Space – Page 7

Some parts of Trump’s proposed budget for NASA are literally draconian

darpa, DRACO, NASA, nasa budget, nuclear thermal propulsion, Science, Space, White House / Kelly Newman / June 3, 2025

“That’s exactly the kind of thing that NASA should be concentrating its resources on.”

Artist’s illustration of the DRACO nuclear rocket engine in space. Credit: Lockheed Martin

New details of the Trump administration’s plans for NASA, released Friday, revealed the White House’s desire to end the development of an experimental nuclear thermal rocket engine that could have shown a new way of exploring the Solar System.

Trump’s NASA budget request is rife with spending cuts. Overall, the White House proposes reducing NASA’s budget by about 24 percent, from $24.8 billion this year to $18.8 billion in fiscal year 2026. In previous stories, Ars has covered many of the programs impacted by the proposed cuts, which would cancel the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft and terminate numerous robotic science missions, including the Mars Sample Return, probes to Venus, and future space telescopes.

Instead, the leftover funding for NASA’s human exploration program would go toward supporting commercial projects to land on the Moon and Mars.

NASA’s initiatives to pioneer next-generation space technologies are also hit hard in the White House’s budget proposal. If the Trump administration gets its way, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, or STMD, will see its budget cut nearly in half, from $1.1 billion to $568 million.

Trump’s budget request isn’t final. Both Republican-controlled houses of Congress will write their own versions of the NASA budget, which must be reconciled before going to the White House for President Trump’s signature.

“The budget reduces Space Technology by approximately half, including eliminating failing space propulsion projects,” the White House wrote in an initial overview of the NASA budget request released May 2. “The reductions also scale back or eliminate technology projects that are not needed by NASA or are better suited to private sector research and development.”

Breathing fire

Last week, the White House and NASA put a finer point on these “failing space propulsion projects.”

“This budget provides no funding for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion and Nuclear Electric Propulsion projects,” officials wrote in a technical supplement released Friday detailing Trump’s NASA budget proposal. “These efforts are costly investments, would take many years to develop, and have not been identified as the propulsion mode for deep space missions. The nuclear propulsion projects are terminated to achieve cost savings and because there are other nearer-term propulsion alternatives for Mars transit.”

Foremost among these cuts, the White House proposes to end NASA’s participation in the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) project. NASA said this proposal “reflects the decision by our partner to cancel” the DRACO mission, which would have demonstrated a nuclear thermal rocket engine in space for the first time.

NASA’s partner on the DRACO mission was the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon’s research and development arm. A DARPA spokesperson confirmed the agency was closing out the project.

“DARPA has completed the agency’s involvement in the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit (DRACO) program and is transitioning its knowledge to our DRACO mission partner, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and to other potential DOD programs,” the spokesperson said in a response to written questions.

A nuclear rocket engine, which was to be part of NASA’s aborted NERVA program, is tested at Jackass Flats, Nevada, in 1967. Credit: Corbis via Getty Images)

Less than two years ago, NASA and DARPA announced plans to move forward with the roughly $500 million DRACO project, targeting a launch into Earth orbit aboard a traditional chemical rocket in 2027. “With the help of this new technology, astronauts could journey to and from deep space faster than ever, a major capability to prepare for crewed missions to Mars,” former NASA administrator Bill Nelson said at the time.

The DRACO mission would have consisted of several elements, including a nuclear reactor to rapidly heat up super-cold liquid hydrogen fuel stored in an insulated tank onboard the spacecraft. Temperatures inside the engine would reach nearly 5,000° Fahrenheit, boiling the hydrogen and driving the resulting gas through a nozzle, generating thrust. From the outside, the spacecraft’s design looks a lot like the upper stage of a traditional rocket. However, theoretically, a nuclear thermal rocket engine like DRACO’s would offer twice the efficiency of the highest-performing conventional rocket engines. That translates to significantly less fuel that a mission to Mars would have to carry across the Solar System.

