A day after SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the sixth time, the company received good news from the Federal Aviation Administration regarding future launch operations from its Starbase facility in South Texas.

In a draft version of what is known as an "Environmental Assessment," the FAA indicated that it will grant SpaceX permission to increase the number of Starship launches in South Texas to 25 per year from the current limit of five. Additionally, the company will likely be allowed to continue increasing the size and power of the Super Heavy booster stage and Starship upper stage.

"FAA has concluded that the modification of SpaceX’s existing vehicle operator license for Starship/Super Heavy operations conforms to the prior environmental documentation, consistent with the data contained in the 2022 PEA, that there are no significant environmental changes, and all pertinent conditions and requirements of the prior approval have been met or will be met in the current action," the federal agency stated in its conclusion.

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SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger, upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight.

The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket's Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13. The Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world, reaching an altitude of 118 miles (190 kilometers) before plunging through the atmosphere for a pinpoint slow-speed splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

The sixth flight of the world's largest launcher—standing 398 feet (121.3 meters) tall—began with a lumbering liftoff from SpaceX's Starbase facility near the US-Mexico border at 4 pm CST (22:00 UTC) Tuesday. The rocket headed east over the Gulf of Mexico, propelled by 33 Raptor engines clustered on the bottom of its Super Heavy first stage.

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The sixth flight of SpaceX's giant Starship rocket, set for takeoff on Tuesday from South Texas, will test the vehicle's limits in new ways.

Most importantly, SpaceX will attempt to briefly reignite one of Starship's six Raptor engines in space. SpaceX tried this on Starship's third launch in March but aborted the engine restart after the rocket lost roll control during the flight's coast phase.

A successful engine relight demonstration would pave the way for future Starships to ascend into stable, sustainable orbits. It's essential to test the Raptor engine's ability to reignite in space for a deorbit burn to steer Starship out of orbit toward an atmospheric reentry.

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Officials from NASA and Russia’s space agency don’t see eye to eye on the causes and risks of small but persistent air leaks on the International Space Station.

That was the word from the new chair of NASA's International Space Station Advisory Committee last week. The air leaks are located in the transfer tunnel of the space station's Russian Zvezda service module, one of the oldest elements of the complex.

US and Russian officials "don't have a common understanding of what the likely root cause is, or the severity of the consequences of these leaks," said Bob Cabana, a retired NASA astronaut who took the helm of the advisory committee earlier this year. Cabana replaced former Apollo astronaut Tom Stafford, who chaired the committee before he died in March.

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As SpaceX made its final preparations for the sixth launch of its Starship rocket, the company's chief operating officer and president spoke at a financial conference on Friday about various topics, including the future of the massive rocket and the Starlink satellite system.

The Starship launch system is about to reach a tipping point, Gwynne Shotwell said, as it moves from an experimental rocket toward operational missions.

"We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years," Shotwell said at the Baron Investment Conference in New York City. "We want to fly it a lot."

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SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites are responsible for more and more public reports of unexplained anomalous phenomena (UAPs), but most recent cases remain unsolved, according to a US government report released Thursday.

Starlinks often move across the sky in "trains" that appear like gleaming gems in the blackness of space. They are particularly visible to the naked eye shortly after each Starlink launch.

In recent years, leaks and disclosures from government officials have revitalized open discussion about mysterious lights and objects, some of which move in, to put it bluntly, unquestionably weird ways. Some of these images, particularly those from sophisticated instruments on military fighter jets, have made their way into the national discourse. The New Yorker, Ars' sister publication, has a thorough report on how UAPs—you might know them better as UFOs—became mainstream.

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A 7-year-old launch company that has yet to have a rocket successfully lift off announced a radical pivot on Thursday. Its new plan? Focusing on missile defense.

The founder and president of ABL Space Systems, Dan Piemont, announced the decision on LinkedIn, adding, "We're consolidating our operational footprint and parting ways with some talented members of our team." He said companies interested in hiring great people in Los Angeles or Mojave, California, should reach out.

A bright beginning

With a background in economics and physics, Piemont founded ABL in 2017 with the aim of developing a ship-and-shoot rocket. The idea was to set up mobile ground systems in remote locations on short notice and launch on demand for the US military and other customers.

