launch – Page 2

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

artemis, blue origin, Commercial space, dave limp, Jeff Bezos, launch, Mars, moon, Science, Space / DJ Henderson / May 30, 2025

“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.”

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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China extends its reach into the Solar System with launch of asteroid mission

asteroids, china, launch, long march 3b, sample return, Science, solar system, Space, tianwen, tianwen 2 / Mike M. / May 29, 2025

Comet 311P/PanSTARRS was observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013 with a set of six comet-like tails radiating from its main body. This object, also called P/2013 P5, is known as an active asteroid. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

Tianwen-2’s mothership, with 11 scientific instruments, will commence the second phase of its mission after dropping off the asteroid specimens at Earth. The probe’s next journey will bring it near an enigma in the asteroid belt, named 311P/PanSTARRS, in the mid-2030s. This object is one in a rare class of objects known as active asteroids or main-belt comets, small worlds that have tails and comas like comets but loiter in orbits most commonly associated with asteroids. Tianwen-2 will be the first mission to see such an object up close.

Stepping into the Solar System

Until the last few years, China’s space program has primarily centered on the Moon as a destination for scientific exploration. The Moon remains the main target for China’s ambitions in space, with the goal of accomplishing a human lunar landing by 2030. But the country is looking farther afield, too.

With the Tianwen-1 mission in 2021, China became the second country to achieve a soft landing on Mars. After Tianwen-2, China will again go to Mars with the Tianwen-3 sample return mission, slated for launch in 2028.

Tianwen, which means “questions to heaven,” is the name given to China’s program of robotic Solar System exploration. Tianwen-3 has a chance to become the first mission to return pristine samples from Mars to Earth. At the same time, NASA’s plans for a Mars Sample Return mission are faltering.

China is looking at launching Tianwen-4 around 2029 to travel to Jupiter and enter orbit around Callisto, one of its four largest moons. In the 2030s, China’s roadmap includes a mission to return atmospheric samples from Venus to Earth, a Mars research station, and a probe to Neptune.

Meanwhile, NASA has sent spacecraft to study every planet in the Solar System and currently has spacecraft at or on the way to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, a metal asteroid, and to interstellar space. Another US science mission, Dragonfly, is scheduled for launch in 2028 on a daring expedition to Saturn’s moon Titan.

But NASA’s science division is bracing for severe budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump. In planetary science, the White House’s budget blueprint calls for canceling a joint US-European Mars Sample Return mission and several other projects, including the DAVINCI mission to Venus.

China extends its reach into the Solar System with launch of asteroid mission Read More »

SpaceX may have solved one problem only to find more on latest Starship flight

Commercial space, elon musk, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, starship flight 9, texas / Shannon Garcia / May 28, 2025

SpaceX’s ninth Starship survived launch, but engineers now have more problems to overcome.

An onboard camera shows the six Raptor engines on SpaceX’s Starship upper stage, roughly three minutes after launching from South Texas on Tuesday. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program’s two previous launches.

But minutes into the mission, SpaceX’s Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company’s privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX’s next-generation rocket is designed to eventually ferry cargo and private and government crews between the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The rocket is complex and gargantuan, wider and longer than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and after nearly two years of steady progress since its first test flight in 2023, this has been a year of setbacks for Starship.

During the rocket’s two previous test flights—each using an upgraded “Block 2” Starship design—problems in the ship’s propulsion system led to leaks during launch, eventually triggering an early shutdown of the rocket’s main engines. On both flights, the vehicle spun out of control and broke apart, spreading debris over an area near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The good news is that that didn’t happen Tuesday. The ship’s main engines fired for their full duration, putting the vehicle on its expected trajectory toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. For a short time, it appeared the ship was on track for a successful flight.

“Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent,” wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, on X.

The bad news is that Tuesday’s test flight revealed more problems, preventing SpaceX from achieving the most important goals Musk outlined going into the launch.

“Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and reentry phase,” Musk posted on X. “Lot of good data to review.”

With the loss of tank pressure, the rocket started slowly spinning as it coasted through the blackness of space more than 100 miles above the Earth. This loss of control spelled another premature end to a Starship test flight. Most notable among the flight’s unmet objectives was SpaceX’s desire to study the performance of the ship’s heat shield, which includes improved heat-absorbing tiles to better withstand the scorching temperatures of reentry back into the atmosphere.

“The most important thing is data on how to improve the tile design, so it’s basically data during the high heating, reentry phase in order to improve the tiles for the next iteration,” Musk told Ars Technica before Tuesday’s flight. “So we’ve got like a dozen or more tile experiments. We’re trying different coatings on tiles. We’re trying different fabrication techniques, different attachment techniques. We’re varying the gap filler for the tiles.”

Engineers are hungry for data on the changes to the heat shield, which can’t be fully tested on the ground. SpaceX officials hope the new tiles will be more robust than the ones flown on the first-generation, or Block 1, version of Starship, allowing future ships to land and quickly launch again, without the need for time-consuming inspections, refurbishment, and in some cases, tile replacements. This is a core tenet of SpaceX’s plans for Starship, which include delivering astronauts to the surface of the Moon, proliferating low-Earth orbit with refueling tankers, and eventually helping establish a settlement on Mars, all of which are predicated on rapid reusability of Starship and its Super Heavy booster.

Last year, SpaceX successfully landed three Starships in the Indian Ocean after they survived hellish reentries, but they came down with damaged heat shields. After an early end to Tuesday’s test flight, SpaceX’s heat shield engineers will have to wait a while longer to satiate their appetites. And the longer they have to wait, the longer the wait for other important Starship developmental tests, such as a full orbital flight, in-space refueling, and recovery and reuse of the ship itself, replicating what SpaceX has now accomplished with the Super Heavy booster.

Failing forward or falling short?

The ninth flight of Starship began with a booming departure from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site at 6: 35 pm CDT (7: 35 pm EDT; 23: 35 UTC) Tuesday.

After a brief hold to resolve last-minute technical glitches, SpaceX resumed the countdown clock to tick away the final seconds before liftoff. A gush of water poured over the deck of the launch pad just before 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines ignited on the rocket’s massive Super Heavy first stage booster. Once all 33 engines lit, the enormous stainless steel rocket—towering more than 400 feet (123 meters)—began to climb away from Starbase.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket, flying with a reused first-stage booster for the first time, climbs away from Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

Heading east, the Super Heavy booster produced more than twice the power of NASA’s Saturn V rocket, an icon of the Apollo Moon program, as it soared over the Gulf of Mexico. After two-and-a-half minutes, the Raptor engines switched off and the Super Heavy booster separated from Starship’s upper stage.

Six Raptor engines fired on the ship to continue pushing it into space. As the booster started maneuvering for an attempt to target an intact splashdown in the sea, the ship burned its engines more than six minutes, reaching a top speed of 16,462 mph (26,493 kilometers per hour), right in line with preflight predictions.

A member of SpaceX’s launch team declared “nominal orbit insertion” a little more than nine minutes into the flight, indicating the rocket reached its planned trajectory, just shy of the velocity required to enter a stable orbit around the Earth.

The flight profile was supposed to take Starship halfway around the world, with the mission culminating in a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. But a few minutes after engine shutdown, the ship started to diverge from SpaceX’s flight plan.

First, SpaceX aborted an attempt to release eight simulated Starlink Internet satellites in the first test of the Starship’s payload deployer. The cargo bay door would not fully open, and engineers called off the demonstration, according to Dan Huot, a member of SpaceX’s communications team who hosted the company’s live launch broadcast Tuesday.

That, alone, would not have been a big deal. However, a few minutes later, Huot made a more troubling announcement.

“We are in a little bit of a spin,” he said. “We did spring a leak in some of the fuel tank systems inside of Starship, which a lot of those are used for attitude control. So, at this point, we’ve essentially lost our attitude control with Starship.”

This eliminated any chance for a controlled reentry and an opportunity to thoroughly scrutinize the performance of Starship’s heat shield. The spin also prevented a brief restart of one of the ship’s Raptor engines in space.

“Not looking great for a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,” Huot said.

