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 / A Crew Dragon spacecraft separates from the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday morning. (credit: SpaceX)

A Falcon 9 rocket streaked into the black predawn sky above Florida on Tuesday, carrying four people on the most ambitious private human spaceflight to date.

The crew of the Polaris Dawn mission, led by a billionaire pilot named Jared Isaacman, were injected into an orbit intended to reach an apogee of 1,200 km and a perigee of 190 km. They plan to raise Crew Dragon's orbit to an apogee of 1,400 km near the end of the first day of flight.

Shortly after the mission's launch, Isaacman thanked the flight controllers, engineers, and technicians at SpaceX that made the privately funded trip possible. "We wouldn't be on this journey without all 14,000 of you back at SpaceX," he said.

Enlarge / A screen capture of landing video of a Falcon 9 rocket just before it tips over on Wednesday morning. (credit: SpaceX)

Early on Wednesday morning, at 3:48 am ET local time, a Falcon 9 rocket booster making its 23rd launch took off from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

The mission successfully delivered 21 Starlink satellites, including 13 of the larger vehicles with direct-to-cell capabilities, before attempting a landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas. However, the experienced booster had a shortfall of stability and tipped over shortly following touchdown.

Prior to Wednesday's landing failure, SpaceX had landed 267 boosters in a row. The company's last failure occurred in February 2021. The cause of the failure was not immediately clear, and SpaceX said "teams are assessing the booster's flight data and status." Based on video of the landing, it is possible there was an engine burn timing issue.

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.

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 / The Starlink 10-9 mission lifts off early Saturday morning from Florida. (credit: SpaceX webcast)

Early on Saturday morning, at 1:45 am local time, a Falcon 9 rocket soared into orbit from its launch site at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

By some measures this was an extremely routine mission—it was, after all, SpaceX's 73rd launch of this calendar year. And like many other Falcon 9 launches this year, the "Starlink 10-9" mission carried 23 of the broadband Internet satellites into orbit. However, after a rare failure earlier this month, this particular Falcon 9 rocket was making a return-to-flight for the company and attempting to get the world's most active booster back into service.

And by all measures, it performed. The first stage booster, B-1069, made its 17th flight into orbit before landing on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Then, a little more than an hour after liftoff, the rocket's second stage released its payload into a good orbit, from which the Starlink spacecraft will use its on-board thrusters to reach operational altitudes in the coming weeks.

Enlarge / File photo of a Falcon 9 launch on May 6 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: SpaceX)

It was only about 10 days ago that the Falcon 9 rocket's upper stage failed in flight, preventing the rocket from delivering its 20 Starlink satellites into a proper orbit. Because they were released lower than expected—about 135 km above the Earth's surface and subject to atmospheric drag—these satellites ultimately reentered the planet's atmosphere and burnt up.

Typically, after a launch failure, a rocket will be sidelined for months while engineers and technicians comb over the available data and debris to identify a cause, perform tests, and institute a fix.

However, according to multiple sources, SpaceX was ready to launch the Falcon 9 rocket as soon as late last week. Currently, the company has a launch opportunity for no earlier than 12:14 am ET (04:14 UTC) on Wednesday for its Starlink 10-4 mission.

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 / Artist's illustration of the COSI spacecraft. (credit: Northrop Grumman/European Southern Observatory (background image))

A small research satellite designed to study the violent processes behind the creation and destruction of chemical elements will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in 2027, NASA announced Tuesday.

The Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI) mission features a gamma-ray telescope that will scan the sky to study gamma-rays emitted by the explosions of massive stars and the end of their lives. These supernova explosions generate reactions that fuse new atomic nuclei, a process called nucleosynthesis, of heavier elements.

Using data from COSI, scientists will map where these elements are forming in the Milky Way galaxy. COSI's observations will also yield new insights into the annihilation of positrons, the antimatter equivalent of electrons, which appear to be originating from the center of the galaxy. Another goal for COSI will be to rapidly report the location of short gamma-ray bursts, unimaginably violent explosions that flash and then fade in just a couple of seconds. These bursts are likely caused by merging neutron stars.

Enlarge / The flight hardware core stage for Europe’s new rocket, Ariane 6, is moved onto the launch pad for the first time. A launch is due to occur on July 9, 2024. (credit: ESA-M. Pédoussaut)

In a shocking announcement this week, the European intergovernmental organization responsible for launching and operating the continent's weather satellites has pulled its next mission off a future launch of Europe's new Ariane 6 rocket. Instead, the valuable MTG-S1 satellite will now reach geostationary orbit on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket in 2025.

“This decision was driven by exceptional circumstances” said Phil Evans, director general of the organization Eumetsat. “It does not compromise our standard policy of supporting European partners, and we look forward to a successful SpaceX launch for this masterpiece of European technology.”

The decision, taken at a council meeting of Eumetsat's 30 member nations on Wednesday and Thursday, comes less than two weeks before the debut of the Ariane 6 rocket, scheduled for July 9.

Enlarge / SpaceX's 10th Falcon Heavy rocket climbs into orbit with a new US government weather satellite. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.50 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX launched its 10th Falcon Heavy rocket this week with the GOES-U weather satellite for NOAA, and this one was a beauty. The late afternoon timing of the launch and atmospheric conditions made for great photography. Falcon Heavy has become a trusted rocket for the US government, and its next flight in October will deploy NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft on the way to explore one of Jupiter's enigmatic icy moons.

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.

Sir Peter Beck dishes on launch business. Ars spoke with the recently knighted Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab, on where his scrappy company fits in a global launch marketplace dominated by SpaceX. Rocket Lab racked up the third-most number of orbital launches by any US launch company (it's headquartered in California but primarily assembles and launches rockets in New Zealand). SpaceX's rideshare launch business with the Falcon 9 rocket is putting immense pressure on small launch companies like Rocket Lab. However, Beck argues his Electron rocket is a bespoke solution for customers desiring to put their satellite in a specific place at a specific time, a luxury they can't count on with a SpaceX rideshare.