Notably, the Dragonfly launch was one of the first times United Launch Alliance has been eligible to bid its new Vulcan rocket for a NASA launch contract. NASA officials gave the green light for the Vulcan rocket to compete head-to-head with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy after ULA’s new launcher had a successful debut launch earlier this year. With this competition, SpaceX came out on top.
A half-life of 88 years
NASA’s policy for new space missions is to use solar power whenever possible. For example, Europa Clipper was originally supposed to use a nuclear power generator, but engineers devised a way for the spacecraft to use expansive solar panels to capture enough sunlight to produce electricity, even at Jupiter’s vast distance from the Sun.
But there are some missions where this isn’t feasible. One of these is Dragonfly, which will soar through the soupy nitrogen-methane atmosphere of Titan. Saturn’s largest moon is shrouded in cloud cover, and Titan is nearly 10 times farther from the Sun than Earth, so its surface is comparatively dim.
The Dragonfly mission, seen here in an artist’s concept, is slated to launch no earlier than 2027 on a mission to explore Saturn’s moon Titan. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/Steve Gribben
Dragonfly will launch with about 10.6 pounds (4.8 kilograms) of plutonium-238 to fuel its power generator. Plutonium-238 has a half-life of 88 years. With no moving parts, RTGs have proven quite reliable, powering spacecraft for many decades. NASA’s twin Voyager probes are approaching 50 years since launch.
The Dragonfly rotorcraft will launch cocooned inside a transit module and entry capsule, then descend under parachute through Titan’s atmosphere, which is four times denser than Earth’s. Finally, Dragonfly will detach from its descent module and activate its eight rotors to reach a safe landing.
Once on Titan, Dragonfly is designed to hop from place to place on numerous flights, exploring environments rich in organic molecules, the building blocks of life. This is one of NASA’s most exciting, and daring, robotic missions of all time.
After launching from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida in July 2028, it will take Dragonfly about six years to reach Titan. When NASA selected the Dragonfly mission to begin development in 2019, the agency hoped to launch the mission in 2026. NASA later directed Dragonfly managers to target a launch in 2027, and then 2028, requiring the mission to change from a medium-lift to a heavy-lift rocket.
Dragonfly has also faced rising costs NASA blames on the COVID-19 pandemic and supply chain issues and an in-depth redesign since the mission’s selection in 2019. Collectively, these issues caused Dragonfly’s total budget to grow to $3.35 billion, more than double its initial projected cost.
The readiness of the Orion crew capsule, where the four Artemis II astronauts will live during their voyage around the Moon, is driving NASA’s schedule for the mission. Officially, Artemis II is projected to launch in September of next year, but there’s little chance of meeting that schedule.
At the beginning of this year, NASA officials ruled out any opportunity to launch Artemis II in 2024 due to several technical issues with the Orion spacecraft. Several of these issues are now resolved, but NASA has not released any meaningful updates on the most significant problem.
This problem involves the Orion spacecraft’s heat shield. During atmospheric reentry at the end of the uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022, the Orion capsule’s heat shield eroded and cracked in unexpected ways, prompting investigations by NASA engineers and an independent panel.
NASA’s Orion heat shield inquiry ran for nearly two years. The investigation has wrapped up, two NASA officials said last month, but they declined to discuss any details of the root cause of the heat shield issue or the actions required to resolve the problem on Artemis II.
These corrective options ranged from doing nothing to changing the Orion spacecraft’s reentry angle to mitigate heating or physically modifying the Artemis II heat shield. In the latter scenario, NASA would have to disassemble the Orion spacecraft, which is already put together and is undergoing environmental testing at Kennedy Space Center. This would likely delay the Artemis II launch by a couple of years.
In August, NASA’s top human exploration official told Ars that the agency would hold off on stacking the SLS rocket until engineers had a good handle on the heat shield problem. There are limits to how long the solid rocket boosters can remain stacked vertically. The joints connecting each segment of the rocket motors are certified for one year. This clock doesn’t actually start ticking until NASA stacks the next booster segments on top of the lowermost segments.
However, NASA waived this rule on Artemis I when the boosters were stacked nearly two years before the successful launch.
A NASA spokesperson told Ars on Wednesday that the agency had nothing new to share on the Orion heat shield or what changes, if any, are required for the Artemis II mission. This information should be released before the end of the year, she said. At the same time, NASA could announce a new target launch date for Artemis II at the end of 2025, or more likely in 2026.
But because NASA gave the “go” for SLS stacking now, it seems safe to rule out any major hardware changes on the Orion heat shield for Artemis II.
SpaceX wasn’t able to catch the Super Heavy booster, but Starship is on the cusp of orbital flight.
The sixth flight of Starship lifts off from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site at Boca Chica Beach, Texas. Credit: SpaceX.
SpaceX launched its sixth Starship rocket Tuesday, proving for the first time that the stainless steel ship can maneuver in space and paving the way for an even larger, upgraded vehicle slated to debut on the next test flight.
The only hiccup was an abortive attempt to catch the rocket’s Super Heavy booster back at the launch site in South Texas, something SpaceX achieved on the previous flight on October 13. The Starship upper stage flew halfway around the world, reaching an altitude of 118 miles (190 kilometers) before plunging through the atmosphere for a pinpoint slow-speed splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The sixth flight of the world’s largest launcher—standing 398 feet (121.3 meters) tall—began with a lumbering liftoff from SpaceX’s Starbase facility near the US-Mexico border at 4 pm CST (22: 00 UTC) Tuesday. The rocket headed east over the Gulf of Mexico, propelled by 33 Raptor engines clustered on the bottom of its Super Heavy first stage.
A few miles away, President-elect Donald Trump joined SpaceX founder Elon Musk to witness the launch. The SpaceX boss became one of Trump’s closest allies in this year’s presidential election, giving the world’s richest man extraordinary influence in US space policy. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was there, too, among other lawmakers. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top commander in the US Space Force, stood nearby, chatting with Trump and other VIPs.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s CEO, President-elect Donald Trump, and Gen. Chance Saltzman of the US Space Force watch the sixth launch of Starship Tuesday. Credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images
From their viewing platform, they watched Starship climb into a clear autumn sky. At full power, the 33 Raptors chugged more than 40,000 pounds of super-cold liquid methane and liquid oxygen per second. The engines generated 16.7 million pounds of thrust, 60 percent more than the Soviet N1, the second-largest rocket in history.
Eight minutes later, the rocket’s upper stage, itself also known as Starship, was in space, completing the program’s fourth straight near-flawless launch. The first two test flights faltered before reaching their planned trajectory.
