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Trade wars muzzle allied talks on Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield

golden dome, michael guetlein, military space, missile defense, Science, Space, space force / 9u50fv / January 27, 2026

“International partners, I have not been allowed to talk to yet because of the trade wars.”

President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office at the White House on May 20, 2025. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Gen. Michael Guetlein, the senior officer in charge of the US military’s planned Golden Dome missile defense shield, has laid out an audacious schedule for deploying a network of space-based sensors and interceptors by the end of President Donald Trump’s term in the White House.

The three-year timeline is aggressive, with little margin for error in the event of budget or technological setbacks. The shield is designed to defend the US homeland against a range of long-range weapons, including intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), cruise missiles, and newer threats like hypersonic weapons and drones.

“By the summer of ’28, we will be able to defend the entire nation against ballistic missiles, as well as other generation aerial threats, and we will continue to grow that architecture through 2035,” Guetlein said Friday in a presentation to representatives from the US defense industry.

Supporters of Golden Dome say it is necessary to defend the United States against emerging threats from potential adversaries like Russia and China, each of which has a vast arsenal of ballistic missiles and more maneuverable hypersonic missiles that are difficult to detect and even harder to track and shoot down. Critics cite Golden Dome’s high cost and its potential to disrupt the global order, an eventuality they say would make the US homeland more prone to attack.

Guetlein’s team is moving fast in many areas. The Pentagon has inked deals with companies to develop prototypes for space-based missile interceptors, and Golden Dome is underpinned by billions of dollars of preexisting investment in sensor technology, reusable launchers, and mass-produced satellites.

These investments give Golden Dome a head start that former President Ronald Reagan’s similarly scoped Strategic Defense Initiative lacked in the 1980s. The initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars,” was drastically downsized as the Cold War wound down and the government struggled with ballooning costs and technical roadblocks.

Consequences to the chaos

But progress in at least one important area has stalled on the Golden Dome program. The Pentagon will need cooperation, if not tangible contributions, from allies to create the best possible version of the missile defense shield. Fundamentally, it comes down to geography. Places like the Canadian Arctic and Greenland are well-positioned to detect incoming missiles coming over the horizon from Russia or China. They might also be useful for hosting next-gen ground-based interceptors, which today are based in Alaska and California.

Guetlein said his interactions with allies have been limited. It’s the consequence of another of the Trump administration’s core policies: tariffs.

“International partners, I have not been allowed to talk to yet because of the trade wars,” Guetlein said. “The administration wants to get all that laying flat before I start having conversations with our allied partners. But everything we are doing is allied by design.”

Without detailed discussions with allies, the Pentagon’s Golden Dome appears to be one-sided.

“We are already planning on how to integrate our allied partners into our architecture,” Guetlein said. [We’re] already understanding what they can bring to the fight, whether that be capability, whether that be through FMS (foreign military sales), or whether that be territory that we need to access to put sensors, or what have you.”

Canada and Denmark, which count Greenland as an autonomous territory, are longtime allies of the United States. Both nations are members of NATO, and Canada is part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), an organization whose mission is already aligned with that of the Golden Dome. However, the Trump administration has targeted both nations for high tariffs, apparently in a bid to achieve the White House’s trade and security objectives.

Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base, with the domes of the Thule Tracking Station, is pictured in northern Greenland on October 4, 2023. Credit: Thomas Traasdahl/Ritzau Scanpix/AFP via Getty Images

Trump’s obsession with acquiring Greenland, where the Space Force already has a military base, soured US relations with Denmark over the last year. The White House threatened additional tariffs on Denmark and other European countries until Denmark agreed to sell Greenland to the United States.

Then, after strong European pushback, Trump suddenly reversed course last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He withdrew threats to take Greenland by force and announced an unspecified “framework” with NATO for a future deal regarding the island. Trump told CNBC the framework involved partnerships on missile defense and mining: “They’re going to be involved in the Golden Dome, and they’re going to be involved in mineral rights, and so are we.”

In a statement, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen responded to Trump signaling an openness to a “constructive dialogue” on Arctic security, including the Golden Dome, “provided that this is done with respect for our territorial integrity.”

The White House’s backpedaling may have lowered the temperature of US relations with Denmark, at least for now. But Canada is still in Trump’s crosshairs. In a social media post on Friday, Trump claimed Canada was “against” plans to include Greenland in the Golden Dome program. Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s ambassador to the United States, told CBS News she didn’t know what Trump was talking about.

The back-and-forth followed Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s rebuke of Trump’s foreign policy during a speech at Davos last week. In another sign of the withering US-Canada partnership, Trump threatened in a social media post Saturday to impose a 100 percent tariff on Canada if it follows through on a trade deal with China.

Canadian officials last year disclosed they were in talks to participate in the Golden Dome. In an interview with The War Zone published earlier this month, the operational commander of NORAD’s Canadian region advocated for “integrated missile defense” and “ground-based effectors” but said Canada’s role in a space-based layer would be a “political decision.”

“We look at it as Continental Shield,” said Royal Canadian Air Force Maj. Gen. Chris McKenna. “Golden Dome is the US brand on it. From our point of view, it’s great air missile defense and what we will put on the table to defend the continent with. And so I think there are ongoing negotiations between our governments with respect to what the specific investments will be.”

A roadmap to something

Guetlein’s comments on Golden Dome last week were part of an “industry day” hosted by Space Systems Command, the Los Angeles-based unit charged with procurement for most of the Space Force’s major programs. Asked what his top priority is this year, Guetlein said his emphasis is on the shield’s command and control system, the “glue layer” that ties together everything else necessary to make Golden Dome work. His deadline to demonstrate the command-and-control system is this summer.

The kinetic, or hit-to-kill, elements of the missile shield will come next. “In the summer of ’27, I have to integrate the interceptors, and in ’28 I have to demonstrate operational capability that is fielded against credible threats,” Guetlein said.

This would bring some version of Golden Dome into service before President Trump leaves the White House, a timetable used for several other programs, including NASA’s Artemis mission to land astronauts on the Moon. Officials are willing to trade perfection for speed. Guetlein’s intention is to “rapidly get an 85 percent product in the field.”

Gen. Michael Guetlein, overseeing the development of the Golden Dome missile defense system, looks on as President Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office of the White House on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

But a comprehensive missile defense shield, if economically and technically feasible, would take many more years to complete. Some pieces of what could become Golden Dome already exist, such as ground-based midcourse interceptors and an array of missile detection sensors on land, at sea, and in space.

Other elements were well along in development before Trump’s second term in the White House. These include a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to better track hypersonic missiles and relay data to help US and allied forces shoot them down. This network, led by the Space Development Agency, began launching in 2023 but is not yet operational.

The Pentagon has already kicked off the preliminary steps to buy space-based interceptors. The shield will need hundreds or thousands of orbiting platforms on alert to shoot down a ballistic missile in flight. The Defense Department also aims to field modernized ground-based interceptors and Golden Dome’s command and control network, the system Guetlein identified as his top priority for this year.

Satellites are getting cheaper and easier to build. SpaceX has manufactured and launched approximately 11,000 Starlink satellites in less than seven years. No other company comes close to this number, but there are businesses looking at building standardized satellites that could be integrated with a range of payloads, including Earth-viewing cameras, radars, communication antennas, or perhaps, a missile interceptor.

But the interceptors themselves are brand new. Nothing like them has ever been put into space and tested before. Last year, the Space Force asked companies to submit their ideas for space-based interceptor (SBI) prototypes. The military awarded 18 companies small prototype development deals in November. The Space Force did not identify the winners, and the value of each contract fell below the $9 million public disclosure threshold for Pentagon programs.

These 18 awards are focused on boost-phase SBIs, weapons that can take out a missile soon after it leaves its silo. From a physics perspective, this is one of the most difficult things to ask an interceptor to do, because the weapon must account for atmospheric disturbances and reentry heating to reach its target. In December, the Space Force issued a follow-up request for prototype proposals looking at space-based midcourse interceptors capable of destroying a ballistic missile while it is coasting through space.

The Pentagon has not said how many SBIs it will need for Golden Dome, or what they will look like. Essentially, an orbiting interceptor will be a flying fuel tank with a rocket and a sensor package to home in on its target. But the Space Force and its prospective Golden Dome contractors, which include industry giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, have not disclosed the interceptors’ design specs or how many the shield will need.

A Standard Missile 3 Block IIA launches from the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, on December 10, 2018, during a test to intercept an intermediate-range ballistic missile target in space. Credit: Mark Wright/DOD

“I can move money around at will”

Guetlein said Pentagon leaders have empowered him with “unprecedented authorities” on the Golden Dome program. He said Friday his office has full authority over the program’s technical aspects, along with Golden Dome’s procurement, contracting, hiring, security, and budget.

President Trump directed the military to start the Golden Dome program in an executive order last January and nominated Guetlein to head the effort. The Senate confirmed him for the job in a voice vote last July. After the initial pomp of Golden Dome’s announcement, including multiple Oval Office photo ops, military officials went quiet. Guetlein cited security concerns for the Pentagon’s silence on one of Trump’s marquee defense programs.

“I was confirmed on the 18th of July. On the 19th of July, I popped No. 1 on the intel collect list for our adversaries,” Guetlein said. “On the 20th of July, they started hacking our defense industrial base, and the Secretary (of Defense) asked us to go silent. So, we have been quiet. I have not been talking to industry consortiums. I have not been talking to the press. I have not been talking to the think tanks. And it wasn’t until September that I was allowed to even start talking to the Hill (Congress).”

Despite this absence of dialogue, lawmakers approved $23 billion in a down payment for Golden Dome last summer. The final cost of the system is anyone’s guess, but the deployment and sustainment of Golden Dome will certainly cost hundreds of billions of dollars over multiple decades. Just getting the missile shield through a partial activation will cost $175 billion over three years, according to the White House.

Guetlein is off and running with the one-time infusion of $23 billion Congress gave him last year. “The budget authority… for the first $23 billion, it has no strings, no color, no year,” he said. “I can move that money around at will.”

He’s about to receive another $13.4 billion in this year’s defense budget, pending the appropriation bill’s final passage in the Senate and President Trump’s signature.

“I’ve got the Space Force buying SBIs. I’ve got the Army buying munitions and sensors. I’ve got the Navy buying munitions. I’ve got the Missile Defense Agency buying next-generation interceptors, glide phase interceptors, and a whole host of other capabilities,” Guetlein said.

