing, and three are in different radial directions (see an image of a doghouse, with the cover removed, here). For docking, these thrusters are essential. There had been some problems with their performance during an uncrewed flight test to the space station in May 2022, and Wilmore had been concerned those issues might crop up again.

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is pictured docked to the International Space Station. One of the four doghouses is visible on the service module.

Credit: NASA

Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is pictured docked to the International Space Station. One of the four doghouses is visible on the service module. Credit: NASA

Wilmore: “Before the flight we had a meeting with a lot of the senior Boeing executives, including the chief engineer. [This was Naveed Hussain, chief engineer for Boeing’s Defense, Space, and Security division.] Naveed asked me what is my biggest concern? And I said the thrusters and the valves because we’d had failures on the OFT missions. You don’t get the hardware back. (Starliner’s service module is jettisoned before the crew capsule returns from orbit). So you’re just looking at data and engineering judgment to say, ‘OK, it must’ve been FOD,’ (foreign object debris) or whatever the various issues they had. And I said that’s what concerns me the most. Because in my mind, I’m thinking, ‘If we lost thrusters, we could be in a situation where we’re in space and can’t control it.’ That’s what I was thinking. And oh my, what happened? We lost the first thruster.”

When vehicles approach the space station, they use two imaginary lines to help guide their approach. These are the R-bar, which is a line connecting the space station to the center of Earth. The “R” stands for radius. Then there is the V-bar, which is the velocity vector of the space station. Due to thruster issues, as Starliner neared the V-bar about 260 meters (850 feet) from the space station, Wilmore had to take manual control of the vehicle.

Wilmore: “As we get closer to the V-bar, we lose our second thruster. So now we’re single fault tolerance for the loss of 6DOF control. You understand that?”

Here things get a little more complicated if you’ve never piloted anything. When Wilmore refers to 6DOF control, he means six degrees of freedom—that is, the six different movements possible in three-dimensional space: forward/back, up/down, left/right, yaw, pitch, and roll. With Starliner’s four doghouses and their various thrusters, a pilot is able to control the spacecraft’s movement across these six degrees of freedom. But as Starliner got to within a few hundred meters of the station, a second thruster failed. The condition of being “single fault” tolerant means that the vehicle could sustain just one more thruster failure before being at risk of losing full control of Starliner’s movement. This would necessitate a mandatory abort of the docking attempt.

Wilmore: “We’re single fault tolerant, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, we’re supposed to leave the space station.’ Because I know the flight rules. I did not know that the flight directors were already in discussions about waiving the flight rule because we’ve lost two thrusters. We didn’t know why. They just dropped.”

The heroes in Mission Control

As part of the Commercial Crew program, the two companies providing transportation services for NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing, got to decide who would fly their spacecraft. SpaceX chose to operate its Dragon vehicles out of a control center at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Boeing chose to contract with NASA’s Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston to fly Starliner. So at this point, the vehicle is under the purview of a Flight Director named Ed Van Cise. This was the capstone mission of his 15-year career as a NASA flight director.

Wilmore: “Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That’s a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, ‘What do you think?’ they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control.”

From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA’s webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point.

Wilmore: “We acquired the V-bar, and I took over manual control. And then we lose the third thruster. Now, again, they’re all in the same direction. And I’m picturing these thrusters that we’re losing. We lost two bottom thrusters. You can lose four thrusters, if they’re top and bottom, but you still got the two on this side, you can still maneuver. But if you lose thrusters in off-orthogonal, the bottom and the port, and you’ve only got starboard and top, you can’t control that. It’s off-axis. So I’m parsing all this out in my mind, because I understand the system. And we lose two of the bottom thrusters. We’ve lost a port thruster. And now we’re zero-fault tolerant. We’re already past the point where we were supposed to leave, and now we’re zero-fault tolerant and I’m manual control. And, oh my, the control is sluggish. Compared to the first day, it is not the same spacecraft. Am I able to maintain control? I am. But it is not the same.”

At this point in the interview, Wilmore went into some wonderful detail.

Wilmore: “And this is the part I’m sure you haven’t heard. We lost the fourth thruster. Now we’ve lost 6DOF control. We can’t maneuver forward. I still have control, supposedly, on all the other axes. But I’m thinking, the F-18 is a fly-by-wire. You put control into the stick, and the throttle, and it sends the signal to the computer. The computer goes, ‘OK, he wants to do that, let’s throw that out aileron a bit. Let’s throw that stabilizer a bit. Let’s pull the rudder there.’ And it’s going to maintain balanced flight. I have not even had a reason to think, how does Starliner do this, to maintain a balance?”