A brief but crucial demo
As exciting as it was, we’ve seen all that before. One of the most important new things engineers wanted to test on this flight occurred about 38 minutes after liftoff.
That’s when Starship reignited one of its six Raptor engines for a brief burn to make a slight adjustment to its flight path. The burn lasted only a few seconds, and the impulse was small—just a 48 mph (77 km/hour) change in velocity, or delta-V—but it demonstrated that the ship can safely deorbit itself on future missions.
With this achievement, Starship will likely soon be cleared to travel into orbit around Earth and deploy Starlink Internet satellites or conduct in-space refueling experiments, two of the near-term objectives on SpaceX’s Starship development roadmap.
Launching Starlinks aboard Starship will allow SpaceX to expand the capacity and reach of its commercial consumer broadband network, which, in turn, provides revenue for Musk to reinvest into Starship. Orbital refueling enables Starship voyages beyond low-Earth orbit, fulfilling SpaceX’s multibillion-dollar contract with NASA to provide a human-rated Moon lander for the agency’s Artemis program. Likewise, transferring cryogenic propellants in orbit is a prerequisite for sending Starships to Mars, making real Musk’s dream of creating a settlement on the red planet.
Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX
Until now, SpaceX has intentionally launched Starships to speeds just shy of the blistering velocities needed to maintain orbit. Engineers wanted to test the Raptor’s ability to reignite in space on the third Starship test flight in March, but the ship lost control of its orientation, and SpaceX canceled the engine firing.
Before going for a full orbital flight, officials needed to confirm that Starship could steer itself back into the atmosphere for reentry, ensuring it wouldn’t present any risk to the public with an unguided descent over a populated area. After Tuesday, SpaceX can check this off its to-do list.
“Congrats to SpaceX on Starship’s sixth test flight,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson posted on X. “Exciting to see the Raptor engine restart in space—major progress towards orbital flight. Starship’s success is Artemis’ success. Together, we will return humanity to the Moon & set our sights on Mars.”
While it lacks the pizzazz of a fiery launch or landing, the engine relight unlocks a new phase of Starship development. SpaceX has now proven that the rocket is capable of reaching space with a fair measure of reliability. Next, engineers will fine-tune how to reliably recover the booster and the ship and learn how to use them.
Acid test
SpaceX appears well on its way to doing this. While SpaceX didn’t catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower’s mechanical arms Tuesday, engineers have shown they can do it. The challenge of catching Starship itself back at the launch pad is more daunting. The ship starts its reentry thousands of miles from Starbase, traveling approximately 17,000 mph (27,000 km/hour), and must thread the gap between the tower’s catch arms within a matter of inches.
The good news is that SpaceX has now twice proven it can bring Starship back to a precision splashdown in the Indian Ocean. In October, the ship settled into the sea in darkness. SpaceX moved the launch time for Tuesday’s flight to the late afternoon, setting up for splashdown shortly after sunrise northwest of Australia.
The shift in time paid off with some stunning new visuals. Cameras mounted on the outside of Starship beamed dazzling live views back to SpaceX through the Starlink network, showing a now-familiar glow of plasma encasing the spacecraft as it plowed deeper into the atmosphere. But this time, daylight revealed the ship’s flaps moving to control its belly-first descent toward the ocean. After passing through a deck of low clouds, Starship reignited its Raptor engines and tilted from horizontal to vertical, making contact with the water tail-first within view of a floating buoy and a nearby aircraft in position to observe the moment.
Here’s a replay of the spacecraft’s splashdown around 65 minutes after launch.
Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on an exciting sixth flight test of Starship! pic.twitter.com/bf98Va9qmL
The ship made it through reentry despite flying with a substandard heat shield. Starship’s thermal protection system is made up of thousands of ceramic tiles to protect the ship from temperatures as high as 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius).
Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer hosting the company’s live broadcast of the mission, said teams at Starbase removed 2,100 heat shield tiles from Starship ahead of Tuesday’s launch. Their removal exposed wider swaths of the ship’s stainless steel skin to super-heated plasma, and SpaceX teams were eager to see how well the spacecraft held up during reentry. In the language of flight testing, this approach is called exploring the corners of the envelope, where engineers evaluate how a new airplane or rocket performs in extreme conditions.
“Don’t be surprised if we see some wackadoodle stuff happen here,” Tice said. There was nothing of the sort. One of the ship’s flaps appeared to suffer some heating damage, but it remained intact and functional, and the harm looked to be less substantial than damage seen on previous flights.
Many of the removed tiles came from the sides of Starship where SpaceX plans to place catch fittings on future vehicles. These are the hardware protuberances that will catch on the top side of the launch tower’s mechanical arms, similar to fittings used on the Super Heavy booster.
“The next flight, we want to better understand where we can install catch hardware, not necessarily to actually do the catch but to see how that hardware holds up in those spots,” Tice said. “Today’s flight will help inform ‘does the stainless steel hold up like we think it may, based on experiments that we conducted on Flight 5?'”
Musk wrote on his social media platform X that SpaceX could try to bring Starship back to Starbase for a catch on the eighth test flight, which is likely to occur in the first half of 2025.
“We will do one more ocean landing of the ship,” Musk said. “If that goes well, then SpaceX will attempt to catch the ship with the tower.”
The heat shield, Musk added, is a focal point of SpaceX’s attention. The delicate heat-absorbing tiles used on the belly of the space shuttle proved vexing to NASA technicians. Early in the shuttle’s development, NASA had trouble keeping tiles adhered to the shuttle’s aluminum skin. Each of the shuttle tiles was custom-machined to fit on a specific location on the orbiter, complicating refurbishment between flights. Starship’s tiles are all hexagonal in shape and agnostic to where technicians place them on the vehicle.
“The biggest technology challenge remaining for Starship is a fully & immediately reusable heat shield,” Musk wrote on X. “Being able to land the ship, refill propellant & launch right away with no refurbishment or laborious inspection. That is the acid test.”
This photo of the Starship vehicle for Flight 6, numbered Ship 31, shows exposed portions of the vehicle’s stainless steel skin after tile removal. Credit: SpaceX
There were no details available Tuesday night on what caused the Super Heavy booster to divert from its planned catch on the launch tower. After detaching from the Starship upper stage less than three minutes into the flight, the booster reversed course to begin the journey back to Starbase.
Then SpaceX’s flight director announced the rocket would fly itself into the Gulf rather than back to the launch site: “Booster offshore divert.”
