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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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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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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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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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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In a blockbuster story published Friday morning, The Wall Street Journal reports that Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin for about two years, with the discussions covering a range of issues from geopolitics to business to personal matters.

There are no on-the-record sources confirming the regular conversations between Musk and Putin, and Musk did not comment to the news organization. A Putin spokesperson said the Russian leader and Musk have had just one telephone call. However, the report is plausibly true, and the Journal cites "several current and former US, European, and Russian officials." This is also not the first time there have been reports of contact between Musk and Putin.

The new story about Musk's direct links to an avowed enemy of the United States immediately raised concerns among some prominent US officials who work with the billionaire entrepreneur, including NASA Administrator Bill Nelson.

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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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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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Early Sunday morning, SpaceX will try something no one has ever done before. If all goes according to plan, around seven minutes after lifting off from South Texas, the huge stainless steel booster from SpaceX's Starship rocket will come back to the launch pad and slow to a hover, allowing powerful mechanical arms to capture it in midair.

This is SpaceX's approach to recovering Starship's Super Heavy booster. If it works, this method will make it easier and faster to reuse the rocket than it is to recycle boosters from SpaceX's smaller Falcon 9 launch vehicle. Falcon 9's boosters usually come down on a floating drone ship stationed hundreds of miles out to sea, requiring SpaceX to return the rocket to shore for refurbishment.

“We’re going for high reusability," said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX's vice president of build and flight reliability.

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We may not have to wait as long as we thought for the next test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket.

The world's most powerful launcher could fly again as soon as Sunday, SpaceX says, assuming the Federal Aviation Administration grants approval. The last public statement released from the FAA suggested the agency didn't expect to determine whether to approve a commercial launch license for SpaceX's next Starship test flight before late November.

There's some optimism at SpaceX that the FAA might issue a launch license much sooner, perhaps in time for Starship to fly this weekend. The launch window Sunday opens at 7 am CDT (8 am EDT; 12:00 UTC), about a half-hour before sunrise at SpaceX's Starbase launch site in South Texas.

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Two years ago, a NASA spacecraft smashed into a small asteroid millions of miles from Earth to test a technique that could one day prove useful to deflect an object off a collision course with Earth. The European Space Agency launched a follow-up mission Monday to go back to the crash site and see the damage done.

The nearly $400 million (363 million euro) Hera mission, named for the Greek goddess of marriage, will investigate the aftermath of a cosmic collision between NASA's DART spacecraft and the skyscraper-size asteroid Dimorphos on September 26, 2022. NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission was the first planetary defense experiment, and it worked, successfully nudging Dimorphos off its regular orbit around a larger companion asteroid named Didymos.

But NASA had to sacrifice the DART spacecraft in the deflection experiment. Its destruction meant there were no detailed images of the condition of the target asteroid after the impact. A small Italian CubeSat deployed by DART as it approached Dimorphos captured fuzzy long-range views of the collision, but Hera will perform a comprehensive survey when it arrives in late 2026.

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SpaceX is investigating a problem with the Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage that caused it to reenter the atmosphere and fall into the sea outside of its intended disposal area after a Saturday launch with a two-man crew heading to the International Space Station.

The upper stage malfunction apparently occurred after the Falcon 9 successfully deployed SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission. Hague and Gorbunov safely arrived at the space station Sunday to begin a five-month stay at the orbiting research complex.

The Falcon 9's second stage Merlin vacuum engine fired for more than six minutes to place the Crew Dragon spacecraft into orbit after liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. The engine was supposed to reignite later to steer the upper stage on a trajectory back into Earth's atmosphere for disposal over the South Pacific Ocean, ensuring the rocket doesn't remain in orbit as a piece of space junk.

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NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov lifted off Saturday from Florida's Space Coast aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, heading for a five-month expedition on the International Space Station.

The two-man crew launched on top of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at 1:17 pm EDT (17:17 UTC), taking advantage of a break in the stormy weather to begin their climb to space. Nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines powered the first stage of the flight on a trajectory northeast from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, then the booster detached and returned to landing at Cape Canaveral as the Falcon 9's upper stage accelerated SpaceX's Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft into orbit.

"It was a sweet ride," Hague said after arriving in space. With a seemingly flawless launch, Hague and Gorbunov are on track to arrive at the space station around 5:30 pm EDT (2130 UTC) Sunday.

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