Space – Page 25

The top fell off Australia’s first orbital-class rocket, delaying its launch

australia, Commercial space, eris rocket, Gilmour space, launch, Science, Space / Paul Patrick / May 16, 2025

This was unusual

Payload fairing problems have caused a number of rocket failures, usually because they don’t jettison during launch, or only partially deploy, leaving too much extra weight on the launch vehicle for it to reach orbit.

Gilmour said it is postponing the Eris launch campaign “to fully understand what happened and make any necessary updates.” The company was founded by two brothers—Adam and James Gilmour—in 2012, and has raised approximately $90 million from venture capital firms and government funds to get the first Eris rocket to the launch pad.

The astronauts on NASA’s Gemini 9A mission snapped this photo of a target vehicle they were supposed to dock with in orbit. But the rocket’s nose shroud only partially opened, inadvertently illustrating the method in which payload fairings are designed to jettison from their rockets in flight. Credit: NASA

The Eris rocket was aiming to become the first all-Australian launcher to reach orbit. Australia hosted a handful of satellite launches by US and British rockets more than 50 years ago.

Gilmour is headquartered in Gold Coast, Australia, about 600 miles south of the Eris launch pad near the coastal town of Bowen. In a statement, Gilmour said it has a replacement payload fairing in its factory in Gold Coast. The company will send it to the launch site and install it on the Eris rocket after a “full investigation” into the cause of the premature fairing deployment.

“While we’re disappointed by the delay, our team is already working on a solution and we expect to be back at the pad soon,” Gilmour said.

Officials did not say how long it might take to investigate the problem, correct it, and fit a new nose cone on the Eris rocket.

This setback follows more than a year of delays Gilmour blamed primarily on holdups in receiving regulatory approval for the launch from the Australian government.

Like many rocket companies have done before, Gilmour set modest expectations for the first test flight of Eris. While the rocket has everything needed to fly to low-Earth orbit, officials said they were looking for just 10 to 20 seconds of stable flight on the first launch, enough to gather data about the performance of the rocket and its unconventional hybrid propulsion system.

The top fell off Australia’s first orbital-class rocket, delaying its launch Read More »

For the first time in the US, a rotating detonation rocket engine takes flight

rotating detonation engine, Space, venus aerospace / Paul Patrick / May 15, 2025

A US-based propulsion company, Venus Aerospace, said Wednesday it had completed a short flight test of its rotating detonation rocket engine at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The company’s chief executive and co-founder, Sassie Duggleby, characterized the flight as “historic.” It is believed to be the first US-based flight test of an idea that has been discussed academically for decades, a rotating detonation rocket engine. The concept has previously been tested in a handful of other countries, but never with a high-thrust engine.

“By proving this engine works beyond the lab, Venus brings the world closer to a future where hypersonic travel—traversing the globe in under two hours—becomes possible,” Duggleby told Ars.

A quick flight

The company has only released limited information about the test. The small rocket, powered by the company’s 2,000-pound-thrust engine, launched from a rail in New Mexico. The vehicle flew for about half a minute, and, as planned, did not break the sound barrier.

Governments around the world have been interested in rotating detonation engine technology for a long time because it has the potential to significantly increase fuel efficiency in a variety of applications, from Navy carriers to rocket engines.

In contrast to a traditional rocket engine, in which a highly pressurized propellant and an oxidizer are injected into a combustion chamber where they burn and produce an energetic exhaust plume, a rotating detonation engine is different in that a wave of detonation travels around a circular channel. This is sustained by the injection of fuel and oxidizer and produces a shockwave that travels outward at supersonic speed.

For the first time in the US, a rotating detonation rocket engine takes flight Read More »

After back-to-back failures, SpaceX tests its fixes on the next Starship

launch, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, starship flight 9, texas / Paul Patrick / May 14, 2025

But that didn’t solve the problem. Once again, Starship’s engines cut off too early, and the rocket broke apart before falling to Earth. SpaceX said “an energetic event” in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines, followed by a loss of attitude control and a loss of communications with the ship.

The similarities between the two failures suggest a likely design issue with the upgraded “Block 2” version of Starship, which debuted in January and flew again in March. Starship Block 2 is slightly taller than the ship SpaceX used on the rocket’s first six flights, with redesigned flaps, improved batteries and avionics, and notably, a new fuel feed line system for the ship’s Raptor vacuum engines.

SpaceX has not released the results of the investigation into the Flight 8 failure, and the FAA hasn’t yet issued a launch license for Flight 9. Likewise, SpaceX hasn’t released any information on the changes it made to Starship for next week’s flight.

What we do know about the Starship vehicle for Flight 9—designated Ship 35—is that it took a few tries to complete a full-duration test-firing. SpaceX completed a single-engine static fire on April 30, simulating the restart of a Raptor engine in space. Then, on May 1, SpaceX aborted a six-engine test-firing before reaching its planned 60-second duration. Videos captured by media observing the test showed a flash in the engine plume, and at least one piece of debris was seen careening out of the flame trench below the ship.

SpaceX ground crews returned Ship 35 to the production site a couple of miles away, perhaps to replace a damaged engine, before rolling Starship back to the test stand over the weekend for Monday’s successful engine firing.

Now, the ship will head back to the Starbase build site, where technicians will make final preparations for Flight 9. These final tasks may include loading mock-up Starlink broadband satellites into the ship’s payload bay and touchups to the rocket’s heat shield.

These are two elements of Starship that SpaceX engineers are eager to demonstrate on Flight 9, beyond just fixing the problems from the last two missions. Those failures prevented Starship from testing its satellite deployer and an upgraded heat shield designed to better withstand scorching temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) during reentry.

