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This launcher is about to displace the V-2 as Germany’s largest rocket

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Isar Aerospace’s first Spectrum rocket will launch from Andøya Spaceport in Norway.

Seven years ago, three classmates at the Technical University of Munich believed their student engineering project might hold some promise in the private sector.

At the time, Daniel Metzler led a team of 40 students working on rocket engines and launching sounding rockets. Josef Fleischmann was on the team that won the first SpaceX Hyperloop competition. Together with another classmate, Markus Brandl, they crafted rocket parts in a campus workshop before taking the leap and establishing Isar Aerospace, named for the river running through the Bavarian capital.

Now, Isar’s big moment has arrived. The company’s orbital-class first rocket, named Spectrum, is set to lift off from a shoreline launch pad in Norway as soon as Monday.

The three-hour launch window opens at 12: 30 pm local time in Norway, or 7: 30 am EDT in the United States. “The launch date remains subject to weather, safety and range infrastructure,” Isar said in a statement.

Isar’s Spectrum rocket rolls out to its launch pad in Norway. Credit: Isar Aerospace

Isar said it received a launch license from the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority on March 14, following the final qualification test on the Spectrum rocket in February to validate its readiness for flight.

Notably, this will be the first orbital launch attempt from a launch pad in Western Europe. The French-run Guiana Space Center in South America is the primary spaceport for European rockets. Virgin Orbit staged an airborne launch attempt from an airport in the United Kingdom in 2023, and the Plesetsk Cosmodrome is located in European Russia.

No guarantees

Success is never assured on the inaugural launch of a new rocket. Isar is the first in a wave of European launch startups to arrive at this point. The company developed the Spectrum rocket with mostly private funding, although Isar received multimillion-euro investments from the European Space Agency, the German government, and the NATO Innovation Fund.

All told, Isar says it has raised more than 400 million euros, or $435 million at today’s currency exchange rate, more than any other European launch startup.

“We are approaching the most important moment of our journey so far, and I would like to thank all our team, partners, customers and investors who have been accompanying and trusting us,” said Daniel Metzler, Isar’s co-founder and CEO, in a statement.

Most privately developed rockets have failed to reach orbit on the first try. Several US launch companies that evolved in a similar mold as Isar—such as Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, and Astra—faltered on the way to orbit on their rockets’ first flights.

“With this mission, Isar Aerospace aims to collect as much data and experience as possible on its in-house-developed launch vehicle. It is the first integrated test of all systems,” said Alexandre Dalloneau, Isar’s vice president of mission and launch operations.

“The test results will feed into the iterations and development of future Spectrum vehicles, which are being built and tested in parallel,” Isar said in a statement.

Look familiar? Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket is powered by nine first-stage engines arranged in an “octaweb” configuration patterned on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: Isar Aerospace/Wingmen Media

Europe has struggled to regain its footing after SpaceX took over the dominant position in the global commercial launch market, a segment led for three decades by Europe’s Ariane rocket family before SpaceX proved the reliability of the lower-cost, partially reusable Falcon 9 launcher. The continent’s new Ariane 6 rocket, funded by ESA and built by a consortium owned by multinational firms Airbus and Safran, is more expensive than the Falcon 9 and years behind schedule. It finally debuted last year.

One ton to LEO

Isar’s Spectrum rocket is not as powerful as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 or Arianespace’s Ariane 6. But even SpaceX had to start somewhere. Its small Falcon 1 rocket failed three times before tasting success. Spectrum is somewhat larger and more capable than Falcon 1, with performance in line with Firefly’s Alpha rocket.

The fully assembled Spectrum rocket stands about 92 feet (28 meters) tall and measures more than 6 feet (2 meters) in diameter. The expendable launcher is designed to haul payloads up to 1 metric ton (2,200 pounds) into low-Earth orbit. Spectrum is powered by nine Aquila engines on its first stage, and one engine on the second stage, burning a mixture of propane and liquid oxygen propellants.

There are no customer satellites aboard the first Spectrum test flight. The rocket will climb into a polar orbit from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, but Isar hasn’t published a launch timeline or the exact parameters of the target orbit.

While modest in size next to Europe’s Ariane launcher family, Isar’s Spectrum is the largest German rocket since the V-2, the World War II weapon of terror launched by Nazi Germany against targets in Great Britain, Belgium, and other places. In the 80 years since the war, German industry developed a handful of small sounding rockets and manufactured upper stages for Ariane rockets.

But German governments have long shunned spending on launchers at levels commensurate with the nation’s place as a top contributor to ESA. France took the lead in the continent’s postwar rocket industry, providing the lion’s share of funding for Ariane and taking responsibility for building engines and booster stages.

Now, 80 years to the week since the last V-2 launch of World War II, Germany again has a homegrown liquid-fueled rocket on the launch pad. This time, it’s for a much different purpose.

As a first step, Isar and other companies in Europe are vying to inject competition with Arianespace into the European launch market. This will begin with small government-funded satellites that otherwise would have likely launched on rideshare flights by SpaceX or Arianespace.

In 2022, the German space agency (known as DLR) announced the selection of research and demo payloads slated to fly on Spectrum’s second launch. The Norwegian Space Agency revealed a contract earlier this month for Isar to launch a pair of satellites for the country’s Arctic Ocean Surveillance program.

Within the next few days, ESA is expected to release an “invitation to tender” for European industry to submit proposals for the European Launcher Challenge. This summer, ESA will select winners from Europe’s crop of launch startups to demonstrate that their rockets can deliver the agency’s scientific satellites to orbit. This is the first time ESA has experimented with a fully commercial business model, with launch service contracts to private companies. Isar is a leading contender to win the launcher challenge, alongside other European companies like Rocket Factory Augsburg, HyImpulse, MaiaSpace, and others.

Previously, ESA has provided billions of euros to Europe’s big incumbent rocket companies for development of new generations of Ariane rockets. Now, ESA wants to follow the path of NASA, which has used fixed-price service contracts to foster commercial cargo and crew transportation to the International Space Station, and most recently, privately owned landers on the Moon.

“Whatever the outcome, Isar Aerospace’s upcoming Spectrum launch will be historic: the first commercial orbital launch from mainland Europe,” Josef Aschbacher, ESA’s director general, posted on X. “The support and co-funding the European Space Agency has given Isar Aerospace and other launch service provider startups is paying off for increased autonomy in Europe. Wishing Isar Aerospace a great launch day with fair weather and most importantly, that the data they receive from the liftoff will speed next iterations of their rockets.”

Toni Tolker-Nielsen, ESA’s acting director of space transportation, called this moment a “paradigm shift” for Europe’s launcher strategy.

“In the last 40 years, we have had these ESA-developed launchers that we have been relying on,” Tolker-Nielsen told Ars in an interview. “So we started with Ariane 1 up to Ariane 6. Vega C came onboard. And it’s been working like that for the last 40 years. Now, we are moving into in the ’30s, and the next decades, to have privately developed launchers.”

Isar Aerospace’s first Spectrum rocket will lift off from the remote Andøya Spaceport in Norway, a gorgeous location that might be the world’s most picturesque launch site. Nestled on the western coast of an island inside the Arctic Circle, Andøya offers an open path over the Norwegian Sea for rockets to fly north, where they can place satellites into polar orbit.

The spaceport is operated by Andøya Space, a company 90 percent owned by the Norwegian government through the Ministry for Trade, Industry, and Fisheries. Until now, Andøya Spaceport has been used for launches of suborbital sounding rockets.

The geography of Norway permits northerly launches from Andøya Spaceport. Credit: Andøya Space

No better time than now

Isar’s first launch comes amid an abrupt turn in European strategic policy as the continent’s leaders struggle with how to respond to moves by President Donald Trump in his first two months in office. In recent weeks, the Trump administration put European leaders on their heels with sudden policy reversals and unpredictable statements on Ukraine, NATO, and the US government’s long-term backstopping of European security.

Friedrich Merz, set to become Germany’s next chancellor, said last month that Europe should strive to “achieve independence” from the United States. “It is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

Last week, Merz shepherded a bill through German parliament to amend the country’s constitution, allowing for a significant increase in German defense spending. The incoming chancellor said the change is “nothing less than the first major step towards a new European defense community.”

The erosion of Europe’s trust in the Trump administration prompted rumors that the US government could trigger a “kill switch” to turn off combat capabilities of F-35 fighter jets sold to US allies. This would have previously seemed like a far-fetched conspiracy theory, but some European officials felt compelled to make statements denying the kill switch reports. Still, the recent turbulence in trans-Atlantic relations has some US allies rethinking their plans to buy more US-made fighter jets and weapons systems.

“Reliable and predictable orders should go to European manufacturers whenever possible,” Merz said.

Robert Habeck, Germany’s vice chancellor and economics minister, tours Isar Aerospace in Ottobrunn, Germany, in 2023. Credit: Marijan Murat/picture alliance via Getty Images

This uncertainty extends to space, where it is most apparent in the launch industry. SpaceX, founded and led by Trump ally Elon Musk, dominates the global commercial launch business. European governments have repeatedly turned to SpaceX to launch multiple defense and scientific satellites over the last several years, while Europe encountered delays with its homegrown Ariane 6 and Vega rockets.

