Space

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NASA officials undermine Musk’s claims about ‘stranded’ astronauts

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“We were looking at this before some of those statements were made by the President.”

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

Over the last month there has been something more than a minor kerfuffle in the space industry over the return of two NASA astronauts from the International Space Station.

The fate of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 5, 2024, has become a political issue after President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the astronauts’ return was held up by the Biden White House.

In February, Trump and Musk appeared on FOX News. During the joint interview, the subject of Wilmore and Williams came up. They remain in space today after NASA decided it would be best they did not fly home in their malfunctioning Starliner spacecraft—but would return in a SpaceX-built Crew Dragon.

“At the President’s request, or instruction, we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed to a ridiculous degree,” Musk said.

“They got left in space,” Trump added.

“They were left up there for political reasons, which is not good,” Musk concluded.

After this interview, a Danish astronaut named Andreas Mogensen asserted that Musk was lying. “What a lie,” Mogensen wrote on the social media site Musk owns, X. “And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.”

Musk offered a caustic response to Mogensen. “You are fully retarded,” Musk wrote. “SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons. Idiot.”

So what’s the truth?

NASA has not directly answered questions about this over the last month. However, the people who really know the answer lie within the human spaceflight programs at the space agency. After one news conference was canceled last month, two key NASA officials were finally made available on a media teleconference on Friday evening. These were Ken Bowersox, associate administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate, and Steve Stich, manager, of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which is responsible for Starliner and Crew Dragon flights.

Musk is essentially making two claims. First, he is saying that last year SpaceX offered to bring Wilmore and Williams home from the International Space Station—and made the offer directly to the Biden Administration. And the offer was refused for “political” reasons.

Second, Musk says that, at Trump’s request, the return of Wilmore and Williams was accelerated. The pair is now likely to return home to Earth as part of the Crew 9 mission later this month, about a week after the launch of a new group of astronauts to the space station. This Crew 10 mission has a launch date of March 12, so Wilmore and Williams could finally fly home about two weeks from now.

Let’s examine each of Musk’s claims in light of what Bowersox and Stich said Friday evening.

Was Musk’s offer declined for political reasons?

On July 14, last year, NASA awarded SpaceX a special contract to study various options to bring Wilmore and Williams home on a Crew Dragon vehicle. At the time, the space agency was considering options if Starliner was determined to be unsafe. Among the options NASA was considering were to fly Wilmore and Williams home on the Crew 8 vehicle attached to the station (which would put an unprecedented six people in the capsule) or asking SpaceX to autonomously fly a Dragon to the station to return Wilmore and Williams separately.

“The SpaceX folks helped us with a lot of options for how we would bring Butch and Suni home on Dragon in a contingency,” Bowersox said during Friday’s teleconference. “When it comes to adding on missions, or bringing a capsule home early, those were always options. But we ruled them out pretty quickly just based on how much money we’ve got in our budget, and the importance of keeping crews on the International Space Station. They’re an important part of maintaining the station.”

As a result, the Crew 9 mission launched in September with just two astronauts. Wilmore and Williams joined that crew for a full, six-month increment on the space station.

Stich said NASA made that decision based on flight schedules to the space station and the orbiting laboratory’s needs. It also allowed time to send SpaceX spacesuits up for the pair of astronauts and to produce seat liners that would make their landing in the water, under parachutes, safe.

“When we laid all that out, the best option was really the one that we’re embarking upon now,” Stich said. “And so we did Crew 9, flying the two empty seats, flying a suit for Butch up, and also making sure that the seats were right for Butch’s anthropometrics, and Suni’s, to return them safely.”

So yes, SpaceX has been working with NASA to present options, including the possibility of a return last fall. However, those discussions were being held within the program levels and their leaders: Stich for Commercial Crew and Dana Weigel for the International Space Station.

“Dana and I worked to come up with a decision that worked for the Commercial Crew Program and Space Station,” Stich said. “And then, Ken (Bowersox), we all we had the Flight Readiness Review process with you, and the Administrator of NASA listened in as well. So we had a recommendation to the agency and that was on the process that we typically use.”

Bowersox confirmed that the decision was made at the programmatic level.

“That’s typically the way our decisions work,” Bowersox said. “The programs work what makes the most sense for them, programmatically, technically. We’ll weigh in at the headquarters level, and in this case we thought the plan that we came up with made a lot of sense.”

During the teleconference, a vice president at SpaceX, Bill Gerstenmaier, was asked directly what offer Musk was referring to when he mentioned the Biden administration. He did not provide a substantive answer.

