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Rocket Report: Channeling the future at Wallops; SpaceX recovers rocket wreckage

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China’s Space Pioneer seems to be back on track a year after an accidental launch.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a payload of 24 Starlink Internet satellites soars into space after launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, shortly after sunset on July 18, 2025. This image was taken in Santee, California, approximately 250 miles (400 kilometers) away from the launch site. Credit: Kevin Carter/Getty Images

Welcome to Edition 8.04 of the Rocket Report! The Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense shield will be a lot of things. Along with new sensors, command and control systems, and satellites, Golden Dome will require a lot of rockets. The pieces of the Golden Dome architecture operating in orbit will ride to space on commercial launch vehicles. And Golden Dome’s space-based interceptors will essentially be designed as flying fuel tanks with rocket engines. This shouldn’t be overlooked, and that’s why we include a couple of entries discussing Golden Dome in this week’s Rocket Report.

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.

Space-based interceptors are a real challenge. The newly installed head of the Pentagon’s Golden Dome missile defense shield knows the clock is ticking to show President Donald Trump some results before the end of his term in the White House, Ars reports. Gen. Michael Guetlein identified command-and-control and the development of space-based interceptors as two of the most pressing technical challenges for Golden Dome. He believes the command-and-control problem can be “overcome in pretty short order.” The space-based interceptor piece of the architecture is a different story.

Proven physics, unproven economics … “I think the real technical challenge will be building the space-based interceptor,” Guetlein said. “That technology exists. I believe we have proven every element of the physics that we can make it work. What we have not proven is, first, can I do it economically, and then second, can I do it at scale? Can I build enough satellites to get after the threat? Can I expand the industrial base fast enough to build those satellites? Do I have enough raw materials, etc.?” Military officials haven’t said how many space-based interceptors will be required for Golden Dome, but outside estimates put the number in the thousands.

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One big defense prime is posturing for Golden Dome. Northrop Grumman is conducting ground-based testing related to space-based interceptors as part of a competition for that segment of the Trump administration’s Golden Dome missile-defense initiative, The War Zone reports. Kathy Warden, Northrop Grumman’s CEO, highlighted the company’s work on space-based interceptors, as well as broader business opportunities stemming from Golden Dome, during a quarterly earnings call this week. Warden identified Northrop’s work in radars, drones, and command-and-control systems as potentially applicable to Golden Dome.

But here’s the real news … “It will also include new innovation, like space-based interceptors, which we’re testing now,” Warden continued. “These are ground-based tests today, and we are in competition, obviously, so not a lot of detail that I can provide here.” Warden declined to respond directly to a question about how the space-based interceptors Northrop Grumman is developing now will actually defeat their targets. (submitted by Biokleen)

Trump may slash environmental rules for rocket launches. The Trump administration is considering slashing rules meant to protect the environment and the public during commercial rocket launches, changes that companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have long sought, ProPublica reports. A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more launches or even more launch sites along their coastlines.

Getting political at the FAA … The order is a step toward the rollback of federal oversight that Musk, who has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, and others have pushed for. Commercial rocket launches have grown exponentially more frequent in recent years. In addition to slashing environmental rules, the draft executive order would make the head of the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation a political appointee. This is currently a civil servant position, but the last head of the office took a voluntary separation offer earlier this year.

There’s a SPAC for that. An unproven small launch startup is partnering with a severely depleted SPAC trust to do the impossible: go public in a deal they say will be valued at $400 million, TechCrunch reports. Innovative Rocket Technologies Inc., or iRocket, is set to merge with a Special Purpose Acquisition Company, or SPAC, founded by former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross. But the most recent regulatory filings by this SPAC showed it was in a tenuous financial position last year, with just $1.6 million held in trust. Likewise, iRocket isn’t flooded with cash. The company has raised only a few million in venture funding, a fraction of what would be needed to develop and test the company’s small orbital-class rocket, named Shockwave.

SpaceX traces a path to orbit for NASA. Two NASA satellites soared into orbit from California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, commencing a $170 million mission to study a phenomenon of space physics that has eluded researchers since the dawn of the Space Age, Ars reports. The twin spacecraft are part of the NASA-funded TRACERS mission, which will spend at least a year measuring plasma conditions in narrow regions of Earth’s magnetic field known as polar cusps. As the name suggests, these regions are located over the poles. They play an important but poorly understood role in creating colorful auroras as plasma streaming out from the Sun interacts with the magnetic field surrounding Earth. The same process drives geomagnetic storms capable of disrupting GPS navigation, radio communications, electrical grids, and satellite operations.

Plenty of room for more … The TRACERS satellites are relatively small, each about the size of a washing machine, so they filled only a fraction of the capacity of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Three other small NASA tech demo payloads hitched a ride to orbit with TRACERS, kicking off missions to test an experimental communications terminal, demonstrate an innovative scalable satellite platform made of individual building blocks, and study the link between Earth’s atmosphere and the Van Allen radiation belts. In addition to those missions, the European Space Agency launched its own CubeSat to test 5G communications from orbit. Five smallsats from an Australian company rounded out the group. Still, the Falcon 9 rocket’s payload shroud was filled with less than a quarter of the payload mass it could have delivered to the TRACERS mission’s targeted Sun-synchronous orbit.

Tianlong launch pad ready for action. Chinese startup Space Pioneer has completed a launch pad at Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China for its Tianlong 3 liquid propellent rocket ahead of a first orbital launch, Space News reports. Space Pioneer said the launch pad passed an acceptance test, and ground crews raised a full-scale model of the Tianlong 3 rocket on the launch pad. “The rehearsal test was successfully completed,” said Space Pioneer, one of China’s leading private launch companies. The activation of the launch pad followed a couple of weeks after Space Pioneer announced the completion of static loads testing on Tianlong 3.

More to come … While this is an important step forward for Space Pioneer, construction of the launch pad is just one element the company needs to finish before Tianlong 3 can lift off for the first time. In June 2024, the company ignited Tianlong 3’s nine-engine first stage on a test stand in China. But the rocket broke free of its moorings on the test stand and unexpectedly climbed into the sky before crashing in a fireball nearby. Space Pioneer says the “weak design of the rocket’s tail structure was the direct cause of the failure” last year. The company hasn’t identified next steps for Tianlong 3, or when it might be ready to fly. Tianlong 3 is a kerosene-fueled rocket with nine main engines, similar in design architecture and payload capacity to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Also, like Falcon 9, Tianlong 3 is supposed to have a recoverable and reusable first stage booster.

Dredging up an issue at Wallops. Rocket Lab has asked regulators for permission to transport oversized Neutron rocket structures through shallow waters to a spaceport off the coast of Virginia as it races to meet a September delivery deadline, TechCrunch reports. The request, which was made in July, is a temporary stopgap while the company awaits federal clearance to dredge a permanent channel to the Wallops Island site. Rocket Lab plans to launch its Neutron medium-lift rocket from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island, Virginia, a lower-traffic spaceport that’s surrounded by shallow channels and waterways. Rocket Lab has a sizable checklist to tick off before Neutron can make its orbital debut, like mating the rocket stages, performing a “wet dress” rehearsal, and getting its launch license from the Federal Aviation Administration. Before any of that can happen, the rocket hardware needs to make it onto the island from Rocket Lab’s factory on the nearby mainland.

Kedging bets … Access to the channel leading to Wallops Island is currently available only at low tides. So, Rocket Lab submitted an application earlier this year to dredge the channel. The dredging project was approved by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission in May, but the company has yet to start digging because it’s still awaiting federal sign-off from the Army Corps of Engineers. As the company waits for federal approval, Rocket Lab is seeking permission to use a temporary method called “kedging” to ensure the first five hardware deliveries can arrive on schedule starting in September. We don’t cover maritime issues in the Rocket Report, but if you’re interested in learning a little about kedging, here’s a link.

Any better ideas for an Exploration Upper Stage? Not surprisingly, Congress is pushing back against the Trump administration’s proposal to cancel the Space Launch System, the behemoth rocket NASA has developed to propel astronauts back to the Moon. But legislation making its way through the House of Representatives includes an interesting provision that would direct NASA to evaluate alternatives for the Boeing-built Exploration Upper Stage, an upgrade for the SLS rocket set to debut on its fourth flight, Ars reports. Essentially, the House Appropriations Committee is telling NASA to look for cheaper, faster options for a new SLS upper stage.

CYA EUS?  … The four-engine Exploration Upper Stage, or EUS, is an expensive undertaking. Last year, NASA’s inspector general reported that the new upper stage’s development costs had ballooned from $962 million to $2.8 billion, and the project had been delayed more than six years. That’s almost a year-for-year delay since NASA and Boeing started development of the EUS. So, what are the options if NASA went with a new upper stage for the SLS rocket? One possibility is a modified version of United Launch Alliance’s dual-engine Centaur V upper stage that flies on the Vulcan rocket. It’s no longer possible to keep flying the SLS rocket’s existing single-engine upper stage because ULA has shut down the production line for it.

Raising Super Heavy from the deep. For the second time, SpaceX has retrieved an engine section from one of its Super Heavy boosters from the Gulf of Mexico, NASASpaceflight.com reports. Images posted on social media showed the tail end of a Super Heavy booster being raised from the sea off the coast of northern Mexico. Most of the rocket’s 33 Raptor engines appear to still be attached to the lower section of the stainless steel booster. Online sleuths who closely track SpaceX’s activities at Starbase, Texas, have concluded the rocket recovered from the Gulf is Booster 13, which flew on the sixth test flight of the Starship mega-rocket last November. The booster ditched in the ocean after aborting an attempted catch back at the launch pad in South Texas.

But why? … SpaceX recovered the engine section of a different Super Heavy booster from the Gulf last year. The company’s motivation for salvaging the wreckage is unclear. “Speculated reasons include engineering research, environmental mitigation, or even historical preservation,” NASASpaceflight reports.

Next three launches

July 26: Vega C | CO3D & MicroCarb | Guiana Space Center, French Guiana | 02: 03 UTC

July 26: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-26 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 08: 34 UTC

July 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-2 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 03: 55 UTC

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Lawmakers writing NASA’s budget want a cheaper upper stage for the SLS rocket

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Eliminating the Block 1B upgrade now would save NASA at least $500 million per year.