SpaceX continued streaming live video from Starship as it soared over the Atlantic Ocean and Africa. Then, a blanket of super-heated plasma enveloped the vehicle as it plunged into the atmosphere. Still in a slow tumble, the ship started shedding scorched chunks of its skin before the screen went black. SpaceX lost contact with the vehicle around 46 minutes into the flight. The ship likely broke apart over the Indian Ocean, dropping debris into a remote swath of sea within its expected flight corridor.

Victories where you find them

Although the flight did not end as well as SpaceX officials hoped, the company made some tangible progress Tuesday. Most importantly, it broke the streak of back-to-back launch failures on Starship’s two most recent test flights in January and March.

SpaceX’s investigation earlier this year into a January 16 launch failure concluded vibrations likely triggered fuel leaks and fires in the ship’s engine compartment, causing an early shutdown of the rocket’s engines. Engineers said the vibrations were likely in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency, intensifying the shaking beyond the levels SpaceX predicted.

Engineers made fixes and launched the next Starship test flight March 6, but it again encountered trouble midway through the ship’s main engine burn. SpaceX said earlier this month that the inquiry into the March 6 failure found its most probable root cause was a hardware failure in one of the upper stage’s center engines, resulting in “inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition.”

In its official statement, the company was silent on the nature of the hardware failure but said engines for future test flights will receive additional preload on key joints, a new nitrogen purge system, and improvements to the propellant drain system. A new generation of Raptor engines, known as Raptor 3, should begin flying around the end of this year with additional improvements to address the failure mechanism, SpaceX said.

Another bright spot in Tuesday’s test flight was that it marked the first time SpaceX reused a Super Heavy booster from a prior launch. The booster used Tuesday previously launched on Starship’s seventh test flight in January before it was caught back at the launch pad and refurbished for another space shot.

Booster 14 comes in for the catch after flying to the edge of space on January 16. SpaceX flew this booster again Tuesday but did not attempt a catch. Credit: SpaceX

After releasing the Starship upper stage to continue its journey into space, the Super Heavy booster flipped around to fly tail-first and reignited 13 of its engines to begin boosting itself back toward the South Texas coast. On this test flight, SpaceX aimed the booster for a hard splashdown in the ocean just offshore from Starbase, rather than a mid-air catch back at the launch pad, which SpaceX accomplished on three of its four most recent test flights.

SpaceX made the change for a few reasons. First, engineers programmed the booster to fly at a higher angle of attack during its descent, increasing the amount of atmospheric drag on the vehicle compared to past flights. This change should reduce propellant usage on the booster’s landing burn, which occurs just before the rocket is caught by the launch pad’s mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” on a recovery flight.

During the landing burn itself, engineers wanted to demonstrate the booster’s ability to respond to an engine failure on descent by using just two of the rocket’s 33 engines for the end of the burn, rather than the usual three. Instead, the rocket appeared to explode around the beginning of the landing burn before it could complete the final landing maneuver.

Before the explosion at the end of its flight, the booster appeared to fly as designed. Data displayed on SpaceX’s live broadcast of the launch showed all 33 of the rocket’s engines fired normally during its initial ascent from Texas, a reassuring sign for the reliability of the Super Heavy booster.

SpaceX kicked off the year with the ambition to launch as many as 25 Starship test flights in 2025, a goal that now seems to be unattainable. However, an X post by Musk on Tuesday night suggested a faster cadence of launches in the coming months. He said the next three Starships could launch at intervals of about once every three to four weeks. After that, SpaceX is expected to transition to a third-generation, or Block 3, Starship design with more changes.

It wasn’t immediately clear how long it might take SpaceX to correct whatever problems caused Tuesday’s test flight woes. The Starship vehicle for the next flight is already built and completed cryogenic prooftesting April 27. For the last few ships, SpaceX has completed this cryogenic testing milestone around one-and-a-half to three months prior to launch.

A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said the agency is “actively working” with SpaceX in the aftermath of Tuesday’s test flight but did not say if the FAA will require SpaceX to conduct a formal mishap investigation.

Shana Diez, director of Starship engineering at SpaceX, chimed in with her own post on X. Based on preliminary data from Tuesday’s flight, she is optimistic the next test flight will fly soon. She said engineers still need to examine data to confirm none of the problems from Starship’s previous flight recurred on this launch but added that “all evidence points to a new failure mode” on Tuesday’s test flight.

SpaceX will also study what caused the Super Heavy booster to explode on descent before moving forward with another booster catch attempt at Starbase, she said.

“Feeling both relieved and a bit disappointed,” Diez wrote. “Could have gone better today but also could have gone much worse.”

SpaceX may have solved one problem only to find more on latest Starship flight Read More »

Do these Buddhist gods hint at the purpose of China’s super-secret satellites?

china, launch, long march 3b, long march 3c, long march rocket, military space, Science, Space / 9u50fv / May 17, 2025

Mission patches are a decades-old tradition in spaceflight. They can range from the figurative to the abstract, prompting valuable insights or feeding confusion. Some are just plain weird.

Ars published a story a few months ago on spaceflight patches from NASA, SpaceX, Russia, and the NRO, the US government’s spy satellite agency, which is responsible for some of the most head-scratching mission logos.

Until recently, China’s entries in the realm of spaceflight patches often lacked the originality found in patches from the West. For example, a series of patches for China’s human spaceflight missions used a formulaic design with a circular shape and a mix of red and blue. The patch for China’s most recent Shenzhou crew to the country’s Tiangong space station last month finally broke the mold with a triangular shape after China’s human spaceflight agency put the patch up for a public vote.

But there’s a fascinating set of new patches Chinese officials released for a series of launches with top secret satellites over the last two months. These four patches depict Buddhist gods with a sense of artistry and sharp colors that stand apart from China’s previous spaceflight emblems, and perhaps—or perhaps not—they can tell us something about the nature of the missions they represent.

Guardians of the Dharma

The four patches show the Four Heavenly Kings, protector deities in Buddhism who guard against evil forces in the four cardinal directions, according to the Kyoto National Museum. The gods also shield the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, from external threats.

These gods have different names, but in China, they are known as Duōwén, Zēngzhǎng, Chíguó, and Guăngmù. Duōwén is the commander and the guardian of the north, the “one who listens to many teachings,” who is often depicted with an umbrella. Zēngzhǎng, guardian of the south, is a god of growth shown carrying a sword. The protector of the east is Chíguó, defender of the nation, who holds a stringed musical instrument. And guarding the west is Guăngmù, an all-seeing god usually depicted with a serpent.

Do these Buddhist gods hint at the purpose of China’s super-secret satellites? Read More »

The top fell off Australia’s first orbital-class rocket, delaying its launch

australia, Commercial space, eris rocket, Gilmour space, launch, Science, Space / DJ Henderson / May 16, 2025

This was unusual

Payload fairing problems have caused a number of rocket failures, usually because they don’t jettison during launch, or only partially deploy, leaving too much extra weight on the launch vehicle for it to reach orbit.

Gilmour said it is postponing the Eris launch campaign “to fully understand what happened and make any necessary updates.” The company was founded by two brothers—Adam and James Gilmour—in 2012, and has raised approximately $90 million from venture capital firms and government funds to get the first Eris rocket to the launch pad.

The astronauts on NASA’s Gemini 9A mission snapped this photo of a target vehicle they were supposed to dock with in orbit. But the rocket’s nose shroud only partially opened, inadvertently illustrating the method in which payload fairings are designed to jettison from their rockets in flight. Credit: NASA

The Eris rocket was aiming to become the first all-Australian launcher to reach orbit. Australia hosted a handful of satellite launches by US and British rockets more than 50 years ago.

Gilmour is headquartered in Gold Coast, Australia, about 600 miles south of the Eris launch pad near the coastal town of Bowen. In a statement, Gilmour said it has a replacement payload fairing in its factory in Gold Coast. The company will send it to the launch site and install it on the Eris rocket after a “full investigation” into the cause of the premature fairing deployment.

“While we’re disappointed by the delay, our team is already working on a solution and we expect to be back at the pad soon,” Gilmour said.