This is a very precarious situation we’re in

Essentially, Wilmore could not fully control Starliner any longer. But simply abandoning the docking attempt was not a palatable solution. Just as the thrusters were needed to control the vehicle during the docking process, they were also necessary to position Starliner for its deorbit burn and reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. So Wilmore had to contemplate whether it was riskier to approach the space station or try to fly back to Earth. Williams was worrying about the same thing.

Williams: “There was a lot of unsaid communication, like, ‘Hey, this is a very precarious situation we’re in.’ I think both of us overwhelmingly felt like it would be really nice to dock to that space station that’s right in front of us. We knew that they [Mission Control] were working really hard to be able to keep communication with us, and then be able to send commands. We were both thinking, what if we lose communication with the ground? So NORDO Con Ops (this means flying a vehicle without a radio), and we didn’t talk about it too much, but we already had synced in our mind that we should go to the space station. This is our place that we need to probably go to, to have a conversation because we don’t know exactly what is happening, why the thrusters are falling off, and what the solution would be.”

Wilmore: “I don’t know that we can come back to Earth at that point. I don’t know if we can. And matter of fact, I’m thinking we probably can’t. So there we are, loss of 6DOF control, four aft thrusters down, and I’m visualizing orbital mechanics. The space station is nose down. So we’re not exactly level with the station, but below it. If you’re below the station, you’re moving faster. That’s orbital mechanics. It’s going to make you move away from the station. So I’m doing all of this in my mind. I don’t know what control I have. What if I lose another thruster? What if we lose comm? What am I going to do?”

One of the other challenges at this point, in addition to holding his position relative to the space station, was keeping Starliner’s nose pointed directly at the orbital laboratory.

Williams: “Starliner is based on a vision system that looks at the space station and uses the space station as a frame of reference. So if we had started to fall off and lose that, which there’s a plus or minus that we can have; we didn’t lose the station ever, but we did start to deviate a little bit. I think both of us were getting a bit nervous then because the system would’ve automatically aborted us.”

After Starliner lost four of its 28 reaction control system thrusters, Van Cise and this team in Houston decided the best chance for success was resetting the failed thrusters. This is, effectively, a fancy way of turning off your computer and rebooting it to try to fix the problem. But it meant Wilmore had to go hands-off from Starliner’s controls.

Imagine that. You’re drifting away from the space station, trying to maintain your position. The station is your only real lifeline because if you lose the ability to dock, the chance of coming back in one piece is quite low. And now you’re being told to take your hands off the controls.

Wilmore: “That was not easy to do. I have lived rendezvous orbital dynamics going back decades. [Wilmore is one of only two active NASA astronauts who has experience piloting the space shuttle.] Ray Bigonesse is our rendezvous officer. What a motivated individual. Primarily him, but me as well, we worked to develop this manual rendezvous capability over the years. He’s a volunteer fireman, and he said, ‘Hey, I’m coming off shift at 5: 30 Saturday morning; will you meet me in the sim?’ So we’d meet on Saturdays. We never got to the point of saying lose four thrusters. Who would’ve thought that, in the same direction? But we’re in there training, doing things, playing around. That was the preparation.”

All of this training meant Wilmore felt like he was in the best position to fly Starliner, and he did not relish the thought of giving up control. But finally, when he thought the spacecraft was temporarily stable enough, Wilmore called down to Mission Control, “Hands off.” Almost immediately, flight controllers sent a signal to override Starliner’s flight computer and fire the thrusters that had been turned off. Two of the four thrusters came back online.

Wilmore: “Now we’re back to single-fault tolerant. But then we lose a fifth jet. What if we’d have lost that fifth jet while those other four were still down? I have no idea what would’ve happened. I attribute to the providence of the Lord getting those two jets back before that fifth one failed. So we’re down to zero-fault tolerant again. I can still maintain control. Again, sluggish. Not only was the control different on the visual, what inputs and what it looked like, but we could hear it. The valve opening and closing. When a thruster would fire, it was like a machine gun.”

We’re probably not flying home in Starliner

Mission Control decided that it wanted to try to recover the failed thrusters again. After Wilmore took his hands off the controls, this process recovered all but one of them. At that point, the vehicle could be flown autonomously, as it was intended to be. When asked to give up control of the vehicle for its final approach to the station, Wilmore said he was apprehensive about doing so. He was concerned that if the system went into automation mode, it may not have been possible to get it back in manual mode. After all that had happened, he wanted to make sure he could take control of Starliner again.