Artist’s illustration of the Boeing-developed Exploration Upper Stage, with four hydrogen-fueled RL10 engines. Credit: NASA

Not surprisingly, Congress is pushing back against the Trump administration’s proposal to cancel the Space Launch System, the behemoth rocket NASA has developed to propel astronauts back to the Moon.

Spending bills making their way through both houses of Congress reject the White House’s plan to wind down the SLS rocket after two more launches, but the text of a draft budget recently released by the House Appropriations Committee suggests an openness to making some major changes to the program.

The next SLS flight, called Artemis II, is scheduled to lift off early next year to send a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon. Artemis III will follow a few years later on a mission to attempt a crew lunar landing at the Moon’s south pole. These missions follow Artemis I, a successful unpiloted test flight in 2022.

After Artemis III, the official policy of the Trump administration is to terminate the SLS program, along with the Orion crew capsule designed to launch on top of the rocket. The White House also proposed canceling NASA’s Gateway, a mini-space station to be placed in orbit around the Moon. NASA would instead procure commercial launches and commercial spacecraft to ferry astronauts between the Earth and the Moon, while focusing the agency’s long-term gaze toward Mars.

CYA EUS?

House and Senate appropriations bills would preserve SLS, Orion, and the Gateway. However, the House version of NASA’s budget has an interesting paragraph directing NASA to explore cheaper, faster options for a new SLS upper stage.

NASA has tasked Boeing, which also builds SLS core stages, to develop an Exploration Upper Stage for debut on the Artemis IV mission, the fourth flight of the Space Launch System. This new upper stage would have large propellant tanks and carry four engines instead of the single engine used on the rocket’s interim upper stage, which NASA is using for the first three SLS flights.

The House version of NASA’s fiscal year 2026 budget raises questions about the long-term future of the Exploration Upper Stage. In one section of the bill, House lawmakers would direct NASA to “evaluate alternatives to the current Exploration Upper Stage (EUS) design for SLS.” The committee members wrote the evaluation should focus on reducing development and production costs, shortening the schedule, and maintaining the SLS rocket’s lift capability.

“NASA should also evaluate how alternative designs could support the long-term evolution of SLS and broader exploration goals beyond low-Earth orbit,” the lawmakers wrote. “NASA is directed to assess various propulsion systems, stage configurations, infrastructure compatibility, commercial and international collaboration opportunities, and the cost and schedule impacts of each alternative.”

The SLS rocket is expensive, projected to cost at least $2.5 billion per launch, not counting development costs or expenses related to the Orion spacecraft and the ground systems required to launch it at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Those figures bring the total cost of an Artemis mission using SLS and Orion to more than $4 billion, according to NASA’s inspector general.

NASA’s Block 1B version of the SLS rocket will be substantially larger than Block 1. Credit: NASA

The EUS is likewise an expensive undertaking. Last year, NASA’s inspector general reported that the new upper stage’s development costs had ballooned from $962 million to $2.8 billion, and the Boeing-led project had been delayed more than six years. The version of the SLS rocket with the EUS, known as Block 1B, is supposed to deliver a 40 percent increase in performance over the Block 1 configuration used on the first three Space Launch System flights. Overall, NASA’s inspector general projected Block 1B’s development costs to total $5.7 billion.

Eliminating the Block 1B upgrade now would save NASA at least $500 million per year, and perhaps more if NASA could also end work on a costly mobile launch tower specifically designed to support SLS Block 1B missions.

NASA can’t go back to the interim upper stage, which is based on the design of the upper stage that flew on United Launch Alliance’s (ULA’s) now-retired Delta IV Heavy rocket. ULA has shut down its Delta production line, so there’s no way to build any more. What ULA does have is a new high-energy upper stage called Centaur V. This upper stage is sized for ULA’s new Vulcan rocket, with more capability than the interim upper stage but with lower performance than the larger EUS.

A season of compromise, maybe

Ars’ Eric Berger wrote last year about the possibility of flying the Centaur V upper stage on SLS missions.

Incorporating the Centaur V wouldn’t maintain the SLS rocket’s lift capability, as the House committee calls for in its appropriations bill. The primary reason for improving the rocket’s performance is to give SLS Block 1B enough oomph to carry “co-manifested” payloads, meaning it can launch an Orion crew capsule and equipment for NASA’s Gateway lunar space station on a single flight. The lunar Gateway is also teed up for cancellation in Trump’s budget proposal, but both congressional appropriations bills would save it, too. If the Gateway escapes cancellation, there are ways to launch its modules on commercial rockets.

Blue Origin also has an upper stage that could conceivably fly on the Space Launch System. But the second stage for Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket would be a more challenging match for SLS for several reasons, chiefly its 7-meter (23-foot) diameter—too wide to be a drop-in replacement for the interim upper stage used on Block 1. ULA’s Centaur V is much closer in size to the existing upper stage.

The House budget bill has passed a key subcommittee vote but won’t receive a vote from the full appropriations committee until after Congress’s August recess. A markup of the bill by the House Appropriations Committee scheduled for Thursday was postponed after Speaker Mike Johnson announced an early start to the recess this week.

Ars reported last week on the broad strokes of how the House and Senate appropriations bills would affect NASA. Since then, members of the House Appropriations Committee released the text of the report attached to their version of the NASA budget. The report, which includes the paragraph on the Exploration Upper Stage, provides policy guidance and more detailed direction on where NASA should spend its money.

The House’s draft budget includes $2.5 billion for the Space Launch System, close to this year’s funding level and $500 million more than the Trump administration’s request for the next fiscal year, which begins October 1. The budget would continue development of SLS Block 1B and the Exploration Upper Stage while NASA completes a six-month study of alternatives.

The report attached to the Senate appropriations bill for NASA has no specific instructions regarding the Exploration Upper Stage. But like the House bill, the Senate’s draft budget directs NASA to continue ordering spares and long-lead parts for SLS and Orion missions beyond Artemis III. Both versions of the NASA budget require the agency to continue with SLS and Orion until a suitable commercial, human-rated rocket and crew vehicle are proven ready for service.

In a further indication of Congress’ position on the SLS and Orion programs, lawmakers set aside more than $4 billion for the procurement of SLS rockets for the Artemis IV and Artemis V rockets in the reconciliation bill signed into law by President Donald Trump earlier this month.

Congress must pass a series of federal appropriations bills by October 1, when funding for the current fiscal year runs out. If Congress doesn’t act by then, it could pass a continuing resolution to maintain funding at levels close to this year’s budget or face a government shutdown.

Lawmakers will reconvene in Washington, DC, in early September in hopes of finishing work on the fiscal year 2026 budget. The section of the budget that includes NASA still must go through a markup hearing by the House Appropriations Committee and pass floor votes in the House and Senate. Then the two chambers will have to come to a compromise on the differences in their appropriations bill. Only then can the budget be put to another vote in each chamber and go to the White House for Trump’s signature.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Lawmakers writing NASA’s budget want a cheaper upper stage for the SLS rocket Read More »

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NASA tested a new SLS booster that may never fly, and the end of it blew off

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NASA didn’t want to say much about one of the tests, and the other one lost its nozzle.

An uncontained plume of exhaust appeared near the nozzle of an SLS solid rocket booster moments before its nozzle was destroyed during a test-firing Thursday. Credit: NASA

NASA’s Space Launch System appears to have a finite shelf life. The Trump administration wants to cancel it after just three launches, while the preliminary text of a bill making its way through Congress would extend it to five flights.

But chances are low the Space Launch System will make it to nine flights, and if it does, it’s questionable that it would reach that point before 2040. The SLS rocket is a core piece of NASA’s plan to return US astronauts to the Moon under the Artemis program, but the White House seeks to cancel the program in favor of cheaper commercial alternatives.

For the second time in less than a week, NASA test-fired new propulsion hardware Thursday that the agency would need to keep SLS alive. Last Friday, a new liquid-fueled RS-25 engine ignited on a test stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. The hydrogen-fueled engine is the first of its kind to be manufactured since the end of the Space Shuttle program. This particular RS-25 engine is assigned to power the fifth flight of the SLS rocket, a mission known as Artemis V.

Then, on Thursday of this week, NASA and Northrop Grumman test-fired a new solid rocket booster in Utah. This booster features a new design that NASA would use to power SLS rockets beginning with the ninth mission, or Artemis IX. The motor tested on Thursday isn’t flight-worthy. It’s a test unit that engineers will use to gather data on the rocket’s performance.

While the engine test in Mississippi apparently went according to plan, the ground firing of the new solid rocket booster didn’t go quite as smoothly. Less than two minutes into the burn, the motor’s exhaust nozzle violently shattered into countless shards of debris. You can watch the moment in the YouTube video below.

At the start of the program nearly 15 years ago, NASA and its backers in Congress pitched the SLS rocket as the powerhouse behind a new era of deep space exploration. The Space Launch System, they said, would have the advantage of recycling old space shuttle engines and boosters, fast-tracking the new rocket’s path to the launch pad for less money than the cost of an all-new vehicle.

That didn’t pan out. Each Artemis mission costs $4.2 billion per flight, and that’s with shuttle-era engines and boosters that NASA and its contractors already have in their inventories. NASA’s 16 leftover shuttle main engines are enough for the first four SLS flights. NASA has leftover parts for eight pairs of solid rocket boosters.

It has been 10 years

Recognizing that shuttle-era parts will eventually run out, NASA signed a contract with Aerojet Rocketdyne to set the stage for the production of new RS-25 engines in 2015. NASA later ordered an initial batch of six RS-25 engines from Aerojet, then added 18 more to the order in 2020, at a price of about $100 million per engine. NASA and its contractor aim to reduce the cost to $70 million per engine, but even that figure is many times the cost of engines of comparable size and power: Blue Origin’s BE-4 and SpaceX’s Raptor.

Finally, NASA test-fired a new flight-rated RS-25 engine for the first time last week at Stennis Space Center. The agency has often provided a livestream of its engine tests at Stennis, but it didn’t offer the public any live video. And this particular test was a pretty big deal. L3Harris, which acquired Aerojet Rocketdyne in 2023, has finally reactivated the RS-25 production line after a decade and billions of dollars of funding.

