Enlarge / Parvesh Sahib Singh Verma and Virendra Sachdeva, two members of Narendra Modi's ruling BJP party, celebrate the landing of India's Chandrayaan 3 spacecraft on the Moon on August 23, 2023. (credit: Raj K Raj/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

All at once, India's government has approved plans to develop a new reusable rocket, the centerpiece of an Indian space station, a robotic sample return mission to the Moon, and a science probe to explore Venus.

"Great news for the space sector!" Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi posted on X. Collectively, the projects authorized by India's union cabinet will cost an estimated $2.7 billion. Most of the funding will go toward the country's space station and a reusable launch vehicle.

If the projects reach their goals, the approvals announced by Modi on Wednesday will put India on a trajectory to become the third-largest space power in the 2030s, after the United States and China. V. Narayanan, director of India's Liquid Propulsion Systems Center, stated this was the objective in a recent presentation, writing that India's space initiatives will catapult the country to a place "among the three important space powers in the world."

Enlarge / Landspace's reusable rocket test vehicle lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (credit: Landspace)

Welcome to Edition 7.11 of the Rocket Report! Outside of companies owned by American billionaires, the most imminent advancements in reusable rockets are coming from China's quasi-commercial launch industry. This industry is no longer nascent. After initially relying on solid-fueled rocket motors apparently derived from Chinese military missiles, China's privately funded launch firms are testing larger launchers, with varying degrees of success, and now performing hop tests reminiscent of SpaceX's Grasshopper and F9R Dev1 programs more than a decade ago.

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.

Landspace hops closer to a reusable rocket. Chinese private space startup Landspace has completed a 10-kilometer (33,000-foot) vertical takeoff and vertical landing test on its Zhuque-3 (ZQ-3) reusable rocket testbed, including a mid-flight engine reignition at near supersonic conditions, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The 18.3-meter (60-foot) vehicle took off from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China, ascended to 10,002 meters, and then made a vertical descent and achieved an on-target propulsive landing 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) from the launch pad. Notably, the rocket's methane-fueled variable-thrust engine intentionally shutdown in flight, then reignited for descent, as engines would operate on future full-scale booster flybacks. The test booster used grid fins and cold gas thrusters to control itself when its main engine was dormant, according to Landspace.

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of catch arms ensnaring SpaceX's Super Heavy booster. (credit: SpaceX)

The Federal Aviation Administration has signaled to SpaceX that it won't approve a launch license for the next test flight of the Starship rocket until at least late November, the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

This is more than two months later than the mid-September timeframe the FAA previously targeted for determining whether to approve a launch license for the next Starship flight. SpaceX says the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage for the next launch—the fifth full-scale test flight of the Starship program—have been ready to launch since the first week of August.

"The flight test will include our most ambitious objective yet: attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catch it in mid-air," SpaceX said in a statement.

Enlarge / The final Vega rocket climbs away from its launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana. (credit: ESA-CNES-ARIANESPACE/Optique vidéo du CSG–S. Martin)

The final flight of Europe's Vega rocket lifted off Wednesday night from French Guiana, carrying an important environmental monitoring satellite for the European Union's flagship Copernicus program.

The 98-foot-tall (30-meter) Vega rocket took off at 9:50 pm EDT Wednesday (01:50 UTC Thursday) from the European-run spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The launcher headed north from the launch pad on the coast of South America, aiming for a polar orbit about 480 miles (775 kilometers) above the Earth.

The sole payload was Sentinel-2C, a remote sensing platform set to join Europe's fleet of Copernicus environmental satellites. The multibillion-dollar Copernicus system is the world's most comprehensive space-based Earth observation network, with satellites fitted with different kinds of instruments monitoring land surfaces, oceans, and the atmosphere.

Enlarge / Welders at SpaceX's Starbase launch site work on the launch pad's "chopstick" catch arms this week. (credit: LabPadre)

Pretty much every day for the last couple of weeks, workers wielding welding guns and torches have climbed onto SpaceX's Starship launch pad in South Texas to make last-minute upgrades ahead of the next test flight of the world's largest rocket.

Livestreams of the launch site provided by LabPadre and NASASpaceflight.com have shown sparks raining down two mechanical arms extending from the side of the Starship launch tower at SpaceX's Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast east of Brownsville, Texas. We are publishing several views here of the welding activity with the permission of LabPadre, which runs a YouTube page with multiple live views of Starbase.

