Space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next three launches

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

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

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

Photo of Stephen Clark

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

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

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Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was minus 280° F

athena, intuitive machines, lunar economy, Space / /

The Athena spacecraft was not exactly flying blind as it approached the lunar surface one week ago. The software on board did a credible job of recognizing nearby craters, even with elongated shadows over the terrain. However, the lander’s altimeter had failed.

So while Athena knew where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, the lander did not know how far it was above the surface.

An important detail, that. As a result, the privately built spacecraft struck the lunar surface on a plateau, toppled over, and began to skid across the surface. As it did so, the lander rotated at least once or twice before coming to a stop in a small, shadowed crater.

“The landing was kind of like sliding into second base,” Steve Altemus, chief executive officer of Intuitive Machines, which built the lander, said in an interview Thursday.

Cold and lonely

It has been a busy and tiring week for the chief of a company that seeks to help lead the development of a lunar economy. Expectations were high for this, the company’s second lunar landing attempt after its Odysseus vehicle became the first private spacecraft to ever make a soft landing on the Moon, last year, before toppling over.

In some ways, this mission was even more disappointing. Because Athena skidded across the lunar surface, it dredged up regolith. When it came to a stop, some of this material was blown up into the solar panels—already in a sub-optimal location on its side. The spacecraft’s power reserves, therefore, were limited. Almost immediately, the team at Intuitive Machines knew their spacecraft was dying.

“We knew we had slid into a slightly shadowed crater, and the temperature was very cold,” Altemus said. “The solar arrays had regolith on them, and they weren’t charging, the ones pointing up, enough to give us sufficient power to power the heaters to keep it warm enough to survive.”

Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was minus 280° F Read More »

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What happens when DEI becomes DOA in the aerospace industry?

Space / /

As part of the executive order, US companies with federal contracts and grants must certify that they no longer have any DEI hiring practices. Preferentially hiring some interns from a pool that includes women or minorities is such a practice. Effectively, then, any private aerospace company that receives federal funding, or intends to one day, would likely be barred under the executive order from engaging with these kinds of fellowships in the future.

US companies are scrambling to determine how best to comply with the executive order in many ways, said Emily Calandrelli, an engineer and prominent science communicator. After the order went into effect, some large defense contractor companies, including Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon) went so far as to cancel internal employee resource groups, including everything from group chats to meetings among women at the company that served to foster a sense of community. When Calandrelli asked Lockheed about this decision, the company confirmed it had “paused” these resource group activities to “align with the new executive order.”

An unwelcoming environment

For women and minorities, Calandrelli said, this creates an unwelcoming environment.

“You want to go where you are celebrated and wanted, not where you are tolerated,” she said. “That sense of belonging is going to take a hit. It’s going to be harder to recruit women and keep women.”

This is not just a problem for women and minorities, but for everyone, Calandrelli said. The aerospace industry is competing with others for top engineering talent. Prospective engineers who feel unwanted in aerospace, as well as women and minorities working for space companies today, may find the salary and environment more welcoming at Apple or Google or elsewhere in the tech industry. That’s a problem for the US Space Force and other areas of the government seeking to ensure the US space industry retains its lead in satellite technology, launch, communications and other aspects of space that touch every part of life on Earth.

What happens when DEI becomes DOA in the aerospace industry? Read More »

what-is-space-war-fighting?-the-space-force’s-top-general-has-some-thoughts.

What is space war-fighting? The Space Force’s top general has some thoughts.

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Controlling space means “employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities.”

Members of the Space Force render a salute during a change of command ceremony July 2, 2024, as Col. Ramsey Horn took the helm of Space Delta 9, the unit that oversees orbital warfare operations at Schriever Space Force Base, Colorado. Credit: US Space Force / Dalton Prejeant

DENVER—The US Space Force lacks the full range of space weapons China and Russia are adding to their arsenals, and military leaders say it’s time to close the gap.

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force’s chief of space operations, told reporters at the Air & Space Forces Association Warfare Symposium last week that he wants to have more options to present to national leaders if an adversary threatens the US fleet of national security satellites used for surveillance, communication, navigation, missile warning, and perhaps soon, missile defense.

In prepared remarks, Saltzman outlined in new detail why the Space Force should be able to go on the offense in an era of orbital warfare. Later, in a roundtable meeting with reporters, he briefly touched on the how.

The Space Force’s top general has discussed the concept of “space superiority” before. This is analogous to air superiority—think of how US and allied air forces dominated the skies in wartime over the last 30 years in places like Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan.

In order to achieve space superiority, US forces must first control the space domain by “employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation, and even destruction, if necessary,” Saltzman said.

Kinetic? Imagine a missile or some other projectile smashing into an enemy satellite. Non-kinetic? This category involves jamming, cyberattacks, and directed-energy weapons, like lasers or microwave signals, that could disable spacecraft in orbit.

“It includes things like orbital warfare and electromagnetic warfare,” Saltzman said. These capabilities could be used offensively or defensively. In December, Ars reported on the military’s growing willingness to talk publicly about offensive space weapons, something US officials long considered taboo for fear of sparking a cosmic arms race.

Officials took this a step further at last week’s warfare symposium in Colorado. Saltzman said China and Russia, which military leaders consider America’s foremost strategic competitors, are moving ahead of the United States with technologies and techniques to attack satellites in orbit.

This new ocean

For the first time in more than a century, warfare is entering a new physical realm. By one popular measure, the era of air warfare began in 1911, when an Italian pilot threw bombs out of his airplane over Libya during the Italo-Turkish War. Some historians might trace airborne warfare to earlier conflicts, when reconnaissance balloons offered eagle-eyed views of battlefields and troop movements. Land and sea combat began in ancient times.

“None of us were alive when the other domains started being contested,” Saltzman said. “It was just natural. It was just a part of the way things work.”

Five years since it became a new military service, the Space Force is in an early stage of defining what orbital warfare actually means. First, military leaders had to stop considering space as a benign environment, where threats from the harsh environment of space reign supreme.

Artist’s illustration of a satellite’s destruction in space. Credit: Aerospace Corporation

“That shift from benign environment to a war-fighting domain, that was pretty abrupt,” Saltzman said. “We had to mature language. We had to understand what was the right way to talk about that progression. So as a Space Force dedicated to it, we’ve been progressing our vocabulary. We’ve been saying, ‘This is what we want to focus on.'”