Until 2022, Europe and Russia jointly operated Soyuz rockets from the Guiana Space Center in South America to deploy government and commercial payloads to orbit. The partnership ended with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Europe’s flagship Ariane 5 rocket retired in 2023, a year before its replacement—the Ariane 6—debuted on its first test flight from the Guiana Space Center. The first operational flight of the Ariane 6 delivered a French military spy satellite to orbit March 6. The smaller Vega C rocket successfully launched in December, two years after officials grounded the vehicle due to an in-flight failure.

ESA funded development of the Ariane 6 and Vega C in partnership with ArianeGroup, a joint venture between Airbus and Safran, and the Italian defense contractor Avio.

For the moment, Europe’s launcher program is back on track to provide autonomous access to space, a capability European officials consider a strategic imperative. Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for research and higher education, said after the Ariane 6 flight earlier this month that the launch was “proof” of European space sovereignty.

“The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with Elon Musk at his side, already has significant consequences on our research partnerships, on our commercial partnerships,” Baptiste said in his remarkably pointed prepared remarks. “If we want to maintain our independence, ensure our security, and preserve our sovereignty, we must equip ourselves with the means for strategic autonomy, and space is an essential part of this.”

The problem? Ariane 6 and Vega C are costly, lack a path to reusability, and aren’t geared to match SpaceX’s blistering launch cadence. If Europe wants autonomous access to space, European taxpayers will have to pay a premium. Isar’s Spectrum also isn’t reusable, but European officials hope competition from new startups will produce fresh launch options, and perhaps stimulate an inspired response from Europe’s entrenched launch companies.

“In today’s geopolitical climate, our first test flight is about much more than a rocket launch: Space is one of the most critical platforms for our security, resilience, and technological advancement,” Metzler said. “In the next days, Isar Aerospace will lay the foundations to regain much needed independent and competitive access to space from Europe.”

Tolker-Nielsen, in charge of ESA’s space transportation division, said this is the first of many steps for Europe to develop a thriving commercial launch sector.

“This launch is a milestone, which is very important,” he said. “It’s the first conclusion of all this work, so I will be looking carefully on that. I cross my fingers that it goes well.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

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

This launcher is about to displace the V-2 as Germany’s largest rocket Read More »

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Rocket Report: ULA confirms cause of booster anomaly; Crew-10 launch on tap

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The head of Poland’s space agency was fired over a bungled response to SpaceX debris falling over Polish territory.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s Dragon spacecraft on top is seen during sunset Tuesday at Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.35 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX’s steamroller is still rolling, but for the first time in many years, it doesn’t seem like it’s rolling downhill. After a three-year run of perfect performance—with no launch failures or any other serious malfunctions—SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has suffered a handful of issues in recent months. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket is having problems, too. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, addressed some (but not all) of these concerns in a post on X this week. Despite the issues with the Falcon 9, SpaceX has maintained a remarkable launch cadence. As of Thursday, SpaceX has launched 28 Falcon 9 flights since January 1, ahead of last year’s pace.

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.

Alpha rocket preps for weekend launch. While Firefly Aerospace is making headlines for landing on the Moon, its Alpha rocket is set to launch again as soon as Saturday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The two-stage, kerosene-fueled rocket will launch a self-funded technology demonstration satellite for Lockheed Martin. It’s the first of up to 25 launches Lockheed Martin has booked with Firefly over the next five years. This launch will be the sixth flight of an Alpha rocket, which has become a leader in the US commercial launch industry for dedicated missions with 1 ton-class satellites.

Firefly’s OG … The Alpha rocket was Firefly’s first product, and it has been a central piece of the company’s development since 2014. Like Firefly itself, the Alpha rocket program has gone through multiple iterations, including a wholesale redesign nearly a decade ago. Sure, Firefly can’t claim any revolutionary firsts with the Alpha rocket, as it can with its Blue Ghost lunar lander. But without Alpha, Firefly wouldn’t be where it is today. The Texas-based firm is one of only four US companies with an operational orbital-class rocket. One thing to watch for is how quickly Firefly can ramp up its Alpha launch cadence. The rocket only flew once last year.

Isar Aerospace celebrates another win. In last week’s Rocket Report, we mentioned that the German launch startup Isar Aerospace won a contract with a Japanese company to launch a 200-kilogram commercial satellite in 2026. But wait, there’s more! On Wednesday, the Norwegian Space Agency announced it awarded a contract to Isar Aerospace for the launch of a pair of satellites for the country’s Arctic Ocean Surveillance initiative, European Spaceflight reports. The satellites are scheduled to launch on Isar’s Spectrum rocket from Andøya Spaceport in Norway by 2028.

First launch pending … These recent contract wins are a promising sign for Isar Aerospace, which is also vying for contracts to launch small payloads for the European Space Agency. The Spectrum rocket could launch on its inaugural flight within a matter of weeks, and if successful, it could mark a transformative moment for the European space industry, which has long been limited to a single launch provider: the French company Arianespace. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

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Mother Nature holds up Oz launch. The first launch by Gilmour Space has been postponed again due to a tropical cyclone that brought severe weather to Australia’s Gold Coast region earlier this month, InnovationAus.com reports. Tropical Cyclone Alfred didn’t significantly impact Gilmour’s launch site, but the storm did cause the company to suspend work at its corporate headquarters in Southeast Queensland. With the storm now over, Gilmour is reassessing when it might be ready to launch its Eris rocket. Reportedly, the delay could be as long as two weeks or more.

A regulatory storm … Gilmour aims to become the first Australian company to launch a rocket into orbit. Last month, Gilmour announced the launch date for the Eris rocket was set for no earlier than March 15, but Tropical Cyclone Alfred threw this schedule out the window. Gilmour said it received a launch license from the Australian Space Agency in November and last month secured approvals to clear airspace around the launch site. But there’s still a hitch. The license is conditional on final documentation for the launch being filed and agreed with the space agency, and this process is stretching longer than anticipated. (submitted by ZygP)

What is going on at SpaceX? As we mention in the introduction to this week’s Rocket Report, it has been an uncharacteristically messy eight months for SpaceX. These speed bumps include issues with the Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage on three missions, two lost Falcon 9 boosters, and consecutive failures of SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket on its first two test flights of the year. So what’s behind SpaceX’s bumpy ride? Ars wrote about the pressures facing SpaceX employees as Elon Musk pushes his workforce ever-harder to accelerate toward what Musk might call a multi-planetary future.

Headwinds or tailwinds? … No country or private company ever launched as many times as SpaceX flew its fleet of Falcon 9 rockets in 2024. At the same time, the company has been attempting to move its talented engineering team off the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs and onto Starship to keep that ambitious program moving forward. This is all happening as Musk has taken on significant roles in the Trump administration, stirring controversy and raising questions about his motives and potential conflicts of interest. However, it may be not so much Musk’s absence from SpaceX that is causing these issues but more the company’s relentless culture. As my colleague Eric Berger suggested in his piece, it seems possible that, at least for now, SpaceX has reached the speed limit for commercial spaceflight.

A titan of Silicon Valley enters the rocket business. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has taken a controlling interest in the Long Beach, California-based Relativity Space, Ars reports. Schmidt’s involvement with Relativity has been quietly discussed among space industry insiders for a few months. Multiple sources told Ars that he has largely been bankrolling the company since the end of October, when the company’s previous fundraising dried up. Now, Schmidt is Relativity’s CEO.

Unclear motives … It is not immediately clear why Schmidt is taking a hands-on approach at Relativity. However, it is one of the few US-based companies with a credible path toward developing a medium-lift rocket that could potentially challenge the dominance of SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket. If the Terran R booster becomes commercially successful, it could play a big role in launching megaconstellations. Schmidt’s ascension also means that Tim Ellis, the company’s co-founder, chief executive, and almost sole public persona for nearly a decade, is now out of a leadership position.

Falcon 9 deploys NASA’s newest space telescope. Satellites come in all shapes and sizes, but there aren’t any that look quite like SPHEREx, an infrared observatory NASA launched Tuesday night in search of answers to simmering questions about how the Universe, and ultimately life, came to be, Ars reports. The SPHEREx satellite rocketed into orbit from California aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, beginning a two-year mission surveying the sky in search of clues about the earliest periods of cosmic history, when the Universe rapidly expanded and the first galaxies formed. SPHEREx will also scan for pockets of water ice within our own galaxy, where clouds of gas and dust coalesce to form stars and planets.

Excess capacity … SPHEREx has lofty goals, but it’s modest in size, weighing just a little more than a half-ton at launch. This meant the Falcon 9 rocket had plenty of extra room for four other small satellites that will fly in formation to image the solar wind as it travels from the Sun into the Solar System. The four satellites are part of NASA’s PUNCH mission. SPHEREx and PUNCH are part of NASA’s Explorers program, a series of cost-capped science missions with a lineage going back to the dawn of the Space Age. SPHEREx and PUNCH have a combined cost of about $638 million. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

China has launched another batch of Internet satellites. A new group of 18 satellites entered orbit Tuesday for the Thousand Sails constellation with the first launch from a new commercial launch pad, Space News reports. The satellites launched on top of a Long March 8 rocket from Hainan Commercial Launch Site near Wenchang on Hainan Island. The commercial launch site has two pads, the first of which entered service with a launch last year. This mission was the first to launch from the other pad at the commercial spaceport, which is gearing up for an uptick in Chinese launch activity to continue deploying satellites for the Thousand Sails network and other megaconstellations.

