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chinese-space-firm-unintentionally-launches-its-new-rocket

Chinese space firm unintentionally launches its new rocket

Anomaly, Space, space pioneer, spacex / /

What goes up must come down —

Space Pioneer had been prepping the vehicle for its debut launch later this summer.

–

The Tianlong-3 rocket as seen on its test stand before the anomaly.

Enlarge / The Tianlong-3 rocket as seen on its test stand before the anomaly.

Space Pioneer

One of the most promising Chinese space startups, Space Pioneer, experienced a serious anomaly this weekend while testing the first stage of its Tianlong-3 rocket near the city of Gongyi.

The rocket was undergoing a static fire test of the stage, in which a vehicle is clamped to a test stand while its engines are ignited, when the booster broke free. According to a statement from the company, the rocket was not sufficiently clamped down and blasted off from the test stand “due to a structural failure.”

Video of the accidental ascent showed the rocket rising several hundred meters into the sky before it crashed explosively into a mountain 1.5 km away from the test site. (See various angles of the accident here, on the social media site X, or on Weibo.) The statement from Space Pioneer sought to downplay the incident, saying it had implemented safety measures before the test, and there were no casualties as a result of the accident. “The test site is far away from the urban area of ​​Gongyi,” the company said.

This is not entirely true, however. Located in the Henan province in eastern China, alongside the Yellow River, Gongyi has a population of about 800,000 people. The test stand is only about 5 km away from the city’s downtown and less than a kilometer from a smaller village.

Such accidents are rare in the launch industry but not unprecedented. Typically, during a static fire test, the mass of propellant on board a vehicle combined with strong clamps hold a rocket down. However, in 1952, a US Viking rocket broke loose of its moorings at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. It crashed 6 km downrange of the launch site without casualties.

How big of a setback?

It is unclear how big of a setback this will be for Space Pioneer, a quasi-private company founded in 2019. A little more than a year ago, Space Pioneer became the first Chinese company to reach orbit with a liquid-fueled rocket. It did so, impressively, on the first attempt of its small Tianlong-2 rocket. This was a notable achievement, but the rocket’s engines were provided by a Chinese state-operated firm, the Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology, rather than the private company.

For the larger Tianlong-3 rocket, Space Pioneer says it is manufacturing its own kerosene-fueled engines, known as TH-12. (They appear to have performed as expected this weekend.) Nine of these engines will power the Tianlong-3 rocket, which is intended to have a thrust of 17 tons to low-Earth orbit. The rocket’s design and the planned reuse of its first stage mimic the Falcon 9 rocket developed by SpaceX.

Space Pioneer had been prepping the vehicle for its debut launch later this summer or fall—and first-stage static-fire tests are indicative of a rocket’s final testing phase before liftoff. The company’s statement did not set a new timeline for a launch attempt but said it would complete the fault analysis “as soon as possible.”

China has the most vibrant commercial space industry in the world after the United States. Nearly a decade ago, the country’s leadership committed to sharing state-owned technology with companies that raised private funding, seeking to emulate the commercial success of SpaceX and other US companies.

Today, there are dozens of Chinese firms developing rockets, satellites, and other spaceflight products. Space Pioneer has been among the most promising, having raised more than $400 million since its inception five years ago.

Chinese space firm unintentionally launches its new rocket Read More »

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NASA and SpaceX misjudged the risks from reentering space junk

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A European ATV cargo freighter reenters the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean in 2013.

Enlarge / A European ATV cargo freighter reenters the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean in 2013.

Since the beginning of the year, landowners have discovered several pieces of space junk traced to missions supporting the International Space Station. On all of these occasions, engineers expected none of the disposable hardware would survive the scorching heat of reentry and make it to Earth’s surface.

These incidents highlight an urgency for more research into what happens when a spacecraft makes an uncontrolled reentry into the atmosphere, according to engineers from the Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research center based in El Segundo, California. More stuff is getting launched into space than ever before, and the trend will continue as companies deploy more satellite constellations and field heavier rockets.

“The biggest immediate need now is just to do some more work to really understand this whole process and to be in a position to be ready to accommodate new materials, new operational approaches as they happen more quickly,” said Marlon Sorge, executive director of Aerospace’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies. “Clearly, that’s the direction that spaceflight is going.”

Ideally, a satellite or rocket body at the end of its life could be guided to a controlled reentry into the atmosphere over a remote part of the ocean. But this is often cost-prohibitive because it would require carrying extra fuel for the de-orbit maneuvers, and in many cases, a spacecraft doesn’t have any rocket thrusters at all.

In March, a fragment from a battery pack jettisoned from the space station punched a hole in the roof of a Florida home, a rare instance of terrestrial property damage attributed to a piece of space junk. In May, a 90-pound chunk of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft that departed the International Space Station fell on the property of a “glamping” resort in North Carolina. At the same time, a homeowner in a nearby town found a smaller piece of material that also appeared to be from the same Dragon mission.

These events followed the discovery in April of another nearly 90-pound piece of debris from a Dragon capsule on a farm in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. NASA and SpaceX later determined the debris fell from orbit in February, and earlier this month, SpaceX employees came to the farm to retrieve the wreckage, according to CBC.

Pieces of a Dragon spacecraft also fell over Colorado last year, and a farmer in Australia found debris from a Dragon capsule on his land in 2022.

NASA and SpaceX misjudged the risks from reentering space junk Read More »

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Rocket Report: China flies reusable rocket hopper; Falcon Heavy dazzles

china, european space agency, falcon 9, falcon heavy, Firefly Aerospace, launch, rocket lab, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex, united launch alliance, vulcan / /
SpaceX's 10th Falcon Heavy rocket climbs into orbit with a new US government weather satellite.

Enlarge / SpaceX’s 10th Falcon Heavy rocket climbs into orbit with a new US government weather satellite.