Musk claims he made an offer directly to senior officials in the Biden Administration. We have no way to verify that, but it does seem clear that the Biden administration never communicated such an offer to lower-level officials within NASA, who made their decision for technical rather than political reasons.

“I think you know we work for NASA, and we worked with NASA cooperatively to do whatever we think was the right thing,” the SpaceX official, Gerstenmaier, replied. “You know, we were willing to support in any manner they thought was the right way to support. They came up with the option you heard described today by them, and we’re supporting that option.”

Did Trump tell NASA to accelerate Butch and Suni’s return?

As of late last year, the Crew 9 mission was due to return in mid-February. However, there was a battery issue with a new Dragon spacecraft that was going to be used to fly Crew 10 into orbit. As a result, NASA announced on December 17 that the return of the crew was delayed into late March or early April.

Then, on February 11, NASA announced that the Crew 10 launch was being brought forward to March 12. This was a couple of weeks earlier than planned, and it was possible because NASA and SpaceX decided to swap out Dragon capsules, using a previously flown vehicle—Crew Dragon Endurance—for Crew 10.

So was this change to accelerate the return of Wilmore and Williams politically driven?

The decision to swap to Endurance was made in late January, Stich said, and this allowed the launch date to be moved forward. Asked if political pressure was a reason, Stich said it was not. “It really was driven by a lot of other factors, and we were looking at this before some of those statements were made by the President and Mr. Musk,” he said.

Bowersox added that this was correct but also said that NASA appreciated the President’s interest in the space program.

“I can verify that Steve has been talking about how we might need to juggle the flights and switch capsules a good month before there was any discussion outside of NASA, but the President’s interest sure added energy to the conversation,” Bowersox said.

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.

NASA officials undermine Musk’s claims about ‘stranded’ astronauts Read More »

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The X-37B spaceplane lands after helping pave the way for “maneuver warfare”

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On this mission, military officials said the X-37B tested “space domain awareness technology experiments” that aim to improve the Space Force’s knowledge of the space environment. Defense officials consider the space domain—like land, sea, and air—a contested environment that could become a battlefield in future conflicts.

Last month, the Space Force released the first image of Earth from an X-37B in space. This image was captured in 2024 as the spacecraft flew in its high-altitude orbit, and shows a portion of the X-37B’s power-generating solar array. Credit: US Space Force

The Space Force hasn’t announced plans for the next X-37B mission. Typically, the next X-37B flight has launched within a year of the prior mission’s landing. So far, all of the X-37B flights have launched from Florida, with landings at Vandenberg and at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where Boeing and the Space Force refurbish the spaceplanes between missions.

The aerobraking maneuvers demonstrated by the X-37B could find applications on future operational military satellites, according to Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command.

“The X-37 is a test and experimentation platform, but that aerobraking maneuver allowed it to bridge multiple orbital regimes, and we think this is exactly the kind of maneuverability we’d like to see in future systems, which will unlock a whole new series of operational concepts,” Whiting said in December at the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference.

Space Command’s “astrographic” area of responsibility (AOR) starts at the top of Earth’s atmosphere and extends to the Moon and beyond.

“An irony of the space domain is that everything in our AOR is in motion, but rarely do we use maneuver as a way to gain positional advantage,” Whiting said. “We believe at US Space Command it is vital, given the threats we now see in novel orbits that are hard for us to get to, as well as the fact that the Chinese have been testing on-orbit refueling capability, that we need some kind of sustained space maneuver.”

Improvements in maneuverability would have benefits in surveilling an adversary’s satellites, as well as in defensive and offensive combat operations in orbit.

The Space Force could attain the capability for sustained maneuvers—known in some quarters as dynamic space operations—in several ways. One is to utilize in-orbit refueling that allows satellites to “maneuver without regret,” and another is to pursue more fuel-efficient means of changing orbits, such as aerobraking or solar-electric propulsion.

Then, Whiting said Space Command could transform how it operates by employing “maneuver warfare” as the Army, Navy and Air Force do. “We think we need to move toward a joint function of true maneuver advantage in space.”

The X-37B spaceplane lands after helping pave the way for “maneuver warfare” Read More »

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Intuitive Machines’ second attempt to land on the Moon also went sideways

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Inside a small control room, during the middle of the day on Thursday local time in Texas, about a dozen white-knuckled engineers at a space startup named Intuitive Machines started to get worried. Their spacecraft, a lander named Athena, was beginning its final descent down to the lunar surface.

A little more than a year had passed since the company’s first attempt to land on the Moon with a similarly built vehicle, Odysseus. Due to problems with that spacecraft’s laser rangefinder, it skidded into the Moon’s surface and toppled over.