In fact, NASA made no public statement about the RS-25 test until Monday, and the agency didn’t mention its assignment to fly on the Artemis V mission. If the Trump administration gets its way, the engine will never fly. Maybe that’s fine, but after so long with so much taxpayer investment, this is a milestone worth publicizing, if not celebrating.

L3Harris issued a press release Tuesday confirming the engine’s planned use on the fifth SLS mission. The engine completed a 500-second acceptance test, throttling up to 111 percent of rated thrust, demonstrating more power than engines that flew on the space shuttle or on the first SLS launch in 2022.

A new RS-25 engine, No. 20001, was installed on its test stand in Mississippi earlier this year. Credit: NASA

“This successful acceptance test shows that we’ve been able to replicate the RS-25’s performance and reliability, while incorporating modern manufacturing techniques and upgraded components such as the main combustion chamber, nozzle, and pogo accumulator assembly,” said Kristin Houston, president of space propulsion and power systems at Aerojet Rocketdyne, L3Harris. “Our propulsion technology is key to ensuring the United States leads in lunar exploration, creates a sustained presence on the Moon and does not cede this strategic frontier to other nations.”

The test-firing last Friday came a few days before the 50th anniversary of the first space shuttle main engine test at Stennis on June 24, 1975. That engine carried the serial number 0001. The new RS-25 engine is designated No. 20001.

Watch out

NASA followed last week’s low-key engine test with the test-firing of a solid-fueled booster at Northrop Grumman’s rocket test site in Promontory, Utah, on Thursday. Held in place on its side, the booster produced 3.9 million pounds of thrust, outclassing the power output of the existing boosters assigned to the first eight SLS missions.

Unlike the RS-25 firing at Stennis, NASA chose to broadcast the booster test. Everything appeared to go well until 1 minute and 40 seconds into the burn, when a fiery plume of super-hot exhaust appeared to burn through part of the booster’s structure just above the nozzle. Moments later, the nozzle disintegrated.

Solid rocket boosters can’t be turned off after ignition, and for better or worse, the motor continued firing until it ran out of propellant about 30 seconds later. The rocket sparked a fire in the hills overlooking the test stand.

This was the first test-firing of the Booster Obsolescence and Life Extension (BOLE) program, which aims to develop a higher-performance solid rocket booster for SLS missions. NASA awarded Northrop Grumman a $3.2 billion contract in 2021 to produce boosters with existing shuttle parts for five SLS missions (Artemis IV-VIII), and design, develop, and test a new booster design for Artemis IX.

The boosters produce more than 75 percent of the thrust required to propel the SLS rocket off the launch pad with NASA’s crewed Orion spacecraft on top. Four RS-25 engines power the core stage, collectively generating more than 2 million pounds of thrust.

Northrop Grumman calls the new booster “the largest and most powerful segmented solid rocket motor ever built for human spaceflight.”

One of the most significant changes with the BOLE booster design is that it replaces shuttle-era steel cases with carbon-fiber composite cases. Northrop says the new cases are lighter and stronger. It also replaces the booster’s hydraulic thrust vector control steering system with an electronic system. The propellant packed inside the booster is also different, using a mix that Northrop packs inside its commercial rocket motors instead of the recipe used for the space shuttle.

Northrop Grumman has had a tough time with rocket nozzles in recent years. In 2019, a test motor for the company’s now-canceled Omega rocket lost its nozzle during a test-firing in Utah. Then, last year, a smaller Northrop-made booster flying on United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket lost its nozzle in flight. Vulcan’s guidance system and main engines corrected for the problem, and the rocket still achieved its planned orbit.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on “exotic” missions

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“There’s not yet a commercial reason only to go to the Moon with humans.”

In this long exposure photograph, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket pierces a cloud deck over Florida’s Space Coast on its inaugural flight January 16. Credit: Blue Origin

Eighteen months after leaving his job as a vice president at Amazon to take over as Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp has some thoughts on how commercial companies and government agencies like NASA should explore the Solar System together.

Limp had no background in the space industry before taking the helm of Jeff Bezos’ space company in December 2023. He started his career as a computer scientist at Apple, took a stint at a venture capital firm, and joined Amazon in 2010, where he managed development of consumer devices like Alexa, Kindle, and the Fire TV.

“I had no thoughts of ever running a space company,” Limp said Thursday at a space conference in Washington, DC. “I’ve done consumer electronics my whole life. Started at Apple and did a bunch of other things, and so when I decided to retire from Amazon, I was looking for something that I could give back a little bit, be a little bit more philanthropic in the sort of second half of my career. I didn’t want to stop working, just wanted to do something different. And about that same time, Jeff was looking for a CEO.”

While he’s still a relative newcomer to the space business, Limp’s views align with those of many policy wonks and industry leaders who have the ears of senior officials in the Trump administration, including Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee to become the next NASA administrator. Limp’s long tenure at Amazon and his selection as Blue Origin’s new CEO demonstrate that he also has the trust of Bezos, who was dissatisfied with his company’s slow progress in spaceflight.

“I think Jeff convinced me, and he’s very persuasive, that Blue didn’t need another rocket scientist,” Limp said. “We have thousands of the world’s best rocket scientists. What we needed was a little bit more decisiveness, a little bit more ability to think about: How do we manufacture at scale? And those are things I’ve done in the past, and so I’ve never looked back.”

David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, speaks during the 2025 Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit at George Washington University in Washington, DC, on May 29, 2025. Credit: Alex Wroblewski / AFP via Getty Images

Leave it to us

In remarks Thursday at the Humans to the Moon & Mars Summit, Limp advocated for commercial companies, like his own, taking a larger role in developing the transportation and infrastructure to meet lofty national objectives established by government leaders.

In some ways, NASA has long been moving in this direction, beginning with initiatives ceding most launch services to private industry in the 1990s. More recently, NASA has turned to commercial companies for crew and cargo deliveries to the International Space Station and cargo and human-rated Moon landers.

However, NASA, with the backing of key congressional leaders, has held an iron grip on having its own heavy-lift launcher and crew capsule to ferry astronauts between Earth and destinations beyond low-Earth orbit. Now, these vehicles—the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft—may be canceled if Congress agrees with Trump’s proposed NASA budget.

Commercial rockets close to matching or exceeding the Space Launch System’s lift capability are available for purchase or likely will be soon. These include SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher. Both are already key elements of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land US astronauts on the Moon as a stepping stone toward human expeditions to Mars.

But NASA still plans to use its government-owned Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft to transport astronauts out to the Moon, where they will rendezvous with a Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander to fly to and from the lunar surface.

SLS and Orion are expensive vehicles, costing more than $4 billion per launch for the initial set of four Artemis missions, according to a report by NASA’s inspector general. While commercial companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build elements of SLS and Orion, NASA acts as the prime integrator. The agency signed cost-plus contracts with the companies building SLS and Orion, meaning the government is on the hook for cost overruns. And there have been many.

Artist’s concept of Blue Ring, a propulsive spacecraft platform Blue Origin says it is developing to carry payloads to different orbits, and possibly all the way to Mars, at lower costs than feasible today. Credit: Blue Origin

NASA’s robotic science probes are also getting more expensive, even when accounting for inflation. Given the way NASA procures science probes, it would cost NASA more today to send an orbiter to Mars than it did for a similarly sized spacecraft a quarter-century ago.

This has to change in order for NASA and private companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX to make their ambitions a reality, Limp said Thursday.

“I think commercial folks can worry about the infrastructure,” he said. “We can do the launch. We can build the satellite buses that can get you to Mars much more frequently, that don’t cost billions of dollars. We can take a zero, and over time, maybe two zeros off of that. And if the governments around the world leave that to the commercial side, then there are a lot more resources that are freed up for the science side, for the national prestige side, and those types of things.”

The bottom line

Limp followed these comments with a dose of realism you don’t often hear from space industry executives. While there’s a growing list of commercially viable markets in space (things like Starlink and satellite servicing wouldn’t have been money-makers 20 years ago), the market for human spaceflight still requires some level of government commitment.

“I think the thing about bringing commercial aspects to exploration, to science, to the Moon, to Mars, is that we have to see a business prospect for it,” Limp said. “We have to turn it into a business, and that benefits American taxpayers because we will use that capital as efficiently as we can to get to the Moon, to get to Mars in a safe way, but in a way that’s the most efficient.

“We’re committed to that, no matter what the architecture looks like, but it does take the US government and international governments to have the motivation to do it,” he continued. “There’s not yet a commercial reason only to go to the Moon with humans. There are lots of commercial reasons to put robotics on the Moon and other types of things. So, we do need to have conviction that the Moon is important and Mars is important as well.”

Trump and Musk, an ally and advisor to the president, rekindled the question of Moon or Mars in a series of remarks during the early weeks of the new Trump administration. The Artemis Moon program began during the first Trump administration, with the goal of returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972. NASA would establish a sustained presence at the Moon, using our nearest planetary body as a proving ground for the next destination for humans in Solar System exploration: Mars.

Space industry rivals Jeff Bezos, second from left, and Elon Musk, second from right, inside the US Capitol for President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

SpaceX’s Starship, while capable of one day landing on the Moon, was designed for long-duration cruises to Mars. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon is tailored for lunar landings.

“As an American, I don’t want another Sputnik moment,” Limp said. “From my standpoint, getting boots on the Moon and setting the groundwork for permanence on the Moon is of national importance and urgency. Rest assured, Blue will do everything in its power to try to make that happen, but in a cost-effective way.”

NASA, please don’t leave us

Since retaking office in January, Trump has mentioned human missions to Mars multiple times, but not the Moon. Isaacman, who may be confirmed as NASA administrator by the Senate as soon as next week, told lawmakers in April that the agency should pursue human missions to the Moon and Mars simultaneously. The details of how that might work haven’t been released but could come out in the White House’s detailed budget proposal for fiscal-year 2026.

A blueprint of Trump’s spending proposal released May 2 includes a 25 percent cut to NASA’s overall budget, but the plan would provide additional money for human space exploration at the Moon and Mars. “The budget funds a program to replace SLS and Orion flights to the Moon with more cost-effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions,” the White House budget office wrote.

This part of the budget request is not controversial for industry leaders like Limp. On the other hand, the budget blueprint proposes slashing NASA’s space science budget by nearly $2.3 billion, Earth science by almost $1.2 billion, and space technology by $531 million.