After back-to-back failures, SpaceX tests its fixes on the next Starship Read More »

If Congress actually cancels the SLS rocket, what happens next?

artemis, sls rocket, Space, Trump / Tim Belzer / May 14, 2025

Here’s what NASA’s exploration plans would actually look like if the White House got its way.

A technician works on the Orion spacecraft, atop the SLS rocket, in January 2022. Credit: NASA

The White House Office of Management and Budget dropped its “skinny” budget proposal for the federal government earlier this month, and the headline news for the US space program was the cancellation of three major programs: the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and Lunar Gateway.

Opinions across the space community vary widely about the utility of these programs—one friend in the industry predicted a future without them to be so dire that Artemis III would be the last US human spaceflight of our lifetimes. But there can be no question that if such changes are made they would mark the most radical remaking of NASA in two decades.

This report, based on interviews with multiple sources inside and out of the Trump administration, seeks to explain what the White House is trying to do with Moon and Mars exploration, what this means for NASA and US spaceflight, and whether it could succeed.

Will it actually happen?

The first question is whether these changes proposed by the White House will be accepted by the US Congress. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have backed Orion for two decades, the SLS rocket for 15 years, and the Gateway for 10 years. Will they finally give up programs that have been such a reliable source of good-paying jobs for so long?

In general, the answer appears to be yes. We saw the outlines of a deal during the confirmation hearing for private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become the next NASA administrator in April. He was asked repeatedly whether he intended to use the SLS rocket and Orion for Artemis II (a lunar fly around) and Artemis III (lunar landing). Isaacman said he did.

However nothing was said about using this (very costly) space hardware for Artemis IV and beyond. Congress did not ask, presumably because it knows the answer. And that answer, as we saw in the president’s skinny budget, is that the rocket and spacecraft will be killed after Artemis III. This is a pragmatic time to do it, as canceling the programs after Artemis III saves NASA billions of dollars in upgrading the rocket for a singular purpose: assembling a Lunar Gateway of questionable use.

But this will not be a normal budget process. The full budget request from the White House is unlikely to come out before June, and it will probably be bogged down in Congress. One of the few levers that Democrats in Congress presently have is the requirement of 60 Senators to pass appropriations bills. So compromise is necessary, and a final budget may not pass by the October 1 start of the next fiscal year.

Then, should Congress not acquiesce to the budget request, there is the added threat of the White House Office of Management and Budget to use “impoundment” to withhold funding and implement its budget priorities. This process would very quickly get bogged down in the courts, and no one really knows how the Supreme Court would rule.

Leadership alignment

To date, the budget process for NASA has not been led by space policy officials. Rather, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and its leader, Russell Vought, have set priorities and funding. This has led to “budget-driven” policy that has resulted in steep cuts to science that often don’t make much sense (i.e., ending funding for the completed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope).

However, there soon will be some important voices to implement a more sound space policy and speak for NASA’s priorities, rather than those of budget cutters.

One of these is President Trump’s nominee to lead NASA, Isaacman. He is awaiting floor time in the US Senate for a final vote. That could happen during the next week or two, allowing Isaacman to become the space agency’s administrator and begin to play an important role in decision-making.

But Isaacman will need allies in the White House itself to carry out sweeping space policy changes. To that end, the report in Politico last week—which Ars has confirmed—that there will be a National Space Council established in the coming months is important. Led by Vice President JD Vance, the space council will provide a counterweight to Vought’s budget-driven process.

Thus, by this summer, there should be key leadership in place to set space policy that advances the country’s exploration goals. But what are those goals?

What happens to Artemis

After the Artemis III mission the natural question is, what would come next if the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft are canceled?

The most likely answer is that NASA turns to an old but successful playbook: COTS. This stands for Commercial Orbital Transportation System and was created by NASA two decades ago to develop cargo transport systems (eventually this became SpaceX’s Dragon and Northrop’s Cygnus spacecraft) for the International Space Station. Since then, NASA has adopted this same model for crew services as well as other commercial programs.

Under the COTS model, NASA provides funding and guidance to private companies to develop their own spacecraft, rockets, and services, and then buys those at a “market” rate.

The idea of a Lunar COTS program is not new. NASA employees explored the concept in a research paper a decade ago, finding that “a future (Lunar) COTS program has the great potential of enabling development of cost-effective, commercial capabilities and establishing a thriving cislunar economy which will lead the way to an economical and sustainable approach for future human missions to Mars.”

Sources indicate NASA would go to industry and seek an “end-to-end” solution for lunar missions. That is, an integrated plan to launch astronauts from Earth, land them on the Moon, and return them to Earth. One of the bidders would certainly be SpaceX, with its Starship vehicle already having been validated during the Artemis III mission. Crews could launch from Earth either in Dragon or Starship. Blue Origin is the other obvious bidder. The company might partner with Lockheed Martin to commercialize the Orion spacecraft or use the crew vehicle it is developing internally.

Other companies could also participate. The point is that NASA would seek to buy astronaut transportation to the Moon, just as it already is doing with cargo and science experiments through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

The extent of an Artemis lunar surface presence would be determined by several factors, including the cost and safety of this transportation program and whether there are meaningful things for astronauts to do on the Moon.

What about Mars?

The skinny budget contained some intriguing language about Mars exploration: “By allocating over $7 billion for lunar exploration and introducing $1 billion in new investments for Mars-focused programs, the Budget ensures that America’s human space exploration efforts remain unparalleled, innovative, and efficient.”

This was, in fact, the only budget increase proposed by the Trump White House. So what does it mean?

No one is saying for sure, but this funding would probably offer a starting point for a robust Mars COTS program. This would begin with cargo missions to Mars. But eventually it would expand to include crewed missions, thus fulfilling Trump’s promise to land humans on the red planet.

