Space – Page 4

Rocket Report: Canada invests in sovereign launch; India flexes rocket muscles

ariane 6, Arianespace, blue origin, Canada, Commercial space, launch, NASA, relativity space, rocket report, Science, Space, spacex, starship / Shannon Garcia / November 7, 2025

Europe’s Ariane 6 rocket gave an environmental monitoring satellite a perfect ride to space.

Rahul Goel, the CEO of Canadian launch startup NordSpace, poses with a suborbital demo rocket and members of his team in Toronto earlier this year. Credit: Andrew Francis Wallace/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Welcome to Edition 8.18 of the Rocket Report! NASA is getting a heck of a deal from Blue Origin for launching the agency’s ESCAPADE mission to Mars. Blue Origin is charging NASA about $20 million for the launch on the company’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. A dedicated ride on any other rocket capable of the job would undoubtedly cost more.

But there are trade-offs. First, there’s the question of risk. The New Glenn rocket is only making its second flight, and it hasn’t been certified by NASA or the US Space Force. Second, the schedule for ESCAPADE’s launch has been at the whim of Blue Origin, which has delayed the mission several times due to issues developing New Glenn. NASA’s interplanetary missions typically have a fixed launch period, and the agency pays providers like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance a premium to ensure the launch happens when it needs to happen.

New Glenn is ready, the satellites are ready, and Blue Origin has set a launch date for Sunday, November 9. The mission will depart Earth outside of the usual interplanetary launch window, so orbital dynamics wizards came up with a unique trajectory that will get the satellites to Mars in 2027.

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.

Canadian government backs launcher development. The federal budget released by the Liberal Party-led government of Canada this week includes a raft of new defense initiatives, including 182.6 million Canadian dollars ($129.4 million) for sovereign space launch capability, SpaceQ reports. The new funding is meant to “establish a sovereign space launch capability” with funds available this fiscal year and spent over three years. How the money will be spent and on what has yet to be released. As anticipated, Canada will have a new Defense Investment Agency (DIA) to oversee defense procurement. Overall, the government outlined 81.8 billion Canadian dollars ($58 billion) over five years for the Canadian Armed Forces. The Department of National Defense will manage the government’s cash infusion for sovereign launch capability.

Kick-starting an industry … Canada joins a growing list of nations pursuing homegrown launchers as many governments see access to space as key to national security and an opportunity for economic growth. International governments don’t want to be beholden to a small number of foreign launch providers from established space powers. That’s why startups in Germany, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Australia are making a play in the launch arena, often with government support. A handful of Canadian startups, such as Maritime Launch Services, Reaction Dynamics, and NordSpace, are working on commercial satellite launchers. The Canadian government’s announcement came days after MDA Space, the largest established space company in Canada, announced its own multimillion-dollar investment in Maritime Launch Services.

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Money alone won’t solve Europe’s space access woes. Increasing tensions with Russia have prompted defense spending boosts throughout Europe that will benefit fledgling smallsat launcher companies across the continent. But Europe is still years away from meeting its own space access needs, Space News reports. Space News spoke with industry analysts from two European consulting firms. They concluded that a lack of experience, not a deficit of money, is holding European launch startups back. None of the new crop of European rocket companies have completed a successful orbital flight.

Swimming in cash … The German company Isar Aerospace has raised approximately $600 million, the most funding of any of the European launch startups. Isar is also the only one of the bunch to make an orbital launch attempt. Its Spectrum rocket failed less than 30 seconds after liftoff last March, and a second launch is expected next year. Isar has attracted more investment than Rocket Lab, Firefly Aerospace, and Astra collectively raised on the private market before each of them successfully launched a rocket into orbit. In addition to Isar, several other European companies have raised more than $100 million on the road to developing a small satellite launcher. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Successful ICBM test from Vandenberg. Air Force Global Strike Command tested an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile in the predawn hours of Wednesday, Air and Space Forces Magazine reports. The test, the latest in a series of launches that have been carried out at regular intervals for decades, came as Russian President Vladimir Putin has touted the development of two new nuclear weapons and President Donald Trump has suggested in recent days that the US might resume nuclear testing. The ICBM launched from an underground silo at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and traveled some 4,200 miles to a test range in the Pacific Ocean after receiving launch orders from an airborne nuclear command-and-control plane.

Rehearsing for the unthinkable … The test, known as Glory Trip 254 (GT 254), provided a “comprehensive assessment” of the Minuteman III’s readiness to launch at a moment’s notice, according to the Air Force. “The data collected during the test is invaluable in ensuring the continued reliability and accuracy of the ICBM weapon system,” said Lt. Col. Karrie Wray, commander of the 576th Flight Test Squadron. For Minuteman III tests, the Air Force pulls its missiles from the fleet of some 400 operational ICBMs. This week’s test used one from F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyoming, and the missile was equipped with a single unarmed reentry vehicle that carried telemetry instrumentation instead of a warhead, service officials said. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

One crew launches, another may be stranded. Three astronauts launched to China’s Tiangong space station on October 31 and arrived at the outpost a few hours later, extending the station’s four-year streak of continuous crew operations. The Shenzhou 21 crew spacecraft lifted off on a Chinese Long March 2F rocket from the Jiuquan space center in the Gobi Desert. Shenzhou 21 is supposed to replace a three-man crew that has been on the Tiangong station since April, but China’s Manned Space Agency announced Tuesday the outgoing crew’s return craft may have been damaged by space junk, Ars reports.

Few details … Chinese officials said the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft will remain at the station while engineers investigate the potential damage. As of Thursday, China has not set a new landing date or declared whether the spacecraft is safe to return to Earth at all. “The Shenzhou 20 manned spacecraft is suspected of being impacted by small space debris,” Chinese officials wrote on social media. “Impact analysis and risk assessment are underway. To ensure the safety and health of the astronauts and the complete success of the mission, it has been decided that the Shenzhou 20 return mission, originally scheduled for November 5, will be postponed.” In the event Shenzhou 20 is unsafe to return, China could launch a rescue craft—Shenzhou 22—already on standby at the Jiuquan space center.

Falcon 9 rideshare boosts Vast ambitions. A pathfinder mission for Vast’s privately owned space station launched into orbit Sunday and promptly extended its solar panel, kicking off a shakedown cruise to prove the company’s designs can meet the demands of spaceflight, Ars reports. Vast’s Haven Demo mission lifted off just after midnight Sunday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and rode a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket into orbit. Haven Demo was one of 18 satellites sharing a ride on SpaceX’s Bandwagon 4 mission, launching alongside a South Korean spy satellite and a small testbed for Starcloud, a startup working with Nvidia to build an orbital data center.

Subscale testing … After release from the Falcon 9, the half-ton Haven Demo spacecraft stabilized itself and extended its power-generating solar array. The satellite captured 4K video of the solar array deployment, and Vast shared the beauty shot on social media. “Haven Demo’s mission success has turned us into a proven spacecraft company,” Vast’s CEO, Max Haot, posted on X. “The next step will be to become an actual commercial space station company next year. Something no one has achieved yet.” Vast plans to launch its first human-rated habitat, named Haven-1, into low-Earth orbit in 2026. Haven Demo lacks crew accommodations but carries several systems that are “architecturally similar” to Haven-1, according to Vast. For example, Haven-1 will have 12 solar arrays, each identical to the single array on Haven Demo. The pathfinder mission uses a subset of Haven-1’s propulsion system, but with identical thrusters, valves, and tanks.

Lights out at Vostochny. One of Russia’s most important projects over the last 15 years has been the construction of the Vostochny spaceport as the country seeks to fly its rockets from native soil and modernize its launch operations. Progress has been slow as corruption clouded Vostochny’s development. Now, the primary contractor building the spaceport, the Kazan Open Stock Company (PSO Kazan), has failed to pay its bills, Ars reports. The story, first reported by the Moscow Times, says that the energy company supplying Vostochny cut off electricity to areas of the spaceport still under construction after PSO Kazan racked up $627,000 in unpaid energy charges. The electricity company did so, it said, “to protect the interests of the region’s energy system.”