Essentially, a nuclear thermal rocket engine combines the high-thrust capability of a chemical engine with some of the fuel efficiency benefits of low-thrust solar-electric engines. With DRACO, engineers sought hard data to verify their understanding of nuclear propulsion and wanted to make sure the nuclear engine’s challenging design actually worked. DRACO would have used high-assay low-enriched uranium to power its nuclear reactor.

Nuclear electric propulsion uses an onboard nuclear reactor to power plasma thrusters that create thrust by accelerating an ionized gas, like xenon, through a magnetic field. Nuclear electric propulsion would provide another leap in engine efficiency beyond the capabilities of a system like DRACO and may ultimately offer the most attractive option for enduring deep space transportation.

NASA led the development of DRACO’s nuclear rocket engine, while DARPA was responsible for the overall spacecraft design, operations, and the thorny problem of securing regulatory approval to launch a nuclear reactor into orbit. The reactor on DRACO would have launched in “cold” mode before activating in space, reducing the risk to people on the ground in the event of a launch accident. The Space Force agreed to pay for DRACO’s launch on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan rocket.

DARPA and NASA selected Lockheed Martin as the lead contractor for the DRACO spacecraft in 2023. BWX Technologies, a leader in the US nuclear industry, won the contract to develop the mission’s reactor.

“We received the notice from DARPA that it ended the DRACO program,” a Lockheed Martin spokesperson said. “While we’re disappointed with the decision, it doesn’t change our vision of how nuclear power influences how we will explore and operate in the vastness of space.”

Mired in the lab

More than 60 years have passed since a US-built nuclear reactor launched into orbit. Aviation Week reported in January that one problem facing DRACO engineers involved questions about how to safely test the nuclear thermal engine on the ground while adhering to nuclear safety protocols.

“We’re bringing two things together—space mission assurance and nuclear safety—and there’s a fair amount of complexity,” said Matthew Sambora, a DRACO program manager at DARPA, in an interview with Aviation Week. At the time, DARPA and NASA had already given up on a 2027 launch to concentrate on developing a prototype engine using helium as a propellant before moving on to an operational engine with more energetic liquid hydrogen fuel, Aviation Week reported.

Greg Meholic, an engineer at the Aerospace Corporation, highlighted the shortfall in ground testing capability in a presentation last year. Nuclear thermal propulsion testing “requires that engine exhaust be scrubbed of radiologics before being released,” he wrote. This requirement “could result in substantially large, prohibitively expensive facilities that take years to build and qualify.”

These safety protocols weren’t as stringent when NASA and the Air Force first pursued nuclear propulsion in the 1960s. Now, the first serious 21st-century effort to fly a nuclear rocket engine in space is grinding to a halt.

“Given that our near-term human exploration and science needs do not require nuclear propulsion, current demonstration projects will end,” wrote Janet Petro, NASA’s acting administrator, in a letter accompanying the Trump administration’s budget release last week.

This figure illustrates the major elements of a typical nuclear thermal rocket engine. Credit: NASA/Glenn Research Center

NASA’s 2024 budget allocated $117 million for nuclear propulsion work, an increase from $91 million the previous year. Congress added more funding for NASA’s nuclear propulsion programs over the Biden administration’s proposed budget in recent years, signaling support on Capitol Hill that may save at least some nuclear propulsion initiatives next year.

It’s true that nuclear propulsion isn’t required for any NASA missions currently on the books. Today’s rockets are good at hurling cargo and people off planet Earth, but once a spacecraft arrives in orbit, there are several ways to propel it toward more distant destinations.

NASA’s existing architecture for sending astronauts to the Moon uses the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, both of which are proposed for cancellation and look a lot like the vehicles NASA used to fly astronauts to the Moon more than 50 years ago. SpaceX’s reusable Starship, designed with an eye toward settling Mars, uses conventional chemical propulsion, with methane and liquid oxygen propellants that SpaceX one day hopes to generate on the surface of the Red Planet.