Sailing on … The Thousand Sails constellation, also known as Qianfan, or G60 Starlink, is a broadband satellite constellation spearheaded by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST), also known as Spacesail, Space News reported. The project, which aims to deploy 14,000 satellites, seeks to compete in the global satellite Internet market. Spacesail has now launched 90 satellites into near-polar orbits, and the operator previously stated it aims to have 648 satellites in orbit by the end of 2025. If Spacesail continues launching 18 satellites per rocket, this goal would require 31 more launches this year. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

NASA, SpaceX call off astronaut launch. With the countdown within 45 minutes of launch, NASA called off an attempt to send the next crew to the International Space Station Wednesday evening to allow more time to troubleshoot a ground system hydraulics issue, CBS News reports. During the countdown Wednesday, SpaceX engineers were troubleshooting a problem with one of two clamp arms that hold the Falcon 9 rocket to its strongback support gantry. Hydraulics are used to retract the two clamps prior to launch.

Back on track … NASA confirmed Thursday SpaceX ground teams completed inspections of the hydraulics system used for the clamp arm supporting the Falcon 9 rocket and successfully flushed a suspected pocket of trapped air in the system, clearing the way for another launch attempt Friday evening. This mission, known as Crew-10, will ferry two NASA astronauts, a Japanese mission specialist, and a Russian cosmonaut to the space station. They will replace a four-person crew currently at the ISS, including Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been in orbit since last June after flying to space on Boeing’s Starliner capsule. Starliner returned to Earth without its crew due to a problem with overheating thrusters, leaving Wilmore and Williams behind to wait for a ride home with SpaceX.

SpaceX’s woes reach Poland’s space agency. The president of the Polish Space Agency, Grzegorz Wrochna, has been dismissed following a botched response to the uncontrolled reentry of a Falcon 9 second stage that scattered debris across multiple locations in Poland, European Spaceflight reports. The Falcon 9’s upper stage was supposed to steer itself toward a controlled reentry last month after deploying a set of Starlink satellites, but a propellant leak prevented it from doing so. Instead, the stage remained in orbit for nearly three weeks before falling back into the atmosphere February 19, scattering debris fragments at several locations in Poland.

A failure to communicate … In the aftermath of the Falcon 9’s uncontrolled reentry, the Polish Space Agency (POLSA) claimed it sent warnings of the threat of falling space debris to multiple departments of the Polish government. One Polish ministry disputed this claim, saying it was not adequately warned about the uncontrolled reentry. POLSA later confirmed it sent information regarding the reentry to a wrong email address. Making matters worse, the Polish Space Agency reported it was hacked on March 2. The Polish government apparently had enough and fired the head of the space agency March 11.

Vulcan booster anomaly blamed on “manufacturing defect.” The loss of a solid rocket motor nozzle on the second flight of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur last October was caused by a manufacturing defect, Space News reports. In a roundtable with reporters Wednesday, ULA chief executive Tory Bruno said the problem has been corrected as the company awaits certification of the Vulcan rocket by the Space Force. The nozzle fell off the bottom of one of the Vulcan launcher’s twin solid rocket boosters about a half-minute into its second test flight last year. The rocket continued its climb into space, but ULA and Northrop Grumman, which supplies solid rocket motors for Vulcan, set up an investigation to find the cause of the nozzle malfunction.

All the trimmings … Bruno said the anomaly was traced to a “manufacturing defect” in one of the internal parts of the nozzle, an insulator. Specific details, he said, remained proprietary, according to Space News. “We have isolated the root cause and made appropriate corrective actions,” he said, which were confirmed in a static-fire test of a motor at a Northrop test site in Utah in February. “So we are back continuing to fabricate hardware and, at least initially, screening for what that root cause was.” Bruno said the investigation was aided by recovery of hardware that fell off the motor while in flight and landed near the launch pad in Florida, as well as “trimmings” of material left over from the manufacturing process. ULA also recovered both boosters from the ocean so engineers could compare the one that lost its nozzle to the one that performed normally. The defective hardware “just stood out night and day,” Bruno said. “It was pretty clear that that was an outlier, far out of family.” Meanwhile, ULA has trimmed its launch forecast for this year, from a projection of up to 20 launches down to a dozen. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

March 14: Falcon 9 | Crew-10 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 23: 03 UTC

March 15: Electron | QPS-SAR-9 | Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand | 00: 00 UTC

March 15: Long March 2B | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 04: 10 UTC

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

Rocket Report: ULA confirms cause of booster anomaly; Crew-10 launch on tap Read More »

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The Starship program hits another speed bump with second consecutive failure

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The flight flight plan going into Thursday’s mission called for sending Starship on a journey halfway around the world from Texas, culminating in a controlled reentry over the Indian Ocean before splashing down northwest of Australia.

The test flight was supposed to be a do-over of the previous Starship flight on January 16, when the rocket’s upper stage—itself known as Starship, or ship—succumbed to fires fueled by leaking propellants in its engine bay. Engineers determined the most likely cause of the propellant leak was a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected.

The Super Heavy booster returned to Starbase in Texas to be caught back at the launch pad. Credit: SpaceX

Engineers test-fired the Starship vehicle for this week’s test flight earlier this month, validating changes to the ship’s fuel feed lines leading its six Raptor engines, adjustments to propellant temperatures, and a new operating thrust.

But engineers missed something. On Thursday, the Raptor engines began shutting down on Starship about eight minutes into the flight, and the rocket started tumbling 90 miles (146 kilometers) over the southeastern Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX ground controllers lost all contact with the rocket about nine-and-a-half minutes after liftoff.

“Prior to the end of the ascent burn, an energetic event in the aft portion of Starship resulted in the loss of several Raptor engines,” SpaceX wrote on X. “This in turn led to a loss of attitude control and ultimately a loss of communications with Starship.”

Just like in January, residents and tourists across the Florida peninsula, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands shared videos of fiery debris trails appearing in the twilight sky. Air traffic controllers diverted or delayed dozens of commercial airline flights flying through the debris footprint, just as they did in response to the January incident.

There were no immediate reports Thursday of any Starship wreckage falling over populated areas. In January, residents in the Turks and Caicos Islands recovered small debris fragments, including one piece that caused minor damage when it struck a car. The debris field from Thursday’s failed flight appeared to fall west of the areas where debris fell after Starship Flight 7.

A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said the regulatory agency will require SpaceX perform an investigation into Thursday’s Starship failure.

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When Europe needed it most, the Ariane 6 rocket finally delivered

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“For this sovereignty, we must yield to the temptation of preferring SpaceX.”

Europe’s second Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center on Thursday with a French military spy satellite. Credit: ESA-CNES-Arianespace-P. Piron

Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket lifted off Thursday from French Guiana and deployed a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the French military, notching a success on its first operational flight.

The 184-foot-tall (56-meter) rocket lifted off from Kourou, French Guiana, at 11: 24 am EST (16: 24 UTC). Twin solid-fueled boosters and a hydrogen-fueled core stage engine powered the Ariane 6 through thick clouds on an arcing trajectory north from the spaceport on South America’s northeastern coast.

The rocket shed its strap-on boosters a little more than two minutes into the flight, then jettisoned its core stage nearly eight minutes after liftoff. The spent rocket parts fell into the Atlantic Ocean. The upper stage’s Vinci engine ignited two times to reach a nearly circular polar orbit about 500 miles (800 kilometers) above the Earth. A little more than an hour after launch, the Ariane 6 upper stage deployed CSO-3, a sharp-eyed French military spy satellite, to begin a mission providing optical surveillance imagery to French intelligence agencies and military forces.

“This is an absolute pleasure for me today to announce that Ariane 6 has successfully placed into orbit the CSO-3 satellite,” said David Cavaillolès, who took over in January as CEO of Arianespace, the Ariane 6’s commercial operator. “Today, here in Kourou, we can say that thanks to Ariane 6, Europe and France have their own autonomous access to space back, and this is great news.”

This was the second flight of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket, following a mostly successful debut launch last July. The first test flight of the unproven Ariane 6 carried a batch of small, relatively inexpensive satellites. An Auxiliary Propulsion Unit (APU)—essentially a miniature second engine—on the upper stage shut down in the latter portion of the inaugural Ariane 6 flight, after the rocket reached orbit and released some of its payloads. But the unit malfunctioned before a third burn of the upper stage’s main engine, preventing the Ariane 6 from targeting a controlled reentry into the atmosphere.

The APU has several jobs on an Ariane 6 flight, including maintaining pressure inside the upper stage’s cryogenic propellant tanks, settling propellants before each main engine firing, and making fine adjustments to the rocket’s position in space. The APU appeared to work as designed Thursday, although this launch flew a less demanding profile than the test flight last year.

Is Ariane 6 the solution?