“We realized, you know what, defending is one thing, but look at this architecture (from China). They’re going to hold our forces at risk. Who’s responsible for that? And clearly the answer is the Space Force,” Saltzman said. “We say, ‘OK, we’ve got to start to solve for that problem.'”

“Well, how do militaries talk about that? We talk about conducting operations, and that includes offense and defense,” he continued. “So it’s more of a maturation of the role and the responsibilities that a new service has, just developing the vocabulary, developing the doctrine, operational concepts, and now the equipment and the training. It’s just part of the process.”

Of course, this will all cost money. Congress approved a $29 billion budget for the Space Force in 2024, about $4 billion more than NASA received but just 3.5 percent of the Pentagon’s overall budget. Frank Kendall, secretary of the Air Force under President Biden, said last year that the Space Force’s budget is “going to need to double or triple over time” to fund everything the military needs to do in space.

The six types of space weapons

Saltzman said the Space Force categorizes adversarial space weapons in six categories—three that are space-based and three that are ground-based.

“You have directed-energy, like lasers, you have RF (radio frequency) jamming capabilities, and you have kinetic, something that you’re trying to destroy physically,” Saltzman said. These three types of weapons could be positioned on the ground or in space, getting to Saltzman’s list of six categories.

“We’re seeing in our adversary developmental capabilities, they’re pursuing all of those,” Saltzman said. “We’re not pursuing all of those yet.”

But Saltzman argued that maybe the United States should. “There are good reasons to have all those categories,” he said. Targeting an enemy satellite in low-Earth orbit, just a few hundred miles above the planet, requires a different set of weapons than a satellite parked more than 22,000 miles up—roughly 36,000 kilometers—in geosynchronous orbit.

China is at the pinnacle of the US military’s threat pyramid, followed by Russia and less sophisticated regional powers like North Korea and Iran.

“Really, what’s most concerning… is the mix of weapons,” Saltzman said. “They are pursuing the broadest mix of weapons, which means they’re going to hold a vast array of targets at risk if we can’t defeat them. So our focus out of the gate has been on resiliency of our architectures. Make the targeting as hard on the adversary as possible.”

Gen. Chance Saltzman, the chief of Space Operations, speaks at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Symposium on March 3, 2025. Credit: Jud McCrehin / Air & Space Forces Association

About a decade ago, the military recognized an imperative to transition to a new generation of satellites. Where they could, Pentagon officials replaced or complemented their fleets of a few large multibillion-dollar satellites with constellations of many more cheaper, relatively expendable satellites. If an adversary took out just one of the military’s legacy satellites, commanders would feel the pain. But the destruction of multiple smaller satellites in the newer constellations wouldn’t have any meaningful effect.

That’s one of the reasons the military’s Space Development Agency has started launching a network of small missile-tracking satellites in low-Earth orbit, and it’s why the Pentagon is so interested in using services offered by SpaceX’s Starlink broadband constellation. The Space Force is looking at ways to revamp its architecture for space-based navigation by potentially augmenting or replacing existing GPS satellites with an array of positioning platforms in different orbits.

“If you can disaggregate your missions from a few satellites to many satellites, you change the targeting calculus,” Saltzman said. “If you can make things maneuverable, then it’s harder to target, so that is the initial effort that we invested heavily on in the last few years to make us more resilient.”

Now, Saltzman said, the Space Force must go beyond reshaping how it designs its satellites and constellations to respond to potential threats. These new options include more potent offensive and defensive weapons. He declined to offer specifics, but some options are better than others.

The cost of destruction

“Generally in a military setting, you don’t say, ‘Hey, here’s all the weapons, and here’s how I’m going to use them, so get ready,'” Saltzman said. “That’s not to our advantage… but I will generally [say] that I am far more enamored by systems that deny, disrupt, [and] degrade. There’s a lot of room to leverage systems focused on those ‘D words.’ The destroy word comes at a cost in terms of debris.”

A high-speed impact between an interceptor weapon and an enemy satellite would spread thousands of pieces of shrapnel across busy orbital traffic lanes, putting US and allied spacecraft at risk.

“We may get pushed into a corner where we need to execute some of those options, but I’m really focused on weapons that deny, disrupt, degrade,” Saltzman said.

This tenet of environmental stewardship isn’t usually part of the decision-making process for commanders in other military branches, like the Air Force or the Navy. “I tell my air-breathing friends all the time: When you shoot an airplane down, it falls out of your domain,” Saltzman said.

China now operates more than 1,000 satellites, and more than a third of these are dedicated to intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. China’s satellites can collect high-resolution spy imagery and relay the data to terrestrial forces for military targeting. The Chinese “space-enabled targeting architecture” is “pretty impressive,” Saltzman said.

This slide from a presentation by Space Systems Command illustrates a few of the counter-space weapons fielded by China and Russia. Credit: Space Systems Command

“We have a responsibility not only to defend the assets in space but to protect the war-fighter from space-enabled attack,” said Lt. Gen. Doug Schiess, a senior official at US Space Command. “What China has done with an increasing launch pace is put up intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance satellites that can then target our naval forces, our land forces, and our air forces at much greater distance. They’ve essentially built a huge kill chain, or kill web, if you will, to be able to target our forces much earlier.”

China’s aerospace forces have either deployed or are developing direct-ascent anti-satellite missiles, co-orbital satellites, electronic warfare platforms like mobile jammers, and directed-energy, or laser, systems, according to a Pentagon report on China’s military and security advancements. These weapons can reach targets from low-Earth orbit all the way up to geosynchronous orbit.

In his role as a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Saltzman advises the White House on military matters. Like most military commanders, he said he wants to offer his superiors as many options as possible. “The more weapons mix we have, the more options we can offer the president,” Saltzman said.

The US military has already demonstrated it can shoot down a satellite with a ground-based interceptor, and the Space Force is poised to field new ground-based satellite jammers in the coming months. The former head of the Space Force, Gen. Jay Raymond, told lawmakers in 2021 that the military was developing directed-energy weapons to assure dominance in space, although he declined to discuss details in an unclassified hearing.

So the Pentagon is working on at least three of the six space weapons categories identified by Saltzman. China and Russia appear to have the edge in space-based weapons, at least for now.

In the last several years, Russia has tested a satellite that can fire a projectile capable of destroying another spacecraft in orbit, an example of a space-based kinetic weapon. Last year, news leaked that US intelligence officials are concerned about Russian plans to put a nuclear weapon in orbit. China launched a satellite named Shijian-17 in 2016 with a robotic arm that could be used to grapple and capture other satellites in space. Then, in 2021, China launched Shijian-21, which docked with a defunct Chinese satellite to take over its maneuvering and move it to a different orbit.