So NASA, SpaceX, and other companies don’t need nuclear propulsion to beat China back to the Moon or put the first human footprints on Mars. But there’s a broad consensus that in the long run, nuclear rockets offer a better way of moving around the Solar System.

The military’s motive for funding nuclear thermal propulsion was its potential for becoming a more efficient means of maneuvering around the Earth. Many of the military’s most important spacecraft are limited by fuel, and the Space Force is investigating orbital refueling and novel propulsion methods to extend the lifespan of satellites.

NASA’s nuclear power program is not finished. The Trump administration’s budget proposal calls for continued funding for the agency’s fission surface power program, with the goal of fielding a nuclear reactor that could power a base on the surface of the Moon or Mars. Lockheed and BWXT, the contractors involved in the DRACO mission, are part of the fission surface power program.

There is some funding in the White House’s budget request for tech demos using other methods of in-space propulsion. NASA would continue funding experiments in long-term storage and transfer of cryogenic propellants like liquid methane, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen. These joint projects between NASA and industry could pave the way for orbital refueling and orbiting propellant depots, aligning with the direction of companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance.

But many scientists and engineers believe nuclear propulsion offers the only realistic path for a sustainable campaign ferrying people between the Earth and Mars. A report commissioned by NASA and the National Academies concluded in 2021 that an aggressive tech-development program could advance nuclear thermal propulsion enough for a human expedition to Mars in 2039. The prospects for nuclear electric propulsion were murkier.

This would have required NASA to substantially increase its budget for nuclear propulsion immediately, likely by an order of magnitude beyond the agency’s baseline funding level, or to an amount exceeding $1 billion per year, said Bobby Braun, co-chair of the National Academies report, in a 2021 interview with Ars. That didn’t happen.

Going nuclear

The interplanetary transportation architectures envisioned by NASA and SpaceX will, at least initially, primarily use chemical propulsion for the cruise between Earth and Mars.

Kurt Polzin, chief engineer of NASA’s space nuclear propulsion projects, said significant technical hurdles stand in the way of any propulsion system selected to power heavy cargo and humans to Mars.

“Anybody who says that they’ve solved the problem, you don’t know that because you don’t have enough data,” Polzin said last week at the Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit in Washington.

“We know that to do a Mars mission with a Starship, you need lots of refuelings at Earth, you need lots of refuelings at Mars, which you have to send in advance,” Polzin said. “You either need to send that propellant in advance or send a bunch of material and hardware to the surface to be set up and robotically make your propellant in situ while you’re there.”

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is betting on chemical propulsion for round-trip flights to Mars with its Starship rocket. This will require assembly of propellant-generation plants on the Martian surface. Credit: SpaceX

Last week, SpaceX founder Elon Musk outlined how the company plans to land its first Starships on Mars. His roadmap includes more than 100 cargo flights to deliver equipment to produce methane and liquid oxygen propellants on the surface of Mars. This is necessary for any Starship to launch off the Red Planet and return to Earth.

“You can start to see that this starts to become a Rube Goldberg way to do Mars,” Polzin said. “Will I say it can’t work? No, but will I say that it’s really, really difficult and challenging. Are there a lot of miracles to make it work? Absolutely. So the notion that SpaceX has solved Mars or is going to do Mars with Starship, I would challenge that on its face. I don’t think the analysis and the data bear that out.”

Engineers know how methane-fueled rocket engines perform in space. Scientists have created liquid oxygen and liquid methane since the late 1800s. Scaling up a propellant plant on Mars to produce thousands of tons of cryogenic liquids is another matter. In the long run, this might be a suitable solution for Musk’s vision of creating a city on Mars, but it comes with immense startup costs and risks. Still, nuclear propulsion is an entirely untested technology as well.

“The thing with nuclear is there are challenges to making it work, too,” Polzin said. “However, all of my challenges get solved here at Earth and in low-Earth orbit before I leave. Nuclear is nice. It has a higher specific impulse, especially when we’re talking about nuclear thermal propulsion. It has high thrust, which means it will get our astronauts there and back quickly, but I can carry all the fuel I need to get back with me, so I don’t need to do any complicated refueling at Mars. I can return without having to make propellant or send any pre-positioned propellant to get back.”