Ariane 6 has been exorbitantly costly and years late, but its first operational success comes at an opportune time for Europe.

Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for research and higher education, says Ariane 6 is “proof of our space sovereignty,” as many European officials feel they can no longer rely on the United States. Baptiste, an engineer and former head of the French space agency, mentioned “sovereignty” so many times, turning his statement into a drinking game crossed my mind.

“The return of Donald Trump to the White House, with Elon Musk at his side, already has significant consequences on our research partnerships, on our commercial partnerships,” Baptiste said. “Should I mention the uncertainties weighing today on our cooperation with NASA and NOAA, when emblematic programs like the ISS (International Space Station) are being unilaterally questioned by Elon Musk?

“If we want to maintain our independence, ensure our security, and preserve our sovereignty, we must equip ourselves with the means for strategic autonomy, and space is an essential part of this,” he continued.

Philippe Baptiste arrives at a government question session at the Senate in Paris on March 5, 2025. Credit: Magali Cohen/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images

Baptiste’s comments echo remarks from a range of European leaders in recent weeks.

French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address Wednesday night that the French were “legitimately worried” about European security after Trump reversed US policy on Ukraine. America’s NATO allies are largely united in their desire to continue supporting Ukraine in its defense against Russia’s invasion, while the Trump administration seeks a ceasefire that would require significant Ukrainian concessions.

“I want to believe that the United States will stay by our side, but we have to be prepared for that not to be the case,” Macron said. “The future of Europe does not have to be decided in Washington or Moscow.”

Friedrich Merz, set to become Germany’s next chancellor, said last month that Europe should strive to “achieve independence” from the United States. “It is clear that the Americans, at least this part of the Americans, this administration, are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

Merz also suggested Germany, France, and the United Kingdom should explore cooperation on a European nuclear deterrent to replace that of the United States, which has committed to protecting European territory from Russian attack for more than 75 years. Macron said the French military, which runs the only nuclear forces in Europe fully independent of the United States, could be used to protect allies elsewhere on the continent.

Access to space is also a strategic imperative for Europe, and it hasn’t come cheap. ESA paid more than $4 billion to develop the Ariane 6 rocket as a cheaper, more capable replacement for the Ariane 5, which retired in 2023. There are still pressing questions about Ariane 6’s cost per launch and whether the rocket will ever be able to meet its price target and compete with SpaceX and other companies in the commercial market.

But European officials have freely admitted the commercial market is secondary on their list of Ariane 6 goals.

European satellite operators stopped launching their payloads on Russian rockets after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Now, with Elon Musk inserting himself into European politics, there’s little appetite among European government officials to launch their satellites on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

The second Ariane 6 rocket on the launch pad in French Guiana. Credit: ESA–S. Corvaja

The Falcon 9 was the go-to choice for the European Space Agency, the European Union, and several national governments in Europe after they lost access to Russia’s Soyuz rocket and when Europe’s homemade Ariane 6 and Vega rockets faced lengthy delays. ESA launched a $1.5 billion space telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket in 2023, then returned to SpaceX to launch a climate research satellite and an asteroid explorer last year. The European Union paid SpaceX to launch four satellites for its flagship Galileo navigation network.

European space officials weren’t thrilled to do this. ESA was somewhat more accepting of the situation, with the agency’s director general recognizing Europe was suffering from an “acute launcher crisis” two years ago. On the other hand, the EU refused to even acknowledge SpaceX’s role in delivering Galileo satellites to orbit in the text of a post-launch press release.

“For this sovereignty, we must yield to the temptation of preferring SpaceX or another competitor that may seem trendier, more reliable, or cheaper,” Baptiste said. “We did not yield for CSO-3, and we will not yield in the future. We cannot yield because doing so would mean closing the door to space for good, and there would be no turning back. This is why the first commercial launch of Ariane 6 is not just a technical and one-off success. It marks a new milestone, essential in the choice of European space independence and sovereignty.”

Two flights into its career, Ariane 6 seems to offer a technical solution for Europe’s needs. But at what cost? Arianespace hasn’t publicly disclosed the cost for an Ariane 6 launch, although it’s likely somewhere in the range of 80 million to 100 million euros, about 40 percent lower than the cost of an Ariane 5. This is about 50 percent more than SpaceX’s list price for a dedicated Falcon 9 launch.

A new wave of European startups should soon begin launching small rockets to gain a foothold in the continent’s launch industry. These include Isar Aerospace, which could launch its first Spectrum rocket in a matter of weeks. These companies have the potential to offer Europe an option for cheaper rides to space, but the startups won’t have a rocket in the class of Ariane 6 until at least the 2030s.

Until then, at least, European governments will have to pay more to guarantee autonomous access to space.

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

When Europe needed it most, the Ariane 6 rocket finally delivered Read More »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another shot at glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FAA’s green light

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Rocket Report: Starship will soon fly again; Gilmour has a launch date

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One Falcon 9 launched an Intuitive Machines lunar lander, an asteroid prospector, and a NASA science probe.

Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, stands inside a test version of the “Hungry Hippo,” a nickname used to describe the clamshell-like nose cone of the Neutron rocket’s first stage booster. The fairing will open in flight to release Neutron’s second and payloads to continue into orbit, then close as the booster comes back to Earth for recovery. Credit: Rocket Lab

Welcome to Edition 7.33 of the Rocket Report! Phew, what a week for Rocket Lab! The company released a bevy of announcements in conjunction with its quarterly earnings report Thursday. Rocket Lab is spending a lot of money to develop the medium-lift rocket Neutron rocket, and as we’ll discuss below, a rocket landing platform and a new satellite design. For now, the company is sticking by its public statements that the Neutron rocket will launch this year—the official line is it will debut in the second half of 2025—but this schedule assumes near-perfect execution on the program. “We’ve always been clear that we run aggressive schedules,” said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO. The official schedule doesn’t quite allow me to invoke a strict interpretation of Berger’s Law, which states that if a rocket’s debut is predicted to happen in the fourth quarter of a year, and that quarter is six or more months away, the launch will be delayed. However, the spirit of the law seems valid here. This time last year, Rocket Lab targeted a first launch by the end of 2024, an aggressive target that has come and gone.

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.

Australian startup sets a launch date. The first attempt to send an Australian-made rocket into orbit is set to take place no sooner than March 15, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. Gilmour Space Technologies’ launch window announcement marks a major development for the company, which has been working towards a test launch for a decade. Gilmour previously hoped to launch its test rocket, Eris, in May 2024, but had to wait for the Australian government to issue a launch license and airspace approvals for the flight to go forward. Those are now in hand, clearing the last regulatory hurdle before liftoff.

Setting expectations … Gilmour’s Eris rocket is made of three stages powered by hybrid engines consuming a solid fuel and a liquid oxidizer. Eris is designed to haul payloads of up to 672 pounds (305 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit, and will launch from Bowen Orbital Spaceport in Queensland on Australia’s northeastern coast. Gilmour said it would be “very lucky” if the rocket reached orbit on first attempt. “Success means different things for different people, but ignition and liftoff will be huge,” said James Gilmour, the company’s co-founder. (submitted by ZygP)

Blue Origin is keeping a secret. Blue Origin conducted the tenth crewed flight of its New Shepard suborbital vehicle Tuesday, carrying six people, one of whom remained at least semi-anonymous, Space News reports. The five passengers Blue Origin identified come from business and entertainment backgrounds, but in a break from past missions, the company did not disclose the identity of the sixth person, with hosts of the company webcast saying that individual “requested we not share his name today.” Photos released by the company before the launch, and footage from the webcast, showed that person to be a man wearing a flight suit with an “R. Wilson” nametag, and the NS-30 mission patch also included “Wilson” with the names of the other members of the crew. Not disclosing the name of someone who has been to space has little precedent.

Big names on NS-31 … Some of the passengers Blue Origin will fly on the next New Shepard crew mission lack the anonymity of R. Wilson. The next flight, designated NS-31, will carry an all-female crew, including music star Katy Perry, CBS host Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez, a former journalist who is engaged to Blue Origin’s founder, Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin identified the other three passengers as Aisha Bowe, Amanda Ngyuen, and Kerianne Flynn. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

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Virgin Galactic is still blowing through cash. Virgin Galactic reported a net loss of $347 million in 2024, compared to a $502 million net loss in 2023, with the improvement primarily driven by lower operating expenses, the company said this week in a quarterly earnings release. These lower operating expenses are tied to Virgin Galactic’s decision to suspend operations of its VSS Unity suborbital rocket plane last year to focus investment into a new series of suborbital spacecraft known as Delta-class ships. Virgin Galactic said cash and cash equivalents fell 18 percent from the same period a year ago to $178.6 million. Investors have been eager for details on when it would resume—and then ramp up—flights to increase sales and cash in on a backlog of around 700 ticket holders, Bloomberg reports.