Is this a gift to Elon Musk? Critics will certainly cast it as such, and that is understandable. But the plan would be open to any interested companies, and there are several. Rocket Lab, for example, has already expressed its interest in sending cargo missions to Mars. Impulse Space, too, has said it is building a spacecraft to ferry cargo to Mars and land there.

The Trump budget proposal also kills a key element of NASA’s Mars exploration plans, the robotic Mars Sample Return mission to bring rocks and soil from the red planet to Earth in the 2030s. However, this program was already frozen by the Biden administration because of delays and cost overruns.

Sources said the goal of this budget cut, rather than having a single $8 billion Mars Sample Return mission, is to create an ecosystem in which such missions are frequent. The benefit of opening a pathway to Mars with commercial companies is that it would allow for not just a single Mars Sample Return mission, but multiple efforts at a lower cost.

“The fact is we want to land large things, including crew cabins, on the Moon and Mars and bring them back to Earth,” one Republican space policy consultant said. “Instead of building a series of expensive bespoke robotic landers to do science, let’s develop cost-effective reusable landers that can, with minimal changes, support both cargo and crew missions to the Moon and Mars.”

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.

If Congress actually cancels the SLS rocket, what happens next? Read More »

Tuesday Telescope: Taking a look at the next generation of telescopes

daily telescope, Space, tuesday telescope / Kris Guyer / May 13, 2025

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

This week’s Tuesday Telescope photo is pretty meta as it features… a telescope.

This particular telescope is under construction in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, one of the darkest places on Earth with excellent atmospheric visibility. The so-called “Extremely Large Telescope” is being built on a mountaintop in the Andes at an elevation of about 3,000 meters.

And it really is extremely large. The primary mirror will be 39 meters (128 feet) in diameter. Like, that’s gigantic for an optical telescope. It is nearly four times larger than the largest operational reflecting telescopes in the world.

The Europeans are in a contest, of sorts, with other very large telescope construction projects. A consortium of several countries, including the United States, is building the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will have a primary diameter of 25.4 meters. This facility is also located in the Atacama Desert. Both facilities are targeting first light before the end of this decade, but this will depend on funding and how smoothly construction proceeds. A third large project, the Thirty Meter Telescope, is planned for Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. However, this effort has stalled due to ongoing opposition from native Hawaiians. It is unclear when, or if, it will proceed.

In any case, within less than a decade, we are going to undergo a radical revolution in how we see the cosmos when one or more of these next-generation ground-based optical telescopes come online. What will we ultimately observe?

The mystery of what’s up there left to be discovered is half the fun!

Source: European Southern Observatory

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Tuesday Telescope: Taking a look at the next generation of telescopes Read More »

Rocket Report: Rocket Lab to demo cargo delivery; America’s new ICBM in trouble

artemis II, falcon 9, hypersonic missile, NASA, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, Space, space launch system, spacex, starship, stratolaunch / Mike M. / May 9, 2025

SpaceX’s plan to turn Starbase into Texas’ newest city won the approval of voters—err, employees.

A decommissioned Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile inside a silo at a museum in Green Valley, Arizona.

Welcome to Edition 7.43 of the Rocket Report! There’s been a lot of recent news in hypersonic testing. We cover some of that in this week’s newsletter, but it’s just a taste of the US military’s appetite for fielding its own hypersonic weapons, and conversely, the Pentagon’s emphasis on the detection and destruction of an enemy’s hypersonic missiles. China has already declared its first hypersonic weapons operational, and Russia claims to have them, too. Now, the Pentagon is finally close to placing hypersonic missiles with combat units. Many US rocket companies believe the hypersonics sector is a lucrative business. Some companies have enough confidence in this emerging market—or lack of faith in the traditional space launch market—to pivot entirely toward hypersonics. I’m interested in seeing if their bets pay off.

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.

Stratolaunch tests reusable hypersonic rocket plane. Stratolaunch has finally found a use for the world’s largest airplane. Twice in the last five months, the company launched a hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific Ocean, accelerated it to more than five times the speed of sound, and autonomously landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Ars reports. Stratolaunch used the same Talon-A vehicle for both flights, demonstrating its reusability, a characteristic that sets it apart from competitors. Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch’s president and CEO, said his team aims to ramp up to monthly flights by the end of the year.

A 21st century X-15 … This is the first time anyone in the United States has flown a reusable hypersonic rocket plane since the last flight of the X-15, the iconic rocket-powered aircraft that pushed the envelope of high-altitude, high-speed flight 60 years ago. Like the Talon-A, the X-15 released from a carrier jet and ignited a rocket engine to soar into the uppermost layers of the atmosphere. But the X-15 had a pilot in command, while the Talon-A flies on autopilot. Stratolaunch is one of several companies participating in a US military program to test parts and technologies for use on future hypersonic weapons. “Why the autonomous flight matters is because hypersonic systems are now pushing the envelope in terms of maneuvering capability, maneuvering beyond what can be done by the human body,” Krevor said.

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.

Sign Me Up!

New details about another recent hypersonic test. A hypersonic missile test on April 25 validated the launch mechanism for the US Navy Conventional Prompt Strike (CPS) weapon program, the Defense Department said on May 2. The CPS missile, the Navy’s name for what the US Army calls the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW), launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, Aviation Week & Space Technology Reports. While the Army and Navy versions use the same hypersonic glide vehicle and missile, they use different launch mechanisms. Last year, the Army tested its version of the hypersonic missile launcher. Now, the Navy has validated the cold-gas launch mechanism it will install on guided missile destroyers.

