spacex – Page 4

SpaceX’s latest Dragon mission will breathe more fire at the space station

Commercial space, dragon, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, spacex / Rejus Almole / August 25, 2025

“Our capsule’s engines are not pointed in the right direction for optimum boost,” said Sarah Walker, SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management. “So, this trunk module has engines pointed in the right direction to maximize efficiency of propellant usage.”

When NASA says it’s the right time, SpaceX controllers will command the Draco thrusters to ignite and gently accelerate the massive 450-ton complex. All told, the reboost kit can add about 20 mph, or 9 meters per second, to the space station’s already-dizzying speed, according to Walker.

Spetch said that’s roughly equivalent to the total reboost impulse provided by one-and-a-half Russian Progress cargo vehicles. That’s about one-third to one-fourth of the total orbit maintenance the ISS needs in a year.

“The boost kit will help sustain the orbiting lab’s altitude, starting in September, with a series of burns planned periodically throughout the fall of 2025,” Spetch said.

After a few months docked at the ISS, the Dragon cargo capsule will depart and head for a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. SpaceX will recover the pressurized capsule to fly again, while the trunk containing the reboost kit will jettison and burn up in the atmosphere.

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft approaches the International Space Station for docking at 7: 05 am EDT (11: 05 UTC) on Monday. Credit: NASA TV/Ars Technica

While this mission is SpaceX’s 33rd cargo flight to the ISS under the auspices of NASA’s multibillion-dollar Commercial Resupply Services contract, it’s also SpaceX’s 50th overall Dragon mission to the outpost. This tally includes 17 flights of the human-rated Crew Dragon.

“With CRS-33, we’ll mark our 50th voyage to ISS,” Walker said. “Just incredible. Together, these missions have (carried) well over 300,000 pounds of cargo and supplies to the orbiting lab and well over 1,000 science and research projects that are not only helping us to understand how to live and work effectively in space… but also directly contributing to critical research that serves our lives here on Earth.”

Future Dragon trunks will be able to accommodate a reboost kit or unpressurized science payloads, depending on NASA’s needs at the space station.

The design of the Dragon reboost kit is a smaller-scale version of what SpaceX will build for a much larger Dragon trunk under a $843 million contract signed with NASA last year for the US Deorbit Vehicle. This souped-up Dragon will dock with the ISS and steer it back into the atmosphere after the lab’s decommissioning in the early 2030s. The deorbit vehicle will have 46 Draco thrusters—16 to control the craft’s orientation and 30 in the trunk to provide the impulse needed to drop the station out of orbit.

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Time is running out for SpaceX to make a splash with second-gen Starship

artemis, Commercial space, elon musk, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, super heavy, texas / Tim Belzer / August 25, 2025

SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch after three straight disappointing test flights.

SpaceX’s 10th Starship rocket awaits liftoff. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

STARBASE, Texas—A beehive of aerospace technicians, construction workers, and spaceflight fans descended on South Texas this weekend in advance of the next test flight of SpaceX’s gigantic Starship rocket, the largest vehicle of its kind ever built.

Towering 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall, the rocket was supposed to lift off during a one-hour launch window beginning at 6: 30 pm CDT (7: 30 pm EDT; 23: 30 UTC) Sunday. But SpaceX called off the launch attempt about an hour before liftoff to investigate a ground system issue at Starbase, located a few miles north of the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX didn’t immediately confirm when it might try again to launch Starship, but it could happen as soon as Monday evening at the same time.

It will take about 66 minutes for the rocket to travel from the launch pad in Texas to a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. You can watch the test flight live on SpaceX’s official website. We’ve also embedded a livestream from Spaceflight Now and LabPadre below.

This will be the 10th full-scale test flight of Starship and its Super Heavy booster stage. It’s the fourth flight of an upgraded version of Starship conceived as a stepping stone to a more reliable, heavier-duty version of the rocket designed to carry up to 150 metric tons, or some 330,000 pounds, of cargo to pretty much anywhere in the inner part of our Solar System.

But this iteration of Starship, known as Block 2 or Version 2, has been anything but reliable. After reeling off a series of increasingly successful flights last year with the first-generation Starship and Super Heavy booster, SpaceX has encountered repeated setbacks since debuting Starship Version 2 in January.

Now, there are just two Starship Version 2s left to fly, including the vehicle poised for launch this week. Then, SpaceX will move on to Version 3, the design intended to go all the way to low-Earth orbit, where it can be refueled for longer expeditions into deep space.

A closer look at the top of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, tail number Ship 37, showing some of the different configurations of heat shield tiles SpaceX wants to test on this flight. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Starship’s promised cargo capacity is unparalleled in the history of rocketry. The privately developed rocket’s enormous size, coupled with SpaceX’s plan to make it fully reusable, could enable cargo and human missions to the Moon and Mars. SpaceX’s most conspicuous contract for Starship is with NASA, which plans to use a version of the ship as a human-rated Moon lander for the agency’s Artemis program. With this contract, Starship is central to the US government’s plans to try to beat China back to the Moon.

Closer to home, SpaceX intends to use Starship to haul massive loads of more powerful Starlink Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit. The US military is interested in using Starship for a range of national security missions, some of which could scarcely be imagined just a few years ago. SpaceX wants its factory to churn out a Starship rocket every day, approximately the same rate Boeing builds its workhorse 737 passenger jets.

Starship, of course, is immeasurably more complex than an airliner, and it sees temperature extremes, aerodynamic loads, and vibrations that would destroy a commercial airplane.

For any of this to become reality, SpaceX needs to begin ticking off a lengthy to-do list of technical milestones. The interim objectives include things like catching and reusing Starships and in-orbit ship-to-ship refueling, with a final goal of long-duration spaceflight to reach the Moon and stay there for weeks, months, or years. For a time late last year, it appeared as if SpaceX might be on track to reach at least the first two of these milestones by now.

The 404-foot-tall (123-meter) Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster stand on SpaceX’s launch pad. In the foreground, there are empty loading docks where tanker trucks deliver propellants and other gases to the launch site. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

Instead, SpaceX’s schedule for catching and reusing Starships, and refueling ships in orbit, has slipped well into next year. A Moon landing is probably at least several years away. And a touchdown on Mars? Maybe in the 2030s. Before Starship can sniff those milestones, engineers must get the rocket to survive from liftoff through splashdown. This would confirm that recent changes made to the ship’s heat shield work as expected.

Three test flights attempting to do just this ended prematurely in January, March, and May. These failures prevented SpaceX from gathering data on several different tile designs, including insulators made of ceramic and metallic materials, and a tile with “active cooling” to fortify the craft as it reenters the atmosphere.

The heat shield is supposed to protect the rocket’s stainless steel skin from temperatures reaching 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). During last year’s test flights, it worked well enough for Starship to guide itself to an on-target controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, halfway around the world from SpaceX’s launch site in Starbase, Texas.

But the ship lost some of its tiles during each flight last year, causing damage to the ship’s underlying structure. While this wasn’t bad enough to prevent the vehicle from reaching the ocean intact, it would cause difficulties in refurbishing the rocket for another flight. Eventually, SpaceX wants to catch Starships returning from space with giant robotic arms back at the launch pad. The vision, according to SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, is to recover the ship, quickly mount it on another booster, refuel it, and launch it again.

If SpaceX can accomplish this, the ship must return from space with its heat shield in pristine condition. The evidence from last year’s test flights showed engineers had a long way to go for that to happen.

Visitors survey the landscape at Starbase, Texas, where industry and nature collide. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

The Starship setbacks this year have been caused by problems in the ship’s propulsion and fuel systems. Another Starship exploded on a test stand in June at SpaceX’s sprawling rocket development facility in South Texas. SpaceX engineers identified different causes for each of the failures. You can read about them in our previous story.

Apart from testing the heat shield, the goals for this week’s Starship flight include testing an engine-out capability on the Super Heavy booster. Engineers will intentionally disable one of the booster’s Raptor engines used to slow down for landing, and instead use another Raptor engine from the rocket’s middle ring. At liftoff, 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines will power the Super Heavy booster off the pad.

SpaceX won’t try to catch the booster back at the launch pad this time, as it did on three occasions late last year and earlier this year. The booster catches have been one of the bright spots for the Starship program as progress on the rocket’s upper stage floundered. SpaceX reused a previously flown Super Heavy booster for the first time on the most recent Starship launch in May.

The booster landing experiment on this week’s flight will happen a few minutes after launch over the Gulf of Mexico east of the Texas coastline. Meanwhile, six Raptor engines will fire until approximately T+plus 9 minutes to accelerate the ship, or upper stage, into space.

The ship is programmed to release eight Starlink satellite simulators from its payload bay in a test of the craft’s payload deployment mechanism. That will be followed by a brief restart of one of the ship’s Raptor engines to adjust its trajectory for reentry, set to begin around 47 minutes into the mission.

If Starship makes it that far, that will be when engineers finally get a taste of the heat shield data they were hungry for at the start of the year.