While Limp didn’t directly address these budget proposals, these parts of NASA are largely focused on research projects that lack a commercial business case. Who else but a government space agency, or perhaps an especially generous type of philanthropic multi-billionaire, would pay to send a probe to study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa? Or a robot to zip by Pluto? Or how about a mission like Landsat, which documents everything from water resources to farms and urban sprawl and makes its data freely available to anyone with an Internet connection?

Most experts agree there are better ways to do these things. Reusable rockets, mass-produced satellite platforms, and improved contracting practices can bring down the costs of these missions. Bezos’ long-term goal for Blue Origin, which is to move all polluting factories off the Earth and into space, will be easier to achieve with government support, not just funding, Limp said.

“Getting up there, building factories on the Moon is a great step, and the government can really help with research dollars around that,” he said. “But it still does need the labs. The science missions need the JPLs [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] of the world. To make the human experience right, we need the Johnson Space Centers of the world to be able to kind of use that gold mine of institutional knowledge.

“I would say, and it might be a little provocative, let’s have those smart brains look on the forward-thinking types of things, the really edge of science, planning the really exotic missions, figuring out how to get to planetary bodies we haven’t gotten to before, and staying there,” Limp said.

Mark it down

For the first decade after Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, the company operated under the radar and seemed to move at a glacial pace. It launched its first small rocket in 2006 to an altitude of less than 300 feet and reached space with the suborbital New Shepard booster in 2015. Blue Origin finally reached orbit in January of this year on the debut test flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. Meanwhile, Blue Origin inked a deal with United Launch Alliance to supply a version of its New Glenn main engine to power that company’s Vulcan rocket.

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 lander, seen in the center, is taller than NASA’s Apollo lunar lander, currently the largest spacecraft to have landed on the Moon. Blue Moon MK2 is even larger, but all three landers are dwarfed in size by SpaceX’s Starship, NASA’s other Artemis lunar lander. Credit: Blue Origin

The next big mission for Blue Origin will be the first flight of its Blue Moon lander. The first version of Blue Moon, called MK1, will launch on a New Glenn rocket later this year and attempt to become the largest spacecraft to ever land on the Moon. This demonstration, without anyone onboard, is fully funded by Blue Origin, Limp said.

A future human-rated version, called MK2, is under development with the assistance of NASA. It will be larger and will require refueling to reach the lunar surface. Blue Moon MK1 can make a landing on one tank.

These are tangible achievements that would be the envy of any space industry startup not named SpaceX. But Musk’s rocket company left Blue Origin in the dust as it broke launch industry records repeatedly and began delivering NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in 2020. My colleague, Eric Berger, wrote a story in January describing Blue Origin’s culture. For much of its existence, one former employee said, Blue Origin had “zero incentive” to operate like SpaceX.

To ensure he would be in lock-step with his boss, Limp felt he had to ask a question that was on the minds of many industry insiders. He got the answer he wanted.

“The only question I really asked Jeff when I was talking about taking this job was, ‘What do you want Blue to be? Is it a hobby, or is it a business?'” Limp said. “And he had the right answer, which is, it’s a business, because I don’t know how to run a hobby, and I don’t think it’s sustainable.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on “exotic” missions Read More »

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As preps continue, it’s looking more likely NASA will fly the Artemis II mission

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NASA’s existing architecture still has a limited shelf life, and the agency will probably have multiple options for transporting astronauts to and from the Moon in the 2030s. A decision on the long-term future of SLS and Orion isn’t expected until the Trump administration’s nominee for NASA administrator, Jared Isaacman, takes office after confirmation by the Senate.

So, what is the plan for SLS?

There are different degrees of cancellation options. The most draconian would be an immediate order to stop work on Artemis II preparations. This is looking less likely than it did a few months ago and would come with its own costs. It would cost untold millions of dollars to disassemble and dispose of parts of Artemis II’s SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft. Canceling multibillion-dollar contracts with Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin would put NASA on the hook for significant termination costs.

Of course, these liabilities would be less than the $4.1 billion NASA’s inspector general estimates each of the first four Artemis missions will cost. Most of that money has already been spent for Artemis II, but if NASA spends several billion dollars on each Artemis mission, there won’t be much money left over to do other cool things.

Other options for NASA might be to set a transition point when the Artemis program would move off of the Space Launch System rocket, and perhaps even the Orion spacecraft, and switch to new vehicles.

Looking down on the Space Launch System for Artemis II. Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux

Another possibility, which seems to be low-hanging fruit for Artemis decision-makers, could be to cancel the development of a larger Exploration Upper Stage for the SLS rocket. If there are a finite number of SLS flights on NASA’s schedule, it’s difficult to justify the projected $5.7 billion cost of developing the upgraded Block 1B version of the Space Launch System. There are commercial options available to replace the rocket’s Boeing-built Exploration Upper Stage, as my colleague Eric Berger aptly described in a feature story last year.

For now, it looks like NASA’s orange behemoth has a little life left in it. All the hardware for the Artemis II mission has arrived at the launch site in Florida.

The Trump administration will release its fiscal-year 2026 budget request in the coming weeks. Maybe then NASA will also have a permanent administrator, and the veil will lift over the White House’s plans for Artemis.

As preps continue, it’s looking more likely NASA will fly the Artemis II mission Read More »

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Trump White House drops diversity plan for Moon landing it created back in 2019

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That was then. NASA’s landing page for the First Woman comic series, where young readers could download or listen to the comic, no longer exists. Callie and her crew survived the airless, radiation-bathed surface of the Moon, only to be wiped out by President Trump’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion executive order, signed two months ago.

Another casualty is the “first woman” language within the Artemis Program. For years, NASA’s main Artemis page, an archived version of which is linked here, included the following language: “With the Artemis campaign, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before.”

Artemis website changes

The current landing page for the Artemis program has excised this paragraph. It is not clear how recently the change was made. It was first noticed by British science journalist Oliver Morton.

The removal is perhaps more striking than Callie’s downfall since it was the first Trump administration that both created Artemis and highlighted its differences from Apollo by stating that the Artemis III lunar landing would fly the first woman and person of color to the lunar surface.

How NASA’s Artemis website appeared before recent changes.

Credit: NASA

How NASA’s Artemis website appeared before recent changes. Credit: NASA

For its part, NASA says it is simply complying with the White House executive order by making the changes.

“In keeping with the President’s Executive Order, we’re updating our language regarding plans to send crew to the lunar surface as part of NASA’s Artemis campaign,” an agency spokesperson said. “We look forward to learning more from about the Trump Administration’s plans for our agency and expanding exploration at the Moon and Mars for the benefit of all.”

The nominal date for the Artemis III landing is 2027, but few in the industry expect NASA to be able to hold to that date. With further delays likely, the space agency will probably not name a crew anytime soon.

Trump White House drops diversity plan for Moon landing it created back in 2019 Read More »

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Here’s the secret to how Firefly was able to nail its first lunar landing

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Darkness fell over Mare Crisium, ending a daily dose of dazzling images from the Moon.

Firefly’s X-band communications antenna (left) is marked with the logos of NASA, Firefly Aerospace, and the US flag. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost science station accomplished a lot on the Moon in the last two weeks. Among other things, its instruments drilled into the Moon’s surface, tested an extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner, and showed that future missions could use GPS navigation signals to navigate on the lunar surface.

These are all important achievements, gathering data that could shed light on the Moon’s formation and evolution, demonstrating new ways of collecting samples on other planets, and revealing the remarkable reach of the US military’s GPS satellite network.

But the pièce de résistance for Firefly’s first Moon mission might be the daily dose of imagery that streamed down from the Blue Ghost spacecraft. A suite of cameras recorded the cloud of dust created as the lander’s engine plume blew away the uppermost layer of lunar soil as it touched down March 2 in Mare Crisium, or the Sea of Crises. This location is in a flat basin situated on the upper right quadrant of the side of the Moon always facing the Earth.

Other images from Firefly’s lander showed the craft shooting tethered electrodes out onto the lunar surface, like a baseball outfielder trying to throw out a runner at home plate. Firefly’s cameras also showed the lander’s drill as it began to probe several meters into the Moon’s crust.

The first Blue Ghost mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program established in 2018 to partner with US companies for cargo transportation to the Moon. Firefly is one of 13 companies eligible to compete for CLPS missions, precursors to future astronaut landings on the Moon under NASA’s Artemis program.

Now, Firefly finds itself at the top of the pack of firms seeking to gain a foothold at the Moon.

Blue Ghost landed just after sunrise at Mare Crisium, an event shown in the blow video captured with four cameras mounted on the lander to observe how its engine plume interacted with loose soil on the lunar surface. The information will be useful as NASA plans to land astronauts on the Moon in the coming years.

“Although the data is still preliminary, the 3,000-plus images we captured appear to contain exactly the type of information we were hoping for in order to better understand plume-surface interaction and learn how to accurately model the phenomenon based on the number, size, thrust and configuration of the engines,” said Rob Maddock, project manager for NASA’s SCALPSS experiment.

One of the vehicle’s payloads, named Lunar PlanetVac, dropped from the bottom of the lander and released a blast of gas to blow fine-grained lunar soil into a collection chamber for sieving. Provided by a company named Honeybee Robotics, this device could be used as a cheaper alternative to other sample collection methods, such as robotic arms, on future planetary science missions.

Just over 4 days on the Moon’s surface and #BlueGhost is checking off several science milestones! 8 out of 10 @NASA payloads, including LPV, EDS, NGLR, RAC, RadPC, LuGRE, LISTER, and SCALPSS, have already met their mission objectives with more to come. Lunar PlanetVac for example… pic.twitter.com/i7pOg70qYi

— Firefly Aerospace (@Firefly_Space) March 6, 2025

After two weeks of pioneering work, the Blue Ghost lander fell into darkness Sunday when the Sun sank below the horizon, robbing it of solar power and plunging temperatures below minus 200° Fahrenheit (148°Celcius). The spacecraft’s internal electronics likely won’t survive the two-week-long lunar night.

A precoded message from Blue Ghost marked the moment Sunday afternoon, signaling a transition to “monument mode.”