If SpaceX has its way on the next flight of Starship, these arms will close together to capture the first-stage booster, called Super Heavy, as it descends back to Earth and slows to a hover over the launch pad.

Enlarge / RFA's first stage during a four-engine test-firing in May. (credit: Rocket Factory Augsburg)

The first stage of Rocket Factory Augsburg's first orbital launcher was destroyed in a fireball during a test-firing Monday evening at a spaceport in Scotland, the company said.

The German launch startup aimed to send its first rocket into space later this year and appeared to be running ahead of several competitors in Europe's commercial launch industry that are also developing rockets to deploy small satellites in orbit.

Within the last few months, Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) delivered all three stages of its first rocket, named RFA One, to its launch site at SaxaVord Spaceport, located on Unst, one of the Shetland Islands and the northernmost inhabited island in the United Kingdom. The company is based in Augsburg, Germany.

Enlarge / The two spacecraft for NASA's ESCAPADE mission at Rocket Lab's factory in Long Beach, California. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Two NASA spacecraft built by Rocket Lab are on the road from California to Florida this weekend to begin preparations for launch on Blue Origin's first New Glenn rocket.

These two science probes must launch between late September and mid-October to take advantage of a planetary alignment between Earth and Mars that only happens once every 26 months. NASA tapped Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission with a $20 million contract.

Last November, the space agency confirmed the $79 million ESCAPADE mission will launch on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket. With this piece of information, the opaque schedule for Blue Origin's long-delayed first New Glenn mission suddenly became more clear.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 booster returns to landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station following a launch Thursday with two WorldView Earth observation satellites for Maxar. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 7.07 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX has not missed a beat since the Federal Aviation Administration gave the company a green light to resume Falcon 9 launches after a failure last month. In 19 days, SpaceX has launched 10 flights of the Falcon 9 rocket, taking advantage of all three of its Falcon 9 launch pads. This is a remarkable cadence in its own right, but even though it's a small sample size, it is especially impressive right out of the gate after the rocket's grounding.

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.

A quick turnaround for Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab launched its 52nd Electron rocket on August 11 from its private spaceport on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, Space News reports. The company's light-class Electron rocket deployed a small radar imaging satellite into a mid-inclination orbit for Capella Space. This was the shortest turnaround between two Rocket Lab missions from its primary launch base in New Zealand, coming less than nine days after an Electron rocket took off from the same pad with a radar imaging satellite for the Japanese company Synspective. Capella's Acadia 3 satellite was originally supposed to launch in July, but Capella requested a delay to perform more testing of its spacecraft. Rocket Lab swapped its place in the Electron launch sequence and launched the Synspective mission first.

Enlarge / A Long March 6A rocket launches the first 18 Internet satellites for China's Qianfan, or Thousand Sails, broadband network. (credit: VCG via Getty Images)

Chinese officials have long signaled their interest in deploying a satellite network, or maybe several, to beam broadband Internet signals across China and other nations within its sphere of influence.

Two serious efforts are underway in China to develop a rival to SpaceX's Starlink network, which the Chinese government has banned in its territory. The first batch of 18 satellites for one of those Chinese networks launched into low-Earth orbit Tuesday.

A Long March 6A rocket delivered the 18 spacecraft into a polar orbit following liftoff at 2:42 am EDT (06:42 UTC) from the Taiyuan launch base in northern China's Shanxi province. The Long March 6A is one of China's newest rockets—and the country's first to employ strap-on solid rocket boosters—with the ability to deploy a payload of up to 4.5 metric tons (9,900 pounds) into a 700-kilometer (435-mile) Sun-synchronous orbit.

Welcome to Edition 7.05 of the Rocket Report! The Federal Aviation Administration grounded SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket for 15 days after a rare failure of its upper stage earlier this month. The FAA gave the green light for Falcon 9 to return to flight July 25, and within a couple of days, SpaceX successfully launched three missions from three launch pads. There's a lot on Falcon 9's to-do list, so we expect SpaceX to quickly return to form with several flights per week.

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.

Big delay for a reusable rocket testbed. The French space agency, CNES, has revealed that the inaugural test flight of its Callisto reusable rocket demonstrator will not take place until late 2025 or early 2026, European Spaceflight reports. CNES unveiled an updated website for the Callisto rocket program earlier this month, showing the test rocket has been delayed from a debut launch later this year to until late 2025 or early 2026. The Callisto rocket is designed to test techniques and technologies required for reusable rockets, such as vertical takeoff and vertical landing, with suborbital flights from the Guiana Space Center in South America.