Welcome to Edition 6.50 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX launched its 10th Falcon Heavy rocket this week with the GOES-U weather satellite for NOAA, and this one was a beauty. The late afternoon timing of the launch and atmospheric conditions made for great photography. Falcon Heavy has become a trusted rocket for the US government, and its next flight in October will deploy NASA’s Europa Clipper spacecraft on the way to explore one of Jupiter’s enigmatic icy moons.

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

Sir Peter Beck dishes on launch business. Ars spoke with the recently knighted Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, on where his scrappy company fits in a global launch marketplace dominated by SpaceX. Rocket Lab racked up the third-most number of orbital launches by any US launch company (it’s headquartered in California but primarily assembles and launches rockets in New Zealand). SpaceX’s rideshare launch business with the Falcon 9 rocket is putting immense pressure on small launch companies like Rocket Lab. However, Beck argues his Electron rocket is a bespoke solution for customers desiring to put their satellite in a specific place at a specific time, a luxury they can’t count on with a SpaceX rideshare.

Ruthlessly efficient … A word that Beck returned to throughout his interview with Ars was “ruthless.” He said Rocket Lab’s success is a result of the company being “ruthlessly efficient and not making mistakes.” At one time, Rocket Lab was up against Virgin Orbit in the small launch business, and Virgin Orbit had access to capital through billionaire Richard Branson. Now, SpaceX is the 800-pound gorilla in the market. “We have a saying here at Rocket Lab that we have no money, so we have to think. We’ve never been in a position to outspend our competitors. We just have to out-think them. We have to be lean and mean.”

Firefly reveals plans for new launch sites. Firefly Aerospace plans to use the state of Virginia-owned launch pad at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility for East Coast launches of its Alpha small-satellite rocket, Aviation Week reports. The company plans to use Pad 0A for US military and other missions, particularly those requiring tight turnaround between procurement and launch. This is the same launch pad previously used by Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket, and it’s the soon-to-be home of the Medium Launch Vehicle (MLV) jointly developed by Northrop and Firefly. The launch pad will be configured for Alpha launches beginning in 2025, according to Firefly, which previously planned to develop an Alpha launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Now, Alpha and MLV rockets will fly from the same site on the East Coast, while Alpha will continue launching from the West Coast at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.

Hello, Sweden… A few days after the announcement for launches from Virginia, Firefly unveiled a collaborative agreement with Swedish Space Corporation to launch Alpha rockets from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden as soon as 2026. Esrange has been the departure point for numerous suborbital and sounding rocket for nearly 50 years, but the spaceport is being upgraded for orbital satellite launches. A South Korean startup named Perigee Aerospace announced in May it signed an agreement to be the first user of Esrange’s orbital launch capability. Firefly is the second company to make plans to launch satellites from the remote site in northern Sweden. (submitted by Ken the Bin and brianrhurley)

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China hops closer to reusable rockets. The Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), part of China’s apparatus of state-owned aerospace companies, has conducted the country’s highest altitude launch and landing test so far as several teams chase reusable rocket capabilities, Space News reports. A 3.8-meter-diameter (9.2-foot) test article powered by three methane liquid-oxygen engines lifted off from the Gobi Desert on June 23 and soared to an altitude of about 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) before setting down successfully for a vertical propulsive touchdown on landing legs at a nearby landing area. SAST will follow up with a 70-kilometer (43.5-mile) suborbital test using grid fins for better control. A first orbital flight of the new reusable rocket is planned for 2025.

Lots of players … If you don’t exclusively follow China’s launch sector, you should be forgiven for being unable to list all the companies working on new reusable rockets. Late last year, a Chinese startup named iSpace flew a hopper rocket testbed to an altitude of several hundred meters as part of a development program for the company’s upcoming partially reusable Hyperbola 2 rocket. A company named Space Pioneer plans to launch its medium-class Tianlong 3 rocket for the first time later this year. Tianlong 3 looks remarkably like SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and its first stage will eventually be made reusable. China recently test-fired engines for the government’s new Long March 10, a partially reusable rocket planned to become China’s next-generation crew launch vehicle. These are just a few of the reusable rocket programs in China. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Spanish launch startup invests in Kourou. PLD Space says it is ready to start construction at a disused launch complex at the Guiana Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana. The Spanish launch startup announced this week a 10 million euro ($10.7 million) investment in the launch complex for its Miura 5 rocket, with preparations of the site set to begin “after the summer.” The launch pad was previously used by the French Diamant rocket in the 1970s and is located several miles away from the launch pads used by the European Ariane 6 and Vega rockets. PLD Space is on track to become the first fully commercial company to launch from the spaceport in South America.

Free access to space … Also this week, PLD Space announced a new program to offer space aboard the first two flights of its Miura 5 rocket for free, European Spaceflight reports. The two-stage Miura 5 rocket will be capable of delivering about a half-ton of payload mass into a Sun-synchronous orbit. PLD Space will offer free launch services aboard the first two Miura 5 flights, which are expected to take place in late 2025 and early 2026. The application process will close on July 30, and winning proposals will be announced on November 30. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Rocket Report: China flies reusable rocket hopper; Falcon Heavy dazzles Read More »

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NASA will pay SpaceX nearly $1 billion to deorbit the International Space Station

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Illustration of the SpaceX Dragon XL as it is deployed from the Falcon Heavy's second stage in high Earth orbit on its way to the Gateway in lunar orbit.

Enlarge / Illustration of the SpaceX Dragon XL as it is deployed from the Falcon Heavy’s second stage in high Earth orbit on its way to the Gateway in lunar orbit.

SpaceX

NASA has awarded an $843 million contract to SpaceX to develop a “US Deorbit Vehicle.” This spacecraft will dock to the International Space Station in 2029 and then ensure the large facility makes a controlled reentry through Earth’s atmosphere before splashing into the ocean in 2030.

“Selecting a US Deorbit Vehicle for the International Space Station will help NASA and its international partners ensure a safe and responsible transition in low Earth orbit at the end of station operations,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for Space Operations, in a statement. “This decision also supports NASA’s plans for future commercial destinations and allows for the continued use of space near Earth.”

