Firefly Aerospace, a Texas-based company resurrected from bankruptcy, is riding high these days. In a few months, Firefly will attempt to become the second company to safely place a commercial lander on the Moon. Firefly's Alpha rocket has reached orbit four times, and engineers are developing a larger medium-class rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman, one of the largest US aerospace and defense contractors.

There's also an orbital transfer vehicle, named Elytra, in Firefly's diversified portfolio. This diversification is proving attractive to investors. Firefly announced Tuesday that it completed a $175 million Series D fundraising round, resulting in a valuation of more than $2 billion. This follows a banner year of fundraising in 2023, when Firefly reported investors funneled approximately $300 million into the company at a valuation of $1.5 billion.

"Firefly is extremely grateful for our existing and new investors whose support demonstrates a huge vote of confidence in our capabilities and future," said Jason Kim, who took over as the company's CEO in October. He replaced Bill Weber, who resigned as chief executive after reports of an alleged inappropriate relationship with a female employee.

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The astronauts who came home from the International Space Station last month experienced some drama on the high frontier, and some of it accompanied them back to Earth.

In orbit, the astronauts aborted two spacewalks, both under unusual circumstances. Then, on October 25, one of the astronauts was hospitalized due to what NASA called an unspecified "medical issue" after splashdown aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that concluded the 235-day mission. After an overnight stay in a hospital in Florida, NASA said the astronaut was released "in good health" and returned to their home base in Houston to resume normal post-flight activities.

The space agency did not identify the astronaut or any details about their condition, citing medical privacy concerns. The three NASA astronauts on the Dragon spacecraft included commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, and mission specialist Jeanette Epps. Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin accompanied the three NASA crew members. Russia's space agency confirmed he was not hospitalized after returning to Earth.

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Welcome to Edition 7.19 of the Rocket Report! Okay, we get it. We received more submissions from our readers on Australia's approval of a launch permit for Gilmour Space than we've received on any other news story in recent memory. Thank you for your submissions as global rocket activity continues apace. We'll cover Gilmour in more detail as they get closer to launch. There will be no Rocket Report next week as Eric and I join the rest of the Ars team for our 2024 Technicon in New York.

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.

Gilmour Space has a permit to fly. Gilmour Space Technologies has been granted a permit to launch its 82-foot-tall (25-meter) orbital rocket from a spaceport in Queensland, Australia. The space company, founded in 2012, had initially planned to lift off in March but was unable to do so without approval from the Australian Space Agency, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. The government approved Gilmour's launch permit Monday, although the company is still weeks away from flying its three-stage Eris rocket.

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From its halo-like orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope is seeing farther than human eyes have ever seen.

In May, astronomers announced that Webb detected the most distant galaxy found so far, a fuzzy blob of red light that we see as it existed just 290 million years after the Big Bang. Light from this galaxy, several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun, traveled more than 13 billion years until photons fell onto Webb's gold-coated mirror.

A few months later, in July, scientists released an image Webb captured of a planet circling a star slightly cooler than the Sun nearly 12 light-years from Earth. The alien world is several times the mass of Jupiter and the closest exoplanet to ever be directly imaged. One of Webb's science instruments has a coronagraph to blot out bright starlight, allowing the telescope to resolve the faint signature of a nearby planet and use spectroscopy to measure its chemical composition.

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The director of the National Reconnaissance Office has a message for US adversaries around the world.

"You can’t hide, because we’re constantly looking," said Chris Scolese, a longtime NASA engineer who took the helm of the US government's spy satellite agency in 2019.

The NRO is taking advantage of SpaceX's Starlink satellite assembly line to build a network of at least 100 satellites, and perhaps many more, to monitor adversaries around the world. So far, more than 80 of these SpaceX-made spacecraft, each a little less than a ton in mass, have launched on four Falcon 9 rockets. There are more to come.

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Earlier this week, North Korea apparently completed a successful test of its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, lofting it nearly 4,800 miles into space before the projectile fell back to Earth.

This solid-fueled, multi-stage missile, named the Hwasong-19, is a new tool in North Korea's increasingly sophisticated arsenal of weapons. It has enough range—perhaps as much as 9,320 miles (15,000 kilometers), according to Japan's government—to strike targets anywhere in the United States.

The test flight of the Hwasong-19 on Thursday was North Korea's first test of a long-range missile in nearly a year, coming as North Korea deploys some 10,000 troops inside Russia just days before the US presidential election. US officials condemned the missile launch as a "provocative and destabilizing" action in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

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The European Commission announced Thursday it plans to sign a contract with the continent's leading space companies before the end of the year to begin development of a 290-satellite broadband Internet network estimated to cost more than 10 billion euros (about $10.9 billion).