There’s no evidence that the US Space Force has demonstrated kinetic space-based anti-satellite weapons, and Pentagon officials have roundly criticized the possibility of Russia placing a nuclear weapon in space. But the US military might soon develop space-based interceptors as part of the Trump administration’s “Golden Dome” missile defense shield. These interceptors might also be useful in countering enemy satellites during conflict.

The Sodium Guidestar at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Starfire Optical Range in New Mexico. Researchers with AFRL’s Directed Energy Directorate use the Guidestar laser for real-time, high-fidelity tracking and imaging of satellites too faint for conventional adaptive optical imaging systems. Credit: US Air Force

The Air Force used a robotic arm on a 2007 technology demonstration mission to snag free-flying satellites out of orbit, but this was part of a controlled experiment with a spacecraft designed for robotic capture. Several companies, such as Maxar and Northrop Grumman, are developing robotic arms that could grapple “non-cooperative” satellites in orbit.

While the destruction of an enemy satellite is likely to be the Space Force’s last option in a war, military commanders would like to be able to choose to do so. Schiess said the military “continues to have gaps” in this area.

“With destroy, we need that capability, just like any other domain needs that capability, but we have to make sure that we do that with responsibility because the space domain is so important,” Schiess said.

Matching the rhetoric of today

The Space Force’s fresh candor about orbital warfare should be self-evident, according to Saltzman. “Why would you have a military space service if not to execute space control?”

This new comfort speaking about space weapons comes as the Trump administration strikes a more bellicose tone in foreign policy and national security. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s secretary of defense, has pledged to reinforce a “warrior ethos” in the US armed services.

Space Force officials are doing their best to match Hegseth’s rhetoric.

“Every guardian is a war-fighter, regardless of your functional specialty, and every guardian contributes to Space Force readiness,” Saltzman said. Guardian is the military’s term for a member of the Space Force, comparable to airmen, sailors, soldiers, and marines. “Whether you built the gun, pointed the gun, or pulled the trigger, you are a part of combat capability.”

Echoing Hegseth, the senior enlisted member of the Space Force, Chief Master Sgt. John Bentivegna, said he’s focused on developing a “war-fighter ethos” within the service. This involves training on scenarios of orbital warfare, even before the Space Force fields any next-generation weapons systems.

“As Gen. Saltzman is advocating for the money and the resources to get the kit, the culture, the space-minded war-fighter, that work has been going on and continues today,” Bentivegna said.

Photo of Stephen Clark

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

What is space war-fighting? The Space Force’s top general has some thoughts. Read More »

no,-that’s-not-a-cosmic-cone-of-shame—it’s-nasa’s-newest-space-telescope

No, that’s not a cosmic cone of shame—it’s NASA’s newest space telescope

Science, Space / /

A filter for the Universe

“SPHEREx is going to produce an enormous three-dimensional map of the entire night sky.”

NASA’s SPHEREx observatory after completion of environmental testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, last year. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/BAE Systems

Satellites come in all shapes and sizes, but there aren’t any that look quite like SPHEREx, an infrared observatory NASA launched Tuesday night in search of answers to simmering questions about how the Universe, and ultimately life, came to be.

The mission launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 8: 10 pm local time (11: 10 pm EDT) Tuesday. Less than 45 minutes later, the Falcon 9’s upper stage released SPHEREx into a polar orbit at an altitude of roughly 420 miles (675 kilometers). Ground controllers received the first signals from the spacecraft, confirming its health after reaching space.

As soon as next month, once engineers verify the observatory is ready, SPHEREx will begin a two-year science mission surveying the sky in 102 colors invisible to the human eye. The observatory’s infrared detectors will collect data on the chemical composition of asteroids, hazy star-forming clouds, and faraway galaxies.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted SPHEREx into orbit. Credit: NASA/Jim Ross

“SPHEREx is going to produce an enormous three-dimensional map of the entire night sky, and with this immense and novel dataset, we’re going to address some of the most fundamental questions in astrophysics,” said Phil Korngut, the mission’s instrument scientist at Caltech.

“Using a technique called linear variable filter spectroscopy, we’re going to produce 102 maps in 102 wavelengths every six months, and our baseline mission is to do this four times over the course of two years,” Korngut said.

Boiling it down

The mission’s full name, for which SPHEREx is the acronym, is a mouthful—it stands for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. The $488 million mission seeks answers to three basic questions: How did the Universe begin? How did galaxies begin? What are the conditions for life outside the Solar System?

While it’s possible to sum up these objectives in an elevator pitch, the details touch on esoteric topics like cosmic inflation, quantum physics, and the flatness of spacetime. Philosophically, these questions are existential. SPHEREx will try to punch above its weight.

Built by BAE Systems, SPHEREx is about the size of a subcompact car, and it lacks the power and resolution of a flagship observatory like the James Webb Space Telescope. Webb’s primary mirror spans more than 21 feet (6.5 meters) across, while SPHEREx’s primary mirror has an effective diameter of just 7.9 inches (20 centimeters), comparable to a consumer-grade backyard telescope.

SPHEREx will test the inflationary model, a theory to explain the unimaginably violent moments after the Big Bang. Credit: NASA

But NASA’s newest space telescope has a few advantages. While Webb is designed to peer deep into small slivers of the sky, SPHEREx’s wider field of view will observe the sky in all directions. Like its name might suggest, SPHEREx will capture a spherical view of the cosmos. Color filters overlay the instrument’s detector array to separate light entering the telescope into its component wavelengths, a process known as spectroscopy. NASA says SPHEREx’s unique design allows it to conduct infrared spectroscopy on hundreds of thousands of objects simultaneously, and more than 600 exposures per day.

“SPHEREx is a testament to doing big science with a small telescope,” said Beth Fabinsky, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Because SPHEREx orbits hundreds of miles above the Earth, the telescope flies above the discernible atmosphere, which can absorb faint thermal energy coming from distant astronomical sources. Its detectors must be cold, below minus 360° Fahrenheit, or 55 Kelvin, or the telescope would be blinded by its own light. This is the reason the spacecraft has such an unusual look.

Many past infrared telescopes used cryogenic coolant to chill their detectors, but this is a finite resource that gradually boils off in space, limiting mission lifetimes. Webb uses a complicated tennis court-sized sunshield to block heat and light from the Sun from its infrared instruments. Engineers came up with a simpler solution for SPHEREx.