Officials did not say how long it might take to investigate the problem, correct it, and fit a new nose cone on the Eris rocket.

This setback follows more than a year of delays Gilmour blamed primarily on holdups in receiving regulatory approval for the launch from the Australian government.

Like many rocket companies have done before, Gilmour set modest expectations for the first test flight of Eris. While the rocket has everything needed to fly to low-Earth orbit, officials said they were looking for just 10 to 20 seconds of stable flight on the first launch, enough to gather data about the performance of the rocket and its unconventional hybrid propulsion system.

The top fell off Australia’s first orbital-class rocket, delaying its launch Read More »

After back-to-back failures, SpaceX tests its fixes on the next Starship

launch, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, starship flight 9, texas / Mike M. / May 14, 2025

But that didn’t solve the problem. Once again, Starship’s engines cut off too early, and the rocket broke apart before falling to Earth. SpaceX said “an energetic event” in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines, followed by a loss of attitude control and a loss of communications with the ship.

The similarities between the two failures suggest a likely design issue with the upgraded “Block 2” version of Starship, which debuted in January and flew again in March. Starship Block 2 is slightly taller than the ship SpaceX used on the rocket’s first six flights, with redesigned flaps, improved batteries and avionics, and notably, a new fuel feed line system for the ship’s Raptor vacuum engines.

SpaceX has not released the results of the investigation into the Flight 8 failure, and the FAA hasn’t yet issued a launch license for Flight 9. Likewise, SpaceX hasn’t released any information on the changes it made to Starship for next week’s flight.

What we do know about the Starship vehicle for Flight 9—designated Ship 35—is that it took a few tries to complete a full-duration test-firing. SpaceX completed a single-engine static fire on April 30, simulating the restart of a Raptor engine in space. Then, on May 1, SpaceX aborted a six-engine test-firing before reaching its planned 60-second duration. Videos captured by media observing the test showed a flash in the engine plume, and at least one piece of debris was seen careening out of the flame trench below the ship.

SpaceX ground crews returned Ship 35 to the production site a couple of miles away, perhaps to replace a damaged engine, before rolling Starship back to the test stand over the weekend for Monday’s successful engine firing.

Now, the ship will head back to the Starbase build site, where technicians will make final preparations for Flight 9. These final tasks may include loading mock-up Starlink broadband satellites into the ship’s payload bay and touchups to the rocket’s heat shield.

These are two elements of Starship that SpaceX engineers are eager to demonstrate on Flight 9, beyond just fixing the problems from the last two missions. Those failures prevented Starship from testing its satellite deployer and an upgraded heat shield designed to better withstand scorching temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius) during reentry.

After back-to-back failures, SpaceX tests its fixes on the next Starship Read More »

We finally know a little more about Amazon’s super-secret satellites

Amazon, atlas v, broadband, Internet, kuiper, launch, Science, Space, united launch alliance / Kelly Newman / May 3, 2025

“Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner,” a source told Reuters at the time of Badyal’s dismissal. Earlier in 2018, SpaceX launched a pair of prototype cube-shaped Internet satellites for demonstrations in orbit. Then, less than a year after firing Badyal, Musk’s company launched the first full stack of Starlink satellites, debuting the now-standard flat-panel design.

In a post Friday on LinkedIn, Badyal wrote the Kuiper satellites have had “an entirely nominal start” to their mission. “We’re just over 72 hours into our first full-scale Kuiper mission, and the adrenaline is still high.”

The Starlink and Kuiper constellations use laser inter-satellite links to relay Internet signals from node-to-node across their networks. Starlink broadcasts consumer broadband in Ku-band frequencies, while Kuiper will use Ka-band.

Ultimately, SpaceX’s simplified Starlink deployment architecture has fewer parts and eliminates the need for a carrier structure. This allows SpaceX to devote a higher share of the rocket’s mass and volume capacity to the Starlink satellites themselves, replacing dead weight with revenue-earning capability. The dispenser architecture used by Amazon is a more conventional design, and gives satellite engineers more flexibility in designing their spacecraft. It also allows satellites to spread out faster in orbit.

Others involved in the broadband megaconstellation rush have copied SpaceX’s architecture.

China’s Qianfan, or Thousand Sails, satellites have a “standardized and modular” flat-panel design that “meets the needs of stacking multiple satellites with one rocket,” according to the company managing the constellation. While Chinese officials haven’t released any photos of the satellites, which could eventually number more than 14,000, this sounds a lot like the design of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.

Another piece of information released by United Launch Alliance helps us arrive at an estimate of the mass of each Kuiper satellite. The collection of 27 satellites that launched earlier this week added up to be the heaviest payload ever flown on ULA’s Atlas V rocket. ULA said the total payload the Atlas V delivered to orbit was about 34,000 pounds, equivalent to roughly 15.4 metric tons.

It wasn’t clear whether this number accounted for the satellite dispenser, which likely weighed somewhere in the range of 1,000 to 2,000 pounds at launch. This would put the mass of each Kuiper satellite somewhere between 1,185 and 1,259 pounds (537 and 571 kilograms).

This is not far off the estimated mass of SpaceX’s most recent iteration of Starlink satellites, a version known as V2 Mini Optimized. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has launched up to 28 of these flat-packed satellites on a single launch.

We finally know a little more about Amazon’s super-secret satellites Read More »

Rocket Report: The pitfalls of rideshare; China launches next Tiangong crew

Arianespace, astra, blue origin, china, human spaceflight, launch, NASA, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex, united launch alliance / Shannon Garcia / April 25, 2025

This week, engineers ground-tested upgrades for Blue Origin’s New Glenn and Europe’s Ariane 6.

A Long March 2F carrier rocket, carrying the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft and a crew of three astronauts, lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China on April 24, 2025. Credit: Photo by Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images

Welcome to Edition 7.41 of the Rocket Report! NASA and its contractors at Kennedy Space Center in Florida continue building a new mobile launch tower for the Space Launch System Block 1B rocket, a taller, upgraded version of the SLS rocket being used for the agency’s initial Artemis lunar missions. Workers stacked another segment of the tower a couple of weeks ago, and the structure is inching closer to its full height of 355 feet (108 meters). But this is just the start. Once the tower is fully assembled, it must be outfitted with miles of cabling, tubing, and piping and then be tested before it can support an SLS launch campaign. Last year, NASA’s inspector general projected the tower won’t be ready for a launch until the spring of 2029, and its costs could reach $2.7 billion. The good news, if you can call it that, is that there probably won’t be an SLS Block 1B rocket that needs to use it in 2029, whether it’s due to delays or cancellation.

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.

Fresh details on Astra’s strategic pivot. Astra, the once high-flying rocket startup that crashed back to Earth with investors before going private last year, has unveiled new details about its $44 million contract with the Department of Defense, Space News reports. The DOD contract announced last year supports the development of Rocket 4, a two-stage, mobile launch vehicle with ambitions to deliver cargo across the globe in under an hour. While Astra’s ill-fated Rocket 3 focused on launching small satellites into low-Earth orbit, Astra wants to make Rocket 4 a military utility vehicle. Rocket 4 will still be able to loft conventional satellites, but Astra’s most lucrative contract for the new launch vehicle involves using the rocket for precise point-to-point delivery of up to 1,300 pounds (590 kilograms) of supplies from orbit via specialized reentry vehicles. The military has shown interest in developing a rocket-based rapid global cargo delivery system for several years, and it has a contract with SpaceX to study how the much larger Starship rocket could do a similar job.

Back from the brink… The Alameda, California-based company, which was delisted from Nasdaq in June 2024 after its shares collapsed, is now targeting the first test flight of Rocket 4 in 2026. Astra’s arrangement with the Defense Innovation Unit includes two milestones: one suborbital (point-to-point) and the other orbital, with the option to launch from a location outside the United States, as Astra is developing a mobile launcher. Chris Kemp, Astra’s co-founder and CEO, told Space News the orbital launch will likely originate from Australia. Astra’s first launches with the new-retired Rocket 3 vehicle were based in Alaska and Florida.

