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ULA’s Vulcan rocket still doesn’t have the Space Force’s seal of approval

11 February 2025 at 15:55

Last October, United Launch Alliance started stacking its third Vulcan rocket on a mobile launch platform in Florida in preparation for a mission for the US Space Force by the end of the year.

That didn't happen, and ULA is still awaiting the Space Force's formal certification of its new rocket, further pushing out delivery schedules for numerous military satellites booked to fly to orbit on the Vulcan launcher.

Now, several months after stacking the next Vulcan rocket, ULA has started taking it apart. First reported by Spaceflight Now, the "de-stacking" will clear ULA's vertical hangar for assembly of an Atlas V rocket—the Vulcan's predecessor—to launch the first batch of operational satellites for Amazon's Kuiper Internet constellation.

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Rocket Report: Another hiccup with SpaceX upper stage; Japan’s H3 starts strong

7 February 2025 at 12:00

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.

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Don’t panic, but an asteroid has a 1.9% chance of hitting Earth in 2032

6 February 2025 at 17:00

Something in the sky captured the attention of astronomers in the final days of 2024. A telescope in Chile scanning the night sky detected a faint point of light, and it didn't correspond to any of the thousands of known stars, comets, and asteroids in astronomers' all-sky catalog.

The detection on December 27 came from one of a network of telescopes managed by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), a NASA-funded project to provide warning of asteroids on a collision course with Earth.

Within a few days, scientists gathered enough information on the asteroid—officially designated 2024 YR4—to determine that its orbit will bring it quite close to Earth in 2028, and then again in 2032. Astronomers ruled out any chance of an impact with Earth in 2028, but there's a small chance the asteroid might hit our planet on December 22, 2032.

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Boeing has now lost $2B on Starliner, but still silent on future plans

4 February 2025 at 13:44

Boeing announced Monday it lost $523 million on the Starliner crew capsule program last year, putting the aerospace company $2 billion in the red on its NASA commercial crew contract since late 2019.

The updated numbers are included in a quarterly filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods," Boeing wrote in the filing.

In 2014, NASA picked Boeing and SpaceX to develop and certify two commercial crew transporter vehicles. Like SpaceX, Boeing's contract, now worth up to $4.6 billion, is structured as a fixed-price deal, meaning the contractor is on the hook to pay for cost overruns that go over NASA's financial commitment.

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It seems the FAA office overseeing SpaceX’s Starship probe still has some bite

1 February 2025 at 21:05

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.

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Trump executive order calls for a next-generation missile defense shield

29 January 2025 at 00:52

One of the new Trump administration's first national security directives aims to defend against missile and drone attacks targeting the United States, and several elements of the plan require an expansion of the US military's presence in space, the White House announced Monday.

For more than 60 years, the military has launched reconnaissance, communications, and missile warning satellites into orbit. Trump's executive order calls for the Pentagon to come up with a design architecture, requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield within 60 days.

A key tenet of Trump's order is to develop and deploy space-based interceptors capable of destroying enemy missiles during their initial boost phase shortly after launch.

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Rocket Report: Did China’s reusable rocket work?; DOT may review SpaceX fines

24 January 2025 at 12:00

Welcome to Edition 7.28 of the Rocket Report! After last week's jam-packed action in the launch business, things are a bit quieter this week. Much of the space world's attention has turned to Washington as the Trump administration takes the helm of the federal government. Some of the administration's policy changes will likely impact the launch industry, with commercial spaceflight poised to become a beneficiary of actions over the next four years. As for the specifics, Ars has reported that NASA is expected to review the future of the Space Launch System rocket. Investments in the military space program could bring in more business for launch companies. And regulatory changes may reduce government oversight of commercial spaceflight.

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.

What happened to China's reusable rocket testbed? A Chinese state-owned company performed a rocket flight on January 18 (US time) aimed at testing reusable launch vehicle technology without announcing the outcome, Space News reports. The Longxing-2 test article lifted off from a makeshift launch area near Haiyang, Shandong province. The methane-fueled rocket was expected to fly to an altitude of 75 kilometers (about 246,000 feet) before performing a reentry burn and a landing burn to guide itself to a controlled splashdown in the Yellow Sea, replicating the maneuvers required to recover a reusable booster like the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9. This was China's most ambitious reusable rocket demonstration flight to date.