NASA has a couple of reasons for bringing the space station’s life to a close in 2030. Foremost among these is that the station is aging. Parts of it are now a quarter of a century old. There are cracks on the Russian segment of the space station that are spreading. Although the station could likely be maintained beyond 2030, it would require increasing amounts of crew time to keep flying the station safely.

Additionally, NASA is seeking to foster a commercial economy in low-Earth orbit. To that end, it is working with several private companies to develop commercial space stations that would be able to house NASA astronauts, as well as those from other countries and private citizens, by or before 2030. By setting an end date for the station’s lifetime and sticking with it, NASA can help those private companies raise money from investors.

Do we have to sink the station?

The station, the largest object humans have ever constructed in space, is too large to allow it to make an uncontrolled return to Earth. It has a mass of 450 metric tons and is about the size of an American football field. The threat to human life and property is too great. Hence the need for a deorbit vehicle.

The space agency considered alternatives to splashing the station down into a remote area of an ocean. One option involved moving the station into a stable parking orbit at 40,000 km above Earth, above geostationary orbit. However, the agency said this would require 3,900 m/s of delta-V, compared to the approximately 47 m/s of delta-V needed to deorbit the station. In terms of propellant, NASA estimated moving to a higher orbit would require 900 metric tons, or the equivalent of 150 to 250 cargo supply vehicles.

NASA also considered partially disassembling the station before its reentry but found this would be much more complex and risky than a controlled deorbit that kept the complex intact.

The NASA announcement did not specify what vehicle SpaceX would use to perform the deorbit burn, but we can draw some clues from the public documents for the contract procurement. For example, NASA will select a rocket for the mission at a later date, but probably no later than 2026. This would support a launch date in 2029, to have the deorbit vehicle docked to the station one year before the planned reentry.

NASA will pay SpaceX nearly $1 billion to deorbit the International Space Station Read More »

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Blue Origin joins SpaceX and ULA in new round of military launch contracts

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Playing with the big boys —

“Lane 1 serves our commercial-like missions that can accept more risk.”

–

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket on the launch pad for testing earlier this year.

Enlarge / Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket on the launch pad for testing earlier this year.

After years of lobbying, protests, and bidding, Jeff Bezos’s space company is now a military launch contractor.

The US Space Force announced Thursday that Blue Origin will compete with United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for at least 30 military launch contracts over the next five years. These launch contracts have a combined value of up to $5.6 billion.

This is the first of two major contract decisions the Space Force will make this year as the military seeks to foster more competition among its roster of launch providers and reduce its reliance on just one or two companies.

For more than a decade following its formation from the merger of Boeing and Lockheed Martin rocket programs, ULA was the sole company certified to launch the military’s most critical satellites. This changed in 2018, when SpaceX started launching national security satellites for the military. In 2020, despite protests from Blue Origin seeking eligibility, the Pentagon selected ULA and SpaceX to continue sharing launch duties.

The National Security Space Launch (NSSL) program is in charge of selecting contractors to deliver military surveillance, navigation, and communications satellites into orbit.

Over the next five years, the Space Force wants to tap into new launch capabilities from emerging space companies. The procurement approach for this new round of contracts, known as NSSL Phase 3, is different from the way the military previously bought launch services. Instead of grouping all national security launches into one monolithic contract, the Space Force is dividing them into two classifications: Lane 1 and Lane 2.

The Space Force’s contract announced Thursday was for Lane 1, which is for less demanding missions to low-Earth orbit. These missions include smaller tech demos, experiments, and launches for the military’s new constellation of missile-tracking and data-relay satellites, an effort that will eventually include hundreds or thousands of spacecraft managed by the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency.

This fall, the Space Force will award up to three contracts for Lane 2, which covers the government’s most sensitive national security satellites, which require “complex security and integration requirements.” These are often large, heavy spacecraft weighing many tons and sometimes needing to go to orbits thousands of miles from Earth. The Space Force will require Lane 2 contractors to go through a more extensive certification process than is required in Lane 1.

“Today marks the beginning of this innovative, dual-lane approach to launch service acquisition, whereby Lane 1 serves our commercial-like missions that can accept more risk and Lane 2 provides our traditional, full mission assurance for the most stressing heavy-lift launches of our most risk-averse missions,” said Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration.

Meeting the criteria

The Space Force received seven bids for Lane 1, but only three companies met the criteria to join the military’s roster of launch providers. The basic requirement to win a Lane 1 contract was for a company to show its rocket can place at least 15,000 pounds of payload mass into low-Earth orbit, either on a single flight or over a series of flights within a 90-day period.

The bidders also had to substantiate their plan to launch the rocket they proposed to use for Lane 1 missions by December 15 of this year. A spokesperson for Space Systems Command said SpaceX proposed using their Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, and ULA offered its Vulcan rocket. Those launchers are already flying. Blue Origin proposed its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, slated for an inaugural test flight no earlier than September.

“As we anticipated, the pool of awardees is small this year because many companies are still maturing their launch capabilities,” said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for the Space Force’s assured access to space division. “Our strategy accounted for this by allowing on-ramp opportunities every year, and we expect increasing competition and diversity as new providers and systems complete development.”

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Enlarge / A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket lifts off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Trevor Mahlmann/Ars Technica

The Space Force plans to open up the first on-ramp opportunity for Lane 1 as soon as the end of this year. Companies with medium-lift rockets in earlier stages of development, such as Rocket Lab, Relativity Space, Firefly Aerospace, and Stoke Space, will have the chance to join ULA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin in the Lane 1 pool at that time. The structure of the NSSL Phase 3 contracts allow the Pentagon to take advantage of emerging launch capabilities as soon as they become available, according to Calvelli.

In a statement, Panzenhagen said having additional launch providers will increase the Space Force’s “resiliency” in a time of increasing competition between the US, Russia, and China in orbit. “Launching more risk-tolerant satellites on potentially less mature launch systems using tailored independent government mission assurance could yield substantial operational responsiveness, innovation, and savings,” Panzenhagen said.

More competition, theoretically, will also deliver lower launch prices to the Space Force. SpaceX and Blue Origin rockets are partially reusable, while ULA eventually plans to recover and reuse Vulcan main engines.

