It looked like the final scene of a movie, the denouement of a long adventure in which the good guys finally prevail. Azure skies and brilliant blue seas provided a perfect backdrop on Tuesday evening as a spacecraft carrying four people neared the planet’s surface.
“Just breathtaking views of a calm, glass-like ocean off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida,” commented Sandra Jones, a NASA spokesperson, during the webcast co-hosted by the space agency and SpaceX, whose Dragon vehicle returned the four astronauts from orbit.
A drone near the landing site captured incredible images of Crew Dragon Freedom as it slowly descended beneath four parachutes. Most of NASA’s astronauts today, outside of the small community of spaceflight devotees, are relatively anonymous. But not two of the passengers inside Freedom, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. After nine months of travails, 286 days to be precise, they were finally coming home.
Dragon continued its stately descent, falling to 400 meters, then 300, and then 200 above the ocean.
Kate Tice, an engineer from SpaceX on the webcast, noted that touchdown was imminent. “We’re going to stand by for splashdown located in the Gulf of America,” she said.
Ah, yes. The Gulf of America.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
A throne of lies
For those of us who have closely followed the story of Wilmore and Williams over the last nine months—and Ars Technica has had its share of exclusivestories about this long and strange saga—the final weeks before the landing have seen it take a disturbing turn.
SpaceX has long had a hard-charging culture. Is it now charging too hard?
File photo of a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Credit: SpaceX
It has been an uncharacteristically messy start to the year for the world’s leading spaceflight company, SpaceX.
Let’s start with the company’s most recent delay. The latest launch date for a NASA mission to survey the sky and better understand the early evolution of the Universe comes Monday night. The launch window for this SPHEREx mission opened on February 28, but a series of problems with integrating the rocket and payloads have delayed the mission nearly two weeks.
Then there are the Falcon 9 first stage issues. Last week, a Falcon 9 rocket launched nearly two dozen Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit. However, one of the rocket’s nine engines suffered a fuel leak during ascent. Due to a lack of oxygen in the thinning atmosphere, the fuel leak did not preclude the satellites from reaching orbit. But when the first stage returned to Earth, it caught fire after landing on a droneship, toppling over. This followed a similar issue in August, when there was a fire in the engine compartment. After nearly three years without a Falcon 9 landing failure, SpaceX had two in six months.
SpaceX has also experienced recent and recurring problems with the Falcon 9 rocket’s expendable upper stage. On February 1, a second stage deorbit burn failed after a Starlink launch. This led to propellant tanks from the stage crashing into western Poland, causing property damage but harming no one. It was the third time in six months that SpaceX had encountered an issue with the Falcon 9 second stage.
Although the vehicle’s first stage performed nominally during test flights in January and March, returning safely to its launch site, the Starship upper stage exploded spectacularly in flight twice. On both occasions, a fire developed in the engine section of Starship, and the vehicle rained fiery debris trails over the Bahamas and other nearby islands. Air traffic controllers diverted or delayed dozens of commercial airline flights flying through the debris footprint.
Putting this into perspective
These issues have occurred against the backdrop of a largely successful and unprecedented launch performance.
For all of the problems described earlier, the company’s only operational payload loss was its own Starlink satellites in July 2024 due to a second stage issue. Before that, SpaceX had not lost a payload with the Falcon 9 in nearly a decade. So SpaceX has been delivering for its customers in a big way.
SpaceX has achieved a launch cadence with the Falcon 9 rocket that’s unmatched by any previous rocket—or even nation—in history. If the SPHEREx mission launches tonight, as anticipated, it would be the company’s 27th mission of this year. The rest of the world combined, including China and its growing space activity, will have a total of 19 orbital launch attempts.
In the United States, SpaceX’s historic launch competitor, United Launch Alliance, has yet to fly a single rocket this year. In fact, the company has not launched in 156 days. During that time, SpaceX has launched 64 Falcon 9 rockets. So yes, SpaceX has had some technical issues. But it is also flying circles around its competition.
The recent failures are also unlikely to jeopardize, at least in the near term, SpaceX’s globally dominant position. The company provides the Western world’s only human access to orbit, and that’s unlikely to change for a while. SpaceX launches the vast majority of NASA’s science missions, and until United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket becomes certified, it remains the US military’s only way to get larger payloads into space. The company also operates a global Internet network with more than 5 million users, and that number is growing rapidly.
All the same, these recent failures may be telling us something about SpaceX.
What is causing this
Without being inside SpaceX, it is impossible to put a fine point on what precisely is happening to cause these technical issues.
Probably the most significant factor is the company’s ever-present pressure to accelerate, even while taking on more and more challenging tasks. No country or private company ever launched as many times as SpaceX did in 2024. By way of comparison, NASA launched the Space Shuttle 135 times, a comparable number to the total of Falcon 9 launches last year (132), over a 30-year period.
At the same time, the company has been attempting to move its talented engineering team off the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs and onto Starship to keep that ambitious program moving forward.
To put it succinctly, SpaceX is balancing a lot of spinning plates, and the company’s leadership is telling its employees to spin the plates faster and faster.
Multiple sources have indicated that the Starship engineering team was under immense pressure after the January 16 failure to identify the cause of a “harmonic response” in the vehicle’s upper stage that contributed to its loss. The goal was to find and fix the problem as quickly as possible.
Let’s step back and appreciate that Starship is an experimental system, by far the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown, and it catastrophically failed in January. During a span of just seven weeks, the Starship team had to study the failure, address any problems, and prepare new hardware.
How much of this is on SpaceX founder Elon Musk? Some have suggested his deep involvement in the 2024 presidential election, oversight of the Department of Government Efficiency, excessive social media activity, and more—like picking fights with US senators— have distracted him from the problems of SpaceX. And there’s no doubt that Musk has been focused on things other than SpaceX for the last half-year or longer.
However, in Musk’s absence, he has capable lieutenants such as Mark Juncosa leading the way. SpaceX has long had a hard-charging culture instilled by Musk since the founding of the company. Musk’s modus operandi is to push his teams to reach some ambitious goal, and when they do, he sets a new, even more audacious target. It may be not so much Musk’s absence that is causing these issues but rather the company’s relentless culture.
It seems possible that, at least for now, SpaceX has reached the speed limit for commercial spaceflight. When you’re launching 150 times a year and building two second stages a week, it’s hard to escape the possibility that some details are slipping through the cracks. And it’s not just the launches. SpaceX is operating a constellation of more than 7,000 satellites, flying humans into space regularly, and developing an unprecedented rocket like Starship.
The recent failures may be signs of cracks in the foundation.
What are the implications
So far, the consequences of these failures have not been lethal. But space remains a difficult, hazardous game. Reentering debris from a Falcon 9 upper stage could have struck someone in Poland. God forbid, a second stage could fail early in a crewed mission.
The risks of serious problems with Starlink should not be understated, either. There have been unconfirmed rumors in recent months of near misses between Starlink satellites and objects in low-Earth orbit. Additional debris in this increasingly cluttered space would be disastrous.
To date, the Falcon 9 rocket program has not been slowed down by these issues. It’s perhaps not fully appreciated how utterly reliant NASA’s human spaceflight activities are on the Falcon 9. It currently launches the only crew-capable vehicle in Dragon. However, a Cargo version of Dragon also flies on the Falcon 9, and this is NASA’s only way to get scientific experiments back to Earth. And for at least the next year, the only other US cargo vehicle, Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus, also must launch on the Falcon 9.
Not just NASA, but every other space station partner outside of Russia, depends on the Falcon 9 for human spaceflight activities. The rocket must fly, and fly safely, or the West will be grounded.
With Starship, the recent failures are a significant setback. Although there will no doubt be pressure from SpaceX leadership to rapidly move forward, there appears to be a debilitating design flaw in the upgraded version of Starship. It will be important to understand and address this. Another launch before this summer seems unlikely. A third consecutive catastrophic failure would be really, really bad.
For the space agency’s Artemis program to return humans to the Moon, Starship’s problems spell more delays. Musk had already signaled in late February that a critical refueling demonstration will now not happen this year. This test is an essential milestone on the path to the Moon, and its delay all but ensures the first lunar landing will not happen in 2027 as currently envisioned.
Most likely, the back-to-back Starship failures will also cement the path forward for Artemis II and Artemis III to fly as planned, with crews flying on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft.
As for Mars, the red planet remains in the far distance, waiting for SpaceX to address its red flags here on Earth.
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.
The flight plan going into Thursday’s mission called for sending Starship on a journey halfway around the world from Texas, culminating in a controlled reentry over the Indian Ocean before splashing down northwest of Australia.
The test flight was supposed to be a do-over of the previous Starship flight on January 16, when the rocket’s upper stage—itself known as Starship, or ship—succumbed to fires fueled by leaking propellants in its engine bay. Engineers determined the most likely cause of the propellant leak was a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected.
The Super Heavy booster returned to Starbase in Texas to be caught back at the launch pad. Credit: SpaceX
Engineers test-fired the Starship vehicle earlier this month for this week’s test flight, validating changes to propellant temperatures, operating thrust, and the ship’s fuel feed lines leading to its six Raptor engines.
