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/ 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/ The main body of NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft is reflected in one of the mission's deployable solar array wings during testing at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (credit: NASA/Frank Michaux)
For a while earlier this summer, it looked like NASA's flagship mission to study Jupiter's icy moon Europa might miss its launch window this year.
In May, engineers raised concerns that transistors installed throughout the spacecraft might be susceptible to damage from radiation, an omnipresent threat for any probe whipping its way around Jupiter. The transistors are embedded in the spacecraft's circuitry and are responsible for approximately 200 unique applications, many of which are critical to keeping the mission operating as it orbits Jupiter and repeatedly zooms by Europa, interrogating the frozen moon with nine science instruments.
The transistors on the Europa Clipper spacecraft are already installed, and removing them for inspections or replacement would delay the mission's launch until late next year. Europa Clipper has a 21-day launch window beginning October 10 to begin its journey into the outer solar system.
Enlarge/ Boeing's Starliner spacecraft after landing Friday night at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico. (credit: Boeing)
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft sailed to a smooth landing in the New Mexico desert Friday night, an auspicious end to an otherwise disappointing three-month test flight that left the capsule's two-person crew stuck in orbit until next year.
Cushioned by airbags, the Boeing crew capsule descended under three parachutes toward an on-target landing at 10:01 pm local time Friday (12:01 am EDT Saturday) at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico. From the outside, the landing appeared just as it would have if the spacecraft brought home NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who became the first people to launch on a Starliner capsule on June 5.
But Starliner's cockpit was empty as it flew back to Earth Friday night. Last month, NASA managers decided to keep Wilmore and Williams on the International Space Station (ISS) until next year after agency officials determined it was too risky for the astronauts to return to the ground on Boeing's spaceship. Instead of coming home on Starliner, Wilmore and Williams will fly back to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in February. NASA has incorporated the Starliner duo into the space station's long-term crew.
Enlarge/ Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is set to undock from the International Space Station on Friday evening. (credit: NASA)
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft will gently back away from the International Space Station Friday evening, then fire its balky thrusters to rapidly depart the vicinity of the orbiting lab and its nine-person crew.
NASA asked Boeing to adjust Starliner's departure sequence to get away from the space station faster and reduce the workload on the thrusters to reduce the risk of overheating, which caused some of the control jets to drop offline as the spacecraft approached the outpost for docking in June.
The action begins at 6:04 pm EDT (22:04 UTC) on Friday, when hooks in the docking mechanism connecting Starliner with the International Space Station (ISS) will open, and springs will nudge the spacecraft away its mooring on the forward end of the massive research complex.
Enlarge/ The second stage of the New Glenn rocket rolled to the launch site this week. (credit: Blue Origin)
NASA and Blue Origin announced Friday that they have agreed to delay the launch of the ESCAPADE mission to Mars until at least the spring of 2025.
The decision to stand down from a launch attempt in mid-October was driven by a deadline to begin loading hypergolic propellant on the two small ESCAPADE (Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers) spacecraft. While it is theoretically possible to offload fuel from these vehicles for a future launch attempt, multiple sources told Ars that such an activity would incur significant risk to the spacecraft.
Forced to make a call on whether to fuel, NASA decided not to. Although the two spacecraft were otherwise ready for launch, it was not clear the New Glenn rocket would be similarly ready to go.
China plans to launch two heavy-lift Long March 5 rockets with elements of the Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission in 2028, the mission's chief designer said Thursday.
In a presentation at a Chinese space exploration conference, the chief designer of China's robotic Mars sample return project described the mission's high-level design and outlined how the mission will collect samples from the Martian surface. Reports from the talk published on Chinese social media and by state-run news agencies were short on technical details and did not discuss any of the preparations for the mission.
Public pronouncements by Chinese officials on future space missions typically come true, but China is embarking on challenging efforts to explore the Moon and Mars. China aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030 in a step toward eventually building a Moon base called the International Lunar Research Station.
Enlarge/ The second stage of the New Glenn rocket rolls to the launch pad on Tuesday. (credit: Blue Origin)
Welcome to Edition 7.10 of the Rocket Report! It has been a big week for seeing new hardware from Blue Origin. We've observed the second stage of New Glenn rolling out to its launch pad in Florida, and the rocket's first stage recovery ship, Jacklyn, arriving at a nearby port. It looks like the pieces are finally coming into place for the debut launch of the massive new rocket.