Over the next five years, Space Systems Command will dole out fixed-price “task orders” to ULA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin for groups of Lane 1 missions. The first batch of missions up for awards in Lane 1 include seven launches for the Space Development Agency’s missile tracking mega-constellation, plus a task order for the National Reconnaissance Office, the government’s spy satellite agency. However, military officials require a rocket to have completed at least one successful orbital launch to win a Lane 1 task order, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn doesn’t yet satisfy this requirement.

The Space Force will pay Blue Origin $5 million for an “initial capabilities assessment” for Lane 1. SpaceX and ULA, the military’s incumbent launch contractors, will each receive $1.5 million for similar assessments.

ULA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin are also the top contenders to win Lane 2 contracts later this year. In order to compete in Lane 2, a launch provider must show it has a plan for its rockets to meet the Space Force’s stringent certification requirements by October 1, 2026. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are already certified, and ULA’s Vulcan is on a path to achieve this milestone by the end of this year, pending a successful second test flight in the next few months. A successful debut of New Glenn by the end of this year would put the October 2026 deadline within reach of Blue Origin.

Blue Origin joins SpaceX and ULA in new round of military launch contracts Read More »

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SpaceX is about to launch Starship again—the FAA will be more forgiving this time

Commercial space, Federal Aviation Administration, launch, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, starship ift-4, texas / /
The rocket for SpaceX's fourth full-scale Starship test flight awaits liftoff from Starbase, the company's private launch base in South Texas.

Enlarge / The rocket for SpaceX’s fourth full-scale Starship test flight awaits liftoff from Starbase, the company’s private launch base in South Texas.

SpaceX

The Federal Aviation Administration approved the commercial launch license for the fourth test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket Tuesday, with liftoff from South Texas targeted for just after sunrise Thursday.

“The FAA has approved a license authorization for SpaceX Starship Flight 4,” the agency said in a statement. “SpaceX met all safety and other licensing requirements for this test flight.”

Shortly after the FAA announced the launch license, SpaceX confirmed plans to launch the fourth test flight of the world’s largest rocket at 7: 00 am CDT (12: 00 UTC) Thursday. The launch window runs for two hours.

This flight follows three prior demonstration missions, each progressively more successful, of SpaceX’s privately developed mega-rocket. The last time Starship flew—on March 14—it completed an eight-and-a-half minute climb into space, but the ship was unable to maneuver itself as it coasted nearly 150 miles (250 km) above Earth. This controllability problem caused the rocket to break apart during reentry.

On Thursday’s flight, SpaceX officials will expect the ascent portion of the test flight to be similarly successful to the launch in March. The objectives this time will be to demonstrate Starship’s ability to survive the most extreme heating of reentry, when temperatures peak at 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) as the vehicle plunges into the atmosphere at more than 20 times the speed of sound.

SpaceX officials also hope to see the Super Heavy booster guide itself toward a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico just offshore from the company’s launch site, known as Starbase, in Cameron County, Texas.

“The fourth flight test turns our focus from achieving orbit to demonstrating the ability to return and reuse Starship and Super Heavy,” SpaceX wrote in an overview of the mission.

Last month, SpaceX completed a “wet dress rehearsal” at Starbase, where the launch team fully loaded the rocket with cryogenic methane and liquid oxygen propellants. Before the practice countdown, SpaceX test-fired the booster and ship at the launch site. More recently, technicians installed components of the rocket’s self-destruct system, which would activate to blow up the rocket if it flies off course.

Then, on Tuesday, SpaceX lowered the Starship upper stage from the top of the Super Heavy booster, presumably to perform final touch-ups to the ship’s heat shield, composed of 18,000 hexagonal ceramic tiles to protect its stainless-steel structure during reentry. Ground teams were expected to raise the ship, or upper stage, back on top of the booster sometime Wednesday, returning the rocket to its full height of 397 feet (121 meters) ahead of Thursday morning’s launch window.

The tick-tock of Starship’s fourth flight

If all goes according to plan, SpaceX’s launch team will start loading 10 million pounds of super-cold propellants into the rocket around 49 minutes before liftoff Thursday. The methane and liquid oxygen will first flow into the smaller tanks on the ship, then into the larger tanks on the booster.

The rocket should be fully loaded about three minutes prior to launch, and, following a sequence of automated checks, the computer controlling the countdown will give the command to light the booster’s 33 Raptor engines. Three seconds later, the rocket will begin its vertical climb off the launch mount, with its engines capable of producing more than 16 million pounds of thrust at full power.

Heading east from the Texas Gulf Coast, the rocket will exceed the speed of sound in about a minute, then begin shutting down its 33 main engines around 2 minutes and 41 seconds after liftoff. Then, just as the Super Heavy booster jettisons to begin a descent back to Earth, Starship’s six Raptor engines will ignite to continue pushing the upper portion of the rocket into space. Starship’s engines are expected to burn until T+ 8 minutes, 23 seconds, accelerating the rocket to near-orbital velocity with enough energy to fly an arcing trajectory halfway around the world to the Indian Ocean.

All of this will be similar to the events of the last Starship launch in March. What differs in the flight plan this time involves the attempts to steer the booster and ship back to Earth. This is important to lay the groundwork for future flights, when SpaceX wants to bring the Super Heavy booster—the size of the fuselage of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet—to a landing back at its launch pad. Eventually, SpaceX also intends to recover reusable Starships back at Starbase or other spaceports.

This infographic released by SpaceX shows the flight profile for SpaceX's fourth Starship launch.

Enlarge / This infographic released by SpaceX shows the flight profile for SpaceX’s fourth Starship launch.

SpaceX

Based on the results of the March test flight, SpaceX still has a lot to prove in these areas. On that flight, the engines on the Super Heavy booster could not complete all the burns required to guide the rocket toward the splashdown zone in the Gulf of Mexico. The booster lost control as it plummeted toward the ocean.