Despite their willingness to fund Golden Dome, lawmakers still aren’t satisfied with the information they are getting from the Pentagon. In a document adjoining this year’s defense budget bill, members of the House and Senate defense appropriations subcommittees wrote they were “unable to effectively assess resources available” and unable to “conduct oversight” of the Golden Dome program “due to insufficient budgetary information” provided by the Department of Defense.

The lawmakers wrote that they “support the operational objectives of Golden Dome” and directed the Pentagon to “provide a comprehensive spend plan” for the missile shield within 60 days of the budget bill becoming law.

“Unfortunately because of the intel threat, we can only brief you at the classified level on what the architecture is,” Guetlein 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.

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Former astronaut on lunar spacesuits: “I don’t think they’re great right now”

artemis, axiom space, Commercial space, Features, human spaceflight, kate rubins, mike barratt, NASA, Science, Space, spacesuits / Mike M. / January 26, 2026

“These are just the difficulties of designing a spacesuit for the lunar environment.”

NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara kneels down to pick up a rock during testing of Axiom’s lunar spacesuit inside NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston on September 24, 2025. Credit: NASA

Crew members traveling to the lunar surface on NASA’s Artemis missions should be gearing up for a grind. They will wear heavier spacesuits than those worn by the Apollo astronauts, and NASA will ask them to do more than the first Moonwalkers did more than 50 years ago.

The Moonwalking experience will amount to an “extreme physical event” for crews selected for the Artemis program’s first lunar landings, a former NASA astronaut told a panel of researchers, physicians, and engineers convened by the National Academies.

Kate Rubins, who retired from the space agency last year, presented the committee with her views on the health risks for astronauts on lunar missions. She outlined the concerns NASA officials often talk about: radiation exposure, muscle and bone atrophy, reduced cardiovascular and immune function, and other adverse medical effects of spaceflight.

Scientists and astronauts have come to understand many of these effects after a quarter-century of continuous human presence on the International Space Station. But the Moon is different in a few important ways. The Moon is outside the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere, lunar dust is pervasive, and the Moon has partial gravity, about one-sixth as strong as the pull we feel on Earth.

Each of these presents challenges for astronauts living and working on the lunar surface, and their effects are amplified for crew members who venture outside for spacewalks. NASA selected Axiom Space, a Houston-based company, for a $228 million fixed-price contract to develop commercial pressurized spacesuits for the Artemis III mission, slated to be the first human landing mission on the Moon since 1972.

NASA hopes to fly the Artemis III mission by the end of 2028, but the schedule is in question. The readiness of Axiom’s spacesuits and the availability of new human-rated landers from SpaceX and Blue Origin are driving the timeline for Artemis III.

Stressing about stress

Rubins is a veteran of two long-duration spaceflights on the International Space Station, logging 300 days in space and conducting four spacewalks totaling nearly 27 hours. She is also an accomplished microbiologist and became the first person to sequence DNA in space.

“What I think we have on the Moon that we don’t really have on the space station that I want people to recognize is an extreme physical stress,” Rubins said. “On the space station, most of the time you’re floating around. You’re pretty happy. It’s very relaxed. You can do exercise. Every now and then, you do an EVA (Extravehicular Activity, or spacewalk).”

“When we get to the lunar surface, people are going to be sleep shifting,” Rubins said. “They’re barely going to get any sleep. They’re going to be in these suits for eight or nine hours. They’re going to be doing EVAs every day. The EVAs that I did on my flights, it was like doing a marathon and then doing another marathon when you were done.”

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins inside the International Space Station in 2020. Credit: NASA

Rubins is now a professor of computational and systems biology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She said treks on the Moon will be “even more challenging” than her spacewalks outside the ISS.

The Axiom spacesuit design builds on NASA’s own work developing a prototype suit to replace the agency’s decades-old Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs) used for spacewalks at the International Space Station (ISS). The new suits allow for greater mobility, with more flexible joints to help astronauts use their legs, crouch, and bend down—things they don’t have to do when floating outside the ISS.

Astronauts on the Moon also must contend with gravity. Including a life-support backpack, the commercial suit weighs more than 300 pounds in Earth’s gravity, but Axiom considers the exact number proprietary. The Axiom suit is considerably heavier than the 185-pound spacesuit the Apollo astronauts wore on the Moon. NASA’s earlier prototype exploration spacesuit was estimated to weigh more than 400 pounds, according to a 2021 report by NASA’s inspector general.

“We’ve definitely seen trauma from the suits, from the actual EVA suit accommodation,” said Mike Barratt, a NASA astronaut and medical doctor. “That’s everything from skin abrasions to joint pain to—no kidding—orthopedic trauma. You can potentially get a fracture of sorts. EVAs on the lunar surface with a heavily loaded suit and heavy loads that you’re either carrying or tools that you’re reacting against, that’s an issue.”

On paper, the Axiom suits for NASA’s Artemis missions are more capable than the Apollo suits. They can support longer spacewalks and provide greater redundancy, and they’re made of modern materials to enhance flexibility and crew comfort. But the new suits are heavier, and for astronauts used to spacewalks outside the ISS, walks on the Moon will be a slog, Rubins said.

“I think the suits are better than Apollo, but I don’t think they are great right now,” Rubins said. “They still have a lot of flexibility issues. Bending down to pick up rocks is hard. The center of gravity is an issue. People are going to be falling over. I think when we say these suits aren’t bad, it’s because the suits have been so horrible that when we get something slightly less than horrible, we get all excited and we celebrate.”

The heavier lunar suits developed for Artemis missions run counter to advice from former astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, who spent 22 hours walking on the Moon during NASA’s Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

“I’d have that go about four times the mobility, at least four times the mobility, and half the weight,” Schmitt said in a NASA oral history interview in 2000. “Now, one way you can… reduce the weight is carry less consumables and learn to use consumables that you have in some other vehicle, like a lunar rover. Any time you’re on the rover, you hook into those consumables and live off of those, and then when you get off, you live off of what’s in your backpack. We, of course, just had the consumables in our backpack.”

NASA won’t have a rover on the first Artemis landing mission. That will come on a later flight. A fully pressurized vehicle for astronauts to drive across the Moon may be ready sometime in the 2030s. Until then, Moonwalkers will have to tough it out.

“I do crossfit. I do triathlons. I do marathons. I get out of a session in the pool in the NBL (Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory) doing the lunar suit underwater, and I just want to go home and take a nap,” Rubins told the panel. “I am absolutely spent. You’re bruised. This is an extreme physical event in a way that the space station is not.”

NASA astronaut Mike Barratt inside the International Space Station in 2024. Credit: NASA

Barratt met with the same National Academies panel this week and presented a few hours before Rubins. The committee was chartered to examine how human explorers can enable scientific discovery at sites across the lunar surface. Barratt had a more favorable take on the spacesuit situation.

“This is not a commercial for Axiom. I don’t promote anyone, but their suit is getting there,” Barratt said. “We’ve got 700 hours of pressurized experience in it right now. We do a lot of tests in the NBL, and there are techniques and body conditioning that you do to help you get ready for doing things like this. Bending down in the suit is really not too bad at all.”

Rubins and Barratt did not discuss the schedule for when Axiom’s lunar spacesuit will be ready to fly to the Moon, but the conversation illuminated the innumerable struggles of spacewalking, Moonwalking, and the training astronauts undergo to prepare for extravehicular outings.

The one who should know

I spoke directly with Rubins after her discussion with the National Academies. Her last assignment at NASA was as chief of the EVA and robotics branch in the astronaut office, where she assisted in the development of the new lunar spacesuits. I asked about her experiences testing the lunar suit and her thoughts on how astronauts should prepare for Moonwalks.

“The suits that we have are definitely much better than Apollo,” Rubins said in the interview. “They were just big bags of air. The joints aren’t in there, so it was harder to move. What they did have going for them was that they were much, much lighter than our current spacesuits. We have added a lot of the joints back, and that does get some mobility for us. But at the end of the day, the suits are still quite heavy.”

You can divide the weight of the suit by six to get an idea of how it might feel to carry it around on the lunar surface. While it won’t feel like 300 pounds, astronauts will still have to account for their mass and momentum.

Rubins explained:

Instead of kind of floating in microgravity and moving your mass around with your hands and your arms, now we’re ambulating. We’re walking with our legs. You’re going to have more strain on your knees and your hips. Your hamstrings, your calves, and your glutes are going to come more into play.

I think, overall, it may be a better fit for humans physically because if you ask somebody to do a task, I’m going to be much better at a task if I can use my legs and I’m ambulating. Then I have to pull myself along with my arms… We’re not really built to do that, but we are built to run and to go long distances. Our legs are just such a powerful force.

So I think there are a lot of things lining up that are going to make the physiology easier. Then there are things that are going to be different because we’re now in a partial gravity environment. We’re going to be bending, we’re going to be twisting, we’re going to be doing different things.

It’s an incredibly hard engineering challenge. You have to keep a human alive in absolute vacuum, warm at temperatures that you know in the polar regions could go as far down as 40 Kelvin (minus 388° Fahrenheit). We haven’t sent humans anywhere that cold before. They are also going to be very hot. They’re going to be baking in the sunshine. You’ve got radiation. If you put all that together, that’s a huge amount of suit material just to keep the human physiology and the human body intact.

Then our challenge is ‘how do you make that mobile?’ It’s very difficult to bend down and pick up a rock. You have to manage that center of gravity because you’re wearing that big life support system on your back, a big pack that has a lot of mass in it, so that brings your center of gravity higher than you’re used to on Earth and a little bit farther backward.

When you move around, it’s like wearing a really, really heavy backpack that has mass but no weight, so it’s going to kind of tip you back. You can do some things with putting weights on the front of the suit to try to move that center of gravity forward, but it’s still higher, and it’s not exactly at your center of mass that you’re used to on the Earth. On the Earth, we have a center of our mass related to gravity, and nobody ever thinks about it, and you don’t think about it until it moves somewhere else, and then it makes all of your natural motion seem very difficult.

Those are some of the challenges that we’re facing engineering-wise. I think the new suits, they’ve gone a long way toward addressing these, but it’s still a hard engineering challenge. And I’m not talking about any specific suit. I can’t talk about the details of the provider’s suits. This is the NASA xEMU and all the lunar suits I have tested over the years. That includes the Mark III suit, the Axiom suit. They have similar issues. So this isn’t really anything about a specific vendor. These are just the difficulties of designing a spacesuit for the lunar environment.