“Goodnight friends,” Blue Ghost radioed Firefly’s mission control center in Central Texas. “After exchanging our final bits of data, I will hold vigil in this spot in Mare Crisium to watch humanity’s continued journey to the stars. Here, I will outlast your mightiest rivers, your tallest mountains, and perhaps even your species as we know it.”

Blue Ghost’s legacy is now secure as the first fully successful commercial lunar lander. Its two-week mission was perhaps just as remarkable for what didn’t happen as it was for what did. The spacecraft encountered no significant problems on its transit to the Moon, its final descent, or during surface operations.

One of the few surprises of the mission was that the lander got hotter a little sooner than engineers predicted. At lunar noon, when the Sun is highest in the sky, temperatures can soar to 250° F (121° C).

“We started noticing that the lander was getting hotter than we expected, and we couldn’t really figure out why, because it was a little early for lunar noon,” Ray Allensworth, Firefly’s spacecraft program director, told Ars. “So we went back and started evaluating and realized that the crater that we landed next to was actually reflecting a really significant amount of heat. So we went back and we updated our thermal models, incorporated that crater into it, and it matched the environment we were seeing.”

Early Friday morning, the Blue Ghost spacecraft captured the first high-definition views of a total solar eclipse from the Moon. At the same time that skywatchers on Earth were looking up to see the Moon turn an eerie blood red, Firefly’s cameras were looking back at us as the Sun, Earth, and Moon moved into alignment and darkness fell at Mare Crisium.

Diamond ring

The eclipse was a bonus for Firefly. It just happened to occur during the spacecraft’s two-week mission at the Moon, the timing of which was dependent on numerous factors, ranging from the readiness of the Blue Ghost lander to weather conditions at its launch site in Florida.

“We weren’t actually planning to have an eclipse until a few months prior to our launch, when we started evaluating and realizing that an eclipse was happening right before lunar sunset,” Allensworth said. “So luckily, that gave us some time to work some procedures and basically set up what we wanted to take images of, what cameras we wanted to run.”

The extra work paid off. Firefly released an image Friday showing a glint of sunlight reaching around the curvature of the Earth, some 250,000 miles (402,000 kilometers) away. This phenomenon is known as the “diamond ring” and is a subject of pursuit for many eclipse chasers, who travel to far-flung locations for a few minutes of totality.

A “diamond ring” appears around the edge of the Earth, a quarter-million miles from Firefly’s science station on the lunar surface. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

The Blue Ghost spacecraft, named for a species of firefly, took eclipse chasing to new heights. Not only did it see the Earth block the Sun from an unexplored location on the Moon, but the lander fell into shadow for 2 hours and 16 minutes, about 18 times longer than the longest possible total solar eclipse on the Earth.

The eclipse presented challenges for Firefly’s engineers monitoring the mission from Texas. Temperatures at the spacecraft’s airless landing site plummeted as darkness took hold, creating what Allensworth called a “pseudo lunar night.”

“We were seeing those temperatures rapidly start dropping,” Allensworth said Friday. “So it was kind of an interesting game of to play with the hardware to keep everything in its temperature bounds but also still powered on and capturing data.”

Shaping up

Using navigation cameras and autonomous guidance algorithms, the spacecraft detected potential hazards at its original landing site and diverted to a safer location more than 230 feet (70 meters) away, according to Allensworth.

Finally happy with the terrain below, Blue Ghost’s computer sent the command for landing, powered by eight thrusters pulsing in rapid succession to control the craft’s descent rate. The landing was gentler than engineers anticipated, coming down at less than 2.2 mph (1 meter per second).

According to preliminary data, Blue Ghost settled in a location just outside of its 330-foot (100-meter) target landing ellipse, probably due to the last-minute divert maneuvers ordered by the vehicle’s hazard avoidance system.

“It looks like we’re slightly out of it, but it’s really OK,” Allensworth said. “NASA has told us, more than anything, that they want us to make sure we land softly… They seem comfortable where we’re at.”

Firefly originally intended to develop a spacecraft based on the design of Israel’s Beresheet lander, which was the first private mission to attempt a landing on the Moon in 2019. The spacecraft crashed, and Firefly opted to go with a new design more responsive to NASA’s requirements.

“Managing the center of gravity and the mass of the lander is most significant, and that informs a lot of how it physically takes shape,” Allensworth said. “So we did want to keep certain things in mind about that, and that really is what led to the lander being wider, shorter, broader. We have these bigger foot pads on there. All of those things were very intentional to help make the lander as stable and predictable as possible.”

Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander, seen here inside the company’s spacecraft manufacturing facility in Cedar Park, Texas. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

These design choices must happen early in a spacecraft’s development. Landing on the Moon comes with numerous complications, including an often-uneven surface and the lack of an atmosphere, rendering parachutes useless. A lander targeting the Moon must navigate itself to a safe landing site without input from the ground.

The Odysseus, or Nova-C, lander built by Intuitive Machines snapped one of its legs and fell over on its side after arriving on the Moon last year. The altimeter on Odysseus failed, causing it to come down with too much horizontal velocity. The lander returned some scientific data from the Moon and qualified as a partial success. The spacecraft couldn’t recharge its batteries after landing on its side, and Odysseus shut down a few days after landing.

The second mission by Intuitive Machines reached the Moon on March 6, but it suffered the same fate. After tipping over, the Athena lander succumbed to low power within hours, preventing it from accomplishing its science mission for NASA.

The landers designed by Intuitive Machines are tall and skinny, towering more than 14 feet (4.3 meters) tall with a width of about 5.2 feet (1.6 meters). The Blue Ghost vehicle is short and squatty in shape—about 6.6 feet tall and 11.5 feet wide (2-by-3.5 meters). Firefly’s approach requires fewer landing legs than Intuitive Machines—four instead of six.

Steve Altemus, co-founder and CEO of Intuitive Machines, defended the design of his company’s lander in a press briefing after the second lunar landing tip-over earlier this month. The Nova-C lander isn’t too top-heavy for a safe landing because most of its cargo attaches to the bottom of the spacecraft, and for now, Altemus said Intuitive Machines is not considering a redesign.

Intuitive Machines stacked its two fuel and oxidizer tanks on top of each other, resulting in a taller vehicle. The Nova-C vehicle uses super-cold methane and liquid oxygen propellants, enabling a fast journey to the Moon over just a few days. The four propellant tanks on Blue Ghost are arranged in a diagonal configuration, with two containing hydrazine fuel and two holding an oxidizer called nitrogen tetroxide. Firefly’s Blue Ghost took about six weeks to travel from launch until landing.

The design trade-off means Firefly’s lander is heavier, with four tanks instead of two, according to Will Coogan, Blue Ghost’s chief engineer at Firefly. By going with a stockier lander design, Firefly needed to install four tanks because the spacecraft’s fuel and oxidizer have different densities. If Firefly went with just two tanks side-by-side, the spacecraft’s center of mass would change continually as it burns propellant during the final descent to the Moon, creating an unnecessary problem for the lander’s guidance, navigation, and control system to overcome.

“You want to avoid that,” Coogan told Ars before Blue Ghost’s launch. “What you can do is you can either get four tanks and have fuel and oxidizer at diagonal angles, and then you’re always centered, or you can stay with two tanks, and you can stack them.”

A camera on Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander captured a view of its shadow after touching down on the Moon just after sunrise on March 2. Earth looms over the horizon. Credit: Firefly Aerospace

The four landing legs on the Blue Ghost vehicle have shock-absorbing feet, with bowl-shaped pads able to bend if the lander comes down on a rock or a slope.

“If we did come in a little bit faster, we needed the legs to be able to take that, so we tested the legs really significantly on the ground,” Allensworth said. “We basically loaded them up on a makeshift weight bench at different angles and slammed it into the ground, slammed it into concrete, slammed it into regular simulant rocks, boulders, at different angles to really characterize what the legs could do.

“It’s actually really funny, because one of the edge cases that we didn’t test is if we came down very lightly, with almost no acceleration,” she said. “And that was the case that the lander landed in. I was joking with our structural engineer that he wasted all his time.”

Proof positive

Firefly delivered 10 NASA-sponsored science and technology demonstration experiments to the lunar surface, operating under contract with NASA’s CLPS program. CLPS builds on the commercial, service-based business model of NASA’s commercial cargo and crew program for transportation to the International Space Station.

NASA officials knew this approach was risky. The last landing on the Moon by a US spacecraft was the last Apollo mission in 1972, and most of the companies involved in CLPS are less than 20 years old, with little experience in deep space missions.

A Pittsburgh company named Astrobotic failed to reach the Moon on its first attempt in January 2024. The next month, Houston-based Intuitive Machines landed its Nova-C spacecraft on the lunar surface, but it tipped over after one of its legs snapped at the moment of touchdown.

Firefly, based in Cedar Park, Texas, was the third company to try a landing. Originally established as a rocket developer, Firefly signed up to be a CLPS provider and won a $101 million contract with NASA in 2021 to transport a government-funded science package to the Moon. NASA’s instruments aboard the Blue Ghost lander cost about $44 million.

The successful landing of Firefly’s Blue Ghost earlier this month buoyed NASA’s expectations for CLPS. “Overall, it’s been a fabulous, wonderful proof positive that the CLPS model does work,” said Brad Bailey, assistant deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

NASA has seven more CLPS missions on contract. The next could launch as soon as August when Blue Origin plans to send its first Blue Moon lander to the Moon. NASA has booked two more Blue Ghost missions with Firefly and two more landing attempts with Intuitive Machines, plus one more flight by Astrobotic and one lander from Draper Laboratory.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

Here’s the secret to how Firefly was able to nail its first lunar landing Read More »

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SpaceX readies a redo of last month’s ill-fated Starship test flight

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The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch Starship’s eighth test flight as soon as Monday.

Ship 34, destined to launch on the next Starship test flight, test-fired its engines in South Texas on February 12. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX plans to launch the eighth full-scale test flight of its enormous Starship rocket as soon as Monday after receiving regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The test flight will be a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to achieve on the previous Starship launch in January, when the rocket broke apart and showered debris over the Atlantic Ocean and Turks and Caicos Islands. The accident prevented SpaceX from completing many of the flight’s goals, such as testing Starship’s satellite deployment mechanism and new types of heat shield material.