The booster finished its descent with a seemingly perfect landing burn using a subset of its Raptor engines. As expected after the water landing, the booster—itself 233 feet (71 meters) tall—toppled and broke apart in a dramatic fireball visible to onshore spectators.
In an update posted to its website after the launch, SpaceX said automated health checks of hardware on the launch and catch tower triggered the aborted catch attempt. The company did not say what system failed the health check. As a safety measure, SpaceX must send a manual command for the booster to come back to land in order to prevent a malfunction from endangering people or property.
Turning it up to 11
There will be plenty more opportunities for more booster catches in the coming months as SpaceX ramps up its launch cadence at Starbase. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, hinted at the scale of the company’s ambitions last week.
“We just passed 400 launches on Falcon, and I would not be surprised if we fly 400 Starship launches in the next four years,” she said at the Barron Investment Conference.
The next batch of test flights will use an improved version of Starship designated Block 2, or V2. Starship Block 2 comes with larger propellant tanks, redesigned forward flaps, and a better heat shield.
The new-generation Starship will hold more than 11 million pounds of fuel and oxidizer, about a million pounds more than the capacity of Starship Block 1. The booster and ship will produce more thrust, and Block 2 will measure 408 feet (124.4 meters) tall, stretching the height of the full stack by a little more than 10 feet.
Put together, these modifications should give Starship the ability to heave a payload of up to 220,000 pounds (100 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit, about twice the carrying capacity of the first-generation ship. Further down the line, SpaceX plans to introduce Starship Block 3 to again double the ship’s payload capacity.
Just as importantly, these changes are designed to make it easier for SpaceX to recover and reuse the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage. SpaceX’s goal of fielding a fully reusable launcher builds on the partial reuse SpaceX pioneered with its Falcon 9 rocket. This should dramatically bring down launch costs, according to SpaceX’s vision.
With Tuesday’s flight, it’s clear Starship works. Now it’s time to see what it can do.
Updated with additional details, quotes, and images.
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.
“The station is not young,” said Michael Barratt, a NASA astronaut who returned from the space station last month. “It’s been up there for quite a while, and you expect some wear and tear, and we’re seeing that.”
“The Russians believe that continued operations are safe, but they can’t prove to our satisfaction that they are,” said Cabana, who was the senior civil servant at NASA until his retirement in 2023. “And the US believes that it’s not safe, but we can’t prove that to the Russian satisfaction that that’s the case.
“So while the Russian team continues to search for and seal the leaks, it does not believe catastrophic disintegration of the PrK is realistic,” Cabana said. “And NASA has expressed concerns about the structural integrity of the PrK and the possibility of a catastrophic failure.”
Closing the PrK hatch permanently would eliminate the use of one of the space station’s four Russian docking ports.
NASA has chartered a team of independent experts to assess the cracks and leaks and help determine the root cause, Cabana said. “This is an engineering problem, and good engineers should be able to agree on it.”
As a precaution, Barratt said space station crews are also closing the hatch separating the US and Russian sections of the space station when cosmonauts are working in the PrK.
“The way it’s affected us, mostly, is as they go in and open that to unload a cargo vehicle that’s docked to it, they’ve also taken time to inspect and try to repair when they can,” Barratt said. “We’ve taken a very conservative approach to closing the hatch between the US side and the Russian side for those time periods.
“It’s not a comfortable thing, but it is the best agreement between all the smart people on both sides, and it’s something that we as a crew live with and adapt.”
“I did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it. I said we’re not going to talk about it.”
NASA astronaut Michael Barratt works with a spacesuit inside the Quest airlock of the International Space Station on May 31. Credit: NASA
The astronauts who came home from the International Space Station last month experienced some drama on the high frontier, and some of it accompanied them back to Earth.
In orbit, the astronauts aborted two spacewalks, both under unusual circumstances. Then, on October 25, one of the astronauts was hospitalized due to what NASA called an unspecified “medical issue” after splashdown aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule that concluded the 235-day mission. After an overnight stay in a hospital in Florida, NASA said the astronaut was released “in good health” and returned to their home base in Houston to resume normal post-flight activities.
The space agency did not identify the astronaut or any details about their condition, citing medical privacy concerns. The three NASA astronauts on the Dragon spacecraft included commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, and mission specialist Jeanette Epps. Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin accompanied the three NASA crew members. Russia’s space agency confirmed he was not hospitalized after returning to Earth.
Dominick, Barratt, and Epps answered media questions in a post-flight press conference Friday, but they did not offer more information on the medical issue or say who experienced it. NASA initially sent all four crew members to the hospital in Pensacola, Florida, for evaluation, but Grebenkin and two of the NASA astronauts were quickly released and cleared to return to Houston. One astronaut remained behind until the next day.
“Spaceflight is still something we don’t fully understand,” said Barratt, a medical doctor and flight surgeon. “We’re finding things that we don’t expect sometimes. This was one of those times, and we’re still piecing things together on this, and so to maintain medical privacy and to let our processes go forward in an orderly manner, this is all we’re going to say about that event at this time.”
NASA typically makes astronaut health data available to outside researchers, who regularly publish papers while withholding identifying information about crew members. NASA officials often tout gaining knowledge about the human body’s response to spaceflight as one of the main purposes of the International Space Station. The agency is subject to federal laws, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) of 1996, restricting the release of private medical information.
“I did not say I was uncomfortable talking about it,” Barratt said. “I said we’re not going to talk about it. I’m a medical doctor. Space medicine is my passion … and how we adapt, how we experience human spaceflight is something that we all take very seriously.”
Maybe some day
Barratt said NASA will release more information about the astronaut’s post-flight medical issue “in the fullness of time.” This was Barratt’s third trip to space and the first spaceflight for Dominick and Epps.
One of the most famous incidents involving hospitalized astronauts was in 1975, before the passage of the HIPAA medical privacy law, when NASA astronauts Thomas Stafford, Deke Slayton, and Vance Brand stayed at a military hospital in Hawaii nearly two weeks after inhaling toxic propellant fumes that accidentally entered their spacecraft’s internal cabin as it descended under parachutes. They were returning to Earth at the end of the Apollo-Soyuz mission, in which they docked their Apollo command module to a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in orbit.
NASA’s view—and perhaps the public’s, too—of medical privacy has changed in the nearly 50 years since. On that occasion, NASA disclosed that the astronauts suffered from lung irritation, and officials said Brand briefly passed out from the fumes after splashdown, remaining unconscious until his crewmates fitted an oxygen mask tightly over his face. NASA and the military also made doctors available to answer media questions about their condition.