NASA trains astronauts for spacewalks in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, an enormous pool in Houston used for simulating weightlessness. They also use a gravity-offloading device to rehearse the basics of spacewalking. The optimal test environment, short of the space environment itself, will be aboard parabolic flights, where suit developers and astronauts can get the best feel for the suit’s momentum, according to Rubins.

Axiom and NASA are well along assessing the new lunar spacesuit’s performance underwater, but they haven’t put it through reduced-gravity flight testing. “Until you get to the actual parabolic flight, that’s when you can really test the ability to manage this momentum,” Rubins said.

NASA astronauts Loral O’Hara and Stan Love test Axiom’s lunar spacesuit inside NASA’s Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory in Houston on September 24, 2025. Credit: NASA

Recovering from a fall on the lunar surface comes with its own perils.

“You’re face down on the lunar surface, and you have to do the most massive, powerful push up to launch you and the entire mass of the suit up off the surface, high enough so you can then flip your legs under you and catch the ground,” Rubins said. “You basically have to kind of do a jumping pushup… This is a risky maneuver we test a whole bunch in training. It’s really non-trivial.”

The lunar suits are sleeker than the suits NASA uses on the ISS, but they are still bulky. “If you’re trying to kneel, if you’re thinking about bending forward at your waist, all that material in your waist has nowhere to go, so it just compresses and compresses,” Rubins said. “That’s why I say it’s harder to kneel. It’s harder to bend forward because you’re having to compress the suit in those areas.

“We’ve done these amazing things with joint mobility,” Rubins said. “The mobility around the joints is amazing… but now we’re dealing with this compression issue. And there’s not an obvious engineering fix to that.”

The fix to this problem might come in the form of tools instead of changes to the spacesuit itself. Rubins said astronauts could use a staff, or something like a hiking pole, to brace themselves when they need to kneel or bend down. “That way I’m not trying to compress the suit and deal with my balance at the same time.”

A bruising exertion

The Moonwalker suit can comfortably accommodate a wider range of astronauts than NASA’s existing EMUs on the space station. The old EMUs can be resized to medium, large, and extra-large, but that leaves gaps and makes the experience uncomfortable for a smaller astronaut. This discomfort is especially noticeable while practicing for spacewalks underwater, where the tug of gravity is still present, Rubins said.

“As a female, I never really had an EMU that fit me,” Rubins said. “It was always giant. When I’m translating around or doing something, I’m physically falling and slamming myself, my chest or my back, into one side of the suit or the other underwater, whereas with the lunar suit, I’ve got a suit that fits me right. That’s going to lead to less bruising. Just having a suit that fits you is much better.”

Mission planners should also emphasize physical conditioning for astronauts assigned to lunar landing missions. That includes preflight weight and endurance training, plus guidance on what to eat in space to maximize energy levels before astronauts head outside for a stroll.

“That human has to go up really maximally conditioned,” Rubins said.

Rubins and Barratt agreed that NASA and its spacesuit provider should be ready to rapidly respond to feedback from future Moonwalkers. Engineers modified and upgraded the Apollo spacesuits in a matter of months, iterating the design between each mission.

“Our general design is on a good path,” Rubins said. “We need to make sure that we continue to push for increasing improvements in human performance, and some of that ties back to the budget. Our first suit design is not where we’re going to be done if we want to do a really sustained lunar program. We have to continue to improve, and I think it’s important to recognize that we’re going to learn so many lessons during Artemis III.”

Barratt has a unique perspective on spacesuit design. He has performed spacewalks at the ISS in NASA’s spacesuit and the Russian Orlan spacesuit. Barratt said the US suit is easier to work in than the Orlan, but the Russian suit is “incredibly reliable” and “incredibly serviceable.”

“It had a couple of glitches, and literally, you unzip a curtain and it’s like looking at my old Chevy Blazer,” Barratt said. “Everything is right there. It’s mechanical, it’s accessible with standard tools. We can fix it. We can do that really easily. We’ve tried to incorporate those lessons learned into our next-generation EVA systems.”

Contrast that with the NASA suits on the ISS, where one of Barratt’s spacewalks in 2024 was cut short by a spacesuit water leak. “We recently had to return a suit from the space station,” Barratt said. “We’ve got another one that’s sort of offline for a while; we’re troubleshooting it. It’s a really subtle problem that’s extremely difficult to work on in places that are hard to access.”

It’s happened before. Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt loses his balance on the Moon, then quickly recovers. Credit: NASA

Harrison Schmitt, speaking with a NASA interviewer in 2000, said his productivity in the Apollo suit “couldn’t have been much more than 10 percent of what you would do normally here on Earth.”

“You take the human brain, the human eyes, and the human hands into space. That’s the only justification you have for having human beings in space,” Schmitt said. “It’s a massive justification, but that’s what you want to use, and all three have distinct benefits in productivity and in gathering new information and infusing data over any automated system. Unfortunately, we have discarded one of those, and that is the hands.”

Schmitt singled out the gloves as the “biggest problem” with the Apollo suits. “The gloves are balloons, and they’re made to fit,” he said. Picking something up with a firm grip requires squeezing against the pressure inside the suit. The gloves can also damage astronauts’ fingernails.

“That squeezing against that pressure causes these forearm muscles to fatigue very rapidly,” Schmitt said. “Just imagine squeezing a tennis ball continuously for eight hours or 10 hours, and that’s what you’re talking about.”

Barratt recounted a conversation in which Schmitt, now 90, said he wouldn’t have wanted to do another spacewalk after his three excursions with commander Gene Cernan on Apollo 17.

“Physically, and from a suit-maintenance standpoint, he thought that that was probably the limit, what they did,” Barratt said. “They were embedded with dust. The visors were abraded. Every time they brushed the dust off the visors, they lost visibility.”

Getting the Artemis spacesuit right is vital to the program’s success. You don’t want to travel all the way to the Moon and stop exploring because of sore fingers or an injured knee.

“If you look at what we’re spending on suits versus what we’re spending on the rocket, this is a pretty small amount,” Rubins said. “Obviously, the rocket can kill you very quickly. That needs to be done right. But the continuous improvement in the suit will get us that much more efficiency. Saving 30 minutes or an hour on the Moon, that gives you that much more science.”

“Once you have safely landed on the lunar surface, this is where you’ve got to put your money,” Barratt said.

Former astronaut on lunar spacesuits: “I don’t think they’re great right now” Read More »

Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback

australia, Commercial space, Gilmour space, isar aerospace, launch, rocket report, Science, Space / Beth Washington / January 23, 2026

Another partially reusable Chinese rocket, the Long March 12B, is nearing its first test flight.

An Archimedes engine for Rocket Lab’s Neutron rocket is test-fired at Stennis Space Center, Mississippi. Credit: Rocket Lab

Welcome to Edition 8.26 of the Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advancements and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA rolled the massive rocket for the Artemis II mission to its launch pad in Florida, while Chinese launchers suffered back-to-back failures within a span of approximately 12 hours. Rocket Lab’s march toward a debut of its new Neutron launch vehicle in the coming months may have stalled after a failure during a key qualification test. We cover all this and more in this week’s Rocket Report.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Australia invests in sovereign launch. Six months after its first orbital rocket cleared the launch tower for just 14 seconds before crashing back to Earth, Gilmour Space Technologies has secured 217 million Australian dollars ($148 million) in funding that CEO Adam Gilmour says finally gives Australia a fighting chance in the global space race, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The funding round, led by the federal government’s National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and superannuation giant Hostplus with $75 million each, makes the Queensland company Australia’s newest unicorn—a fast-growth start-up valued at more than $1 billion—and one of the country’s most heavily backed private technology ventures.

Homegrown rocket… “We’re a rocket company that has never had access to the capital that our American competitors have,” Gilmour told the newspaper. “This is the first raise where I’ve actually raised a decent amount of capital compared to the rest of the world.” The investment reflects growing concern about Australia’s reliance on foreign launch providers—predominantly Elon Musk’s SpaceX—to put government, defense, and commercial satellites into orbit. With US launch queues stretching beyond two years and geopolitical tensions reshaping access to space infrastructure, Canberra has identified sovereign launch capability as a strategic priority. Gilmour’s first Eris rocket lifted off from the Bowen Orbital Spaceport in North Queensland on July 30 last year. It achieved 14 seconds of flight before falling back to the ground, a result Gilmour framed as a partial success in an industry where first launches routinely fail.

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Isar Aerospace postpones test flight. Isar Aerospace scrubbed a potential January 21 launch of its Spectrum rocket to address a technical fault, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Hours before the launch window was set to open, the German company said that it was addressing “an issue with a pressurization valve.” A valve issue was one of the factors that caused a Spectrum to crash moments after liftoff on Isar’s first test flight last year. “The teams are currently assessing the next possible launch opportunities and a new target date will be announced shortly,” the company wrote in a post on its website. The Spectrum rocket, designed to haul cargoes of up to a metric ton (2,200 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, is awaiting liftoff from Andøya Spaceport in Norway.

Geopolitics at play... The second launch of Isar’s Spectrum rocket comes at a time when Europe’s space industry looks to secure the continent’s sovereignty in spaceflight. European satellites are no longer able to launch on Russian rockets, and the continent’s leaders don’t have much of an appetite to turn to US rockets amid strained trans-Atlantic relations. Europe’s satellite industry is looking for more competition for the Ariane 6 and Vega C rockets developed by ArianeGroup and Avio, and Isar Aerospace appears to be best positioned to become a new entrant in the European launch market. “I’m well aware that it would be really good for us Europeans to get this one right,” said Daniel Metzler, Isar’s co-founder and CEO.

A potential buyer for Orbex? UK-based rocket builder Orbex has signed a letter of intent to sell its business to European space logistics startup The Exploration Company, European Spaceflight reports. Orbex was founded in 2015 and is developing a small launch vehicle called Prime. The company also began work on a larger medium-lift launch vehicle called Proxima in December 2024. On Wednesday, Orbex published a brief press release stating that a letter of intent had been signed and that negotiations had begun. The company added that all details about the transaction remain confidential at this stage.