March toward manufacturing … Virgin Galactic said it plans to start assembling its first Delta-class ship in March, with a first flight targeted for the summer of 2026, two years after it stopped flying VSS Unity. The Delta ships will be easier to recycle between flights, and will carry six paying passengers, rather than the four VSS Unity carried on each flight. Company officials believe a higher flight rate with more passengers will bring in significantly more revenue, which was reported at just $430,000 in the fourth quarter of 2024. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Japanese customers seem to love Rocket Lab. While Rocket Lab is developing the larger Neutron rocket, the company’s operational Electron launch vehicle continues to dominate the market for dedicated launches of small satellites. Rocket Lab announced Thursday it signed a new multi-launch deal with iQPS, a Japan-based Earth imaging company. The new deal follows an earlier multi-launch contract signed with iQPS in 2024 and brings the total number of booked dedicated Electron launches for iQPS to eight.

Radar is all the rage … These eight Electron launches in 2025 and 2026 will help iQPS build out its planned constellation of 36 radar remote sensing satellites capable of imaging the Earth day and night, and through any weather. The new deal is one of the largest Electron launch agreements to date, second only to Rocket Lab’s ten launch deal with another Japanese radar constellation operator, Synspective, signed last year. (submitted by zapman987)

Falcon 9 launch targets Moon and asteroid. With two commercial Moon landers already on their way, Houston-based Intuitive Machines launched its second robotic lander atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday, CBS News reports. Given the on-time launch and assuming no major problems, the Athena lander is expected to descend to touchdown on a flat mesa-like structure known as Mons Mouton on March 6, setting down just 100 miles from the Moon’s south pole—closer than any other spacecraft has attempted. Intuitive Machines became the first company to successfully land a spacecraft on the Moon last year, but the Athena lander will pursue more complex goals. It will test a NASA-provided drill designed to search for subsurface ice, deploy a small “micro-rover,” and dispatch a rocket-powered drone to explore a permanently shadowed crater.

Hitching a ride … The Athena lander didn’t take up all the capacity of the Falcon 9 rocket. Three other spacecraft also rocketed into space Wednesday night. These rideshare payloads were AstroForge’s commercially developed Odin asteroid prospector to search for potentially valuable mineral deposits, NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer satellite to characterize lunar ice from a perch in lunar orbit, and a compact space tug from Epic Aerospace. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

This rocket got a visitor for the first time since 2009. Astroscale’s ADRAS-J mission became the first spacecraft (at least in the unclassified world) to approach a piece of space junk in low-Earth orbit, Ars reports. This particular object, a derelict upper stage from a Japanese H-IIA rocket, has been in orbit since 2009. It’s one of about 2,000 spent rocket bodies circling the Earth and one of more than 45,000 objects in orbit tracked by US Space Command. Astroscale, based in Tokyo, built and launched the ADRAS-J mission in partnership with the Japanese space agency as a demonstration to show how a commercial satellite could rendezvous with an object in orbit that was never designed to receive visitors.

Next steps … ADRAS-J worked like a champ, closing in to a distance of less than 50 feet (15 meters) from the H-IIA rocket as it orbited several hundred miles above the Earth. The rocket is a “non-cooperative” object representative of other large pieces of space junk, which Astroscale wants to remove from orbit with a series of trash collecting satellites like ADRAS-J. But this demo only validated part of the technology required for space debris removal. Japan’s space agency and Astroscale are partnering on another mission, ADRAS-J2, for launch in 2027 to go up and latch on to the same H-IIA rocket and steer it out of orbit toward a controlled reentry over the ocean.

An update on Falcon 9’s upper stage. SpaceX said that a Falcon 9 upper stage that reentered over Europe earlier this month suffered a propellant leak that prevented it from doing a controlled reentry, Space News reports. The upper stage was placed in orbit on a February 1 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. After deploying its payload of 22 Starlink satellites, the upper stage was expected to perform a burn to enable a controlled reentry over the ocean, a standard procedure on most Falcon 9 launches to low-Earth orbit. The stage, though, did not appear to perform the burn and remained in orbit. Its orbit decayed from atmospheric drag and the stage reentered over Europe on February 19. Debris from the Falcon 9 second stage, including composite overwrapped pressure vessels, fell in Poland, landing near the city of Poznań.

Higher than expected body rates … In an update posted to its website this week, SpaceX blamed the upper stage anomaly on a liquid oxygen leak. “During the coast phase of this Starlink mission, a small liquid oxygen leak developed, which ultimately drove higher than expected vehicle body rates,” SpaceX said. SpaceX aborted the deorbit burn and instead passivated the upper stage, a process where the rocket discharges energy from its batteries and vents leftover propellant from its tanks to minimize the risk of a break-up in orbit. This was the third incident involving a Falcon 9 upper stage in a little more than six months. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Rocket Lab’s reveals “Return On Investment.” Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket is designed for partial reusability, and the company unveiled Thursday an important piece of infrastructure to make this a reality. Neutron’s first stage booster will land on a modified barge named “Return On Investment” measuring around 400 feet (122 meters) wide, somewhat bigger than SpaceX’s drone ships used for Falcon 9 landings at sea. In order to prep the barge for rocket duty, the company is adding autonomous ground support equipment to capture and secure the landed Neutron, blast shielding to protect equipment during Neutron landings, and station-keeping thrusters for precise positioning. It should be ready to enter service in 2026. Rocket Lab also has the option to return the Neutron first stage back to the launch site when mission parameters allow the rocket to reserve enough propellant to make the return journey.

More news from Rocket Lab … Continuing the firehose of news from Rocket Lab this week, the company announced a new satellite design called “Flatellite” that looks remarkably similar to SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. The satellite is flat in shape, hence its name, and stackable to fit as many spacecraft as possible into the envelope of a rocket’s payload fairing. Rocket Lab said the new satellite “can be produced in high volumes and (is) tailored for large constellations, targeting high value applications and national security missions.” (submitted by zapman987)

The writing is on the wall for SLS. The lights may be starting to go out for NASA’s Space Launch System program. On Wednesday, one of the Republican space policy leaders most consistently opposed to commercial heavy lift rockets over the last decade—as an alternative to NASA’s large SLS rocket—has changed his mind, Ars reports. “We need an off-ramp for reliance on the SLS,” said Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, in written testimony before a congressional hearing about US space policy.

Not keeping Pace … A physicist and influential policy expert, Pace has decades of experience researching and writing space policy. He has served in multiple Republican administrations, most recently as executive secretary of the National Space Council from 2017 to 2020. He strongly advocated for the SLS rocket after Congress directed NASA to develop it in 2011. As part of his policy recommendations, Pace said NASA should seek to use commercial providers of heavy lift launch so that NASA can send “multiple” crew and cargo missions to the Moon each year. He notes that the SLS rocket is not reusable and is incapable of a high flight rate. Commercial options from SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance are now available, Pace wrote.

The verdict is in for Starship Flight 7. SpaceX believes the spectacular break-up of Starship’s upper stage during its most recent test flight was caused by a harmonic response that stressed onboard hardware, leading to a fire and loss of the vehicle, Aviation Week reports. Higher-than-expected vibrations stressed hardware in the ship’s propulsion system, triggering propellant leaks and sustained fires until the test flight ended prematurely. The rocket broke apart and deposited debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean, and forced dozens of commercial and private aircraft to delay their flights or steer into safer airspace.

Whole lotta shaking … SpaceX’s description of the problem as a harmonic response suggests vibrations during Starship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected from ground testing. SpaceX completed an extended duration static fire of the next Starship upper stage to test hardware modifications at multiple engine thrust levels. According to SpaceX, findings from the static fire informed changes to the fuel feed lines to Starship’s Raptor engines, adjustments to propellant temperatures, and a new operating thrust for the next test flight, which could launch from South Texas as soon as Monday.

Next three launches

March 1: Kuaizhou 1A | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 10: 00 UTC

March 2: Ceres 1 | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 08: 10 UTC

March 2: Soyuz-2.1b | Glonass-K2 No. 14L | Plesetsk Cosmodrome, Russia | 22: 22 UTC

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

Rocket Report: Starship will soon fly again; Gilmour has a launch date Read More »

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German startup to attempt the first orbital launch from Western Europe

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The nine-engine first stage for Isar Aerospace’s Spectrum rocket lights up on the launch pad on February 14. Credit: Isar Aerospace

Isar builds almost all of its rockets in-house, including Spectrum’s Aquila engines.

“The flight will be the first integrated test of tens of thousands of components,” said Josef Fleischmann, Isar’s co-founder and chief technical officer. “Regardless of how far we get, this first test flight will hopefully generate an enormous amount of data and experience which we can apply to future missions.”

Isar is the first European startup to reach this point in development. “Reaching this milestone is a huge success in itself,” Meltzer said in a statement. “And while Spectrum is ready for its first test flight, launch vehicles for flights two and three are already in production.”

Another Bavarian company, Rocket Factory Augsburg, destroyed its first booster during a test-firing on its launch pad in Scotland last year, ceding the frontrunner mantle to Isar. RFA received its launch license from the UK government last month and aims to deliver its second booster to the launch site for hot-fire testing and a launch attempt later this year.

There’s an appetite within the European launch industry for new companies to compete with Arianespace, the continent’s sole operational launch services provider backed by substantial government support. Delays in developing the Ariane 6 rocket and several failures of Europe’s smaller Vega launcher forced European satellite operators to look abroad, primarily to SpaceX, to launch their payloads.