This story was updated at 8: 30 pm EDT after SpaceX scrubbed Sunday’s launch attempt.

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.

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US military’s X-37B spaceplane stays relevant with launch of another mission

Boeing, falcon 9, laser communications, launch, military space, quantum sensing, Science, Space, spaceplane, spacex, US Space Force, X-37b / Tim Belzer / August 23, 2025

“Quantum inertial sensors are not only scientifically intriguing, but they also have direct defense applications,” said Lt. Col. Nicholas Estep, an Air Force engineer who manages the DIU’s emerging technology portfolio. “If we can field devices that provide a leap in sensitivity and precision for observing platform motion over what is available today, then there’s an opportunity for strategic gains across the DoD.”

Teaching an old dog new tricks

The Pentagon’s twin X-37Bs have logged more than 4,200 days in orbit, equivalent to about 11-and-a-half years. The spaceplanes have flown in secrecy for nearly all of that time.

The most recent flight, Mission 7, ended in March with a runway landing at Vandenberg after a mission of more than 14 months that carried the spaceplane higher than ever before, all the way to an altitude approaching 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers). The high-altitude elliptical orbit required a boost on a Falcon Heavy rocket.

In the final phase of the mission, ground controllers commanded the X-37B to gently dip into the atmosphere to demonstrate the spacecraft could use “aerobraking” maneuvers to bring its orbit closer to Earth in preparation for reentry.

An X-37B spaceplane is ready for encapsulation inside the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing. Credit: US Space Force

Now, on Mission 8, the spaceplane heads back to low-Earth orbit hosting quantum navigation and laser communications experiments. Few people, if any, envisioned these kinds of missions flying on the X-37B when it first soared to space 15 years ago. At that time, quantum sensing was confined to the lab, and the first laser communication demonstrations in space were barely underway. SpaceX hadn’t revealed its plans for the Falcon Heavy rocket, which the X-37B needed to get to its higher orbit on the last mission.

The laser communications experiments on this flight will involve optical inter-satellite links with “proliferated commercial satellite networks in low-Earth orbit,” the Space Force said. This is likely a reference to SpaceX’s Starlink or Starshield broadband satellites. Laser links enable faster transmission of data, while offering more security against eavesdropping or intercepts.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s chief of space operations, said in a statement that the laser communications experiment “will mark an important step in the US Space Force’s ability to leverage proliferated space networks as part of a diversified and redundant space architectures. In so doing, it will strengthen the resilience, reliability, adaptability and data transport speeds of our satellite communications architecture.”

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SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine. But what about the machine?

boca chica, Features, Space, spacex, Starbase, starfactory / Mike M. / August 21, 2025

SpaceX has built an impressive production site in Texas. Will Starship success follow?

A Starship upper stage is moved past the northeast corner of Starfactory in July 2025. Credit: SpaceX

STARBASE, Texas—I first visited SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas a decade ago. Driving down the pocked and barren two-lane road to its sandy terminus, I found only rolling dunes, a large mound of dirt, and a few satellite dishes that talked to Dragon spacecraft as they flew overhead.

A few years later, in mid-2019, the company had moved some of that dirt and built a small launch pad. A handful of SpaceX engineers working there at the time shared some office space nearby in a tech hub building, “Stargate.” The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley proudly opened this state-of-the-art technology center just weeks earlier. That summer, from Stargate’s second floor, engineers looked on as the Starhopper prototype made its first two flights a couple of miles away.

Over the ensuing years, as the company began assembling its Starship rockets on site, SpaceX first erected small tents, then much larger tents, and then towering high bays in which the vehicles were stacked. Starbase grew and evolved to meet the company’s needs.

All of this was merely a prelude to the end game: Starfactory. SpaceX opened this truly massive facility earlier this year. The sleek rocket factory is emblematic of the new Starbase: modern, gargantuan, spaceship-like.

To the consternation of some local residents and environmentalists, the rapid growth of Starbase has wiped out the small and eclectic community that existed here. And that brand new Stargate building that public officials were so excited about only a few years ago? SpaceX first took it over entirely and then demolished it. The tents are gone, too. For better or worse, in the name of progress, the SpaceX steamroller has rolled onward, paving all before it.

Starbase is even its own Texas city now. And if this were a medieval town, Starfactory would be the impenetrable fortress at its heart. In late May, I had a chance to go inside. The interior was super impressive, of course. Yet it could not quell some of the concerns I have about the future of SpaceX’s grand plans to send a fleet of Starships into the Solar System.

Inside the fortress

The main entrance to the factory lies at its northeast corner. From there, one walks into a sleek lobby that serves as a gateway into the main, cavernous section of the building. At this corner, there are three stories above the ground floor. Each of these three higher levels contains various offices, conference rooms and, on the upper floor, a launch control center.

Large windows from here offer a breathtaking view of the Starship launch site two miles up the road. A third-floor executive conference room has carpet of a striking rusty, reddish hue—mimicking the surface of Mars, naturally. A long, black table dominates the room, with 10 seats along each side, and one at the head.

An aerial overview of the Starship production site in South Texas earlier this year. The sprawling Starfactory is in the center. Credit: SpaceX

But the real attraction of these offices is the view to the other end. Each of the upper three floors has a balcony overlooking the factory floor. From there, it’s as if one stands at the edge of an ocean liner, gazing out to sea. In this case, the far wall is discernible, if only barely. Below, the factory floor is crammed with all manner of Starship parts: nose cones, grid fins, hot staging rings, and so much more. The factory emitted a steady din and hum as work proceeded on vehicles below.

The ultimate goal of this factory is to build one Starship rocket a day. This sounds utterly mad. For the entire Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s, NASA built 15 Saturn V rockets. Over the course of more than three decades, NASA built and flew only five different iconic Space Shuttles. SpaceX aims to build 365 vehicles, which are larger, per year.

Wandering around the Starfactory, however, this ambition no longer seems undoable. The factory measures about 1 million square feet. This is two times as large as SpaceX’s main Falcon 9 factory in Hawthorne, California. It feels like the company could build a lot of Starships here if needed.

During one of my visits to South Texas, in early 2020 just before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, SpaceX was building its first Starship rockets in football field-sized tents. At the time, SpaceX founder Elon Musk opined in an interview that building the factory might well be more difficult than building the rocket.

Here’s a view of SpaceX’s Starship production facilities, from the east side, in late February 2020. Credit: Eric Berger

“If you want to actually make something at reasonable volume, you have to build the machine that makes the machine, which mathematically is going to be vastly more complicated than the machine itself,” he said. “The thing that makes the machine is not going to be simpler than the machine. It’s going to be much more complicated, by a lot.”

Five years later, standing inside Starfactory, it seems clear that SpaceX has built the machine to build the machine—or at least it’s getting close.

But what happens if that machine is not ready for prime time?

A pretty bad year for Starship

SpaceX has not had a good run of things with the ambitious Starship vehicle this year. Three times, in January, March, and May, the vehicle took flight. And three times, the upper stage experienced significant problems during ascent, and the vehicle was lost on the ride up to space, or just after. These were the seventh, eighth, and ninth test flights of Starship, following three consecutive flights in 2024 during which the Starship upper stage made more or less nominal flights and controlled splashdowns in the Indian Ocean.

It’s difficult to view the consecutive failures this year—not to mention the explosion of another Starship vehicle during testing in June—as anything but a major setback for the program.

There can be no question that the Starship rocket, with its unprecedentedly large first stage and potentially reusable upper stage, is the most advanced and ambitious rocket humans have ever conceived, built, and flown. The failures this year, however, have led some space industry insiders to ask whether Starship is too ambitious.

My sources at SpaceX don’t believe so. They are frustrated by the run of problems this year, but they believe the fundamental design of Starship is sound and that they have a clear path to resolving the issues. The massive first stage has already been flown, landed, and re-flown. This is a huge step forward. But the sources also believe the upper stage issues can be resolved, especially with a new “Version 3” of Starship due to make its debut late this year or early in 2026.

The acid test will only come with upcoming flights. The vehicle’s tenth test flight is scheduled to take place no earlier than Sunday, August 24. It’s possible that SpaceX will fly one more “Version 2” Starship later this year before moving to the upgraded vehicle, with more powerful Raptor engines and lots of other changes to (hopefully) improve reliability.

SpaceX could certainly use a win. The Starship failures occur at a time when Musk has become embroiled in political controversy while feuding with the president of the United States. His actions have led some in government and private industry to question whether they should be doing business with SpaceX going forward.

It’s often said in sports that winning solves a lot of problems. For SpaceX, success with Starship would solve a lot of problems.

Next steps for Starship

The failures are frustrating and publicly embarrassing. But more importantly, they are a bottleneck for a lot of critical work SpaceX needs to do for Starship to reach its considerable potential. All of the technical progress the Starship program needs to make to deploy thousands of Starlink satellites, land NASA astronauts on the Moon, and send humans to Mars remains largely on hold.