But engineers missed something. On Thursday, the Raptor engines began shutting down on Starship about eight minutes into the flight, and the rocket started tumbling 90 miles (146 kilometers) over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX ground controllers lost all contact with the rocket about nine-and-a-half minutes after liftoff.
“Prior to the end of the ascent burn, an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines,” SpaceX wrote on X. “This in turn led to a loss of attitude control and ultimately a loss of communications with Starship.”
Just like in January, residents and tourists across the Florida peninsula, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands shared videos of fiery debris trails appearing in the twilight sky. Air traffic controllers diverted or delayed dozens of commercial airline flights flying through the debris footprint, just as they did in response to the January incident.
There were no immediate reports Thursday of any Starship wreckage falling over populated areas. In January, residents in the Turks and Caicos Islands recovered small debris fragments, including one piece that caused minor damage when it struck a car. The debris field from Thursday’s failed flight appeared to fall west of the areas where debris fell after Starship Flight 7.
A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said the regulatory agency will require SpaceX to perform an investigation into Thursday’s Starship failure.
The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch Starship’s eighth test flight as soon as Monday.
Ship 34, destined to launch on the next Starship test flight, test-fired its engines in South Texas on February 12. Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX plans to launch the eighth full-scale test flight of its enormous Starship rocket as soon as Monday after receiving regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.
The test flight will be a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to achieve on the previous Starship launch in January, when the rocket broke apart and showered debris over the Atlantic Ocean and Turks and Caicos Islands. The accident prevented SpaceX from completing many of the flight’s goals, such as testing Starship’s satellite deployment mechanism and new types of heat shield material.
Those things are high on the to-do list for Flight 8, set to lift off at 5: 30 pm CST (6: 30 pm EST; 23: 30 UTC) Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast. Over the weekend, SpaceX plans to mount the rocket’s Starship upper stage atop the Super Heavy booster already in position on the launch pad.
The fully stacked rocket will tower 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. Like the test flight on January 16, this launch will use a second-generation, Block 2, version of Starship with larger propellant tanks with 25 percent more volume than previous vehicle iterations. The payload compartment near the ship’s top is somewhat smaller than the payload bay on Block 1 Starships.
This block upgrade moves SpaceX closer to attempting more challenging things with Starship, such as returning the ship, or upper stage, back to the launch site from orbit. It will be caught with the launch tower at Starbase, just like SpaceX accomplished last year with the Super Heavy booster. Officials also want to bring Starship into service to launch Starlink Internet satellites and demonstrate in-orbit refueling, an enabling capability for future Starship flights to the Moon and Mars.
NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a Starship spinoff as a human-rated Moon lander for the Artemis lunar program. The mega-rocket is central to Elon Musk’s ambition to create a human settlement on Mars.
Another shot at glory
Other changes introduced on Starship Version 2 include redesigned forward flaps, which are smaller and closer to the tip of the ship’s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Technicians also removed some of the ship’s thermal protection tiles to “stress-test vulnerable areas” of the vehicle during descent. SpaceX is experimenting with metallic tile designs, including one with active cooling, that might be less brittle than the ceramic tiles used elsewhere on the ship.
Engineers also installed rudimentary catch fittings on the ship to evaluate how they respond to the heat of reentry, when temperatures outside the vehicle climb to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Read more about Starship Version in this previous story from Ars.
It will take about 1 hour and 6 minutes for Starship to fly from the launch pad in South Texas to a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. The rocket’s Super Heavy booster will fire 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines for two-and-a-half minutes as it climbs east from the Texas coastline, then jettison from the Starship upper stage and reverse course to return to Starbase for another catch with mechanical arms on the launch tower.
Meanwhile, Starship will ignite six Raptor engines and accelerate to a speed just shy of orbital velocity, putting the ship on a trajectory to reenter the atmosphere after soaring about halfway around the world.
Booster 15 perched on the launch mount at Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX
If you’ve watched the last few Starship flights, this profile probably sounds familiar. SpaceX achieved successful splashdowns after three Starship test flights last year, and hoped to do it again before the premature end of Flight 7 in January. Instead, the accident was the most significant technical setback for the Starship program since the first full-scale test flight in 2023, which damaged the launch pad before the rocket spun out of control in the upper atmosphere.
Now, SpaceX hopes to get back on track. At the end of last year, company officials said they targeted as many as 25 Starship flights in 2025. Two months in, SpaceX is about to launch its second Starship of the year.
The breakup of Starship last month prevented SpaceX from evaluating the performance of the ship’s Pez-like satellite deployer and upgraded heat shield. Engineers are eager to see how those perform on Monday’s flight. Once in space, the ship will release four simulators replicating the approximate size and mass of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. They will follow the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and reenter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.
That will be followed by a restart of a Raptor engine on Starship in space, repeating a feat first achieved on Flight 6 in November. Officials want to ensure Raptor engines can reignite reliably in space before actually launching Starship into a stable orbit, where the ship must burn an engine to guide itself back into the atmosphere for a controlled reentry. With another suborbital flight on tap Monday, the engine relight is purely a confidence-building demonstration and not critical for a safe return to Earth.
The flight plan for Starship’s next launch includes another attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower, a satellite deployment demonstration, and an important test of its heat shield. Credit: SpaceX
Then, about 47 minutes into the mission, Starship will plunge back into the atmosphere. If this flight is like the previous few, expect to see live high-definition video streaming back from Starship as super-heated plasma envelops the vehicle in a cloak of pink and orange. Finally, air resistance will slow the ship below the speed of sound, and just 20 seconds before reaching the ocean, the rocket will flip to a vertical orientation and reignite its Raptor engines again to brake for splashdown.
This is where SpaceX hopes Starship Version 2 will shine. Although three Starships have made it to the ocean intact, the scorching temperatures of reentry damaged parts of their heat shields and flaps. That won’t do for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing Starship with minimal or no refurbishment. Heat shield repairs slowed down the turnaround time between NASA’s space shuttle missions, and officials hope the upgraded heat shield on Starship Version 2 will decrease the downtime.
FAA’s green light
The FAA confirmed Friday it issued a launch license earlier this week for Starship Flight 8.
“The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” an FAA spokesperson said in a statement.
The federal regulator oversaw a SpaceX-led investigation into the failure of Flight 7. SpaceX said NASA, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the US Space Force also participated in the investigation, which determined that propellant leaks and fires in an aft compartment, or attic, of Starship led to the shutdown of its engines and eventual breakup.
Engineers concluded the leaks were most likely caused by a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected from ground testing.
Earlier this month, SpaceX completed an extended-duration static fire of the next Starship upper stage to test hardware modifications at multiple engine thrust levels. According to SpaceX, findings from the static fire informed changes to the fuel feed lines to Starship’s Raptor engines, adjustments to propellant temperatures, and a new operating thrust for the next test flight.
“To address flammability potential in the attic section on Starship, additional vents and a new purge system utilizing gaseous nitrogen are being added to the current generation of ships to make the area more robust to propellant leakage,” SpaceX said. “Future upgrades to Starship will introduce the Raptor 3 engine, reducing the attic volume and eliminating the majority of joints that can leak into this volume.”
FAA officials were apparently satisfied with all of this. The agency’s commercial spaceflight division completed a “comprehensive safety review” and determined Starship can return to flight operations while the investigation into the Flight 7 failure remains open. This isn’t new. The FAA also used this safety determination to expedite SpaceX launch license approvals last year as officials investigated mishaps on Starship and Falcon 9 rocket flights.
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.
Vast’s schedule for deploying a mini-space station in low-Earth orbit was always ambitious.
A stack of 21 Starlink Internet satellites arrives in orbit Tuesday following launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: SpaceX
Welcome to Edition 7.30 of the Rocket Report! The US government relies on SpaceX for a lot of missions. These include launching national security satellites, putting astronauts on the Moon, and global broadband communications. But there are hurdles—technical and, increasingly, political—on the road ahead. To put it generously, Elon Musk, without whom much of what SpaceX does wouldn’t be possible, is one of the most divisive figures in American life today.
Now, a Democratic lawmaker in Congress has introduced a bill that would end federal contracts for special government employees (like Musk), citing conflict-of-interest concerns. The bill will go nowhere with Republicans in control of Congress, but it is enough to make me pause and think. When the Trump era passes and a new administration takes the White House, how will they view Musk? Will there be an appetite to reduce the government’s reliance on SpaceX? To answer this question, you must first ask if the government will even have a choice. What if, as is the case in many areas today, there’s no viable replacement for the services offered by SpaceX?
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.
Blue Origin flight focuses on lunar research. For the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has put its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship through a couple of minutes’ worth of Moon-level gravity, GeekWire reports. The uncrewed mission, known as NS-29, sent 30 research payloads on a 10-minute trip from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. For this trip, the crew capsule was spun up to 11 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the typical half-revolution per minute. The resulting centrifugal force was equivalent to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, which is what would be felt on the Moon.