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.
Vega rocket makes its final flight. 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, Ars reports. About an hour after liftoff, the Vega rocket's upper stage released Sentinel-2C into an on-target orbit. Then, Sentinel-2C radioed its status to ground controllers, confirming the satellite was healthy in space. The Vega rocket will be replaced by the larger Vega-C rocket, with a more powerful booster stage and a wider payload fairing. One of the primary purposes of the Vega-C will be to launch future Copernicus satellites for Europe.
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NASA is ready for Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, stricken with thruster problems and helium leaks, to leave the International Space Station as soon as Friday, wrapping up a disappointing test flight that has clouded the long-term future of the Starliner program.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched aboard Starliner on June 5, closed the spacecraft's hatch Thursday in preparation for departure Friday. But it wasn't what they envisioned when they left Earth on Starliner three months ago. Instead of closing the hatch from a position in Starliner's cockpit, they latched the front door to the spacecraft from the space station's side of the docking port.
The Starliner spacecraft is set to undock from the International Space Station at 6:04 pm EDT (22:04 UTC) Friday. If all goes according to plan, Starliner will ignite its braking rockets at 11:17 pm EDT (03:17 UTC) for a minute-long burn to target a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned landing at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, at 12:03 am EDT (04:03 UTC) Saturday.
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/ The Artemis II Orion spacecraft being prepared for tests at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in June 2024. (credit: NASA / Rad Sinyak)
Now that NASA has resolved the question of the Starliner spacecraft and its two crew members on the International Space Station, the agency faces another high-stakes human spaceflight decision.
The choice concerns the Orion spacecraft's heat shield and whether NASA will make any changes before the Artemis II mission that will make a lunar flyby. Although Starliner has garnered a lot of media attention, this will be an even higher-profile decision for NASA, with higher consequences—four astronauts will be on board, and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people will be watching humanity's first deep space mission in more than five decades.
The issue is the safety of the heat shield, located at the base of the capsule, which protects Orion's crew during its return to Earth. During the Artemis I mission that sent Orion beyond the Moon in late 2022, without astronauts on board, chunks of charred material cracked and chipped away from Orion's heat shield during reentry into Earth's atmosphere. Once the spacecraft landed, engineers found more than 100 locations where the stresses of reentry damaged the heat shield.
Enlarge/ The Terran 1 rocket made its only flight (a beautiful one) in March 2023. (credit: Relativity Space/John Kraus)
A splashy California-based launch company named Relativity Space shared a photo of sleek-looking rocket hardware on its social mediachannels last week. The image featured an impressively large payload fairing, which protects satellites on the ride into space.
"Time to take a look at Terran R’s payload envelope," the company said, calling attention to three people standing to the left of the tall fairing.
Such an anodyne post seems an unlikely candidate to spark an analysis of what is really happening at Relativity Space, but that’s exactly what happened. Less than an hour after its publication, a source I've been talking to about Relativity for a while contacted me again.
Enlarge/ Image of the New Glenn second stage on its mobile test stand. (credit: Blue Origin)
Blue Origin plans to enter the final phase of its launch preparations for the New Glenn rocket on Monday by rolling the vehicle's second stage to Launch Complex 36 in Florida. Pending weather and other final considerations, a rollout could occur as early as Monday afternoon.
This is the flight version of the vehicle, with the exception of a fixed adaptor for weather protection during a test campaign. The launch company is targeting a hot fire test of the upper stage, which is powered by two BE-3U engines, within the next week or so.
The launch company, founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, is closing in on the debut launch of the massive New Glenn rocket, which will be one of the most powerful launch vehicles in the world. With a fully reusable first stage, New Glenn has a lift capacity of 45 metric tons to low-Earth orbit.
Enlarge/ Boeing's Starliner spacecraft is seen docked at the International Space Station on June 13. (credit: NASA)
On Saturday NASA astronaut Butch Wilmore noticed some strange noises emanating from a speaker inside the Starliner spacecraft.
"I've got a question about Starliner," Wilmore radioed down to Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "There's a strange noise coming through the speaker... I don't know what's making it."