The tug of war over nuclear propulsion is nothing new. The Air Force started a program to develop reactors for nuclear thermal rockets at the height of the Cold War. NASA took over the Air Force’s role a few years later, and the project proceeded into the next phase, called the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA). President Richard Nixon ultimately canceled the NERVA project in 1973 after the government had spent $1.4 billion on it, equivalent to about $10 billion in today’s dollars. Despite nearly two decades of work, NERVA never flew in space.

Doing the hard things

The Pentagon and NASA studied several more nuclear thermal and nuclear electric propulsion initiatives before DRACO. Today, there’s a nascent commercial business case for compact nuclear reactors beyond just the government. But there’s scant commercial interest in mounting a full-scale nuclear propulsion demonstration solely with private funding.

Fred Kennedy, co-founder and CEO of a space nuclear power company called Dark Fission, said most venture capital investors lack the appetite to wait for financial returns in nuclear propulsion that they may see in 15 or 20 years.

“It’s a truism: Space is hard,” said Kennedy, a former DARPA program manager. “Nuclear turns out to be hard for reasons we can all understand. So space-nuclear is hard-squared, folks. As a result, you give this to your average associate at a VC firm and they get scared quick. They see the moles all over your face, and they run away screaming.”

But commercial launch costs are coming down. With sustained government investment and streamlined regulations, “this is the best chance we’ve had in a long time” to get a nuclear propulsion system into space, Kennedy said.

Technicians prepare a nozzle for a prototype nuclear thermal rocket engine in 1964. Credit: NASA

“I think, right now, we’re in this transitional period where companies like mine are going have to rely on some government largesse, as well as hopefully both commercial partnerships and honest private investment,” Kennedy said. “Three years ago, I would have told you I thought I could have done the whole thing with private investment, but three years have turned my hair white.”

Those who share Kennedy’s view thought they were getting an ally in the Trump administration. Jared Isaacman, the billionaire commercial astronaut Trump nominated to become the next NASA administrator, promised to prioritize nuclear propulsion in his tenure as head of the nation’s space agency.

During his Senate confirmation hearing in April, Isaacman said NASA should turn over management of heavy-lift rockets, human-rated spacecraft, and other projects to commercial industry. This change, he said, would allow NASA to focus on the “near-impossible challenges that no company, organization, or agency anywhere in the world would be able to undertake.”

The example Isaacman gave in his confirmation hearing was nuclear propulsion. “That’s something that no company would ever embark upon,” he told lawmakers. “There is no obvious economic return. There are regulatory challenges. That’s exactly the kind of thing that NASA should be concentrating its resources on.”

But the White House suddenly announced on Saturday that it was withdrawing Isaacman’s nomination days before the Senate was expected to confirm him for the NASA post. While there’s no indication that Trump’s withdrawal of Isaacman had anything to do with any specific part of the White House’s funding plan, his removal leaves NASA without an advocate for nuclear propulsion and a number of other projects falling under the White House’s budget ax.

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

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Tuesday Telescope: A time-lapse from orbit reveals treasures below

daily telescope, Space, tuesday telescope / Beth Washington / June 3, 2025

Welcome to the Tuesday Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

I did not expect to feature NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers in the Tuesday Telescope so soon, but a recent photo she shared is just sublime. (In case you missed it, we wrote about her photo of lightning from space about a month ago.)

This week Ayers has a time-lapse sequence she captured from the Cupola as the International Space Station soared near Central and South America.

“Soooooo much going on in this picture,” Ayers wrote on the social media site X. “You can see Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, with South America off in the distance.”

The most distinct feature is a lightning strike near Panama City. This illuminates the clouds below. Above the strike is a reddish phenomenon known as a sprite, which sometimes occurs in the atmosphere between 50 and 90 km above a lightning strike near the surface of the planet. This appears to be a “jellyfish” sprite. It is rendered beautifully.