Engineers traced the failure to blockage in a filter where liquid oxygen flows into the Raptor engines. Notably, a similar problem occurred on the second Starship test flight last November. The Super Heavy booster awaiting launch Thursday has additional hardware to improve propellant filtration capabilities, according to SpaceX. The company also implemented “operational changes” on the booster for the upcoming test flight, including to jettison the Super Heavy’s staging ring, which sits between the booster and ship during launch, to reduce the rocket’s mass during descent.

SpaceX has a lot of experience bringing back its fleet of Falcon 9 boosters. The company now boasts a streak of more than 240 successful rocket landings in a row, so it’s reasonable to expect SpaceX will overcome the challenge of recovering the larger Super Heavy booster.

SpaceX is about to launch Starship again—the FAA will be more forgiving this time Read More »

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Here’s why a Japanese billionaire just canceled his lunar flight on Starship

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No Moon —

“I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer.”

–

Elon Musk speaks as Yusaku Maezawa, founder and president of Start Today Co., looks on at an event at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, in 2018.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks as Yusaku Maezawa, founder and president of Start Today Co., looks on at an event at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, in 2018.

Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images

On Friday night the dearMoon project—a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and 10 other ‘crew members’ on a circumlunar flight aboard SpaceX’s Starship vehicle—was abruptly canceled.

“It is unfortunate to be announcing that ‘dearMoon’, the first private circumlunar flight project, will be cancelled,” the mission’s official account on the social media site X said. “We thank everyone who has supported us and apologize to those who have looked forward to this project.”

Shortly afterward the financial backer of the project and its ‘crew leader,’ Yusaku Maezawa, explained this decision on X. When Maezawa agreed to the mission in 2018, he said, the assumption was that the dearMoon mission would launch by the end of 2023.

“It’s a developmental project so it is what it is, but it is still uncertain as to when Starship can launch,” he wrote. “I can’t plan my future in this situation, and I feel terrible making the crew members wait longer, hence the difficult decision to cancel at this point in time. I apologize to those who were excited for this project to happen.”

The mission was to be Starship’s first human spaceflight to launch from Earth, fly around the Moon, and come back. Now, it’s not happening. Why did this happen, and what does it mean?

Origins of the mission

Maezawa and Musk made the announcement, side by side, at SpaceX’s rocket factory in Hawthorne in September 2018. It was something of an odd but important moment. It seemed significant that SpaceX was signing its first commercial contract for the massive Starship rocket. And while the value was not disclosed, Maezawa was injecting something on the order of the low hundreds of millions of dollars into the program.

Maezawa, however, always came off as a bit non-serious. He said he would hold a competition to fill 10 other seats on board the vehicle. “I did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself,” he said. “I would be a little lonely.” Later, he did select a crew of creative people.

Initially, however, Maezawa did take the project seriously. When I watched the very first Starship hop test in July 2019, there were only a handful of visitors on hand to view the brief flight of “Starhopper.” One of them was a representative of Maezawa who was keeping close tabs on the progress of Starship.

As big space projects do—and to the surprise of no one—Starship ran behind in its development. The first test flight did not occur until April 2023, and that was just the beginning. The dearMoon mission lay at the very end of a long line of tests that the vehicle must complete: safe launch, controlled flight in space, safe landing of the Starship upper stage, in-space refueling, habitability in space, and much more.

With the fourth test flight of Starship coming in a few days, as early as June 5, SpaceX has so far demonstrated the ability to safely launch Starship. So it remains at the beginning of a challenging technical journey.

A turning point

One of the biggest impacts to the dearMoon project came in April 2021, when NASA selected the Starship vehicle as the lunar lander for its Artemis Program. This put the large vehicle on the critical path for NASA’s ambitious program to land humans on the surface of the Moon. It also offered an order of magnitude more funding, $2.9 billion, and the promise of more if SpaceX could deliver a vehicle to take humans down to the Moon’s surface from lunar orbit, and back.

Since then SpaceX has had two clear priorities for its Starship program. The first of these is to become operational, and begin deploying larger Starlink satellites. And the second is to use these flights to test technologies needed for NASA’s Artemis Program, such as in-space propellant storage and refueling.

As a result other aspects of the program, including dearMoon, were deprioritized. In recent months it became clear that if Maezawa’s mission happened, it would not occur until at least the early 2030s—at least a decade after the original plan.

Changing fortunes

In the meantime, Maezawa’s priorities also likely changed. According to Forbes, when the plan was announced in 2018, the entrepreneur had a net worth of about $3 billion. Today he is estimated to be worth only half of that. Additionally, he scratched his itch to go to space in 2021, flying aboard a Russian Soyuz vehicle for a 12-day trip to the International Space Station.

The writing has been on the wall for a while about Maezawa, since SpaceX founder Elon Musk unfollowed the Japanese entrepreneur on X earlier this year. (This is a sure sign of his disfavor. Musk has unfollowed me twice on Twitter/X after stories or interactions he did not like.) It is probable that the combination of developmental delays and Maezawa’s personal fortunes led the parties to disband the project.

This all leaves a clearer road ahead for Starship: Become operational, start flying Starlink satellites, and begin ticking off the technical challenges for Artemis. Then, several years from now, the company will turn its attention toward the challenging prospect of launching humans inside Starship from Earth, and then landing back on the planet. The first of these people will be another billionaire, Jared Isaacman, who has already flown on Crew Dragon and plans at least two more such flights before the pioneering Starship mission.

Here’s why a Japanese billionaire just canceled his lunar flight on Starship Read More »

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Rocket Report: North Korean rocket explosion; launch over Chinese skyline

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A sea-borne variant of the commercial Ceres 1 rocket lifts off near the coast of Rizhao, a city of 3 million in China's Shandong province.

Enlarge / A sea-borne variant of the commercial Ceres 1 rocket lifts off near the coast of Rizhao, a city of 3 million in China’s Shandong province.

Welcome to Edition 6.46 of the Rocket Report! It looks like we will be covering the crew test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft and the fourth test flight of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket over the next week. All of this is happening as SpaceX keeps up its cadence of flying multiple Starlink missions per week. The real stars are the Ars copy editors helping make sure our stories don’t use the wrong names.