The European Space Agency is organizing the European Launcher Challenge, a competition that will set aside some of the agency’s satellites for launch opportunities with a new crop of startups. Isar is one of the top contenders in the competition to win money from ESA. The agency expects to award funding to multiple European launch providers after releasing a final solicitation later this year.

The first flight of the Spectrum rocket will attempt to reach a polar orbit, flying north from Andøya Spaceport. Located at approximately 69 degrees north latitude, the spaceport is poised to become the world’s northernmost orbital launch site.

Because the inaugural launch of the Spectrum rocket is a test flight, it won’t carry any customer payloads, an Isar spokesperson told Ars.

German startup to attempt the first orbital launch from Western Europe Read More »

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ULA’s Vulcan rocket still doesn’t have the Space Force’s seal of approval

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ULA crews at Cape Canaveral have already stacked the next Vulcan rocket on its mobile launch platform in anticipation of launching the USSF-106 mission. But with the Space Force’s Space Systems Command still withholding certification, there’s no confirmed launch date for USSF-106.

So ULA is pivoting to another customer on its launch manifest.

Amazon’s first group of production satellites for the company’s Kuiper Internet network is now first in line on ULA’s schedule. Amazon confirmed last month that it would ship Kuiper satellites to Cape Canaveral from its factory in Kirkland, Washington. Like ULA, Amazon has run into its own delays with manufacturing Kuiper satellites.

“These satellites, built to withstand the harsh conditions of space and the journey there, will be processed upon arrival to get them ready for launch,” Amazon posted on X. “These satellites will bring fast, reliable Internet to customers even in remote areas. Stay tuned for our first launch this year.”

Amazon and the Space Force take up nearly all of ULA’s launch backlog. Amazon has eight flights reserved on Atlas V rockets and 38 missions booked on the Vulcan launcher to deploy about half of its 3,232 satellites to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network. Amazon also has launch contracts with Blue Origin, which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, along with Arianespace and SpaceX.

The good news is that United Launch Alliance has an inventory of rockets awaiting an opportunity to fly. The company plans to finish manufacturing its remaining 15 Atlas V rockets within a few months, allowing the factory in Decatur, Alabama, to focus solely on producing Vulcan launch vehicles. ULA has all the major parts for two Vulcan rockets in storage at Cape Canaveral.

“We have a stockpile of rockets, which is kind of unusual,” Bruno said. “Normally, you build it, you fly it, you build another one… I would certainly want anyone who’s ready to go to space able to go to space.”

Space Force officials now aim to finish the certification of the Vulcan rocket in late February or early March. This would clear the path for launching the USSF-106 mission after the next Atlas V. Once the Kuiper launch gets off the ground, teams will bring the Vulcan rocket’s components back to the hangar to be stacked again.

The Space Force has not set a launch date for USSF-106, but the service says liftoff is targeted for sometime between the beginning of April and the end of June, nearly five years after ULA won its lucrative contract.

ULA’s Vulcan rocket still doesn’t have the Space Force’s seal of approval Read More »

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Rocket Report: Another hiccup with SpaceX upper stage; Japan’s H3 starts strong

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Vast’s schedule for deploying a mini-space station in low-Earth orbit was always ambitious.

A stack of 21 Starlink Internet satellites arrives in orbit Tuesday following launch on a Falcon 9 rocket. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 7.30 of the Rocket Report! The US government relies on SpaceX for a lot of missions. These include launching national security satellites, putting astronauts on the Moon, and global broadband communications. But there are hurdles—technical and, increasingly, political—on the road ahead. To put it generously, Elon Musk, without whom much of what SpaceX does wouldn’t be possible, is one of the most divisive figures in American life today.

Now, a Democratic lawmaker in Congress has introduced a bill that would end federal contracts for special government employees (like Musk), citing conflict-of-interest concerns. The bill will go nowhere with Republicans in control of Congress, but it is enough to make me pause and think. When the Trump era passes and a new administration takes the White House, how will they view Musk? Will there be an appetite to reduce the government’s reliance on SpaceX? To answer this question, you must first ask if the government will even have a choice. What if, as is the case in many areas today, there’s no viable replacement for the services offered by SpaceX?

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.

Blue Origin flight focuses on lunar research. For the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has put its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship through a couple of minutes’ worth of Moon-level gravity, GeekWire reports. The uncrewed mission, known as NS-29, sent 30 research payloads on a 10-minute trip from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. For this trip, the crew capsule was spun up to 11 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the typical half-revolution per minute. The resulting centrifugal force was equivalent to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, which is what would be felt on the Moon.

Gee, that’s cool … The experiments aboard Blue Origin’s space capsule examined how to process lunar soil to extract resources and how to manufacture solar cells on the Moon for Blue Origin’s Blue Alchemist project. Another investigated how moondust gets electrically charged and levitated when exposed to ultraviolet light. These types of experiments in partial gravity can be done on parabolic airplane flights, but those only provide a few seconds of the right conditions to simulate the Moon’s gravity. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Orbex announces two-launch deal with D-Orbit. UK-based rocket builder Orbex announced Monday that it has signed a two-launch deal with Italian in-orbit logistics provider D-Orbit, European Spaceflight reports. The deal includes capacity aboard two launches on Orbex’s Prime rocket over the next three years. D-Orbit aggregates small payloads on rideshare missions (primarily on SpaceX rockets so far) and has an orbital transfer vehicle for ferrying satellites to different altitudes after separation from a launch vehicle. Orbex’s Prime rocket is sized for the small satellite industry, and the company aims to debut it later this year.

Thanks to fresh funding? … Orbex has provided only sparse updates on its progress toward launching the Prime rocket. What we do know is that Orbex suspended plans to develop a spaceport in Scotland to focus its resources on the Prime rocket itself. Despite little evidence of any significant accomplishments, Orbex last month secured a $25 million investment from the UK government. The timing of the launch agreement with D-Orbit begs the question of whether the UK government’s backing helped seal the deal. As Andrew Parsonson of European Spaceflight writes: “Is this a clear indication of how important strong institutional backing is for the growth of privately developed launch systems in Europe?” (submitted by EllPeaTea)

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Falcon 9’s upper stage misfires again. The second stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket remained in orbit following a launch Saturday from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The rocket successfully deployed a new batch of Starlink Internet satellites but was supposed to reignite its engine for a braking maneuver to head for a destructive reentry over the Pacific Ocean. While airspace warning notices from the FAA showed a reentry zone over the eastern Pacific Ocean, publicly available US military tracking continued to show the upper stage in orbit this week. Sources also told Ars that SpaceX delayed two Falcon 9 launches this week by a day to allow time for engineers to evaluate the problem.

3 in 6 months … This is the third time since last July that the Falcon 9’s upper stage has encountered a problem in flight. On one occasion, the upper stage failed to reach its targeted orbit, leading to the destruction of 20 Starlink satellites. Then, an upper stage misfired during a deorbit burn after an otherwise successful launch in September, causing debris to fall outside of the pre-approved danger area. After both events, the FAA briefly grounded the Falcon 9 rocket while SpaceX conducted an investigation. This time, an FAA spokesperson said the agency won’t require an investigation. “All flight events occurred within the scope of SpaceX’s licensed activities,” the spokesperson told Ars.

Vast tests hardware for commercial space station. Vast Space has started testing a qualification model of its first commercial space station but has pushed back the launch of that station into 2026, Space News reports. In an announcement Thursday, Vast said it completed a proof test of the primary structure of a test version of its Haven-1 space station habitat at a facility in Mojave, California. During the testing, Vast pumped up the pressure inside the structure to 1.8 times its normal level and conducted a leak test. “On the first try we passed that critical test,” Max Haot, chief executive of Vast, told Space News.

Not this year … It’s encouraging to see Vast making tangible progress in developing its commercial space station. The privately held company is one of several seeking to develop a commercial outpost in low-Earth orbit to replace the International Space Station after its scheduled retirement in 2030. NASA is providing funding to two industrial teams led by Blue Origin and Voyager Space, which are working on different space station concepts. But so far, Vast’s work has been funded primarily through private capital. The launch of the Haven-1 outpost, which Vast previously said could happen this year, is now scheduled no earlier than May 2026. The spacecraft will launch in one piece on a Falcon 9 rocket, and the first astronaut crew to visit Haven-1 could launch a month later. Haven-1 is a pathfinder for a larger commercial station called Haven-2, which Vast intends to propose to NASA. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

H3 deploys Japanese navigation satellite. Japan successfully launched a flagship H3 rocket Sunday and put into orbit a Quasi-Zenith Satellite (QZS), aiming to improve the accuracy of global positioning data for various applications, Kyodo News reports. After separation from the H3 rocket, the Michibiki 6 satellite will climb into geostationary orbit, where it will supplement navigation signals from GPS satellites to provide more accurate positioning data to users in Japan and surrounding regions, particularly in mountainous terrain and amid high-rise buildings in large cities. The new satellite joins a network of four QZS spacecraft launched by Japan beginning in 2010. Two more Quasi-Zenith Satellites are under construction, and Japan’s government is expected to begin development of an additional four regional navigation satellites this year.