Deploying soon … “The cold-gas approach allows the Navy to eject the missile from the platform and achieve a safe distance above the ship prior to first stage ignition,” said Vice Adm Johnny R. Wolfe Jr., director of the Navy’s Strategic Systems Programs, which is the lead designer of the common hypersonic missile. The Army plans to field its Long Range Hypersonic Weapon—also called “Dark Eagle”—with a combat unit later this year, while the Navy’s version won’t be ready for testing at sea until 2027 or 2028. Both missiles are designed for conventional (non-nuclear) strikes. The Army’s Dark Eagle will be the US military’s first operational hypersonic weapon.

Sentinel needs new silos. The Air Force will have to dig entirely new nuclear missile silos for the LGM-35A Sentinel, creating another complication for a troubled program that is already facing future cost and schedule overruns, Defense News reports. The Air Force originally hoped the existing silos that have housed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles could be adapted to launch Sentinel missiles, which would be more efficient than digging entirely new silos. But a test project at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California showed that approach would be fraught with further problems and cause the program to run even further behind and over budget, the service said.

Rising costs … Sentinel, developed by Northrop Grumman, will replace the Air Force’s fleet of Minuteman III ICBMs, which entered service in 1970, as the land-based leg of the military’s nuclear triad. It was originally expected to cost $77.7 billion, but projected future costs ran so severely over budget that in January 2024, it triggered a review process known as a critical Nunn-McCurdy breach. After that review, the Pentagon last year concluded Sentinel was too critical to national security to abandon, but ordered the Air Force to restructure it to bring its costs under control. Further studies of the program are now showing more potential problems.

Gilmour says it (hopefully) will wait no more. The Australian launch startup Gilmour Space Technologies has been given approval by Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority for the debut launch of its Eris orbital rocket, InnovationAus.com reports. There is still one final regulatory hurdle, a final sign-off from the Australian Space Agency. If that happens in the next few days, Gilmour’s launch window will open May 15. The company has announced tentative launch schedules before, only to be thwarted by technical issues, regulatory hangups, or bad weather. Most recently, Gilmour got within six days of its targeted launch date in March before regulatory queries and the impact of a tropical cyclone forced a delay.

Stand by for history … The launch of Gilmour’s three-stage Eris rocket will be historic. If successful, the 82-foot-tall (25-meter) rocket will be Australia’s first homegrown orbital launcher. Eris is capable of hauling cargoes up to 672 pounds (305 kilograms) to orbit, according to Gilmour. The company has dispatched a small team from its Gold Coast headquarters to the launch site in Queensland, on Australia’s northeastern coast, to perform testing on the vehicle after it remained dormant for weeks. (submitted by trainticket)

Fresh insights into one of SpaceX’s worst days. When a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on its launch pad nearly nine years ago, SpaceX officials initially struggled to explain how it could have happened. The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk. A building leased by SpaceX’s main competitor in launch, United Launch Alliance, lay just a mile away from the Falcon 9 launch pad, and a video around the time of the explosion indicated a flash on its roof. Ars has now obtained a letter sent to SpaceX by the Federal Aviation Administration more than a month after the explosion, indicating the matter was elevated to the FBI. The bureau looked into it, and what did they find? Nothing, apparently.

Investigation terminated … “The FBI has informed us that based upon a thorough and coordinated review by the appropriate Federal criminal and security investigative authorities, there were no indications to suggest that sabotage or any other criminal activity played a role in the September 1 Falcon 9 explosion,” an FAA official wrote in the letter to SpaceX. Ultimately, engineers determined the explosion was caused by the sudden failure of a high-pressure helium tank on the Falcon 9’s upper stage.

Eric Schmidt’s motivations become clearer. In the nearly two months since former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt acquired Relativity Space, the billionaire has not said much publicly about his plans for the launch company. However, his intentions for Relativity now appear to be increasingly clear: He wants to have the capability to launch a significant amount of computing infrastructure into space, Ars reports. During a congressional hearing last month, Schmidt discussed the need more electricity to power data centers that will facilitate the computing needs for AI development and applications.

How big this crisis is … “People are planning 10 gigawatt data centers,” Schmidt said at the hearing. “Gives you a sense of how big this crisis is.” In an exchange with my colleague Eric Berger on X, Schmidt seemed to confirm he bought Relativity Space as a means to support the development of data centers in space. Such data centers, ideally, would be powered by solar panels and be able to radiate heat into the vacuum of space. Relativity’s Terran R rocket, still in development, is well-sized to play a role in launching the infrastructure for data centers in space. But several big questions remain: How big would these data centers be? Where would they go within an increasingly cluttered low-Earth orbit? Could space-based solar power meet their energy needs? Can all of this heat be radiated away efficiently in space? Economically, would any of this make sense?

Rocket Lab, meet Rocket Cargo. Rocket Lab’s next-generation Neutron rocket has been selected for an experimental US Air Force mission to test rapid global cargo delivery capabilities, a milestone for the company as it pushes further into the national security launch market, Space News reports. The mission, slated for no earlier than 2026, will fall under the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) “Rocket Cargo” program, which explores how commercial launch vehicles might one day deliver materiel to any point on Earth within hours—a vision akin to airlift logistics via spaceflight.

A new mission for Neutron … Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, said the Rocket Cargo contract from AFRL represents an “experimental phase” of the program. “It’ll be interesting to see if that turns into a full requirement for an operational capability,” he said Thursday. Neutron is expected to carry a payload that will reenter Earth’s atmosphere, demonstrating the rocket’s ability to safely transport and deploy cargo. SpaceX’s Starship, with roughly 10 times more payload lift capacity than Neutron, is also on contract with AFRL for demonstrations for the Rocket Cargo program. Meanwhile, Beck said Neutron remains on schedule for its inaugural launch from Wallops Island, Virginia, later this year.