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

Another North Korean launch failure. North Korea’s latest attempt to launch a rocket with a military reconnaissance satellite ended in failure due to the midair explosion of the rocket during the first-stage flight this week, South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reports. Video captured by the Japanese news organization NHK appears to show the North Korean rocket disappearing in a fireball shortly after liftoff Monday night from a launch pad on the country’s northwest coast. North Korean officials acknowledged the launch failure and said the rocket was carrying a small reconnaissance satellite named Malligyong-1-1.

Russia’s role? … Experts initially thought the pending North Korean launch, which was known ahead of time from international airspace warning notices, would use the same Chŏllima 1 rocket used on three flights last year. But North Korean statements following the launch Monday indicated the rocket used a new propulsion system burning a petroleum-based fuel, presumably kerosene, with liquid oxygen as the oxidizer. The Chŏllima 1 rocket design used a toxic mixture of hypergolic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide as propellants. If North Korea’s statement is true, this would be a notable leap in the country’s rocket technology and begs the question of whether Russia played a significant role in the launch. Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged more Russian support for North Korea’s rocket program in a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. (submitted by Ken the Bin and Jay500001)

Rocket Lab deploys small NASA climate satellite. Rocket Lab is in the midst of back-to-back launches for NASA, carrying identical climate research satellites into different orbits to study heat loss to space in Earth’s polar regions. The Polar Radiant Energy in the Far-InfraRed Experiment (PREFIRE) satellites are each about the size of a shoebox, and NASA says data from PREFIRE will improve computer models that researchers use to predict how Earth’s ice, seas, and weather will change in a warming world. “The difference between the amount of heat Earth absorbs at the tropics and that radiated out from the Arctic and Antarctic is a key influence on the planet’s temperature, helping to drive dynamic systems of climate and weather,” NASA said in a statement.

Twice in a week… NASA selected Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle to deliver the two PREFIRE satellites into orbit on two dedicated rides rather than launching at a lower cost on a rideshare mission. This is because scientists want the satellites flying at the proper alignment to ensure they fly over the poles several hours apart, providing the data needed to measure how the rate at which heat radiates from the polar regions changes over time. The first PREFIRE launch occurred on May 25, and the next one is slated for May 31. Both launches will take off from Rocket Lab’s base in New Zealand. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

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A rocket launch comes to Rizhao. China has diversified its launch sector over the last decade to include new families of small satellite launchers and new spaceports. One of these relatively new small rockets, the solid-fueled Ceres 1, took off Wednesday from a floating launch pad positioned about 2 miles (3 km) off the coast of Rizhao, a city of roughly 3 million people in China’s Shandong province. The Ceres 1 rocket, developed by a quasi-commercial company called Galactic Energy, has previously flown from land-based launch pads and a sea-borne platform, but this mission originated from a location remarkably close to shore, with the skyline of a major metropolitan area as a backdrop.

Range safety … There’s no obvious orbital mechanics reason to position the rocket’s floating launch platform so near a major Chinese city, other than perhaps to gain a logistical advantage by launching close to port. The Ceres 1 rocket has a fairly good reliability record—11 successes in 12 flights—but for safety reasons, there’s no Western spaceport that would allow members of the public (not to mention a few million) to get so close to a rocket launch. For decades, Chinese rockets have routinely dropped rocket boosters containing toxic propellant on farms and villages downrange from the country’s inland spaceports.

Rocket Report: North Korean rocket explosion; launch over Chinese skyline Read More »

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SpaceX sets date for next Starship flight, explains what went wrong the last time

Science, Space, spacex, starship / /

IFT-4 on June 5 —

Clearing blocked filters and clogged valves is the order of the day.

–

SpaceX's Starship vehicle undergoes a wet dress rehearsal prior to its fourth launch attempt.

Enlarge / SpaceX’s Starship vehicle undergoes a wet dress rehearsal prior to its fourth launch attempt.

SpaceX

SpaceX is targeting June 5 for the next flight of its massive Starship rocket, the company said Friday.

The highly anticipated test flight— the fourth in a program to bring Starship to operational readiness and make progress toward its eventual reuse—will seek to demonstrate the ability of the Super Heavy first stage to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico and for the Starship upper stage to make a controlled reentry through Earth’s atmosphere before it falls into the Indian Ocean.

This mission will carry no payloads as SpaceX seeks additional flight data about the performance of the complex Starship vehicle. It is simultaneously the largest and most powerful rocket ever built and the first launch system ever intended to be fully and rapidly reusable.

As part of its announcement of the flight date, SpaceX provided some information about its learnings from the most recent flight test, Flight 3, which launched on March 14, 2024.

Dissecting Flight 3

During that flight, SpaceX also attempted a soft landing of the Super Heavy first stage. After its separation from the Starship upper stage, as intended, 13 of Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines successfully relit to make a controlled flight through the lower atmosphere. During this boostback burn, however, six of these engines shut down early. Later in the descent, as the rocket neared the sea surface, the rocket was supposed to use the same 13 engines to make a final landing burn.

“The six engines that shut down early in the boostback burn were disabled from attempting the landing burn startup, leaving seven engines commanded to start up with two successfully reaching mainstage ignition,” the company said in its recap of the flight. “The booster had lower than expected landing burn thrust when contact was lost at approximately 462 meters in altitude over the Gulf of Mexico and just under seven minutes into the mission.”

The cause of this failure was traced to blockage in a filter where liquid oxygen flows into the Raptor engines. Notably, a similar problem occurred during the second test flight of Starship in November 2023. SpaceX says it implemented “hardware changes” to address this blockage issue for the third test flight. Now, the company said, “Super Heavy boosters for Flight 4 and beyond will get additional hardware inside oxygen tanks to further improve propellant filtration capabilities.” It will be interesting to see whether the company’s engineers have successfully addressed this issue.