Gee, that’s cool … The experiments aboard Blue Origin’s space capsule examined how to process lunar soil to extract resources and how to manufacture solar cells on the Moon for Blue Origin’s Blue Alchemist project. Another investigated how moondust gets electrically charged and levitated when exposed to ultraviolet light. These types of experiments in partial gravity can be done on parabolic airplane flights, but those only provide a few seconds of the right conditions to simulate the Moon’s gravity. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Orbex announces two-launch deal with D-Orbit. UK-based rocket builder Orbex announced Monday that it has signed a two-launch deal with Italian in-orbit logistics provider D-Orbit, European Spaceflight reports. The deal includes capacity aboard two launches on Orbex’s Prime rocket over the next three years. D-Orbit aggregates small payloads on rideshare missions (primarily on SpaceX rockets so far) and has an orbital transfer vehicle for ferrying satellites to different altitudes after separation from a launch vehicle. Orbex’s Prime rocket is sized for the small satellite industry, and the company aims to debut it later this year.
Thanks to fresh funding? … Orbex has provided only sparse updates on its progress toward launching the Prime rocket. What we do know is that Orbex suspended plans to develop a spaceport in Scotland to focus its resources on the Prime rocket itself. Despite little evidence of any significant accomplishments, Orbex last month secured a $25 million investment from the UK government. The timing of the launch agreement with D-Orbit begs the question of whether the UK government’s backing helped seal the deal. As Andrew Parsonson of European Spaceflight writes: “Is this a clear indication of how important strong institutional backing is for the growth of privately developed launch systems in Europe?” (submitted by EllPeaTea)
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Falcon 9’s upper stage misfires again. The second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket remained in orbit following a launch Saturday from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The rocket successfully deployed a new batch of Starlink Internet satellites but was supposed to reignite its engine for a braking maneuver to head for a destructive reentry over the Pacific Ocean. While airspace warning notices from the FAA showed a reentry zone over the eastern Pacific Ocean, publicly available US military tracking continued to show the upper stage in orbit this week. Sources also told Ars that SpaceX delayed two Falcon 9 launches this week by a day to allow time for engineers to evaluate the problem.
3 in 6 months … This is the third time since last July that the Falcon 9’s upper stage has encountered a problem in flight. On one occasion, the upper stage failed to reach its targeted orbit, leading to the destruction of 20 Starlink satellites. Then, an upper stage misfired during a deorbit burn after an otherwise successful launch in September, causing debris to fall outside of the pre-approved danger area. After both events, the FAA briefly grounded the Falcon 9 rocket while SpaceX conducted an investigation. This time, an FAA spokesperson said the agency won’t require an investigation. “All flight events occurred within the scope of SpaceX’s licensed activities,” the spokesperson told Ars.
Vast tests hardware for commercial space station. Vast Space has started testing a qualification model of its first commercial space station but has pushed back the launch of that station into 2026, Space News reports. In an announcement Thursday, Vast said it completed a proof test of the primary structure of a test version of its Haven-1 space station habitat at a facility in Mojave, California. During the testing, Vast pumped up the pressure inside the structure to 1.8 times its normal level and conducted a leak test. “On the first try we passed that critical test,” Max Haot, chief executive of Vast, told Space News.
Not this year … It’s encouraging to see Vast making tangible progress in developing its commercial space station. The privately held company is one of several seeking to develop a commercial outpost in low-Earth orbit to replace the International Space Station after its scheduled retirement in 2030. NASA is providing funding to two industrial teams led by Blue Origin and Voyager Space, which are working on different space station concepts. But so far, Vast’s work has been funded primarily through private capital. The launch of the Haven-1 outpost, which Vast previously said could happen this year, is now scheduled no earlier than May 2026. The spacecraft will launch in one piece on a Falcon 9 rocket, and the first astronaut crew to visit Haven-1 could launch a month later. Haven-1 is a pathfinder for a larger commercial station called Haven-2, which Vast intends to propose to NASA. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
H3 deploys Japanese navigation satellite. Japan successfully launched a flagship H3 rocket Sunday and put into orbit a Quasi-Zenith Satellite (QZS), aiming to improve the accuracy of global positioning data for various applications, Kyodo News reports. After separation from the H3 rocket, the Michibiki 6 satellite will climb into geostationary orbit, where it will supplement navigation signals from GPS satellites to provide more accurate positioning data to users in Japan and surrounding regions, particularly in mountainous terrain and amid high-rise buildings in large cities. The new satellite joins a network of four QZS spacecraft launched by Japan beginning in 2010. Two more Quasi-Zenith Satellites are under construction, and Japan’s government is expected to begin development of an additional four regional navigation satellites this year.
A good start … After a failed inaugural flight in 2023, Japan’s new H3 rocket has reeled off four consecutive successful launches in less than a year. This may not sound like a lot, but the H3 has achieved its first four successful flights faster than any other rocket since 2000. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket completed its first four successful flights in a little more than two years, and United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V logged its fourth flight in a similar timeframe. More than 14 months elapsed between the first and fourth successful flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. The H3 is an expendable rocket with no roadmap to reusability, so its service life and commercial potential are likely limited. But the rocket is shaping up to provide reliable access to space for Japan’s space agency and military, while some of its peers in Europe and the United States struggle to ramp up to a steady launch cadence. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Europe really doesn’t like relying on Elon Musk. Europe’s space industry has struggled to keep up with SpaceX for a decade. The writing was on the wall when SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster for the first time. Now, European officials are wary of becoming too reliant on SpaceX, and there’s broad agreement on the continent that Europe should have the capability to launch its own satellites. In this way, access to space is a strategic imperative for Europe. The problem is, Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket is just not competitive with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and there’s no concrete plan to counter SpaceX’s dominance.
So here’s another terrible idea … Airbus, Europe’s largest aerospace contractor with a 50 percent stake in the Ariane 6 program, has enlisted Goldman Sachs for advice on how to forge a new European space and satellite company to better compete with SpaceX. France-based Thales and the Italian company Leonardo are part of the talks, with Bank of America also advising on the initiative. The idea that some bankers from Goldman and Bank of America will go into the guts of some of Europe’s largest institutional space companies and emerge with a lean, competitive entity seems far-fetched, to put it mildly, Ars reports.
The FAA still has some bite. We’re now three weeks removed from the most recent test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which ended with the failure of the vehicle’s upper stage in the final moments of its launch sequence. The accident rained debris over the Atlantic Ocean and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and ordered an investigation into the accident on the day after the launch. This decision came three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who counts Musk as one of his top allies. So far, the FAA hasn’t budged on its requirement for an investigation, an agency spokesperson told Ars.
Debris field … In the hours and days after the failed Starship launch, residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos shared images of debris scattered across the islands and washing up onshore. The good news is there were no injuries or reports of significant damage from the wreckage, but the FAA confirmed one report of minor damage to a vehicle located in South Caicos. It’s rare for debris from US rockets to fall over land during a launch. This would typically only happen if a launch failed at certain parts of the flight. Before now, there has been no public record of any claims of third-party property damage in the era of commercial spaceflight.
DOD eager to reap the benefits of Starship. A Defense Department unit is examining how SpaceX’s Starship vehicle could be used to support a broader architecture of in-space refueling, Space News reports. A senior adviser at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) said SpaceX approached the agency about how Starship’s refueling architecture could be used by the wider space industry. The plan for Starship is to transfer cryogenic propellants between tankers, depots, and ships heading to the Moon, Mars, or other deep-space destinations.
Few details available … US military officials have expressed interest in orbital refueling to support in-space mobility, where ground controllers have the freedom to maneuver national security satellites between different orbits without worrying about running out of propellant. For several years, Space Force commanders and Pentagon officials have touted the importance of in-space mobility, or dynamic space operations, in a new era of orbital warfare. However, there are reports that the Space Force has considered zeroing out a budget line item for space mobility in its upcoming fiscal year 2026 budget request.
A small step toward a fully reusable European rocket. The French space agency CNES has issued a call for proposals to develop a reusable upper stage for a heavy-lift rocket, European Spaceflight reports. This project is named DEMESURE (DEMonstration Étage SUpérieur REutilisable / Reusable Upper Stage Demonstration), and it marks one of Europe’s first steps in developing a fully reusable rocket. That’s all good, but there’s a sense of tentativeness in this announcement. The current call for proposals will only cover the earliest phases of development, such as a requirements evaluation, cost estimation review, and a feasibility meeting. A future call will deal with the design and fabrication of a “reduced scale” upper stage, followed by a demonstration phase with a test flight, recovery, and reuse of the vehicle. CNES’s vision is to field a fully reusable rocket as a successor to the single-use Ariane 6.