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The Army has a catchy name for its newest weapon. The Long Range Hypersonic Weapon has a new name: Dark Eagle. The US Army announced the popular name for the service’s quick strike missile this week. “Part of the name pays tribute to the eagle—a master hunter known for its speed, stealth and agility—due to the LRHW’s combination of velocity, accuracy, maneuverability, survivability and versatility,” the Army said in a press release. “In addition, the bald eagle—our national bird—represents independence, strength, and freedom.” The Dark Eagle is designed to strike targets with little or no warning via a hypersonic glide vehicle capable of maneuvering in the upper atmosphere after an initial launch with a conventional missile. The hypersonic weapon’s ability to overcome an adversary’s air and missile defenses is embodied in the word “dark” in Dark Eagle, the Army said.

Flying again soon… The Army tested the hypersonic weapon’s “all-up round” during a missile launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in December. The test was delayed more than a year due to unspecified issues. The Army appears to be preparing for another Dark Eagle test from Florida’s Space Coast as soon as Friday, according to airspace and maritime warning notices in the Atlantic Ocean. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Northrop’s niche with Minotaur. Ars mentioned in last week’s Rocket Report that Northrop Grumman’s Minotaur IV rocket launched April 16 with a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office. This was the first Minotaur IV launch in nearly five years and the first orbital Minotaur launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, in 14 years. The low-volume Minotaur IV uses solid rocket motors from the Air Force’s stockpile of retired Peacekeeper ballistic missiles, turning part of a weapon of mass destruction into, in this case, a tool to support the US government’s spy satellite agency. The Minotaur IV’s lift capability fits neatly between the capacity of smaller commercial rockets, like Firefly’s Alpha or Rocket Lab’s Electron, and larger rockets like SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The most recent Minotaur IV launch contract cost the Space Force roughly $30 million, more than a mission with Firefly but less than a dedicated ride on a Falcon 9.

Minotaur IV will keep flying… The Space Force has at least two more missions reserved to launch on the expendable Minotaur IV rocket. One of the missions will launch multiple small satellites for the US military’s Space Test Program, and the other will place a military weather satellite into orbit. Both missions will launch from California, with planning launch dates in 2026, a Space Systems Command spokesperson told Ars. “We do have multiple launches planned using Minotaur family launch vehicles between our OSP-4 (Orbital/Suborbital Program) and SRP-4 (Sounding Rocket Program) contracts,” the spokesperson said. “We will release more information on those missions as we get closer to launch.” The Commercial Space Act of 1998 prohibits the use of surplus ICBM motors for commercial launches and limits their use to only specific kinds of military launches. The restrictions were intended to encourage NASA and commercial satellite operators to use privately developed launch vehicles.

NASA’s launch prices have somehow gone up. In an era of reusable rockets and near-daily access to space, NASA is still paying more than it did 30 years ago to launch missions into orbit, according to a study soon to be published in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica. Adjusted for inflation, the prices NASA pays for launch services rose at an annual average rate of 2.82 percent from 1996 to 2024, the report says. “Furthermore, there is no evidence of shift in the launch service costs trend after the introduction of a new launch service provider [SpaceX] in 2016.” Ars analyzed NASA’s launch prices in a story published Thursday.

Why is this? … One might think SpaceX’s reuse of Falcon 9 rocket components would drive down launch prices, but no. Rocket reuse and economies of scale have significantly reduced SpaceX’s launch costs, but the company is charging NASA roughly the same as it did before booster reuse became commonplace. There are a few reasons this is happening. One is that SpaceX hasn’t faced any meaningful competition for NASA launch contracts in the last six years. That should change soon with the recent debuts of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher. NASA levies additional requirements on its commercial launch providers, and the agency must pay for them. These include schedule priority, engineering oversight, and sometimes special payload cleanliness requirements and the choice of a particular Falcon 9 booster from SpaceX’s inventory.

What’s holding up ULA’s next launch? After poor weather forced ULA to scrub a launch attempt on April 9, the company will have to wait nearly three weeks for another try to launch an Atlas V rocket with Amazon’s first full-up load of 27 Kuiper broadband satellites, Ars reports. The rocket and satellites are healthy, according to ULA. But the military-run Eastern Range at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, is unable to accommodate ULA until Monday, April 28. The Space Force is being unusually cagey about the reasons for the lengthy delay, which isn’t affecting SpaceX launches to the same degree.

Finally, a theory… The publishing of airspace and maritime warning notices for an apparent test launch of the Army’s Long Range Hypersonic Weapon, or Dark Eagle, might explain the range’s unavailability. The test launch could happen as soon as Friday, and offshore keep-out zones cover wide swaths of the Atlantic Ocean. If this is the reason for the long Atlas V launch delay, we still have questions. If this launch is scheduled for Friday, why has it kept ULA from launching the last few weeks? Why was SpaceX permitted to launch multiple times in the same time period? And why didn’t the first test flight of the Dark Eagle missile in December result in similar lengthy launch delays on the Eastern Range?

Shenzhou 20 bound for Tiangong. A spaceship carrying three astronauts docked Thursday with China’s space station in the latest crew rotation, approximately six hours after their launch on a Long March 2F rocket from the Gobi Desert, the Associated Press reports. The Shenzhou 20 mission is commanded by Chen Dong, who is making his third flight. He is accompanied by fighter pilot Chen Zhongrui and engineer Wang Jie, both making their maiden voyages. They will replace three astronauts currently on the Chinese Tiangong space station. Like those before them, they will stay on board for roughly six months.

Finding a rhythm… China’s human spaceflight missions have launched like clockwork since the country’s first domestic astronaut launch in 2003. Now, with the Tiangong space station fully operational, China is launching fresh crews at six-month intervals. While in space, the astronauts will conduct experiments in medical science and new technologies and perform spacewalks to carry out maintenance and install new equipment. Their tasks will include adding space debris shielding to the exterior of the Tiangong station. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX resupplies the ISS. SpaceX launched an uncrewed Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station early Monday on a resupply mission with increased importance after a transportation mishap derailed a flight by another US cargo ship, Spaceflight Now reports. The Dragon cargo vessel docked at the space station early Tuesday with 4,780 pounds (2,168 kilograms) of pressurized cargo and 1,653 pounds (750 kilograms) of unpressurized payloads in the vehicle’s trunk. NASA adjusted the Dragon spacecraft’s payload because an upcoming flight by Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus supply freighter was canceled after the Cygnus cargo module was damaged during transport to the launch site.

Something strange… The payloads aboard this Dragon cargo mission—the 32nd by SpaceX—include normal things like fresh food (exactly 1,262 tortillas), biomedical and pharmaceutical experiments, and the technical demonstration of a new atomic clock. However, there’s something onboard nobody at NASA or SpaceX wants to talk about. A payload package named STP-H10 inside Dragon’s trunk section will be installed on a mounting post outside of the space station to perform a mission for the US military’s Space Test Program. STP-H10 wasn’t mentioned in NASA’s press kit for this mission, and SpaceX didn’t show the usual views of Dragon’s trunk when the spacecraft deployed from its Falcon 9 rocket shortly after launch. These kinds of Space Test Program experiment platforms have launched to the ISS before without any secrecy. Stranger still is the fact that the STP-H10 experiments are unclassified. You can see the list here. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

There are some drawbacks to rideshare. SpaceX launched its third “Bandwagon” rideshare mission into a mid-inclination orbit Monday evening from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Space News reports. The payloads included a South Korean military radar spy satellite, a small commercial weather satellite, and the most interesting payload: an experimental reentry vehicle from a German startup named Atmos Space Cargo. The startup’s Phoenix vehicle, fitted with an inflatable heat shield, separated from the Falcon 9’s upper stage about 90 minutes after liftoff. Roughly a half-hour later, it began reentry for a splashdown in the South Atlantic Ocean, about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers) off the coast of Brazil. Until last month, the Phoenix vehicle was supposed to reenter over the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, near the island of Réunion. The late change to the mission’s trajectory meant Atmos could not recover the spacecraft after splashdown.