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams landed in a Crew Dragon spacecraft in March. Dolphins were among their greeters.

Credit: NASA

Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams landed in a Crew Dragon spacecraft in March. Dolphins were among their greeters. Credit: NASA

Wilmore: “I was very apprehensive. In earlier sims, I had even told the flight directors, ‘If we get in a situation where I got to give it back to auto, I may not.’ And they understood. Because if I’ve got a mode that’s working, I don’t want to give it up. But because we got those jets back, I thought, ‘OK, we’re only down one.’ All this is going through my mind in real time. And I gave it back. And of course, we docked.”

Williams: “I was super happy. If you remember from the video, when we came into the space station, I did this little happy dance. One, of course, just because I love being in space and am happy to be on the space station and [with] great friends up there. Two, just really happy that Starliner docked to the space station. My feeling at that point in time was like, ‘Oh, phew, let’s just take a breather and try to understand what happened.'”

“There are really great people on our team. Our team is huge. The commercial crew program, NASA and Boeing engineers, were all working hard to try to understand, to try to decide what we might need to do to get us to come back in that spacecraft. At that point, we also knew it was going to take a little while. Everything in this business takes a little while, like you know, because you want to cross the T’s and dot the I’s and make sure. I think the decision at the end of the summer was the right decision. We didn’t have all the T’s crossed; we didn’t have all the I’s dotted. So do we take that risk where we don’t need to?”

Wilmore added that he felt pretty confident, in the aftermath of docking to the space station, that Starliner probably would not be their ride home.

Wilmore: “I was thinking, we might not come home in the spacecraft. We might not. And one of the first phone calls I made was to Vincent LaCourt, the ISS flight director, who was one of the ones that made the call about waiving the flight rule. I said, ‘OK, what about this spacecraft, is it our safe haven?‘”

It was unlikely to happen, but if some catastrophic space station emergency occurred while Wilmore and Williams were in orbit, what were they supposed to do? Should they retreat to Starliner for an emergency departure, or cram into one of the other vehicles on station, for which they did not have seats or spacesuits? LaCourt said they should use Starliner as a safe haven for the time being. Therein followed a long series of meetings and discussions about Starliner’s suitability for flying crew back to Earth. Publicly, NASA and Boeing expressed confidence in Starliner’s safe return with crew. But Williams and Wilmore, who had just made that harrowing ride, felt differently.

Wilmore: “I was very skeptical, just because of what we’d experienced. I just didn’t see that we could make it. I was hopeful that we could, but it would’ve been really tough to get there, to where we could say, ‘Yeah, we can come back.'”

So they did not.

Photo of Eric Berger

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.

Starliner’s flight to the space station was far wilder than most of us thought Read More »

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NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the longest chain carbon molecules yet on Mars

Curiosity rover, mars rover, NASA, Science, Space, syndication / /

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has detected the largest organic (carbon-containing) molecules ever found on the red planet. The discovery is one of the most significant findings in the search for evidence of past life on Mars. This is because, on Earth at least, relatively complex, long-chain carbon molecules are involved in biology. These molecules could actually be fragments of fatty acids, which are found in, for example, the membranes surrounding biological cells.

Scientists think that, if life ever emerged on Mars, it was probably microbial in nature. Because microbes are so small, it’s difficult to be definitive about any potential evidence for life found on Mars. Such evidence needs more powerful scientific instruments that are too large to be put on a rover.

The organic molecules found by Curiosity consist of carbon atoms linked in long chains, with other elements bonded to them, like hydrogen and oxygen. They come from a 3.7-billion-year-old rock dubbed Cumberland, encountered by the rover at a presumed dried-up lakebed in Mars’s Gale Crater. Scientists used the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument on the NASA rover to make their discovery.

Scientists were actually looking for evidence of amino acids, which are the building blocks of proteins and therefore key components of life as we know it. But this unexpected finding is almost as exciting. The research is published in Proceedings of the National Academies of Science.

Among the molecules were decane, which has 10 carbon atoms and 22 hydrogen atoms, and dodecane, with 12 carbons and 26 hydrogen atoms. These are known as alkanes, which fall under the umbrella of the chemical compounds known as hydrocarbons.

It’s an exciting time in the search for life on Mars. In March this year, scientists presented evidence of features in a different rock sampled elsewhere on Mars by the Perseverance rover. These features, dubbed “leopard spots” and “poppy seeds,” could have been produced by the action of microbial life in the distant past, or not. The findings were presented at a US conference and have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has found the longest chain carbon molecules yet on Mars Read More »