A good start … After a failed inaugural flight in 2023, Japan’s new H3 rocket has reeled off four consecutive successful launches in less than a year. This may not sound like a lot, but the H3 has achieved its first four successful flights faster than any other rocket since 2000. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket completed its first four successful flights in a little more than two years, and United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V logged its fourth flight in a similar timeframe. More than 14 months elapsed between the first and fourth successful flight of Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket. The H3 is an expendable rocket with no roadmap to reusability, so its service life and commercial potential are likely limited. But the rocket is shaping up to provide reliable access to space for Japan’s space agency and military, while some of its peers in Europe and the United States struggle to ramp up to a steady launch cadence. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Europe really doesn’t like relying on Elon Musk. Europe’s space industry has struggled to keep up with SpaceX for a decade. The writing was on the wall when SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster for the first time. Now, European officials are wary of becoming too reliant on SpaceX, and there’s broad agreement on the continent that Europe should have the capability to launch its own satellites. In this way, access to space is a strategic imperative for Europe. The problem is, Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket is just not competitive with SpaceX’s Falcon 9, and there’s no concrete plan to counter SpaceX’s dominance.

So here’s another terrible idea … Airbus, Europe’s largest aerospace contractor with a 50 percent stake in the Ariane 6 program, has enlisted Goldman Sachs for advice on how to forge a new European space and satellite company to better compete with SpaceX. France-based Thales and the Italian company Leonardo are part of the talks, with Bank of America also advising on the initiative. The idea that some bankers from Goldman and Bank of America will go into the guts of some of Europe’s largest institutional space companies and emerge with a lean, competitive entity seems far-fetched, to put it mildly, Ars reports.

The FAA still has some bite. We’re now three weeks removed from the most recent test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, which ended with the failure of the vehicle’s upper stage in the final moments of its launch sequence. The accident rained debris over the Atlantic Ocean and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and ordered an investigation into the accident on the day after the launch. This decision came three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who counts Musk as one of his top allies. So far, the FAA hasn’t budged on its requirement for an investigation, an agency spokesperson told Ars.

Debris field … In the hours and days after the failed Starship launch, residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos shared images of debris scattered across the islands and washing up onshore. The good news is there were no injuries or reports of significant damage from the wreckage, but the FAA confirmed one report of minor damage to a vehicle located in South Caicos. It’s rare for debris from US rockets to fall over land during a launch. This would typically only happen if a launch failed at certain parts of the flight. Before now, there has been no public record of any claims of third-party property damage in the era of commercial spaceflight.

DOD eager to reap the benefits of Starship. A Defense Department unit is examining how SpaceX’s Starship vehicle could be used to support a broader architecture of in-space refueling, Space News reports. A senior adviser at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) said SpaceX approached the agency about how Starship’s refueling architecture could be used by the wider space industry. The plan for Starship is to transfer cryogenic propellants between tankers, depots, and ships heading to the Moon, Mars, or other deep-space destinations.

Few details available … US military officials have expressed interest in orbital refueling to support in-space mobility, where ground controllers have the freedom to maneuver national security satellites between different orbits without worrying about running out of propellant. For several years, Space Force commanders and Pentagon officials have touted the importance of in-space mobility, or dynamic space operations, in a new era of orbital warfare. However, there are reports that the Space Force has considered zeroing out a budget line item for space mobility in its upcoming fiscal year 2026 budget request.

A small step toward a fully reusable European rocket. The French space agency CNES has issued a call for proposals to develop a reusable upper stage for a heavy-lift rocket, European Spaceflight reports. This project is named DEMESURE (DEMonstration Étage SUpérieur REutilisable / Reusable Upper Stage Demonstration), and it marks one of Europe’s first steps in developing a fully reusable rocket. That’s all good, but there’s a sense of tentativeness in this announcement. The current call for proposals will only cover the earliest phases of development, such as a requirements evaluation, cost estimation review, and a feasibility meeting. A future call will deal with the design and fabrication of a “reduced scale” upper stage, followed by a demonstration phase with a test flight, recovery, and reuse of the vehicle. CNES’s vision is to field a fully reusable rocket as a successor to the single-use Ariane 6.

Toes in the water … If you’re looking for reasons to be skeptical about Project DEMESURE, look no further than the Themis program, which aims to demonstrate the recovery and reuse of a booster stage akin to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Themis originated in a partnership between CNES and European industry in 2019, then ESA took over the project in 2020. Five years later, the Themis demonstrator still hasn’t flown. After some initial low-altitude hops, Themis is supposed to launch on a high-altitude test flight and maneuver through the entire flight profile of a reusable booster, from liftoff to a vertical propulsive landing. As we’ve seen with SpaceX, recovering an orbital-class upper stage is a lot harder than landing the booster. An optimistic view of this announcement is that anything worth doing requires taking a first step, and that’s what CNES has done here. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

Feb. 7: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-9 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 18: 52 UTC

Feb. 8: Electron | IoT 4 You and Me | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 20: 43 UTC

Feb. 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-10 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 00: 03 UTC

Photo of Stephen Clark

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

Rocket Report: Another hiccup with SpaceX upper stage; Japan’s H3 starts strong Read More »

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Europe has the worst imaginable idea to counter SpaceX’s launch dominance

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It is not difficult to understand the unease on the European continent about the rise of SpaceX and its controversial founder, Elon Musk.

SpaceX has surpassed the European Space Agency and its institutional partners in almost every way when it comes to accessing space and providing secure communications. Last year, for example, SpaceX launched 134 orbital missions. Combined, Europe had three. SpaceX operates a massive constellation of more than 7,000 satellites, delivering broadband Internet around the world. Europe hopes to have a much more modest capability online by 2030 serving the continent at a cost of $11 billion.

And Europe has good reasons for being wary about working directly with SpaceX. First, Europe wants to maintain sovereign access to space, as well as a space-based communication network. Second, buying services from SpaceX undermines European space businesses. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Musk has recently begun attacking governments in European capitals such as Berlin and London, taking up the “Make Europe Great Again” slogan. This seems to entail throwing out the moderate coalitions governing European nations and replacing them with authoritarian, hard-right leaders.

All of that to say, it is understandable that Europe would like to provide a reasonable answer to the dominance of SpaceX.

Bring on the bankers

However, the approach being pursued by Airbus—a European aerospace corporation that is, on a basic level, akin to Boeing—seems like the dumbest idea imaginable. According to Bloomberg, “Airbus has hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for advice on an effort to forge a new European space and satellite company that can better compete with Elon Musk’s dominant SpaceX.”

The publication reports that talks are preliminary and include France-based Thales and Italy’s Leonardo S.p.A. to create a portfolio of space services. Leonardo has hired Bank of America Inc. for the plan, which has been dubbed Project Bromo. (According to Merriam-Webster, “bromo” is a form of bromide, which originates from the Greek word brōmos, meaning bad smell.)

Europe has the worst imaginable idea to counter SpaceX’s launch dominance Read More »

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It seems the FAA office overseeing SpaceX’s Starship probe still has some bite

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The political winds have shifted in Washington, but the FAA hasn’t yet changed its tune on Starship.

Liftoff of SpaceX’s seventh full-scale test flight of the Super Heavy/Starship launch vehicle on January 16. Credit: SpaceX

The seventh test flight of SpaceX’s gigantic Starship rocket came to a disappointing end a little more than two weeks ago. The in-flight failure of the rocket’s upper stage, or ship, about eight minutes after launch on January 16 rained debris over the Turks and Caicos Islands and the Atlantic Ocean.

Amateur videos recorded from land, sea, and air showed fiery debris trails streaming overhead at twilight, appearing like a fireworks display gone wrong. Within hours, posts on social media showed small pieces of debris recovered by residents and tourists in the Turks and Caicos. Most of these items were modest in size, and many appeared to be chunks of tiles from Starship’s heat shield.

Unsurprisingly, the Federal Aviation Administration grounded Starship and ordered an investigation into the accident on the day after the launch. This decision came three days before the inauguration of President Donald Trump. Elon Musk’s close relationship with Trump, coupled with the new administration’s appetite for cutting regulations and reducing the size of government, led some industry watchers to question whether Musk’s influence might change the FAA’s stance on SpaceX.

So far, the FAA hasn’t budged on its requirement for an investigation, an agency spokesperson told Ars on Friday. After a preliminary assessment of flight data, SpaceX officials said a fire appeared to develop in the aft section of the ship before it broke apart and fell to Earth.

“The FAA has directed SpaceX to lead an investigation of the Starship Super Heavy Flight 7 mishap with FAA oversight,” the spokesperson said. “Based on the investigation findings for root cause and corrective actions, the FAA may require a company to modify its license.”

This is much the same language the FAA used two weeks ago, when it first ordered the investigation.

Damage report

The FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation is charged with ensuring commercial space launches and reentries don’t endanger the public, and requires launch operators obtain liability insurance or demonstrate financial ability to cover any third-party property damages.

For each Starship launch, the FAA requires SpaceX maintain liability insurance policies worth at least $500 million for such claims. It’s rare for debris from US rockets to fall over land during a launch. This would typically only happen if a launch failed at certain parts of the flight. And there’s no public record of any claims of third-party property damage in the era of commercial spaceflight. Under federal law, the US government would pay for damages to a much higher amount if any claims exceeded a launch company’s insurance policies.