Time’s up... A statement from Orbex CEO Phil Chambers suggests that the company’s financial position factored into its decision to pursue a buyer. “Our Series D fundraising could have led us in many directions,” said Chambers. “We believe this opportunity plays to the strengths of both businesses, and we look forward to sharing more when the time is right.” The Exploration Company, headquartered near Munich, Germany, is developing a reusable space capsule to ferry cargo to low-Earth orbit and a high-thrust reusable rocket engine. It is one of the most well-financed space startups in Europe. Orbex is one of five launch startups in Europe selected by the European Space Agency last year to compete in the European Launcher Challenge and receive funding from ESA member states. But the UK company’s financial standing is in question. Orbex’s Danish subsidiary is filing for bankruptcy, and its main UK entity is overdue in filing its 2024 financial accounts. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

A bad day for Chinese rockets. China suffered a pair of launch failures January 16, seeing the loss of a classified Shijian satellite and the failed first launch of the Ceres-2 rocket, Space News reports. The first of the two failures involved the attempted launch of a Shijian military satellite aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang launch base in southwestern China. The Shijian 32 satellite was likely heading for a geostationary transfer orbit, but a failure of the Long March 3B’s third stage doomed the mission. The Long March 3B is one of China’s most-flown rockets, and this was the first failure of a Long March 3-series vehicle since 2020, ending a streak of 50 consecutive successful flights of the rocket.

And then… Less than 12 hours later, another Chinese rocket failed on its climb to orbit. This launch, using a Ceres-2 rocket, originated from the Jiuquan space center in northwestern China. It was the first flight of the Ceres-2, a larger variant of the light-class Ceres-1 rocket developed and operated by a Chinese commercial startup named Galactic Energy. Chinese officials did not disclose the payloads lost on the Ceres-2 rocket.

Neutron in neutral. Rocket Lab suffered a structural failure of the Neutron rocket’s Stage 1 tank during testing, setting back efforts to get to the inaugural flight for the partially reusable launcher, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The mishap occurred during a hydrostatic pressure trial, the company said Wednesday. “There was no significant damage to the test structure or facilities,” Rocket Lab added. Rocket Lab last year pushed the first Neutron mission from 2025 to 2026, citing the volume of testing ahead. The US-based company said it is now analyzing what transpired to determine the impact on Neutron launch plans. Rocket Lab said it would provide an update during its next quarterly financials, due in a few weeks.

Where to go from here?… The Neutron rocket is designed to catapult Rocket Lab into more direct competition with legacy rocket companies like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. “The next Stage 1 tank is already in production, and Neutron’s development campaign continues,” the company said. Setbacks like this one are to be expected during the development of new rockets. Rocket Lab has publicized aggressive, or aspirational, launch schedules for the first Neutron rocket, so it’s likely the company will hang onto its projection of a debut launch in 2026, at least for now. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Falcon 9 launches NRO spysats. SpaceX executed a late night Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base on January 16, carrying an undisclosed number of intelligence-gathering satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office, Spaceflight Now reports. The mission, NROL-105, hauled a payload of satellites heading to low-Earth orbit, which are believed to be Starshield, a government variant of the Starlink satellites. “Today’s mission is the twelfth overall launch of the NRO’s proliferated architecture and first of approximately a dozen NRO launches scheduled throughout 2026 consisting of proliferated and national security missions,” the NRO said in a post-launch statement.

Mysteries abound… A public accounting of the agency’s proliferated constellation suggests it now numbers nearly 200 satellites with the ability to rapidly image locations around the world. The NRO has dozens more satellites serving other functions. “Having hundreds of NRO satellites on orbit is critical to supporting our nation and its partners,” the agency said in a statement. “This growing constellation enhances mission resilience and capability through reduced revisit times, improved persistent coverage, and accelerated processing and delivery of critical data.” What was unusual about the January 16 mission is it may have only carried two satellites, well short of the 20-plus Starshield satellites launched on most previous Falcon 9 launches, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and expert tracker of global space launch activity.

Long March 12B hot-fired at Jiuquan. China’s main space contractor performed a static fire test of a new reusable Long March rocket Friday, paving the way for a test flight, Space News reports. The test-firing of the Long March 12B rocket’s first stage engines occurred on a launch pad at the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Test Zone at Jiuquan spaceport in northwestern China. The mere existence of the Long March 12B rocket was not publicly known until recently. The new rocket was developed by a subsidiary of the state-owned China Aerospace Science Technology Corporation, with the capacity to carry a payload of 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit in expendable mode. It’s unknown if the first Long March 12B test flight will include a booster landing attempt.

Another one… The Long March 12B has a reusable first stage with landing legs, similar to the recovery architecture of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. The booster is designed to land downrange at a recovery zone in the Gobi Desert. The Long March 12B is the latest in a line of partially reusable Chinese rockets to reach the launch pad, following soon after the debut launches of the Long March 12A and Zhuque 3 rocket last month. Several more companies in China are working on their own reusable boosters. Of them all, the Long March 12B appears to be the closest to a clone of SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Like the Falcon 9, the Long March 12B will have nine kerosene-fueled first stage engines and a single kerosene-fueled upper stage engine. Chinese officials have not announced when the Long March 12B will launch.

Artemis II rolls to the launch pad. Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward last weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad, Ars reports. The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

Key test ahead… “This is the start of a very long journey,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “We ended our last human exploration of the Moon on Apollo 17.” The Artemis II mission will set several notable human spaceflight records. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will travel farther from Earth than any human in history as they travel beyond the far side of the Moon. They won’t land. That distinction will fall to the next mission in line in NASA’s Artemis program. This will be the first time astronauts have flown on the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft. The launch window opens February 6, but the exact date of Artemis II’s liftoff will be determined by the outcome of a critical fueling test of the SLS rocket scheduled for early February.

Blue Origin confirms rocket reuse plan. Blue Origin confirmed Thursday that the next launch of its New Glenn rocket will carry a large communications satellite into low-Earth orbit for AST SpaceMobile, Ars reports. The rocket will launch the next-generation Block 2 BlueBird satellite “no earlier than late February” from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. However, the update from Blue Origin appears to have buried the real news toward the end: “The mission follows the successful NG-2 mission, which included the landing of the ‘Never Tell Me The Odds’ booster. The same booster is being refurbished to power NG-3,” the company said.

Impressive strides… The second New Glenn mission launched on November 13, just 10 weeks ago. If the company makes the late-February target for the next mission—and Ars was told last week to expect the launch to slip into March—it will represent a remarkably short turnaround for an orbital booster. By way of comparison, SpaceX did not attempt to refly the first Falcon 9 booster it landed in December 2015. Instead, initial tests revealed that the vehicle’s interior had been somewhat torn up. It was scrapped and inspected closely so that engineers could learn from the wear and tear.

Next three launches

Jan. 25: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 15: 17 UTC

Jan. 26: Falcon 9 | GPS III SV09 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 04: 46 UTC

Jan. 26: Long March 7A | Unknown Payload | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 21: 00 UTC

Rocket Report: Chinese rockets fail twice in 12 hours; Rocket Lab reports setback Read More »

Blue Origin makes impressive strides with reuse—next launch will refly booster

ast spacemobile, blue origin, reuse, Space / 9u50fv / January 22, 2026

SpaceX successfully landed its second Falcon 9 booster in April 2016, on the 23rd overall flight of the Falcon 9 fleet. This booster was refurbished and, after a lengthy series of inspections, it was reflown successfully in March 2017, nearly 11 months later.

Reshuffling the manifest

With New Glenn, Blue Origin is seeking to refly a booster on just the third overall flight of the New Glenn fleet and turn the rocket around in less than four months. Even for a well-capitalized program with the benefit of learning from both Blue Origin’s own suborbital New Shepard rocket and the industry’s experience with the Falcon 9, this represents an impressive turnaround in first stage reuse.

Blue Origin originally planned to launch its MK1 lunar lander on the third flight of New Glenn, but it pivoted to a commercial launch as the lunar vehicle continues preparatory work.

On Wednesday, the company announced that it had completed the integration of the MK1 vehicle and put it on a barge bound for Johnson Space Center in Houston. There, it will undergo vacuum chamber testing before a launch later this spring—or, more likely, sometime this summer.

Blue Origin makes impressive strides with reuse—next launch will refly booster Read More »

Another Jeff Bezos company has announced plans to develop a megaconstellation

blue origin, megaconstellation, Space, terawave / DJ Henderson / January 21, 2026

The announcement came out of the blue, from Blue, on Wednesday.

The space company founded by Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, said it was developing a new megaconstellation named TeraWave to deliver data speeds of up to 6Tbps anywhere on Earth. The constellation will consist of 5,408 optically interconnected satellites, with a majority in low-Earth orbit and the remainder in medium-Earth orbit.

The satellites in low-Earth orbit will provide up to 144Gbps through radio spectrum, whereas those in medium-Earth orbit will provide higher data rates through optical links.

“This provides the reliability and resilience needed for real-time operations and massive data movement,” Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp, said on social media. “It also provides backup connectivity during outages, keeping critical operations running. Plus, the ability to scale on demand and rapidly deploy globally while maintaining performance.”

Going for the enterprise market

Unlike other megaconstellations, including SpaceX’s Starlink, Blue Origin’s new constellation will not serve consumers or try to provide direct-to-cell communications. Rather, TeraWave will seek to serve “tens of thousands” of enterprise, data center, and government users who require reliable connectivity for critical operations.

The announcement was surprising for several reasons, but it may also represent a shrewd business decision.

It was surprising because Bezos’ other company, Amazon, has already spent more than half a decade developing its own megaconstellation, now known as Amazon Leo, which is presently authorized to deploy 3,236 satellites into low-Earth orbit. This service is intended to compete with Starlink, both through customer terminals and by providing services such as in-flight Wi-Fi.

However, the emergence of increased data needs from AI data centers and other operations must have convinced Bezos that Blue Origin should enter the competition for lucrative enterprise customers—an area in which Amazon Leo is also expected to compete.

Another Jeff Bezos company has announced plans to develop a megaconstellation Read More »

The first commercial space station, Haven-1, is now undergoing assembly for launch

commercial space station, Space, vast space / Kelly Newman / January 20, 2026

“We have a very strong incentive to send a crew as quickly as we can safely do so.”

The Haven-1 space station seen here in the Vast Space clean room. Credit: Vast Space

As Ars reported last week, NASA’s plan to replace the International Space Station with commercial space stations is running into a time crunch.

The sprawling International Space Station is due to be decommissioned less than five years from now, and the US space agency has yet to formally publish rules and requirements for the follow-on stations being designed and developed by several different private companies.

Although there are expected to be multiple bidders in “phase two” of NASA’s commercial space station program, there are at present four main contenders: Voyager Technologies, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Vast Space. At some point later this year, the space agency is expected to select one, or more likely two, of these companies for larger contracts that will support their efforts to build their stations.