Two of the most important objectives for the next flight require the Starship vehicle to fly a nominal mission. For several flights now, SpaceX engineers have dutifully prepared Starlink satellite simulators to test a Pez-like dispenser in space. And each Starship vehicle has carried about two dozen different tile experiments as the company attempts to build a rapidly reusable heat shield to protect Starship during atmospheric reentry.

The engineers are still waiting for the results of their experiments.

In the near term, SpaceX is hyper-focused on getting Starship working and starting the deployment of large Starlink satellites that will have the potential to unlock significant amounts of revenue. But this is just the beginning of the work that needs to happen for SpaceX to turn Starship into a deep-space vehicle capable of traveling to the Moon and Mars.

These steps include:

Reuse: Developing a rapidly reusable heat shield and landing and re-flying Starship upper stages
Prop transfer: Conducting a refueling test in low-Earth orbit to demonstrate the transfer of large amounts of propellant between Starships
Depots: Developing and testing cryogenic propellant depots to understand heating losses over time
Lunar landing: Landing a Starship successfully on the Moon, which is challenging due to the height of the vehicle and uneven terrain
Lunar launch: Demonstrating the capability of Starship, using liquid propellant, to launch safely from the lunar surface without infrastructure there
Mars transit: Demonstrating the operation of Starship over months and the capability to perform a powered landing on Mars.

Each of these steps is massively challenging and at least partly a novel exercise in aerospace. There will be a lot of learning, and almost certainly some failures, as SpaceX works through these technical milestones.

Some details about the Starship propellant transfer test, a key milestone that NASA and SpaceX had hoped to complete this year but now may tackle in 2026. Credit: NASA

SpaceX prefers a test, fly, and fix approach to developing hardware. This iterative approach has served the company well, allowing it to develop rockets and spacecraft faster and for less money than its competitors. But you cannot fly and fix hardware for the milestones above without getting the upper stage of Starship flying nominally.

That’s one reason why the Starship program has been so disappointing this year.

Then there are the politics

As SpaceX has struggled with Starship in 2025, its founder, Musk, has also had a turbulent run, from the presidential campaign trail to the top of political power in the world, the White House, and back out of President Trump’s inner circle. Along the way, he has made political enemies, and his public favorability ratings have fallen.

Amid the fallout between Trump and Musk this spring and summer, the president ordered a review of SpaceX’s contracts. Nothing happened because government officials found that most of the services SpaceX offers to NASA, the US Department of Defense, and other federal agencies are vital.

However, multiple sources have told Ars that federal officials are looking for alternatives to SpaceX and have indicated they will seek to buy launches, satellite Internet, and other services from emerging competitors if available.

Starship’s troubles also come at a critical time in space policy. As part of its budget request for fiscal year 2026, the White House sought to terminate the production of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and spacecraft after the Artemis III mission. The White House has also expressed an interest in sending humans to Mars, viewing the Moon as a stepping stone to the red planet.

Although there are several options in play, the most viable hardware for both a lunar and Mars human exploration program is Starship. If it works. If it continues to have teething pains, though, that makes it easier for Congress to continue funding NASA’s expensive rocket and spacecraft, as it would prefer to do.

What about Artemis and the Moon?

Starship’s “lost year” also has serious implications for NASA’s Artemis Moon Program. As Ars reported this week, China is now likely to land on the Moon before NASA can return. Yes, the space agency has a nominal landing date in 2027 for the Artemis III mission, but no credible space industry officials believe that date is real. (It has already slipped multiple times from 2024). Theoretically, a landing in 2028 remains feasible, but a more rational over/under date for NASA is probably somewhere in the vicinity of 2030.

SpaceX is building the lunar lander for the Artemis III mission, a modified version of Starship. There is so much we don’t really know yet about this vehicle. For example, how many refuelings will it take to load a Starship with sufficient propellant to land on the Moon and take off? What will the vehicle’s controls look like, and will the landings be automated?

And here’s another one: How many people at SpaceX are actually working on the lunar version of Starship?

Publicly, Musk has said he doesn’t worry too much about China beating the United States back to the Moon. “I think the United States should be aiming for Mars, because we’ve already actually been to the Moon several times,” Musk said in an interview in late May. “Yeah, if China sort of equals that, I’m like, OK, sure, but that’s something that America did 56 years ago.”

Privately, Musk is highly critical of Artemis, saying NASA should focus on Mars. Certainly, that’s the long arc of history toward which SpaceX’s efforts are being bent. Although both the Moon and Mars versions of Starship require the vehicle to reach orbit and successfully refuel, there is a huge divergence in the technology and work required after that point.

It’s not at all clear that the Trump administration is seriously seeking to address this issue by providing SpaceX with carrots and sticks to move the lunar lander program forward. If Artemis is not a priority for Musk, how can it be for SpaceX?

This all creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty ahead of Sunday’s Starship launch. As Musk likes to say, “Excitement is guaranteed.”

Success would be better.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink

Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program, Policy, spacex, starlink / Mike M. / August 20, 2025

Starlink operator SpaceX is continuing its fight against state plans to expand fiber broadband availability. After saying the Trump administration should deny a Virginia proposal, SpaceX is taking the same approach in a fight against Louisiana.

SpaceX made its view known to the Louisiana Office of Broadband Development and Connectivity in a filing, which was reported yesterday by PCMag. SpaceX complained that Louisiana proposed awarding 91.5 percent of funds to fiber Internet service providers instead of to the Starlink satellite system. SpaceX alleged that Louisiana was influenced by “a legion of fiber lobbyists and other hangers-on seeking to personally benefit from massive taxpayer spending.”

The Trump administration rewrote rules for the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program in a way that benefits Starlink. Instead of prioritizing fiber networks that offer better service and are more future-proof, the Trump administration ordered states to revise their plans with a “tech-neutral approach” and lower the average cost of serving each location.

SpaceX’s letters to Virginia and Louisiana claim the states are violating the new rules with their funding proposals.

“The State of Louisiana’s Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program Final Proposal proposes to spend nearly $500 million dollars [sic] to provide connectivity to its unserved and underserved locations,” SpaceX wrote. “SpaceX applied to serve virtually all BEAD households for less than $100 million dollars. As such, Louisiana’s proposal includes over $400 million dollars in wasteful and unnecessary taxpayer spending.”

SpaceX unhappy with $7.75 million

Instead of selecting Starlink for all locations, Louisiana allocated the company $7.75 million to serve 10,327 locations. The plan would spend $499 million for 127,842 locations overall. The Louisiana Local Fiber Consortium, which includes two Louisiana providers that partnered with T-Mobile, was the biggest winner, with $378 million for 68,535 locations.

“Louisiana’s results demonstrate that it did not observe statutory requirements or program rules and did not conduct a competitive process,” SpaceX alleged. “A process in which Louisiana is required to award grants based on the lowest cost to the program, and awards 91.5% of funds to fiber projects at an average per-location cost of $4,449, while rejecting applications at $750 per location because the bid was based on Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) technology could not possibly be considered compliant, technology neutral or a ‘competition.'”

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SpaceX reveals why the last two Starships failed as another launch draws near

Commercial space, Federal Aviation Administration, launch, Science, Space, spacex, starship / Tim Belzer / August 16, 2025

“SpaceX can now proceed with Starship Flight 10 launch operations under its current license.”

SpaceX completed a six-engine static fire of the next Starship upper stage on August 1. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX is continuing with final preparations for the 10th full-scale test flight of the company’s enormous Starship rocket after receiving launch approval Friday from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Engineers completed a final test of Starship’s propulsion system with a so-called “spin prime” test Wednesday at the launch site in South Texas. Ground crews then rolled the ship back to a nearby hangar for engine inspections, touchups to its heat shield, and a handful of other chores to ready it for liftoff.

SpaceX has announced the launch is scheduled for no earlier than next Sunday, August 24, at 6: 30 pm local time in Texas (23: 30 UTC).

Like all previous Starship launches, the huge 403-foot-tall (123-meter) rocket will take off from SpaceX’s test site in Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border. The rocket consists of a powerful booster stage named Super Heavy, with 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines. Six Raptors power the upper stage, known simply as Starship.

With this flight, SpaceX officials hope to put several technical problems with the Starship program behind them. SpaceX is riding a streak of four disappointing Starship test flights from January through May, and and the explosion and destruction of another Starship vehicle during a ground test in June.

These setbacks followed a highly successful year for the world’s largest rocket in 2024, when SpaceX flew Starship four times and achieved new objectives on each flight. These accomplishments included the first catch of a Super Heavy booster back at the launch pad, proving the company’s novel concept for recovering and reusing the rocket’s first stage.

Starship’s record so far in 2025 is another story. The rocket’s inability to make it through an entire suborbital test flight has pushed back future program milestones, such as the challenging tasks of recovering and reusing the rocket’s upper stage, and demonstrating the ability to refuel another rocket in orbit. Those would both be firsts in the history of spaceflight.

These future tests, and more, are now expected to occur no sooner than next year. This time last year, SpaceX officials hoped to achieve them in 2025. All of these demonstrations are vital for Elon Musk to meet his promise of sending numerous Starships to build a settlement on Mars. Meanwhile, NASA is eager for SpaceX to reel off these tests as quickly as possible because the agency has selected Starship as the human-rated lunar lander for the Artemis Moon program. Once operational, Starship will also be key to building out SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink broadband network.