Enlarge / Astroscale's ADRAS-J spacecraft captured these views of the H-IIA rocket upper stage on July 15. (credit: Astroscale)

There are more than 2,000 mostly intact dead rockets circling the Earth, but until this year, no one ever launched a satellite to go see what one looked like after many years of tumbling around the planet.

In February, a Japanese company named Astroscale sent a small satellite into low-Earth orbit on top of a Rocket Lab launcher. A couple of months later, Astroscale's ADRAS-J (Active Debris Removal by Astroscale-Japan) spacecraft completed its pursuit of a Japanese rocket stuck in orbit for more than 15 years.

ADRAS-J photographed the upper stage of an H-IIA rocket from a range of several hundred meters and then backed away. This was the first publicly released image of space debris captured from another spacecraft using rendezvous and proximity operations.

Enlarge / Liftoff of ULA's Atlas V rocket on the US Space Force's USSF-51 mission. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

United Launch Alliance delivered a classified US military payload to orbit Tuesday for the last time with an Atlas V rocket, ending the Pentagon's use of Russian rocket engines as national security missions transition to all-American launchers.

The Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:45 am EDT (10:45 UTC) Tuesday, propelled by a Russian-made RD-180 engine and five strap-on solid-fueled boosters in its most powerful configuration. This was the 101st launch of an Atlas V rocket since its debut in 2002, and the 58th and final Atlas V mission with a US national security payload since 2007.

The US Space Force's Space Systems Command confirmed a successful conclusion to the mission, code-named USSF-51, on Tuesday afternoon. The rocket's Centaur upper stage released the top secret USSF-51 payload about seven hours after liftoff, likely in a high-altitude geostationary orbit over the equator. The military did not publicize the exact specifications of the rocket's target orbit.

Enlarge / A top-down view of United Launch Alliance's first Vulcan rocket before its liftoff in January. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

United Launch Alliance is targeting September 16 for the second test flight of the new Vulcan rocket, and a flawless mission could finally set the stage for the first Vulcan launch for the US military by the end of the year.

The US Space Force has contracted ULA's Vulcan rocket to launch the majority of the military's space missions over the next few years. Pentagon officials are eager for Vulcan to get flying so they can start checking off a backlog of 25 military space missions the Space Force wants to launch by the end of 2027.

By any measure, the first Vulcan launch in January was a resounding success. On its debut flight, the new rocket delivered a commercial lunar lander to an on-target orbit. The next Vulcan mission, which ULA calls Cert-2, will be the rocket's second certification flight. The Space Force requires ULA to complete two successful flights of the Vulcan rocket before entrusting it to launch national security satellites.

Enlarge / The core stage for NASA's second Space Launch System rocket rolls aboard a barge that will take it from New Orleans to Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (credit: NASA)

Welcome to Edition 7.03 of the Rocket Report! One week ago, SpaceX suffered a rare failure of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. In fact, it was the first time the latest version of the Falcon 9, known as the Block 5, has ever failed on its prime mission after nearly 300 launches. The world's launch pads have been silent since the grounding of the Falcon 9 fleet after last week's failure. This isn't surprising, but it's noteworthy. After all, the Falcon 9 has flown more this year than all of the world's other rockets combined and is fundamental to much of what the world does in space.

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 finally goes private, again. A long-simmering deal for Astra's founders to take the company private has been finalized, the company announced Thursday, capping the rocket launch company’s descent from blank-check darling to delisting in three years, Bloomberg reports. The launch company's valuation peaked at $3.9 billion in 2021, the year it went public, and was worth about $12.2 million at the end of March, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Astra's chief executive officer, Chris Kemp, and chief technology officer, Adam London, founded the company in 2016 with the goal of essentially commoditizing launch services for small satellites. But Astra's rockets failed to deliver and fell short of orbit five times in seven tries.

Enlarge / A drone shot looking down on SpaceX's Super Heavy booster during a test-firing of its 33 Raptor engines Monday. (credit: SpaceX)

It's unclear yet how long SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket will remain grounded as engineers investigate a rare launch failure last week, but the next test flight of the company's next-generation Starship vehicle appears to be on track for liftoff next month.