Toes in the water … If you’re looking for reasons to be skeptical about Project DEMESURE, look no further than the Themis program, which aims to demonstrate the recovery and reuse of a booster stage akin to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Themis originated in a partnership between CNES and European industry in 2019, then ESA took over the project in 2020. Five years later, the Themis demonstrator still hasn’t flown. After some initial low-altitude hops, Themis is supposed to launch on a high-altitude test flight and maneuver through the entire flight profile of a reusable booster, from liftoff to a vertical propulsive landing. As we’ve seen with SpaceX, recovering an orbital-class upper stage is a lot harder than landing the booster. An optimistic view of this announcement is that anything worth doing requires taking a first step, and that’s what CNES has done here. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Next three launches
Feb. 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-9 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18: 52 UTC
Feb. 8: Electron | IoT 4 You and Me | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 20: 43 UTC
Feb. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 00: 03 UTC
Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.
Like a lot of the rest of the federal government right now, NASA is reeling during the first turbulent days of the Trump administration.
The last two weeks have brought a change in leadership in the form of interim administrator Janet Petro, whose ascension was a surprise. Her first act was to tell agency employees to remove diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility contracts and to “report” on anyone who did not carry out this order. Soon, civil servants began receiving emails from the US Office of Personnel Management that some perceived as an effort to push them to resign.
Then there are the actions of SpaceX founder Elon Musk. Last week he sowed doubt by claiming NASA had “stranded” astronauts on the space station. (The astronauts are perfectly safe and have a ride home.) Perhaps more importantly, he owns the space agency’s most important contractor and, in recent weeks, has become deeply enmeshed in operating the US government through his Department of Government Efficiency. For some NASA employees, whether or not it is true, there is now an uncomfortable sense that they are working for Musk and to dole out contracts to SpaceX.
This concern was heightened late Friday when Petro announced that a longtime SpaceX employee named Michael Altenhofen had joined the agency “as a senior advisor to the NASA Administrator.” Altenhofen is an accomplished engineer who interned at NASA in 2005 but has spent the last 15 years at SpaceX, most recently as a leader of human spaceflight programs. He certainly brings expertise, but his hiring also raises concerns about SpaceX’s influence over NASA operations. Petro did not respond to a request for comment on Monday about potential conflicts of interest and the scope of Altenhofen’s involvement.
I spent this weekend talking and texting with NASA sources at various centers around the country, and the overriding message is that morale at the agency is “absurdly low.” Meetings between civil servants and their leadership, such as an all-hands gathering at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia recently, have been fraught with tension. No one knows what will happen next.
Estimates of Starlink’s consumer revenues. Credit: Quilty Space
Both of the new analyses indicate that over the course of the last decade, SpaceX has built a robust space-Internet business with affordable ground terminals, sophisticated gateways around the world, more than 7,000 satellites in orbit, and a reusable launch business to service the network. There is new technology coming, with larger V3 satellites on the horizon—to be launched by SpaceX’s Starship vehicle—and the promise of direct-to-cell Internet connectivity that bypasses the need for a ground terminal.
There is also plenty of room for growth in market share in both existing territories as well as large nations such as India, where SpaceX is seeking access to the market and providing Internet service.
Some risk on the horizon
In all of this, Starlink now faces a moment of promise and peril. The company has all of the potential described above, but SpaceX founder Elon Musk has become an increasingly prominent and controversial figure both in US and global politics. Many people and governments are becoming more uncomfortable with Musk’s behavior, his insertion into domestic and foreign politics, and the power he is wielding within the Trump administration.
In the near term, this may be good for Starlink’s business. The Financial Times reported that corporate America, in an effort to deepen ties with the Trump Administration, has been “cozying” up to Musk and his business empire. This includes Starlink, with United Airlines accelerating a collaboration for use of the service on its fleet, as well as deals with Oracle and Apple.
At the same time, Musk’s activities may make it challenging for Starlink in the long term in countries that seek to punish him and his companies. For example, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported Monday that Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford will rip up Ontario’s nearly $100 million contract with Starlink in the wake of US tariffs on virtually all Canadian goods.
The contract, signed in November, was intended to provide high-speed Internet to 15,000 eligible homes and businesses in rural, remote, and northern communities by June of this year. Musk is “part of the Trump team that wants to destroy families, incomes, destroy businesses,” Ford said at a news conference Monday. “He wants to take food off the table of people—hard-working people—and I’m not going to tolerate it.”
The political winds have shifted in Washington, but the FAA hasn’t yet changed its tune on Starship.
Liftoff of SpaceX’s seventh full-scale test flight of the Super Heavy/Starship launch vehicle on January 16. Credit: SpaceX
The seventh test flight of SpaceX’s gigantic Starship rocket came to a disappointing end a little more than two weeks ago. The in-flight failure of the rocket’s upper stage, or ship, about eight minutes after launch on January 16 rained debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean.
Amateur videos recorded from land, sea, and air showed fiery debris trails streaming overhead at twilight, appearing like a fireworks display gone wrong. Within hours, posts on social media showed small pieces of debris recovered by residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos. Most of these items were modest in size, and many appeared to be chunks of tiles from Starship’s heat shield.
Unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and ordered an investigation into the accident on the day after the launch. This decision came three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Elon Musk’s close relationship with Trump, coupled with the new administration’s appetite for cutting regulations and reducing the size of government, led some industry watchers to question whether Musk’s influence might change the FAA’s stance on SpaceX.
So far, the FAA hasn’t budged on its requirement for an investigation, an agency spokesperson told Ars on Friday. After a preliminary assessment of flight data, SpaceX officials said a fire appeared to develop in the aft section of the ship before it broke apart and fell to Earth.
“The FAA has directed SpaceX to lead an investigation of the Starship Super Heavy Flight 7 mishap with FAA oversight,” the spokesperson said. “Based on the investigation findings for root cause and corrective actions, the FAA may require a company to modify its license.”
This is much the same language the FAA used two weeks ago, when it first ordered the investigation.
Damage report
The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation is charged with ensuring commercial space launches and reentries don’t endanger the public, and requires launch operators obtain liability insurance or demonstrate financial ability to cover any third-party property damages.
For each Starship launch, the FAA requires SpaceX maintain liability insurance policies worth at least $500 million for such claims. It’s rare for debris from US rockets to fall over land during a launch. This would typically only happen if a launch failed at certain parts of the flight. And there’s no public record of any claims of third-party property damage in the era of commercial spaceflight. Under federal law, the US government would pay for damages to a much higher amount if any claims exceeded a launch company’s insurance policies.
The good news is there were no injuries or reports of significant damage from the wreckage that fell over the Turks and Caicos. “The FAA confirmed one report of minor damage to a vehicle located in South Caicos,” an FAA spokesperson told Ars on Friday. “To date, there are no other reports of damage.”
It’s not clear if the vehicle owner in South Caicos will file a claim against SpaceX for the damage. It would the first time someone makes such a claim related to an accident with a commercial rocket overseen by the FAA. Last year, a Florida homeowner submitted a claim to NASA for damage to his house from a piece of debris that fell from the International Space Station.
Nevertheless, the Turks and Caicos government said local officials met with representatives from SpaceX and the UK Air Accident Investigations Branch on January 25 to develop a recovery plan for debris that fell on the islands, which are a British Overseas Territory.
A prickly relationship
Musk often bristled at the FAA last year, especially after regulators proposed fines of more than $600,000 alleging that SpaceX violated terms of its launch licenses during two Falcon 9 missions. The alleged violations involved the relocation of a propellant farm at one of SpaceX’s launch pads in Florida, and the use of a new launch control center without FAA approval.
In a post on X, Musk said the FAA was conducting “lawfare” against his company. “SpaceX will be filing suit against the FAA for regulatory overreach,” Musk wrote.
There was no such lawsuit, and the issue may now be moot. Sean Duffy, Trump’s new secretary of transportation, vowed to review the FAA fines during his confirmation hearing in the Senate. It is rare for the FAA to fine launch companies, and the fines last year made up the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division.
SpaceX also criticized delays in licensing Starship test flights last year. The FAA cited environmental issues and concerns about the extent of the sonic boom from Starship’s 23-story-tall Super Heavy booster returning to its launch pad in South Texas. SpaceX successfully caught the returning first stage booster at the launch pad for the first time in October, and repeated the feat after the January 16 test flight.
What separates the FAA’s ongoing oversight of Starship’s recent launch failure from these previous regulatory squabbles is that debris fell over populated areas. This would appear to be directly in line with the FAA’s responsibility for public safety.
During last month’s test flight, Starship did not deviate from its planned ground track, which took the rocket over the Gulf of Mexico, the waters between Florida and Cuba, and then the Atlantic Ocean. But the debris field extended beyond the standard airspace closure for the launch. After the accident, FAA air traffic controllers cleared additional airspace over the debris zone for more than an hour, rerouting, diverting, and delaying dozens of commercial aircraft.
These actions followed pre-established protocols. However, it highlighted the small but non-zero risk of rocket debris falling to Earth after a launch failure. “The potential for a bad day downrange just got real,” Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator, posted on X.
Public safety is not sole mandate of the FAA’s commercial space office. It is also chartered to “encourage, facilitate, and promote commercial space launches and reentries by the private sector,” according to an FAA website. There’s a balance to strike.