A good outcome on the next Starship test flight would give SpaceX footing to finally take a step toward these future demos after months of dithering over design dilemmas.

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, presented an update on Starship to company employees in May. This chart shows the planned evolution from Starship Version 2 (left) to Version 3 (middle), and an even larger rocket (right) in the more distant future.

The FAA said Friday it formally closed the investigation into Starship’s most recent in-flight failure in May, when the rocket started leaking propellant after reaching space, rendering it unable to complete the test flight.

“The FAA oversaw and accepted the findings of the SpaceX-led investigation,” the federal regulator said in a statement. “The final mishap report cites the probable root cause for the loss of the Starship vehicle as a failure of a fuel component. SpaceX identified corrective actions to prevent a reoccurrence of the event.”

Diagnosing failures

SpaceX identified the most probable cause for the May failure as a faulty main fuel tank pressurization system diffuser located on the forward dome of Starship’s primary methane tank. The diffuser failed a few minutes after launch, when sensors detected a pressure drop in the main methane tank and a pressure increase in the ship’s nose cone just above the tank.

The rocket compensated for the drop in main tank pressure and completed its engine burn, but venting from the nose cone and a worsening fuel leak overwhelmed Starship’s attitude control system. Finally, detecting a major problem, Starship triggered automatic onboard commands to vent all remaining propellant into space and “passivate” itself before an unguided reentry over the Indian Ocean, prematurely ending the test flight.

Engineers recreated the diffuser failure on the ground during the investigation, and then redesigned the part to better direct pressurized gas into the main fuel tank. This will also “substantially decrease” strain on the diffuser structure, SpaceX said.

The FAA, charged with ensuring commercial rocket launches don’t endanger public safety, signed off on the investigation and gave the green light for SpaceX to fly Starship again when it is ready.

“SpaceX can now proceed with Starship Flight 10 launch operations under its current license,” the FAA said.

“The upcoming flight will continue to expand the operating envelope on the Super Heavy booster, with multiple landing burn tests planned,” SpaceX said in an update posted to its website Friday. “It will also target similar objectives as previous missions, including Starship’s first payload deployment and multiple reentry experiments geared towards returning the upper stage to the launch site for catch.”

File photo of Starship’s six Raptor engines firing on a test stand in South Texas. Credit: SpaceX

In the aftermath of the test flight in May, SpaceX hoped to fly Starship again by late June or early July. But another accident June 18, this time on the ground, delayed the program another couple of months. The Starship vehicle SpaceX assigned to the next flight, designated Ship 36, exploded on a test stand in Texas as teams filled it with cryogenic propellants for an engine test-firing.

The accident destroyed the ship and damaged the test site, prompting SpaceX to retrofit the sole active Starship launch pad to support testing of the next ship in line—Ship 37. Those tests included a brief firing of all six of the ship’s Raptor engines August 1.

After Ship 37’s final spin prime test Wednesday, workers transported the rocket back to a hangar for evaluation, and crews immediately got to work transitioning the launch pad back to its normal configuration to host a full Super Heavy/Starship stack.

SpaceX said the explosion on the test stand in June was likely caused by damage to a high-pressure nitrogen storage tank inside Starship’s payload bay section. This tank, called a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, or COPV, violently ruptured and led to the ship’s fiery demise. SpaceX said COPVs on upcoming flights will operate at lower pressures, and managers ordered additional inspections on COPVs to look for damage, more proof testing, more stringent acceptance criteria, and a hardware change to address the problem.

Try, try, try, try again

This year began with the first launch of an upgraded version of Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, in January. But the vehicle suffered propulsion failures and lost control before the upper stage completed its engine burn to propel the rocket on a trajectory carrying it halfway around the world to splash down in the Indian Ocean. Instead, the rocket broke apart and rained debris over the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands more than 1,500 miles downrange from Starbase.

That was followed in March by another Starship launch that had a similar result, again scattering debris near the Bahamas. In May, the ninth Starship test flight made it farther downrange and completed its engine burn before spinning out of control in space, preventing it from making a guided reentry to gather data on its heat shield.

Mastering the design of Starship’s heat shield is critical the future of the program. As it has on all of this year’s test flights, SpaceX has installed on the next Starship several different ceramic and metallic tile designs to test alternative materials to protect the vehicle during its scorching plunge back into Earth’s atmosphere. Starship successfully made it through reentry for a controlled splashdown in the sea several times last year, but sensors detected hot spots on the rocket’s stainless steel skin after some of the tiles fell off during launch and descent.

Making the Starship upper stage reusable like the Super Heavy booster will require better performance from the heat shield. The demands of flying the ship home from orbit and attempting a catch at the launch pad far outweigh the challenge of recovering a booster. Coming back from space, the ship encounters much higher temperatures than the booster sees at lower velocities.

Therefore, SpaceX’s most important goal for the 10th Starship flight will be gathering information about how well the ship’s different heat shield materials hold up during reentry. Engineers want to have this data as soon as possible to inform design decisions about the next iteration of Starship—Version 3 or Block 3—that will actually fly into orbit. So far, all Starship launches have intentionally targeted a speed just shy of orbital velocity, bringing the vehicle back through the atmosphere halfway around the world.

Other objectives on the docket for Starship Flight 10 include the deployment of spacecraft simulators mimicking the size of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. Like the heat shield data, this has been part of the flight plan for the last three Starship launches, but the rocket never made it far enough to attempt any payload deployment tests.

Thirty-three Raptor engines power the Super Heavy booster downrange from SpaceX’s launch site near Brownsville, Texas, in January. Credit: SpaceX

Engineers also plan to put the Super Heavy booster through the wringer on the next launch. Instead of coming back to Starbase for a catch at the launch pad—something SpaceX has now done three times—the massive booster stage will target a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico east of the Texas coast. This will give SpaceX room to try new things with the booster, such as controlling the rocket’s final descent with a different mix of engines to see if it could overcome a problem with one of its three primary landing engines.

SpaceX tried to experiment with new ways of landing of the Super Heavy booster on the last test flight, too. The Super Heavy exploded before reaching the ocean, likely due to a structural failure of the rocket’s fuel transfer tube, an internal pipe where methane flows from the fuel tank at the top of the rocket to the engines at the bottom of the booster. SpaceX said the booster flew a higher angle of attack during its descent in May to test the limits of the rocket’s performance. It seems engineers found the limit, and the booster won’t fly at such a high angle of attack next time.

SpaceX has just two Starship Version 2 vehicles in its inventory before moving on to the taller Version 3 configuration, which will also debut improved Raptor engines.

“Every lesson learned, through both flight and ground testing, continues to feed directly into designs for the next generation of Starship and Super Heavy,” SpaceX said. “Two flights remain with the current generation, each with test objectives designed to expand the envelope on vehicle capabilities as we iterate towards fully and rapidly reusable, reliable rockets.”

SpaceX reveals why the last two Starships failed as another launch draws near Read More »

Rocket Report: Ariane 6 beats Vulcan to third launch; China’s first drone ship

ariane 6, Arianespace, artemis II, china, human spaceflight, NASA, rocket report, Science, Space, space launch system, spacex, united launch alliance, vulcan / Tim Belzer / August 15, 2025

Why is China’s heavy-lift Long March 5B able to launch only 10 Guowang satellites at a time?

Wearing their orange launch and reentry spacesuits, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman (bottom) and pilot Victor Glover (top) walk out of an emergency egress basket during nighttime training at Launch Complex 39B.

Welcome to Edition 8.06 of the Rocket Report! Two of the world’s most storied rocket builders not named SpaceX achieved major successes this week. Arianespace’s Ariane 6 rocket launched from French Guiana on its third flight Tuesday night with a European weather satellite. Less than 20 minutes later, United Launch Alliance’s third Vulcan rocket lifted off from Florida on a US military mission. These are two of the three big rockets developed in the Western world that have made their orbital debuts in the last two years, alongside Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher. Ariane 6 narrowly won the “race” to reach its third orbital flight, but if you look at it another way, Ariane 6 reached its third flight milestone 13 months after its inaugural launch. It took Vulcan more than 19 months, and New Glenn has flown just once. SpaceX’s Super Heavy/Starship rocket has flown nine times but has yet to reach orbit.

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.

Sixth success for sea-launched Chinese rocket. Private Chinese satellite operator Geespace added 11 spacecraft to its expanding Internet of Things constellation on August 8, aiming to boost low-power connectivity in key emerging markets, Space News reports. The 11 satellites rode into orbit aboard a solid-fueled Jielong 3 (Smart Dragon 3) rocket lifting off from an ocean platform in the Yellow Sea off the coast of Rizhao, a city in eastern China’s Shandong province. This was the sixth flight of the Jielong 3, a rocket developed by a commercially oriented spinoff of the state-owned China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology.