To get a sense of the overall landscape as the competition heats up, Ars recently interviewed Voyager chief executive Dylan Taylor about his company’s plans for a private station, Starlab. Today we are publishing an interview with Max Haot, the chief executive of Vast. The company is furthest along in terms of development, choosing to build a smaller, interim space station, Haven-1, capable of short-duration stays. Eventually, NASA wants facilities capable of continuous habitation, but it is not clear whether that will be a requirement starting in 2030.

Until today, Haven-1 had a public launch date of mid-2026. However, as Haot explained in our interview, that launch date is no longer tenable.

Ars: You’re slipping the launch of Haven-1 from the middle of this year to the first quarter of 2027. Why?

Max Haot: This is obviously our first space station, and we’re moving as safely and as fast as we can. That’s the date right now that we are confident we will meet. We’ve been tracking that date, without slip, for quite a while. And that’s still a year, probably two years or even more, ahead of anyone else. It will be building the world’s first commercial space station from scratch, from an empty building and no team, in under four years.

Ars: Where are you with the hardware?

Haot: Last Saturday (January 10) we reached the key milestone of fully completing the primary structure, and some of the secondary structure; all of the acceptance testing occurred in November as well. Now we are starting clean room integration, which starts with TCS (thermal control system), propulsion, interior shells, and then moving on to avionics. And then final close out, which we expect will be done by the fall, and then we have on the books with NASA a full test campaign at the end of the year at Plum Brook. Then the launch in Q1 next year.

Ars: What happens after you launch Haven-1?

Haot: We are not launching Haven-1 with crew inside. It’s a 15-ton, very valuable and expensive satellite, but still no humans involved, launching on a Falcon 9. So then we have a period that we can monitor it and control it uncrewed and confirm everything is functioning perfectly, right? We are holding pressure. We are controlling attitude. These checkouts can happen in as little as two weeks.

At the end of it, we have to basically convince SpaceX, both contractually and with many verification events, that it will be safe to dock Dragon. And if they agree with the data we provide them, they will put a fully trained crew on board Dragon and bring them up. It could be as early as two weeks after, and it could be as late as any time within three years, which is a lifetime of Haven-1. But we have a very strong incentive to send a crew as quickly as we can safely do so.

The Haven-1 space station undergoes acceptance testing. Credit: Vast Space

Ars: Have you picked the crew yet?

Haot: We are in deep negotiations, maybe more than that, with both private individuals and nation states. But there’s nothing we are ready to announce yet. Especially with the Q1 launch date, in our desire to follow with the crew right after, this is now becoming pretty urgent. We believe, with our partner at SpaceX, one year for training is very comfortable, and we think we can compress it to maybe as little as six months for both training on Dragon and Haven-1 so long as we have an experienced crew. So we have a bit of time left to announce it.

Ars: You mentioned Haven-1 has a three-year lifetime. How many crews will you try to cycle through?

Haot: The nominal plan is for a two-week mission, and we have one fully contracted with SpaceX, as well as a second one that we have a deposit and an option on. And then we plan to do two more. That’s assuming they are 10-day missions with two days of transfer on either side. So two-week missions. We also have the option to maybe do a 30-day mission if we want. So the exact duration and makeup will be decided as we make progress with customers and potentially NASA.

Ars: What is the plan after Haven-1?

Haot: If you look at the first module of our second station, what will be the difference? We have two docking ports, not one. We expect to have more power, and potentially more volume, depending on the launch vehicle. What you see on our website and what we do might be different. We have a lot of optionality. But other than that, it’s all of the exact same components of Haven demo and Haven-1, which are basically being iterated on. And so that’s the key. The life support system, the air revitalization system, the software, the primary structure—the first module of Haven-2 will be just tweaks on Haven-1. That’s why we think we’re in the best position of all of the competitors. And that’s not been enabled by chance, right? It’s been enabled by a billion-dollar investment in 1,000 employees and all the facilities to mass produce the follow-on modules.

Ars: NASA is nearing the second phase of its competition for commercial space stations, known as CLDs. Do you plan to compete with Haven-1 or Haven-2 for these contracts?

Haot: We have not decided because, as you know, it’s unclear yet what the requirements will be. Will they be asking for a 30-day demonstration flight? On our end it’s unclear if we want to bid that 30-day demonstration with Haven-1, or Haven-2 with two or three modules. If they ask for a 30-day mission, we have the option to offer it on Haven-1 in 2027 if we want to.

Ars: Last week a key space staffer in the US Senate, Maddy Davis, said she was “begging” for NASA to release the phase two “request for proposals” that would set the ground rules for the CLD competition. Do you feel the same way?

Haot: Vast is dedicated to ensuring we have continuous human presence in low-Earth orbit after the ISS is retired. The date we are aiming at is end of 2030. Maddy mentioned an ISS extension. We agree, for America, if no one is ready it should be extended. But in our view, we will be ready, and we need to make sure we’re ready to start a continuous crewed mission by the end of 2030. That’s less than five years away now, right? So we definitely agree with the sentiment, and I think the full industry agrees, and I’m pretty sure Jared Isaacman also agrees that it is overdue and it’s time to make a decision and release an RFP.

Ars: What do you hope to see in that RFP when it comes to requirements?

Haot: We obviously can’t decide what NASA will do, and we will be competitive in whatever they decide. But there’s a few key recommendations we feel strongly about. The first one is that, as they consider whether they proceed with a demonstration mission or something else, we think they should focus on what is right for the country. What we are hearing is that they are trying to tweak the approach to do something fair to all of the bidders. And I don’t think it should matter whether people have been doing a right thing or wrong thing, and whether what’s right for the country puts somebody in a better position or not.

The second piece, obviously, is to move faster, which we just talked about. The third piece is that we think it’s really important that they require a demonstration. If you look at every human space flight program in history, none of them went straight from the program starting to a long-duration mission on a spacecraft. They all had a stepping stone, and right now none of us has proven we can have humans safely on orbit in a space station. And so in our view, they should require demonstration, and not on the eve of January 1, 2031. They should require a demonstration with crew as quickly as possible before they buy services.

Ars: You mentioned doing the “right thing for the country.” What does that mean for NASA?

Haot: It means you’re focused on commercial stations being ready by 2030, so there is not a need to extend the ISS. And it means ensuring we have not just one winner, but two, in case history repeats itself, such as Boeing and SpaceX in crew transportation.

Ars: Do you think the government has committed enough funding to make the commercial space station program a success?

Haot: I’m a vendor, and obviously I’d like as much buffer as possible, and as much funding as possible. With the current budget we don’t think more than two winners is reasonable, but it should absolutely be two in the best interest of the country. If there was a bigger budget, obviously, three would be great. And so if you look at the CLD budget line, which is approved for next year—projected over five years for development, and you assume two winners, and then services that come later—we are confident we can be successful and profitable with two companies operating.

Obviously, we also need international customers, right? We need Europe. We need Japan, where we just opened a subsidiary. We need all the new emerging human spaceflight nations in the Middle East, in Europe, in Asia. And a little bit of private spaceflight. We’re not in a space tourism era, in orbit, but there are still some private individuals willing to fund a mission and do important work. With that, we get to profitability.

We think a big differentiator of Vast is that we are really excited and eager to unlock the orbital economy. I’m talking about in-space semiconductor, fiber, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and so on. We think that’s our upside. We want to unlock it. But we don’t know how quickly it will happen or how big it will be. What we do know is, whoever has a platform up there with flight crew, facilities, and power will be the one unlocking it. But in our business model, if that’s delayed, we can still be profitable.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

The first commercial space station, Haven-1, is now undergoing assembly for launch Read More »

The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff

artemis, artemis II, Christina Koch, human spaceflight, Jeremy Hansen, Kennedy Space Center, moon, NASA, orion, Reid Wiseman, Science, Space, space launch system, victor glover / Shannon Garcia / January 19, 2026

After a remarkably smooth launch campaign, Artemis II reached its last stop before the Moon.

NASA’s Space Launch System rocket rolls to Launch Complex 39B on Saturday. Credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida—Preparations for the first human spaceflight to the Moon in more than 50 years took a big step forward this weekend with the rollout of the Artemis II rocket to its launch pad.

The rocket reached a top speed of just 1 mph on the four-mile, 12-hour journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. At the end of its nearly 10-day tour through cislunar space, the Orion capsule on top of the rocket will exceed 25,000 mph as it plunges into the atmosphere to bring its four-person crew back to Earth.

“This is the start of a very long journey,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “We ended our last human exploration of the moon on Apollo 17.”

The Artemis II mission will set several notable human spaceflight records. Astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen will travel farther from Earth than any human in history. They won’t land. That distinction will fall to the next mission in line in NASA’s Artemis program.

But the Artemis II astronauts will travel more than 4,000 miles beyond the far side of the Moon (the exact distance depends on the launch date), setting up for a human spaceflight speed record during their blazing reentry over the Pacific Ocean a few days later. Koch will become the first woman to fly to the vicinity of the Moon, and Hansen will be the first non-US astronaut to do the same.

“We really are ready to go,” said Wiseman, the Artemis II commander, during Saturday’s rollout to the launch pad. “We were in a sim [in Houston] for about 10 hours yesterday doing our final capstone entry and landing sim. We got in T-38s last night and we flew to the Cape to be here for this momentous occasion.”

The rollout began around sunrise Saturday, with NASA’s Space Launch System rocket and Orion capsule riding a mobile launch platform and a diesel-powered crawler transporter along a throughway paved with crushed Alabama river rock. Employees, VIPs, and guests gathered along the crawlerway to watch the 11 million-pound stack inch toward the launch pad. The rollout concluded about an hour after sunset, when the crawler transporter’s jacking system lowered the mobile launch platform onto pedestals at Pad 39B.

Hitting the launch window

The rollout keeps the Artemis II mission on track for liftoff as soon as next month, when NASA has a handful of launch opportunities on February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11.

The big milestone leading up to launch day will be a practice countdown or Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), currently slated for around February 2, when NASA’s launch team will pump more than 750,000 gallons of super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the rocket. NASA had trouble keeping the cryogenic fluids at the proper temperature, then encountered hydrogen leaks when the launch team first tried to fill the rocket for the unpiloted Artemis I mission in 2022. Engineers implemented the same fixes on Artemis II that they used to finally get over the hump with propellant loading on Artemis I.

So, what are the odds NASA can actually get the Artemis II mission off the ground next month?

“We’ll have to have things go right,” said Matt Ramsey, NASA’s Artemis II mission manager, in an interview with Ars on Saturday. “There’s a day of margin there for weather. There’s some time after WDR that we’ve got for data reviews and that sort of thing. It’s not unreasonable, but I do think it’s a success-oriented schedule.”