Three concentric photon shields extend from the top of the spacecraft to insulate the telescope’s optics and detectors from light from the Sun and the Earth. This design requires no moving parts, boosting the mission’s reliability and longevity. The photon shields look like an Elizabethan collar. Pet owners may know it as the “cone of shame” given to animals after surgeries.

Like NASA’s new half-billion-dollar space telescope, this cheery canine wears his collar with pride. Credit: Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

For SPHEREx, this cone is an enabler, allowing astronomers to map hundreds of millions of galaxies to study inflation, a cosmological theory that suggests the Universe underwent a mind-boggling expansion just after the Big Bang nearly 13.8 billion years ago. Through the process of inflation, the Universe grew a “trillion-trillion-fold” in a fraction of a second, Korngut said.

The theory suggests inflation left behind the blueprint for the largest-scale structures of the Universe, called the cosmic web. Inflation “expanded tiny fluctuations, smaller than an atom, to enormous cosmological scales that we see today, traced out by galaxies and clusters of galaxies,” said Jamie Bock, a cosmologist at Caltech who leads the SPHEREx science team.

“Even though inflation (theory) was invented in the 1980s, it’s been tested over the intervening decades and has been consistent with the data,” Bock said. “While we have this general picture, we still don’t know what drove inflation, why it happened. So what SPHEREx will do is test certain models of inflation by tracing out the three dimensions, hundreds of millions of galaxies, over the entire sky. And those galaxies trace out the initial fluctuations set up by inflation.”

SPHEREx’s telescope will also collect the combined light emitted by all galaxies, all the way back to the cosmic dawn, when the first stars and galaxies shined through the foggy aftermath of the Big Bang. Scientists believe star formation peaked in the Universe some 10 billion years ago, but their understanding of cosmic history is based on observations of a relatively small population of galaxies.

“SPHEREx, with its small telescope, is going to address this subject in a novel way,” Bock said. “Instead of really counting, very deeply, individual galaxies, SPHEREx is going to look at the total glow produced by all galaxies. This cosmological glow captures all light emitted over cosmic history from galaxies, as well as anything else that emits light. So it’s a very different way of looking at the Universe, and in particular, that first stage of star and galaxy formation must also be in this cosmic glow.”

Bock and his science team will match the aggregate data from SPHEREx with what they know about the Universe’s early galaxies from missions like Webb and the Hubble Space Telescope. “We can compare to counts that have been built up with large telescopes and see if we’ve missed any sources of light,” Bock said.

Closer to home

In our own galaxy, SPHEREx will use its infrared sensitivity to investigate the origins and abundance of water and ice in molecular clouds, the precursors to alien solar systems where gas and dust collapse to form stars and planets.

“We think that most of the water and ice in the universe is in places like this,” said Rachel Akeson, SPHEREx science data center lead at Caltech. “It’s also likely that the water in Earth’s oceans originated in the molecular cloud. So how will SPHEREx map the ice in our galaxy? While other space telescopes have found reservoirs of water in hundreds of locations, SPHEREx observations of our galaxy will give us more than 9 million targets, a much bigger sample than we have now.”

As the telescope scans across these millions of targets, its detectors will measure of each point in the sky in 102 infrared wavelengths. With the help of spectroscopy, SPHEREx will measure how much water is bound up in these star-forming clouds.

“Knowing the water content around the galaxy is a clue to how many locations could potentially host life,” Akeson said.

The SPHEREx observatory (top) was joined on its ride to space by four small NASA satellites (bottom) setting out to study the solar wind. Credit: Benjamin Fry/BAE Systems

All-sky surveys like SPHEREx’s often turn up surprises because they ingest immense amounts of data. They leave behind enduring legacies by building up catalogs of galaxies and stars. Astronomers use these archives to plan follow-up observations by more powerful telescopes like Webb and Hubble, or with future observatories employing technologies unavailable today.

As it pans across the sky observing distant galaxies, SPHEREx’s telescope will also catch glimpses of targets within our own Solar System. These include planets and thousands of asteroids, comets, icy worlds beyond Pluto, and interstellar objects that occasionally transit through the Solar System. SPHEREx will measure water, iron, carbon dioxide, and multiple types of ices (water, methane, nitrogen, ammonia, and others) on the surface of these worlds closer to home.

Finding savings where possible

A second NASA mission hitched a ride to space with SPHEREx, deploying into a similar orbit a few minutes after the Falcon 9 released its primary payload.

This secondary mission, called PUNCH, consists of four suitcase-size satellites that will study the solar corona, or outer atmosphere, a volatile sheath of super-heated gas extending millions of miles from the Sun’s surface. NASA expects PUNCH’s $150 million mission will reveal information about how the corona generates the solar wind, charged particles that stream continuously from the Sun in all directions.

There are tangible reasons to study the solar wind. These particles travel through space at speeds close to 1 million mph, and upon reaching Earth, interact with our planet’s magnetic field. Bursts of energy erupting from the Sun, like solar flares, can generate shocks in the solar wind current, leading to higher risks for geomagnetic storms. These have a range of effects on the Earth, ranging from colorful but benign auroras to disruptions to satellite operations and navigation and communications systems.

Other NASA spacecraft have zoomed in to observe second-by-second changes in the Sun’s atmosphere, and a fleet of sentinels closer to Earth measure the solar wind after it has traveled through space for three days. PUNCH will combine the imaging capacities of four small satellites to create a single “virtual instrument” with a view broad enough to monitor the solar wind as it leaves the Sun and courses farther into the Solar System.

Hailing a ride to space is not as simple as opening up Uber on your phone, but sharing rides offers a more cost-effective way to launch small satellites like PUNCH. SpaceX regularly launches rideshare flights, called Transporter missions, on its Falcon 9 rocket, sometimes with more than 100 satellites on a single launch going to a standard orbit. Missions like SPHEREx and PUNCH aren’t usually a good fit for SpaceX’s Transporter missions because they have more stringent demands for cleanliness and must launch into bespoke orbits to achieve their science goals.

Matching SPHEREx and PUNCH to the same rocket required both missions to go to the same orbit and be ready for launch at the same time. That’s a luxury not often available to NASA’s mission planners, but where possible, the agency wants to take advantage of rideshare opportunities.

Launching the PUNCH mission on its own dedicated rocket would have likely cost at least $15 million. This is the approximate price of a mission on Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket, the cheapest US launcher with the muscle to lift the PUNCH satellites into orbit.