A dark reputation … Officials at the government-owned spaceport said PSO Kazan would repay its debt by the end of November, but the local energy company said it intends to file a lawsuit against KSO Kazan to declare the entity bankrupt. The two operational launch pads at Vostochny are apparently not affected by the power cuts. Vostochny has been a fiasco from the start. After construction began in 2011, the project was beset by hunger strikes, claims of unpaid workers, and the theft of $126 million. Additionally, a man driving a diamond-encrusted Mercedes was arrested after embezzling $75,000. Five years ago, there was another purge of top officials after another round of corruption.

Ariane 6 delivers for Europe again. European launch services provider Arianespace has successfully launched the Sentinel 1D Earth observation satellite aboard an Ariane 62 rocket for the European Commission, European Spaceflight reports. Launched in its two-booster configuration, the Ariane 6 rocket lifted off from the Guiana Space Center in South America on Tuesday. Approximately 34 minutes after liftoff, the satellite was deployed from the rocket’s upper stage into a Sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 693 kilometers (430 miles). Sentinel 1D is the newest spacecraft to join Europe’s Copernicus program, the world’s most expansive network of environmental monitoring satellites. The new satellite will extend Europe’s record of global around-the-clock radar imaging, revealing information about environmental disasters, polar ice cover, and the use of water resources.

Doubling cadence … This was the fourth flight of Europe’s new Ariane 6 rocket, and its third operational launch. Arianespace plans one more Ariane 62 launch to close out the year with a pair of Galileo navigation satellites. The company aims to double its Ariane 6 launch cadence in 2026, with between six and eight missions planned, according to David Cavaillès, Arianespace’s CEO. The European launch provider will open its 2026 manifest with the first flight of the more powerful four-booster variant of the rocket. If the company does manage eight Ariane 6 flights in 2026, it will already be close to reaching the stated maximum launch cadence of between nine and 10 flights per year.

India sets its own record for payload mass. The Indian Space Research Organization on Sunday successfully launched the Indian Navy’s advanced communication satellite GSAT-7R, or CMS-03, on an LVM3 rocket from the Satish Dhawan Space Center, The Hindu reports. The indigenously designed and developed satellite, weighing approximately 4.4 metric tons (9,700 pounds), is the heaviest satellite ever launched by an Indian rocket and marks a major milestone in strengthening the Navy’s space-based communications and maritime domain awareness.

Going heavy … The launch Sunday was India’s fourth of 2025, a decline from the country’s high-water mark of eight orbital launches in a year in 2023. The failure in May of India’s most-flown rocket, the PSLV, has contributed to this year’s slower launch cadence. India’s larger rockets, the GSLV and LVM3, have been more active while officials grounded the PSLV for an investigation into the launch failure. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Blue Origin preps for second flight of New Glenn. The road to the second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifting New Glenn rocket got a lot clearer this week. The company confirmed it is targeting Sunday, November 9, for the launch of New Glenn from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This follows a successful test-firing of the rocket’s seven BE-4 main engines last week, Ars reports. Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, said the engines operated at full power for 22 seconds, generating nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust on the launch pad.

Fully integrated … With the launch date approaching, engineers worked this week to attach the rocket’s payload shroud containing two NASA satellites set to embark on a journey to Mars. Now that the rocket is fully integrated, ground crews will roll it back to Blue Origin’s Launch Complex-36 (LC-36) for final countdown preps. The launch window on Sunday opens at 2: 45 pm EST (19: 45 UTC). Blue Origin is counting on recovering the New Glenn first stage on the next flight after missing the landing on the rocket’s inaugural mission in January. Officials plan to reuse this booster on the third New Glenn launch early next year, slated to propel Blue Origin’s first unpiloted Blue Moon lander toward the Moon.

Next three launches

Nov. 8: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-51 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 08: 30 UTC

Nov. 8: Long March 11H| Unknown Payload | Haiyang Spaceport, China Coastal Waters | 21: 00 UTC

Nov. 9: New Glenn | ESCAPADE | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 19: 45 UTC

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: Canada invests in sovereign launch; India flexes rocket muscles Read More »

After Russian spaceport firm fails to pay bills, electric company turns the lights off

corruption, Putin, roscosmos, russia, Space, vostochny / 9u50fv / November 6, 2025

The fall and rise of PSO Kazan

As minor as this dispute may seem, it’s remarkable that PSO Kazan is working on a spaceport in Russia at all.

PSO Kazan won the contract to build the launch site’s second pad, 1A for the Angara rocket, in December 2017. The pad was due to be completed in time for an Angara launch in 2021. The company is owned by a Russian billionaire from the city of Kazan, Ravil Ziganshin, previously known for building sports arenas in the Republic of Tatarstan on the other side of the country from Vostochny.

The adventure into spaceport construction did not go well. According to Russian Space Web, the contract for spaceport construction was not signed until October 2018. Months later, amid allegations of criminal activity and delays, Roscosmos moved to cancel the contract with PSO Kazan.

Other firms emerged as bidders on the contract to build the Angara launch pad, among them the Crocus Group. However, they and others later backed out, saying the Russian government was offering to pay far less money than it would actually cost to build the launch site.

“I said I was ready, but not for that amount of money,” Aras Agalarov, founder of the Crocus Group, explained in an interview at the time. “When they asked me, I said there were two pieces of news. The first was that the second phase of the cosmodrome could be built in two years. The second was that it couldn’t be built with the money allocated. If you increase the cost, you’ll get everything in two years. If not, I’m sorry.”

A toxic reputation?

And so Roscosmos—under the leadership of Dmitry Rogozin at the time—went crawling back to PSO Kazan to lead construction of the Angara launch pad.

“Independent observers were puzzled by the sudden about-face and wondered whether Roscosmos had such a toxic reputation in the construction business that it had failed to attract any other contender for the job and, as a result, the State Corporation had no choice but to keep the original contractor on the hook,” Russian Space Web concluded about the decision.

After years of delays and cost overruns, the Angara pad was eventually completed, with its first launch last November. There does not appear to be too much demand, however, as there has not yet been a second launch from the A1 pad since.

After Russian spaceport firm fails to pay bills, electric company turns the lights off Read More »

If you want to satiate AI’s hunger for power, Google suggests going to space

AI, artificial inteligence, Commercial space, Google, machine learning, planet labs, Science, Space / DJ Henderson / November 5, 2025

Google engineers think they already have all the pieces needed to build a data center in orbit.

With Project Suncatcher, Google will test its Tensor Processing Units on satellites. Credit: Google

It was probably always when, not if, Google would add its name to the list of companies intrigued by the potential of orbiting data centers.

Google announced Tuesday a new initiative, named Project Suncatcher, to examine the feasibility of bringing artificial intelligence to space. The idea is to deploy swarms of satellites in low-Earth orbit, each carrying Google’s AI accelerator chips designed for training, content generation, synthetic speech and vision, and predictive modeling. Google calls these chips Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs.

“Project Suncatcher is a moonshot exploring a new frontier: equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space,” Google wrote in a blog post.

“Like any moonshot, it’s going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges,” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, wrote on X. Pichai noted that Google’s early tests show the company’s TPUs can withstand the intense radiation they will encounter in space. “However, significant challenges still remain like thermal management and on-orbit system reliability.”

The why and how

Ars reported on Google’s announcement on Tuesday, and Google published a research paper outlining the motivation for such a moonshot project. One of the authors, Travis Beals, spoke with Ars about Project Suncatcher and offered his thoughts on why it just might work.