The medical concern after splashdown last month was not the only part of the Crew-8 mission that remains shrouded in mystery. Dominick and NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson were supposed to go outside the International Space Station for a spacewalk June 13, but NASA called off the excursion, citing a “spacesuit discomfort issue.” NASA replaced Dominick with Barratt and rescheduled the spacewalk for June 24 to retrieve a faulty electronics box and collect microbial samples from the exterior of the space station. But that excursion ended after just 31 minutes, when Dyson reported a water leak in the service and cooling umbilical unit of her spacesuit.
While Barratt discussed the water leak in some detail Friday, Dominick declined to answer a question from Ars regarding the suit discomfort issue. “We’re still reviewing and trying to figure all the details,” he said.
Aging suits
Regarding the water leak, Barratt said he and Dyson noticed her suit had a “spewing umbilical, which was quite dramatic, actually.” The decision to abandon the spacewalk was a “no-brainer,” he said.
“It was not a trivial leak, and we’ve got footage,” Barratt said. “Anybody who was watching NASA TV at the time could see there was basically a snowstorm, a blizzard, spewing from the airlock because we already had the hatch open. So we were seeing flakes of ice in the airlock, and Tracy was seeing a lot of them on her helmet, on her gloves, and whatnot. Dramatic is the right word, to be real honest.”
Dyson, who came back to Earth in September on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, reconnected the leaking umbilical with her gloves and helmet covered with ice, with restricted vision. “Tracy’s actions were nowhere short of heroic,” Barratt said.
Once the leak stabilized, the astronauts closed the hatch and began repressurizing the airlock.
“Getting the airlock closed was kind of me grabbing her legs and using her as an end effector to lever that thing closed, and she just made it happen,” Barratt said. “So, yeah, there was this drama. Everything worked out fine. Again, normal processes and procedures saved our bacon.”
Barratt said the leak wasn’t caused by any procedural error as the astronauts prepared their suits for the spacewalk.
“It was definitely a hardware issue,” he said. “There was a little poppet valve on the interface that didn’t quite seat, so really, the question became why didn’t that seat? We solved that problem by changing out the whole umbilical.”
By then, NASA’s attention on the space station had turned to other tasks, such as experiments, the arrival of a new cargo ship, and testing of Boeing’s Starliner crew capsule docked at the complex, before it ultimately departed and left its crew behind. The spacewalk wasn’t urgent, so it had to wait. NASA now plans to attempt the spacewalk again as soon as January with a different set of astronauts.
Barratt thinks the spacesuits on the space station are good to go for the next spacewalk. However, the suits are decades old, and their original designs date back more than 40 years, when NASA developed the units for use on the space shuttle. Efforts to develop a replacement suit for use in low-Earth orbit have stalled. In June, Collins Aerospace dropped out of a NASA contract to build new spacesuits for servicing the International Space Station and future orbiting research outposts.
“None of our spacesuits are spring chickens, so we will expect to see some hardware issues with repeated use and not really upgrading,” Barratt said.
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.
From its halo-like orbit nearly a million miles from Earth, the James Webb Space Telescope is seeing farther than human eyes have ever seen.
In May, astronomers announced that Webb detected the most distant galaxy found so far, a fuzzy blob of red light that we see as it existed just 290 million years after the Big Bang. Light from this galaxy, several hundreds of millions of times the mass of the Sun, traveled more than 13 billion years until photons fell onto Webb’s gold-coated mirror.
A few months later, in July, scientists released an image Webb captured of a planet circling a star slightly cooler than the Sun nearly 12 light-years from Earth. The alien world is several times the mass of Jupiter and the closest exoplanet to ever be directly imaged. One of Webb’s science instruments has a coronagraph to blot out bright starlight, allowing the telescope to resolve the faint signature of a nearby planet and use spectroscopy to measure its chemical composition.
These are just a taste of the discoveries made by the $10 billion Webb telescope since it began science observations in 2022. Judging by astronomers’ interest in using Webb, there are many more to come.
Breaking records
The Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates Webb on behalf of NASA and its international partners, said last week that it received 2,377 unique proposals from science teams seeking observing time on the observatory. The institute released a call for proposals earlier this year for the so-called “Cycle 4” series of observations with Webb.
This volume of proposals represents around 78,000 hours of observing time with Webb, nine times more than the telescope’s available capacity for scientific observations in this cycle. The previous observing cycle had a similar “oversubscription rate” but had less overall observing time available to the science community.
For his most recent trip to the International Space Station, in lieu of bringing coffee or some other beverage in his “personal drink bag” allotment for the stay, NASA astronaut Don Pettit asked instead for a couple of bags of unflavored gelatin.
This was not for cooking purposes but rather to perform scientific experiments. How many of us would give up coffee for science?
Well, Donald Roy Pettit is not like most of us.
At the age of 69, Pettit is NASA’s oldest active astronaut and began his third long-duration stay on the space station last month. A lifelong tinkerer and gifted science communicator, he already is performing wonders up there, and we’ll get to his current activities in a moment. But just so you understand who we’re dealing with, the thing to know about Pettit is that he is insatiably curious, and wants to share the wonder of science and the natural world with others.
Here’s just one small example. During his last six-month increment in orbit, from late 2011 to the middle of 2012, Pettit had some Lego blocks he’d been using for student demonstrations. After the final one, he asked if he could use the Legos for a science experiment. He turned them into a belts-and-rollers-type Van de Graaff generator and produced groundbreaking work in electric fluids. This research was published in Physical Review Letters after Pettit returned to Earth. Most of us probably could not even spell Van de Graaff generator, and this dude is up there, in space, building them out of toys.
The way Pettit, a chemical engineer by training, explains things is that he has the “programmatic” scientific research he does for NASA, and then there’s everything else, often done during his limited free time.
“This is well-planned, well thought out, peer-reviewed, and uplinked to station with the supplies needed,” he said of programmatic research. “And then you have what I call science of opportunity. This is science which comes to mind while you are there, simply because you are there, and you can do it because you can. The scientific disciplines that I’ve dabbled in on the International Space Station include fluid physics, classic physics, chemistry, biology, plant growth, and Earth observations.”
NASA said Friday one its astronauts is in a hospital in Florida for medical observation after a “normal” predawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico inside a SpaceX capsule.
The mission’s other three crew members were cleared to return to their home base at Johnson Space Center in Houston after their own medical evaluations, NASA said.
The hospitalized astronaut “is in stable condition and under observation as a precautionary measure,” a NASA spokesperson said in a statement. The agency did not identify the astronaut or provide any more details about their condition, citing medical privacy protections.