“This is a real change in how we do business,” said Mark Clampin, the acting deputy administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, or SMD. “It’s a new strategy that SMD is working where we can maximize the efficiency of launches by flying two payloads at once, so we maximize the science return.”

Photo of Stephen Clark

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

No, that’s not a cosmic cone of shame—it’s NASA’s newest space telescope Read More »

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Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is the new leader of Relativity Space

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Another Silicon Valley investor is getting into the rocket business.

Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt has taken a controlling interest in the Long Beach, California-based Relativity Space. The New York Times first reported the change becoming official, after Schmidt told employees in an all-hands meeting on Monday.

Schmidt’s involvement with Relativity has been quietly discussed among space industry insiders for a few months. Multiple sources told Ars that he has largely been bankrolling the company since the end of October, when the company’s previous fundraising dried up.

It is not immediately clear why Schmidt is taking a hands-on approach at Relativity. However, it is one of the few US-based companies with a credible path toward developing a medium-lift rocket that could potentially challenge the dominance of SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket. If the Terran R booster becomes commercially successful, it could play a big role in launching megaconstellations.

Schmidt’s ascension also means that Tim Ellis, the company’s co-founder, chief executive, and almost sole public persona for nearly a decade, is now out of a leadership position.

“Today marks a powerful new chapter as Eric Schmidt becomes Relativity’s CEO, while also providing substantial financial backing,” Ellis wrote on the social media site X. “I know there’s no one more tenacious or passionate to propel this dream forward. We have been working together to ensure a smooth transition, and I’ll proudly continue to support the team as Co-founder and Board member.”

Terran R’s road to launch

On Monday, Relativity also released a nearly 45-minute video that outlines the development of the Terran R rocket to date and the lengths to which it must go to reach the launch pad. Tellingly, Ellis appears only briefly in the video, which features several other senior officials who presumably will remain with the company, including Chief Operating Officer Zach Dunn.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is the new leader of Relativity Space Read More »

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After less than a day, the Athena lander is dead on the Moon

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NASA expected Athena to have a reasonable chance of success. Although it landed on its side, Odysseus was generally counted as a win because it accomplished most of its tasks. Accordingly, NASA loaded a number of instruments onto the lander. Most notable among these was the PRIME-1 experiment, an ice drill to sample and analyze any ice that lies below the surface.

A dark day, but not the end

“After landing, mission controllers were able to accelerate several program and payload milestones, including NASA’s PRIME-1 suite, before the lander’s batteries depleted,” the company’s statement said. However, this likely means that the company was able to contact the instrument but not perform any meaningful scientific activities.

NASA has accepted that these commercial lunar missions are high-risk, high-reward. (Firefly’s successful landing last weekend offers an example of high rewards). It is paying the companies, on average, $100 million or less per flight. This is a fraction of what NASA would pay through a traditional procurement program. The hope is that, after surviving initial failures, companies like Intuitive Machines will learn from their mistakes and open a low-cost, reliable pathway to the lunar surface.

Even so, this failure has to be painful for NASA and Intuitive Machines. The space agency lost out on some valuable science, and Intuitive Machines has taken a step backward with this mission rather than moving forward as it had hoped to do.

Fortunately, this is unlikely to be the end for the company. NASA has committed to a third and fourth mission on Intuitive Machines’ lander, the next of which could come during the first quarter of 2026. NASA has also contracted with the company to build a small network of satellites around the Moon for communications and positioning services. So although the company’s fortunes look dark today, they are not permanently shadowed like the craters on the Moon that NASA hopes to soon explore.

After less than a day, the Athena lander is dead on the Moon Read More »

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White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent

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In many ways, NASA’s science directorate is the crown jewel of the space agency. Nearly all of the most significant achievements over the last 25 years have been delivered by the science programs: Ingenuity flying on Mars, New Horizons swooping by Pluto, images from the James Webb Space Telescope, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, the return of samples from asteroids and comets, Cassini’s discovery of water plumes on Enceladus, a continuous robotic presence on Mars, and so much more. Even the recent lunar landings by Firefly and Intuitive Machines were funded by NASA’s science directorate.

Of NASA’s roughly $25 billion budget, however, only about 30 percent is allocated to science. For fiscal year 2024, this amounted to $7.4 billion. This spending was broken down into approximately $2.7 billion for planetary science, $2.2 billion for Earth science, $1.5 billion for astrophysics, and $800 million for heliophysics.

NASA science funding since 1980.

Credit: Casey Dreier/The Planetary Society

NASA science funding since 1980. Credit: Casey Dreier/The Planetary Society

The proposed cuts are being driven by Russell Vought, the recently confirmed director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, which sets budget and policy priorities for a presidential administration. In some sense, the budgetary decisions should not come as a surprise, as they are consistent with what Vought proposed in a “shadow” budget for fiscal-year 2023 as part of his Center for Renewing America.

“The budget also proposes a 50 percent reduction in NASA Science programs and spending, reducing their misguided Carbon Reduction System spending and Global Climate Change programs,” Vought’s organization wrote in its report published in December 2022.

Zeroing out Earth science?

Despite Vought’s desire, however, NASA is expressly charged with studying our planet.

The congressional act that created NASA in 1958 calls for the space agency to expand human knowledge about Earth’s atmosphere and space, and the agency’s Earth observation satellites have substantially increased our understanding of this planet’s weather, changing climate, and land use.

Even if NASA’s Earth science budget were taken to zero, cutting the overall science budget in half would still dramatically reduce funding in planetary science as well as other research areas. Scientists told Ars that NASA would be forced to make difficult decisions, likely including shutting off extended missions such as the Voyager and Curiosity probes on Mars, and possibly even the Hubble Space Telescope. It might be possible to save missions in later stages of development, such as the Dragonfly probe to Saturn’s moon Titan, and the NEO Surveyor mission to search for hazardous asteroids. But it would be impossible to start meaningful new missions to explore the Solar System, potentially setting back planetary exploration a decade.

White House may seek to slash NASA’s science budget by 50 percent Read More »

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NASA officials undermine Musk’s claims about ‘stranded’ astronauts

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“We were looking at this before some of those statements were made by the President.”

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams aboard the International Space Station. Credit: NASA

Over the last month there has been something more than a minor kerfuffle in the space industry over the return of two NASA astronauts from the International Space Station.

The fate of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on June 5, 2024, has become a political issue after President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the astronauts’ return was held up by the Biden White House.