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Fire destroys Starship on its seventh test flight, raining debris from space

17 January 2025 at 04:44

SpaceX launched an upgraded version of its massive Starship rocket from South Texas on Thursday, but the flight ended less than nine minutes later after engineers lost contact with the spacecraft.

For a few moments, SpaceX officials discussing the launch on the company's live webcast were unsure of the outcome of the test flight. However, within minutes, residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos Islands, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico shared videos showing a shower of debris falling through the atmosphere along Starship's expected flight corridor.

The videos confirmed Starshipthe rocket's upper stagebroke apart in space, or experienced a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" in SpaceX-speak. This happened well short of the spacecraft's planned trajectory, which would have seen it fly halfway around the world and splash down in the Indian Ocean after more than an hour of flight.

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Here’s what NASA would like to see SpaceX accomplish with Starship this year

16 January 2025 at 19:41

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.

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Two lunar landers are on the way to the Moon after SpaceX’s double moonshot

16 January 2025 at 16:41

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida early Wednesday and deployed two commercial lunar landers on separate trajectories to reach the Moon in the next few months.

The mission began with a middle-of-the-night launch from Kennedy at 1:11 am EST (06:11 UTC) Wednesday. It took about an hour and a half for the Falcon 9 rocket to release both payloads into two slightly different orbits, ranging up to 200,000 and 225,000 miles (322,000 and 362,000 kilometers) from Earth.

The two robotic lunar landers—one from Firefly Aerospace based near Austin, Texas, and another from the Japanese space company ispace—will use their own small engines for the final maneuvers required to enter orbit around the Moon in the coming months.

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There was a straight shot from Earth to the Moon and Mars last night

14 January 2025 at 23:21

I almost missed it. Amid a bout of prime-time doomscrolling, a social media post reminded me there was something worth seeing in the sky. Mars disappeared behind the full Moon for a little more than an hour Monday night, an event visible across most of North America and parts of Africa.

So I grabbed my camera, ran outside, and looked up just as Mars was supposed to emerge from the Moon's curved horizon. Seen with the naked eye, the Moon's brightness far outshined Mars, casting soft shadows on a cold winter evening in East Texas.

Viewing the Moon through binoculars, the red planet appeared just above several large partially shadowed craters at the edge of the Moon's curved limb. I quickly snapped dozens of photos with my handheld Canon 80D fitted with a 600 mm lens. Within a few minutes, Mars rose farther above the Moon's horizon. Thanks to the parallax effect, the Moon's relative motion in its orbit around Earth appears significantly faster than the movement of Mars in its orbit around the Sun.

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SpaceX is superb at reusing boosters, but how about building upper stages?

14 January 2025 at 12:20

On any given day, SpaceX is probably launching a Falcon 9 rocket, rolling one out to the launch pad or bringing one back into port. With three active Falcon 9 launch pads and an increasing cadence at the Starbase facility in Texas, SpaceX's teams are often doing all three.

The company achieved another milestone Friday with the 25th successful launch and landing of a single Falcon 9 booster. This rocket, designated B1067, launched a batch of 21 Starlink Internet satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

The rocket's nine kerosene-fueled Merlin 1D engines powered the 21 Starlink satellites into space, then separated from the Falcon 9's upper stage, which accelerated the payload stack into orbit. The 15-story-tall booster returned to a vertical propulsive landing on one of SpaceX's offshore drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles downrange from Cape Canaveral.

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Rocket Report: China launches refueling demo; DoD’s big appetite for hypersonics

10 January 2025 at 19:22

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.

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A taller, heavier, smarter version of SpaceX’s Starship is almost ready to fly

9 January 2025 at 21:59

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. Teams will then complete the final tests and preparations for the countdown on Monday.

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NASA defers decision on Mars Sample Return to the Trump administration

8 January 2025 at 18:44

For nearly four years, NASA's Perseverance rover has journeyed across an unexplored patch of land on Mars—once home to an ancient river delta—and collected a slew of rock samples sealed inside cigar-sized titanium tubes.