Strapped into their seats onside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft, the four-person crew splashed down just south of Pensacola, Florida, at 3: 29 am EDT (07: 29 UTC) Friday, wrapping up a 235-day mission in low-Earth orbit.
NASA extended their stay at the International Space Station earlier this year to accommodate schedule changes caused by the troubled test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, then to wait for better weather conditions in SpaceX’s recovery zones near Florida.
Commander Matthew Dominick, pilot Michael Barratt, mission specialist Jeanette Epps, and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin were inside SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft for reentry and splashdown. NASA said one of its astronauts “experienced a medical issue” after the splashdown, and all four crew members were flown to Ascension Sacred Heart Pensacola for medical evaluation.
Three of the crew members were later released and departed Pensacola on a NASA business jet to fly back to Houston, according to NASA. The unidentified astronaut remains at Ascension.
“We’re grateful to Ascension Sacred Heart for its support during this time, and we are proud of our team for its quick action to ensure the safety of our crew members,” the NASA spokesperson said. “NASA will provide additional information as it becomes available.”
Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, left, NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, second from left, Matthew Dominick, second from right, and Jeanette Epps, right are seen inside the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft shortly after splashdown Friday morning.
Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin, left, NASA astronauts Michael Barratt, second from left, Matthew Dominick, second from right, and Jeanette Epps, right are seen inside the SpaceX Dragon Endeavour spacecraft shortly after splashdown Friday morning. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky
This mission, named Crew-8, was SpaceX’s eighth operational crew rotation flight to the space station under a multibillion-dollar commercial crew contract with NASA. This was the first flight to space for Dominick, Epps, and Grebenkin, and the third space mission for Barratt.
Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, released a photo of Grebenkin standing in Pensacola a few hours after splashdown. “After the space mission and splashdown, cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin feels great!” Roscosmos posted on its Telegram channel.
Adapting to Earth
This is not the first time an astronaut has been hospitalized after returning to Earth, but it is uncommon. South Korean astronaut Yi So-yeon was hospitalized for back pain after experiencing higher-than-expected g-forces during reentry in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft in 2008.
Three NASA astronauts were hospitalized in Hawaii after splashing down at the end of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission in 1975. The astronauts suffered lung irritation after breathing in toxic vapors from the Apollo spacecraft’s thrusters in the final moments before splashdown.
“We signed up to some things that are problematic.”
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft backs away from the International Space Station on September 6 without its crew. Credit: NASA
Sometimes, it’s worth noting when something goes unsaid.
On Wednesday, Boeing’s new CEO, Kelly Ortberg, participated in his first quarterly conference call with investment analysts. Under fire from labor groups and regulators, Boeing logged a nearly $6.2 billion loss for the last three months, while the new boss pledged a turnaround for the troubled aerospace company.
What Ortberg didn’t mention in the call was the Starliner program. Starliner is a relatively small portion of Boeing’s overall business, but it’s a high-profile and unprofitable one.
Mounting losses
Boeing has reported recurring financial losses on the program and added $250 million to the tally with Wednesday’s quarterly report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This brings the company’s total losses on Starliner to $1.85 billion, recorded in increments over the last few years as the program has faced technical problems and delays.
In its SEC filing, Boeing wrote: “Risk remains that we may record additional losses in future periods.”
Boeing runs the Starliner program under a fixed-price contract with NASA, meaning the government pays the contractor a set amount of money, and the company is on the hook for any cost overruns. These are favorable terms for the government because they divert financial risk to the contractor, usually resulting in lower costs if the program is successful.
Since the last Starliner test flight ended in a disappointing fashion, Boeing has released no updates on its plans for the future of the spacecraft. The company released a short written statement after Starliner landed in early September, saying managers would review data and “determine the next steps for the program.”
A week after Starliner landed, Boeing’s chief financial officer, Brian West, echoed that line. “There is important work to determine any next steps for the Starliner program, and we’ll evaluate that,” he said at a conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley.
A member of the Starliner recovery team removes cargo from the spacecraft after landing in New Mexico on September 6, without its two-person crew.
Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
A member of the Starliner recovery team removes cargo from the spacecraft after landing in New Mexico on September 6, without its two-person crew. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
Starliner concluded its third test flight a little more than six weeks ago, leaving behind the two astronauts the craft ferried to the International Space Station earlier in the year. This was the first time people flew into orbit on a Starliner spacecraft.
NASA, which partnered with Boeing to develop the Starliner spacecraft, decided the Boeing capsule should return to Earth without its crew after the test flight encountered problems with overheating thrusters and helium leaks. The spacecraft safely reached the space station with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams in June, but agency officials were not comfortable with risking the crew’s safety on Starliner for the trip home. Instead, the duo will return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft early next year.
Boeing managers had a different opinion and lobbied for Starliner to return to Earth with Wilmore and Williams. Ultimately, the Starliner spacecraft parachuted to a successful landing at White Sands Space Harbor, New Mexico, on September 6, but there’s a lot of work ahead for Boeing to fix the thruster problems and helium leaks before the capsule can fly with people again. This will take many months—potentially a year or more—and will cost Boeing hundreds of millions of dollars, as shown in Wednesday’s SEC filing.
Doing less
In response to questions Wednesday from Wall Street investment firms, Ortberg, who took the CEO job in August, suggested it’s time for Boeing to look at cutting some of its losses and recalibrate how it pursues new business opportunities. Boeing’s previous CEO, Dave Calhoun, said last year the company would no longer enter into fixed-price development contracts.
“I think that that we’re better off being doing less and doing it better than doing more and not doing it well,” Ortberg said. “So we’re in the process of taking an evaluation of the portfolio. It’s something a new CEO always does when you come into a business.”
Most of Boeing’s financial loss in the third quarter of this year came from the company’s commercial airplane business. Beset by safety concerns with its 737 Max aircraft and a labor strike that has halted production at many of its airplane factories, Boeing posted its worst quarterly performance since the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020.
Even before the strike, the Federal Aviation Administration capped Boeing’s production rate for the 737 Max, limiting revenue for the commercial airplane business.
Ortberg didn’t specify any programs that Boeing might consider trimming or canceling, but said the company’s “core” business of commercial airplanes and military systems will stay.
“There are probably some things on the fringe there that we can be more efficient with, or that just distract us from our main goal here. So, more to come on that,” Ortberg said. “I don’t have a specific list of things that we’re going to keep and we’re not going to keep. That’s something for us to evaluate, and the process is underway.”
Kelly Ortberg, Boeing’s new CEO, is pictured in 2016 during his tenure as chief executive of Rockwell Collins.