But wait, there’s more! The lightning strike is so bright that its reflection can be seen in the space station’s structure, at the top of the image. Additionally the atmosphere’s airglow can be clearly seen in the orange line just above the atmosphere.

All in all, it’s a wonderful photo, and I can’t wait to see what other treasures Ayers sends down from on high.

Source: Nichole Ayers/NASA

Do you want to submit a photo for the Daily Telescope? Reach out and say hello.

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Trump pulls Isaacman nomination for space. Source: “NASA is f***ed”

isaacman, NASA, Space, Trump / Shannon Garcia / June 1, 2025

Musk was a key factor behind Isaacman’s nomination as NASA administrator, and with his backing, Isaacman was able to skip some of the party purity tests that have been applied to other Trump administration nominees. One mark against Isaacman is that he had recently donated money to Democrats. He also indicated opposition to some of the White House’s proposed cuts to NASA’s science budget.

Musk’s role in the government was highly controversial, winning him enemies both among opponents of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda as well as inside the administration. One source told Ars that, with Musk’s exit, his opponents within the administration sought to punish him by killing Isaacman’s nomination.

The loss of Isaacman is almost certainly a blow to NASA, which faces substantial budget cuts. The Trump Administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2026, released Friday, seeks $18.8 billion for the agency next year—a 24 percent cut from the agency’s budget of $24.8 billion for FY 2025.

Going out of business?

Isaacman is generally well-liked in the space community and is known to care deeply about space exploration. Officials within the space agency—and the larger space community—hoped that having him as NASA’s leader would help the agency restore some of these cuts.

Now? “NASA is f—ed,” one current leader in the agency told Ars on Saturday.

“NASA’s budget request is just a going-out-of-business mode without Jared there to innovate,” a former senior NASA leader said.

The Trump administration did not immediately name a new nominee, but two people told Ars that former US Air Force Lieutenant General Steven L. Kwast may be near the top of the list. Now retired, Kwast has a distinguished record in the Air Force and is politically loyal to Trump and MAGA.

However, his background seems to be far less oriented toward NASA’s civil space mission and far more focused on seeing space as a battlefield—decidedly not an arena for cooperation and peaceful exploration.

Trump pulls Isaacman nomination for space. Source: “NASA is f***ed” Read More »

Testing a robot that could drill into Europa and Enceladus

astronomy, Enceladus, Europa, exobiology, icy moon, planetary science, Science, Space / DJ Henderson / May 31, 2025

We don’t currently have a mission to put it on, but NASA is making sure it’s ready.

Geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus Credit: NASA

Europa and Enceladus are two ocean moons that scientists have concluded have liquid water oceans underneath their outer icy shells. The Europa Clipper mission should reach Europa around April of 2030. If it collects data hinting at the moon’s potential habitability, robotic lander missions could be the only way to confirm if there’s really life in there or not.

To make these lander missions happen, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory team has been working on a robot that could handle the search for life and already tested it on the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska. “At this point this is a pretty mature concept,” says Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist at JPL who led this effort.

Into the unknown

There are only a few things we know for sure about conditions on the surface of Europa, and nearly all of them don’t bode well for lander missions. First, Europa is exposed to very harsh radiation, which is a problem for electronics. The window of visibility—when a potential robotic lander could contact Earth—lasts less than half of the 85 hours it takes for the moon to complete its day-night cycle due to the Europa-Jupiter orbit. So, for more than half the mission, the robot would need to fend for itself, with no human ground teams to get it out of trouble. The lander would also need to run on non-rechargeable batteries, because the vast distance to the Sun would make solar panels prohibitively massive.

And that’s just the beginning. Unlike on Mars, we don’t have any permanent orbiters around Europa that could provide a communication infrastructure, and we don’t have high-resolution imagery of the surface, which would make the landing particularly tricky. “We don’t know what Europa’s surface looks like at the centimeter to meter scale. Even with the Europa Clipper imagery, the highest resolution will be about half a meter per pixel across a few select regions,” Hand explains.