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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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Many throughout the country are going through a mental health lapse, anxiety or just general sadness following last week’s presidential election. However, there is help out there to get you through this very trying time. Starting at $5.83/month, Headspace is a mental health and meditation app that can help your cope during a crisis, put […]

Barely nine months after the last cut, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory will again reduce its workforce. On Wednesday, the lab will lay 325 employees off, representing about 5 percent of the workforce at the California-based laboratory that leads the development of robotic space probes for NASA.

"This is a message I had hoped not to have to write," JPL Director Laurie Leshin said in a memo to staff members on Tuesday morning, local time. "Despite this being incredibly difficult for our community, this number is lower than projected a few months ago thanks in part to the hard work of so many people across JPL."

The cuts this week follow a reduction of 530 employees in February of this year due to various factors, including a pause in funding for the Mars Sample Return mission. The NASA laboratory has now cut about one-eighth of its workforce this year.

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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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Like a lot of competitors in the global launch industry, Russia for a long time dismissed the prospects of a reusable first stage for a rocket.

As late as 2016, an official with the Russian agency that develops strategy for the country's main space corporation, Roscosmos, concluded, "The economic feasibility of reusable launch systems is not obvious." In the dismissal of the landing prospects of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, Russian officials were not alone. Throughout the 2010s, competitors including space agencies in Europe and Japan, and US-based United Launch Alliance, all decided to develop expendable rockets.

However, by 2017, when SpaceX re-flew a Falcon 9 rocket for the first time, the writing was on the wall. "This is a very important step, we sincerely congratulate our colleague on this achievement," then-Roscosmos CEO Igor Komarov said at the time. He even spoke of developing reusable components, such as rocket engines capable of multiple firings.

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The global space community awoke to a new reality on Wednesday morning.

The founder of this century's most innovative space company, Elon Musk, successfully used his fortune, time, and energy to help elect Donald Trump to president of the United States. Already, Musk was the dominant Western player in space. SpaceX launches national security satellites and NASA astronauts and operates a megaconstellation. He controls the machines that provide essential space services to NASA and the US military. And now, thanks to his gamble on backing Trump, Musk has strong-armed himself into Trump's inner circle.

Although he may not have a cabinet-appointed position, Musk will have a broad portfolio in the new administration for as long as his relations with Trump remain positive. This gives Musk extraordinary power over a number of areas, including spaceflight. Already this week, he has been soliciting ideas and input from colleagues. The New York Times reported that Musk has advised Trump to hire key employees from SpaceX into his administration, including at the Department of Defense. This reflects the huge conflict of interest that Musk will face when it comes to space policy. His actions could significantly benefit SpaceX, of which he is the majority owner and has the final say in major decisions.

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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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Less than a month has passed since the historic fifth flight of SpaceX's Starship, during which the company caught the booster with mechanical arms back at the launch pad in Texas. Now, another test flight could come as soon as Nov. 18, the company announced Wednesday.

The improbable but successful recovery of the Starship first stage with "chopsticks" last month, and the on-target splashdown of the Starship upper stage halfway around the world, allowed SpaceX to avoid an anomaly investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration. Thus, the company was able to press ahead on a sixth test flight if it flew a similar profile.

And that's what SpaceX plans to do, albeit with some notable additions to the flight plan.

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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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A Cargo Dragon spacecraft docked to the International Space Station on Tuesday morning, less than a day after lifting off from Florida.

As space missions go, this one was fairly routine, ferrying about 6,000 pounds (2,700 kg) of cargo and science experiments to the space station. Over the course of nearly a dozen years, this was the 31st cargo supply mission that SpaceX has flown for NASA to the orbiting laboratory.

However, there is one characteristic of this flight that may prove significant for NASA and the future of the space station. As early as Friday, NASA and SpaceX have scheduled a "reboost and attitude control demonstration," during which the Dragon spacecraft will use some of the thrusters at the base of the capsule. This is the first time the Dragon spacecraft will be used to move the space station.

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When Chinese space officials unveiled the design for the country's first super heavy lift rocket nearly a decade ago, it looked like a fairly conventional booster. The rocket was fully expendable, with three stages and solid motors strapped onto its sides.

Since then, the Asian country has been revising the design of this rocket, named Long March 9, in response to the development of reusable rockets by SpaceX. As of two years ago, China had recalibrated the design to have a reusable first stage.

Now, based on information released at a major airshow in Zhuhai, China, the design has morphed again. And this time, the plan for the Long March 9 rocket looks almost exactly like a clone of SpaceX's Starship rocket.

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