Apart from technical execution, Ortberg identified Boeing’s errors in cost and risk estimation as other reasons for the company’s poor performance on several fixed-price government contracts, including Starliner.
“We’re not going to be able to just wave the wand and clean up these troubled contracts,” he said. “We signed up to some things that are problematic.”
Ortberg said he is reluctant to ditch all of Boeing’s troubled contracts. “Even if we wanted to, I don’t think we can walk away from these contracts,” he said. “These are our core customers that need this capability. We’ve got long-term commitments to them. So walking away isn’t an answer to this.”
However, Orberg added that Boeing could reassess programs as they shift from one contract phase to the next. NASA’s commercial crew contract with Boeing has a maximum value of $4.6 billion, but that assumes the agency gives Boeing the green light to fly six operational Starliner missions.
So far, NASA has only authorized Boeing to begin detailed preparations for three. The latter half of the commercial crew contract remains a question mark, and could be an opportunity for Boeing to reevaluate the Starliner program without breaking its obligations to NASA. This is especially salient because NASA plans to decommission the International Space Station in 2030, and it’s not clear Boeing could fly all six of its Starliner missions before then while still alternating with SpaceX for crew transportation duties.
“We do have to get into a position where we’ve got a portfolio much more balanced with less risky programs and more profitable programs, and we’re going to be working that,” Ortberg said. “But I don’t think a wholesale walkaway is in the cards.”
This statement makes it sound like Boeing isn’t going to pull the plug on Starliner immediately. Still, Boeing hasn’t laid out its specific plans for Starliner, or even confirmed its intention to keep working on the program. This is puzzling.
Saying nothing
Ortberg was not asked about Starliner in Wednesday’s investor call. After the call, Ars asked a Boeing spokesperson if the company still has a long-term commitment to the Starliner program. The spokesperson replied that the company has nothing to share on the topic.
The Starliner test flight this year was supposed to pave the way for NASA to officially certify the Boeing crew capsule to begin flying in a slate of up to six operational crew rotation flights to the space station. Once certified, Boeing will become NASA’s second crew transportation provider alongside SpaceX, which has now launched nine operational crew missions for NASA, plus a handful more all-private astronaut missions.
NASA still wants to certify Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft to provide the agency with a second commercial option for getting astronauts into orbit. A fundamental goal set out for NASA’s commercial crew program more than a decade ago was to develop two dissimilar human-rated transportation systems for access to low-Earth orbit. The idea here is competition will drive down costs, and NASA will have a backup option if one of the commercial crew providers runs into difficulties.
However, NASA has not announced whether it will require Boeing to complete another test flight to achieve the certification milestone with Starliner. NASA is looking at slots to fly an unpiloted Starliner spacecraft on a cargo mission to the space station next year, perhaps to verify modifications to the ship’s propulsion system really fix the problems discovered on the test flight this year.
NASA is making moves while assuming Boeing will stay in the game. Astronauts are still assigned to train for the first operational Starliner mission, although it’s not likely to happen until the end of next year or in 2026. Earlier this month, NASA announced SpaceX will launch a four-person crew to the International Space Station no earlier than July of next year, taking a slot that the agency once hoped Boeing would use.
Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator, told reporters in late August that he received assurances from Ortberg that Boeing intends to “move forward and fly Starliner in the future.” At the time, Ortberg was just a couple of weeks into his tenure at Boeing.
Two months later, Nelson’s secondhand assertion is still all we have.
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.
Enlarge/ SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft climbs away from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on Saturday atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
NASA/Keegan Barber
NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov lifted off Saturday from Florida’s Space Coast aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, heading for a five-month expedition on the International Space Station.
The two-man crew launched on top of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket at 1: 17 pm EDT (17: 17 UTC), taking an advantage of a break in stormy weather to begin a five-month expedition in space. Nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines powered the first stage of the flight on a trajectory northeast from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, then the booster detached and returned to landing at Cape Canaveral as the Falcon 9’s upper stage accelerated SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft into orbit.
“It was a sweet ride,” Hague said after arriving in space. With a seemingly flawless launch, Hague and Gorbunov are on track to arrive at the space station around 5: 30 pm EDT (2130 UTC) Sunday.
Empty seats
This is SpaceX’s 15th crew mission since 2020, and SpaceX’s 10th astronaut launch for NASA, but Saturday’s launch was unusual in a couple of ways.
“All of our missions have unique challenges and this one, I think, will be memorable for a lot of us,” said Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations.
First, only two people rode into orbit on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft, rather than the usual complement of four astronauts. This mission, known as Crew-9, originally included Hague, Gorbunov, commander Zena Cardman, and NASA astronaut Stephanie Wilson.
But the troubled test flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft threw a wrench into NASA’s plans. The Starliner mission launched in June with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams. Boeing’s spacecraft reached the space station, but thruster failures and helium leaks plagued the mission, and NASA officials decided last month it was too risky to being the crew back to Earth on Starliner.
NASA selected SpaceX and Boeing for multibillion-dollar commercial crew contracts in 2014, with each company responsible for developing human-rated spaceships to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX flew astronauts for the first time in 2020, and Boeing reached the same milestone with the test flight that launched in June.
Ultimately, the Starliner spacecraft safely returned to Earth on September 6 with a successful landing in New Mexico. But it left Wilmore and Williams behind on the space station with the lab’s long-term crew of seven astronauts and cosmonauts. The space station crew rigged two temporary seats with foam inside a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft currently docked at the outpost, where the Starliner astronauts would ride home if they needed to evacuate the complex in an emergency.
Enlarge/ NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov in their SpaceX pressure suits.
NASA/Kim Shiflett
This is a temporary measure to allow the Dragon spacecraft to return to Earth with six people instead of the usual four. NASA officials decided to remove two of the astronauts from the next SpaceX crew mission to free up normal seats for Wilmore and Williams to ride home in February, when Crew-9 was already slated to end its mission.
The decision to fly the Starliner spacecraft back to Earth without its crew had several second order effects on space station operations. Managers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston had to decide who to bump from the Crew-9 mission, and who to keep on the crew.
Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov ended up keeping their seats on the Crew-9 flight. Hague originally trained as the pilot on Crew-9, and NASA decided he would take Zena Cardman’s place as commander. Hague, a 49-year-old Space Force colonel, is a veteran of one long-duration mission on the International Space Station, and also experienced a rare in-flight launch abort in 2018 due to a failure of a Russian Soyuz rocket.