Lawmakers last year urged the FAA to speed up its launch approvals, primarily because Starship is central to strategic national objectives. NASA has contracts with SpaceX to develop a variant of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon, and Starship’s unmatched ability to deliver more than 100 tons of cargo to low-Earth orbit is attractive to the Pentagon.
While Musk criticized the FAA in 2024, SpaceX officials in 2023 took a different tone, calling for Congress to increase the budget for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Spaceflight and for the regulator to double the space division’s workforce. This change, SpaceX officials argued, would allow the FAA to more rapidly assess and approve a fast-growing number of commercial launch and reentry applications.
In September, SpaceX released a statement accusing the former administrator of the FAA, Michael Whitaker, of making inaccurate statements about SpaceX to a congressional subcommittee. In a different post on X, Musk directly called for Whitaker’s resignation.
That’s exactly what happened. Whitaker, who took over the FAA’s top job in 2023 under the Biden administration, announced in December he would resign on Inauguration Day. Since the agency’s establishment in 1958, three FAA administrators have similarly resigned when a new administration takes power, but the office has been largely immune from presidential politics in recent decades. Since 1993, FAA administrators have stayed in their post during all presidential transitions.
There’s no evidence Whitaker’s resignation had any role in the mid-air collision of an American Eagle passenger jet and a US Army helicopter Wednesday night near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. But his departure from the FAA less than two years into a five-year term on January 20 left the agency without a leader. Trump named Chris Rocheleau as the FAA’s acting administrator Thursday.
Next flight, next month?
SpaceX has not released an official schedule for the next Starship test flight or outlined its precise objectives. However, it will likely repeat many of the goals planned for the previous flight, which ended before SpaceX could accomplish some of its test goals. These missed objectives included the release of satellite mockups in space for the first demonstration of Starship’s payload deployment mechanism, and a reentry over the Indian Ocean to test new, more durable heat shield materials.
The January 16 test flight was the first launch up an upgraded, slightly taller Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2. The next flight will use the same upgraded version.
A SpaceX filing with the Federal Communications Commission suggests the next Starship flight could launch as soon as February 24. Sources told Ars that SpaceX teams believe a launch before the end of February is realistic.
But SpaceX has more to do before Flight 8. These tasks include completing the FAA-mandated investigation and the installation of all 39 Raptor engines on the rocket. Then, SpaceX will likely test-fire the booster and ship before stacking the two elements together to complete assembly of the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) rocket.
SpaceX is also awaiting a new FAA launch license, pending its completion of the investigation into what happened on Flight 7.
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.
This launch debuted a more advanced, slightly taller version of Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, with larger propellant tanks, a new avionics system, and redesigned feed lines flowing methane and liquid oxygen propellants to the ship’s six Raptor engines. SpaceX officials did not say whether any of these changes might have caused the problem on Thursday’s launch.
SpaceX officials have repeatedly and carefully set expectations for each Starship test flight. They routinely refer to the rocket as experimental, and the primary focus of the rocket’s early demo missions is to gather data on the performance of the vehicle. What works, and what doesn’t work?
Still, the outcome of Thursday’s test flight is a clear disappointment for SpaceX. This was the seventh test flight of SpaceX’s enormous rocket and the first time Starship failed to complete its launch sequence since the second flight in November 2023. Until now, SpaceX has made steady progress, and each Starship flight has achieved more milestones than the one before.
On the first flight in April 2023, the rocket lost control a little more than two minutes after liftoff, and the ground-shaking power of the booster’s 33 engines shattered the concrete foundation beneath the launch pad. Seven months later, on Flight 2, the rocket made it eight minutes before failing. On that mission, Starship failed at roughly the same point of its ascent, just before the cutoff of the vehicle’s six methane-fueled Raptor engines.
Back then, a handful of photos and images from the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico showed debris in the sky after Starship activated its self-destruct mechanism due to an onboard fire caused by a dump of liquid oxygen propellant. But that flight occurred in the morning, with bright sunlight along the ship’s flight path.
This time, the ship disintegrated and reentered the atmosphere at dusk, with impeccable lighting conditions accentuating the debris cloud’s appearance. These twilight conditions likely contributed to the plethora of videos posted to social media on Thursday.
Starship and Super Heavy head downrange from SpaceX’s launch site near Brownsville, Texas. Credit: SpaceX
The third Starship test flight last March saw the spacecraft reach its planned trajectory and fly halfway around the world before succumbing to the scorching heat of atmospheric reentry. In June, the fourth test flight ended with controlled splashdowns of the rocket’s Super Heavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico and of Starship in the Indian Ocean.
In October, SpaceX caught the Super Heavy booster with mechanical arms at the launch pad for the first time, proving out the company’s audacious approach to recovering and reusing the rocket. On this fifth test flight, SpaceX modified the ship’s heat shield to better handle the hot temperatures of reentry, and the vehicle again made it to an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
Most recently, Flight 6 on November 19 demonstrated the ship’s ability to reignite its Raptor engines in space for the first time and again concluded with a bullseye splashdown. But SpaceX aborted an attempt to again catch the booster back at Starbase due to a problem with sensors on the launch pad’s tower.
With Flight 7, SpaceX hoped to test more changes to the heat shield protecting Starship from reentry temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Musk has identified the heat shield as one of the most difficult challenges still facing the program. In order for SpaceX to reach its ambition for the ship to become rapidly reusable, with minimal or no refurbishment between flights, the heat shield must be resilient and durable.
The seventh test flight of Starship is scheduled for launch Thursday afternoon.
SpaceX’s upgraded Starship rocket stands on its launch pad at Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX
SpaceX plans to launch the seventh full-scale test flight of its massive Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket Thursday afternoon. It’s the first of what might be a dozen or more demonstration flights this year as SpaceX tries new things with the most powerful rocket ever built.
There are many things on SpaceX’s Starship to-do list in 2025. They include debuting an upgraded, larger Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, on the test flight preparing to launch Thursday. The one-hour launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 22: 00 UTC) at SpaceX’s launch base in South Texas. You can watch SpaceX’s live webcast of the flight here.
SpaceX will again attempt to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster—more than 20 stories tall and wider than a jumbo jet—back at the launch pad using mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” mounted to the launch tower. Read more about the Starship Block 2 upgrades in our story from last week.
You might think of next week’s Starship test flight as an apéritif before the entrées to come. Ars recently spoke with Lisa Watson-Morgan, the NASA engineer overseeing the agency’s contract with SpaceX to develop a modified version of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon. NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop and fly two Starship human landing missions under the umbrella of the agency’s Artemis program to return humans to the Moon.
We are publishing the entire interview with Watson-Morgan below, but first, let’s assess what SpaceX might accomplish with Starship this year.
There are many things to watch for on this test flight, including the deployment of 10 satellite simulators to test the ship’s payload accommodations and the performance of a beefed-up heat shield as the vehicle blazes through the atmosphere for reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
If this all works, SpaceX may try to launch a ship into low-Earth orbit on the eighth flight, expected to launch in the next couple of months. All of the Starship test flights to date have intentionally flown on suborbital trajectories, bringing the ship back toward reentry over the sea northwest of Australia after traveling halfway around the world.
Then, there’s an even bigger version of Starship called Block 3 that could begin flying before the end of the year. This version of the ship is the one that SpaceX will use to start experimenting with in-orbit refueling, according to Watson-Morgan.
In order to test refueling, two Starships will dock together in orbit, allowing one vehicle to transfer super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into the other. Nothing like this on this scale has ever been attempted before. Future Starship missions to the Moon and Mars may require 10 or more tanker missions to gas up in low-Earth orbit. All of these missions will use different versions of the same basic Starship design: a human-rated lunar lander, a propellant depot, and a refueling tanker.
Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX
Questions for 2025
Catching Starship back at its launch tower and demonstrating orbital propellant transfer are the two most significant milestones on SpaceX’s roadmap for 2025.
SpaceX officials have said they aim to fly as many as 25 Starship missions this year, allowing engineers to more rapidly iterate on the vehicle’s design. SpaceX is constructing a second launch pad at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, to help speed up the launch cadence.
Can SpaceX achieve this flight rate in 2025? Will faster Starship manufacturing and reusability help the company fly more often? Will SpaceX fly its first ship-to-ship propellant transfer demonstration this year? When will Starship begin launching large batches of new-generation Starlink Internet satellites?
Licensing delays at the Federal Aviation Administration have been a thorn in SpaceX’s side for the last couple of years. Will those go away under the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who counts SpaceX founder Elon Musk as a key adviser?
And will SpaceX gain a larger role in NASA’s Artemis lunar program? The Artemis program’s architecture is sure to be reviewed by the Trump administration and the nominee for the agency’s next administrator, billionaire businessman and astronaut Jared Isaacman.
The very expensive Space Launch System rocket, developed by NASA with Boeing and other traditional aerospace contractors, might be canceled. NASA currently envisions the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as the transportation system to ferry astronauts between Earth and the vicinity of the Moon, where crews would meet up with a landing vehicle provided by commercial partners SpaceX and Blue Origin.