Mistaken for a meteor … The fourth stage of the Jielong 3 rocket, left in orbit after deploying its 11 satellite payloads, reentered the atmosphere late Sunday night. The fiery and destructive reentry created a fireball that streaked across the skies over Spain, the Spanish newspaper El Mundo reports. Many Spanish residents identified the streaking object as a meteor associated with the Perseid meteor shower. But it turned out to be a piece of China’s Jielong 3 rocket. Any debris that may have survived the scorching reentry likely fell into the Mediterranean Sea.

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Portugal green-lights Azores spaceport. The Portuguese government has granted the Atlantic Spaceport Consortium a license to build and operate a rocket launch facility on the island of Santa Maria in the Azores, European Spaceflight reports. The Atlantic Spaceport Consortium (ASC) was founded in 2019 with the goal of developing a commercial spaceport on Santa Maria, 1,500 kilometers off the Portuguese mainland. In September 2024, the company showcased the island’s suitability as a launch site by launching two small solid-fuel amateur-class rockets that it developed in-house.

What’s on deck? … The spaceport license granted by Portugal’s regulatory authorities does not cover individual launches themselves. Those must be approved in a separate licensing process. It’s likely that the launch site on Santa Maria Island will initially host suborbital launches, including flights by the Polish rocket company SpaceForest. The European Space Agency has also selected Santa Maria as the landing site for the first flight of the Space Rider lifting body vehicle after it launches into orbit, perhaps in 2027. (submitted by claudiodcsilva)

Why is Jeff Bezos buying launches from Elon Musk? Early Monday morning, a Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from its original launch site in Florida. Remarkably, it was SpaceX’s 100th launch of the year. Perhaps even more notable was the rocket’s payload: two-dozen Project Kuiper satellites, which were dispensed into low-Earth orbit on target, Ars reports. This was SpaceX’s second launch of satellites for Amazon, which is developing a constellation to deliver low-latency broadband Internet around the world. SpaceX, then, just launched a direct competitor to its Starlink network into orbit. And it was for the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who owns a rocket company of his own in Blue Origin.

Several answers … So how did it come to this—Bezos and Elon Musk, competitors in so many ways, working together in space? There are several answers. Most obviously, launching payloads for customers is one of SpaceX’s two core business areas, alongside Starlink. SpaceX sells launch services to all comers and typically offers the lowest price per kilogram to orbit. There’s immediate revenue to be made if a company with deep pockets like Amazon is willing to pay SpaceX. Second, the other options to get Kuiper satellites into orbit just aren’t available at the volume Amazon needs. Amazon has reserved the lion’s share of its Kuiper launches with SpaceX’s competitors: United Launch Alliance, Arianespace, and Jeff Bezos’ own space company Blue Origin. Lastly, SpaceX could gain some leverage by providing launch services to Amazon. In return for a launch, SpaceX has asked other companies with telecom satellites, such as OneWeb and Kepler Communications, to share spectrum rights to enable Starlink to expand into new markets.

Trump orders cull of commercial launch regulations. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday directing government agencies to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses, Ars reports. The FAA, part of the Department of Transportation, is responsible for granting the licenses after ensuring launch and reentries don’t endanger the public, comply with environmental laws, and comport with US national interests. The drive toward deregulation will be welcome news for companies like SpaceX, led by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk; SpaceX conducts nearly all of the commercial launches and reentries licensed by the FAA.

Deflecting scrutiny? … The executive order does several things, and not all of them will be as controversial as the potential elimination of environmental reviews. The order includes a clause directing the government to reevaluate, amend, or rescind a slate of launch-safety regulations written during the first Trump administration. The FAA published the new regulations, known as Part 450, in 2020, and they went into effect in 2021, but space companies have complained that they are too cumbersome and have slowed down the license approval process. The Biden administration established a committee last year to look at reforming the regulations in response to industry’s outcry. Another part of the order that will likely lack bipartisan support is a call for making the head of the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division a political appointee. This job has historically been held by a career civil servant.

Ariane 6 launches European weather satellite. Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket successfully launched for a third time on Tuesday night, carrying a satellite into orbit for weather forecasting and climate monitoring, Euronews reports. “The success of this second commercial launch confirms the performance, reliability, and precision of Ariane 6,” said Martin Sion, CEO of ArianeGroup, operator of the rocket. “Once again, the new European heavy-lift launcher meets Europe’s needs, ensuring sovereign access to space,” Sion added. It marks the second commercial flight of the rocket, which has been in development for almost a decade with the European Space Agency (ESA). It is significant as it gives Europe independent access to space and reduces its reliance on Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Eumetsat returns to Europe … The polar-orbiting weather satellite launched by the Ariane 6 rocket this week is owned by the European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites, or Eumetsat. Headquartered in Germany, Eumetsat is a multinational organization that owns and operates geostationary and polar-orbiting weather satellites, watching real-time storm development over Europe and Africa, while feeding key data into global weather and climate models. Just last month, Eumetsat’s newest geostationary weather satellite launched from Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket because of delays with the Ariane 6 program.

Rocket Lab isn’t giving up on 2025 yet. Rocket Lab continues to push for a first launch of its medium-lift Neutron rocket before the end of the year, but company executives acknowledge that schedule has no margin for error, Space News reports. It may seem unlikely, but Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, Peter Beck, said in a conference call with investment analysts last week that the company has a “green light” schedule to debut the Neutron rocket within the next four-and-a-half months. There’s still much work to do to prepare for the first launch, and the inaugural flight seems almost certain to slip into 2026.

Launch pad nearly complete … Rocket Lab plans to host a ribbon-cutting at the Neutron rocket’s new launch pad on Wallops Island, Virginia, on August 28. This launch pad is located just south of the spaceport’s largest existing launch facility, where Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket lifts off on resupply missions to the International Space Station. Rocket Lab has a small launch pad for its light-class Electron launcher co-located with the Antares pad at Wallops.

Chinese company reveals drone ship. The Chinese launch company iSpace has released the first photos of an ocean-going recovery ship to support the landings of reusable first-stage boosters. The company hosted a dedication ceremony in Yangzhou, China, earlier this month for the vessel, which looks similar to SpaceX’s rocket landing drone ships. In a press release, iSpace said the ship, named “Interstellar Return,” is China’s first marine rocket recovery ship, and the fifth such vessel in the world. SpaceX has three drone ships in its fleet for the Falcon 9 rocket, and Blue Origin has one for the New Glenn booster.

Rocket agnostic … The recovery ship will be compatible with various medium- and large-sized reusable rockets, iSpace said. But its main use will be as the landing site for the first stage booster for iSpace’s own Hyperbola 3 rocket, a medium-lift launcher with methane-fueled engines. The company has completed multiple vertical takeoff and landing tests of prototype boosters for the Hyperbola 3. The recovery ship measures about 100 meters long and 42 meters wide, with a displacement of 17,000 metric tons, and it has the ability to perform “intelligent unmanned operations” thanks to a dynamic positioning system, according to iSpace.

Vulcan’s first national security launch. United Launch Alliance delivered multiple US military satellites into a high-altitude orbit after a prime-time launch Tuesday night, marking an important transition from development to operations for the company’s new Vulcan rocket, Ars reports. This mission, officially designated USSF-106 by the US Space Force, was the first flight of ULA’s Vulcan rocket to carry national security payloads. Two test flights of the Vulcan rocket last year gave military officials enough confidence to certify it for launching the Pentagon’s medium-to-large space missions.

Secrecy in the fairing … The Vulcan rocket’s Centaur upper stage released its payloads into geosynchronous orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator roughly seven hours after liftoff. One of the satellites deployed by the Vulcan rocket is an experimental navigation testbed named NTS-3. It will demonstrate new technologies that could be used on future GPS navigation satellites. But the Space Force declined to disclose any information about the mission’s other payloads.

Artemis II crew trains for nighttime ops. The four astronauts training to fly around the Moon on NASA’s Artemis II mission next year have been at Kennedy Space Center in Florida this week. One of the reasons they were at Kennedy was to run through a rehearsal for what it will be like to work at the launch pad if the Artemis II mission ends up lifting off at night. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen put on their spacesuits and rehearsed emergency procedures at Launch Complex 39B, replicating a daytime simulation they participated in last year.

Moving forward … The astronauts also went inside the Vehicle Assembly Building to practice using egress baskets they would use to quickly escape the launch pad in the event of a prelaunch emergency. The baskets are fastened to the mobile launch tower inside the VAB, where technicians are assembling and testing the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission. Later this year, the astronauts will return to Kennedy for a two-part countdown demonstration test. First, the crew members will board their Orion spacecraft once it’s stacked atop the SLS rocket inside the VAB. Then, in part two, the astronauts will again rehearse emergency evacuation procedures once the rocket rolls to the launch pad.

China’s Long March 5B flies again. China is ramping up construction of its national satellite-Internet megaconstellation with the successful deployment of another batch of Guowang satellites by a heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket on Wednesday, Space.com reports. Guowang, whose name translates as “national network,” will be operated by China SatNet, a state-run company established in 2021. The constellation will eventually consist of about 13,000 satellites if all goes to plan.