Changes in longitude… Five weeks before the launch, SpaceX informed Atmos of a change in trajectory because of “operational constraints” of the primary payload, a South Korean reconnaissance satellite. Smaller payloads on rideshare launches benefit from lower launch prices, but their owners have no control over the schedule or trajectory of the launch. The change for this mission resulted in a splashdown well off the coast of Brazil, ruling out any attempt to recover Phoenix after splashdown. It also meant a steeper reentry than previously planned, creating higher loads on the spacecraft. The company lined up new ground stations in South America to communicate with the spacecraft during key phases of flight leading up to reentry. In addition, it chartered a plane to attempt to collect data during reentry, but the splashdown location was beyond the range of the aircraft. Some data suggests that the heat shield inflated as planned, but Atmos’s CEO said the company needed more time to analyze the data it had, adding that it was “very difficult” to get data from Phoenix in the final phases of its flight, given its distance from ground stations.

Ariane 6 is gonna need a bigger booster. A qualification motor for an upgraded solid rocket booster for Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket successfully fired up for the first time on a test stand Thursday in Kourou, French Guiana, according to the European Space Agency. The new P160C solid rocket motor burned for more than two minutes, and ESA declared the test-firing a success. ESA’s member states approved the development of the P160C motor in 2022. The upgraded motor is about 3 feet (1 meter) longer than the P120C motor currently flying on the Ariane 6 rocket and carries about 31,000 pounds (14 metric tons) more solid propellant. The Ariane 6 rocket can fly with two or four of these strap-on boosters. Officials plan to introduce the P160C on Ariane 6 flights next year, giving the rocket’s heaviest version the ability to haul up to 4,400 pounds (2 metric tons) of additional cargo mass to orbit.

A necessary change… The heavier P160C solid rocket motor is required for Arianespace to fulfill its multi-mission launch contract with Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite broadband network. Alongside similar contracts with ULA and Blue Origin, Amazon reserved 18 Kuiper launches on Ariane 6 rockets, and 16 of them must use the upgraded P160C booster to deliver additional Kuiper satellites to orbit. The P160C is a joint project between ArianeGroup and Avio, which will use the same motor design on Europe’s smaller Vega C rocket to improve its performance. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Progress toward the second flight of New Glenn. Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said his team completed a full-duration 15-second hot-fire test Thursday of the upper stage for the company’s second New Glenn rocket. In a post on X, Limp wrote that the upper stage for the next New Glenn flight will have “enhanced performance.” The maximum power of its hydrogen-fueled BE-3U engine will increase from 173,000 pounds to 175,000 pounds of thrust. Two BE-3U engines fly on New Glenn’s second stage.

A good engine… The BE-3U engine is a derivative of the BE-3 engine flying on Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket. Limp wrote that the upper stage on the first New Glenn launch in January “performed remarkably” and achieved an orbital injection with less than 1 percent deviation from its target. So when will New Glenn launch again? We’ve heard late spring, June, or October, depending on the source. I’ll note that Blue Origin test-fired the New Glenn upper stage for the rocket’s first flight about four months before it launched.

Next three launches

April 27: Alpha | “Message in a Booster” | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 13: 37 UTC

April 27: Long March 3B/E | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 15: 55 UTC

April 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-9 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 20: 55 UTC

Rocket Report: The pitfalls of rideshare; China launches next Tiangong crew Read More »

Reusable rockets are here, so why is NASA paying more to launch stuff to space?

blue origin, launch, NASA, Space, spacex, united launch alliance / DJ Henderson / April 25, 2025

• 1998: Deep Space 1 — Delta II rocket — $86 million

• 1999: Mars Polar Lander — Delta II rocket — $88 million

• 2001: Mars Odyssey — Delta II rocket — $96 million

• 2003: Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers — two Delta II rockets — $87 million per launch

• 2004: Swift — Delta II rocket — $90 million

• 2005: Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter — Atlas V rocket — $147 million

• 2007: Phoenix Mars lander — Delta II rocket — $132 million

Launch prices for NASA missions soared after the late 2000s, following the creation of United Launch Alliance through a merger of the Atlas and Delta rocket programs developed by Lockheed Martin and Boeing. The merger eliminated competition for most of NASA’s launch contracts until SpaceX’s Falcon 9 became available for NASA science missions in the mid-2010s. Here’s a sample of missions as examples of the rising costs, with contract values adjusted for inflation from the time of their award to reflect 2025 dollars:

• 2009: Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter — Atlas V rocket — $220 million

• 2012: Radiation Belt Storm Probes — Atlas V rocket — $226 million (averaged from a bulk buy)

• 2014: Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 — Delta II rocket — $191 million (averaged from a bulk buy)

• 2016: OSIRIS-REx asteroid mission — Atlas V rocket — $252 million

• 2017: TDRS-M data relay satellite — Atlas V rocket — $179 million

• 2017: JPSS-2 weather satellite — Atlas V rocket — $224 million

• 2018: InSight Mars lander — Atlas V rocket — $220 million

• 2018: ICESAT-2 — Delta II rocket — $134 million

Again, the missions listed above would likely launch on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets if NASA awarded these contracts today. So, how do SpaceX’s more recent Falcon 9 prices compare? Let’s take a look. These contract values are adjusted for inflation from the time of their award to reflect 2025 dollars:

• 2016: Jason 3 oceanography satellite — Falcon 9 rocket — $114 million

• 2018: Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite — Falcon 9 rocket — $118 million

• 2020: Sentinel-6A — Falcon 9 rocket — $126 million

• 2021: Double Asteroid Redirection Test — Falcon 9 rocket — $86 million

• 2021: Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer — Falcon 9 rocket — $62 million

• 2022: Surface Water and Ocean Topography — Falcon 9 rocket — $148 million

• 2024: PACE Earth sciences mission — Falcon 9 rocket — $99 million

• 2025: SPHEREx astronomy mission — Falcon 9 rocket — $99 million

And here are a few future launches NASA has booked to fly on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Some of these contracts were awarded in the last 12 months, and those have not been adjusted for inflation. The others reflect 2025 dollars:

• 2025: Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe — Falcon 9 rocket — $134 million

• 2025: Sentinel-6B — Falcon 9 rocket — $101 million

• 2027: NEO Surveyor — Falcon 9 rocket — $100 million

• 2027: JPSS-4 weather satellite — Falcon 9 rocket — $113 million

• 2027: Compton Spectrometer and Imager — Falcon 9 rocket — $69 million

There are a few other things worth noting when we chart NASA’s launch prices. One is that SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, used for NASA’s heaviest missions, costs more than a Falcon 9 rocket. For example, two identical weather satellites launched in 2022 and 2024 on ULA’s Atlas V and SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket for $207 million and $178 million, respectively, again adjusted for inflation.

Reusable rockets are here, so why is NASA paying more to launch stuff to space? Read More »

There’s a secret reason the Space Force is delaying the next Atlas V launch

Amazon, kuiper, launch, Space, space force, united launch alliance / Mike M. / April 18, 2025

The Space Force is looking for responsive launch. This week, they’re the unresponsive ones.

File photo of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch in 2022. Credit: SpaceX

Pushed by trackmobile railcar movers, the Atlas V rocket rolled to the launch pad last week with a full load of 27 satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper Internet megaconstellation. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Last week, the first operational satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband network were minutes from launch at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

These spacecraft, buttoned up on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, are the first of more than 3,200 mass-produced satellites Amazon plans to launch over the rest of the decade to deploy the first direct US competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink Internet network.

However, as is often the case on Florida’s Space Coast, bad weather prevented the satellites from launching April 9. No big deal, right? Anyone who pays close attention to the launch industry knows delays are part of the business. A broken component on the rocket, a summertime thunderstorm, or high winds can thwart a launch attempt. Launch companies know this, and the answer is usually to try again the next day.

But something unusual happened when ULA scrubbed the countdown last Wednesday. ULA’s launch director, Eric Richards, instructed his team to “proceed with preparations for an extended turnaround.” This meant ULA would have to wait more than 24 hours for the next Atlas V launch attempt.

But why?

At first, there seemed to be a good explanation for the extended turnaround. SpaceX was preparing to launch a set of Starlink satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket around the same time as Atlas V’s launch window the next day. The Space Force’s Eastern Range manages scheduling for all launches at Cape Canaveral and typically operates on a first-come, first-served basis.