As for the Starship upper stage, the vehicle began losing the ability to control its attitude during its coast phase in space. This was found to be due to clogged valves used by reaction control thrusters on the upper stage. The company’s update notes that “SpaceX has since added additional roll control thrusters on upcoming Starships.” But it is not clear that they will be available for Flight 4. Indeed, the fact that SpaceX is not attempting an in-flight relight of Raptor engines on the Starship upper stage suggests these new roll control thrusters are not yet in place.

Ultimately this lack of attitude control during Flight 3 resulted in a non-nominal reentry to Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceX was able to maintain contact with the vehicle down to 65 km in altitude before telemetry was lost due to excess heating.

Back to the basics

On Flight 3, SpaceX achieved some important milestones, including the opening of the Starship payload bay door in space and a small propellant transfer demonstration. Due to the loss of attitude control, however, a planned Raptor rocket engine re-light test was not conducted. This is an important test, as Raptor ignition is needed to perform a controlled reentry—essentially to ensure that Starship returns to a remote section of ocean rather than land.

For the next flight, SpaceX is focused on solving the technical issues observed on Flight 3: the filter blockages observed during Super Heavy’s boostback and landing burns, Starship’s attitude control during its coast phase, and managing reentry of that vehicle from orbital velocity.

Once these issues are resolved, the company can proceed to more advanced tests, including landing the Super Heavy booster back at the South Texas launch site, deployment of Starlink satellites, and additional tests of propellant transfer essential for NASA’s Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon.

SpaceX sets date for next Starship flight, explains what went wrong the last time Read More »

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We take a stab at decoding SpaceX’s ever-changing plans for Starship in Florida

artemis, cape canaveral, Commercial space, Features, Federal Aviation Administration, Kennedy Space Center, launch, launch complex 39a, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, starship / /
SpaceX's Starship tower (left) at Launch Complex 39A dwarfs the launch pad for the Falcon 9 rocket (right).

Enlarge / SpaceX’s Starship tower (left) at Launch Complex 39A dwarfs the launch pad for the Falcon 9 rocket (right).

There are a couple of ways to read the announcement from the Federal Aviation Administration that it’s kicking off a new environmental review of SpaceX’s plan to launch the most powerful rocket in the world from Florida.

The FAA said on May 10 that it plans to develop an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for SpaceX’s proposal to launch Starships from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The FAA ordered this review after SpaceX updated the regulatory agency on the projected Starship launch rate and the design of the ground infrastructure needed at Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), the historic launch pad once used for Apollo and Space Shuttle missions.

Dual environmental reviews

At the same time, the US Space Force is overseeing a similar EIS for SpaceX’s proposal to take over a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles south of LC-39A. This launch pad, designated Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37), is available for use after United Launch Alliance’s last Delta rocket lifted off there in April.

On the one hand, these environmental reviews often take a while and could cloud Elon Musk’s goal of having Starship launch sites in Florida ready for service by the end of 2025. “A couple of years would not be a surprise,” said George Nield, an aerospace industry consultant and former head of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.

Another way to look at the recent FAA and Space Force announcements of pending environmental reviews is that SpaceX finally appears to be cementing its plans to launch Starship from Florida. These plans have changed quite a bit in the last five years.

The environmental reviews will culminate in a decision on whether to approve SpaceX’s proposals for Starship launches at LC-39A and SLC-37. The FAA will then go through a separate licensing process, similar to the framework used to license the first three Starship test launches from South Texas.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a human-rated version of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon on the first two Artemis lunar landing flights later this decade. To do that, SpaceX must stage a fuel depot in low-Earth orbit to refuel the Starship lunar lander before it heads for the Moon. It will take a series of Starship tanker flights—perhaps 10 to 15—to fill the depot with cryogenic propellants.

Launching that many Starships over the course of a month or two will require SpaceX to alternate between at least two launch pads. NASA and SpaceX officials say the best way to do this is by launching Starships from one pad in Texas and another in Florida.

Earlier this week, Ars spoke with Lisa Watson-Morgan, who manages NASA’s human-rated lunar lander program. She was at Kennedy Space Center this week for briefings on the Starship lander and a competing lander from Blue Origin. One of the topics, she said, was the FAA’s new environmental review before Starship can launch from LC-39A.

“I would say we’re doing all we can to pull the schedule to where it needs to be, and we are working with SpaceX to make sure that their timeline, the EIS timeline, and NASA’s all work in parallel as much as we can to achieve our objectives,” she said. “When you’re writing it down on paper just as it is, it looks like there could be some tight areas, but I would say we’re collectively working through it.”

Officially, SpaceX plans to perform a dress rehearsal for the Starship lunar landing in late 2025. This will be a full demonstration, with refueling missions, an uncrewed landing of Starship on the lunar surface, then a takeoff from the Moon, before NASA commits to putting people on Starship on the Artemis III mission, currently slated for September 2026.

So you can see that schedules are already tight for the Starship lunar landing demonstration if SpaceX activates launch pads in Florida late next year.

We take a stab at decoding SpaceX’s ever-changing plans for Starship in Florida Read More »

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Rocket Report: Starship stacked; Georgia shuts the door on Spaceport Camden

atlas v, blue origin, Commercial space, human spaceflight, launch, rocket report, Science, Space, spaceport Camden, spacex, starliner, starship, united launch alliance, vulcan / /
On Wednesday, SpaceX fully stacked the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the mega-rocket's next test flight from South Texas.

Enlarge / On Wednesday, SpaceX fully stacked the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the mega-rocket’s next test flight from South Texas.

Welcome to Edition 6.44 of the Rocket Report! Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility, says the company expects to receive an FAA launch license for the next Starship test flight shortly after Memorial Day. It looks like this rocket could fly in late May or early June, about two-and-a-half months after the previous Starship test flight. This is an improvement over the previous intervals of seven months and four months between Starship flights.

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

Blue Origin launch on tap this weekend. Blue Origin plans to launch its first human spaceflight mission in nearly two years on Sunday. This flight will launch six passengers on a flight to suborbital space more than 60 miles (100 km) over West Texas. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company, has not flown people to space since a New Shepard rocket failure on an uncrewed research flight in September 2022. The company successfully launched New Shepard on another uncrewed suborbital mission in December.