Trump calls for canceling the Space Launch System. The Trump administration released its “skinny” budget proposal earlier this week. Overall, NASA is asked to take a 25 percent cut in its budget, from about $25 billion to $18.8 billion. There are also significant changes proposed in NASA’s biggest-ticket exploration programs. The budget would cancel the Lunar Gateway that NASA has started developing and end the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft after two more flights, Artemis II and Artemis III, Ars reports. A statement from the White House calls the SLS rocket “grossly expensive” with projected costs of $4 billion per launch.

If not SLS, then what? … “The budget funds a program to replace SLS and Orion flights to the Moon with more cost-effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions,” the Trump administration wrote. There are no further details about those commercial systems. NASA has contracted with SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop reusable landers for the Moon, and both of these systems include vehicles to move from Earth orbit to the Moon. In the budget proposal, the White House sets a priority for a human expedition to Mars to follow the Artemis program’s lunar landing.

FAA unlocks SpaceX launch cadence. Although we are still waiting for SpaceX to signal when it will fly the Starship rocket again, the company got some good news from the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday, Ars reports. After a lengthy review, the federal agency agreed to allow SpaceX to substantially increase the number of annual launches from its Starbase launch site in South Texas. Previously, the company was limited to five launches, but now it will be able to conduct up to 25 Starship launches and landings during a calendar year.

Waiting for clearance … Although the new finding permits SpaceX to significantly increase its flight rate from South Texas, the company still has work to do before it can fly Starship again. The company’s engineers are still working to get the massive rocket back to flight after its eighth mission broke apart off the coast of Florida on March 6. This was the second time, in two consecutive missions, that the Starship upper stage failed during its initial phase of flight. After two consecutive failures, there will be a lot riding on the next test flight of Starship. It will also be the first time the company attempts to fly a first stage of the rocket for a second time. According to some sources, if additional testing of this upper stage goes well, Starship could launch as early as May 19. This date is also supported by a notice to mariners, but it should be taken as notional rather than something to be confident in.

SpaceX adds to its dominion. Elon Musk’s wish to create his own city just came true, the Texas Tribune reports. On Saturday, voters living around SpaceX’s Starship rocket testing and launch facility in South Texas approved a measure to incorporate the area as a new city. Unofficial results later Saturday night showed the election was a landslide: 212 voted in favor; 6 opposed. After the county certifies the results, the new city will be official.

Elections have consequences … Only 283 people, those who live within the boundaries of the proposed city, were eligible to vote in the election. A Texas Newsroom analysis of the voter rolls showed two-thirds of them either work for SpaceX or had already indicated their support. The three unopposed people who ran to lead the city also have ties to SpaceX. It’s not clear if Musk, whose primary residence is at Starbase, cast a ballot. The vote clears the way for Musk to try to capture more control over the nearby public beach, which must be closed for launches.

Next three launches

May 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-3 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 00: 00 UTC

May 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-91 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06: 28 UTC

May 11: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-83 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 04: 24 UTC

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: Rocket Lab to demo cargo delivery; America’s new ICBM in trouble Read More »

A Soviet-era spacecraft built to land on Venus is falling to Earth instead

kosmos 482, russia, Space, space debris, venera, Venus / Rejus Almole / May 9, 2025

Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.

On average, a piece of space junk the size of Kosmos 482, with a mass of about a half-ton, falls into the atmosphere about once per week. What’s different this time is that Kosmos 482 was designed to land on Venus, with a titanium heat shield built to withstand scorching temperatures, and structures engineered to survive atmospheric pressures nearly 100 times higher than Earth’s.

So, there’s a good chance the spacecraft will survive the extreme forces it encounters during its plunge through the atmosphere. Typically, space debris breaks apart and burns up during reentry, with only a small fraction of material reaching the Earth’s surface. The European Space Agency, one of several institutions that track space debris, says Kosmos 482 is “highly likely” to reach Earth’s surface in one piece.

Fickle forecasts

The Kosmos 482 spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, now part of Kazakhstan, aboard a Molniya rocket on March 31, 1972. A short time later, the rocket’s upper stage was supposed to propel the probe out of Earth orbit on an interplanetary journey toward Venus, where it would have become the third mission to land on the second planet from the Sun.

But the rocket failed, rendering it unable to escape the gravitational grip of Earth. The spacecraft separated into several pieces, and Russian engineers gave up on the mission. The main section of the Venus probe reentered the atmosphere in 1981, but for 53 years, the 3.3-foot-diameter (1-meter) segment of the spacecraft that was supposed to land on Venus remained in orbit around the Earth, its trajectory influenced only by the tenuous uppermost layers of the atmosphere.

The mission was part of the Soviet Union’s Venera program, which achieved the first soft landing of a spacecraft on another planet with the Venera 7 mission in 1970, and followed up with another successful landing with Venera 8 in 1972. Because it failed, Soviet officials gave the next mission, which would have become Venera 9, a non-descriptive name: Kosmos 482.

A Soviet-era spacecraft built to land on Venus is falling to Earth instead Read More »

NASA scrambles to cut ISS activity due to budget issues

international space station, Space, trump budget / Rejus Almole / May 8, 2025

Canceling the tracker layer upgrade to the spectrometer would also not be catastrophic. The addition of a silicon tracker layer on top of the detector would increase the amount of data from the $2 billion physics experiment over the next five years by a factor of three. However, the experiment has been in operation since 2011, so it has had ample time to collect information about dark matter and other fundamental physics in the universe.

Cutting crews down to size

The real eye-catching proposal in NASA’s options is reducing the crew size from four to three.

Typically, Crew Dragon missions carry two NASA astronauts, one Roscosmos cosmonaut, and an international partner astronaut. Therefore, although it appears that NASA would only be cutting its crew size by 25 percent, in reality, it would be cutting the number of NASA astronauts on Crew Dragon missions by 50 percent. Overall, this would lead to an approximately one-third decline in science conducted by the space station. (This is because there are usually three NASA astronauts on station: two from Dragon and one on each Soyuz flight.)