Because Europa has an extremely thin atmosphere that doesn’t provide any insulation, the temperatures on top of its ice shell are estimated to vary between minus-160° Celsius during the daytime maximum and minus-220° C during the night, which means the ice the lander would be there to sample is most likely hard as concrete. Hand’s team, building their robot, had to figure out a design that could deal with all these issues.

The work on the robotic system for the Europa lander mission began more than 10 years ago. Back then, the 2013–2022 decadal strategy for planetary science cited the Europa Clipper as the second-highest priority large-scale planetary mission, so a lander seemed like a natural follow-up.

Autonomy and ice drilling

The robot developed by Hand’s team has legs that enable it to stabilize itself on various types of surfaces, from rock-hard ice to loose, soft snow. To orient itself in the environment, it uses a stereoscopic camera with an LED light source for illumination hooked to computer-vision algorithms—a system similar to the one currently used by the Perseverance rover on Mars. “Stereoscopic cameras can triangulate points in an image and build a digital surface topography model,” explains Joseph Bowkett, a JPL researcher and engineer who worked on the robot’s design.

The team built an entirely new robotic arm with seven degrees of freedom. Force torque sensors installed in most of its joints act a bit like a nervous system, informing the robot when key components sustain excessive loads to prevent it from damaging the arm or the drill. “As we press down on the surface [and] conduct drilling and sampling, we can measure the forces and react accordingly,” Bowkett says. The finishing touch was the ICEPICK, a drilling and sampling tool the robot uses to excavate samples from the ice up to 20 centimeters deep.

Because of long periods the lander would need operate without any human supervision, the team also gave it a wide range of autonomous systems, which operate at two different levels. High-level autonomy is responsible for scheduling and prioritizing tasks within a limited energy budget. The robot can drill into a sampling site, analyze samples with onboard instruments, and decide whether it makes sense to keep drilling at the same spot or choose a different sampling site. The high-level system is also tasked with choosing the most important results for downlink back to Earth.

Low-level autonomy breaks all these high-level tasks down into step-by-step decisions on how to operate the drill and how to move the arm in the safest and most energy-efficient way.

The robot was tested in simulation software first, then indoors at JPL’s facilities, and finally at the Matanuska Glacier in Alaska, where it was lowered from a helicopter that acted as a proxy for a landing vehicle. It was tested at three different sites, ranked from the easiest to the most challenging. It completed all the baseline activities as well as all of the extras. The latter included a task like drilling 27 centimeters deep into ice at the most difficult site, where it was awkwardly positioned on an eight-to-12-degree slope. The robot passed all the tests with flying colors.

And then it got shelved.

Switching the ocean worlds

Hand’s team put their Europa landing robot through the Alaskan field test campaign between July and August 2022. But when the new decadal strategy for planetary science came out in 2023, it turned out that the Europa lander was not among the missions selected. The National Academies committee responsible for formulating these decadal strategies did not recommend giving it a go, mainly because they believed harsh radiation in the Jovian system would make detecting biosignatures “challenging” for a lander.

An Enceladus lander, on the other hand, remained firmly on the table. “I was also on the team developing EELS, a robot intended for a potential Enceladus mission, so thankfully I can speak about both. The radiation challenges are indeed far greater for Europa,” Bowkett says.

Another argument for changing our go-to ocean world is that water plumes containing salts along with carbon- and nitrogen-bearing molecules have already been observed on Enceladus, which means there is a slight chance biosignatures could be detected by a flyby mission. The surface of Enceladus, according to the decadal strategy document, should be capable of preserving biogenic evidence for a long time and seems more conducive to a lander mission. “Luckily, many of the lessons on how to conduct autonomous sampling on Europa, we believe, will transfer to Enceladus, with the benefit of a less damaging radiation environment,” Bowkett told Ars.

The dream of a Europa landing is not completely dead, though. “I would love to get into the Europa’s ocean with a submersible and further down to the seafloor. I would love for that to happen,” Hand says. “But technologically it’s quite a big leap, and you always have to balance your dream missions with the number of technological miracles that need to be solved to make these missions possible.”