“We’re just seeing so much demand from people for AI,” said Beals, senior director of Paradigms of Intelligence, a research team within Google. “So, we wanted to figure out a solution for compute that could work no matter how large demand might grow.”

Higher demand will lead to bigger data centers consuming colossal amounts of electricity. According to the MIT Technology Review, AI alone could consume as much electricity annually as 22 percent of all US households by 2028. Cooling is also a problem, often requiring access to vast water resources, raising important questions about environmental sustainability.

Google is looking to the sky to avoid potential bottlenecks. A satellite in space can access an infinite supply of renewable energy and an entire Universe to absorb heat.

“If you think about a data center on Earth, it’s taking power in and it’s emitting heat out,” Beals said. “For us, it’s the satellite that’s doing the same. The satellite is going to have solar panels … They’re going to feed that power to the TPUs to do whatever compute we need them to do, and then the waste heat from the TPUs will be distributed out over a radiator that will then radiate that heat out into space.”

Google envisions putting a legion of satellites into a special kind of orbit that rides along the day-night terminator, where sunlight meets darkness. This north-south, or polar, orbit would be synchronized with the Sun, allowing a satellite’s power-generating solar panels to remain continuously bathed in sunshine.

“It’s much brighter even than the midday Sun on Earth because it’s not filtered by Earth’s atmosphere,” Beals said.

This means a solar panel in space can produce up to eight times more power than the same collecting area on the ground, and you don’t need a lot of batteries to reserve electricity for nighttime. This may sound like the argument for space-based solar power, an idea first described by Isaac Asimov in his short story Reason published in 1941. But instead of transmitting the electricity down to Earth for terrestrial use, orbiting data centers would tap into the power source in space.

“As with many things, the ideas originate in science fiction, but it’s had a number of challenges, and one big one is, how do you get the power down to Earth?” Beals said. “So, instead of trying to figure out that, we’re embarking on this moonshot to bring [machine learning] compute chips into space, put them on satellites that have the solar panels and the radiators for cooling, and then integrate it all together so you don’t actually have to be powered on Earth.”

SpaceX is driving down launch costs, thanks to reusable rockets and an abundant volume of Starlink satellite launches. Credit: SpaceX

Google has a mixed record with its ambitious moonshot projects. One of the most prominent moonshot graduates is the self-driving car kit developer Waymo, which spun out to form a separate company in 2016 and is now operational. The Project Loon initiative to beam Internet signals from high-altitude balloons is one of the Google moonshots that didn’t make it.

Ars published two stories last week on the promise of space-based data centers. One of the startups in this field, named Starcloud, is partnering with Nvidia, the world’s largest tech company by market capitalization, to build a 5 gigawatt orbital data center with enormous solar and cooling panels approximately 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) in width and length. In response to that story, Elon Musk said SpaceX is pursuing the same business opportunity but didn’t provide any details. It’s worth noting that Google holds an estimated 7 percent stake in SpaceX.

Strength in numbers

Google’s proposed architecture differs from that of Starcloud and Nvidia in an important way. Instead of putting up just one or a few massive computing nodes, Google wants to launch a fleet of smaller satellites that talk to one another through laser data links. Essentially, a satellite swarm would function as a single data center, using light-speed interconnectivity to aggregate computing power hundreds of miles over our heads.

If that sounds implausible, take a moment to think about what companies are already doing in space today. SpaceX routinely launches more than 100 Starlink satellites per week, each of which uses laser inter-satellite links to bounce Internet signals around the globe. Amazon’s Kuiper satellite broadband network uses similar technology, and laser communications will underpin the US Space Force’s next-generation data-relay constellation.

Artist’s illustration of laser crosslinks in space. Credit: TESAT

Autonomously constructing a miles-long structure in orbit, as Nvidia and Starcloud foresee, would unlock unimagined opportunities. The concept also relies on tech that has never been tested in space, but there are plenty of engineers and investors who want to try. Starcloud announced an agreement last week with a new in-space assembly company, Rendezvous Robotics, to explore the use of modular, autonomous assembly to build Starcloud’s data centers.

Google’s research paper describes a future computing constellation of 81 satellites flying at an altitude of some 400 miles (650 kilometers), but Beals said the company could dial the total swarm size to as many spacecraft as the market demands. This architecture could enable terawatt-class orbital data centers, according to Google.

“What we’re actually envisioning is, potentially, as you scale, you could have many clusters,” Beals said.

Whatever the number, the satellites will communicate with one another using optical inter-satellite links for high-speed, low-latency connectivity. The satellites will need to fly in tight formation, perhaps a few hundred feet apart, with a swarm diameter of a little more than a mile, or about 2 kilometers. Google says its physics-based model shows satellites can maintain stable formations at such close ranges using automation and “reasonable propulsion budgets.”

“If you’re doing something that requires a ton of tight coordination between many TPUs—training, in particular—you want links that have as low latency as possible and as high bandwidth as possible,” Beals said. “With latency, you run into the speed of light, so you need to get things close together there to reduce latency. But bandwidth is also helped by bringing things close together.”

Some machine-learning applications could be done with the TPUs on just one modestly sized satellite, while others may require the processing power of multiple spacecraft linked together.

“You might be able to fit smaller jobs into a single satellite. This is an approach where, potentially, you can tackle a lot of inference workloads with a single satellite or a small number of them, but eventually, if you want to run larger jobs, you may need a larger cluster all networked together like this,” Beals said.

Google has worked on Project Suncatcher for more than a year, according to Beals. In ground testing, engineers tested Google’s TPUs under a 67 MeV proton beam to simulate the total ionizing dose of radiation the chip would see over five years in orbit. Now, it’s time to demonstrate Google’s AI chips, and everything else needed for Project Suncatcher will actually work in the real environment.

Google is partnering with Planet, the Earth-imaging company, to develop a pair of small prototype satellites for launch in early 2027. Planet builds its own satellites, so Google has tapped it to manufacture each spacecraft, test them, and arrange for their launch. Google’s parent company, Alphabet, also has an equity stake in Planet.

“We have the TPUs and the associated hardware, the compute payload… and we’re bringing that to Planet,” Beals said. “For this prototype mission, we’re really asking them to help us do everything to get that ready to operate in space.”

Beals declined to say how much the demo slated for launch in 2027 will cost but said Google is paying Planet for its role in the mission. The goal of the demo mission is to show whether space-based computing is a viable enterprise.

“Does it really hold up in space the way we think it will, the way we’ve tested on Earth?” Beals said.

Engineers will test an inter-satellite laser link and verify Google’s AI chips can weather the rigors of spaceflight.

“We’re envisioning scaling by building lots of satellites and connecting them together with ultra-high bandwidth inter-satellite links,” Beals said. “That’s why we want to launch a pair of satellites, because then we can test the link between the satellites.”

Evolution of a free-fall (no thrust) constellation under Earth’s gravitational attraction, modeled to the level of detail required to obtain Sun-synchronous orbits, in a non-rotating coordinate system. Credit: Google

Getting all this data to users on the ground is another challenge. Optical data links could also route enormous amounts of data between the satellites in orbit and ground stations on Earth.

Aside from the technical feasibility, there have long been economic hurdles to fielding large satellite constellations. But SpaceX’s experience with its Starlink broadband network, now with more than 8,000 active satellites, is proof that times have changed.

Google believes the economic equation is about to change again when SpaceX’s Starship rocket comes online. The company’s learning curve analysis shows launch prices could fall to less than $200 per kilogram by around 2035, assuming Starship is flying about 180 times per year by then. This is far below SpaceX’s stated launch targets for Starship but comparable to SpaceX’s proven flight rate with its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.

It’s possible there could be even more downward pressure on launch costs if SpaceX, Nvidia, and others join Google in the race for space-based computing. The demand curve for access to space may only be eclipsed by the world’s appetite for AI.