NASA announced the original astronaut assignments for the Crew-9 mission in January. Cardman, a 36-year-old geobiologist, would have been the first rookie astronaut without test pilot experience to command a NASA spaceflight. Three-time space shuttle flier Stephanie Wilson, 58, was the other astronaut removed from the Crew-9 mission.
The decision on who to fly on Crew-9 was a “really close call,” said Bowersox, who oversees NASA’s spaceflight operations directorate. “They were thinking very hard about flying Zena, but in this situation, it made sense to have somebody who had at least one flight under their belt.”
Gorbunov, a 34-year-old Russian aerospace engineer making his first flight to space, moved over to take pilot’s seat in the Crew Dragon spacecraft, although he remains officially designated a mission specialist. His remaining presence on the crew was preordained because of an international agreement between NASA and Russia’s space agency that provides seats for Russian cosmonauts on US crew missions and US astronauts on Russian Soyuz flights to the space station.
Bowersox said NASA will reassign Cardman and Wilson to future flights.
Enlarge/ NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, seen in their Boeing flight suits before their launch.
Operational flexibility
This was also the first launch of astronauts from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX’s busiest launch pad. SpaceX has outfitted the launch pad with the equipment necessary to support launches of human spaceflight missions on the Crew Dragon spacecraft, including a more than 200-foot-tall tower and a crew access arm to allow astronauts to board spaceships on top of Falcon 9 rockets.
SLC-40 was previously based on a “clean pad” architecture, without any structures to service or access Falcon 9 rockets while they were vertical on the pad. SpaceX also installed slide chutes to give astronauts and ground crews an emergency escape route away from the launch pad in an emergency.
SpaceX constructed the crew tower last year and had it ready for the launch of a Dragon cargo mission to the space station in March. Saturday’s launch demonstrated the pad’s ability to support SpaceX astronaut missions, which have previously all departed from Launch Complex-39A (LC-39A) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, a few miles north of SLC-40.
Bringing human spaceflight launch capability online at SLC-40 gives SpaceX and NASA additional flexibility in their scheduling. For example, LC-39A remains the only launch pad configured to support flights of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. SpaceX is now preparing LC-39A for a Falcon Heavy launch October 10 with NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which only has a window of a few weeks to depart Earth this year and reach its destination at Jupiter in 2030.
With SLC-40 now certified for astronaut launches, SpaceX and NASA teams are able to support the Crew-9 and Europa Clipper missions without worrying about scheduling conflicts. The Florida spaceport now has three launch pads certified for crew flights—two for SpaceX’s Dragon and one for Boeing’s Starliner—and NASA will add a fourth human-rated launch pad with the Artemis II mission to the Moon late next year.
“That’s pretty exciting,” said Pam Melroy, NASA’s deputy administrator. “I think it’s a reflection of where we are in our space program at NASA, but also the capabilities that the United States has developed.”
Earlier this week, Hague and Gorbunov participated in a launch day dress rehearsal, when they had the opportunity to familiarize themselves with SLC-40. The launch pad has the same capabilities as LC-39A, but with a slightly different layout. SpaceX also test-fired the Falcon 9 rocket Tuesday evening, before lowering the rocket horizontal and moving it back into a hangar for safekeeping as the outer bands of Hurricane Helene moved through Central Florida.
Inside the hangar, SpaceX technicians discovered sooty exhaust from the Falcon 9’s engines accumulated on the outside of the Dragon spacecraft during the test-firing. Ground teams wiped the soot off of the craft’s solar arrays and heat shield, then repainted portions of the capsule’s radiators around the edge of Dragon’s trunk section before rolling the vehicle back to the launch pad Friday.
“It’s important that the radiators radiate heat in the proper way to space, so we had to put some some new paint on to get that back to the right emissivity and the right reflectivity and absorptivity of the solar radiation that hit those panels so it will reject the heat properly,” said Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability.
Gerstenmaier also outlined a new backup ability for the Crew Dragon spacecraft to safely splash down even if all of its parachutes fail to deploy on final descent back to Earth. This involves using the capsule’s eight powerful SuperDraco thrusters, normally only used in the unlikely instance of a launch abort, to fire for a few seconds and slow Dragon’s speed for a safe splashdown.
Enlarge/ A hover test using SuperDraco thrusters on a prototype Crew Dragon spacecraft in 2015.
SpaceX
“The way it works is, in the case where all the parachutes totally fail, this essentially fires the thrusters at the very end,” Gerstenmaier said. “That essentially gives the crew a chance to land safely, and essentially escape the vehicle. So it’s not used in any partial conditions. We can land with one chute out. We can land with other failures in the chute system. But this is only in the case where all four parachutes just do not operate.”
When SpaceX first designed the Crew Dragon spacecraft more than a decade ago, the company wanted to use the SuperDraco thrusters to enable the capsule to perform propulsive helicopter-like landings. Eventually, SpaceX and NASA agreed to change to a more conventional parachute-assisted splashdown.
The SuperDracos remained on the Crew Dragon spacecraft to push the capsule away from its Falcon 9 rocket during a catastrophic launch failure. The eight high-thrust engines burn hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide propellants that combust when making contact with one another.
The backup option has been activated for some previous commercial Crew Dragon missions, but not for a NASA flight, according to Gerstenmaier. The capability “provides a tolerable landing for the crew,” he added. “So it’s a true deep, deep contingency. I think our philosophy is, rather than have a system that you don’t use, even though it’s not maybe fully certified, it gives the crew a chance to escape a really, really bad situation.”
Steve Stich, NASA’s commercial crew program manager, said the emergency propulsive landing capability will be enabled for the return of the Crew-8 mission, which has been at the space station since March. With the arrival of Hague and Gorbunov on Crew-9—and the extension of Wilmore and Williams’ mission—the Crew-8 mission is slated to depart the space station and splash down in early October.
This story was updated after confirmation of a successful launch.
Enlarge/ The first stage of ULA’s second Vulcan rocket was raised onto its launch platform August 11 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.
United Launch Alliance is free to compete for NASA contracts with its new Vulcan rocket after a successful test flight earlier this year, ending a period where SpaceX was the only company competing for rights to launch the agency’s large science missions.
For several years, ULA was unable to bid for NASA launch contracts after the company sold all of its remaining Atlas V rockets to other customers, primarily for Amazon’s Project Kuiper Internet network. ULA could not submit its new Vulcan rocket, which will replace the Atlas V, for NASA to consider in future launch contracts until the Vulcan completed at least one successful flight, according to Tim Dunn, senior launch director at NASA’s Launch Services Program.