So engineers at Intuitive Machines had checked, and re-checked the laser-based altimeters on Athena. When the lander got down within about 30 km of the lunar surface, they tested the rangefinders again. Worryingly, there was some noise in the readings as the laser bounced off the Moon. However, the engineers had reason to believe that, maybe, the readings would improve as the spacecraft got nearer to the surface.

“Our hope was that the signal to noise would improve as we got closer to the Moon,” said Tim Crain, chief technology officer for Intuitive Machines, speaking to reporters afterward.

It didn’t. The noise remained. And so, to some extent, Athena went down to the Moon blind. The spacecraft’s propulsion system, based on liquid oxygen and methane, and designed in-house, worked beautifully. But in the final moments, the spacecraft did not quite know where it was relative to the surface.

Probably lying on its side

Beyond that, Crain and the rest of the company, including its chief executive Steve Altemus, could not precisely say what happened. After Athena landed, the engineers in mission control could talk to the spacecraft, and they were able to generate some power from its solar arrays. But precisely where it was, or how it lay on the ground, they could not say a few hours later.

Based on a reading from an inertial measurement unit inside the vehicle, most likely Athena is lying on its side. This is the same fate Odysseus met last year, when it skidded into the Moon, broke a leg, and toppled over.

Intuitive Machines’ second attempt to land on the Moon also went sideways Read More »

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When Europe needed it most, the Ariane 6 rocket finally delivered

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“For this sovereignty, we must yield to the temptation of preferring SpaceX.”

Europe’s second Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center on Thursday with a French military spy satellite. Credit: ESA-CNES-Arianespace-P. Piron

Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket lifted off Thursday from French Guiana and deployed a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the French military, notching a success on its first operational flight.

The 184-foot-tall (56-meter) rocket lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 11: 24 am EST (16: 24 UTC). Twin solid-fueled boosters and a hydrogen-fueled core stage engine powered the Ariane 6 through thick clouds on an arcing trajectory north from the spaceport on South America’s northeastern coast.

The rocket shed its strap-on boosters a little more than two minutes into the flight, then jettisoned its core stage nearly eight minutes after liftoff. The spent rocket parts fell into the Atlantic Ocean. The upper stage’s Vinci engine ignited two times to reach a nearly circular polar orbit about 500 miles (800 kilometers) above the Earth. A little more than an hour after launch, the Ariane 6 upper stage deployed CSO-3, a sharp-eyed French military spy satellite, to begin a mission providing optical surveillance imagery to French intelligence agencies and military forces.

“This is an absolute pleasure for me today to announce that Ariane 6 has successfully placed into orbit the CSO-3 satellite,” said David Cavaillolès, who took over in January as CEO of Arianespace, the Ariane 6’s commercial operator. “Today, here in Kourou, we can say that thanks to Ariane 6, Europe and France have their own autonomous access to space back, and this is great news.”

This was the second flight of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket, following a mostly successful debut launch last July. The first test flight of the unproven Ariane 6 carried a batch of small, relatively inexpensive satellites. An Auxiliary Propulsion Unit (APU)—essentially a miniature second engine—on the upper stage shut down in the latter portion of the inaugural Ariane 6 flight, after the rocket reached orbit and released some of its payloads. But the unit malfunctioned before a third burn of the upper stage’s main engine, preventing the Ariane 6 from targeting a controlled reentry into the atmosphere.

The APU has several jobs on an Ariane 6 flight, including maintaining pressure inside the upper stage’s cryogenic propellant tanks, settling propellants before each main engine firing, and making fine adjustments to the rocket’s position in space. The APU appeared to work as designed Thursday, although this launch flew a less demanding profile than the test flight last year.

Is Ariane 6 the solution?

Ariane 6 has been exorbitantly costly and years late, but its first operational success comes at an opportune time for Europe.

Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for research and higher education, says Ariane 6 is “proof of our space sovereignty,” as many European officials feel they can no longer rely on the United States. Baptiste, an engineer and former head of the French space agency, mentioned “sovereignty” so many times, turning his statement into a drinking game crossed my mind.

“The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with Elon Musk at his side, already has significant consequences on our research partnerships, on our commercial partnerships,” Baptiste said. “Should I mention the uncertainties weighing today on our cooperation with NASA and NOAA, when emblematic programs like the ISS (International Space Station) are being unilaterally questioned by Elon Musk?

“If we want to maintain our independence, ensure our security, and preserve our sovereignty, we must equip ourselves with the means for strategic autonomy, and space is an essential part of this,” he continued.