Historic flight … This will be the 25th flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, and the seventh human spaceflight mission on New Shepard. Before Blue Origin’s rocket failure in 2022, the company was reaching a flight cadence of about one launch every two months, on average. The flight rate has diminished since then. Sunday’s flight is important not only because it marks the resumption of launches for Blue Origin’s suborbital human spaceflight business, but also because its six-person crew includes an aviation pioneer. Ed Dwight, 90, almost became the first Black astronaut in 1963. Dwight, a retired Air Force captain, piloted military fighter jets and graduated test pilot school, following a familiar career track as many of the early astronauts. He was on a short list of astronaut candidates the Air Force provided NASA, but the space agency didn’t include him. Dwight will become the oldest person to ever fly in space.

Spaceport Camden is officially no more. With the stroke of a pen, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a bill that dissolved the Camden County Spaceport Authority, Action News Jax reported. This news follows a referendum in March 2022 where more than 70 percent of voters rejected a plan to buy land for the spaceport on the Georgia coastline between Savannah and Jacksonville, Florida. County officials still tried to move forward with the spaceport initiative after the failed referendum, but Georgia’s Supreme Court ruled in February that the county had to abide by the voters’ wishes.

$12 million for what?… The government of Camden County, with a population of about 55,000 people spent $12 million on the Spaceport Camden concept over the course of a decade. The goal of the spaceport authority was to lure small launch companies to the region, but no major launches ever took place from Camden County. State Rep. Steven Sainz, who sponsored the bill eliminating the spaceport authority, said in a statement that the legislation “reflects the community’s choice and opens a path for future collaborations in economic initiatives that are more aligned with local needs.” (submitted by zapman987)

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Polaris Spaceplanes moves on to bigger things. German startup Polaris Spaceplanes says it is progressing with construction of its MIRA II and MIRA III spaceplane prototypes after MIRA, a subscale test vehicle, was damaged earlier this year, European Spaceflight reports. The MIRA demonstration vehicle crash-landed on a test flight in February. The incident occurred on takeoff at an airfield in Germany before the vehicle could ignite its linear aerospace engine in flight. The remote-controlled MIRA prototype measured about 4.25 meters long. Polaris announced on April 30 that will not repair MIRA and will instead move forward with the construction of a pair of larger vehicles.

Nearly 16 months without a launch … The MIRA II and MIRA III vehicles will be 5 meters long and will be powered by Polaris’s AS-1 aerospike engines, along with jet engines to power the craft before and after in-flight tests of the rocket engine. Aerospike engines are rocket engines that are designed to operate efficiently at all altitudes. The MIRA test vehicles are precursors to AURORA, a multipurpose spaceplane and hypersonic transporter Polaris says will be capable of delivering up to 1,000 kilograms of payload to low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Jay500001 and Tfargo04)

Rocket Report: Starship stacked; Georgia shuts the door on Spaceport Camden Read More »

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Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away

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The risk of RTO —

“It’s easier to manage a team that’s happy.”

–

Someone holding a box with their belonging in an office

A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors.

The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:

In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce. In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.

The study looked at résumé data from People Data Labs and used “260 million résumés matched to company data.” It only examined three companies, but the report’s authors noted that Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX represent 30 percent of the tech industry’s revenue and over 2 percent of the technology industry’s workforce. The three companies have also been influential in setting RTO standards beyond their own companies. Robert Ployhart, a professor of business administration and management at the University of South Carolina and scholar at the Academy of Management, told the Post that despite the study being limited to three companies, its conclusions are a broader reflection of the effects of RTO policies in the US.

“Taken together, our findings imply that return to office mandates can imply significant human capital costs in terms of output, productivity, innovation, and competitiveness for the companies that implement them,” the report reads.

For example, after Apple enacted its RTO mandate, which lets employees work at home part-time, the portion of its employee base considered senior-level decreased by 5 percentage points, according to the paper. Microsoft, which also enacted a hybrid RTO approach, saw a decline of 5 percentage points. SpaceX’s RTO mandate, meanwhile, requires workers to be in an office full time. Its share of senior-level employees fell 15 percentage points after the mandate, the study found.

“We find experienced employees impacted by these policies at major tech companies seek work elsewhere, taking some of the most valuable human capital investments and tools of productivity with them,” one of the report’s authors, Austin Wright, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Chicago, told the Post.

Christopher Myers, associate professor of management and organization health at Johns Hopkins University, suggested to the Post that the departure of senior-level workers could be tied to the hurt morale that comes from RTO mandates, noting that “it’s easier to manage a team that’s happy.”

Debated topic

Since the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, whether having employees return to work in an office is necessary or beneficial to companies is up for debate. An estimated 75 percent of tech companies in the US are considered “fully flexible,” per a 2023 report from Scoop. As noted by the Post, however, the US’s biggest metro areas have, on average, 51 percent office occupancy, per data from managed security services firm Kastle Systems, which says it analyzes “keycard, fob and KastlePresence app access data across 2,600 buildings and 41,000 businesses.”

Microsoft declined to comment on the report from University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers, while SpaceX didn’t respond. Apple representative Josh Rosenstock told The Washington Post that the report drew “inaccurate conclusions” and “does not reflect the realities of our business.” He claimed that “attrition is at historically low levels.”

Yet some companies have struggled to make employees who have spent months successfully doing their jobs at home eager to return to the office. Dell, Amazon, Google, Meta, and JPMorgan Chase have tracked employee badge swipes to ensure employees are coming into the office as often as expected. Dell also started tracking VPN usage this week and has told workers who work remotely full time that they can’t get a promotion.

Some company leaders are adamant that remote work can disrupt a company’s ability to innovate. However, there’s research suggesting that RTO mandates aren’t beneficial to companies. A survey of 18,000 Americans released in March pointed to flexible work schedules helping mental health. And an analysis of 457 S&P 500 companies in February found RTO policies hurt employee morale and don’t increase company value.

Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away Read More »