In February, Trump and Musk appeared on FOX News. During the joint interview, the subject of Wilmore and Williams came up. They remain in space today after NASA decided it would be best they did not fly home in their malfunctioning Starliner spacecraft—but would return in a SpaceX-built Crew Dragon.

“At the President’s request, or instruction, we are accelerating the return of the astronauts, which was postponed to a ridiculous degree,” Musk said.

“They got left in space,” Trump added.

“They were left up there for political reasons, which is not good,” Musk concluded.

After this interview, a Danish astronaut named Andreas Mogensen asserted that Musk was lying. “What a lie,” Mogensen wrote on the social media site Musk owns, X. “And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media.”

Musk offered a caustic response to Mogensen. “You are fully retarded,” Musk wrote. “SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons. Idiot.”

So what’s the truth?

NASA has not directly answered questions about this over the last month. However, the people who really know the answer lie within the human spaceflight programs at the space agency. After one news conference was canceled last month, two key NASA officials were finally made available on a media teleconference on Friday evening. These were Ken Bowersox, associate administrator, Space Operations Mission Directorate, and Steve Stich, manager, of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which is responsible for Starliner and Crew Dragon flights.

Musk is essentially making two claims. First, he is saying that last year SpaceX offered to bring Wilmore and Williams home from the International Space Station—and made the offer directly to the Biden Administration. And the offer was refused for “political” reasons.

Second, Musk says that, at Trump’s request, the return of Wilmore and Williams was accelerated. The pair is now likely to return home to Earth as part of the Crew 9 mission later this month, about a week after the launch of a new group of astronauts to the space station. This Crew 10 mission has a launch date of March 12, so Wilmore and Williams could finally fly home about two weeks from now.

Let’s examine each of Musk’s claims in light of what Bowersox and Stich said Friday evening.

Was Musk’s offer declined for political reasons?

On July 14, last year, NASA awarded SpaceX a special contract to study various options to bring Wilmore and Williams home on a Crew Dragon vehicle. At the time, the space agency was considering options if Starliner was determined to be unsafe. Among the options NASA was considering were to fly Wilmore and Williams home on the Crew 8 vehicle attached to the station (which would put an unprecedented six people in the capsule) or asking SpaceX to autonomously fly a Dragon to the station to return Wilmore and Williams separately.

“The SpaceX folks helped us with a lot of options for how we would bring Butch and Suni home on Dragon in a contingency,” Bowersox said during Friday’s teleconference. “When it comes to adding on missions, or bringing a capsule home early, those were always options. But we ruled them out pretty quickly just based on how much money we’ve got in our budget, and the importance of keeping crews on the International Space Station. They’re an important part of maintaining the station.”

As a result, the Crew 9 mission launched in September with just two astronauts. Wilmore and Williams joined that crew for a full, six-month increment on the space station.

Stich said NASA made that decision based on flight schedules to the space station and the orbiting laboratory’s needs. It also allowed time to send SpaceX spacesuits up for the pair of astronauts and to produce seat liners that would make their landing in the water, under parachutes, safe.

“When we laid all that out, the best option was really the one that we’re embarking upon now,” Stich said. “And so we did Crew 9, flying the two empty seats, flying a suit for Butch up, and also making sure that the seats were right for Butch’s anthropometrics, and Suni’s, to return them safely.”

So yes, SpaceX has been working with NASA to present options, including the possibility of a return last fall. However, those discussions were being held within the program levels and their leaders: Stich for Commercial Crew and Dana Weigel for the International Space Station.

“Dana and I worked to come up with a decision that worked for the Commercial Crew Program and Space Station,” Stich said. “And then, Ken (Bowersox), we all we had the Flight Readiness Review process with you, and the Administrator of NASA listened in as well. So we had a recommendation to the agency and that was on the process that we typically use.”

Bowersox confirmed that the decision was made at the programmatic level.

“That’s typically the way our decisions work,” Bowersox said. “The programs work what makes the most sense for them, programmatically, technically. We’ll weigh in at the headquarters level, and in this case we thought the plan that we came up with made a lot of sense.”

During the teleconference, a vice president at SpaceX, Bill Gerstenmaier, was asked directly what offer Musk was referring to when he mentioned the Biden administration. He did not provide a substantive answer.

Musk claims he made an offer directly to senior officials in the Biden Administration. We have no way to verify that, but it does seem clear that the Biden administration never communicated such an offer to lower-level officials within NASA, who made their decision for technical rather than political reasons.

“I think you know we work for NASA, and we worked with NASA cooperatively to do whatever we think was the right thing,” the SpaceX official, Gerstenmaier, replied. “You know, we were willing to support in any manner they thought was the right way to support. They came up with the option you heard described today by them, and we’re supporting that option.”

Did Trump tell NASA to accelerate Butch and Suni’s return?

As of late last year, the Crew 9 mission was due to return in mid-February. However, there was a battery issue with a new Dragon spacecraft that was going to be used to fly Crew 10 into orbit. As a result, NASA announced on December 17 that the return of the crew was delayed into late March or early April.

Then, on February 11, NASA announced that the Crew 10 launch was being brought forward to March 12. This was a couple of weeks earlier than planned, and it was possible because NASA and SpaceX decided to swap out Dragon capsules, using a previously flown vehicle—Crew Dragon Endurance—for Crew 10.

So was this change to accelerate the return of Wilmore and Williams politically driven?

The decision to swap to Endurance was made in late January, Stich said, and this allowed the launch date to be moved forward. Asked if political pressure was a reason, Stich said it was not. “It really was driven by a lot of other factors, and we were looking at this before some of those statements were made by the President and Mr. Musk,” he said.

Bowersox added that this was correct but also said that NASA appreciated the President’s interest in the space program.

“I can verify that Steve has been talking about how we might need to juggle the flights and switch capsules a good month before there was any discussion outside of NASA, but the President’s interest sure added energy to the conversation,” Bowersox said.

Photo of Eric Berger

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.

NASA officials undermine Musk’s claims about ‘stranded’ astronauts Read More »

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The X-37B spaceplane lands after helping pave the way for “maneuver warfare”

Boeing, military space, Science, Space, Vandenberg space force base, x-37b spaceplane / /

On this mission, military officials said the X-37B tested “space domain awareness technology experiments” that aim to improve the Space Force’s knowledge of the space environment. Defense officials consider the space domain—like land, sea, and air—a contested environment that could become a battlefield in future conflicts.