Philippe Baptiste arrives at a government question session at the Senate in Paris on March 5, 2025. Credit: Magali Cohen/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

Baptiste’s comments echo remarks from a range of European leaders in recent weeks.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address Wednesday night that the French were “legitimately worried” about European security after Trump reversed US policy on Ukraine. America’s NATO allies are largely united in their desire to continue supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion, while the Trump administration seeks a ceasefire that would require significant Ukrainian concessions.

“I want to believe that the United States will stay by our side, but we have to be prepared for that not to be the case,” Macron said. “The future of Europe does not have to be decided in Washington or Moscow.”

Friedrich Merz, set to become Germany’s next chancellor, said last month that Europe should strive to “achieve independence” from the United States. “It is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

Merz also suggested Germany, France, and the United Kingdom should explore cooperation on a European nuclear deterrent to replace that of the United States, which has committed to protecting European territory from Russian attack for more than 75 years. Macron said the French military, which runs the only nuclear forces in Europe fully independent of the United States, could be used to protect allies elsewhere on the continent.

Access to space is also a strategic imperative for Europe, and it hasn’t come cheap. ESA paid more than $4 billion to develop the Ariane 6 rocket as a cheaper, more capable replacement for the Ariane 5, which retired in 2023. There are still pressing questions about Ariane 6’s cost per launch and whether the rocket will ever be able to meet its price target and compete with SpaceX and other companies in the commercial market.

But European officials have freely admitted the commercial market is secondary on their list of Ariane 6 goals.

European satellite operators stopped launching their payloads on Russian rockets after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now, with Elon Musk inserting himself into European politics, there’s little appetite among European government officials to launch their satellites on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

The second Ariane 6 rocket on the launch pad in French Guiana. Credit: ESA–S. Corvaja

The Falcon 9 was the go-to choice for the European Space Agency, the European Union, and several national governments in Europe after they lost access to Russia’s Soyuz rocket and when Europe’s homemade Ariane 6 and Vega rockets faced lengthy delays. ESA launched a $1.5 billion space telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket in 2023, then returned to SpaceX to launch a climate research satellite and an asteroid explorer last year. The European Union paid SpaceX to launch four satellites for its flagship Galileo navigation network.

European space officials weren’t thrilled to do this. ESA was somewhat more accepting of the situation, with the agency’s director general recognizing Europe was suffering from an “acute launcher crisis” two years ago. On the other hand, the EU refused to even acknowledge SpaceX’s role in delivering Galileo satellites to orbit in the text of a post-launch press release.

“For this sovereignty, we must yield to the temptation of preferring SpaceX or another competitor that may seem trendier, more reliable, or cheaper,” Baptiste said. “We did not yield for CSO-3, and we will not yield in the future. We cannot yield because doing so would mean closing the door to space for good, and there would be no turning back. This is why the first commercial launch of Ariane 6 is not just a technical and one-off success. It marks a new milestone, essential in the choice of European space independence and sovereignty.”

Two flights into its career, Ariane 6 seems to offer a technical solution for Europe’s needs. But at what cost? Arianespace hasn’t publicly disclosed the cost for an Ariane 6 launch, although it’s likely somewhere in the range of 80 million to 100 million euros, about 40 percent lower than the cost of an Ariane 5. This is about 50 percent more than SpaceX’s list price for a dedicated Falcon 9 launch.

A new wave of European startups should soon begin launching small rockets to gain a foothold in the continent’s launch industry. These include Isar Aerospace, which could launch its first Spectrum rocket in a matter of weeks. These companies have the potential to offer Europe an option for cheaper rides to space, but the startups won’t have a rocket in the class of Ariane 6 until at least the 2030s.

Until then, at least, European governments will have to pay more to guarantee autonomous access to space.

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.

When Europe needed it most, the Ariane 6 rocket finally delivered Read More »

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Yes, we are about to be treated to a second lunar landing in a week

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Because the space agency now has some expectation that Intuitive Machines will be fully successful with its second landing attempt, it has put some valuable experiments on board. Principal among them is the PRIME-1 experiment, which has an ice drill to sample any ice that lies below the surface. Drill, baby, drill.

The Athena lander also is carrying a NASA-funded “hopper” that will fire small hydrazine rockets to bounce around the Moon and explore lunar craters near the South Pole. It might even fly into a lava tube. If this happens it will be insanely cool.

Because this is a commercial program, NASA has encouraged the delivery companies to find additional, private payloads. Athena has some nifty ones, including a small rover from Lunar Outpost, a data center from Lonestar Data Holdings, and a 4G cellular network from Nokia. So there’s a lot riding on Athena‘s success.

So will it be a success?