“The more people are doing interesting, exciting things in space, the more investment there is in launch, and in the long run, that could help drive down launch costs,” Beals said. “So, it’s actually great to see that investment in other parts of the space supply chain and value chain. There are a lot of different ways of doing this.”

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Space junk may have struck a Chinese crew ship in low-Earth orbit

china, chinese space program, human spaceflight, Science, shenzhou, shenzhou 20, shenzhou 21, Space, tiangong / Beth Washington / November 5, 2025

Three Chinese astronauts were due to depart the Tiangong space station, reenter the atmosphere, and land in the remote desert of Inner Mongolia on Wednesday. Instead, officials ordered the crew to remain at the station while engineers investigate a potential problem with their landing craft.

The China Manned Space Agency, run by the country’s military, announced the change late Tuesday in a brief statement posted to Weibo, the Chinese social media platform.

“The Shenzhou 20 manned spacecraft is suspected of being impacted by small space debris,” the statement said. “Impact analysis and risk assessment are underway. To ensure the safety and health of the astronauts and the complete success of the mission, it has been decided that the Shenzhou 20 return mission, originally scheduled for November 5, will be postponed.”

What we know

The Shenzhou 20 astronauts arrived at the Tiangong station in April. Their replacements on the Shenzhou 21 mission docked with Tiangong on Friday, temporarily raising the station’s crew size to six people. After several days of joint operations, the six astronauts held a handover ceremony early Tuesday to formally transfer command of the outpost to the new crew.

Less than 24 hours later, Chinese officials decided to call off Shenzhou 20’s departure from Tiangong. The statement from the China Manned Space Agency did not say what part of the Shenzhou 20 spacecraft may have been damaged, what evidence led engineers to suspect space debris was the culprit, or how long Shenzhou 20’s departure might be postponed.

This view shows a Shenzhou spacecraft departing the Tiangong space station in 2023. Credit: China Manned Space Agency

The ship has three sections, with a landing capsule positioned between the crew living quarters and a power and propulsion module. The modules separate from one another before reentry, and the return craft heads for a parachute-assisted landing while the other elements burn up during atmospheric reentry.

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In a stunning comeback, Jared Isaacman is renominated to lead NASA

duffy, isaacman, nasa administrator, Space / Mike M. / November 5, 2025

President Trump announced Tuesday evening that he is renominating private astronaut Jared Isaacman to lead NASA.

“Jared’s passion for space, astronaut experience, and dedication to pushing the boundaries of exploration, unlocking the mysteries of the universe, and advancing the new space economy make him ideally suited to lead NASA into a bold new era,” Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social.

In his statement, Trump did not offer an explanation for why he found Isaacman acceptable now after pulling his original nomination in late May.

That decision was made for political reasons, ostensibly because Isaacman had made some donations to Democrats in the past. In reality, the leader of the White House Office of Personnel Management at the time, Sergio Gor, took advantage of Elon Musk’s departure from Washington, DC, to derail Isaacman, who has twice flown on SpaceX’s rockets into orbit.

Walking away graciously

Isaacman exited the field at the time, thanking Trump for the honor of the nomination. In July, Trump named his secretary of transportation, Sean Duffy, to lead the space agency on an interim basis. Trump expected Duffy to interview candidates and pick a full-time candidate.

In the ensuing months, however, Duffy settled into the NASA job, which comes with many opportunities for press appearances. He frequently gave interviews to Fox News and other television outlets about the space program, enjoying the positive publicity.

At the same time, Trump whisperers, such as former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, continued to press Isaacman’s case. They liked his mix of business background and spaceflight experience, as well as his desire to push NASA into the modern era of commercial space.

Over the last several weeks, it has become clear that Trump was reconsidering his decision, especially after Gor was confirmed as ambassador to India and left Washington, DC. Isaacman has had dinner with Trump multiple times, and the two have struck up a relationship.

In a stunning comeback, Jared Isaacman is renominated to lead NASA Read More »

A commercial space station startup now has a foothold in space

bandwagon, Commercial space, haven-1, low earth orbit, Space, space station, spacex, vast / Kelly Newman / November 4, 2025

The integration tasks still include installing Haven-1’s environmental control and life support elements, power, data, and thermal control systems, and thrusters, fuel tanks, and internal crew accommodations. While that work continues on Earth, Vast’s demo mission will validate some of the company’s designs in space.

Flying at an altitude of 300 miles (500 kilometers), Haven Demo will test Vast’s computer, power, software, guidance and control, propulsion, and radio systems. The pathfinder will also provide Vast an opportunity to exercise its ground stations and mission control teams.

Meanwhile, Vast will ship Haven-1 from its California headquarters to NASA’s Neil Armstrong Test Facility in Ohio for a rigorous environmental test campaign. The Haven-1 module, roughly 33 feet (10.1 meters) long and 14 feet (4.4 meters) wide, will undergo acoustics, vibration, and electromagnetic interference testing. Engineers will also place the habitat into a test chamber to check its performance in the extreme temperatures and airless vacuum environment of low-Earth orbit.

Then, Haven-1 will ship to Cape Canaveral, Florida, for final launch preparations. Vast’s official schedule calls for a launch of Haven-1 no earlier than May 2026, but there’s still a lot to do before the spacecraft is ready to travel to the launch site.

The primary structure of Vast’s Haven-1 habitat is seen undergoing structural testing in Mojave, California. Credit: Vast

Once in orbit, Haven-1 will host a series of crew visits flying on SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, each staying for two weeks before returning to Earth.

Haven-1 has a habitable volume of about 1,600 cubic feet (45 cubic meters), somewhat less than one of the primary modules on the International Space Station, but five times more than SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. Vast’s longer-term roadmap includes a larger multi-module space station called Haven-2 to support larger crews and longer expeditions in the 2030s.

Vast’s demo mission is an initial step toward these goals. The satellite now circling the planet carries several systems that are “architecturally similar” to Haven-1, according to Vast. For example, Haven-1 will have 12 solar arrays, each identical to the single array on Haven Demo. The pathfinder mission uses a subset of Haven-1’s propulsion system, but with identical thrusters, valves, and tanks.

A commercial space station startup now has a foothold in space Read More »

Capitol Hill is abuzz with talk of the “Athena” plan for NASA

duffy, isaacman, nasa administrator, Space / DJ Henderson / November 3, 2025

In recent weeks, copies of an intriguing policy document have started to spread among space lobbyists on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. The document bears the title “Athena,” and it purports to summarize the actions that private astronaut Jared Isaacman would have taken, were his nomination to become NASA administrator confirmed.

The 62-page plan is notable both for the ideas to remake NASA that it espouses as well as the manner in which it has been leaked to the space community.

After receiving a copy of this plan from an industry official, I spoke with multiple sources over the weekend to understand what is happening. Based upon this reporting there are clearly multiple layers to the story, which I want to unpack.

In the big picture, this leak appears to be part of a campaign by interim NASA Administrator Sean Duffy to either hold onto the high-profile job or, at the very least, prejudice the re-nomination of Isaacman to lead the space agency. Additionally, it is also being spread by legacy aerospace contractors who seek to protect their interests from the Trump administration’s goal of controlling spending and leaning into commercial space.

The Athena plan’s origin

The leaked document is 62 pages long and, according to sources, represents a pared-down version of a more comprehensive “Athena” plan devised by Isaacman and his advisors early in 2025, after President Trump nominated him to become NASA administrator.

The Athena plan lays out a blueprint for Isaacman’s tenure at NASA, seeking to return the space agency to “achieving the near impossible,” focusing on leading the world in human space exploration, igniting the space economy, and becoming a force multiplier for science.

Isaacman’s nomination was pulled in late May, largely for political reasons. Trump then appointed his Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, to oversee NASA on an interim basis in early July. As a courtesy, in August, Isaacman’s team edited a shorter version of the plan down to 62 pages and gave a copy to Duffy and his chief of staff, Pete Meachum.