The Moon has to be in the right position in its orbit for the Artemis II launch to proceed. There are also restrictions on launch dates to ensure the Orion capsule returns to Earth and reenters the atmosphere at an angle safe for the ship’s heat shield. If the launch does not happen in February, NASA has a slate of backup launch dates in early March.

Ars was at Kennedy Space Center for the rocket’s move to the launch pad Saturday. The photo gallery below shows the launcher emerging from the Vehicle Assembly Building, the same facility once used to stack Saturn V rockets during the Apollo Moon program. The Artemis II astronauts were also on hand for a question and answer session with reporters.

Around the clock

The first flight of astronauts on the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft is running at least five years late. The flight’s architecture, trajectory, and goals have changed multiple times, and technical snags discovered during manufacturing and testing repeatedly shifted the schedule. The program’s engineering and budgetary problems are well documented.

But the team readying the rocket and spacecraft for launch has hit a stride in recent months. Technicians inside the Vehicle Assembly Building started stacking the SLS rocket in late 2024, beginning with the vehicle’s twin solid-fueled boosters. Then ground teams added the core stage, upper stage, and finally installed the Orion spacecraft on top of the rocket last October.

Working nearly around the clock in three shifts, it took about 12 months for crews at Kennedy to assemble the rocket and prepare it for rollout. But the launch campaign inside the VAB was remarkably smooth. Ground teams shaved about two months off the time it took to integrate the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission, which launched on the program’s first full-up unpiloted test flight in 2022.

“About a year ago, I was down here and we set the rollout date, and we hit it within a day or two,” said Matt Ramsey, NASA’s mission manager for Artemis II. “Being able to stay on schedule, it was a daily grind to be able to do that.”

Engineers worked through a handful of technical problems last year, including an issue with a pressure-assisted device used to assist the astronauts in opening the Orion hatch in the event of an emergency. More recently, NASA teams cleared a concern with caps installed on the rocket’s upper stage, according to Ramsey.

The most significant engineering review focused on proving the Orion heat shield is safe to fly. That assessment occurred in the background from the perspective of the technicians working on Artemis II at Kennedy.

The Artemis II team is now focused on activities at the launch pad. This week, NASA plans to perform a series of tests extending and retracting the crew access mark. Next, the Artemis II astronauts will rehearse an emergency evacuation from the launch pad. That will be followed by servicing of the rocket’s hydraulic steering system.

The big question mark

All of this leads up to the crucial practice countdown early next month. The astronauts won’t be aboard the rocket for the test, but almost everything else will look like launch day. The countdown will halt around 30 seconds prior to the simulated liftoff.

It took repeated tries to get through the Wet Dress Rehearsal for the Artemis I mission. There were four attempts at the countdown practice run before the first actual Artemis I launch countdown. After encountering hydrogen leaks on two scrubbed launch attempts, NASA performed another fueling test before finally successfully launching Artemis I in November 2022.

The launch team repaired a leaky hydrogen seal and introduced a gentler hydrogen loading procedure to overcome the problem. Hydrogen is an extremely efficient fuel for rockets, but its super-cold temperature and the tiny size of hydrogen molecules make it prone to leakage. The hydrogen feeds the SLS rocket’s four core stage engines and single upper stage engine.

“Artemis I was a test flight, and we learned a lot during that campaign getting to launch,” said Charlie Blackwell-Thompson, NASA’s Artemis II launch director. “The things that we’ve learned relative to how to go load this vehicle, how to load LOX (liquid oxygen), how to load hydrogen, have all been rolled in to the way in which we intend to load the Artemis II vehicle.”

NASA is hesitant to publicly set a target launch date until the agency gets through the dress rehearsal, but agency officials say a February launch remains feasible.

“We’ve held schedule pretty well getting to rollout today,” Isaacman said. “We have zero intention of communicating an actual launch date until we get through wet dress. But look, that’s our first window, and if everything is tracking accordingly, I know the teams are prepared, I know this crew is prepared, we’ll take it.”

“Wet dress is the driver to launch,” Blackwell-Thompson said. “With a wet dress that is without significant issues, if everything goes to plan, then certainly there are opportunities within February that could be achievable.”

One constraint that threw a wrench into NASA’s Artemis I launch campaign is no longer a significant factor for Artemis II. On Artemis I, NASA had to roll the rocket back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) after the wet dress rehearsal to complete final installation and testing on its flight termination system, which consists of a series of pyrotechnic charges designed to destroy the rocket if it flies off course and threatens populated areas after liftoff.

The US Space Force’s Eastern Range, responsible for public safety for all launches from Florida’s Space Coast, requires the flight termination system be retested after 28 to 35 days, a clock that started ticking last week before rollout. During Artemis I, technicians could not access the parts of the rocket they needed to in order to perform the retest at the launch pad. NASA now has structural arms to give ground teams the ability to reach parts higher up the rocket for the retest without returning to the hangar.

With this new capability, Artemis II could remain at the pad for launch opportunities in February and March before officials need to bring it back to the VAB to replace the flight termination system’s batteries, which still can’t be accessed at the pad.

The fastest human spaceflight mission in history crawls closer to liftoff Read More »

The race to build a super-large ground telescope is likely down to two competitors

european extremely large telescope, giant magellan telescope, Space / 9u50fv / January 19, 2026

I have been writing about the Giant Magellan Telescope for a long time. Nearly two decades ago, for example, I wrote that time was “running out” in the race to build the next great optical telescope on the ground.

At the time the proposed telescope was one of three contenders to make a giant leap in mirror size from the roughly 10-meter diameter instruments that existed then, to approximately 30 meters. This represented a huge increase in light-gathering potential, allowing astronomers to see much further into the universe—and therefore back into time—with far greater clarity.

Since then the projects have advanced at various rates. An international consortium to build the Thirty Meter Telescope in Hawaii ran into local protests that have bogged down development. Its future came further into question when the US National Science Foundation dropped support for the project in favor of the Giant Magellan Telescope. Meanwhile the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) has advanced on a faster schedule, and this 39.5-meter telescope could observe its first light in 2029.

This leaves the Magellan telescope. Originally backers of the GMT intended it to be fully operational by now, but it has faced funding and technology challenges. It has a price tag of approximately $2 billion, and although it is smaller than the European project, the 25.4-meter telescope now represents the best avenue for US-based astronomy to remain competitive in the field.

Given all of this, I recently spoke with University of Texas at Austin astronomer Dan Jaffe, who is the new president of the telescope’s executive team, to get an update on things. Here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Ars Technica: What should we know about the Giant Magellan Telescope?

Dan Jaffe: This is going to be one of the premier next-generation optical infrared telescopes in the world. It will give the United States astronomical community access that helps us to be a leading nation in this field, inspire students to go into science and engineering, and really enrich the human experience through the new knowledge that we get about the nature of the universe. So I think it covers both this kind of aspiration that we have to enrich humanity in some way, to help foster the future economy by bringing more people into these technical fields, and also by driving technology in some areas. The kinds of work we’re doing on adaptive optics, for example, in building sensitive detector systems and spectrometers, drive the frontier of what you can do with these systems.

The race to build a super-large ground telescope is likely down to two competitors Read More »

Managers on alert for “launch fever” as pressure builds for NASA’s Moon mission

artemis, artemis II, human spaceflight, Kennedy Space Center, moon, NASA, orion, Science, Space, space launch system / Mike M. / January 17, 2026

“Putting crew on the rocket and taking the crew around the Moon, this is going be our first step toward a sustained lunar presence,” Honeycutt said. “It’s 10 days [and] four astronauts going farther from Earth than any other human has ever traveled. We’ll be validating the Orion spacecraft’s life support, navigation and crew systems in the really harsh environments of deep space, and that’s going to pave the way for future landings.”

NASA’s 322-foot-tall (98-meter) SLS rocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building on the eve of rollout to Launch Complex 39B. Credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky

There is still much work ahead before NASA can clear Artemis II for launch. At the launch pad, technicians will complete final checkouts and closeouts before NASA’s launch team gathers in early February for a critical practice countdown. During this countdown, called a Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR), Blackwell-Thompson and her team will oversee the loading of the SLS rocket’s core stage and upper stage with super-cold liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants.

The cryogenic fluids, particularly liquid hydrogen, gave fits to the Artemis launch team as NASA prepared to launch the Artemis I mission—without astronauts—on the SLS rocket’s first test flight in 2022. Engineers resolved the issues and successfully launched the Artemis I mission in November 2022, and officials will apply the lessons for the Artemis II countdown.

“Artemis I was a test flight, and we learned a lot during that campaign getting to launch,” Blackwell-Thompson said. “And the things that we’ve learned relative to how to go load this vehicle, how to load LOX (liquid oxygen), how to load hydrogen, have all been rolled in to the way in which we intend to do for the Artemis II vehicle.”

Finding the right time to fly

Assuming the countdown rehearsal goes according to plan, NASA could be in a position to launch the Artemis II mission as soon as February 6. But the schedule for February 6 is tight, with no margin for error. Officials typically have about five days per month when they can launch Artemis II, when the Moon is in the right position relative to Earth, and the Orion spacecraft can follow the proper trajectory toward reentry and splashdown to limit stress on the capsule’s heat shield.

In February, the available launch dates are February 6, 7, 8, 10, and 11, with launch windows in the overnight hours in Florida. If the mission isn’t off the ground by February 11, NASA will have to stand down until a new series of launch opportunities beginning March 6. The space agency has posted a document showing all available launch dates and times through the end of April.

John Honeycutt, chair NASA’s Mission Management Team for the Artemis II mission, speaks during a news conference at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on January 16, 2026. Credit: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

NASA’s leaders are eager for Artemis II to fly. NASA is not only racing China, a reality the agency’s former administrator acknowledged during the Biden administration. Now, the Trump administration is pushing NASA to accomplish a human landing on the Moon by the end of his presidential term on January 20, 2029.

One of Honeycutt’s jobs as chair of the Mission Management Team (MMT) is ensuring all the Is are dotted and Ts are crossed amid the frenzy of final launch preparations. While the hardware for Artemis II is on the move in Florida, the astronauts and flight controllers are wrapping up their final training and simulations at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

“I think I’ve got a good eye for launch fever,” he said Friday.

“As chair of the MMT, I’ve got one job, and it’s the safe return of Reid, Victor, Christina, and Jeremy. I consider that a duty and a trust, and it’s one I intend to see through.”