The press release announcing the contract award to IRIS²—known as Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite—did not specify the financial details of the agreement, but European media has widely reported the 10 billion euro cost. The commission's decision follows an evaluation of the best-and-final offer from the SpaceRISE consortium formed by European satellite network operators SES, Eutelsat, and Hispasat.

We’ll do it ourselves

The European Commission, the European Union's executive arm, is managing the IRIS² program, which will also receive funding from the European Space Agency and European industry in a public-private partnership. European governments previously expected to provide around 60 percent of the funding for the initiative. Under that plan, European industry would supply roughly 40 percent of the money in a public-private partnership. The specifics of the final cost-sharing arrangement were not available Thursday.

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A little more than a year ago, a snippet of video that wasn't supposed to go public made its way onto United Launch Alliance's live broadcast of an Atlas V rocket launch carrying three classified surveillance satellites for the US Space Force and the National Reconnaissance Office.

On these types of secretive national security missions, the government typically requests that the launch provider stop providing updates on the ascent into space when the rocket jettisons its two-piece payload fairing a few minutes after launch. And there should be no live video from the rocket released to the public showing the fairing separation sequence, which exposes the payloads to the space environment for the first time.

But the public saw video of the clamshell-like payload fairing falling away from the Atlas V rocket as it fired downrange from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on September 10, 2023. It wasn't pretty. Numerous chunks of material, possibly insulation from the inner wall of the payload shroud's two shells, fell off the fairing. The video embedded below shows the moment of payload fairing jettison.

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For those who follow NASA's human spaceflight program, when the Orion spacecraft's heat shield cracked and chipped away during atmospheric reentry on the unpiloted Artemis I test flight in late 2022, what caused it became a burning question.

Multiple NASA officials said Monday they now know the answer, but they're not telling. Instead, agency officials want to wait until more reviews are done to determine what this means for Artemis II, the Orion spacecraft's first crew mission around the Moon, officially scheduled for launch in September 2025.

"We have gotten to a root cause," said Lakiesha Hawkins, assistant deputy associate administrator for NASA's Moon to Mars program office, in response to a question from Ars on Monday at the Wernher von Braun Space Exploration Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

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NASA said Saturday that an astronaut who was hospitalized after returning from space the day before has been released and is in "good health." The agency did not provide any more details on the matter, citing medical privacy protections.

The astronaut was one of four crew members who returned from a 235-day mission in low-Earth orbit with a predawn splashdown Friday. The four-person crew splashed down inside SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft at 3:29 am EDT (07:29 UTC) in the Gulf of Mexico south of Pensacola, Florida.

Commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, mission specialist Jeanette Epps, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin were inside SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft for reentry and splashdown. NASA said one of its astronauts "experienced a medical issue" after the splashdown, and all four crew members were flown to Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola for medical evaluation.

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Welcome to Edition 7.17 of the Rocket Report! Next week marks 10 years since one of the more spectacular launch failures of this century. On October 28, 2014, an Antares rocket, then operated by Orbital Sciences, suffered an engine failure six seconds after liftoff from Virginia and crashed back onto the pad in a fiery twilight explosion. I was there and won't forget seeing the rocket falter just above the pad, being shaken by the deafening blast, and then running for cover. The Antares rocket is often an afterthought in the space industry, but it has an interesting backstory touching on international geopolitics, space history, and novel engineering. Now, Northrop Grumman and Firefly Aerospace are developing a new version of Antares.

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.

Astra gets a lifeline from DOD. Astra, the launch startup that was taken private again earlier this year for a sliver of its former value, has landed a new contract with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to support the development of a next-gen launch system for time-sensitive space missions, TechCrunch reports. The contract, which the DIU awarded under its Novel Responsive Space Delivery (NRSD) program, has a maximum value of $44 million. The money will go toward the continued development of Astra’s Launch System 2, designed to perform rapid, ultra-low-cost launches.

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Sometimes, it's worth noting when something goes unsaid.

On Wednesday, Boeing's new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, participated in his first quarterly conference call with investment analysts. Under fire from labor groups and regulators, Boeing logged a nearly $6.2 billion loss for the last three months, while the new boss pledged a turnaround for the troubled aerospace company.

What Ortberg didn't mention in the call was the Starliner program. Starliner is a relatively small portion of Boeing's overall business, but it's a high-profile and unprofitable one.

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United Launch Alliance has started assembling its next Vulcan rocket—the first destined to launch a US military payload—as the Space Force prepares to certify it to loft the Pentagon's most precious national security satellites.

Space Force officials expect to approve ULA's Vulcan rocket for military missions without requiring another test flight, despite an unusual problem on the rocket's second demonstration flight earlier this month.