The Vulcan rocket’s first certification flight on January 8, called Cert-1, was nearly flawless, demonstrating the launcher’s methane-fueled BE-4 engines built by Blue Origin and an uprated twin-engine Centaur upper stage. A second test flight, known as Cert-2, is scheduled to lift off no earlier than October 4 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. Assuming the upcoming launch is as successful as the first one, the US Space Force aims to launch its first mission on a Vulcan rocket by the end of the year.
The Space Force has already booked 25 launches on ULA’s Vulcan rocket for military payloads and spy satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. But these missions won’t launch until Vulcan completes its second test flight, clearing the way for the Space Force to certify ULA’s new rocket for national security missions.
Back in the game
NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP) is responsible for selecting and overseeing launch providers for the agency’s robotic science missions. NASA’s near-term options for launching large missions include SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, ULA’s Vulcan, and Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher.
However, only SpaceX’s rockets have been available for NASA bids since 2021, when ULA sold all of its remaining Atlas V rockets to Amazon. For example, ULA did not submit proposals for the launch of a GOES weather satellite or NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, two of the more lucrative launch contracts the agency has awarded in the last couple of years. NASA selected SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, the only eligible rocket, for both missions.
This is a notable role reversal for SpaceX and ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that was the sole launch provider for large NASA science missions and military satellites for nearly a decade. SpaceX launched its first mission for NASA’s Launch Services Program in January 2016.
The situation changed with the first flight of the Vulcan rocket in January.
“They certainly demonstrated a huge success earlier this year flying Cert-1,” Dunn told Ars in an interview. “They needed a successful flight to then bid for future missions, so that allowed them to be in a position to bid on our missions.”
NASA has not yet formally certified the Vulcan rocket to launch one of the agency’s science missions, but that would not stop NASA from selecting Vulcan for a contract. Some of NASA’s next big science missions up for launch contract awards include the nuclear-powered Dragonfly mission to explore Saturn’s moon Titan and an asteroid-hunting telescope named NEO Surveyor.
The second Vulcan flight next month will move ULA’s rocket toward certification by the Space Force and NASA.
“A second Cert flight that will then demonstrate a few other capabilities of the rocket allows more data for our certification team that is working in concert with the US Space Force’s certification team,” Dunn said. “We’re doing a lot of shared, intergovernmental collaborations in the certification work, so it allows us all more data, more confidence in that launch vehicle to meet all the needs that we believe we will have in the coming decade-plus.”
Enlarge/ Two strap-on solid-fueled boosters and twin BE-4 main engines on ULA’s second Vulcan rocket.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn could also compete for contracts to launch NASA’s larger, more expensive missions after it completes at least one successful flight. Blue Origin is currently eligible for bids to launch NASA’s smaller missions, such as the ESCAPADE mission to Mars already assigned to New Glenn. NASA is willing to accept more risk for launching these types of lower-cost missions.
ULA capped off the assembly of its second Vulcan rocket at Cape Canaveral on Saturday when technicians lifted the launcher’s payload fairing atop Vulcan’s first-stage booster and Centaur upper stage. For its second launch, Vulcan will carry a dummy payload instead of a real satellite. The second Vulcan flight was initially supposed to launch Sierra Space’s first Dream Chaser spaceplane to the International Space Station, but Dream Chaser isn’t ready, and the Space Force is eager for ULA to get moving and finish the certification process.
The head of Space Systems Command, Lt. Gen. Philip Garrant, told Ars last week that he is “optimistic” ULA will be in a position to launch its first Space Force missions with the Vulcan rocket by the end of this year. ULA has already delivered Vulcan rocket parts for the next two missions to Cape Canaveral, but the Cert-2 launch needs to go off without a hitch.
“We’re working very closely with ULA on that, as well as the manifest for the following missions,” Garrant said. “All of the rocket parts are at the launch locations, ready to go, but clearly the priority is the certification flight and making sure that the launch vehicle is certified. But we are optimistic that we’re going to get those launches off.”
Enlarge/ This photo of the International Space Station was captured by a crew member on a Soyuz spacecraft.
NASA/Roscosmos
A little more than two years ago, Dmitry Rogozin, the bellicose former head of Russia’s space agency, nearly brought the International Space Station partnership to its knees.
During his tenure as director general of Roscosmos, Rogozin was known for his bombastic social media posts and veiled threats to abandon the space station after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin tersely dismissed Rogozin in July 2022 and replaced him with Yuri Borisov, a former deputy prime minister.
While the clash between Russia and Western governments over the war in Ukraine has not cooled, the threats against the International Space Station (ISS) ended. The program remains one of the few examples of cooperation between the US and Russian governments. Last year, Russia formally extended its commitment to the ISS to at least 2028. NASA and space agencies in Europe, Japan, and Canada have agreed to maintain the space station through 2030.
It’s this two-year disparity that concerns NASA officials plotting the final days of the ISS. NASA awarded SpaceX a contract in June to develop a deorbit vehicle based on the company’s Dragon spacecraft to steer the more than 450-ton complex toward a safe reentry over a remote stretch of ocean.
“We do have that uncertainty, 2028 through 2030, with Roscosmos,” said Robyn Gatens, director of the ISS program at NASA Headquarters, in a meeting of the agency’s advisory council this week. “We expect to hear from them over the next year or two as far as their follow-on plans, hoping that they also extend through 2030.”
Fighting through the tension
Roscosmos works in four-year increments, so Russia’s decision last year extended the country’s participation in the space station program from 2024 until 2028. Russian space officials know the future of the country’s space program is directly tied to the ISS. If Russia pulls out of the space station in 2028, Roscosmos will be left without much of a human spaceflight program.
There’s no chance Russia will have its own space station in low-Earth orbit in four years, so abandoning its role on the ISS would leave Russia’s Soyuz crew ferry spacecraft without a destination. Russian and Chinese leaders have fostered closer ties in space in recent years, but China’s Tiangong space station is inaccessible from Russia’s launch sites.
The US and Russian segments of the ISS depend on one another for critical functions. The US section generates most of the space station’s electricity and maintains the lab’s orientation without using precious rocket fuel. Russia is responsible for maintaining the station’s altitude and maneuvering the complex out of the path of space junk, although Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo craft has also demonstrated an ability to boost the station’s orbit.
While Russia’s space program would feel the pain if Roscosmos made an early exit from the space station, the relationship between Russia and the West is volatile. US and European leaders may soon give Ukraine the green light to use Western-supplied weapons for attacks deep inside Russian territory. Putin said last week that this would be tantamount to war. “This will mean that NATO countries, the United States, and European countries are fighting Russia,” he said.