The Space Force accommodated 93 launches on the Eastern Range last year—sometimes on the same day—an annual record that military officials are quite proud of achieving. This is nearly six times the number of launches from Cape Canaveral in 2014, a growth rate primarily driven by SpaceX. In previous interviews, Space Force officials have emphasized their eagerness to support more commercial launches. “How do we get to yes?” is often what range officials ask themselves when a launch provider submits a scheduling request.

It wouldn’t have been surprising for SpaceX to get priority on the range schedule since it had already reserved the launch window with the Space Force for April 10. SpaceX subsequently delayed this particular Starlink launch for two days until it finally launched on Saturday evening, April 12. Another SpaceX Starlink mission launched Monday morning.

There are several puzzling things about what happened last week. When SpaceX missed its reservation on the range twice in two days, April 10 and 11, why didn’t ULA move back to the front of the line?

ULA, which is usually fairly transparent about its reasons for launch scrubs, didn’t disclose any technical problems with the rocket that would have prevented another launch attempt. ULA offers access to listen to the launch team’s audio channel during the countdown, and engineers were not discussing any significant technical issues.

The company’s official statement after the scrub said: “A new launch date will be announced when approved on the range.”

Also, why can’t ULA make another run at launching the Kuiper mission this week? The answer to that question is also a mystery, but we have some educated speculation.

Changes in attitudes

A few days ago, SpaceX postponed one of its own Starlink missions from Cape Canaveral without explanation, leaving the Florida spaceport with a rare week without any launches. SpaceX plans to resume launches from Florida early next week with the liftoff of a resupply mission to the International Space Station. The delayed Starlink mission will fly a few days later.

Meanwhile, the next launch attempt for ULA is unknown.

Tory Bruno, ULA’s president and CEO, wrote on X that questions about what is holding up the next Atlas V launch are best directed toward the Space Force. A spokesperson for ULA told Ars the company is still working with the range to determine the next launch date. “The rocket and payload are healthy,” she said. “We will announce the new launch date once confirmed.”

While the SpaceX launch delay this week might suggest a link to the same range kerfuffle facing United Launch Alliance, it’s important to point out a key difference between the companies’ rockets. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 uses an automated flight termination system to self-destruct the rocket if it flies off course, while ULA’s Atlas V uses an older human-in-the-loop range safety system, which requires additional staff and equipment. Therefore, the Space Force is more likely to be able to accommodate a SpaceX mission near another activity on the range.

One more twist in this story is that a few days before the launch attempt, ULA changed its launch window for the Kuiper mission on April 9 from midday to the evening hours due to a request from the Eastern Range. Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, the range commander, spoke with reporters in a roundtable meeting last week. After nearly 20 years of covering launches from Cape Canaveral, I found a seven-hour time change so close to launch to be unusual, so I asked Panzenhagen about the reason for it, mostly out of curiosity. She declined to offer any details.

File photo of a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch in 2022. Credit: SpaceX

“The Eastern Range is huge,” she said. “It’s 15 million square miles. So, as you can imagine, there are a lot of players that are using that range space, so there’s a lot of de-confliction … Public safety is our top priority, and we take that very seriously on both ranges. So, we are constantly de-conflicting, but I’m not going to get into details of what the actual conflict was.”

It turns out the range conflict now impacting the Eastern Range is having some longer-lasting impacts. While a one- or two-week launch delay doesn’t seem serious, it adds up to deferred or denied revenue for a commercial satellite operator. National security missions get priority on range schedules at Cape Canaveral and at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, but there are significantly more commercial missions than military launches from both spaceports.

Clearly, there’s something out of the ordinary going on in the Eastern Range, which extends over much of the Atlantic Ocean to the southeast, east, and northeast of Cape Canaveral. The range includes tracking equipment, security forces, and ground stations in Florida and downrange sites in Bermuda and Ascension Island.

One possibility is a test of one or more submarine-launched Trident ballistic missiles, which commonly occur in the waters off the east coast of Florida. But those launches are usually accompanied by airspace and maritime warning notices to ensure pilots and sailors steer clear of the test. Nothing of the sort has been publicly released in the last couple of weeks.

Maybe something is broken at the Florida launch base. When launches were less routine than today, the range at Cape Canaveral would close for a couple of weeks per year for upgrades and refurbishment of critical infrastructure. This is no longer the case. In 2023, Panzenhagen told Ars that the Space Force changed the policy.

“When the Eastern Range was supporting 15 to 20 launches a year, we had room to schedule dedicated periods for maintenance of critical infrastructure,” she said at the time. “During these periods, launches were paused while teams worked the upgrades. Now that the launch cadence has grown to nearly twice per week, we’ve adapted to the new way of business to best support our mission partners.”

Perhaps, then, it’s something more secret, like a larger-scale, multi-element military exercise or war game that either requires Eastern Range participation or is taking place in areas the Space Force needs to clear for safety reasons for a rocket launch to go forward. The military sometimes doesn’t publicize these activities until they’re over.

A Space Force spokesperson did not respond to Ars Technica’s questions on the matter.

While we’re still a ways off from rocket launches becoming as routine as an airplane flight, the military is shifting in the way it thinks about spaceports. Instead of offering one-off bespoke services tailored to the circumstances of each launch, the Space Force wants to operate the ranges more like an airport.

“We’ve changed the nomenclature from calling ourselves a range to calling ourselves a spaceport because we see ourselves more like an airport in the future,” one Space Force official told Ars for a previous story.

In the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal-year 2024, Congress gave the Space Force the authority to charge commercial launch providers indirect fees to help pay for common infrastructure at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg—things like roads, electrical and water utilities, and base security used by all rocket operators at each spaceport. The military previously could only charge rocket companies direct fees for the specific services it offered in support of a particular launch, while the government was on the hook for overhead costs.

Military officials characterize the change in law as a win-win for the government and commercial launch providers. Ideally, it will grow the pool of money available to modernize the military’s spaceports, making them more responsive to all users, whether it’s the Space Force, SpaceX, ULA, or a startup new to the launch industry.

Whatever is going on in Florida or the Atlantic Ocean this week, it’s something the Space Force doesn’t want to talk about in detail. Maybe there are good reasons for that.

Cape Canaveral is America’s busiest launch base. Extending the spaceport-airport analogy a little further, the closure of America’s busiest airport for a week or more would be a big deal. One of the holy grails the Space Force is pursuing is the capability to launch on demand.

This week, there’s demand for launch slots at Cape Canaveral, but the answer is no.

There’s a secret reason the Space Force is delaying the next Atlas V launch Read More »

Rocket Report: “No man’s land” in rocket wars; Isaacman lukewarm on SLS

blue origin, falcon 9, falcon heavy, human spaceflight, international space station, launch, new glenn, rocket lab, rocket report, russia, Science, soyuz, Space, space launch system, spacex, united launch alliance, vulcan / Beth Washington / April 11, 2025

China’s approach to space junk is worrisome as it begins launching its own megaconstellations.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket rolls to its launch pad in Florida in preparation for liftoff with 27 satellites for Amazon’s Kuiper broadband network. Credit: United Launch Alliance

Welcome to Edition 7.39 of the Rocket Report! Not getting your launch fix? Buckle up. We’re on the cusp of a boom in rocket launches as three new megaconstellations have either just begun or will soon begin deploying thousands of satellites to enable broadband connectivity from space. If the megaconstellations come to fruition, this will require more than a thousand launches in the next few years, on top of SpaceX’s blistering Starlink launch cadence. We discuss the topic of megaconstellations 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.

So, what is SpinLaunch doing now? Ars Technica has mentioned SpinLaunch, the company that literally wants to yeet satellites into space, in previous Rocket Report newsletters. This company enjoyed some success in raising money for its so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea of catapulting rockets and satellites into the sky, a concept SpinLaunch calls “kinetic launch.” But SpinLaunch is now making a hard pivot to small satellites, a move that, on its face, seems puzzling after going all-in on kinetic launch and even performing several impressive hardware tests, throwing a projectile to altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Ars got the scoop, with the company’s CEO detailing why and how it plans to build a low-Earth orbit telecommunications constellation with 280 satellites.