Those things are high on the to-do list for Flight 8, set to lift off at 5: 30 pm CST (6: 30 pm EST; 23: 30 UTC) Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast. Over the weekend, SpaceX plans to mount the rocket’s Starship upper stage atop the Super Heavy booster already in position on the launch pad.

The fully stacked rocket will tower 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. Like the test flight on January 16, this launch will use a second-generation, Block 2, version of Starship with larger propellant tanks with 25 percent more volume than previous vehicle iterations. The payload compartment near the ship’s top is somewhat smaller than the payload bay on Block 1 Starships.

This block upgrade moves SpaceX closer to attempting more challenging things with Starship, such as returning the ship, or upper stage, back to the launch site from orbit. It will be caught with the launch tower at Starbase, just like SpaceX accomplished last year with the Super Heavy booster. Officials also want to bring Starship into service to launch Starlink Internet satellites and demonstrate in-orbit refueling, an enabling capability for future Starship flights to the Moon and Mars.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a Starship spinoff as a human-rated Moon lander for the Artemis lunar program. The mega-rocket is central to Elon Musk’s ambition to create a human settlement on Mars.

Another shot at glory

Other changes introduced on Starship Version 2 include redesigned forward flaps, which are smaller and closer to the tip of the ship’s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Technicians also removed some of the ship’s thermal protection tiles to “stress-test vulnerable areas” of the vehicle during descent. SpaceX is experimenting with metallic tile designs, including one with active cooling, that might be less brittle than the ceramic tiles used elsewhere on the ship.

Engineers also installed rudimentary catch fittings on the ship to evaluate how they respond to the heat of reentry, when temperatures outside the vehicle climb to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Read more about Starship Version in this previous story from Ars.

It will take about 1 hour and 6 minutes for Starship to fly from the launch pad in South Texas to a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. The rocket’s Super Heavy booster will fire 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines for two-and-a-half minutes as it climbs east from the Texas coastline, then jettison from the Starship upper stage and reverse course to return to Starbase for another catch with mechanical arms on the launch tower.

Meanwhile, Starship will ignite six Raptor engines and accelerate to a speed just shy of orbital velocity, putting the ship on a trajectory to reenter the atmosphere after soaring about halfway around the world.

Booster 15 perched on the launch mount at Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

If you’ve watched the last few Starship flights, this profile probably sounds familiar. SpaceX achieved successful splashdowns after three Starship test flights last year, and hoped to do it again before the premature end of Flight 7 in January. Instead, the accident was the most significant technical setback for the Starship program since the first full-scale test flight in 2023, which damaged the launch pad before the rocket spun out of control in the upper atmosphere.

Now, SpaceX hopes to get back on track. At the end of last year, company officials said they targeted as many as 25 Starship flights in 2025. Two months in, SpaceX is about to launch its second Starship of the year.

The breakup of Starship last month prevented SpaceX from evaluating the performance of the ship’s Pez-like satellite deployer and upgraded heat shield. Engineers are eager to see how those perform on Monday’s flight. Once in space, the ship will release four simulators replicating the approximate size and mass of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. They will follow the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and reenter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

That will be followed by a restart of a Raptor engine on Starship in space, repeating a feat first achieved on Flight 6 in November. Officials want to ensure Raptor engines can reignite reliably in space before actually launching Starship into a stable orbit, where the ship must burn an engine to guide itself back into the atmosphere for a controlled reentry. With another suborbital flight on tap Monday, the engine relight is purely a confidence-building demonstration and not critical for a safe return to Earth.

The flight plan for Starship’s next launch includes another attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower, a satellite deployment demonstration, and an important test of its heat shield. Credit: SpaceX

Then, about 47 minutes into the mission, Starship will plunge back into the atmosphere. If this flight is like the previous few, expect to see live high-definition video streaming back from Starship as super-heated plasma envelops the vehicle in a cloak of pink and orange. Finally, air resistance will slow the ship below the speed of sound, and just 20 seconds before reaching the ocean, the rocket will flip to a vertical orientation and reignite its Raptor engines again to brake for splashdown.

This is where SpaceX hopes Starship Version 2 will shine. Although three Starships have made it to the ocean intact, the scorching temperatures of reentry damaged parts of their heat shields and flaps. That won’t do for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing Starship with minimal or no refurbishment. Heat shield repairs slowed down the turnaround time between NASA’s space shuttle missions, and officials hope the upgraded heat shield on Starship Version 2 will decrease the downtime.

FAA’s green light

The FAA confirmed Friday it issued a launch license earlier this week for Starship Flight 8.

“The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” an FAA spokesperson said in a statement.

The federal regulator oversaw a SpaceX-led investigation into the failure of Flight 7. SpaceX said NASA, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the US Space Force also participated in the investigation, which determined that propellant leaks and fires in an aft compartment, or attic, of Starship led to the shutdown of its engines and eventual breakup.

Engineers concluded the leaks were most likely caused by a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected from ground testing.

Earlier this month, SpaceX completed an extended-duration static fire of the next Starship upper stage to test hardware modifications at multiple engine thrust levels. According to SpaceX, findings from the static fire informed changes to the fuel feed lines to Starship’s Raptor engines, adjustments to propellant temperatures, and a new operating thrust for the next test flight.

“To address flammability potential in the attic section on Starship, additional vents and a new purge system utilizing gaseous nitrogen are being added to the current generation of ships to make the area more robust to propellant leakage,” SpaceX said. “Future upgrades to Starship will introduce the Raptor 3 engine, reducing the attic volume and eliminating the majority of joints that can leak into this volume.”

FAA officials were apparently satisfied with all of this. The agency’s commercial spaceflight division completed a “comprehensive safety review” and determined Starship can return to flight operations while the investigation into the Flight 7 failure remains open. This isn’t new. The FAA also used this safety determination to expedite SpaceX launch license approvals last year as officials investigated mishaps on Starship and Falcon 9 rocket flights.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

SpaceX readies a redo of last month’s ill-fated Starship test flight Read More »

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

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Iterate, iterate, and iterate some more

The seventh test flight of Starship is scheduled for launch Thursday afternoon.

SpaceX’s upgraded Starship rocket stands on its launch pad at Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

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.

You might think of next week’s Starship test flight as an apéritif before the entrées to come. Ars recently spoke with Lisa Watson-Morgan, the NASA engineer overseeing the agency’s contract with SpaceX to develop a modified version of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon. NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop and fly two Starship human landing missions under the umbrella of the agency’s Artemis program to return humans to the Moon.

We are publishing the entire interview with Watson-Morgan below, but first, let’s assess what SpaceX might accomplish with Starship this year.

There are many things to watch for on this test flight, including the deployment of 10 satellite simulators to test the ship’s payload accommodations and the performance of a beefed-up heat shield as the vehicle blazes through the atmosphere for reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

If this all works, SpaceX may try to launch a ship into low-Earth orbit on the eighth flight, expected to launch in the next couple of months. All of the Starship test flights to date have intentionally flown on suborbital trajectories, bringing the ship back toward reentry over the sea northwest of Australia after traveling halfway around the world.

Then, there’s an even bigger version of Starship called Block 3 that could begin flying before the end of the year. This version of the ship is the one that SpaceX will use to start experimenting with in-orbit refueling, according to Watson-Morgan.

In order to test refueling, two Starships will dock together in orbit, allowing one vehicle to transfer super-cold methane and liquid oxygen into the other. Nothing like this on this scale has ever been attempted before. Future Starship missions to the Moon and Mars may require 10 or more tanker missions to gas up in low-Earth orbit. All of these missions will use different versions of the same basic Starship design: a human-rated lunar lander, a propellant depot, and a refueling tanker.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

Questions for 2025

Catching Starship back at its launch tower and demonstrating orbital propellant transfer are the two most significant milestones on SpaceX’s roadmap for 2025.

SpaceX officials have said they aim to fly as many as 25 Starship missions this year, allowing engineers to more rapidly iterate on the vehicle’s design. SpaceX is constructing a second launch pad at its Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, to help speed up the launch cadence.

Can SpaceX achieve this flight rate in 2025? Will faster Starship manufacturing and reusability help the company fly more often? Will SpaceX fly its first ship-to-ship propellant transfer demonstration this year? When will Starship begin launching large batches of new-generation Starlink Internet satellites?

Licensing delays at the Federal Aviation Administration have been a thorn in SpaceX’s side for the last couple of years. Will those go away under the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who counts SpaceX founder Elon Musk as a key adviser?

And will SpaceX gain a larger role in NASA’s Artemis lunar program? The Artemis program’s architecture is sure to be reviewed by the Trump administration and the nominee for the agency’s next administrator, billionaire businessman and astronaut Jared Isaacman.

The very expensive Space Launch System rocket, developed by NASA with Boeing and other traditional aerospace contractors, might be canceled. NASA currently envisions the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as the transportation system to ferry astronauts between Earth and the vicinity of the Moon, where crews would meet up with a landing vehicle provided by commercial partners SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Watson-Morgan didn’t have answers to all of these questions. Many of them are well outside of her purview as Human Landing System program manager, so Ars didn’t ask. Instead, Ars discussed technical and schedule concerns with her during the half-hour interview. Here is one part of the discussion, lightly edited for clarity.

Ars: What do you hope to see from Flight 7 of Starship?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: One of the exciting parts of working with SpaceX are these test flights. They have a really fast turnaround, where they put in different lessons learned. I think you saw many of the flight objectives that they discussed from Flight 6, which was a great success. I think they mentioned different thermal testing experiments that they put on the ship in order to understand the different heating, the different loads on certain areas of the system. All that was really good with each one of those, in addition to how they configure the tiles. Then, from that, there’ll be additional tests that they will put on Flight 7, so you kind of get this iterative improvement and learning that we’ll get to see in Flight 7. So Flight 7 is the first Version 2 of their ship set. When I say that, I mean the ship, the booster, all the systems associated with it. So, from that, it’s really more just understanding how the system, how the flaps, how all of that interacts and works as they’re coming back in. Hopefully we’ll get to see some catches, that’s always exciting.