On Monday, SpaceX test-fired the 33 Raptor engines on the Starship rocket's Super Heavy booster at the company's Starbase facility in South Texas. The methane-fueled engines fired for about eight seconds, long enough for SpaceX engineers to verify all systems functioned normally. At full power, the 33 engines generated nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, twice the power output of NASA's iconic Saturn V Moon rocket.

SpaceX confirmed the static fire test reached its full duration, and teams drained methane and liquid oxygen from the rocket, known as Booster 12 in the company's inventory of ships and boosters. The upper stage for the next Starship test flight, known as Ship 30, completed the static fire of its six Raptor engines in May.

Enlarge / Numerous pieces of ice fell off the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket during its climb into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. (credit: SpaceX)

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket suffered an upper stage engine failure and deployed a batch of Starlink Internet satellites into a perilously low orbit after launch from California Thursday night, the first blemish on the workhorse launcher's record in more than 300 missions since 2016.

Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO, posted on X that the rocket's upper stage engine failed when it attempted to reignite nearly an hour after the Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 7:35 pm PDT (02:35 UTC).

Frosty evidence

After departing Vandenberg to begin SpaceX's Starlink 9-3 mission, the rocket's reusable first stage booster propelled the Starlink satellites into the upper atmosphere, then returned to Earth for an on-target landing on a recovery ship parked in the Pacific Ocean. A single Merlin Vacuum engine on the rocket's second stage fired for about six minutes to reach a preliminary orbit.

Enlarge / Europe's first Ariane 6 rocket lifts off from a new launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana. (credit: Jody Amiet/AFP via Getty Images)

The first European Ariane 6 rocket fired off its launch pad at the edge of the Amazon rainforest and climbed into orbit Tuesday, an inaugural flight a decade in the making that restored Europe's ability to put its own large satellites into space.

The debut of the Ariane 6 rocket came almost exactly one year after Europe's previous workhorse rocket, the Ariane 5, flew for the final time. Running four years late, the Ariane 6 is set to become Europe's next flagship launcher. But delays in its development, combined with other factors, forced European governments to pay SpaceX to deliver several payloads to orbit.

With Tuesday's test flight, European space officials hope those days are behind them. The European Space Agency paid more than $4 billion to get the Ariane 6 rocket to this point, with the goal of replacing the Ariane 5 with a cheaper, more capable launcher. There are still pressing questions about Ariane 6's cost per launch, and whether the rocket will ever be able to meet its price target and compete with SpaceX and other companies in the commercial market.

Enlarge / The first Ariane 6 rocket is pictured inside the mobile gantry on its launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana. The gantry will wheel away from the rocket during the countdown Tuesday. (credit: ESA-S. Corvaja)

Europe's Ariane 6 rocket is finally ready to fly, four years late but vital as ever for European governments backing the more than $4 billion project.

Set for liftoff from French Guiana, the new rocket will be Europe's flagship launcher for the next decade, providing rides to space for European science probes, navigation satellites, and military payloads. Ariane 6 also has a toehold in the commercial market, with a contract for 18 launches to deliver satellites to orbit for Amazon's Project Kuiper broadband network.

The first Ariane 6 rocket has a four-hour launch window opening at 2 pm EDT (18:00 UTC) Tuesday to depart the European-run Guiana Space Center in South America.

Enlarge / Four kerosene-fueled Reaver engines power Firefly's Alpha rocket off the pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. (credit: Firefly Aerospace)

Welcome to Edition 7.01 of the Rocket Report! We're compiling this week's report a day later than usual due to the Independence Day holiday. Ars is beginning its seventh year publishing this weekly roundup of rocket news, and there's a lot of it this week despite the holiday here in the United States. Worldwide, there were 122 launches that flew into Earth orbit or beyond in the first half of 2024, up from 91 in the same period last year.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

Firefly launches its fifth Alpha flight. Firefly Aerospace placed eight CubeSats into orbit on a mission funded by NASA on the first flight of the company’s Alpha rocket since an upper stage malfunction more than half a year ago, Space News reports. The two-stage Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California late Wednesday, two days after an issue with ground equipment aborted liftoff just before engine ignition. The eight CubeSats come from NASA centers and universities for a range of educational, research, and technology demonstration missions. This was the fifth flight of Firefly's Alpha rocket, capable of placing about a metric ton of payload into low-Earth orbit.