Traditional versus kinetic … The planned constellation, named Meridian, is an opportunity for SpinLaunch to diversify away from being solely a launch company, according to David Wrenn, the company’s CEO. We’ve observed this in a number of companies that started out as rocket developers before branching out to satellite manufacturing or space services. Wrenn said SpinLaunch could loft all of the Meridian satellites on a single large conventional rocket, or perhaps two medium-lift rockets, and then maintain the constellation with its own kinetic launch system. A satellite communications network presents a better opportunity for profit, Wrenn said. “The launch market is relatively small compared to the economic potential of satellite communication,” he said. “Launch has generally been more of a cost center than a profit center. Satcom will be a much larger piece of the overall industry.”

Sign Me Up!

Peter Beck suggests Electron is here to stay. The conventional wisdom is that the small launch vehicle business isn’t a big moneymaker. There is really only one company, Rocket Lab, that has gained traction in selling dedicated rides to orbit for small satellites. Rocket Lab’s launcher, Electron, can place payloads of up to a few hundred pounds into orbit. As soon as Rocket Lab had some success, SpaceX began launching rideshare missions on its much larger Falcon 9 rocket, cobbling together dozens of satellites on a single vehicle to spread the cost of the mission among many customers. This offers customers a lower price point than buying a dedicated launch on Electron. But Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, says his company has found a successful market providing dedicated launches for small satellites, despite price pressure from SpaceX, Space News reports. “Dedicated small launch is a real market, and it should not be confused with rideshare,” he argued. “It’s totally different.”

No man’s land … Some small satellite companies that can afford the extra cost of a dedicated launch realize the value of controlling their schedule and orbit, traits that a dedicated launch offers over a rideshare, Beck said. It’s easy to blame SpaceX for undercutting the prices of Rocket Lab and other players in this segment of the launch business, but Beck said companies that have failed or withdrawn from the small launch market didn’t have a good business plan, a good product, or good engineering. He added that the capacity of the Electron vehicle is well-suited for dedicated launch, whereas slightly larger rockets in the one-ton-to-orbit class—a category that includes Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha and Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rockets—are an ill fit. The one-ton performance range is “no man’s land” in the market, Beck said. “It’s too small to be a useful rideshare mission, and it’s too big to be a useful dedicated rocket” for smallsats. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

ULA scrubs first full-on Kuiper launch. A band of offshore thunderstorms near Florida’s Space Coast on Wednesday night forced United Launch Alliance to scrub a launch attempt of the first of dozens of missions on behalf of its largest commercial customer, Amazon, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission will use an Atlas V rocket to deploy 27 satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper network. It’s the first launch of what will eventually be more than 3,200 operational Kuiper satellites beaming broadband connectivity from space, a market currently dominated by SpaceX’s Starlink. As of Thursday, ULA hadn’t confirmed a new launch date, but airspace warning notices released by the FAA suggest the next attempt might occur Monday, April 14.

What’s a few more days? … This mission has been a long time coming. Amazon announced the Kuiper megaconstellation in 2019, and the company says it’s investing at least $10 billion in the project (the real number may be double that). Problems in manufacturing the Kuiper satellites, which Amazon is building in-house, delayed the program’s first full-on launch by a couple of years. Amazon launched a pair of prototype satellites in 2023, but the operational versions are different, and this mission fills the capacity of ULA’s Atlas V rocket. Amazon has booked more than 80 launches with ULA, Arianespace, Blue Origin, and SpaceX to populate the Kuiper network. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Space Force swaps ULA for SpaceX. For the second time in six months, SpaceX will deploy a US military satellite that was sitting in storage, waiting for a slot on United Launch Alliance’s launch schedule, Ars reports. Space Systems Command, which oversees the military’s launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA’s Vulcan rocket to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force’s fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world. The move allows the GPS satellite to launch as soon as the end of May, the Space Force said. The military executed a similar rocket swap for a GPS mission that launched on a Falcon 9 in December.

Making ULA whole … The Space Force formally certified ULA’s Vulcan rocket for national security missions last month, so Vulcan may finally be on the cusp of delivering for the military. But there are several military payloads in the queue to launch on Vulcan before GPS III SV-08, which was already completed and in storage at its Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado. Meanwhile, SpaceX is regularly launching Falcon 9 rockets with ample capacity to add the GPS mission to the manifest. In exchange for losing the contract to launch this particular GPS satellite, the Space Force swapped a future GPS mission that was assigned to SpaceX to fly on ULA’s Vulcan instead.

Russia launches a former Navy SEAL to space. Jonny Kim, a former Navy SEAL, Harvard Medical School graduate, and now a NASA astronaut, blasted off with two cosmonaut crewmates aboard a Russian Soyuz rocket early Tuesday, CBS News reports. Three hours later, Kim and his Russian crewmates—Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky—chased down the International Space Station and moved in for a picture-perfect docking aboard their Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft. “It was the trip of a lifetime and an honor to be here,” Kim told flight controllers during a traditional post-docking video conference.

Rotating back to Earth … Ryzhikov, Zubritsky, and Kim joined a crew of seven living aboard the International Space Station, temporarily raising the lab’s crew complement to 10 people. The new station residents are replacing an outgoing Soyuz crew—Alexey Ovchinin, Ivan Wagner, and Don Pettit—who launched to the ISS last September and who plan to return to Earth aboard their own spacecraft April 19 to wrap up a 219-day stay in space. This flight continues the practice of launching US astronauts on Russian Soyuz missions, part of a barter agreement between NASA and the Russian space agency that also reserves a seat on SpaceX Dragon missions for Russian cosmonauts.

China is littering in LEO. China’s construction of a pair of communications megaconstellations could cloud low Earth orbit with large spent rocket stages for decades or beyond, Space News reports. Launches for the government’s Guowang and Shanghai-backed but more commercially oriented Qianfan (Thousand Sails) constellation began in the second half of 2024, with each planned to consist of over 10,000 satellites, demanding more than a thousand launches in the coming years. Placing this number of satellites is enough to cause concern about space debris because China hasn’t disclosed its plans for removing the spacecraft from orbit at the end of their missions. It turns out there’s another big worry: upper stages.

An orbital time bomb … While Western launch providers typically deorbit their upper stages after dropping off megaconstellation satellites in space, China does not. This means China is leaving rockets in orbits high enough to persist in space for more than a century, according to Jim Shell, a space domain awareness and orbital debris expert at Novarum Tech. Space News reported on Shell’s commentary in a social media post, where he wrote that orbital debris mass in low-Earth orbit “will be dominated by PRC [People’s Republic of China] upper stages in short order unless something changes (sigh).” So far, China has launched five dedicated missions to deliver 90 Qianfan satellites into orbit. Four of these missions used China’s Long March 6A rocket, with an upper stage that has a history of breaking up in orbit, exacerbating the space debris problem. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SpaceX wins another lunar lander launch deal. Intuitive Machines has selected a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to launch a lunar delivery mission scheduled for 2027, the Houston Chronicle reports. The upcoming IM-4 mission will carry six NASA payloads, including a European Space Agency-led drill suite designed to search for water at the lunar south pole. It will also include the launch of two lunar data relay satellites that support NASA’s so-called Near Space Network Services program. This will be the fourth lunar lander mission for Houston-based Intuitive Machines under the auspices of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

Falcon 9 has the inside track … SpaceX almost certainly offered Intuitive Machines the best deal for this launch. The flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket is reliable and inexpensive compared to competitors and has already launched two Intuitive Machines missions, with a third one set to fly late this year. However, there’s another factor that made SpaceX a shoe-in for this contract. SpaceX has outfitted one of its launch pads in Florida with a unique cryogenic loading system to pump liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the Intuitive Machines lunar lander as it sits on top of its rocket just before liftoff. The lander from Intuitive Machines uses these super-cold propellants to feed its main engine, and SpaceX’s infrastructure for loading it makes the Falcon 9 rocket the clear choice for launching it.