Make this make sense … Guowang is a long way from that goal. Wednesday’s launch was the eighth overall for the network, but it was the fourth for the project in less than three weeks. Each mission lofts just five to 10 Guowang spacecraft, apparently because each satellite is quite large. For comparison, SpaceX launches 24 to 28 satellites on each mission to assemble its Starlink broadband megaconstellation, which currently consists of nearly 8,100 operational spacecraft. The Long March 5B is China’s most powerful operational rocket, with a lift capacity somewhat higher than SpaceX’s Falcon 9 but below that of the Falcon Heavy. It begs the question of just how big the Guowang satellites really are, and do they have a purpose beyond broadband Internet service?

Next three launches

Aug. 16: Kinetica 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 07: 35 UTC

Aug. 17: Long March 4C | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 09: 05 UTC

Aug. 17: Long March 6A | Unknown Payload | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China | 14: 15 UTC

Rocket Report: Ariane 6 beats Vulcan to third launch; China’s first drone ship Read More »

Starlink tries to block Virginia’s plan to bring fiber Internet to residents

Broadband Equity Access and Deployment program, Policy, spacex, starlink / Tim Belzer / August 15, 2025

Noting that its “project areas span from mountains and hills to farmland and coastal plains,” the DHCD said its previous experience with grant-funded deployments “revealed that tree canopy, rugged terrain, and slope can complicate installation and/or obstruct line-of-sight.” State officials said that wireless and low-Earth orbit satellite technology “can have signal degradation, increased latency, and reduced reliability” when there isn’t a clear line of sight.

The DHCD said it included these factors in its evaluation of priority broadband projects. State officials were also apparently concerned about the network capacity of satellite services and the possibility that using state funding to guarantee satellite service in one location could reduce availability of that same service in other locations.

“To review a technology’s ability to scale, the Office considered the currently served speeds of 100/20 Mbps, an application’s stated network capacity, the project area’s number of [locations], the project area’s geographic area, current customer base (if applicable), and future demand,” the department said. “For example, the existing customer base should not be negatively impacted by the award of BEAD locations for a given technology to be considered scalable.”

SpaceX: “Playing field was anything but level”

SpaceX said Virginia is wrong to determine that Starlink “did not qualify as ‘Priority Broadband,'” since the company “provided information demonstrating these capabilities in its application, and it appears that Virginia used this definition only as a pretext to reach a pre-ordained outcome.” SpaceX said that 95 percent of funded “locations in Virginia have an active Starlink subscriber within 1 mile, showing that Starlink already serves every type of environment in Virginia’s BEAD program today” and that 15 percent of funded locations have an active Starlink subscriber within 100 meters.

“The playing field was anything but level and technology neutral, as required by the [updated program rules], and was instead insurmountably stacked against low-Earth orbit satellite operators like SpaceX,” the company said.

We contacted the Virginia DHCD about SpaceX’s comments today and will update this article if the department provides a response.

Starlink tries to block Virginia’s plan to bring fiber Internet to residents Read More »

Trump orders cull of regulations governing commercial rocket launches

Commercial space, Donald Trump, executive order, FAA, launch, Science, Space, space policy, spacex, White House / Mike M. / August 14, 2025

The head of the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division will become a political appointee.

Birds take flight at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in this 2010 photo. Credit: NASA

President Donald Trump signed an executive order Wednesday directing government agencies to “eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for commercial launch and reentry licenses.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), part of the Department of Transportation (DOT), grants licenses for commercial launch and reentry operations. The FAA is charged with ensuring launch and reentries comply with environmental laws, comport with US national interests, and don’t endanger the public.

The drive toward deregulation will be welcome news for companies like SpaceX, led by onetime Trump ally Elon Musk; SpaceX conducts nearly all of the commercial launches and reentries licensed by the FAA.

Deregulation time

Trump ordered Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who also serves as the acting administrator of NASA, to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite… environmental reviews for… launch and reentry licenses and permits.” In the order signed by Trump, White House officials wrote that Duffy should consult with the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality and follow “applicable law” in the regulatory cull.

The executive order also includes a clause directing Duffy to reevaluate, amend, or rescind a slate of launch-safety regulations written during the first Trump administration. The FAA published the new regulations, known as Part 450, in 2020, and they went into effect in 2021, but space companies have complained they are too cumbersome and have slowed down the license approval process.

And there’s more. Trump ordered NASA, the military, and DOT to eliminate duplicative reviews for spaceport development. This is particularly pertinent at federally owned launch ranges like those at Cape Canaveral, Florida; Vandenberg Space Force Base, California; and Wallops Island, Virginia.

The Trump administration also plans to make the head of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation a political appointee. This office oversees commercial launch and reentry licensing and was previously led by a career civil servant. Duffy will also hire an advisor on deregulation in the commercial spaceflight industry to join DOT, and the Office of Space Commerce will be elevated to a more prominent position within the Commerce Department.

“It is the policy of the United States to enhance American greatness in space by enabling a competitive launch marketplace and substantially increasing commercial space launch cadence and novel space activities by 2030,” Trump’s executive order reads. “To accomplish this, the federal government will streamline commercial license and permit approvals for United States-based operators.”

News of the executive order was reported last month by ProPublica, which wrote that the Trump administration was circulating draft language among federal agencies to slash rules to protect the environment and the public from the dangers of rocket launches. The executive order signed by Trump and released by the White House on Wednesday confirms ProPublica’s reporting.

Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, criticized the Trump administration’s move.

“This reckless order puts people and wildlife at risk from private companies launching giant rockets that often explode and wreak devastation on surrounding areas,” Margolis said in a statement. “Bending the knee to powerful corporations by allowing federal agencies to ignore bedrock environmental laws is incredibly dangerous and puts all of us in harm’s way. This is clearly not in the public interest.”

Duffy, the first person to lead NASA and another federal department at the same time, argued the order is important to sustain economic growth in the space industry.

“By slashing red tape tying up spaceport construction, streamlining launch licenses so they can occur at scale, and creating high-level space positions in government, we can unleash the next wave of innovation,” Duffy said in a statement. “At NASA, this means continuing to work with commercial space companies and improving our spaceports’ ability to launch.”

Nipping NEPA

The executive order is emblematic of the Trump administration’s broader push to curtail environmental reviews for large infrastructure projects.

The White House has already directed federal agencies to repeal regulations enforcing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a 1969 law that requires the feds prepare environmental assessments and environmental impact statements to evaluate the effects of government actions—such as licensing approvals—on the environment.

Regarding commercial spaceflight, the White House ordered the Transportation Department to create a list of activities officials there believe are not subject to NEPA and establish exclusions under NEPA for launch and reentry licenses.

Onlookers watch from nearby sand dunes as SpaceX prepares a Starship rocket for launch from Starbase, Texas. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

The changes to the environmental review process might be the most controversial part of Trump’s new executive order. Another section of the order—the attempt to reform or rescind the so-called Part 450 launch and reentry regulations—appears to have bipartisan support in Congress.

The FAA started implementing its new Part 450 commercial launch and reentry regulations less than five years ago after writing the rules in response to another Trump executive order signed in 2018. Part 450 was intended to streamline the launch approval process by allowing companies to submit applications for a series of launches or reentries, rather than requiring a new license for each mission.

But industry officials quickly criticized the new regulations, which they said didn’t account for rapid iteration of rockets and spacecraft like SpaceX’s enormous Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle. The FAA approved a SpaceX request in May to increase the number of approved Starship launches from five to 25 per year from the company’s base in Starship, Texas, near the US-Mexico border.

Last year, the FAA’s leadership under the Biden administration established a committee to examine the shortcomings of Part 450. The Republican and Democratic leaders of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee submitted a joint request in February for the Government Accountability Office to conduct an independent review of the FAA’s Part 450 regulations.

“Reforming and streamlining commercial launch regulations and licensing is an area the Biden administration knew needed reform,” wrote Laura Forczyk, founder and executive director of the space consulting firm Astralytical, in a post on X. “However, little was done. Will more be done with this executive order? I hope so. This was needed years ago.”

Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, applauded the Trump administration’s regulatory policy.

“This executive order will strengthen and grow the US commercial space industry by cutting red tape while maintaining a commitment to public safety, benefitting the American people and the US government that are increasingly reliant on space for our national and economic security,” Cavossa said in a statement.

Specific language in the new Trump executive order calls for the FAA to evaluate which regulations should be waived for hybrid launch or reentry vehicles that hold FAA airworthiness certificates, and which requirements should be remitted for rockets with a flight termination system, an explosive charge designed to destroy a launch vehicle if it veers off its pre-approved course after liftoff. These are similar to the topics the Biden-era FAA was looking at last year.

The new Trump administration policy also seeks to limit the authority of state officials in enforcing their own environmental rules related to the construction or operation of spaceports.