ULA has launched two Vulcan test flights. Military officials watched closely, gathering data to formally certify the rocket is reliable enough to launch national security missions. The first test flight in January, designated Cert-1, was nearly flawless. The Cert-2 launch October 4 overcame an anomaly on one of Vulcan's strap-on solid rocket boosters, which lost its exhaust nozzle but kept firing with degraded thrust.

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BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—I've taken some time to process what happened on the mudflats of South Texas a little more than a week ago and relived the scene in my mind countless times.

With each replay, it's still as astonishing as it was when I saw it on October 13, standing on an elevated platform less than 4 miles away. It was surreal watching SpaceX's enormous 20-story-tall Super Heavy rocket booster plummeting through the sky before being caught back at its launch pad by giant mechanical arms.

This is the way, according to SpaceX, to enable a future where it's possible to rapidly reuse rockets, not too different from the way airlines turn around their planes between flights. This is required for SpaceX to accomplish the company's mission, set out by Elon Musk two decades ago, of building a settlement on Mars.

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The US Space Force's Space Systems Command announced Friday it has ordered nine launches from SpaceX in the first batch of dozens of missions the military will buy in a new phase of competition for lucrative national security launch contracts.

The nine launches are divided into two fixed-price "task orders" that Space Systems Command opened up for bids earlier this year. One covers seven launches with groups of spacecraft for the Space Development Agency's constellation of missile tracking and data relay satellites. The other task order is for two missions for the National Reconnaissance Office, the US government's spy satellite agency.

Two eligible bidders

The parameters of the competition limited the bidders to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (ULA). SpaceX won both task orders for a combined value of $733.5 million, or roughly $81.5 million per mission. Six of the nine missions will launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, beginning as soon as late 2025. The other three will launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, a Space Systems Command spokesperson told Ars.

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The US Commerce Department announced Thursday it is easing restrictions on exports of space-related technology, answering a yearslong call from space companies to reform regulations governing international trade.

This is the most significant update to space-related export regulations in a decade and opens more opportunities for US companies to sell their satellite hardware abroad.

“We are very excited about this rollout," a senior Commerce official said during a background call with reporters. "It’s been a long time coming, and I think it’s going to be very meaningful for our national security and foreign policy interests and certainly facilitate secure trade with our partners."

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When the exhaust nozzle on one of the Vulcan rocket's strap-on boosters failed shortly after liftoff earlier this month, it scattered debris across the beachfront landscape just east of the launch pad on Florida's Space Coast.

United Launch Alliance, the company that builds and launches the Vulcan rocket, is investigating the cause of the booster anomaly before resuming Vulcan flights. Despite the nozzle failure, the rocket continued its climb and ended up reaching its planned trajectory heading into deep space.

The nozzle fell off one of Vulcan's two solid rocket boosters around 37 seconds after taking off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on October 4. There were some indications of a problem with the booster a few seconds earlier, as tracking cameras observed hot exhaust escaping just above the bell-shaped nozzle, which is bolted to the bottom of the booster casing.

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NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft lifted off Monday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, kicking off a $5.2 billion robotic mission to explore one of the most promising locations in the Solar System for finding extraterrestrial life.

The Falcon Heavy rocket fired its 27 kerosene-fueled engines and vaulted away from Launch Complex 39A at 12:06 pm EDT (16:06 UTC) Monday. Delayed several days due to Hurricane Milton, which passed through Central Florida late last week, the launch of Europa Clipper signaled the start of a five-and-a-half- year journey to Jupiter, where the spacecraft will settle into an orbit taking it repeatedly by one of the giant planet's numerous moons.

The moon of Jupiter that has most captured scientists' interest, Europa, is sheathed in ice. There's strong evidence of a global ocean of liquid water below Europa's frozen crust, and Europa Clipper is going there to determine if it has the ingredients for life.

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BOCA CHICA BEACH, Texas—SpaceX accomplished a groundbreaking engineering feat Sunday when it launched the fifth test flight of its gigantic Starship rocket and then caught the booster back at the launch pad in Texas with mechanical arms seven minutes later.

This achievement is the first of its kind, and it's crucial for SpaceX's vision of rapidly reusing the Starship rocket, enabling human expeditions to the Moon and Mars, routine access to space for mind-bogglingly massive payloads, and novel capabilities that no other company—or country—seems close to attaining.

The test flight began with a thundering liftoff of the 398-foot-tall (121.3-meter) Starship rocket at 7:25 am CDT (12:25 UTC) from SpaceX's Starbase launch site in South Texas, a few miles north of the US-Mexico border. The rocket's Super Heavy booster stage fired 33 Raptor engines, generating nearly 17 million pounds of thrust and gulping 20 tons of methane and liquid oxygen propellants per second at full throttle.

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