Time may finally be running out for SLS. Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee for NASA administrator, said Wednesday in a Senate confirmation hearing that he wants the space agency to pursue human missions to the Moon and Mars at the same time, an effort that will undoubtedly require major changes to how NASA spends its money. My colleague Eric Berger was in Washington for the hearing and reported on it for Ars. Senators repeatedly sought Isaacman’s opinion on the Space Launch System, the NASA heavy-lifter designed to send astronauts to the Moon. The next SLS mission, Artemis II, is slated to launch a crew of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon next year. NASA’s official plans call for the Artemis III mission to launch on an SLS rocket later this decade and attempt a landing at the Moon’s south pole.

Limited runway … Isaacman sounded as if he were on board with flying the Artemis II mission as envisioned—no surprise, then, that the four Artemis II astronauts were in the audience—and said he wanted to get a crew of Artemis III to the lunar surface as quickly as possible. But he questioned why it has taken NASA so long, and at such great expense, to get its deep space human exploration plans moving. In one notable exchange, Isaacman said NASA’s current architecture for the Artemis lunar plans, based on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, is probably not the ideal “long-term” solution to NASA’s deep space transportation plans. The smart reading of this is that Isaacman may be willing to fly the Artemis II and Artemis III missions as conceived, given that much of the hardware is already built. But everything that comes after this, including SLS rocket upgrades and the Lunar Gateway, could be on the chopping block.

Welcome to the club, Blue Origin. Finally, the Space Force has signaled it’s ready to trust Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, for launching the military’s most precious satellites, Ars reports. Blue Origin received a contract April 4 to launch seven national security missions for the Space Force between 2027 and 2032, an opening that could pave the way for more launch deals in the future. These missions will launch on Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which had a successful debut test flight in January. The Space Force hasn’t certified New Glenn for national security launches, but military officials expect to do so sometime next year. Blue Origin joins SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in the Space Force’s mix of most-trusted launch providers.

A different class … The contract Blue Origin received last week covers launch services for the Space Force’s most critical space missions, requiring rocket certification and a heavy dose of military oversight to ensure reliability. Blue Origin was already eligible to launch a separate batch of missions the Space Force set aside to fly on newer rockets. The military is more tolerant of risk on these lower-priority missions, which include launches of “cookie cutter” satellites for the Pentagon’s large fleet of missile-tracking satellites and a range of experimental payloads.

Why is SpaceX winning so many Space Force contracts? In less than a week, the US Space Force awarded SpaceX a $5.9 billion deal to make Elon Musk’s space company the Pentagon’s leading launch provider, replacing United Launch Alliance in top position. Then, the Space Force assigned the vast majority of this year’s most lucrative launch contracts to SpaceX. As we mention earlier in the Rocket Report, the military also swapped a ULA rocket for a SpaceX launch vehicle for an upcoming GPS mission. So, is SpaceX’s main competitor worried Elon Musk is tipping the playing field for lucrative government contracts by cozying up to President Trump?

It’s all good, man … Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, doesn’t seem too worried in his public statements, Ars reports. In a roundtable with reporters this week at the annual Space Symposium conference in Colorado, Bruno was asked about Musk’s ties with Trump. “We have not been impacted by our competitor’s position advising the president, certainly not yet,” Bruno said. “I expect that the government will follow all the rules and be fair and follow all the laws, and so we’re behaving that way.” The reason Bruno can say Musk’s involvement in the Trump administration so far hasn’t affected ULA is simple. SpaceX is cheaper and has a ready-made line of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets available to launch the Pentagon’s satellites. ULA’s Vulcan rocket is now certified to launch military payloads, but it reached this important milestone years behind schedule.

Two Texas lawmakers are still fighting the last war. NASA has a lot to figure out in the next couple of years. Moon or Mars? Should, or when should, the Space Launch System be canceled? Can the agency absorb a potential 50 percent cut to its science budget? If Senators John Cornyn and Ted Cruz get their way, NASA can add moving a space shuttle to its list. The Lone Star State’s two Republican senators introduced the “Bring the Space Shuttle Home Act” on Thursday, CollectSpace reports. If passed by Congress and signed into law, the bill would direct NASA to take the space shuttle Discovery from the national collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and transport it to Space Center Houston, a museum and visitor attraction next to Johnson Space Center, home to mission control and NASA’s astronaut training base. Discovery has been on display at the Smithsonian since 2012. NASA awarded museums in California, Florida, and New York the other three surviving shuttle orbiters.

Dollars and nonsense … Moving a space shuttle from Virginia to Texas would be a logistical nightmare, cost an untold amount of money, and would create a distraction for NASA when its focus should be on future space exploration. In a statement, Cruz said Houston deserves one of NASA’s space shuttles because of the city’s “unique relationship” to the program. Cornyn alleged in a statement that the Obama administration blocked Houston from receiving a space shuttle for political reasons. NASA’s inspector general found no evidence of this. On the contrary, transferring a space shuttle to Texas now would be an unequivocal example of political influence. The Boeing 747s that NASA used to move space shuttles across the country are no longer flightworthy, and NASA scrapped the handling equipment needed to prepare a shuttle for transport. Moving the shuttle by land or sea would come with its own challenges. “I can easily see this costing a billion dollars,” Dennis Jenkins, a former shuttle engineer who directed NASA’s shuttle transition and retirement program more than a decade ago, told CollectSpace in an interview. On a personal note, the presentation of Discovery at the Smithsonian is remarkable to see in person, with aerospace icons like the Concorde and the SR-71 spy plane under the same roof. Space Center Houston can’t match that.

Next three launches

April 12: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-17 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 01: 15 UTC

April 12: Falcon 9 | NROL-192 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 12: 17 UTC

April 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-73 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 01: 59 UTC

Rocket Report: “No man’s land” in rocket wars; Isaacman lukewarm on SLS Read More »

A military satellite waiting to launch with ULA will now fly with SpaceX

falcon 9, GPS, launch, military space, Space, spacex, united launch alliance, vulcan / Mike M. / April 8, 2025

For the second time in six months, SpaceX will deploy a US military satellite that was sitting in storage, waiting for a slot on United Launch Alliance’s launch schedule.

Space Systems Command, which oversees the military’s launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA’s Vulcan rocket to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force’s fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world.

The Space Force booked the Vulcan rocket to launch this spacecraft in 2023, when ULA hoped to begin flying military satellites on its new rocket by mid-2024. The Vulcan rocket is now scheduled to launch its first national security mission around the middle of this year, following the Space Force’s certification of ULA’s new launcher last month.

The “launch vehicle trade” allows the Space Force to launch the GPS III SV-08 satellite from Cape Canaveral, Florida, as soon as the end of May, according to a press release.

“Capability sitting on the ground”

With Vulcan now cleared to launch military missions, officials are hopeful ULA can ramp up the rocket’s flight cadence. Vulcan launched on two demonstration flights last year, and ULA eventually wants to launch Vulcan twice per month. ULA engineers have their work cut out for them. The company’s Vulcan backlog now stands at 89 missions, following the Space Force’s announcement last week of 19 additional launches awarded to ULA.

Last year, the Pentagon’s chief acquisition official for space wrote a letter to ULA’s owners—Boeing and Lockheed Martin—expressing concern about ULA’s ability to scale the manufacturing of the Vulcan rocket.

“Currently there is military satellite capability sitting on the ground due to Vulcan delays,” Frank Calvelli, the Pentagon’s chief of space acquisition, wrote in the letter.

Vulcan may finally be on the cusp of delivering for the Space Force, but there are several military payloads in the queue to launch on Vulcan before GPS III SV-08, which was complete and in storage at its Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado.

Col. Jim Horne, senior materiel leader of launch execution, said in a statement that the rocket swap showcases the Space Force’s ability to launch in three months from call-up, compared to the typical planning cycle of two years. “It highlights another instance of the Space Force’s ability to complete high-priority launches on a rapid timescale, which demonstrates the capability to respond to emergent constellation needs as rapidly as Space Vehicle readiness allows,” Horne said.

A military satellite waiting to launch with ULA will now fly with SpaceX Read More »