This is especially relevant after the California Coastal Commission rejected a proposal by SpaceX to double its launch cadence at Vandenberg Space Force Base, a spaceport located roughly 140 miles (225 kilometers) northwest of Los Angeles. The Space Force, which owns Vandenberg and is one of SpaceX’s primary customers, backs SpaceX’s push for more launches.

Finally, the order gives the Department of Commerce responsibility for authorizing “novel space activities” such as in-space assembly and manufacturing, asteroid and planetary mining, and missions to remove space debris from orbit.

This story was updated at 12: 30 am EDT on August 14 with statements from the Center for Biological Diversity and the Commercial Spaceflight Federation.

Trump orders cull of regulations governing commercial rocket launches Read More »

With Trump’s cutbacks, crew heads for ISS unsure of when they’ll come back

commercial crew, crew dragon, crew-11, dragon, falcon 9, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, spacex / Kris Guyer / August 2, 2025

“We are looking at the potential to extend this current flight, Crew-11.”

NASA astronaut Zena Cardman departs crew quarters at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, for the ride to SpaceX’s launch pad. Credit: Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/Getty Images

The next four-person team to live and work aboard the International Space Station departed from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Friday, taking aim at the massive orbiting research complex for a planned stay of six to eight months.

Spacecraft commander Zena Cardman leads the mission, designated Crew-11, that lifted off from Florida’s Space Coast at 11: 43 am EDT (15: 43 UTC) on Friday. Sitting to her right inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour capsule was veteran NASA astronaut Mike Fincke, serving as the vehicle pilot. Flanking the commander and pilot were two mission specialists: Kimiya Yui of Japan and Oleg Platonov of Russia.

Cardman and her crewmates rode a Falcon 9 rocket off the launch pad and headed northeast over the Atlantic Ocean, lining up with the space station’s orbit to set the stage for an automated docking at the complex early Saturday.

Goodbye LZ-1

The Falcon 9’s reusable first stage booster detached and returned to a propulsive touchdown at Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles south of the launch site. This was the 53rd and final rocket landing at LZ-1 since SpaceX aced the first intact recovery of a Falcon 9 booster there on December 21, 2015.

On most of SpaceX’s missions, Falcon 9 boosters land on the company’s offshore drone ships hundreds of miles downrange from the launch site. For launches with enough fuel margin, the first stage can return to an onshore landing. But the Space Force, which leases out the landing zones to SpaceX, wants to convert the site of LZ-1 into a launch site for another rocket company.

SpaceX will move onshore rocket landings to new landing zones to be constructed next to the two Falcon 9 launch pads at the Florida spaceport. Landing Zone 2, located adjacent to Landing Zone 1, will also be decommissioned and handed back over to the Space Force once SpaceX activates the new landing sites.

“We’re working with the Cape and with the Kennedy Space Center folks to figure out the right time to make that transition from Landing Zone 2 in the future,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability. “But I think we’ll stay with Landing Zone 2 at least near-term, for a little while, and then look at the right time to move to the other areas.”

The Falcon 9 booster returns to Landing Zone 1 after the launch of the Crew-11 mission on Friday, August 1, 2025. Credit: SpaceX

Meanwhile, the Falcon 9’s second stage fired its single engine to accelerate the Crew Dragon spacecraft into low-Earth orbit. Less than 10 minutes after liftoff, the capsule separated from the second stage to wrap up the 159th consecutive successful launch of a Falcon 9 rocket.

“I have no emotions but joy right now,” Cardman said moments after arriving in orbit. “That was absolutely transcendent, the ride of a lifetime.”

This is the first trip to space for Cardman, a 37-year-old geobiologist and Antarctic explorer selected as a NASA astronaut in 2017. She was assigned to command a Dragon flight to the ISS last year, but NASA bumped her and another astronaut from the mission to make room for the spacecraft to return the two astronauts left behind on the station by Boeing’s troubled Starliner capsule.

Mike Fincke, 58, is beginning his fourth spaceflight after previous launches on Russian Soyuz spacecraft and NASA’s space shuttle. He was previously training to fly on the Starliner spacecraft’s first long-duration mission, but NASA moved him to Dragon as the Boeing program faced more delays.

“Boy, it’s great to be back in orbit!” Fincke said. “Thank you to SpaceX and NASA for getting us here. What a ride!”

Yui is on his second flight to orbit. The 55-year-old former fighter pilot in the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force spent 141 days in space in 2015. Platonov, a 39-year-old spaceflight rookie, was a fighter pilot in the Russian Air Force before training to become a cosmonaut.

A matter of money

There’s some unexpected uncertainty going into this mission about how long the foursome will be in space. Missions sometimes get extended for technical reasons, or because of poor weather in recovery zones on Earth, but there’s something different in play with Crew-11. For the first time, there’s a decent chance that NASA will stretch out this expedition due to money issues.

The Trump administration has proposed across-the-board cuts to most NASA programs, including the International Space Station. The White House’s budget request for NASA in fiscal year 2026, which begins on October 1, calls for an overall cut in agency funding of nearly 25 percent.

The White House proposes a slightly higher reduction by percentage for the International Space Station and crew and cargo transportation to and from the research outpost. The cuts to the ISS would keep the station going through 2030, but with a smaller crew and a reduced capacity for research. Effectively, the ISS would limp toward retirement after more than 30 years in orbit.

Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said the agency’s engineers are working with SpaceX to ensure the Dragon spacecraft can stay in orbit for at least eight months. The current certification limit is seven months, although officials waived the limit for one Dragon mission that lasted longer.

“When we launch, we have a mission duration that’s baseline,” Stich said in a July 10 press conference. “And then we can extend [the] mission in real-time, as needed, as we better understand… the reconciliation bill and the appropriations process and what that means relative to the overall station manifest.”

An update this week provided by Dana Weigel, NASA’s ISS program manager, indicated that officials are still planning for Crew-11 to stay in space a little longer than usual.

“We are looking at the potential to extend this current flight, Crew-11,” Weigel said Wednesday. “There are a few more months worth of work to do first.”

This photo of the International Space Station was captured by a crew member on a Soyuz spacecraft. Credit: NASA/Roscosmos

Budget bills advanced in the Senate and House of Representatives in July would maintain funding for most NASA programs, including the ISS and transportation, close to this year’s levels. But it’s no guarantee that Congress will pass an appropriations bill for NASA before the deadline of midnight on October 1. It’s also unknown whether President Donald Trump would sign a budget bill into law that rejects his administration’s cuts.

If Congress doesn’t act, lawmakers must pass a continuing resolution as a temporary stopgap measure or accept a government shutdown. Some members of Congress are also concerned that the Trump administration might simply refuse to spend money allotted to NASA and other federal agencies in any budget bill. This move, called impoundment, would be controversial, and its legality would likely have to be adjudicated in the courts.

A separate amendment added in Congress to a so-called reconciliation bill and signed into law by Trump on July 4 also adds $1.25 billion for ISS operations through 2029. “We’re still evaluating how that’s going to affect operations going forward, but it’s a positive step,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations.

Suffice it to say that while Congress has signaled its intention to keep funding the ISS and many other NASA programs, the amount of money the space agency will actually receive remains uncertain. Trump appointees have directed NASA managers to prepare to operate as if the White House’s proposed cuts will become reality.

For officials in charge of the International Space Station, this means planning for fewer astronauts, reductions in research output, and longer-duration missions to minimize the number of crew rotation flights NASA must pay for. SpaceX is NASA’s primary contractor for crew rotation missions, using its Dragon spacecraft. NASA has a similar contract with Boeing, but that company’s Starliner spacecraft has not been certified for any operational flights to the station.

SpaceX’s next crew mission to the space station, Crew-12, is scheduled to launch early next year. Weigel said NASA is looking at the “entire spectrum” of options to cut back on the space station’s operations and transportation costs. One of those options would be to launch three crew members on Crew-12 instead of the regular four-person complement.

“We don’t have to answer that right now,” Weigel said. “We can actually wait pretty late to make the crew size smaller if we need to. In terms of cargo vehicles, we’re well-supplied through this fall, so in the short term, I’d say, through the end of this year and the beginning of ’26, things look pretty normal in terms of what we have planned for the program.

“But we’re evaluating things, and we’ll be ready to adjust when the budget is passed and when we figure out where we really land.”

With Trump’s cutbacks, crew heads for ISS unsure of when they’ll come back Read More »

Smithsonian Air and Space opens halls for “milestone” and “future” artifacts

blue origin, Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, Futures in Space, inspiration4, National Air and Space Museum, reimagined galleries, renovation, Smithsonian, Space, Space exploration, space history, spacex / Kris Guyer / July 28, 2025

$900M renovation nearing completion

John Glenn’s Friendship 7 returns as SpaceX and Blue Origin artifacts debut.

“Futures in Space” recaptures the experience of the early visitors to the National Air and Space Museum, where the objects on display were contemporary to the day. A mockup of a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule and SpaceX Merlin rocket engine are among the items on display for the first time. Credit: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

The National Air and Space Museum welcomed the public into five more of its renovated galleries on Monday, including two showcasing spaceflight artifacts. The new exhibitions shine modern light on returning displays and restore the museum’s almost 50-year-old legacy of adding objects that made history but have yet to become historical.