It’s difficult to see how this would result in enormous cost savings. Yes, NASA would need to send marginally fewer cargo missions to keep fewer astronauts supplied. And there would be some reduction in training costs. But it seems kind of nuts to spend decades and more than $100 billion building an orbital laboratory, putting all of this effort into developing commercial vehicles to supply the station and enlarge its crew, establishing a rigorous training program to ensure maximum science is done and then to say, ‘Well, actually we don’t want to use it.’

NASA has not publicly announced the astronauts who will fly on Crew-12 next year, but according to sources, it has already assigned veteran astronaut Jessica Meir and newcomer Jack Hathaway, a former US Navy fighter pilot who joined NASA’s astronaut corps in 2021. If these changes go through, presumably one of these two would be removed from the mission.

NASA scrambles to cut ISS activity due to budget issues Read More »

The company with the world’s largest aircraft now has a hypersonic rocket plane

hypersonic vehicles, Mojave, Space, stratolaunch, ursa major, Vandenberg space force base / Rejus Almole / May 7, 2025

“Demonstrating the reuse of fully recoverable hypersonic test vehicles is an important milestone for MACH-TB,” said George Rumford, director of the Test Resource Management Center, in a statement. “Lessons learned from this test campaign will help us reduce vehicle turnaround time from months down to weeks.”

Krevor said Talon-A carried multiple experiments on each mission but did not offer any details about the nature of the payloads, citing proprietary reasons and customer agreements.

“We cannot disclose the nature of those payloads, other than to say typical materials, instrumentation, sensors, etc.,” he said. “The customers were thrilled with their ability to recover the payloads shortly after landing.”

Stratolaunch completed the first powered flight of a Talon-A vehicle last year, when the rocket plane launched over the Pacific Ocean and fired its liquid-fueled Hadley engine—produced by Ursa Major—for about 200 seconds. The Talon-A1 vehicle accelerated to just shy of hypersonic speed, then fell into the sea as planned and was not recovered.

That set the stage for Talon-A2’s first flight in December.

Military officials previously stated they set up the MACH-TB program to enable more frequent flight testing of hypersonic weapon technologies, including communication, navigation, guidance, sensors, and seekers. Stratolaunch aims for monthly flights of the Talon-A rocket plane by the end of the year and eventually wants to ramp up to weekly flights.

“These flights are setting the stage now to increase the cadence of hypersonic flight testing in this country,” Krevor said. “The ability to have a fully reusable hypersonic flight architecture enables a very high cadence of flight along with a lot of responsiveness. The DoD can call Stratolaunch if there’s a priority program, and we can have a hypersonic flight next week, assuming the readiness of all the other technologies and payloads.”

Pentagon officials in 2022 set a goal of growing US capacity for hypersonic testing from 12 to 50 flight tests per year. Krevor believes Stratolaunch will play a key part in making that happen.

Catching up

So, why is hypersonic flight testing important?

The Pentagon seeks to close what it views as a technological gap with China, which US officials acknowledge has become the world’s leader in hypersonic missile development. Hypersonic weapons are more difficult than conventional missiles for aerial defense systems to detect, track, and destroy. Unlike ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons ride at the top of the atmosphere, enhancing their maneuverability and ability to evade interceptors.

Hypersonic flight is an unforgiving environment. Temperatures outside the Talon-A vehicle can reach up to 2,000° Fahrenheit (1,100° Celsius) as the plane plows through air molecules, Krevor said. He declined to disclose the duration, top speed, and maximum altitude of the December and March test flights but said the rocket plane performed a series of “high-G” maneuvers on the journey from its drop location to Vandenberg.

The company with the world’s largest aircraft now has a hypersonic rocket plane Read More »

FAA green-lights Starship launches every other week from Starbase

Space, space.spacex, spacex, starship / Tim Belzer / May 7, 2025

Although we are still waiting for SpaceX to signal when it will fly the Starship rocket again, the company got some good news from the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday.

After a lengthy review, the federal agency agreed to allow SpaceX to substantially increase the number of annual launches from its Starbase launch site in South Texas. Previously, the company was limited to five launches, but now it will be able to conduct up to 25 Starship launches and landings during a calendar year.

“The FAA has determined that modifying SpaceX’s vehicle operator license supporting the increased launch and landing cadence of the Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle would not significantly impact the quality of the human environment,” states the document, known as a Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact. This finding was signed by Daniel P. Murray, executive director of the FAA’s Office of Operational Safety.

This ruling follows a draft finding issued six months ago that indicated this would be the final outcome.

Assessing all of the impacts

Among the impacts considered were increased trucking operations to deliver water and various propellants needed to support Starship launches. An earlier analysis by the FAA found that, to support a cadence of 25 launches a year, the vehicle presence on State Highway 4 to Boca Chica Beach will grow from an estimated 6,000 trucks a year to 23,771 trucks annually.

Because of this, the FAA is requiring SpaceX to undertake dozens of mitigating actions. For example, for trucks, it has sought to reduce employee miles driven on the primary artery leading to the Starbase launch site.

“The Proposed Action would increase annual truck traffic, but mitigation measures like employee shuttles and limiting water truck deliveries to daytime hours would help reduce traffic impacts to wildlife,” the FAA document states.

FAA green-lights Starship launches every other week from Starbase Read More »

Tuesday Telescope: After spacewalking, an astronaut strikes lightning

daily telescope, Space, tuesday telescope / Mike M. / May 6, 2025

Most astronauts these days are fairly anonymous, and chances are you have never heard of Nichole Ayers. And that’s OK.