Ars: How did the in-space Raptor engine relight go on Flight 6 (on November 19)?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: Beautifully. And that’s something that’s really important to us because when we’re sitting on the Moon… well, actually, the whole path to the Moon as we are getting ready to land on the Moon, we’ll perform a series of maneuvers, and the Raptors will have an environment that is very, very cold. To that, it’s going to be important that they’re able to relight for landing purposes. So that was a great first step towards that. In addition, after we land, clearly the Raptors will be off, and it will get very cold, and they will have to relight in a cold environment (to get off the Moon). So that’s why that step was critical for the Human Landing System and NASA’s return to the Moon.

A recent artist’s illustration of two Starships docked together in low-Earth orbit. Credit: SpaceX

Ars: Which version of the ship is required for the propellant transfer demonstration, and what new features are on that version to enable this test?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: We’re looking forward to the Version 3, which is what’s coming up later on, sometime in ’25, in the near term, because that’s what we need for propellant transfer and the cryo fluid work that is also important to us… There are different systems in the V3 set that will help us with cryo fluid management. Obviously, with those, we have to have the couplers and the quick-disconnects in order for the two systems to have the right guidance, navigation, trajectory, all the control systems needed to hold their station-keeping in order to dock with each other, and then perform the fluid transfer. So all the fluid lines and all that’s associated with that, those systems, which we have seen in tests and held pieces of when we’ve been working with them at their site, we’ll get to see those actually in action on orbit.

Ars: Have there been any ground tests of these systems, whether it’s fluid couplers or docking systems? Can you talk about some of the ground tests that have gone into this development?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: Oh, absolutely. We’ve been working with them on ground tests for this past year. We’ve seen the ground testing and reviewed the data. Our team works with them on what we deem necessary for the various milestones. While the milestone contains proprietary (information), we work closely with them to ensure that it’s going to meet the intent, safety-wise as well as technically, of what we’re going to need to see. So they’ve done that.

Even more exciting, they have recently shipped some of their docking systems to the Johnson Space Center for testing with the Orion Lockheed Martin docking system, and that’s for Artemis III. Clearly, that’s how we’re going to receive the crew. So those are some exciting tests that we’ve been doing this past year as well that’s not just focused on, say, the booster and the ship. There are a lot of crew systems that are being developed now. We’re in work with them on how we’re going to effectuate the crew manual control requirements that we have, so it’s been a great balance to see what the crew needs, given the size of the ship. That’s been a great set of work. We have crew office hours where the crew travels to Hawthorne [SpaceX headquarters in California] and works one-on-one with the different responsible engineers in the different technical disciplines to make sure that they understand not just little words on the paper from a requirement, but actually what this means, and then how systems can be operated.

Ars: For the docking system, Orion uses the NASA Docking System, and SpaceX brings its own design to bear on Starship?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: This is something that I think the Human Landing System has done exceptionally well. When we wrote our high-level set of requirements, we also wrote it with a bigger picture in mind—looked into the overall standards of how things are typically done, and we just said it has to be compliant with it. So it’s a docking standard compliance, and SpaceX clearly meets that. They certainly do have the Dragon heritage, of course, with the International Space Station. So, because of that, we have high confidence that they’re all going to work very well. Still, it’s important to go ahead and perform the ground testing and get as much of that out of the way as we can.

Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s HLS program manager, is based at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Credit: ASA/Aubrey Gemignani

Ars: How far along is the development and design of the layout of the crew compartment at the top of Starship? Is it far along, or is it still in the conceptual phase? What can you say about that?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: It’s much further along there. We’ve had our environmental control and life support systems, whether it’s carbon dioxide monitoring fans to make sure the air is circulating properly. We’ve been in a lot of work with SpaceX on the temperature. It’s… a large area (for the crew). The seats, making sure that the crew seats and the loads on that are appropriate. For all of that work, as the analysis work has been performed, the NASA team is reviewing it. They had a mock-up, actually, of some of their life support systems even as far back as eight-plus months ago. So there’s been a lot of progress on that.

Ars: Is SpaceX planning to use a touchscreen design for crew displays and controls, like they do with the Dragon spacecraft?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: We’re in talks about that, about what would be the best approach for the crew for the dynamic environment of landing.

Ars: I can imagine it is a pretty dynamic environment with those Raptor engines firing. It’s almost like a launch in reverse.

Lisa Watson-Morgan: Right. Those are some of the topics that get discussed in the crew office hours. That’s why it’s good to have the crew interacting directly, in addition to the different discipline leads, whether it’s structural, mechanical, propulsion, to have all those folks talking guidance and having control to say, “OK, well, when the system does this, here’s the mode we expect to see. Here’s the impact on the crew. And is this condition, or is the option space that we have on the table, appropriate for the next step, with respect to the displays.”

Ars: One of the big things SpaceX needs to prove out before going to the Moon with Starship is in-orbit propellant transfer. When do you see the ship-to-ship demonstration occurring?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: I see it occurring in ’25.

Ars: Anything more specific about the schedule for that?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: That’d be a question for SpaceX because they do have a number of flights that they’re performing commercially, for their maturity. We get the benefit of that. It’s actually a great partnership. I’ll tell you, it’s really good working with them on this, but they’d have to answer that question. I do foresee it happening in ’25.

Ars: What things do you need to see SpaceX accomplish before they’re ready for the refueling demo? I’m thinking of things like the second launch tower, potentially. Do they need to demonstrate a ship catch or anything like that before going for orbital refueling?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: I would say none of that’s required. You just kind of get down to, what are the basics? What are the basics that you need? So you need to be able to launch rapidly off the same pad, even. They’ve shown they can launch and catch within a matter of minutes. So that is good confidence there. The catching is part of their reuse strategy, which is more of their commercial approach, and not a NASA requirement. NASA reaps the benefit of it by good pricing as a result of their commercial model, but it is not a requirement that we have. So they could theoretically use the same pad to perform the propellant transfer and the long-duration flight, because all it requires is two launches, really, within a specified time period to where the two systems can meet in a planned trajectory or orbit to do the propellant transfer. So they could launch the first one, and then within a week or two or three, depending on what the concept of operations was that we thought we could achieve at that time, and then have the propellant transfer demo occur that way. So you don’t necessarily need two pads, but you do need more thermal characterization of the ship. I would say that is one of the areas (we need to see data on), and that is one of the reasons, I think, why they’re working so diligently on that.

Ars: You mentioned the long-duration flight demonstration. What does that entail?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: The simple objectives are to launch two different tankers or Starships. The Starship will eventually be a crewed system. Clearly, the ones that we’re talking about for the propellant transfer are not. It’s just to have the booster and Starship system launch, and within a few weeks, have another one launch, and have them rendezvous. They need to be able to find each other with their sensors. They need to be able to come close, very, very close, and they need to be able to dock together, connect, do the quick connect, and make sure they are able, then, to flow propellant and LOX (liquid oxygen) to another system. Then, we need to be able to measure the quantity of how much has gone over. And from that, then they need to safely undock and dispose.

Ars: So the long-duration flight demonstration is just part of what SpaceX needs to do in order to be ready for the propellant transfer demonstration?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: We call it long duration just because it’s not a 45-minute or an hour flight. Long duration, obviously, that’s a relative statement, but it’s a system that can stay up long enough to be able to find another Starship and perform those maneuvers and flow of fuel and LOX.

Ars: How much propellant will you transfer with this demonstration, and do you think you’ll get all the data you need in one demonstration, or will SpaceX need to try this several times?

Lisa Watson-Morgan: That’s something you can ask SpaceX (about how much propellant will be transferred). Clearly, I know, but there’s some sensitivity there. You’ve seen our requirements in our initial solicitation. We have thresholds and goals, meaning we want you to at least do this, but more is better, and that’s typically how we work almost everything. Working with commercial industry in these fixed-price contracts has worked exceptionally well, because when you have providers that are also wanting to explore commercially or trying to make a commercial system, they are interested in pushing more than what we would typically ask for, and so often we get that for an incredibly fair price.

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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

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

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Starship will test its payload deployment mechanism on its seventh test flight.

SpaceX’s first second-generation Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, could launch as soon as January 13. Credit: SpaceX

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. Then, teams will complete the final tests and preparations for the countdown on Monday.

“The upcoming flight test will launch a new generation ship with significant upgrades, attempt Starship’s first payload deployment test, fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the Super Heavy booster,” SpaceX officials wrote in a mission overview posted on the company’s website.

The mission Monday will repeat many of the maneuvers SpaceX demonstrated on the last two Starship test flights. The company will again attempt to return the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and attempt to catch it with two mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” on the launch tower approximately seven minutes after liftoff.

SpaceX accomplished this feat on the fifth Starship test flight in October but aborted a catch attempt on a November flight because of damaged sensors on the tower chopsticks. The booster, which remained healthy, diverted to a controlled splashdown offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

SpaceX’s next Starship prototype, Ship 33, emerges from its assembly building at Starbase, Texas, early Thursday morning. Credit: SpaceX/Elon Musk via X

For the next flight, SpaceX added protections to the sensors on the tower and will test radar instruments on the chopsticks to provide more accurate ranging measurements for returning vehicles. These modifications should improve the odds of a successful catch of the Super Heavy booster and of Starship on future missions.

In another first, one of the 33 Raptor engines that will fly on this Super Heavy booster—designated Booster 14 in SpaceX’s fleet—was recovered from the booster that launched and returned to Starbase in October. For SpaceX, this is a step toward eventually flying the entire rocket repeatedly. The Super Heavy booster and Starship spacecraft are designed for full reusability.

After separation of the booster stage, the Starship upper stage will ignite six engines to accelerate to nearly orbital velocity, attaining enough energy to fly halfway around the world before gravity pulls it back into the atmosphere. Like the past three test flights, SpaceX will guide Starship toward a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia around one hour after liftoff.

New ship, new goals

The most significant changes engineers will test next week are on the ship, or upper stage, of SpaceX’s enormous rocket. The most obvious difference on Starship Version 2, or Block 2, is with the vehicle’s forward flaps. Engineers redesigned the flaps, reducing their size and repositioning them closer to the tip of the ship’s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Cameras onboard Starship showed heat damage to the flaps during reentry on test flights last year.

SpaceX is also developing an upgraded Super Heavy booster that is slightly taller than the existing model. The next version of the booster will produce more thrust and will be slightly taller than the current Super Heavy, but for the upcoming test flight, SpaceX will still use the first-generation booster design.