Watson-Morgan didn’t have answers to all of these questions. Many of them are well outside of her purview as Human Landing System program manager, so Ars didn’t ask. Instead, Ars discussed technical and schedule concerns with her during the half-hour interview. Here is one part of the discussion, lightly edited for clarity.
Ars: What do you hope to see from Flight 7 of Starship?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: One of the exciting parts of working with SpaceX are these test flights. They have a really fast turnaround, where they put in different lessons learned. I think you saw many of the flight objectives that they discussed from Flight 6, which was a great success. I think they mentioned different thermal testing experiments that they put on the ship in order to understand the different heating, the different loads on certain areas of the system. All that was really good with each one of those, in addition to how they configure the tiles. Then, from that, there’ll be additional tests that they will put on Flight 7, so you kind of get this iterative improvement and learning that we’ll get to see in Flight 7. So Flight 7 is the first Version 2 of their ship set. When I say that, I mean the ship, the booster, all the systems associated with it. So, from that, it’s really more just understanding how the system, how the flaps, how all of that interacts and works as they’re coming back in. Hopefully we’ll get to see some catches, that’s always exciting.
Ars: How did the in-space Raptor engine relight go on Flight 6 (on November 19)?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: Beautifully. And that’s something that’s really important to us because when we’re sitting on the Moon… well, actually, the whole path to the Moon as we are getting ready to land on the Moon, we’ll perform a series of maneuvers, and the Raptors will have an environment that is very, very cold. To that, it’s going to be important that they’re able to relight for landing purposes. So that was a great first step towards that. In addition, after we land, clearly the Raptors will be off, and it will get very cold, and they will have to relight in a cold environment (to get off the Moon). So that’s why that step was critical for the Human Landing System and NASA’s return to the Moon.
A recent artist’s illustration of two Starships docked together in low-Earth orbit. Credit: SpaceX
Ars: Which version of the ship is required for the propellant transfer demonstration, and what new features are on that version to enable this test?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: We’re looking forward to the Version 3, which is what’s coming up later on, sometime in ’25, in the near term, because that’s what we need for propellant transfer and the cryo fluid work that is also important to us… There are different systems in the V3 set that will help us with cryo fluid management. Obviously, with those, we have to have the couplers and the quick-disconnects in order for the two systems to have the right guidance, navigation, trajectory, all the control systems needed to hold their station-keeping in order to dock with each other, and then perform the fluid transfer. So all the fluid lines and all that’s associated with that, those systems, which we have seen in tests and held pieces of when we’ve been working with them at their site, we’ll get to see those actually in action on orbit.
Ars: Have there been any ground tests of these systems, whether it’s fluid couplers or docking systems? Can you talk about some of the ground tests that have gone into this development?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: Oh, absolutely. We’ve been working with them on ground tests for this past year. We’ve seen the ground testing and reviewed the data. Our team works with them on what we deem necessary for the various milestones. While the milestone contains proprietary (information), we work closely with them to ensure that it’s going to meet the intent, safety-wise as well as technically, of what we’re going to need to see. So they’ve done that.
Even more exciting, they have recently shipped some of their docking systems to the Johnson Space Center for testing with the Orion Lockheed Martin docking system, and that’s for Artemis III. Clearly, that’s how we’re going to receive the crew. So those are some exciting tests that we’ve been doing this past year as well that’s not just focused on, say, the booster and the ship. There are a lot of crew systems that are being developed now. We’re in work with them on how we’re going to effectuate the crew manual control requirements that we have, so it’s been a great balance to see what the crew needs, given the size of the ship. That’s been a great set of work. We have crew office hours where the crew travels to Hawthorne [SpaceX headquarters in California] and works one-on-one with the different responsible engineers in the different technical disciplines to make sure that they understand not just little words on the paper from a requirement, but actually what this means, and then how systems can be operated.
Ars: For the docking system, Orion uses the NASA Docking System, and SpaceX brings its own design to bear on Starship?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: This is something that I think the Human Landing System has done exceptionally well. When we wrote our high-level set of requirements, we also wrote it with a bigger picture in mind—looked into the overall standards of how things are typically done, and we just said it has to be compliant with it. So it’s a docking standard compliance, and SpaceX clearly meets that. They certainly do have the Dragon heritage, of course, with the International Space Station. So, because of that, we have high confidence that they’re all going to work very well. Still, it’s important to go ahead and perform the ground testing and get as much of that out of the way as we can.
Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s HLS program manager, is based at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Credit: ASA/Aubrey Gemignani
Ars: How far along is the development and design of the layout of the crew compartment at the top of Starship? Is it far along, or is it still in the conceptual phase? What can you say about that?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: It’s much further along there. We’ve had our environmental control and life support systems, whether it’s carbon dioxide monitoring fans to make sure the air is circulating properly. We’ve been in a lot of work with SpaceX on the temperature. It’s… a large area (for the crew). The seats, making sure that the crew seats and the loads on that are appropriate. For all of that work, as the analysis work has been performed, the NASA team is reviewing it. They had a mock-up, actually, of some of their life support systems even as far back as eight-plus months ago. So there’s been a lot of progress on that.
Ars: Is SpaceX planning to use a touchscreen design for crew displays and controls, like they do with the Dragon spacecraft?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: We’re in talks about that, about what would be the best approach for the crew for the dynamic environment of landing.
Ars: I can imagine it is a pretty dynamic environment with those Raptor engines firing. It’s almost like a launch in reverse.
Lisa Watson-Morgan: Right. Those are some of the topics that get discussed in the crew office hours. That’s why it’s good to have the crew interacting directly, in addition to the different discipline leads, whether it’s structural, mechanical, propulsion, to have all those folks talking guidance and having control to say, “OK, well, when the system does this, here’s the mode we expect to see. Here’s the impact on the crew. And is this condition, or is the option space that we have on the table, appropriate for the next step, with respect to the displays.”
Ars: One of the big things SpaceX needs to prove out before going to the Moon with Starship is in-orbit propellant transfer. When do you see the ship-to-ship demonstration occurring?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: I see it occurring in ’25.
Ars: Anything more specific about the schedule for that?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: That’d be a question for SpaceX because they do have a number of flights that they’re performing commercially, for their maturity. We get the benefit of that. It’s actually a great partnership. I’ll tell you, it’s really good working with them on this, but they’d have to answer that question. I do foresee it happening in ’25.
Ars: What things do you need to see SpaceX accomplish before they’re ready for the refueling demo? I’m thinking of things like the second launch tower, potentially. Do they need to demonstrate a ship catch or anything like that before going for orbital refueling?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: I would say none of that’s required. You just kind of get down to, what are the basics? What are the basics that you need? So you need to be able to launch rapidly off the same pad, even. They’ve shown they can launch and catch within a matter of minutes. So that is good confidence there. The catching is part of their reuse strategy, which is more of their commercial approach, and not a NASA requirement. NASA reaps the benefit of it by good pricing as a result of their commercial model, but it is not a requirement that we have. So they could theoretically use the same pad to perform the propellant transfer and the long-duration flight, because all it requires is two launches, really, within a specified time period to where the two systems can meet in a planned trajectory or orbit to do the propellant transfer. So they could launch the first one, and then within a week or two or three, depending on what the concept of operations was that we thought we could achieve at that time, and then have the propellant transfer demo occur that way. So you don’t necessarily need two pads, but you do need more thermal characterization of the ship. I would say that is one of the areas (we need to see data on), and that is one of the reasons, I think, why they’re working so diligently on that.
Ars: You mentioned the long-duration flight demonstration. What does that entail?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: The simple objectives are to launch two different tankers or Starships. The Starship will eventually be a crewed system. Clearly, the ones that we’re talking about for the propellant transfer are not. It’s just to have the booster and Starship system launch, and within a few weeks, have another one launch, and have them rendezvous. They need to be able to find each other with their sensors. They need to be able to come close, very, very close, and they need to be able to dock together, connect, do the quick connect, and make sure they are able, then, to flow propellant and LOX (liquid oxygen) to another system. Then, we need to be able to measure the quantity of how much has gone over. And from that, then they need to safely undock and dispose.
Ars: So the long-duration flight demonstration is just part of what SpaceX needs to do in order to be ready for the propellant transfer demonstration?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: We call it long duration just because it’s not a 45-minute or an hour flight. Long duration, obviously, that’s a relative statement, but it’s a system that can stay up long enough to be able to find another Starship and perform those maneuvers and flow of fuel and LOX.
Ars: How much propellant will you transfer with this demonstration, and do you think you’ll get all the data you need in one demonstration, or will SpaceX need to try this several times?
Lisa Watson-Morgan: That’s something you can ask SpaceX (about how much propellant will be transferred). Clearly, I know, but there’s some sensitivity there. You’ve seen our requirements in our initial solicitation. We have thresholds and goals, meaning we want you to at least do this, but more is better, and that’s typically how we work almost everything. Working with commercial industry in these fixed-price contracts has worked exceptionally well, because when you have providers that are also wanting to explore commercially or trying to make a commercial system, they are interested in pushing more than what we would typically ask for, and so often we get that for an incredibly fair price.