Managers on alert for “launch fever” as pressure builds for NASA’s Moon mission Read More »

Rocket Report: Ariane 64 to debut soon; India has a Falcon 9 clone too?

launch, rocket report, Space / 9u50fv / January 17, 2026

All the news that’s fit to lift

“We are fundamentally shifting our approach to securing our munitions supply chain.”

SpaceX launched the Pandora satellite for NASA on Sunday. Credit: SpaceX

Welcome to Edition 8.25 of the Rocket Report! All eyes are on Florida this weekend as NASA rolls out the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft to its launch site in Florida for the Artemis II mission. NASA has not announced a launch date yet, and this will depend in part on how well a “wet dress rehearsal” goes with fueling the rocket. However, it is likely the rocket has a no-earlier-than launch date of February 8. Our own Stephen Clark will be in Florida for the rollout on Saturday, so be sure and check back here for coverage.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

MaiaSpace scores a major launch deal. The ArianeGroup subsidiary, created in 2022, has inked a major new launch contract with satellite operator Eutelsat, Le Monde reports. A significant portion of the 440 new satellites ordered by Eutelsat from Airbus to renew or expand its OneWeb constellation will be launched into orbit by the new Maia rocket. MaiaSpace previously signed two contracts: one with Exotrail for the launch of an orbital transfer, and the other for two satellites for the Toutatis mission, a defense system developed by U-Space.

A big win for the French firm … The first test launch of Maia is scheduled for the end of 2026, a year later than initially planned, at the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana. The first flights carrying OneWeb satellites are therefore likely to launch no earlier than 2027. Powered by liquid oxygen-methane propellant, Maia aims to be able to deliver up to 500 kg to low-Earth orbit when the first stage is recovered, and 1,500 kg when fully expendable.

Firefly announces Alpha upgrade plan. Firefly Aerospace said this week it was planning a “Block II” upgrade to its Alpha rocket that will “focus on enhancing reliability, streamlining producibility, and improving launch operations to further support commercial, civil, and national security mission demand.” Firefly’s upcoming Alpha Flight 7, targeted to launch in the coming weeks, will be the last flown in the current configuration and will serve as a test flight with multiple Block II subsystems in shadow mode.

Too many failures … “Firefly worked closely with customers and incorporated data and lessons learned from our first six Alpha launches and hundreds of hardware tests to make upgrades that increase reliability and manufacturability with consolidated parts, key configuration updates, and stronger structures built with automated machinery,” said Jason Kim, CEO of Firefly Aerospace. Speaking bluntly, reliability upgrades are needed. Of Alpha’s six launches to date, only two have been a complete success. (submitted by TFargo04)

Sign Me Up!

Another PSLV launch failure. India’s first launch of 2026 ended in failure due to an issue with the third stage of its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV), Spaceflight Now reports. The mission, designated PSLV-C62, was also the second consecutive failure of this four-stage rocket, with both anomalies affecting the third stage. This time, 16 satellites were lost, including those of other nations. ISRO said it initiated a “detailed analysis” to determine the root cause of the anomaly.

Has been India’s workhorse rocket … The four-stage launch vehicle is a mixture of solid- and liquid- fueled stages. Both the first and third stages are solid-fueled, while the second and fourth stages are powered by liquid propulsion. The PSLV Rocket has flown in multiple configurations since it debuted in September 1993 and achieved 58 fully successful launches, with the payloads on those missions reaching their intended orbit.

US military invests in L3Harris rocket motors. The US government will invest $1 billion in L3Harris Technologies’ growing rocket motor business, guaranteeing a steady supply of the much-needed motors used in a wide range of ‍missiles such as Tomahawks and Patriot interceptors, CNBC reports. L3Harris said on Tuesday it ‌is planning ‌an IPO of its growing rocket motor business into a new publicly traded company backed by a $1 billion government convertible security investment. The securities will automatically convert to common equity when the company goes public later in 2026.

Shifting investment strategy … “We are fundamentally shifting our approach to securing our munitions supply chain,” said Michael Duffey, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment. “By investing directly in suppliers we are building the resilient industrial ⁠base needed for the Arsenal of Freedom.” However, the government’s equity position in L3Harris could face blowback from L3Harris’ rivals, given that it creates a potentially significant conflict of interest for the US government. The Pentagon will have an ownership stake in a company that regularly bids on major defense and other government contracts.

First Ariane 64 to launch next month. Arianespace announced Thursday that it plans to launch the first variant of the Ariane 6 rocket with four solid rocket boosters on February 12 from French Guiana. The mission will also be the company’s first launch of Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) satellites. This is the first of 18 Ariane 6 launches that Arianespace sold to Amazon for the broadband communications megaconstellation.

A growing cadence … The Ariane 6 rocket has launched five times, including its debut flight in July 2024. All of the launches were a success, although the first flight failed to relight the upper stage in order to make a controlled reentry. Arianespace increased the cadence to four launches last year and will seek to try to double that this year.

Falcon 9 launches the Pandora mission. NASA’s Pandora satellite rocketed into orbit early Sunday from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, Ars reports. It hitched a ride with around 40 other small payloads aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, launching into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit before deploying at an altitude of roughly 380 miles (613 kilometers).

A satellite that can carry a tune … Pandora will augment the capabilities of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. Over the next few weeks, ground controllers will put Pandora through a series of commissioning and calibration steps before turning its eyes toward deep space. From low-Earth orbit, Pandora will observe exoplanets and their stars simultaneously, allowing astronomers to correct their measurements of the planet’s atmospheric composition and structure based on the ever-changing conditions of the host star itself.

ArianeGroup seeking ideas for Ariane 6 reuse. In this week’s newsletter, we’ve already had a story about MaiaSpace and another item about the Ariane 6 rocket. So why not combine the two and also have a report about an Ariane 6 mashup with the Maia rocket? As it turns out, there’s a relatively new proposal to retrofit the existing Ariane 6 rocket design for partial reuse with Maia rockets as side boosters, Ars reports.

Sir, maia I have some cost savings? … It’s infeasible to recover the Ariane 6’s core stage for many reasons. Chief among them is that the main stage burns for more than seven minutes on an Ariane 6 flight, reaching speeds about twice as fast as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster achieves during its two-and-a-half minutes of operation during launch. Swapping out Ariane 6’s solid rocket motors for reusable liquid boosters makes some economic sense for ArianeGroup. The proposal would bring the development and production of the boosters under full control of ArianeGroup and its French subsidiary, cutting Italy’s solid rocket motor developer, Avio, out of the program. All the same, we’ll believe this when we see it.

Meet the EtherealX Razor Crest Mk-1. I learned that there is a rocket company founded in Bengaluru, India, named Ethereal Exploration Guild, or EtherealX. (Did you see what they did there?) I found this out because the company announced (via email) that it had raised an oversubscribed $20.5 million Series A round led by TDK Ventures and BIG Capital. So naturally, I went to the EtherealX website looking for more information.

Let me say, I was not disappointed … As you might expect from a company named EtherealX, its proposed rocket has nine engines, is powered by liquid oxygen and kerosene, and has a maximum capacity of 24.8 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. (Did you see what they did there?) The website does not include much information, but there is this banger of a statement: “The EtherealX Razor Crest Mk-1 will house 9 of the most powerful operational liquid rocket engines in Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa, South America, and Antarctica – Stallion.” And let’s be honest, when you’ve bested Antarctica in engine development, you know you’re cooking. Alas, what I did not see on the website was much evidence of real hardware.

NASA topples historic Saturn and shuttle infrastructure. Two historic NASA test facilities used in the development of the Saturn V and space shuttle launch vehicles have been demolished after towering over the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama since the start of the Space Age, Ars reports. The Propulsion and Structural Test Facility, which was erected in 1957—the same year the first artificial satellite entered Earth orbit—and the Dynamic Test Facility, which has stood since 1964, were brought down by a coordinated series of implosions on Saturday, January 10.

Out with the old, in with the new … Located in Marshall’s East Test Area on the US Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, the two structures were no longer in use and, according to NASA, had a backlog of $25 million in needed repairs. “This work reflects smart stewardship of taxpayer resources,” Jared Isaacman, NASA administrator, said in a statement. “Clearing outdated infrastructure allows NASA to safely modernize, streamline operations and fully leverage the infrastructure investments signed into law by President Trump to keep Marshall positioned at the forefront of aerospace innovation.”

Space Force swaps Vulcan for Falcon 9. The next Global Positioning System satellite is switching from a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket to a SpaceX Falcon 9, a spokesperson for the US Space Force Space Systems Command System Delta 80 said Tuesday, Spaceflight Now reports. SpaceX could launch the GPS III Space Vehicle 09 (SV09) within the next few weeks, as the satellite was entering the final stages of pre-flight preparations.

The trade is logical … SV09 was originally awarded to ULA as part of order-year five of the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 2 contract, which was announced on October 31, 2023. This isn’t the first time that the Space Force has shuffled timelines and switched launch providers for GPS missions. In May 2025, SpaceX launched the GPS III SV08 spacecraft, which was originally assigned to ULA in June 2023. In exchange, ULA was given the SV11 launch, which would have flown on a Falcon Heavy rocket. The changes have been driven largely by repeated delays in Vulcan readiness.

Next three launches

January 16: Long March 3B | Unknown payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 16: 55 UTC

January 17: Ceres 2 | Demo flight | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China | 04: 05 UTC

January 17: Falcon 9 | NROL-105 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 06: 18 UTC

Rocket Report: Ariane 64 to debut soon; India has a Falcon 9 clone too? Read More »

NASA’s first medical evacuation from space ends with on-target splashdown

commercial crew, crew dragon, crew-11, human spaceflight, international space station, NASA, Science, Space, spacex / 9u50fv / January 15, 2026

“Because the astronaut is absolutely stable, this is not an emergent evacuation,” said James “JD” Polk, NASA’s chief medical officer, in a press conference last week. “We’re not immediately disembarking and getting the astronaut down.”

Amit Kshatriya, the agency’s associate administrator, called the situation a “controlled medical evacuation” in a briefing with reporters.

But without a confirmed diagnosis of the astronaut’s medical issue, there was some “lingering risk” for the astronaut’s health if they remained in orbit, Polk said. That’s why NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and his deputies agreed to call an early end to the Crew-11 mission.

A first for NASA

The Crew-11 mission launched on August 1 and was supposed to stay on the space station until around February 20, a few days after the scheduled arrival of SpaceX’s Crew-12 mission with a team of replacement astronauts. But the early departure means the space station will operate with a crew of three until the launch of Crew-12 next month.