“Of course, everybody’s wondering, are we gonna land upright?” Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ chief technology officer, told Ars. “So, I can tell you our laser test plan is much more comprehensive than those last time.”

During the first landing about a year ago, Odysseus‘ laser-based system for measuring altitude failed during the descent. Because Odysseus did not have access to altitude data, the spacecraft touched down faster, and on a 12-degree slope, which exceeded the 10-degree limit. As a result, the lander skidded across the surface, and one of its six legs broke, causing it to fall over.

Crain said about 10 major changes were made to the spacecraft and its software for the second mission. On top of that, about 30 smaller things, such as more efficient file management, were updated on the new vehicle.

In theory, everything should work this time. Intuitive Machines has the benefit of all of its learnings from the last time, and nearly everything worked right during this first attempt. But the acid test comes on Thursday.

The company and NASA will provide live coverage of the attempt beginning at 11: 30 am ET (16: 30 UTC) on NASA+, with landing set for just about one hour later. The Moon may be a harsh mistress, but hopefully not too harsh.

Yes, we are about to be treated to a second lunar landing in a week Read More »

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Butch Wilmore says Elon Musk is “absolutely factual” on Dragon’s delayed return

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For what it is worth, all of the reporting done by Ars over the last nine months suggests the decision to return Wilmore and Williams this spring was driven by technical reasons and NASA’s needs on board the International Space Station, rather than because of politics.

Q. How do you feel about waking up and finding yourself in a political storm?

Wilmore: I can tell you at the outset, all of us have the utmost respect for Mr. Musk, and obviously, respect and admiration for our president of the United States, Donald Trump. We appreciate them. We appreciate all that they do for us, for human space flight, for our nation. The words they said, politics, I mean, that’s part of life. We understand that. And there’s an important reason why we have a political system, a political system that we do have, and we’re behind it 100 percent. We know what we’ve lived up here, the ins and outs, and the specifics that they may not be privy to. And I’m sure that they have some issues that they are dealing with, information that they have, that we are not privy to. So when I think about your question, that’s part of life, we are on board with it.

Q. Did politics influence NASA’s decision for you to stay longer in space?

Wilmore: From my standpoint, politics is not playing into this at all. From our standpoint, I think that they would agree, we came up prepared to stay long, even though we plan to stay short. That’s what we do in human spaceflight. That’s what your nation’s human space flight program is all about, planning for unknown, unexpected contingencies. And we did that, and that’s why we flowed right into Crew 9, into Expedition 72 as we did. And it was somewhat of a seamless transition, because we had planned ahead for it, and we were prepared.

Butch Wilmore says Elon Musk is “absolutely factual” on Dragon’s delayed return Read More »

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The modern era of low-flying satellites may begin this week

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Clarity-1 at the pad

Albedo’s first big test may come within the next week and the launch of the “Transporter-13” mission on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The company’s first satellite, Clarity-1, is 530 kg (1170 pounds) and riding atop the stack of ridesharing spacecraft. The mission could launch as soon as this coming weekend from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The Clarity-1 satellite will be dropped off between 500 and 600 km orbit and then attempt to lower itself to an operational orbit 274 km (170 miles) above the planet.

This is a full-up version of Albedo’s satellite design. The spacecraft is larger than a full-size refrigerator, similar to a phone booth, and is intended to operate for a lifetime of about five years, depending on the solar cycle. Clarity-1 is launching near the peak of the 11-year solar cycle, so this could reduce its active lifetime.

Albedo recently won a contract from the US Air Force Research Laboratory that is worth up to $12 million to share VLEO-specific, on-orbit data and provide analysis to support the development of new missions and payloads beyond its own optical sensors.

Serving many different customers

The advantages of such a platform include superior image quality, less congested orbits, and natural debris removal as inoperable satellites are pulled down into Earth’s atmosphere and burnt up.

But what about the drawbacks? In orbits closer to Earth the primary issue is atomic oxygen, which is highly reactive and energetic. There are also plasma eddies and other phenomena that interfere with the operation of satellites and degrade their materials. This makes VLEO far more hazardous than higher altitudes. It’s also more difficult to capture precise imagery.

“The hardest part is pointing and attitude control,” Haddad said, “because that’s already hard in LEO, when you have a big telescope and you’re trying to get a high resolution. Then you put it in VLEO, where the Earth’s rotation beneath is moving faster, and it just exacerbates the problem.”

In the next several years, Albedo is likely to reach a constellation sized at about 24 satellites, but that number will depend on customer demand, Haddad said. Albedo has previously announced about half a dozen of its commercial customers who will task Clarity-1 for various purposes, such as power and pipeline monitoring or solar farm maintenance.