Capitol Hill is abuzz with talk of the “Athena” plan for NASA Read More »

New Glenn rocket has clear path to launch after test-firing at Cape Canaveral

blue origin, Commercial space, escapade, launch, Mars, NASA, new glenn, Space / Beth Washington / November 1, 2025

The road to the second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifting New Glenn rocket got a lot clearer Thursday night with a success test-firing of the launcher’s seven main engines on a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Standing on a seaside launch pad, the New Glenn rocket ignited its seven BE-4 main engines at 9: 59 pm EDT Thursday (01: 59 UTC Friday). The engines burned for 38 seconds while the rocket remained firmly on the ground, according to a social media post by Blue Origin.

The hold-down firing of the first stage engines was the final major test of the New Glenn rocket before launch day. Blue Origin previously test-fired the rocket’s second-stage engines. Officials have not announced a target launch date, but sources tell Ars the rocket could be ready for liftoff as soon as November 9.

“Love seeing New Glenn’s seven BE-4 engines come alive! Congratulations to Team Blue on today’s hotfire,” the company’s CEO, Dave Limp, posted on X.

Blue Origin, the space company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, said the engines operated at full power for 22 seconds, generating nearly 3.9 million pounds of thrust. Limp said engineers extended this test-firing and shut down some of the BE-4 engines to simulate the booster’s landing burn sequence, which Blue Origin hopes will culminate in a successful touchdown on a barge floating downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.

“This helps us understand fluid interactions between active and inactive engine feedlines during landing,” Limp wrote.

Blue Origin is counting on recovering the New Glenn first stage on the next flight after missing the landing on the rocket’s inaugural mission in January. Officials plan to reuse this booster on the third New Glenn launch early next year, slated to propel Blue Origin’s first unpiloted Blue Moon lander toward the Moon. If Blue Origin fails to land this rocket, it’s unlikely a new first stage booster will be ready to launch until sometime later in 2026.

A few more things to do

With the test-firing complete, Blue Origin’s ground crew will lower the more than 320-foot-tall (98-meter) rocket and roll it back to a nearby hangar. There, technicians will inspect the vehicle and swap its payload fairing for another clamshell containing two NASA-owned spacecraft set to begin their journey to Mars.

New Glenn rocket has clear path to launch after test-firing at Cape Canaveral Read More »

Elon Musk on data centers in orbit: “SpaceX will be doing this”

data centers, Space, spacex, starlink / 9u50fv / October 31, 2025

Interest is growing rapidly

“The amount of momentum from heavyweights in the tech industry is very much worth paying attention to,” said Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, in an interview. “If they start putting money behind it, we could see another transformation of what’s done in space.”

The essential function of a data center is to store, process, and transmit data. Historically, satellites have already done a lot of this, Henry said. Telecommunications satellites specialize in transmitting data. Imaging satellites store a lot of data and then dump it when they pass over ground stations. In recent years, onboard computers have gotten more sophisticated at processing data. Data centers in space could represent the next evolution of that.

Critics rightly note that it would require very large satellites with extensive solar panels to power data centers that rival ground-based infrastructure. However, SpaceX’s Starlink V3 satellites are unlike any previous space-based technology, Henry said.

A lot more capacity

SpaceX’s current Starlink V2 mini satellites have a maximum downlink capacity of approximately 100 Gbps. The V3 satellite is expected to increase this capacity by a factor of 10, to 1 Tbps. This is not unprecedented in satellite capacity, but it certainly is at scale.

For example, Viasat contracted with Boeing for the better part of a decade, spending hundreds of millions of dollars, to build Viasat-3, a geostationary satellite with a capacity of 1 Tbps. This single satellite may launch next week on an Atlas V rocket.

SpaceX plans to launch dozens of Starlink V3 satellites—Henry estimates the number is about 60—on each Starship rocket launch. Those launches could occur as soon as the first half of 2026, as SpaceX has already tested a satellite dispenser on its Starship vehicle.

“Nothing else in the rest of the satellite industry that comes close to that amount of capacity,” Henry said.

Exactly what “scaling up” Starlink V3 satellites might look like is not clear, but it doesn’t seem silly to expect it could happen. The very first operational Starlink satellites launched a little more than half a decade ago with a mass of about 300 kg and a capacity of 15Gbps. Starlink V3 satellites will likely mass 1,500 kg.

Elon Musk on data centers in orbit: “SpaceX will be doing this” Read More »

NASA test flight seeks to help bring commercial supersonic travel back

Space, supersonic flight, supersonic travel, syndication, X-59 / DJ Henderson / October 31, 2025

The X-59 has successfully completed its inaugural flight.

Credit: Lockheed Martin/Michael Jackson

About an hour after sunrise over the Mojave Desert of Southern California, NASA’s newest experimental supersonic jet took to the skies for the first time on Tuesday. The X-59 Quesst (Quiet SuperSonic Technology) is designed to decrease the noise of a sonic boom when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier, paving the way for future commercial jets to fly at supersonic speeds over land.

The jet, built by Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, took off from US Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale, California. Flown by Nils Larson, NASA’s lead test pilot for the X-59, the inaugural flight validated the jet’s airworthiness and safety before landing about an hour after takeoff near NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California.

“X-59 is a symbol of American ingenuity,” acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said in a statement. “It’s part of our DNA—the desire to go farther, faster, and even quieter than anyone has ever gone before.”

Commercial planes are prohibited from flying at supersonic speeds over land in the US due to the disruption that breaking the sound barrier causes on the ground, releasing a loud sonic boom that can rattle windows and trigger alarms. The Concorde, which was the only successful commercial supersonic jet, was limited to flying at supersonic speeds only over the oceans.

When a plane approaches the speed of sound, pressure waves build up on the surface of the aircraft. These areas of high pressure coalesce into large shock waves when the plane goes supersonic, producing the double thunderclap of a sonic boom.

The X-59 is capable of reaching supersonic speeds, without the supersonic boom. Credit: Lockheed Martin/Gary Tice

The X-59 will generate a lower “sonic thump” thanks to its unique design. It was given a long, slender nose that accounts for about a third of the total length and breaks up pressure waves that would otherwise merge on other parts of the airplane. The engine was mounted on top of the X-59’s fuselage, rather than underneath as on a fighter jet, to keep a smooth underside that limits shock waves and also to direct sound waves up into the sky rather than down toward the ground. NASA aims to provide key data to aircraft manufacturers so they can build less noisy supersonic planes.

A jet like no other

The X-59 is a single-seat, single-engine jet. It is 99.7 feet long and 29.5 feet wide, making it almost twice as long as an F-16 fighter jet but with a slightly smaller wingspan. The X-59’s cockpit and ejection seat come from the T-38 jet trainer, its landing gear from an F-16, and its control stick from the F-117 stealth attack aircraft. Its engine, a modified General Electric F414 from the F/A-18 fighter jet, will allow the plane to cruise at Mach 1.4, about 925 mph, at an altitude of 55,000 feet. This is nearly twice as high and twice as fast as commercial airliners typically fly.

Perhaps the most striking change on the X-59 is that it does not have a glass cockpit window. Instead, the cockpit is fully enclosed to be as aerodynamic as possible, and the pilot watches a camera feed of the outside world on a 4K monitor known as the eXternal Visibility System.

“You can’t see very clearly through glass when you look at it at a very shallow angle, and so you need to have a certain steepness of the view screen to have good optical qualities, and that would develop a strong shock wave that would really corrupt the low-boom characteristics of the airplane,” says Michael Buonanno, the air vehicle lead for the X-59 at Lockheed Martin.