Last month, the Space Force released the first image of Earth from an X-37B in space. This image was captured in 2024 as the spacecraft flew in its high-altitude orbit, and shows a portion of the X-37B’s power-generating solar array. Credit: US Space Force

The Space Force hasn’t announced plans for the next X-37B mission. Typically, the next X-37B flight has launched within a year of the prior mission’s landing. So far, all of the X-37B flights have launched from Florida, with landings at Vandenberg and at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, where Boeing and the Space Force refurbish the spaceplanes between missions.

The aerobraking maneuvers demonstrated by the X-37B could find applications on future operational military satellites, according to Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of US Space Command.

“The X-37 is a test and experimentation platform, but that aerobraking maneuver allowed it to bridge multiple orbital regimes, and we think this is exactly the kind of maneuverability we’d like to see in future systems, which will unlock a whole new series of operational concepts,” Whiting said in December at the Space Force Association’s Spacepower Conference.

Space Command’s “astrographic” area of responsibility (AOR) starts at the top of Earth’s atmosphere and extends to the Moon and beyond.

“An irony of the space domain is that everything in our AOR is in motion, but rarely do we use maneuver as a way to gain positional advantage,” Whiting said. “We believe at US Space Command it is vital, given the threats we now see in novel orbits that are hard for us to get to, as well as the fact that the Chinese have been testing on-orbit refueling capability, that we need some kind of sustained space maneuver.”

Improvements in maneuverability would have benefits in surveilling an adversary’s satellites, as well as in defensive and offensive combat operations in orbit.

The Space Force could attain the capability for sustained maneuvers—known in some quarters as dynamic space operations—in several ways. One is to utilize in-orbit refueling that allows satellites to “maneuver without regret,” and another is to pursue more fuel-efficient means of changing orbits, such as aerobraking or solar-electric propulsion.

Then, Whiting said Space Command could transform how it operates by employing “maneuver warfare” as the Army, Navy and Air Force do. “We think we need to move toward a joint function of true maneuver advantage in space.”

The X-37B spaceplane lands after helping pave the way for “maneuver warfare” Read More »

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Rocket Report: Starship fails for a second time; what’s to blame for Vulcan delays?

rocket report, Space / /

“During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

The first commercial flight of Ariane 6, operated by Arianespace, lifts off on Thursday. Credit: Arianespace

Welcome to Edition 7.34 of the Rocket Report! What a day in space Thursday was. During the morning hours we saw the triumphant second flight of the Ariane 6 rocket, a pivotal moment for European sovereignty in space. Then Intuitive Machines had a partially successful landing on the Moon. And finally, on Thursday evening, SpaceX’s Starship failed during its second consecutive test flight.

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.

Firefly sets date for next Alpha launch. Having completed a static-fire test, Firefly Aerospace has set a target date of March 15 for the launch of its “Message in a Booster” mission. The Alpha rocket will launch Lockheed Martin’s LM 400 spacecraft from Vandenberg Space Force Base, with the 52-minute launch window opening at 6: 25 am PT (14: 25 UTC). Lockheed is self-funding the demonstration mission of its new satellite bus, the LM 400, which it says can serve civil, military, and commercial customers.

A slow build … This is Alpha’s second launch for Lockheed Martin, and the first of Firefly’s multi-launch agreement with the company that includes up to 25 missions over the next five years. Alpha is capable of lifting 1 metric ton to low-Earth orbit, and this will be the rocket’s sixth launch since its debut in September 2021. The company has recorded one failure, two partial failures, and two successes during the time. It’s been a slow ramp up for Alpha, with the rocket having launched just a single time in 2024, in July.

Isar Aerospace wins Asian launch contract. A Japanese microgravity services startup named ElevationSpace has become the first Asian customer for Germany’s Isar Aerospace, Space News reports. ElevationSpace said Monday it has booked a launch during the second half of 2026 with Isar Aerospace for AOBA, a 200-kilogram spacecraft designed to test a recoverable platform for space-based experiments and manufacturing. This is a hopeful sign that European startups will have commercial appeal beyond the continent.

Spectrum rocket nearing debut launch … The Japanese firm cited Isar Aerospace’s direct injection capability into low Earth orbit and flexible launch scheduling as key factors in its decision to sign the contract. Isar Aerospace said last month that Spectrum, designed to deliver up to 1,000 kilograms to low-Earth orbit, has completed static-fire testing and is prepared for its first flight from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway, pending final regulatory approval.

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A small launch site in French Guiana. The French space agency, CNES, has opened a public consultation period for the new multi-user micro-launcher facility at the Guiana Space Centre in French Guiana, European Spaceflight reports. Last month, the first of four public consultation sessions into the construction of the new Multi-Launcher Launch Complex at the Guiana Space Centre was held at Kourou Town Hall. In March 2021, CNES announced plans to transform the old Diamant launch site into a new multi-use facility for commercial micro-launcher providers, supporting rockets with payloads of up to 1,500 kilograms.

Lots of potential users … The final mission launched from the Guiana Space Centre’s Diamant facility lifted off in 1976, after which it was abandoned and left to be reclaimed by the jungle. In 2019, the site was earmarked for revitalization to serve as a testing ground for the Callisto and Themis reusable rocket booster demonstrators. This testing was, however, always going to serve as a temporary justification for the launch facility’s rebirth. In July 2022, CNES pre-selected Avio, HyImpulse, Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, PLD Space, Rocket Factory Augsburg, and Latitude to use the facility. However, MaiaSpace has since allocated the Guiana Space Centre’s old Soyuz launch pad for its partially reusable Maia rocket.

Firefly nets Earth science launch contract. Amid its successful lunar landing, forthcoming Alpha launch, and a new launch contract, Firefly is having one heck of a week. NASA revealed this week that it has selected Firefly Aerospace to launch a trio of Earth science smallsats that will study the formation of storms, Space News reports. The agency said March 4 that it awarded a task order through its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare (VADR) contract to Firefly to launch the three-satellite Investigation of Convective Updrafts mission.

Hello, Virginia … NASA did not disclose the value of the task order, a practice it has followed on other VADR awards. The three satellites will launch on a Firefly Alpha rocket from Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. NASA did not disclose a launch date in its announcement, but Firefly, in its own statement, said the launch would take place as soon as 2026. Firefly said it will launch the mission from Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia, which has been used by Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket and will also be used by Alpha and the future MLV rocket.