Here’s a piece of Starship 33 @SpaceX @elonmusk found in Turks and Caicos! 🚀🏝️ pic.twitter.com/HPZDCqA9MV

— @maximzavet (@MaximZavet) January 17, 2025

The good news is there were no injuries or reports of significant damage from the wreckage that fell over the Turks and Caicos. “The FAA confirmed one report of minor damage to a vehicle located in South Caicos,” an FAA spokesperson told Ars on Friday. “To date, there are no other reports of damage.”

It’s not clear if the vehicle owner in South Caicos will file a claim against SpaceX for the damage. It would the first time someone makes such a claim related to an accident with a commercial rocket overseen by the FAA. Last year, a Florida homeowner submitted a claim to NASA for damage to his house from a piece of debris that fell from the International Space Station.

Nevertheless, the Turks and Caicos government said local officials met with representatives from SpaceX and the UK Air Accident Investigations Branch on January 25 to develop a recovery plan for debris that fell on the islands, which are a British Overseas Territory.

A prickly relationship

Musk often bristled at the FAA last year, especially after regulators proposed fines of more than $600,000 alleging that SpaceX violated terms of its launch licenses during two Falcon 9 missions. The alleged violations involved the relocation of a propellant farm at one of SpaceX’s launch pads in Florida, and the use of a new launch control center without FAA approval.

In a post on X, Musk said the FAA was conducting “lawfare” against his company. “SpaceX will be filing suit against the FAA for regulatory overreach,” Musk wrote.

There was no such lawsuit, and the issue may now be moot. Sean Duffy, Trump’s new secretary of transportation, vowed to review the FAA fines during his confirmation hearing in the Senate. It is rare for the FAA to fine launch companies, and the fines last year made up the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the FAA’s commercial spaceflight division.

SpaceX also criticized delays in licensing Starship test flights last year. The FAA cited environmental issues and concerns about the extent of the sonic boom from Starship’s 23-story-tall Super Heavy booster returning to its launch pad in South Texas. SpaceX successfully caught the returning first stage booster at the launch pad for the first time in October, and repeated the feat after the January 16 test flight.

What separates the FAA’s ongoing oversight of Starship’s recent launch failure from these previous regulatory squabbles is that debris fell over populated areas. This would appear to be directly in line with the FAA’s responsibility for public safety.

During last month’s test flight, Starship did not deviate from its planned ground track, which took the rocket over the Gulf of Mexico, the waters between Florida and Cuba, and then the Atlantic Ocean. But the debris field extended beyond the standard airspace closure for the launch. After the accident, FAA air traffic controllers cleared additional airspace over the debris zone for more than an hour, rerouting, diverting, and delaying dozens of commercial aircraft.

These actions followed pre-established protocols. However, it highlighted the small but non-zero risk of rocket debris falling to Earth after a launch failure. “The potential for a bad day downrange just got real,” Lori Garver, a former NASA deputy administrator, posted on X.

Public safety is not sole mandate of the FAA’s commercial space office. It is also chartered to “encourage, facilitate, and promote commercial space launches and reentries by the private sector,” according to an FAA website. There’s a balance to strike.

Lawmakers last year urged the FAA to speed up its launch approvals, primarily because Starship is central to strategic national objectives. NASA has contracts with SpaceX to develop a variant of Starship to land astronauts on the Moon, and Starship’s unmatched ability to deliver more than 100 tons of cargo to low-Earth orbit is attractive to the Pentagon.

While Musk criticized the FAA in 2024, SpaceX officials in 2023 took a different tone, calling for Congress to increase the budget for the FAA’s Office of Commercial Spaceflight and for the regulator to double the space division’s workforce. This change, SpaceX officials argued, would allow the FAA to more rapidly assess and approve a fast-growing number of commercial launch and reentry applications.

In September, SpaceX released a statement accusing the former administrator of the FAA, Michael Whitaker, of making inaccurate statements about SpaceX to a congressional subcommittee. In a different post on X, Musk directly called for Whitaker’s resignation.

He needs to resign https://t.co/pG8htfTYHb

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2024

That’s exactly what happened. Whitaker, who took over the FAA’s top job in 2023 under the Biden administration, announced in December he would resign on Inauguration Day. Since the agency’s establishment in 1958, three FAA administrators have similarly resigned when a new administration takes power, but the office has been largely immune from presidential politics in recent decades. Since 1993, FAA administrators have stayed in their post during all presidential transitions.

There’s no evidence Whitaker’s resignation had any role in the mid-air collision of an American Eagle passenger jet and a US Army helicopter Wednesday night near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. But his departure from the FAA less than two years into a five-year term on January 20 left the agency without a leader. Trump named Chris Rocheleau as the FAA’s acting administrator Thursday.

Next flight, next month?

SpaceX has not released an official schedule for the next Starship test flight or outlined its precise objectives. However, it will likely repeat many of the goals planned for the previous flight, which ended before SpaceX could accomplish some of its test goals. These missed objectives included the release of satellite mockups in space for the first demonstration of Starship’s payload deployment mechanism, and a reentry over the Indian Ocean to test new, more durable heat shield materials.

The January 16 test flight was the first launch up an upgraded, slightly taller Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2. The next flight will use the same upgraded version.

A SpaceX filing with the Federal Communications Commission suggests the next Starship flight could launch as soon as February 24. Sources told Ars that SpaceX teams believe a launch before the end of February is realistic.

But SpaceX has more to do before Flight 8. These tasks include completing the FAA-mandated investigation and the installation of all 39 Raptor engines on the rocket. Then, SpaceX will likely test-fire the booster and ship before stacking the two elements together to complete assembly of the 404-foot-tall (123.1-meter) rocket.

SpaceX is also awaiting a new FAA launch license, pending its completion of the investigation into what happened on Flight 7.

Photo of Stephen Clark

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

It seems the FAA office overseeing SpaceX’s Starship probe still has some bite Read More »

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Fire destroys Starship on its seventh test flight, raining debris from space

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This launch debuted a more advanced, slightly taller version of Starship, known as Version 2 or Block 2, with larger propellant tanks, a new avionics system, and redesigned feed lines flowing methane and liquid oxygen propellants to the ship’s six Raptor engines. SpaceX officials did not say whether any of these changes might have caused the problem on Thursday’s launch.

SpaceX officials have repeatedly and carefully set expectations for each Starship test flight. They routinely refer to the rocket as experimental, and the primary focus of the rocket’s early demo missions is to gather data on the performance of the vehicle. What works, and what doesn’t work?

Still, the outcome of Thursday’s test flight is a clear disappointment for SpaceX. This was the seventh test flight of SpaceX’s enormous rocket and the first time Starship failed to complete its launch sequence since the second flight in November 2023. Until now, SpaceX has made steady progress, and each Starship flight has achieved more milestones than the one before.

On the first flight in April 2023, the rocket lost control a little more than two minutes after liftoff, and the ground-shaking power of the booster’s 33 engines shattered the concrete foundation beneath the launch pad. Seven months later, on Flight 2, the rocket made it eight minutes before failing. On that mission, Starship failed at roughly the same point of its ascent, just before the cutoff of the vehicle’s six methane-fueled Raptor engines.

Back then, a handful of photos and images from the Florida Keys and Puerto Rico showed debris in the sky after Starship activated its self-destruct mechanism due to an onboard fire caused by a dump of liquid oxygen propellant. But that flight occurred in the morning, with bright sunlight along the ship’s flight path.

This time, the ship disintegrated and reentered the atmosphere at dusk, with impeccable lighting conditions accentuating the debris cloud’s appearance. These twilight conditions likely contributed to the plethora of videos posted to social media on Thursday.

Starship and Super Heavy head downrange from SpaceX’s launch site near Brownsville, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

The third Starship test flight last March saw the spacecraft reach its planned trajectory and fly halfway around the world before succumbing to the scorching heat of atmospheric reentry. In June, the fourth test flight ended with controlled splashdowns of the rocket’s Super Heavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico and of Starship in the Indian Ocean.

In October, SpaceX caught the Super Heavy booster with mechanical arms at the launch pad for the first time, proving out the company’s audacious approach to recovering and reusing the rocket. On this fifth test flight, SpaceX modified the ship’s heat shield to better handle the hot temperatures of reentry, and the vehicle again made it to an on-target splashdown in the Indian Ocean.

Most recently, Flight 6 on November 19 demonstrated the ship’s ability to reignite its Raptor engines in space for the first time and again concluded with a bullseye splashdown. But SpaceX aborted an attempt to again catch the booster back at Starbase due to a problem with sensors on the launch pad’s tower.

With Flight 7, SpaceX hoped to test more changes to the heat shield protecting Starship from reentry temperatures up to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Musk has identified the heat shield as one of the most difficult challenges still facing the program. In order for SpaceX to reach its ambition for the ship to become rapidly reusable, with minimal or no refurbishment between flights, the heat shield must be resilient and durable.

Fire destroys Starship on its seventh test flight, raining debris from space Read More »