Visitors can again enter through the “Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall,” which has been closed for the past three years and has on display some of the museum’s most iconic items, including John Glenn’s Friendship 7 Mercury capsule and an Apollo lunar module.

From there, visitors can tour through the adjacent “Futures in Space,” a new gallery focused on the different approaches and technology that spaceflight will take in the years to come. Here, the Smithsonian is displaying for the first time objects that were recently donated by commercial spaceflight companies, including items used in space tourism and in growing the low-Earth orbit economy.

a museum gallery with air and spacecraft displayed on the terrazzo floor and suspended from the ceiling — The artifacts are iconic, but the newly reopened Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall at the National Air and Space Museum is all new. Credit: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

“We are thrilled to open this next phase of exhibitions to the public,” said Chris Browne, the John and Adrienne Mars Director of the National Air and Space Museum, in a statement. “Reopening our main hall with so many iconic aerospace artifacts, as well as completely new exhibitions, will give visitors much more to see and enjoy.”

The other three galleries newly open to the public are devoted to aviation history, including the “Barron Hilton Pioneers of Flight,” “World War I: The Birth of Military Aviation,” and the “Allan and Shelley Holt Innovations Gallery.”

What’s new is not yet old

Among the artifacts debuting in “Futures in Space” are a Merlin engine and grid fin that flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, Sian Proctor’s pressure suit that she wore on the private Inspiration4 mission in 2021, and a mockup of a New Shepard crew module that Blue Origin has pledged to replace with its first flown capsule when it is retired from flying.

“When the museum first opened back in 1976 and people came here and saw things like the Apollo command module and Neil Armstrong’s spacesuit, or really anything related to human spaceflight, at that point it was all still very recent,” said Matt Shindell, one of the curators behind “Futures in Space,” in an interview with collectSPACE.com. “So when you would come into the museum, it wasn’t so much a history of space but what’s happening now and what could happen next. We wanted to have a gallery that would recapture that feeling.”

Instead of being themed around a single program or period in history, the new gallery invites visitors to consider a series of questions, including: Who decides who goes to space? Why do we go? And what will we do when we get there?

a black and white astronaut's pressure suit and other space artifacts are displayed behind glass in a museum gallery with blue flooring and walls — Curatores designed “Futures in Space” around a list of questions, including “Why go to space?” On display is a pressure suit worn by Sian Proctor on the Inspiration4 mission and a 1978 NASA astronaut “TFNG” T-shirt. Credit: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

“We really wanted the gallery to be one that engaged visitors in these questions and that centered the experience around what they thought should be happening in the future and what that would mean for them,” said Shindell. “We also have visions of the future presented throughout the gallery, including from popular culture—television shows, movies and comic books—that have explored what the future might look like and what it would mean for the people living through it.”

That is why the gallery also includes R2-D2, or rather a reproduction of the “Star Wars” droid as built by Adam Savage of Tested. In George Lucas’ vision of the future (“a long, long time ago”), Astromech droids serve as spacecraft navigators, mechanics, and companion aides.

Beyond the artifacts and exhibits (which also include an immersive 3D-printed Mars habitat and Yuri Gagarin’s training pressure suit), there is a stage and seating area at the center of “Futures.”

“I think of it as a TED Talk-style stage,” said Shindell. “We’re hoping to bring in people from industry, stakeholders, people who have flown, people who are getting ready to fly, and people who have ideas about what should be happening to come and talk to visitors from that stage about the same questions that we’re asking in the gallery.”

Modernized “Milestones”

The artifacts presented in the “Boeing Milestones of Flight” are mostly the same as they were before the hall was closed in 2022. The hall underwent a renovation in 2014 ahead of the museum’s 40th anniversary, so its displays did not need another redesign.

Still, the gallery looks new due to the work done surrounding the objects.

“What is new for the ‘Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall’ is, at some level, most noticeably the floor and media elements,” said Margaret Weitekamp, curator and division chair at the National Air and Space Museum, in an interview.

“We have a wonderful 123-foot (37-meter) media band that goes across the front of the mezzanine, and we have 20 different slide shows that work as a digest of what you’ll find in the new galleries throughout the building,” said Weitekamp. “So as people come into the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall, they’ll be greeted by that and get a taste of what they’re going to see inside.”

And then there is the new flooring. In the past, the hall had been lined in maroon or dark gray carpet. It is now a much lighter color terrazzo.

“It really brightens up the room,” Weitekamp told collectsPACE.

“Also, you’ll notice that as you are going up and down the hallways, there are medallions embedded in the floor that display quotes from significant aviation and spaceflight figures. So we’ve been able to put some quotes from Carl Sagan, Sally Ride, and Chuck Yeager into the floor,” she said.

the view looking down and into a museum gallery with aircraft suspended from the ceiling, spacecraft on display and a binary map embedded in the flooring — The pattern on the floor of the Boeing Milesones of Flight Hall is the pulsar-based map to Earth’s solar system that was mounted to the Pioneer and Voyager probes, now updated for 2026. Credit: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Visitors should also pay attention to what look like lines of dashes converging at the hall’s center. The design is an update to a NASA graphic.

“We have a revised version of the pulsar map from Pioneer 10 and 11 and the Voyager interstellar record,” said Weitekamp, referring to the representation of the location of Earth for any extraterrestrial species that might discover the probes in the future. “The map located Earth’s solar system with relationship to 14 pulsars.”

When the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft were launched, astronomers didn’t know that pulsars (or rotating neutron stars) slow down over time.

“So we worked with a colleague of ours to make it a map to our solar system as would be accurate for 2026, which will mark the 50th anniversary of the museum’s building and the 250th birthday of the nation,” Weitekamp said.

Thirteen open, eight to go

Monday’s opening followed an earlier debut of eight reimagined galleries in 2022. Also open is the renovated Lockheed Martin IMAX Theater, which joins the planetarium, the museum store, and the Mars Café that were reopened earlier.

the exterior entrance to a building with a tall, spike-like silver sculpture standing front and center — The redesigned north entrance to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum opened to the public on Monday, July 28, 2025. Credit: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

“We are nearing the end of this multi-year renovation project,” said Browne. “We look forward to welcoming many more people into these modernized and inspiring new spaces,”

Eight more exhibitions are scheduled to open next year in time for the 50th anniversary of the National Air and Space Museum. Among those galleries are three that are focused on space: “At Home in Space,” “National Science Foundation Discovering Our Universe,” and “RTX Living in the Space Age Hall.”

Admission to the National Air and Space Museum and the new galleries is free, but timed-entry passes, available from the Smithsonian’s website, are required.

Robert Pearlman is a space historian, journalist and the founder and editor of collectSPACE, a daily news publication and online community focused on where space exploration intersects with pop culture. He is also a contributing writer for Space.com and co-author of “Space Stations: The Art, Science, and Reality of Working in Space” published by Smithsonian Books in 2018. He is on the leadership board for For All Moonkind and is a member of the American Astronautical Society’s history committee.

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Starlink kept me connected to the Internet without fail—until Thursday

broadband, Space, spacex, starlink, Ukraine / Tim Belzer / July 26, 2025

A rare global interruption in the Starlink satellite Internet network knocked subscribers offline for more than two hours on Thursday, the longest widespread outage since SpaceX opened the service to consumers nearly five years ago.

The outage affected civilian and military users, creating an inconvenience for many but cutting off a critical lifeline for those who rely on Starlink for military operations, health care, and other applications.

Michael Nicolls, SpaceX’s vice president of Starlink engineering, wrote on X that the network outage lasted approximately 2.5 hours.

“The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,” Nicolls wrote. “We apologize for the temporary disruption in our service; we are deeply committed to providing a highly reliable network, and will fully root cause this issue and ensure it does not occur again.”

Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, apologized for the interruption in service on X: “Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn’t happen again.”

Effects big and small

The Ukrainian military has been at the leading edge of adopting Starlink services and adapting the system for use in war zones. Ukraine’s exploitation of Starlink connectivity has been instrumental in directing military operations, supporting battlefield communications, and controlling drones engaged in reconnaissance and offensive strikes.

The commander of Ukraine’s drone forces, Robert Brovdi, confirmed Thursday’s Starlink outage reached his country’s ongoing war with Russia.

“Starlink went down across the entire front,” Brovdi wrote on Telegram. “Combat operations were carried out without broadcasts; reconnaissance was carried out … using shock weapons.”

Brovdi added that the interruption in service illustrates the importance of having multiple paths of connectivity, especially for time-critical military operations. “This incident, which lasted 150 minutes in the war, points to bottlenecks,” he wrote, urging the military to diversify its means of communication and connectivity.

Oleksandr Dmitriev, the founder of a Ukrainian system that centralizes feeds from thousands of drone crews across the frontline, told Reuters the outage was an example of the shortcomings of relying on cloud services for military operations, particularly battlefield drone reconnaissance.

Starlink kept me connected to the Internet without fail—until Thursday Read More »