The X-59 has repurposed components of other NASA aircrafts. Credit: Lockheed Martin

For this first flight, the X-59 flew at a lower altitude and at about 240 mph, according to NASA. During future tests, the jet will gradually increase its speed and altitude until it goes supersonic, NASA said, which occurs at about 659 mph at 55,000 feet, or 761 mph at sea level. The speed of sound varies according to temperature and to a lesser degree pressure, causing it to decrease at higher altitudes.

“The primary objective on a first flight is really just to land,” James Less, a project pilot for the X-59 who will be conducting future flights, tells WIRED. Less flew an F-15 fighter jet in formation with the X-59 as a support aircraft during the flight, observing the new experimental jet for any issues.

“I’m looking for anything external to the airplane that the pilot can’t see,” Less says. Generally the first thing he would check for is that the landing gear retracted successfully, but on this initial flight the X-59 intentionally left the landing gear down. “If the aircraft is leaking any kind of fluids, be it fuel or hydraulics, as a chase pilot, you can usually see that… Also I’m looking for other traffic, air traffic, just to point that out to him.”

Following the X-59’s successful touchdown at Armstrong, NASA and Lockheed Martin engineers will review the flight data to prepare for the jet’s future, faster flights.

The design of the X-59 includes a nose that makes up most of the length of the craft, designed to help reduce noise. Credit: NASA/Steve Freeman

The future of supersonic flight

The eXternal Visibility System is just one of the modern technologies needed to build a low-boom airplane like the X-59. Decades of computational fluid dynamics research and wind tunnel testing were also required to arrive at the final design.

“We’ve really had the opportunity to spend a lot of time on the computational fluid dynamics application to these low-boom aircraft,” Lori Ozoroski, the commercial supersonic technology project manager at NASA, tells WIRED. “We’ve gone from this computational domain around an aircraft of something that’s got a couple of million cells as you divide up the space around it to… things with a couple million cells, and now we’re pushing a billion cells.”

Once the X-59 gets up to speed, the next step will be to make sure the quieter sonic thumps really are tolerable for people on the ground.

“We have been planning a test campaign where we will fly over various communities in the US, polling them with a survey and understanding how annoyed people are,” Ozoroski says. The flights will produce both loud and quiet sonic booms to see how people react, she explains.

“Our plan is to gather all this data, doing approximately one-month tests in a couple of locations around the country, and then providing all that data to the FAA and the international regulatory community to try to establish a sound limit, rather than the speed limit.”

If the program is a success, it could pave the way for new commercial supersonic aircraft that would cut travel times in half, something that companies such as Boom Supersonic are trying to achieve.

The jet has joined the ranks of innovative NASA X-planes, dating back almost 80 years to the Bell X-1 that Chuck Yeager piloted on the first faster-than-sound flight in 1947.

“I grew up reading Popular Science and Popular Mechanics and reading about the X-planes out at Edwards, and never imagined that I’d be in a position to do something like this,” says Less, who is eagerly awaiting his turn at the X-59’s stick. “This will be the highlight of my career.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

NASA test flight seeks to help bring commercial supersonic travel back Read More »

SpaceX teases simplified Starship as alarms sound over Moon landing delays

artemis, artemis iii, china, Commercial space, launch, moon, NASA, Space, spacex, starship / Mike M. / October 31, 2025

“SpaceX shares the goal of returning to the Moon as expeditiously as possible.”

Artist’s illustration of Starship on the surface of the Moon. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX on Thursday released the most detailed public update in nearly two years on its multibillion-dollar contract to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA, amid growing sentiment that China is likely to beat the United States back to the lunar surface with humans.

In a lengthy statement published on SpaceX’s website Thursday, the company said it “will be a central enabler that will fulfill the vision of NASA’s Artemis program, which seeks to establish a lasting presence on the lunar surface… and ultimately forge the path to land the first humans on Mars.”

Getting to Mars is SpaceX’s overarching objective, a concise but lofty mission statement introduced by Elon Musk at the company’s founding nearly a quarter-century ago. Musk has criticized NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to return US astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the last Apollo lunar mission in 1972, as unambitious and too reliant on traditional aerospace contractors.

Is this a priority for SpaceX?

The Starship rocket and its massive Super Heavy booster are supposed to be SpaceX’s solution for fulfilling Musk’s mission of creating a settlement on Mars. The red planet has been the focus each time Musk has spoken at length about Starship in the last couple of years, with Moon missions receiving little or no time in his comments, whether they’re scripted or off the cuff.

In the background, SpaceX’s engineers have been busy developing a version of the Starship rocket to fly crews to and from the surface of the Moon for NASA. The agency’s current architecture calls for astronauts to transit from the Earth to the vicinity of the Moon inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft, made by Lockheed Martin, then link up with Starship in lunar orbit for a ride to the Moon’s south pole.

After completing their mission on the surface, the astronauts will ride Starship back into space and dock with Orion to bring them home. Starship and Orion may also link together by docking at the planned Gateway mini-space station orbiting the Moon, but Gateway’s future is in question as NASA faces budget cuts.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX valued at more than $4 billion to land two astronaut crews on the Moon on NASA’s Artemis III and Artemis IV missions. The contract also covers milestones ahead of any human mission, such as an uncrewed Starship landing and takeoff at the Moon, to prove the vehicle is ready.

SpaceX’s Starship descends toward the Indian Ocean at the conclusion of Flight 11 on October 3. Credit: SpaceX

The fresh update from SpaceX lists recent achievements the company has accomplished on the path to the Moon, including demos of life support and thermal control systems, the docking adapter to link Starship with Orion, navigation hardware and software, a landing leg structural test, and engine firings in conditions similar to what the ship will see at the Moon.

Many of these milestones were completed ahead of schedule, SpaceX said. But the biggest tests, such as demonstrating in-orbit refueling, remain ahead. Some NASA officials believe mastering orbital refueling will take many tries, akin to SpaceX’s iterative two steps forward, one step back experience with its initial Starship test flights.

The first test to transfer large amounts of cryogenic liquid methane and liquid oxygen between two Starships in low-Earth orbit is now planned for next year. This time a year ago, SpaceX aimed to launch the first orbital refueling demo before the end of 2025.

Orbital refueling is key to flying Starship to the Moon or Mars. The rocket consumes all of its propellant getting to low-Earth orbit, and it needs more gas to go farther. For lunar missions, SpaceX will launch a Starship-derived propellant depot into orbit, refill it with perhaps a dozen or more Starship tankers, and then dock the Starship lander with it to load its tanks before heading off to the Moon.

Officials haven’t given a precise number of tanker flights required for a Starship lunar lander. It’s likely engineers won’t settle on an exact number until they obtain data on how much of the super-cold liquid propellant boils off in space, and how efficient it is to transfer from ship to ship. Whatever the number, SpaceX says Starship’s design for recovery and rapid reuse will facilitate a fast-paced launch and refueling campaign.

SpaceX tests the elevator to be used on Starship. Credit: SpaceX

The upshot of overcoming the refueling hurdle is Starship’s promise of becoming a transformative vehicle. Starship is enormous compared to any other concept for landing on the Moon. One single Starship has a pressurized habitable volume of more than 600 cubic meters, or more than 21,000 cubic feet, roughly two-thirds that of the entire International Space Station, according to SpaceX. Starship will have dual airlocks, or pathways for astronauts and equipment to exit and enter the spacecraft.

An elevator will lower people and cargo down to the lunar surface from the crew cabin at the top of the 15-story-tall spacecraft. For pure cargo missions, SpaceX says Starship will be capable of landing up to 100 metric tons of cargo directly on the Moon’s surface. This would unlock the ability to deliver large rovers, nuclear reactors, or lunar habitats to the Moon in one go. In the long run, the Starship architecture could allow landers to be reused over and over again. All of this is vital if NASA wants to build a permanent base or research outpost on the Moon.