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.
We’re just a few days away from getting a double-dose of heavy-lift rocket action.
Stratolaunch’s Talon-A hypersonic rocket plane will be used for military tests involving hypersonic missile technology. Credit: Stratolaunch
Welcome to Edition 7.26 of the Rocket Report! Let’s pause and reflect on how far the rocket business has come in the last 10 years. On this date in 2015, SpaceX made the first attempt to land a Falcon 9 booster on a drone ship positioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Not surprisingly, the rocket crash-landed. In less than a year and a half, though, SpaceX successfully landed reusable Falcon 9 boosters onshore and offshore, and now has done it nearly 400 times. That was remarkable enough, but we’re in a new era now. Within a few days, we could see SpaceX catch its second Super Heavy booster and Blue Origin land its first New Glenn rocket on an offshore platform. Extraordinary.
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.
Our annual ranking of the top 10 US launch companies. You can easily guess who made the top of the list: the company that launched Falcon rockets 134 times in 2024 and launched the most powerful and largest rocket ever built on four test flights, each accomplishing more than the last. The combined 138 launches is more than NASA flew the Space Shuttle over three decades. SpaceX will aim to launch even more often in 2025. These missions have far-reaching impacts, supporting Internet coverage for consumers worldwide, launching payloads for NASA and the US military, and testing technology that will take humans back to the Moon and, someday, Mars.
Are there really 10? … It might also be fairly easy to rattle off a few more launch companies that accomplished big things in 2024. There’s United Launch Alliance, which finally debuted its long-delayed Vulcan rocket and flew two Atlas V missions and the final Delta IV mission, and Rocket Lab, which launched 16 missions with its small Electron rocket this year. Blue Origin flew its suborbital New Shepard vehicle on three human missions and one cargo-only mission and nearly launched its first orbital-class New Glenn rocket in 2024. That leaves just Firefly Aerospace as the only other US company to reach orbit last year.
DoD announces lucrative hypersonics deal. Defense technology firm Kratos has inked a deal worth up to $1.45 billion with the Pentagon to help develop a low-cost testbed for hypersonic technologies, Breaking Defense reports. The award is part of the military’s Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed (MACH-TB) 2.0 program. The MACH-TB program, which began as a US Navy effort, includes multiple “Task Areas.” For its part, Kratos will be tasked with “systems engineering, integration, and testing, to include integrated subscale, full-scale, and air launch services to address the need to affordably increase hypersonic flight test cadence,” according to the company’s release.
Multiple players … The team led by Kratos, which specializes in developing airborne drones and military weapons systems, includes several players such as Leidos, Rocket Lab, Stratolaunch, and others. Kratos last year revealed that its Erinyes hypersonic test vehicle successfully flew for a Missile Defense Agency experiment. Rocket Lab has launched multiple suborbital hypersonic experiments for the military using a modified version of its Electron rocket, and Stratolaunch reportedly flew a high-speed test vehicle and recovered it last month, according to Aviation Week & Space Technology. The Pentagon is interested in developing hypersonic weapons that can evade conventional air and missile defenses. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
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ESA will modify some of its geo-return policies. An upcoming European launch competition will be an early test of efforts by the European Space Agency to modify its approach to policies that link contracts to member state contributions, Space News reports. ESA has long used a policy known as geo-return, where member states are guaranteed contracts with companies based in their countries in proportion to the contribution those member states make to ESA programs.
The third rail of European space … Advocates of geo-return argue that it provides an incentive for countries to fund those programs. This incentivizes ESA to lure financial contributions from its member states, which will win guaranteed business and jobs from the agency’s programs. However, critics of geo-return, primarily European companies, claim that it creates inefficiencies that make them less competitive. One approach to revising geo-return is known as “fair contribution,” where ESA first holds competitions for projects, and member states then make contributions based on how companies in their countries fared in the competition. ESA will try the fair contribution approach for the upcoming launch competition to award contracts to European rocket startups. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
RFA is building a new rocket. German launch services provider Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) is currently focused on building a new first stage for the inaugural flight of its RFA One rocket, European Spaceflight reports. The stage that was initially earmarked for the flight was destroyed during a static fire test last year on a launch pad in Scotland. In a statement given to European Spaceflight, RFA confirmed that it expects to attempt an inaugural flight of RFA One in 2025.
Waiting on a booster … RFA says it is “fully focused on building a new first stage and qualifying it.” The rocket’s second stage and Redshift OTV third stage are already qualified for flight and are being stored until a new first stage is ready. The RFA One rocket will stand 98 feet (30 meters) tall and will be capable of delivering payloads of up to 1.3 metric tons (nearly 2,900 pounds) into polar orbits. RFA is one of several European startups developing commercial small satellite launchers and was widely considered the frontrunner before last year’s setback. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Pentagon provides a boost for defense startup. Defense technology contractor Anduril Industries has secured a $14.3 million Pentagon contract to expand solid-fueled rocket motor production, as the US Department of Defense moves to strengthen domestic manufacturing capabilities amid growing supply chain concerns, Space News reports. The contract, awarded under the Defense Production Act, will support facility modernization and manufacturing improvements at Anduril’s Mississippi plant, the Pentagon said Tuesday.
Doing a solid … The Pentagon is keen to incentivize new entrants into the solid rocket manufacturing industry, which provides propulsion for missiles, interceptors, and other weapons systems. Two traditional defense contractors, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris, control almost all US solid rocket production. Companies like Anduril, Ursa Major, and X-Bow are developing solid rocket motor production capability. The Navy previously awarded Anduril a $19 million contract last year to develop solid rocket motors for the Standard Missile 6 program. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Relativity’s value seems to be plummeting. For several years, an innovative, California-based launch company named Relativity Space has been the darling of investors and media. But the honeymoon appears to be over, Ars reports. A little more than a year ago, Relativity reached a valuation of $4.5 billion following its latest Series F fundraising round. This was despite only launching one rocket and then abandoning that program and pivoting to the development of a significantly larger reusable launch vehicle. The decision meant Relativity would not realize any significant revenue for several years, and Ars reported in September on some of the challenges the company has encountered developing the much larger Terran R rocket.
Gravity always wins … Relativity is a privately held company, so its financial statements aren’t public. However, we can glean some clues from the published quarterly report from Fidelity Investments, which owns Relativity shares. As of March 2024, Fidelity valued its 1.67 million shares at an estimated $31.8 million. However, in a report ending November 29 of last year, which was only recently published, Fidelity’s valuation of Relativity plummeted. Its stake in Relativity was then thought to be worth just $866,735—a per-share value of 52 cents. Shares in the other fundraising rounds are also valued at less than $1 each.
SpaceX has already launched four times this year. The space company is off to a fast start in 2025, with four missions in the first nine days of the year. Two of these missions launched Starlink internet satellites, and the other two deployed an Emirati-owned geostationary communications satellite and a batch of Starshield surveillance satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. In its new year projections, SpaceX estimates it will launch more than 170 Falcon rockets, between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, Spaceflight Now reports. This is in addition to SpaceX’s plans for up to 25 flights of the Starship rocket from Texas.
What’s in store this year?… Highlights of SpaceX’s launch manifest this year will likely include an attempt to catch and recover Starship after returning from orbit, a first in-orbit cryogenic propellant transfer demonstration with Starship, and perhaps the debut of a second launch pad at Starbase in South Texas. For the Falcon rocket fleet, notable missions this year will include launches of commercial robotic lunar landers for NASA’s CLPS program and several crew flights, including the first human spaceflight mission to fly in polar orbit. According to public schedules, a Falcon 9 rocket could launch a commercial mini-space station for Vast, a privately held startup, before the end of the year. That would be a significant accomplishment, but we won’t be surprised if this schedule moves to the right.
China is dipping its toes into satellite refueling. China kicked off its 2025 launch activities with the successful launch of the Shijian-25 satellite Monday, aiming to advance key technologies for on-orbit refueling and extending satellite lifespans, Space News reports. The satellite launched on a Long March 3B into a geostationary transfer orbit, suggesting the unspecified target spacecraft for the refueling demo test might be in geostationary orbit more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator.
Under a watchful eye … China has tested mission extension and satellite servicing capabilities in space before. In 2021, China launched a satellite named Shijian-21, which docked a defunct Beidou navigation satellite and towed it to a graveyard orbit above the geostationary belt. Reportedly, Shijian-21 satellite may have carried robotic arms to capture and manipulate other objects in space. These kinds of technologies are dual-use, meaning they have civilian and military applications. The US Space Force is also interested in satellite life extension and refueling tech, so US officials will closely monitor Shijian-25’s actions in orbit.
SpaceX set to debut upgraded Starship. An upsized version of SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week, Ars reports. The rocket could lift off as soon as Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase test facility in South Texas. This flight is the seventh full-scale demonstration launch for Starship. The rocket will test numerous upgrades, including a new flap design, larger propellant tanks, redesigned propellant feed lines, a new avionics system, and an improved antenna for communications and navigation.