These tubes might contain tantalizing clues about past life on Mars, but NASA's ever-changing plans to bring them back to Earth are still unclear.

On Tuesday, NASA officials presented two options for retrieving and returning the samples gathered by the Perseverance rover. One alternative involves a conventional architecture reminiscent of past NASA Mars missions, relying on the "sky crane" landing system demonstrated on the agency's two most recent Mars rovers. The other option would be to outsource the lander to the space industry.

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Rocket Report: ULA has a wild idea; Starliner crew will stay in orbit even longer

20 December 2024 at 19:40

Welcome to Edition 7.24 of the Rocket Report! This is the last Rocket Report of the year, and what a year it's been. So far, there have been 244 rocket launches to successfully reach orbit this year, a record for annual launch activity. And there are still a couple of weeks to go before the calendar turns to 2025. Time is running out for Blue Origin to launch its first heavy-lift New Glenn rocket this year, but if it flies before January 1, it will certainly be one of the top space stories of 2024.

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.

Corkscrew in the sky. A Japanese space startup said its second attempt to launch a rocket carrying small satellites into orbit had been terminated minutes after liftoff Wednesday and destroyed itself again, nine months after the company’s first launch attempt in an explosion, the Associated Press reports. The startup that developed the rocket, named Space One, launched the Kairos rocket from a privately owned coastal spaceport in Japan's Kansai region. Company executive and space engineer Mamoru Endo said an abnormality in the first stage engine nozzle or its control system is likely to have caused an unstable flight of the rocket, which started spiraling in mid-flight and eventually destroyed itself about three minutes after liftoff, using its autonomous safety mechanism.

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China orbits first Guowang Internet satellites, with thousands more to come

17 December 2024 at 04:41

The first batch of Internet satellites for China's Guowang megaconstellation launched Monday on the country's heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket.

The satellites are the first of up to 13,000 spacecraft a consortium of Chinese companies plans to build and launch over the next decade. The Guowang fleet will beam low-latency high-speed Internet signals in an architecture similar to SpaceX's Starlink network, although Chinese officials haven't laid out any specifics, such as target markets, service specifications, or user terminals.

The Long March 5B rocket took off from Wenchang Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, at 5:00 am EST (10:00 UTC) Monday. Ten liquid-fueled engines powered the rocket off the ground with 2.4 million pounds of thrust, steering the Long March 5B on a course south from Wenchang into a polar orbit.

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The US military is now talking openly about going on the attack in space

13 December 2024 at 15:40

ORLANDO, Florida—Earlier this year, officials at US Space Command released a list of priorities and needs, and among the routine recitation of things like cyber defense, communications, and surveillance was a relatively new term: "integrated space fires."

This is a new phrase in the esoteric terminology the military uses to describe its activities. Essentially, "fires" are offensive or defensive actions against an adversary. The Army defines fires as "the use of weapon systems to create specific lethal and nonlethal effects on a target."

The inclusion of this term in a Space Command planning document was another signal that Pentagon leaders, long hesitant to even mention the possibility of putting offensive weapons in space for fear of stirring up a cosmic arms race, see the taboo of talking about space warfare as a thing of the past.

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NASA’s boss-to-be proclaims we’re about to enter an “age of experimentation”

12 December 2024 at 14:11

ORLANDO, Florida—On Wednesday, Jared Isaacman made his first public appearance since his nomination earlier this month to become NASA's next administrator. Although his remarks were short on specifics, Isaacman endorsed a vision that would signal radical departures from the way NASA does business.

He talked of commercial investment, a thriving space economy, and going fast and taking risks. These talking points are familiar to anyone who has listened to NASA's leadership in recent years, and there has been tangible progress in the agency's partnerships with commercial companies. However, NASA is leaving some commercial expertise on the field, or in this case, on the ground.

"I love all about the commercial space industry right now," Isaacman said in a discussion at the Space Force Association's Spacepower Conference in Orlando, Florida. "They’re all generally doing the same thing, which is putting a lot of their own dollars on the line because they believe in the future that it holds."

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