A competition in more ways than one

But hard things take time. SpaceX dealt with repeated setbacks in the first half of this year: three in-flight failures of Starship and one Starship explosion on the ground at the company’s development facility in South Texas. Since then, teams have reeled off consecutive successful Starship test flights ahead of the debut of an upgraded Starship variant called Version 3 in the coming months. Starship Version 3 will have the accoutrements for refueling, and SpaceX says this will also be the version to fly to the Moon.

The recent Starship delays, coupled with the scope of work to go, have raised concerns that the Artemis program is falling behind China’s initiative to land its own astronauts on the Moon. China’s goal is to do it by 2030, a schedule reiterated in Chinese state media this week. The Chinese program relies on an architecture more closely resembling NASA’s old Apollo designs.

The official schedule for the first Artemis crew landing, on Artemis III, puts it in 2027, but that timeline is no longer achievable. Starship and new lunar spacesuits developed by Axiom Space won’t be ready, in part because NASA didn’t award the contracts to SpaceX and Axiom until 2021 and 2022.

All of this adds up to waning odds that the United States can beat China back to the Moon, according to a growing chorus of voices in the space community. Last month, former NASA chief Jim Bridenstine, who led the agency during the first Trump administration, told Congress the United States was likely to lose the second lunar space race.

At a space conference earlier this week, Bridenstine suggested the Trump administration use its powers to fast-track a lunar landing, even floating the idea of invoking the Defense Production Act, a law that grants the president authority to marshal industrial might to meet pressing national needs.

An executive order from President Donald Trump could authorize such an effort and declare a “national security imperative that we’re going to beat China to the Moon,” Bridenstine said at the American Astronautical Society’s von Braun Space Exploration Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

Charlie Bolden, NASA’s administrator under former President Barack Obama, also expressed doubts that NASA could land humans on the Moon before China, or by the end of Trump’s term in the White House. “Let’s be real, OK? Everybody in this room knows, to say we’re going to do it by the end of the term, or we’re going to do it before the Chinese, that doesn’t help industry.”

But Bolden said maybe it’s not so terrible if China lands people on the Moon before NASA can return with astronauts. “We may not make 2030, and that’s OK with me, as long as we get there in 2031 better than they are with what they have there.”

Sean Duffy, NASA’s acting administrator, doesn’t see it the same way. Duffy said last week he would give contractors until this Wednesday to propose other ways of landing astronauts on the Moon sooner than the existing plan. SpaceX and Blue Origin, the space company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos, confirmed they submitted updated plans to NASA this week.

SpaceX released a new rendering of the internal crew cabin for the Starship lunar lander. Credit: SpaceX

Blue Origin has a separate contract with NASA to provide its own human-rated lunar lander—Blue Moon Mark 2—for entry into service on the Artemis V mission, likely not to occur before the early 2030s. A smaller unpiloted lander—Blue Moon Mark 1—is on track to launch on Blue Origin’s first lunar landing attempt next year.

Blue Moon Mark 1 is still a big vehicle, standing taller than the lunar lander used by NASA during the Apollo program. But it doesn’t match the 52-foot (16-meter) height of Blue Origin’s Mark 2 lander, and tops out well short of the roughly 165-foot-tall (50-meter) Starship lander.

What’s more, Blue Moon Mark 1 won’t need to be refueled after launch, unlike Starship and Mark 2. Jacki Cortese, senior director of civil space at Blue Origin, confirmed Tuesday that her company is looking at employing a “more incremental approach” using Mark 1 to accelerate an Artemis crew landing. Ars first reported Blue Origin was studying how to modify Blue Moon Mark 1 for astronauts.

All of this is a reminder of something Blue Origin said in 2021, when NASA passed over Bezos’ company to award the first Artemis lander contract to SpaceX. Blue Origin protested the award and filed a lawsuit against the government, triggering a lunar lander work stoppage that lasted several months until a federal judge dismissed the suit.

Blue Origin said SpaceX’s approach with numerous refueling sorties was “immensely complex and high risk” and argued its proposal was the better option for NASA. The statement has taken on a meme-worthy status among fans of Starship.

But SpaceX bid a lower cost, and NASA officials said it was the only proposal the agency could afford at the time. And then, when Blue Origin won a contract from NASA in 2023 to provide a second lander option, the company’s concept also hinged on refueling the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander in space.

Now, SpaceX is making a new offering to NASA. Like Blue Origin, SpaceX said it has sent in a proposal for a “simplified architecture” for landing astronauts on the Moon, but did not provide details.

“We’ve shared and are formally assessing a simplified mission architecture and concept of operations that we believe will result in a faster return to the Moon while simultaneously improving crew safety,” the company said.

Since NASA selected SpaceX for the Human Landing System contract in 2021, the company said it has been “consistently responsive to NASA as requirements for Artemis III have changed.”

For example, NASA originally required SpaceX to only demonstrate it could land Starship on the Moon before moving forward with a crew mission. Lori Glaze, who leads NASA’s human exploration division, said in July that the agency is now requiring the uncrewed landing demo to also include an ascent from the Moon’s surface. NASA wants to know if Starship can not just land astronauts on the Moon, but also get them back.

“Starship continues to simultaneously be the fastest path to returning humans to the surface of the Moon and a core enabler of the Artemis program’s goal to establish a permanent, sustainable presence on the lunar surface,” SpaceX said. “SpaceX shares the goal of returning to the Moon as expeditiously as possible, approaching the mission with the same alacrity and commitment that returned human spaceflight capability to America under NASA’s Commercial Crew program.”

An artist’s illustration of multiple Starships on the lunar surface, with a Moon base in the background. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX has built a reputation for doing things quickly. One example has been the rapid-fire launch cadence of the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX is setting up launch pads and factories to manufacture and launch Super Heavy and Starship—combining together to make the largest rocket ever built—at an even faster rate than Falcon 9.

The company has launched 11 full-scale test flights of Starship/Super Heavy since April 2023. “This campaign has quickly matured the core Starship and has produced numerous feats,” SpaceX said. The company listed some of them:

Multiple successful ascents of the world’s most powerful rocket
The launch, return, catch, and reuse of that rocket to unlock the high launch rate cadence needed for lunar missions
The transfer of approximately 5 metric tons of cryogenic propellant between tanks while in space
Successful in-space relights of the Raptor engines that are critical for the maneuvers that will send Starship to the Moon
Multiple controlled reentries through Earth’s atmosphere

It’s true that these feats have come fast. Many more remain on the road ahead before SpaceX can make good on its commitment to NASA.

SpaceX teases simplified Starship as alarms sound over Moon landing delays Read More »

Rocket Report: SpaceX surpasses shuttle launch total; Skyroot has big ambitions

rocket report, Space / 9u50fv / October 31, 2025

All the news that’s fit to lift

“I do think we’re rapidly approaching the point where it will be a significant impact.”

Expedition 1’s Soyuz-U launch vehicle is transported to its launch pad in October 2000. Credit: NASA

Welcome to Edition 8.17 of the Rocket Report! Tomorrow marks the 25th anniversary of the first crewed launch to the International Space Station on a Soyuz rocket from Baikonur. Since this time, humans have lived in space continuously, even through spacecraft accidents and wars on Earth. This is a remarkable milestone that all of humanity can celebrate.

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.

Skyroot nearing first launch with big ambitions. Three years after India opened up its space sector to private companies, Hyderabad-based Skyroot Aerospace is targeting its first full-scale commercial satellite launch mission in January 2026, Mint reports. After this debut flight, Skyroot is targeting a launch every three months next year, and one every month from 2027. Each satellite launch mission is expected to generate the company nearly $5 million, according to Skyroot chief executive Pawan Chandana.

A promising start … Skyroot became India’s first space startup to demonstrate a rocket launch when it sent up a smaller version of its satellite vehicle from Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh in November 2022. There are several other Indian launch startups, but Skyroot appears to be the most promising. Even so, a launch cadence of every three months next year seems highly ambitious. A single, successful launch in 2026 would be a great step forward.