But sometimes it’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on just how accomplished these people are. Ayers, 36, flew the supersonic F-22 stealth aircraft in the international war against the Islamic State and rose to become a major in the US Air Force before being selected as a NASA astronaut in 2021. Oh, yeah, she also completed a master’s degree in computational and applied mathematics at Rice University.

For her first spaceflight, Ayers launched on the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station in March. This flight got a fair amount of media attention, but that was largely because the arrival of Crew-10 allowed the Crew Dragon spacecraft to which Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were assigned to return home. Since then, Ayers has spent 50 days in space, astronauting. This included a spacewalk last week, her first, alongside veteran astronaut Anne McClain.

As they returned to the airlock, the Earth below started to put on a lightning show, and Ayers took note, mesmerized. A day later, she picked up a camera and captured some additional lightning strikes, saying, “I am so amazed by the view we have up here of our Earth’s weather systems.” I’ve chosen my favorite of these photos for today’s post.

Source: Nichole Ayers/NASA

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

Tuesday Telescope: After spacewalking, an astronaut strikes lightning Read More »

SpaceX pushed “sniper” theory with the feds far more than is publicly known

Features, Space / Mike M. / May 5, 2025

“It came out of nowhere, and it was really violent.”

The Amos 6 satellite is lost atop a Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: USLaunchReport

The rocket was there. And then it decidedly was not.

Shortly after sunrise on a late summer morning nearly nine years ago at SpaceX’s sole operational launch pad, engineers neared the end of a static fire test. These were still early days for their operation of a Falcon 9 rocket that used super-chilled liquid propellants, and engineers pressed to see how quickly they could complete fueling. This was because the liquid oxygen and kerosene fuel warmed quickly in Florida’s sultry air, and cold propellants were essential to maximizing the rocket’s performance.

On this morning, September 1, 2016, everything proceeded more or less nominally up until eight minutes before the ignition of the rocket’s nine Merlin engines. It was a stable point in the countdown, so no one expected what happened next.

“I saw the first explosion,” John Muratore, launch director for the mission, told me. “It came out of nowhere, and it was really violent. I swear, that explosion must have taken an hour. It felt like an hour. But it was only a few seconds. The second stage exploded in this huge ball of fire, and then the payload kind of teetered on top of the transporter erector. And then it took a swan dive off the top rails, dove down, and hit the ground. And then it exploded.”

The dramatic loss of the Falcon 9 rocket and its Amos-6 satellite, captured on video by a commercial photographer, came at a pivotal moment for SpaceX and the broader commercial space industry. It was SpaceX’s second rocket failure in a little more than a year, and it occurred as NASA was betting heavily on the company to carry its astronauts to orbit. SpaceX was not the behemoth it is today, a company valued at $350 billion. It remained vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the launch industry. This violent failure shook everyone, from the engineers in Florida to satellite launch customers to the suits at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC.

As part of my book on the Falcon 9 and Dragon years at SpaceX, Reentry, I reported deeply on the loss of the Amos-6 mission. In the weeks afterward, the greatest mystery was what had precipitated the accident. It was understood that a pressurized helium tank inside the upper stage had ruptured. But why? No major parts on the rocket were moving at the time of the failure. It was, for all intents and purposes, akin to an automobile idling in a driveway with half a tank of gasoline. And then it exploded.

This failure gave rise to one of the oddest—but also strangely compelling—stories of the 2010s in spaceflight. And we’re still learning new things today.

The “sniper” theory

The lack of a concrete explanation for the failure led SpaceX engineers to pursue hundreds of theories. One was the possibility that an outside “sniper” had shot the rocket. This theory appealed to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who was asleep at his home in California when the rocket exploded. Within hours of hearing about the failure, Musk gravitated toward the simple answer of a projectile being shot through the rocket.

This is not as crazy as it sounds, and other engineers at SpaceX aside from Musk entertained the possibility, as some circumstantial evidence to support the notion of an outside actor existed. Most notably, the first rupture in the rocket occurred about 200 feet above the ground, on the side of the vehicle facing the southwest. In this direction, about one mile away, lay a building leased by SpaceX’s main competitor in launch, United Launch Alliance. A separate video indicated a flash on the roof of this building, now known as the Spaceflight Processing Operations Center. The timing of this flash matched the interval it would take a projectile to travel from the building to the rocket.

A sniper on the roof of a competitor’s building—forget the Right Stuff, this was the stuff of a Mission: Impossible or James Bond movie.

At Musk’s direction, SpaceX worked this theory both internally and externally. Within the company, engineers and technicians actually took pressurized tanks that stored helium—one of these had burst, leading to the explosion—and shot at them in Texas to determine whether they would explode and what the result looked like. Externally, they sent the site director for their Florida operations, Ricky Lim, to inquire whether he might visit the roof of the United Launch Alliance building.

SpaceX pursued the sniper theory for more than a month. A few SpaceX employees told me that they did not stop this line of inquiry until the Federal Aviation Administration sent the company a letter definitively saying that there was no gunman involved. It would be interesting to see this letter, so I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request to the FAA in the spring of 2023. Because the federal FOIA process moves slowly, I did not expect to receive a response in time for the book. But it was worth a try anyway.

No reply came in 2023 or early 2024, when the final version of my book was due to my editor. Reentry was published last September, and still nothing. However, last week, to my great surprise and delight, I got a response from the FAA. It was the very letter I requested, sent from the FAA to Tim Hughes, the general counsel of SpaceX, on October 13, 2016. And yes, the letter says there was no gunman involved.

However, there were other things I did not know—namely, that the FBI had also investigated the incident.

The ULA rivalry

One of the most compelling elements of this story is that it involves SpaceX’s heated rival, United Launch Alliance. For a long time, ULA had the upper hand, but in recent years, it has taken a dramatic turn. Now we know that David would grow up and slay Goliath: Between the final rocket ULA launched last year (the Vulcan test flight on October 4) and the first rocket the company launched this year (Atlas V, April 28), SpaceX launched 90 rockets.