Starship Block 2 has smaller flaps than previous ships. The flaps are located in a more leeward position to protect them from the heat of reentry. Credit: SpaceX

For next week’s flight, Super Heavy and Starship combined will hold more than 10.5 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer. The ship’s propellant tanks have 25 percent more volume than previous iterations of the vehicle, and the payload compartment, which contains 10 mock-ups of Starlink Internet satellites on this launch, is somewhat smaller. Put together, the changes add nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) to the rocket’s height, bringing the full stack to approximately 404 feet (123.1 meters).

This means SpaceX will break its own record for launching the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. And the company will do it again with the even larger Starship Version 3, which SpaceX says will have nine upper stage engines, instead of six, and will deliver up to 440,000 pounds (200 metric tons) of cargo to low-Earth orbit.

Other changes debuting with Starship Version 2 next week include:

• Vacuum jacketing of propellant feedlines

• A new fuel feedline system for the ship’s Raptor vacuum engines

• An improved propulsion avionics module controlling vehicle valves and reading sensors

• Redesigned inertial navigation and star tracking sensors

• Integrated smart batteries and power units to distribute 2.7 megawatts of power across the ship

• An increase to more than 30 cameras onboard the vehicle.

Laying the foundation

The enhanced avionics system will support future missions to prove SpaceX’s ability to refuel Starships in orbit and return the ship to the launch site. For example, SpaceX will fly a more powerful flight computer and new antennas that integrate connectivity with the Starlink Internet constellation, GPS navigation satellites, and backup functions for traditional radio communication links. With Starlink, SpaceX said Starship can stream more than 120Mbps of real-time high-definition video and telemetry in every phase of flight.

These changes “all add additional vehicle performance and the ability to fly longer missions,” SpaceX said. “The ship’s heat shield will also use the latest generation tiles and includes a backup layer to protect from missing or damaged tiles.”

Somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, a little more than 17 minutes into the flight, Starship will deploy 10 dummy payloads similar in size and weight to next-generation Starlink satellites. The mock-ups will soar around the world on a suborbital trajectory, just like Starship, and reenter over the unpopulated Indian Ocean. Future Starship flights will launch real next-gen Starlink satellites to add capacity to the Starlink broadband network, but they’re too big and too heavy to launch on SpaceX’s smaller Falcon 9 rocket.

SpaceX will again reignite one of the ship’s Raptor engines in the vacuum of space, repeating a successful test achieved on Flight 6 in November. The engine restart capability is important for several reasons. It gives the ship the ability to maneuver itself out of low-Earth orbit for reentry (not a concern for Starship’s suborbital tests), and will allow the vehicle to propel itself to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars once SpaceX masters the technology for orbital refueling.

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

NASA has contracts with SpaceX to build a derivative of Starship to ferry astronauts to and from the surface of the Moon for the agency’s Artemis program. The NASA program manager overseeing SpaceX’s lunar lander contract, Lisa Watson-Morgan, said she was pleased with the results of the in-space engine restart demo last year.

“The whole path to the Moon, as we are getting ready to land on the Moon, we’ll perform a series of maneuvers, and the Raptors will have an environment that is very, very cold,” Morgan told Ars in a recent interview. “To that, it’s going to be important that they’re able to relight for landing purposes. So that was a great first step towards that.

“In addition, after we land, clearly, the Raptors will be off, and it will get very cold, and they will have to relight in a cold environment (to launch the crews off the lunar surface),” she said. “So that’s why that step was critical for the Human Landing System and NASA’s return to the Moon.”

“The biggest technology challenge remaining”

SpaceX continues to experiment with Starship’s heat shield, which the company’s founder and CEO, Elon Musk, has described as “the biggest technology challenge remaining with Starship.” In order for SpaceX to achieve its lofty goal of launching Starships multiple times per day, the heat shield needs to be fully and immediately reusable.

While the last three ships have softly splashed down in the Indian Ocean, some of their heat-absorbing tiles stripped away from the vehicle during reentry, when it’s exposed to temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius).

Engineers removed tiles from some areas of the ship for next week’s test flight in order to “stress-test” vulnerable parts of the vehicle. They also smoothed and tapered the edge of the tile line, where the ceramic heat shield gives way to the ship’s stainless steel skin, to address “hot spots” observed during reentry on the most recent test flight.

“Multiple metallic tile options, including one with active cooling, will test alternative materials for protecting Starship during reentry,” SpaceX said.

SpaceX is also flying rudimentary catch fittings on Starship to test their thermal performance on reentry. The ship will fly a more demanding trajectory during descent to probe the structural limits of the redesigned flaps at the point of maximum entry dynamic pressure, according to SpaceX.

All told, SpaceX’s inclusion of a satellite deployment demo and ship upgrades on next week’s test flight will lay the foundation for future missions, perhaps in the next few months, to take the next great leap in Starship development.

In comments following the last Starship test flight in November, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X that the company could try to return the ship to a catch back at the launch site—something that would require the vehicle to complete at least one full orbit of Earth—as soon as the next flight following Monday’s mission.

“We will do one more ocean landing of the ship,” Musk posted. “If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.”

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Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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

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NASA says Orion’s heat shield is good to go for Artemis II—but does it matter?

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“We have since determined that while the capsule was dipping in and out of the atmosphere, as part of that planned skip entry, heat accumulated inside the heat shield outer layer, leading to gases forming and becoming trapped inside the heat shield,” said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator. “This caused internal pressure to build up and led to cracking and uneven shedding of that outer layer.”

An independent team of experts concurred with NASA’s determination of the root cause, Melroy said.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy, Associate Administrator Jim Free, and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman speak with reporters Thursday in Washington, DC. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

Counterintuitively, this means NASA engineers are comfortable with the safety of the heat shield if the Orion spacecraft reenters the atmosphere at a slightly steeper angle than it did on Artemis I and spends more time subjected to higher temperatures.

When the Orion spacecraft climbed back out of the atmosphere during the Artemis I skip reentry, a period known as the skip dwell, NASA said heating rates decreased and thermal energy accumulated inside the heat shield’s Avcoat material. This generated gases inside the heat shield through a process known as pyrolysis. 

“Pyrolysis is just burning without oxygen,” said Amit Kshatriya, deputy associate administrator of NASA’s Moon to Mars program. “We learned that as part of that reaction, the permeability of the Avcoat material is essential.”

During the skip dwell, “the production of those gases was higher than the permeability could tolerate, so as a result, pressure differential was created. That pressure led to cracks in plane with the outer mold line of the vehicle,” Kshatriya said.

NASA didn’t know this could happen because engineers tested the heat shield on the ground at higher temperatures than the Orion spacecraft encountered in flight to prove the thermal barrier could withstand the most extreme possible heating during reentry.

“What we missed was this critical region in the middle, and we missed that region because we didn’t have the test facilities to produce the low-level energies that occur during skip and dwell,” Kshatriya said Thursday.

During the investigation, NASA replicated the charring and cracking after engineers devised a test procedure to expose Avcoat heat shield material to the actual conditions of the Artemis I reentry.

So, for Artemis II, NASA plans to modify the reentry trajectory to reduce the skip reentry’s dwell time. Let’s include some numbers to help illustrate the difference.

The distance traveled by Artemis I during the reentry phase of the mission was more than 3,000 nautical miles (3,452 miles; 5,556 kilometers), according to Kshatriya. This downrange distance will be limited to no more than 1,775 nautical miles (2,042 miles; 3,287 kilometers) on Artemis II, effectively reducing the dwell time the Orion spacecraft spends in the lower heating regime that led to the cracking on Artemis I.

NASA’s inspector general report in May included new images of Orion’s heat shield that the agency did not initially release after the Artemis I mission. Credit: NASA Inspector General

With this change, Kshatriya said NASA engineers don’t expect to see the heat shield erosion they saw on Artemis I. “The gas generation that occurs during that skip dwell is sufficiently low that the environment for crack generation is not going to overwhelm the structural integrity of the char layer.”

For future Orion spaceships, NASA and its Orion prime contractor, Lockheed Martin, will incorporate changes to address the heat shield’s permeability problem.

Waiting for what?

NASA officials discussed the heat shield issue, and broader plans for the Artemis program, in a press conference in Washington on Thursday. But the event’s timing added a coat of incredulity to much of what they said. President-elect Donald Trump, with SpaceX founder Elon Musk in his ear, has vowed to cut wasteful government spending.

NASA says Orion’s heat shield is good to go for Artemis II—but does it matter? Read More »

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Trump nominates Jared Isaacman to become the next NASA administrator

artemis, Donald Trump, human spaceflight, jared isaacman, NASA, Science, Space, space policy, spacex / /

President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday he has selected Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman and space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX, to become the next NASA administrator.

“I am delighted to nominate Jared Isaacman, an accomplished business leader, philanthropist, pilot, and astronaut, as Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social. “Jared will drive NASA’s mission of discovery and inspiration, paving the way for groundbreaking achievements in space science, technology, and exploration.”

In a post on X, Isaacman said he was “honored” to receive Trump’s nomination.

“Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history,” Isaacman wrote. “On my last mission to space, my crew and I traveled farther from Earth than anyone in over half a century. I can confidently say this second space age has only just begun.”

Top officials who served at NASA under President Trump and President Obama endorsed Isaacman as the next NASA boss.

“Jared Isaacman will be an outstanding NASA Administrator and leader of the NASA family,” said Jim Bridenstine, who led NASA as administrator during Trump’s first term in the White House. “Jared’s vision for pushing boundaries, paired with his proven track record of success in private industry, positions him as an ideal candidate to lead NASA into a bold new era of exploration and discovery. I urge the Senate to swiftly confirm him.”

Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator during the Obama administration, wrote on X that Isaacman’s nomination was “terrific news,” adding that “he has the opportunity to build on NASA’s amazing accomplishments to pave our way to an even brighter future.”

Isaacman, 41, is the founder and CEO of Shift4, a mobile payment processing platform, and co-founded Draken International, which owns a fleet of retired fighter jets to pose as adversaries for military air combat training. If the Senate confirms his nomination, Isaacman would become the 15th NASA administrator, and the fourth who has flown in space.

Trump nominates Jared Isaacman to become the next NASA administrator Read More »