Ariane 6 delivers for Europe when it is needed. Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket lifted off Thursday from French Guiana and deployed a high-resolution reconnaissance satellite into orbit for the French military, notching a success on its first operational flight. “This is an absolute pleasure for me today to announce that Ariane 6 has successfully placed into orbit the CSO-3 satellite,” said David Cavaillolès, who took over in January as CEO of Arianespace, the Ariane 6’s commercial operator. “Today, here in Kourou, we can say that thanks to Ariane 6, Europe and France have their own autonomous access to space back, and this is great news.”

Can no longer rely on US rockets … This was the second flight of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket, following a mostly successful debut launch last July. The first test flight of the unproven Ariane 6 carried a batch of small, relatively inexpensive satellites. An auxiliary propulsion unit (APU)—essentially a miniature second engine—on the upper stage shut down in the latter portion of the inaugural Ariane 6 flight, after the rocket reached orbit and released some of its payloads. Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister for research and higher education, says Ariane 6 is “proof of our space sovereignty,” as many European officials feel they can no longer rely on the United States.

US launch facilities are not prepared for a surge. Rocket firm executives warned this week that the nation’s primary launch facilities may soon be unable to handle the projected surge in rocket launches, potentially hampering America’s competitiveness in the rapidly expanding commercial space sector, Space News reports. “I don’t think that people realize how many rockets are going to be launching five or eight years from now,” Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, said at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Conference in Aurora, Colorado.

Support needed for multiple daily launches … Limp’s concerns were echoed by executives from SpaceX and United Launch Alliance during a panel discussion, where all three agreed that the industry must collectively prepare for a future where multiple daily launches become the norm. Jon Edwards, SpaceX’s vice president of Falcon launch vehicles, highlighted that even at Cape Canaveral, the busiest US spaceport, current protocols don’t allow simultaneous launches by different providers.

Falcon 9 first stage fails to land safely. After what appeared to be a routine Starlink mission on Sunday, a Falcon 9 first stage landed on the Just Read the Instructions drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Shortly after the landing, however, a fire broke out in the aft end of the rocket. This damaged a landing leg and caused the rocket to topple over. Florida Today has video of the badly damaged rocket returning to Port Canaveral.

Space remains hard … The Starlink satellites safely reached orbit, so this did not impact the primary mission. However, Falcon 9 landings have become so seemingly routine, such a failure now stands out. This booster was relatively new, having launched three Starlink missions, GOES-U, and Maxar 3. It was only the first-stage booster’s fifth flight. To date, SpaceX has successfully flown a single booster 26 times.

India begins construction of a new launch site. The Indian space agency, ISRO, presently has two operational launch pads at the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The space agency launches Indian and foreign satellites aboard rockets like PSLV and GSLV from here. As it seeks to expand its launch activities, ISRO officially began constructing a new launch site at Kulasekaranpattinam, in Tamil Nadu, this week, The National reports.

Avoiding the dogs … The Kulasekaranpattinam launch site is strategically located near the equator. With open seas to the south of it, the site allows for direct southward launches over the Indian Ocean. This will minimize fuel consumption and maximize payload capacity for small satellite launch vehicles, particularly beneficial for cost-effective commercial satellite launches. The site also avoids the need for complex “dogleg” maneuvers around Sri Lanka.

SpaceX launches Starship on its eighth flight. SpaceX launched the eighth full-scale test flight of its enormous Starship rocket on Thursday evening after receiving regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. The test flight sought a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to achieve on the previous Starship launch in January, when the rocket broke apart and showered debris over the Atlantic Ocean and Turks and Caicos Islands.

Alas … Unfortunately for SpaceX, the Starship upper stage failed again, in a similar location, with similar impacts. About a minute before reaching the cutoff of the vehicle’s engines en route to space, the upper stage spun out of control and broke apart. “During Starship’s ascent burn, the vehicle experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly and contact was lost,” SpaceX said in a statement about an hour later. “Our team immediately began coordination with safety officials to implement pre-planned contingency responses.” Ars will have full coverage of what is a serious setback for the company.

Amazon culture comes to Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos has moved to introduce a tough Amazon-like approach to his rocket maker Blue Origin, as the world’s third-richest person seeks to revive a company that has lagged behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the Financial Times reports. The space company’s founder and sole shareholder has pushed to shift its internal culture with management hires from Amazon, while implementing policies akin to the e-commerce giant, including longer working hours and more aggressive targets.

Work-life balance, what? … Key to Bezos’s effort is chief executive Dave Limp. The former Amazon devices chief was appointed in late 2023 and has been followed in quick succession by several veterans from the $2.2 trillion tech giant, including supply chain chief Tim Collins, chief information officer Josh Koppelman, and chief financial officer Allen Parker. The changes in leadership have been accompanied by significant layoffs. In February, roughly 10 percent of Blue Origin’s more than 10,000-strong workforce was dismissed. Employees are now expected to work longer hours, and badge scanners have been introduced to track employee time similar to Amazon.

Space Force is to blame for Vulcan delays? The debut of United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket was delayed more than four years, ultimately from 2019 to January 2024. The first flight went very well, but during the second certification mission in October 2024 there was an anomaly with one of the two solid rocket boosters powering the vehicle. Although the rocket reached its intended orbit, this issue necessitated an investigation. Vulcan has yet to fly again, and with the certification process still ongoing, it is now likely to launch no earlier than sometime this summer.

Spacecraft end up moving to the right … No one is more interested in seeing Vulcan fly than the US Space Force, which has dozens of missions lined up for the rocket. These missions were supposed to be launched between 2022 and 2026. To make up for lost time, the Space Force now hopes to launch 11 national security missions this year (this almost certainly won’t happen). In a curious comment to Space News, Bruno appeared to put some of the blame for delays on the Space Force, rather than Vulcan’s tardiness: Bruno pointed out there is inherent unpredictability in national security launch schedules, noting that “about half of the spacecraft end up needing to move right, and they move right by a lot.” It is a weird comment to make with a rocket that is years late.

Next three launches

March 9: Falcon 9 | SPHEREx & PUNCH | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 03: 09 UTC

March 9: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-21 | Cape Canaveral, Fla. | 04: 10 UTC

March 10: Electron | The Lightning God Reigns | Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand | 00:oo UTC

Photo of Eric Berger

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.

Rocket Report: Starship fails for a second time; what’s to blame for Vulcan delays? Read More »

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The Starship program hits another speed bump with second consecutive failure

Commercial space, elon musk, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, starship, starship flight 8 / /

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Starship program hits another speed bump with second consecutive failure Read More »