Ninety.

But it was a different story in the summer of 2016 in the months leading up to the Amos 6 failure. Back then, ULA was launching about 15 rockets a year, compared to SpaceX’s five. And ULA was launching all of the important science missions for NASA and the critical spy satellites for the US military. They were the big dog, SpaceX the pup.

In the early days of the Falcon 9 rocket, some ULA employees would drive to where SpaceX was working on the first booster and jeer at their efforts. And rivalry played out not just on the launch pad but in courtrooms and on Capitol Hill. After ULA won an $11 billion block buy contract from the US Air Force to launch high-value military payloads into the early 2020s, Musk sued in April 2014. He alleged that the contract had been awarded without a fair competition and said the Falcon 9 rocket could launch the missions at a substantially lower price. Taxpayers, he argued, were being taken for a ride.

Eventually, SpaceX and the Air Force resolved their claims. The Air Force agreed to open some of its previously awarded national security missions to competitive bids. Over time, SpaceX has overtaken ULA even in this arena. During the most recent round of awards, SpaceX won 60 percent of the contracts compared to ULA’s 40 percent.

So when SpaceX raised the possibility of a ULA sniper, it came at an incendiary moment in the rivalry, when SpaceX was finally putting forth a very serious challenge to ULA’s dominance and monopoly.

It is no surprise, therefore, that ULA told SpaceX’s Ricky Lim to get lost when he wanted to see the roof of their building in Florida.

“Hair-on-fire stuff”

NASA officials were also deeply concerned by the loss of the Falcon 9 rocket in September 2016.

The space agency spent much of the 2010s working with SpaceX and Boeing to develop, test, and fly spacecraft that could fly humans into space. These were difficult years for the space agency, which had to rely on Russia to get its astronauts into space. NASA also had a challenging time balancing costs with astronaut safety. Then rockets started blowing up.

Consider this sequence from mid-2015 to mid-2016. In June 2015, the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a cargo version of the Dragon spacecraft into orbit exploded. Less than two weeks later, NASA named four astronauts to its “commercial crew” cadre from which the initial pilots of Dragon and Starliner spacecraft would be selected. Finally, a little more than a year after this, a second Falcon 9 rocket upper stage exploded during flight.

Video of CRS-7 launch and failure.

Even as it was losing Falcon 9 rockets, SpaceX revealed that it intended to upend NASA’s long-standing practice of fueling a rocket and then, when the vehicle reached a stable condition, putting crew on board. Rather, SpaceX said it would put the astronauts on board before fueling. This process became known as “load and go.”

NASA’s safety community went nuts.

“When SpaceX came to us and said we want to load the crew first and then the propellant, mushroom clouds went off in our safety community,” Phil McAlister, the head of NASA’s commercial programs, told me for Reentry. “I mean, hair-on-fire stuff. It was just conventional wisdom that you load the propellant first and get it thermally stable. Fueling is a very dynamic operation. The vehicle is popping and hissing. The safety community was adamantly against this.”

Amos-6 compounded these concerns. That’s because the rocket was not shot by a sniper. After months of painful investigation and analysis, engineers determined the rocket was lost due to the propellant-loading process. In their goal of rapidly fueling the Falcon 9 rocket, the SpaceX teams had filled the pressurized helium tanks too quickly, heating the aluminum liner and causing it to buckle. In their haste to load super-chilled propellant onto the Falcon 9, SpaceX had found its speed limit.

At NASA, it was not difficult to visualize astronauts in a Dragon capsule sitting atop an exploding rocket during propellant loading rather than a commercial satellite.

Enter the FBI

We should stop and appreciate the crucible that SpaceX engineers and technicians endured in the fall of 2016. They were simultaneously attempting to tease out the physics of a fiendishly complex failure; prove to NASA their exploding rocket was safe; convince safety officials that even though they had just blown up their rocket by fueling it too quickly, load-and-go was feasible for astronaut missions; increase the cadence of Falcon 9 missions to catch and surpass ULA; and, oh yes, gently explain to the boss that a sniper had not shot their rocket.

So there had to be some relief when, on October 13, Hughes received that letter from Dr. Michael C. Romanowski, director of Commercial Space Integration at the FAA.

According to this letter (see a copy here), three weeks after the launch pad explosion, SpaceX submitted “video and audio” along with its analysis of the failure to the FAA. “SpaceX suggested that in the company’s view, this information and data could be indicative of sabotage or criminal activity associated with the on-pad explosion of SpaceX’s Falcon 9,” the letter states.

This is notable because it suggests that Musk directed SpaceX to elevate the “sniper” theory to the point that the FAA should take it seriously. But there was more. According to the letter, SpaceX reported the same data and analysis to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Florida.

After this, the Tampa Field Office of the FBI and its Criminal Investigative Division in Washington, DC, looked into the matter. And what did they find? Nothing, apparently.

“The FBI has informed us that based upon a thorough and coordinated review by the appropriate Federal criminal and security investigative authorities, there were no indications to suggest that sabotage or any other criminal activity played a role in the September 1 Falcon 9 explosion,” Romanowski wrote. “As a result, the FAA considers this matter closed.”

The failure of the Amos-6 mission would turn out to be a low point for SpaceX. For a few weeks, there were non-trivial questions about the company’s financial viability. But soon, SpaceX would come roaring back. In 2017, the Falcon 9 rocket launched a record 18 times, surpassing ULA for the first time. The gap would only widen. Last year, SpaceX launched 137 rockets to ULA’s five.

With Amos-6, therefore, SpaceX lost the battle. But it would eventually win the war—without anyone firing a shot.

SpaceX pushed “sniper” theory with the feds far more than is publicly known Read More »