But first, it has to demonstrate its technology.

The modern era of low-flying satellites may begin this week Read More »

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SpaceX readies a redo of last month’s ill-fated Starship test flight

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The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch Starship’s eighth test flight as soon as Monday.

Ship 34, destined to launch on the next Starship test flight, test-fired its engines in South Texas on February 12. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX plans to launch the eighth full-scale test flight of its enormous Starship rocket as soon as Monday after receiving regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The test flight will be a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to achieve on the previous Starship launch in January, when the rocket broke apart and showered debris over the Atlantic Ocean and Turks and Caicos Islands. The accident prevented SpaceX from completing many of the flight’s goals, such as testing Starship’s satellite deployment mechanism and new types of heat shield material.

Those things are high on the to-do list for Flight 8, set to lift off at 5: 30 pm CST (6: 30 pm EST; 23: 30 UTC) Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast. Over the weekend, SpaceX plans to mount the rocket’s Starship upper stage atop the Super Heavy booster already in position on the launch pad.

The fully stacked rocket will tower 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. Like the test flight on January 16, this launch will use a second-generation, Block 2, version of Starship with larger propellant tanks with 25 percent more volume than previous vehicle iterations. The payload compartment near the ship’s top is somewhat smaller than the payload bay on Block 1 Starships.

This block upgrade moves SpaceX closer to attempting more challenging things with Starship, such as returning the ship, or upper stage, back to the launch site from orbit. It will be caught with the launch tower at Starbase, just like SpaceX accomplished last year with the Super Heavy booster. Officials also want to bring Starship into service to launch Starlink Internet satellites and demonstrate in-orbit refueling, an enabling capability for future Starship flights to the Moon and Mars.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a Starship spinoff as a human-rated Moon lander for the Artemis lunar program. The mega-rocket is central to Elon Musk’s ambition to create a human settlement on Mars.

Another shot at glory

Other changes introduced on Starship Version 2 include redesigned forward flaps, which are smaller and closer to the tip of the ship’s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Technicians also removed some of the ship’s thermal protection tiles to “stress-test vulnerable areas” of the vehicle during descent. SpaceX is experimenting with metallic tile designs, including one with active cooling, that might be less brittle than the ceramic tiles used elsewhere on the ship.

Engineers also installed rudimentary catch fittings on the ship to evaluate how they respond to the heat of reentry, when temperatures outside the vehicle climb to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Read more about Starship Version in this previous story from Ars.

It will take about 1 hour and 6 minutes for Starship to fly from the launch pad in South Texas to a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. The rocket’s Super Heavy booster will fire 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines for two-and-a-half minutes as it climbs east from the Texas coastline, then jettison from the Starship upper stage and reverse course to return to Starbase for another catch with mechanical arms on the launch tower.

Meanwhile, Starship will ignite six Raptor engines and accelerate to a speed just shy of orbital velocity, putting the ship on a trajectory to reenter the atmosphere after soaring about halfway around the world.

Booster 15 perched on the launch mount at Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

If you’ve watched the last few Starship flights, this profile probably sounds familiar. SpaceX achieved successful splashdowns after three Starship test flights last year, and hoped to do it again before the premature end of Flight 7 in January. Instead, the accident was the most significant technical setback for the Starship program since the first full-scale test flight in 2023, which damaged the launch pad before the rocket spun out of control in the upper atmosphere.

Now, SpaceX hopes to get back on track. At the end of last year, company officials said they targeted as many as 25 Starship flights in 2025. Two months in, SpaceX is about to launch its second Starship of the year.

The breakup of Starship last month prevented SpaceX from evaluating the performance of the ship’s Pez-like satellite deployer and upgraded heat shield. Engineers are eager to see how those perform on Monday’s flight. Once in space, the ship will release four simulators replicating the approximate size and mass of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. They will follow the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and reenter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

That will be followed by a restart of a Raptor engine on Starship in space, repeating a feat first achieved on Flight 6 in November. Officials want to ensure Raptor engines can reignite reliably in space before actually launching Starship into a stable orbit, where the ship must burn an engine to guide itself back into the atmosphere for a controlled reentry. With another suborbital flight on tap Monday, the engine relight is purely a confidence-building demonstration and not critical for a safe return to Earth.

The flight plan for Starship’s next launch includes another attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower, a satellite deployment demonstration, and an important test of its heat shield. Credit: SpaceX

Then, about 47 minutes into the mission, Starship will plunge back into the atmosphere. If this flight is like the previous few, expect to see live high-definition video streaming back from Starship as super-heated plasma envelops the vehicle in a cloak of pink and orange. Finally, air resistance will slow the ship below the speed of sound, and just 20 seconds before reaching the ocean, the rocket will flip to a vertical orientation and reignite its Raptor engines again to brake for splashdown.