The new largest rocket … Put together, all of these changes to the ship raise the rocket’s total height by nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters), so it now towers 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. With this change, SpaceX will break its own record for the largest rocket ever launched. SpaceX plans to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in Texas and will target a controlled splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean.
Blue Origin targets weekend launch of New Glenn. Blue Origin is set to launch its New Glenn rocket in a long-delayed, uncrewed test mission that would help pave the way for the space venture founded by Jeff Bezos to compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX, The Washington Post reports. Blue Origin has confirmed it plans to launch the 320-foot-tall rocket during a three-hour launch window opening at 1 am EDT (06: 00 UTC) Sunday in the company’s first attempt to reach orbit.
Finally … This is a much-anticipated milestone for Blue Origin and for the company’s likely customers, which include the Pentagon and NASA. Data from this test flight will help the Space Force certify New Glenn to loft national security satellites, providing a new competitor for SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in the heavy-lift segment of the market. Blue Origin isn’t quite shooting for the Moon on this inaugural launch, but the company will attempt to reach orbit and try to land the New Glenn’s first stage booster on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Next three launches
Jan. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-12 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18: 11 UTC
Jan. 12: New Glenn | NG-1 Blue Ring Pathfinder | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 06: 00 UTC
Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.
Starship will test its payload deployment mechanism on its seventh test flight.
SpaceX’s first second-generation Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, could launch as soon as January 13. Credit: SpaceX
An upsized version of SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket rolled to the launch pad early Thursday in preparation for liftoff on a test flight next week.
The two-mile transfer moved the bullet-shaped spaceship one step closer to launch Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase test site in South Texas. The launch window opens at 5 pm EST (4 pm CST; 2200 UTC). This will be the seventh full-scale test flight of SpaceX’s Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft and the first of 2025.
In the coming days, SpaceX technicians will lift the ship on top of the Super Heavy booster already emplaced on the launch mount. Then, teams will complete the final tests and preparations for the countdown on Monday.
“The upcoming flight test will launch a new generation ship with significant upgrades, attempt Starship’s first payload deployment test, fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the Super Heavy booster,” SpaceX officials wrote in a mission overview posted on the company’s website.
The mission Monday will repeat many of the maneuvers SpaceX demonstrated on the last two Starship test flights. The company will again attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and attempt to catch it with two mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” on the launch tower approximately seven minutes after liftoff.
SpaceX accomplished this feat on the fifth Starship test flight in October but aborted a catch attempt on a November flight because of damaged sensors on the tower chopsticks. The booster, which remained healthy, diverted to a controlled splashdown offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.
SpaceX’s next Starship prototype, Ship 33, emerges from its assembly building at Starbase, Texas, early Thursday morning. Credit: SpaceX/Elon Musk via X
For the next flight, SpaceX added protections to the sensors on the tower and will test radar instruments on the chopsticks to provide more accurate ranging measurements for returning vehicles. These modifications should improve the odds of a successful catch of the Super Heavy booster and of Starship on future missions.
In another first, one of the 33 Raptor engines that will fly on this Super Heavy booster—designated Booster 14 in SpaceX’s fleet—was recovered from the booster that launched and returned to Starbase in October. For SpaceX, this is a step toward eventually flying the entire rocket repeatedly. The Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft are designed for full reusability.
After separation of the booster stage, the Starship upper stage will ignite six engines to accelerate to nearly orbital velocity, attaining enough energy to fly halfway around the world before gravity pulls it back into the atmosphere. Like the past three test flights, SpaceX will guide Starship toward a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia around one hour after liftoff.
New ship, new goals
The most significant changes engineers will test next week are on the ship, or upper stage, of SpaceX’s enormous rocket. The most obvious difference on Starship Version 2, or Block 2, is with the vehicle’s forward flaps. Engineers redesigned the flaps, reducing their size and repositioning them closer to the tip of the ship’s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Cameras onboard Starship showed heat damage to the flaps during reentry on test flights last year.
SpaceX is also developing an upgraded Super Heavy booster that is slightly taller than the existing model. The next version of the booster will produce more thrust and will be slightly taller than the current Super Heavy, but for the upcoming test flight, SpaceX will still use the first-generation booster design.
Starship Block 2 has smaller flaps than previous ships. The flaps are located in a more leeward position to protect them from the heat of reentry. Credit: SpaceX
For next week’s flight, Super Heavy and Starship combined will hold more than 10.5 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer. The ship’s propellant tanks have 25 percent more volume than previous iterations of the vehicle, and the payload compartment, which contains 10 mock-ups of Starlink Internet satellites on this launch, is somewhat smaller. Put together, the changes add nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) to the rocket’s height, bringing the full stack to approximately 404 feet (123.1 meters).
This means SpaceX will break its own record for launching the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. And the company will do it again with the even larger Starship Version 3, which SpaceX says will have nine upper stage engines, instead of six, and will deliver up to 440,000 pounds (200 metric tons) of cargo to low-Earth orbit.
Other changes debuting with Starship Version 2 next week include:
• Vacuum jacketing of propellant feedlines
• A new fuel feedline system for the ship’s Raptor vacuum engines
• An improved propulsion avionics module controlling vehicle valves and reading sensors
• Redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors
• Integrated smart batteries and power units to distribute 2.7 megawatts of power across the ship
• An increase to more than 30 cameras onboard the vehicle.
Laying the foundation
The enhanced avionics system will support future missions to prove SpaceX’s ability to refuel Starships in orbit and return the ship to the launch site. For example, SpaceX will fly a more powerful flight computer and new antennas that integrate connectivity with the Starlink Internet constellation, GPS navigation satellites, and backup functions for traditional radio communication links. With Starlink, SpaceX said Starship can stream more than 120Mbps of real-time high-definition video and telemetry in every phase of flight.
These changes “all add additional vehicle performance and the ability to fly longer missions,” SpaceX said. “The ship’s heat shield will also use the latest generation tiles and includes a backup layer to protect from missing or damaged tiles.”
Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, a little more than 17 minutes into the flight, Starship will deploy 10 dummy payloads similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites. The mock-ups will soar around the world on a suborbital trajectory, just like Starship, and reenter over the unpopulated Indian Ocean. Future Starship flights will launch real next-gen Starlink satellites to add capacity to the Starlink broadband network, but they’re too big and too heavy to launch on SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket.
SpaceX will again reignite one of the ship’s Raptor engines in the vacuum of space, repeating a successful test achieved on Flight 6 in November. The engine restart capability is important for several reasons. It gives the ship the ability to maneuver itself out of low-Earth orbit for reentry (not a concern for Starship’s suborbital tests), and will allow the vehicle to propel itself to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars once SpaceX masters the technology for orbital refueling.
Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX
NASA has contracts with SpaceX to build a derivative of Starship to ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the Moon for the agency’s Artemis program. The NASA program manager overseeing SpaceX’s lunar lander contract, Lisa Watson-Morgan, said she was pleased with the results of the in-space engine restart demo last year.
“The whole path to the Moon, as we are getting ready to land on the Moon, we’ll perform a series of maneuvers, and the Raptors will have an environment that is very, very cold,” Morgan told Ars in a recent interview. “To that, it’s going to be important that they’re able to relight for landing purposes. So that was a great first step towards that.
“In addition, after we land, clearly, the Raptors will be off, and it will get very cold, and they will have to relight in a cold environment (to launch the crews off the lunar surface),” she said. “So that’s why that step was critical for the Human Landing System and NASA’s return to the Moon.”
“The biggest technology challenge remaining”
SpaceX continues to experiment with Starship’s heat shield, which the company’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, has described as “the biggest technology challenge remaining with Starship.” In order for SpaceX to achieve its lofty goal of launching Starships multiple times per day, the heat shield needs to be fully and immediately reusable.
While the last three ships have softly splashed down in the Indian Ocean, some of their heat-absorbing tiles stripped away from the vehicle during reentry, when it’s exposed to temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius).
Engineers removed tiles from some areas of the ship for next week’s test flight in order to “stress-test” vulnerable parts of the vehicle. They also smoothed and tapered the edge of the tile line, where the ceramic heat shield gives way to the ship’s stainless steel skin, to address “hot spots” observed during reentry on the most recent test flight.
“Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry,” SpaceX said.
SpaceX is also flying rudimentary catch fittings on Starship to test their thermal performance on reentry. The ship will fly a more demanding trajectory during descent to probe the structural limits of the redesigned flaps at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure, according to SpaceX.
All told, SpaceX’s inclusion of a satellite deployment demo and ship upgrades on next week’s test flight will lay the foundation for future missions, perhaps in the next few months, to take the next great leap in Starship development.
In comments following the last Starship test flight in November, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that the company could try to return the ship to a catch back at the launch site—something that would require the vehicle to complete at least one full orbit of Earth—as soon as the next flight following Monday’s mission.
“We will do one more ocean landing of the ship,” Musk posted. “If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.”
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.