Canadian spaceport gets infusion of cash. Maritime Launch Services will receive a senior credit facility for up to 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.1 million) from Canada’s government-owned export credit agency for defense, telecommunications, and weather-monitoring needs, Payload reports. Spaceport Nova Scotia, which is the Atlantic launching facility for MLS, will use the money to build out infrastructure and a launch pad for orbital missions. Half of the money will be advanced immediately, with more available as construction costs arise.

Going up from up there … Canada used to have a Manitoba spaceport when the United States was in a “space race” for military supremacy in the 1950s and 1960s. After hosting decades of Black Brant sounding rocket flights, officials closed the spaceport in 1985. Canada now mainly uses foreign launchers, in part because the government deemed building sovereign capability too costly. But Canadian companies (inspired by SpaceX) are moving to build their own facilities and rockets. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Sign Me Up!

ArcaSpace is dead, replaced by … a fashion company. Somehow I missed this news when it came out a year ago, but I’m including it now for completeness. For a quarter of a century, a Romania-based rocket organization, ArcaSpace, had been promising to revolutionize spaceflight. But that meme dream ended in late 2024 when the group rebranded itself as ArcaFashion. “The ArcaFashion products are designed and manufactured on the shoulders of innovation and cutting-edge technological achievements, using the vast aerospace capabilities of ArcaSpace,” the group said. Their early products look, well, you decide.

But wait, there’s more … Before it went away, ArcaSpace released a video of its “accomplishments” to date, meant to be a sizzle reel of sorts. This popped into my feed this week because the madlads at Arca apparently aren’t done in aerospace. They put out a new video showing some bonkers-looking vehicle they’re calling “ArcaBoard2,” which purports to be a vertical takeoff personal electric vehicle. Maybe don’t be one of the early customers for this.

HTV-launch launches, docks with space station. Japan’s H3 rocket launched a new spacecraft, the HTV-X, last weekend from a launch pad on Tanegashima Island. This cargo ship pulled alongside the International Space Station on Wednesday, maneuvering close enough for the lab’s robotic arm to reach out and grab it, Ars reports. The HTV-X spacecraft is an upgraded cargo freighter replacing Japan’s H-II Transfer Vehicle, which successfully resupplied the space station nine times between 2009 and 2020.

An improved design … At the conclusion of the first HTV program, Japan’s space agency preferred to focus its resources on designing a new cargo ship with more capability at a lower cost. That’s what HTV-X is supposed to be, and Wednesday’s high-flying rendezvous marked the new ship’s first delivery to the ISS. At 26 feet (8 meters) long, the HTV-X is somewhat shorter than the vehicle it replaces. But an improved design gives the HTV-X more capacity, with the ability to accommodate more than 9,000 pounds (4.1 metric tons) inside its pressurized cargo module, about 25 percent more than the HTV. (submitted by tsunam)

India seeks dramatic increase in launch cadence. The chairman of the Indian space agency, V. Narayanan, has told The Times of India that the country seeks to dramatically scale up its annual launch cadence to 50 missions a year. He said the goal is to grow the country’s ecosystem of government-sponsored and private launches, and that the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has set a goal of 50 launches a year by the end of this decade.

A big step up … “We are working on it,” Narayanan said of his government’s request. He said the country currently has just two active launch sites, which is a constraint on activity, but that new facilities will soon come online. By the end of 2027, he said that 30 launches a year will be possible. Given that India has recently averaged about five launches annually, this would represent a significant step up in overall activity.

SpaceX breaks Vandenberg turnaround record, twice. SpaceX continued its rapid pace of launches Monday with the flight of a Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Starlink 11-21 flight broke the record for the fastest pad turnaround for SpaceX’s West Coast launch pad, flying two days, 10 hours, 22 minutes, and 59 seconds since the Starlink 11-12 mission on Saturday, Spaceflight Now reports.

Going fast, and then faster … And oh, by the way, the previous record beaten by Monday’s flight was two days, 18 hours, 52 minutes, and 20 seconds, which was set during the past week. This milestone comes after the company set another turnaround record over at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station earlier this month. SpaceX clearly is continuing to seek to optimize Falcon 9 operations and is having some success.

Ariane 6 upper stage engine production moves to Germany. ArianeGroup will transfer responsibility for the assembly of Ariane 6 Vinci upper-stage engines from Vernon, France, to Lampoldshausen, Germany, European Spaceflight reports. The agreement will also see the transfer of responsibility for the development of the Ariane 6 oxygen turbopump from Avio’s headquarters in Colleferro to Vernon.

A whole seven launches per year … Each Vinci engine for Ariane 6 will now be assembled, integrated, and tested at Lampoldshausen. To support this process, a new production facility will be built. The engines will then be transferred to Bremen for integration with the rocket’s upper stage. According to ArianeGroup, the transfer will “optimize the competitiveness of Ariane 6,” helping to secure the “financial viability of Ariane 6 with a rate of 7 launches per year.”

SpaceX surpasses 2024 launch total. On Saturday morning, SpaceX launched a batch of Starlink satellites that marked the company’s 135th Falcon 9 launch of the year, Spaceflight Now reports. This broke the company’s record number of orbital launches achieved in all of 2024. The mission came nearly a week after SpaceX launched its 10,000th Starlink satellite to date.

A big number in another way … The number 135 is symbolic in another way. That’s equal to the number of NASA’s space shuttles over the 30-year lifetime of the program. That is to say, SpaceX will launch more Falcon 9 rockets this year than shuttles launched by NASA in three decades. The contours of spaceflight have certainly changed.

Amid shutdown, NASA trying to keep Artemis II on schedule. It has been nearly one month since many parts of the federal government shut down after lawmakers missed a budget deadline at the end of September, but so far, NASA’s most critical operations have been unaffected by the political impasse in Washington, DC. That may change soon, Ars reports. Federal civil servants and NASA contractors are not getting paid during the shutdown, even if agency leaders have deemed their tasks essential and directed them to continue working.

A significant impact soon … Many employees at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida remain at work, where their job is to keep the Artemis II mission on schedule for launch as soon as next February. Even while work continues, the government shutdown is creating inefficiencies that, if left unchecked, will inevitably impact the Artemis II schedule. And some officials are starting to sound the alarm. Kirk Shireman, vice president and program manager for Orion at Lockheed Martin, said this week, “I do think we’re rapidly approaching the point where it will be a significant impact.”

Variant of China’s Moon rocket to take flight. China aims to conduct the first launch of its Long March 10 rocket and a lunar-capable crew spacecraft next year, Space News reports. “The Long March 10 carrier rocket, the Mengzhou crew spacecraft, the Lanyue lunar lander, the Wangyu lunar suit, and the Exploration crew lunar rover have completed the main work of the prototype stage,” Zhang Jingbo, spokesperson for China’s human spaceflight program, said Thursday at a pre-launch press conference for the Shenzhou-21 mission at Jiuquan spaceport.

China appears on track for pre-2030 landing … Though not explicitly stated, Mengzhou will likely fly on a two-stage, single-stick variant of the Long March 10, which is used for low Earth orbit (LEO) missions. The full, three-stage, 92.5-meter-tall Long March 10 for lunar flights will use three 5-meter-diameter first stages bundled together, each powered by seven YF-100K variable thrust kerosene-liquid oxygen engines. Zhang did not state if the first flight would be crewed or uncrewed, nor if the mission would head to the Tiangong space station. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

October 31: Long March 2 | Shenzhou 21 crewed flight | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China| 15: 44 UTC

October 31: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-23 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, Calif. | 20: 06 UTC

Nov. 2: Falcon 9 | Bandwagon-4 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla. | 05: 09 UTC

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.

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