This is where SpaceX hopes Starship Version 2 will shine. Although three Starships have made it to the ocean intact, the scorching temperatures of reentry damaged parts of their heat shields and flaps. That won’t do for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing Starship with minimal or no refurbishment. Heat shield repairs slowed down the turnaround time between NASA’s space shuttle missions, and officials hope the upgraded heat shield on Starship Version 2 will decrease the downtime.

FAA’s green light

The FAA confirmed Friday it issued a launch license earlier this week for Starship Flight 8.

“The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” an FAA spokesperson said in a statement.

The federal regulator oversaw a SpaceX-led investigation into the failure of Flight 7. SpaceX said NASA, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the US Space Force also participated in the investigation, which determined that propellant leaks and fires in an aft compartment, or attic, of Starship led to the shutdown of its engines and eventual breakup.

Engineers concluded the leaks were most likely caused by a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected from ground testing.

Earlier this month, SpaceX completed an extended-duration static fire of the next Starship upper stage to test hardware modifications at multiple engine thrust levels. According to SpaceX, findings from the static fire informed changes to the fuel feed lines to Starship’s Raptor engines, adjustments to propellant temperatures, and a new operating thrust for the next test flight.

“To address flammability potential in the attic section on Starship, additional vents and a new purge system utilizing gaseous nitrogen are being added to the current generation of ships to make the area more robust to propellant leakage,” SpaceX said. “Future upgrades to Starship will introduce the Raptor 3 engine, reducing the attic volume and eliminating the majority of joints that can leak into this volume.”

FAA officials were apparently satisfied with all of this. The agency’s commercial spaceflight division completed a “comprehensive safety review” and determined Starship can return to flight operations while the investigation into the Flight 7 failure remains open. This isn’t new. The FAA also used this safety determination to expedite SpaceX launch license approvals last year as officials investigated mishaps on Starship and Falcon 9 rocket flights.

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

SpaceX readies a redo of last month’s ill-fated Starship test flight Read More »

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Astroscale aced the world’s first rendezvous with a piece of space junk

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Astroscale’s US subsidiary won a $25.5 million contract from the US Space Force in 2023 to build a satellite refueler that can hop around geostationary orbit. Like the ADRAS-J mission, this project is a public-private partnership, with Astroscale committing $12 million of its own money. In January, the Japanese government selected Astroscale for a contract worth up to $80 million to demonstrate chemical refueling in low-Earth orbit.

The latest win for Astroscale came Thursday, when the Japanese Ministry of Defense awarded the company a contract to develop a prototype satellite that could fly in geostationary orbit and collect information on other objects in the domain for Japan’s military and intelligence agencies.

“We are very bullish on the prospects for defense-related business,” said Nobu Matsuyama, Astroscale’s chief financial officer.

Astroscale’s other projects include a life extension mission for an unidentified customer in geostationary orbit, providing a similar service as Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV).

So, can Astroscale really do all of this? In an era of a militarized final frontier, it’s easy to see the usefulness of sidling up next to a “non-cooperative” satellite—whether it’s to refuel it, repair it, de-orbit it, inspect it, or (gasp!) disable it. Astroscale’s demonstration with ADRAS-J showed it can safely operate near another object in space without navigation aids, which is foundational to any of these applications.

So far, governments are driving demand for this kind of work.

Astroscale raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding before going public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last June. After quickly spiking to nearly $1 billion, the company’s market valuation has dropped to about $540 million as of Thursday. Astroscale has around 590 full-time employees across all its operating locations.

Matsuyama said Astroscale’s total backlog is valued at about 38.9 billion yen, or $260 million. The company is still in a ramp-up phase, reporting operating losses on its balance sheet and steep research and development spending that Matsuyama said should max out this year.

“We are the only company that has proved RPO technology for non-cooperative objects, like debris, in space,” Okada said last month.

“In simple terms, this means approach and capture of objects,” Okada continued. “This capability did not exist before us, but one’s mastering of this technology enables you to provide not only debris removal service, but also orbit correction, refueling, inspection, observation, and eventually repair and reuse services.”

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German startup to attempt the first orbital launch from Western Europe

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The nine-engine first stage for Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket lights up on the launch pad on February 14. Credit: Isar Aerospace

Isar builds almost all of its rockets in-house, including Spectrum’s Aquila engines.