Wilmore said he was not sure if there was some oddity in the connection between the station and the spacecraft causing the noise, or something else. He asked the flight controllers in Houston to see if they could listen to the audio inside the spacecraft. A few minutes later, Mission Control radioed back that they were linked via "hardline" to listen to audio inside Starliner, which has now been docked to the International Space Station for nearly three months.
Enlarge/ Boeing's Starliner spacecraft undocks from the International Space Station at the conclusion of an unpiloted test flight in May 2022. (credit: NASA)
NASA and Boeing are proceeding with final preparations to undock the Starliner spacecraft from the International Space Station next Friday, September 6, to head for landing at White Sands Space Harbor in southern New Mexico.
Astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who were supposed to return to Earth inside Starliner, will remain behind on the space station after NASA decided last week to conclude the Boeing test flight without its crew on board. NASA officials decided it was too risky to put the astronauts on Starliner after the spacecraft suffered thruster failures during its flight to the space station in early June.
Instead, Wilmore and Williams will come home on a SpaceX Dragon capsule no earlier than February, extending their planned stay on the space station from eight days to eight months. Flying on autopilot, the Starliner spacecraft is scheduled to depart the station at approximately 6:04 pm EDT (22:04 UTC) on September 6. The capsule will fire its engines to drop out of orbit and target a parachute-assisted landing in New Mexico at 12:03 am EDT (04:03 UTC) on September 7, NASA said in a statement Thursday.
Enlarge/ Nick Hague, left, and Zena Cardman train inside a Crew Dragon spacecraft mock-up in November 2023. (credit: NASA)
On Friday NASA publicly announced a decision that has roiled the top levels of the agency's human spaceflight program for several weeks. The space agency named the two crew members who will launch on a Crew Dragon mission set to lift off no earlier than September 24 to the International Space Station.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague will serve as the mission's commander, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will serve as mission specialist. Instead of a usual complement of four astronauts, a two-person crew was necessitated by the need to use the Crew 9 spacecraft, Freedom, as a rescue vehicle for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. They flew to the station in June aboard Boeing's Starliner vehicle, which has been deemed unsafe for them to return in.
Wilmore and Williams will join the Crew-9 increment on board the space station and fly back to Earth with Hague and Gorbunov next February.
Enlarge/ The first stage of the RFA One rocket collapses on its launch pad in Scotland after an aborted test-firing. (credit: Rocket Factory Augsburg)
Welcome to Edition 7.09 of the Rocket Report! When will SpaceX launch the next test flight of Starship? It certainly doesn't look to be imminent, with SpaceX ground teams in Texas feverishly working to beef up the launch pad in preparation for an attempt to catch the rocket's massive Super Heavy booster when it returns to the launch site on the next flight. Meanwhile, the FAA is reviewing SpaceX's proposal to recover the booster on land for the first time. And on Thursday, a NASA official monitoring SpaceX's Starship effort said the next test flight was scheduled for launch in the "fall," suggesting it could be a month or more away. Also, we've listed the next three launches as "TBD" (To Be Determined) because SpaceX is waiting for FAA approval to resume Falcon 9 launches following a booster landing failure this week, and the Polaris Dawn mission is on hold due to an unfavorable weather forecast.
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.
Firefly has a new chief executive. Jason Kim, former head of Boeing-owned satellite-maker Millennium Space Systems, has been appointed CEO of Firefly Aerospace effective October 1, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Kim joins Firefly as the ambitious space transportation startup, which has raised close to $600 million from investors since its 2021 founding, looks to launch a commercial lunar lander for NASA before the end of the year. Firefly is also working on a medium-lift rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman, with the goal of competing for missions to resupply the International Space Station and launch payloads for the US military and commercial customers.
The head of US Space Command said Wednesday he would like to see more transparency from the Chinese government on space debris, especially as one of China's newer rockets has shown a propensity for breaking apart and littering low-Earth orbit with hundreds of pieces of space junk.
Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of US Space Command, said he has observed some improvement in the dialogue between US and Chinese military officials this year. But the disintegration of the upper stage from a Long March 6A rocket earlier this month showed China could do more to prevent the creation of space debris and communicate openly about it when it happens.
The Chinese government acknowledged the breakup of the Long March 6A rocket's upper stage in a statement by its Ministry of Foreign Affairs on August 14, more than a week after the rocket's launch August 6 with the first batch of 18 Internet satellites for a megaconstellation of thousands of spacecraft analogous to SpaceX's Starlink network.
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