NASA astronaut Chris Williams will be the sole astronaut responsible for maintaining the US segment of the station. Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Mikayev launched with Williams in November on a Russian Soyuz vehicle. The Crew Dragon was the lifeboat for all four Crew-11 astronauts, so standard procedure called for the entire crew to return with the astronaut suffering the undisclosed medical issue.

The space station regularly operated with just three crew members for the first decade of its existence. The complex has been permanently staffed since 2000, sometimes with as few as two astronauts or cosmonauts. The standard crew size was raised to six in 2009, then to seven in 2020.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon *Endeavour* spacecraft descends toward the Pacific Ocean under four main parachutes. Credit: NASA

Williams will have his hands full until reinforcements arrive. The scaled-down crew will not be able to undertake any spacewalks, and some of the lab’s science programs may have to be deferred to ensure the crew can keep up with maintenance tasks.

This is the first time NASA has called an early end to a space mission for medical reasons, but the Soviet Union faced similar circumstances several times during the Cold War. Russian officials cut short an expedition to the Salyut 7 space station in 1985 after the mission’s commander fell ill in orbit. A similar situation occurred in 1976 with the Soyuz 21 mission to the Salyut 5 space station.

NASA’s first medical evacuation from space ends with on-target splashdown Read More »

NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope

astrophysics, exoplanets, goddard space flight center, launch, NASA, pandora, Science, Space, spacex / Mike M. / January 12, 2026

“It was not recognized how serious a problem that is until… about 2017 or 2018.”

The Pandora observatory, seen here inside a clean room, is about the size of a refrigerator. Credit: Blue Canyon Technologies

Among other things, the James Webb Space Telescope is designed to get us closer to finding habitable worlds around faraway stars. From its perch a million miles from Earth, Webb’s huge gold-coated mirror collects more light than any other telescope put into space.

The Webb telescope, launched in 2021 at a cost of more than $10 billion, has the sensitivity to peer into distant planetary systems and detect the telltale chemical fingerprints of molecules critical to or indicative of potential life, like water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane. Webb can do this while also observing the oldest observable galaxies in the Universe and studying planets, moons, and smaller objects within our own Solar System.

Naturally, astronomers want to get the most out of their big-budget observatory. That’s where NASA’s Pandora mission comes in.

The Pandora satellite rocketed into orbit early Sunday from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. It hitched a ride with around 40 other small payloads aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, launching into a polar Sun-synchronous orbit before deploying at an altitude of roughly 380 miles (613 kilometers).

Over the next few weeks, ground controllers will put Pandora through a series of commissioning and calibration steps before turning its eyes toward deep space. Pandora is a fraction of the size of Webb. Its primary mirror is about the size of the largest consumer-grade amateur telescopes, less than one-tenth the dimension of Webb’s. NASA capped Pandora’s budget at $20 million. The budget to develop Webb was more than 500 times higher.

Double-checking Webb

So what can little Pandora add to Webb’s bleeding-edge science? First, it helps to understand how scientists use Webb to study exoplanets. When a planet passes in front of its parent star, some of the starlight shines through its atmosphere. Webb has the sensitivity to detect the filtered starlight and break it apart into its spectral components, telling astronomers about the composition of clouds and hazes in the planet’s atmosphere. Ultimately, the data is useful in determining whether an exoplanet might be like Earth.

“I liken it often to holding a glass of wine in front of a candle, so that we can see really what’s inside,” said Daniel Apai, a member of Pandora’s science team from the University of Arizona. “We can assess, basically, the quality of the wine. In this case, we use the light that filters through the star’s [atmosphere] through the planetary atmosphere to judge what chemicals, gases in particular, may be present. Water vapor is one that we are the most sensitive to.”

But there’s a catch. Stars shine millions to billions of times brighter than their planetary companions, and starlight isn’t constant. Like the Sun, other stars have spots, flares, and variability over hours, days, or years. Hot spots and cool spots rotate in and out of view. And the star’s own atmospheres can contain some of the same molecules scientists are seeking to find on exoplanets, including water vapor.

Therefore, a star’s spectral signature easily outshines the signal coming from a nearby planet. Astronomers discovered this signal “contamination” when they started looking for potentially habitable worlds, injecting confounding uncertainties into their findings. Were the promising spectra they were seeing coming from the planet or the star?

Artist’s concept of the Pandora telescope with an exoplanet and two stars in the background. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Conceptual Image Lab

“One of the ways that this manifests is by making you think that you’re seeing absorption features like water and potentially methane when there may not be any, or, conversely, you’re not seeing the signatures that are there because they’re masked by the stellar signal,” said Tom Barclay, deputy project scientist and technical lead on the Pandora mission at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The problem became apparent in the 2010s as astronomers used more powerful telescopes to see the finer details of exoplanets.

“This is something that we always suspected as a community,” Apai told Ars. “We always suspected that stars are not perfect. At some point, it becomes a problem. But it was not recognized how serious a problem that is until, I would say, about 2017 or 2018.”

Scientists quickly got to work looking for a solution, and NASA selected the Pandora mission for development in 2021, just months before the launch of Webb.

“When we’re trying to find water in the atmospheres of these small Earth-like planets, we want to be really sure it’s not coming from the star before we go tell the press and make a big stink about it,” said Elisa Quintana, Pandora’s lead scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “So we designed the Pandora mission specifically to solve this problem.”

From low-Earth orbit, Pandora will observe exoplanets and their stars simultaneously, allowing astronomers to correct their measurements of the planet’s atmospheric composition and structure based on the ever-changing conditions of the host star itself. Webb could theoretically do this work, but scientists already fill every hour of Webb’s schedule. Pandora will point and stare at 20 preselected exoplanets 10 times during its one-year prime mission, collecting 24 hours of visible and infrared observations with each visit. This will capture short-term and longer-term changes in each star’s behavior.

SpaceX launched Pandora into a so-called “twilight orbit” that follows the boundary between day and night on Earth, allowing the satellite to keep its solar panels illuminated by the Sun while performing its observations.

“We can send this small telescope out, sit on a star for a really long time, and sort of map all the star spots, and really disentangle the star and planet signals,” Quintana said in a recent panel discussion at NASA Goddard. “It’s filling a really nice gap in helping us to sort of calibrate all these stars that James Webb is going to look at, so we can be really confident that all of these molecules that we’re detecting in planets are real.”

“I think this is really the most important scientific barrier that we have to break down to fully unlock the potential of Webb and future missions,” Apai said.

Looking down the barrel of Pandora’s 17-inch-wide (45-centimeter) telescope. Credit: NASA/Jordan Karburn, LLNL

Ben Hord, a member of Pandora’s science team at Goddard, singled out one example in a presentation at an American Astronomical Society meeting last year. This planet, named GJ 486 b, is a “super-Earth” discovered in 2021 circling a relatively cool red dwarf star. Hord said astronomers had trouble determining if the planet has a water-rich atmosphere based on Webb’s observations alone.

“We want to know if water is in the atmospheres of these exoplanets, and this stellar contamination from the spots on the star can mask or mimic features like water,” Hord said. “Our hope is that Pandora will help James Webb data be even more precise by providing context and understanding for these host stars and these planetary systems.”

Planets around small dwarf stars are some of the best candidates for finding a true Earth analog. Because these stars put out a fraction of the heat of the Sun, a potentially habitable planet could lurk very close to its host, completing a year in a handful of days. This allows astronomers to see the planet repeatedly as it passes in front of its star, rapidly building a dataset on its size, structure, and environment.

Scientists hope they can extend the lessons learned from Pandora’s observations of a sample of 20 exoplanets to other worlds in our galactic neighborhood. As of late last year, astronomers have confirmed detections of more than 6,000 exoplanets.

“With a well-corrected spectrum, we can say there’s water, there’s nitrogen,” Quintana said. “So with every mission, as we evolve, we’re chipping away and taking bigger and bigger steps toward that question of, ‘OK, we know Earths are out there. We know they’re abundant. We know they have atmospheres. How do we know if they have life on them?’”

Building on a budget

A mission like Pandora was not possible until recently, certainly not on the $20 million budget NASA devoted to the project. With Pandora, the agency took advantage of a fast-growing small satellite industry churning out spacecraft at a fraction of what it cost 10 or 15 years ago.

The Pandora spacecraft weighed approximately 716 pounds (325 kilograms) at launch and likely would have required a dedicated rocket to travel to space before SpaceX started offering shared rides on its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. NASA did not disclose what it paid SpaceX to launch Pandora, but publicly available pricing suggests SpaceX charges a few million dollars to launch a satellite of the same size. Before the rideshare option became available, NASA would have paid tens of millions of dollars for the launch alone.

The Pandora mission is part of NASA’s Astrophysics Pioneers program, an initiative set up to solicit ideas for lower-cost astronomy missions.

“It’s been very, very challenging to try and squeeze this big amount of science into this small cost box, but that’s kind of what makes it fun, right?” Barclay told Ars. “We have to be pretty ruthless in making sure that we only fund the things we need to fund. We accept risk where we need to accept the risk, and at times we need to accept that we may need to give up performance in order to make sure that we hit the schedule and we hit the launch [schedule].”

It helps that Pandora’s 17-inch (45-centimeter) telescope comes from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which had the technology on the shelf from a national security program. Pandora uses a small satellite platform from Blue Canyon Technologies, a Colorado company.

“There is no way we could have done Pandora 10 years ago,” Barclay said. “The small launch capabilities that come from companies like Rocket Lab and SpaceX and others meant that now the vendors of spacecraft buses and spacecraft instruments are able to push their costs down because they know that there’s a market for small missions out there. Other parts of the government are investing heavily in small spacecraft, and so that allows us on the science side to make use of that economies of scale.”

For comparison, the European Space Agency launched an exoplanet observatory about the same size as Pandora in 2019 at a cost of more than $100 million.

There are companies now looking at how to scale up production of larger satellites, too. Cheaper, heavy satellites could launch on new heavy- and super-heavy rockets like SpaceX’s Starship or Blue Origin’s New Glenn.

“I think it is an amazing capability to have for astrophysicists because science is moving fast,” Apai said. “Exoplanet science is changing. I would say every three or four years, we have breakthroughs. And the product keeps changing. We push the boundaries, and if you ever have to work with 20- or 25-year-long mission lifetimes, that really just limits progress.”

NASA launches new mission to get the most out of the James Webb Space Telescope Read More »