“The flight will be the first integrated test of tens of thousands of components,” said Josef Fleischmann, Isar’s co-founder and chief technical officer. “Regardless of how far we get, this first test flight will hopefully generate an enormous amount of data and experience which we can apply to future missions.”

Isar is the first European startup to reach this point in development. “Reaching this milestone is a huge success in itself,” Meltzer said in a statement. “And while Spectrum is ready for its first test flight, launch vehicles for flights two and three are already in production.”

Another Bavarian company, Rocket Factory Augsburg, destroyed its first booster during a test-firing on its launch pad in Scotland last year, ceding the frontrunner mantle to Isar. RFA received its launch license from the UK government last month and aims to deliver its second booster to the launch site for hot-fire testing and a launch attempt later this year.

There’s an appetite within the European launch industry for new companies to compete with Arianespace, the continent’s sole operational launch services provider backed by substantial government support. Delays in developing the Ariane 6 rocket and several failures of Europe’s smaller Vega launcher forced European satellite operators to look abroad, primarily to SpaceX, to launch their payloads.

The European Space Agency is organizing the European Launcher Challenge, a competition that will set aside some of the agency’s satellites for launch opportunities with a new crop of startups. Isar is one of the top contenders in the competition to win money from ESA. The agency expects to award funding to multiple European launch providers after releasing a final solicitation later this year.

The first flight of the Spectrum rocket will attempt to reach a polar orbit, flying north from Andøya Spaceport. Located at approximately 69 degrees north latitude, the spaceport is poised to become the world’s northernmost orbital launch site.

Because the inaugural launch of the Spectrum rocket is a test flight, it won’t carry any customer payloads, an Isar spokesperson told Ars.

German startup to attempt the first orbital launch from Western Europe Read More »

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SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired

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Kiernan is currently a lead software engineer at SpaceX, according to his LinkedIn page. Before joining SpaceX in May 2020, he worked at Wayfair and is a 2017 Dartmouth graduate.

Smeal is a software engineer who has worked at SpaceX since September 2021, according to his LinkedIn. He graduated from Saint Vincent College in 2018.

Glantz is a software engineer who has worked at SpaceX since May 2024 and worked as an engineering analyst at Goldman Sachs from 2019 to 2021, according to his LinkedIn, and graduated from the University of Michigan in 2019.

Malaska, Kiernan, Smeal, and Glantz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The FAA also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In his post on X, Duffy wrote, “Because I know the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon’s team is getting special access, let me make clear that the @FAANews regularly gives tours of the command center to both media and companies.”

But on Wednesday, FAA acting administrator Chris Rocheleau wrote in an email to FAA staff, viewed by WIRED, that DOGE and the teams of special government employees deployed in federal agencies were “top-of-mind,” before noting that the agency had “recently welcomed” a team of special government employees who had already toured some FAA facilities. “We are asking for their help to engineer solutions while we keep the airspace open and safe,” he wrote, adding that the new employees had already visited the FAA Command Center and Potomac TRACON, a facility that controls the airspace around and provides air traffic control services to airports in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia areas.

In a Department of Transportation all-hands meeting late last week, Duffy responded to a question about DOGE’s role in national airspace matters, and without explicitly mentioning the new employees, suggested help was needed on reforming Notice to Air Mission (NOTAM) alerts, a critical system that distributes real-time data and warnings to pilots but which has had significant outages, one as recently as this month. “If I can get ideas from really smart engineers on how we can fix it, I’m going to take those ideas,” he said, according to a recording of the meeting reviewed by WIRED. “Great engineers” might also work on airspace issues, he said.

SpaceX engineers brought on at FAA after probationary employees were fired Read More »

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In a last-minute decision, White House decides not to terminate NASA employees

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So what changed?

It was not immediately clear why. A NASA spokesperson in Washington, DC, offered no comment on the updated guidance. Two sources indicated that it was plausible that private astronaut Jared Isaacman, whom President Trump has nominated to lead the space agency, asked for the cuts to be put on hold.

Although this could not be confirmed, it seems reasonable that Isaacman would want to retain some control over where cuts at the agency are made. Firing all probationary employees—which is the most expedient way to reduce the size of government—is a blunt instrument. It whacks new hires that the agency may have recruited for key positions, as well as high performers who earned promotions.

The reprieve in these terminations does not necessarily signal that NASA will escape significant budget or employment cuts in the coming months.

The administration could still seek to terminate probationary employees. In addition, Ars reported earlier that directors at the agency’s field centers have been told to prepare options for a “significant” reduction in force in the coming months. The scope of these cuts has not been defined, and it’s likely they would need to be negotiated with Congress.

In a last-minute decision, White House decides not to terminate NASA employees Read More »