Science Robotics, 2025. DOI: 10.1126/scirobotics.adi5582

Jacek Krywko is a freelance science and technology writer who covers space exploration, artificial intelligence research, computer science, and all sorts of engineering wizardry.

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Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on “exotic” missions

artemis, blue origin, Commercial space, dave limp, Jeff Bezos, launch, Mars, moon, Science, Space / DJ Henderson / May 30, 2025

“There’s not yet a commercial reason only to go to the Moon with humans.”

In this long exposure photograph, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket pierces a cloud deck over Florida’s Space Coast on its inaugural flight January 16. Credit: Blue Origin

Eighteen months after leaving his job as a vice president at Amazon to take over as Blue Origin’s chief executive, Dave Limp has some thoughts on how commercial companies and government agencies like NASA should explore the Solar System together.

Limp had no background in the space industry before taking the helm of Jeff Bezos’ space company in December 2023. He started his career as a computer scientist at Apple, took a stint at a venture capital firm, and joined Amazon in 2010, where he managed development of consumer devices like Alexa, Kindle, and the Fire TV.

“I had no thoughts of ever running a space company,” Limp said Thursday at a space conference in Washington, DC. “I’ve done consumer electronics my whole life. Started at Apple and did a bunch of other things, and so when I decided to retire from Amazon, I was looking for something that I could give back a little bit, be a little bit more philanthropic in the sort of second half of my career. I didn’t want to stop working, just wanted to do something different. And about that same time, Jeff was looking for a CEO.”

While he’s still a relative newcomer to the space business, Limp’s views align with those of many policy wonks and industry leaders who have the ears of senior officials in the Trump administration, including Jared Isaacman, President Trump’s nominee to become the next NASA administrator. Limp’s long tenure at Amazon and his selection as Blue Origin’s new CEO demonstrate that he also has the trust of Bezos, who was dissatisfied with his company’s slow progress in spaceflight.

“I think Jeff convinced me, and he’s very persuasive, that Blue didn’t need another rocket scientist,” Limp said. “We have thousands of the world’s best rocket scientists. What we needed was a little bit more decisiveness, a little bit more ability to think about: How do we manufacture at scale? And those are things I’ve done in the past, and so I’ve never looked back.”

David Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, speaks during the 2025 Humans to the Moon and Mars Summit at George Washington University in Washington, DC, on May 29, 2025. Credit: Alex Wroblewski / AFP via Getty Images

Leave it to us

In remarks Thursday at the Humans to the Moon & Mars Summit, Limp advocated for commercial companies, like his own, taking a larger role in developing the transportation and infrastructure to meet lofty national objectives established by government leaders.

In some ways, NASA has long been moving in this direction, beginning with initiatives ceding most launch services to private industry in the 1990s. More recently, NASA has turned to commercial companies for crew and cargo deliveries to the International Space Station and cargo and human-rated Moon landers.

However, NASA, with the backing of key congressional leaders, has held an iron grip on having its own heavy-lift launcher and crew capsule to ferry astronauts between Earth and destinations beyond low-Earth orbit. Now, these vehicles—the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft—may be canceled if Congress agrees with Trump’s proposed NASA budget.

Commercial rockets close to matching or exceeding the Space Launch System’s lift capability are available for purchase or likely will be soon. These include SpaceX’s Starship mega-rocket and Blue Origin’s New Glenn launcher. Both are already key elements of NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land US astronauts on the Moon as a stepping stone toward human expeditions to Mars.

But NASA still plans to use its government-owned Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft to transport astronauts out to the Moon, where they will rendezvous with a Starship or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander to fly to and from the lunar surface.

SLS and Orion are expensive vehicles, costing more than $4 billion per launch for the initial set of four Artemis missions, according to a report by NASA’s inspector general. While commercial companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman build elements of SLS and Orion, NASA acts as the prime integrator. The agency signed cost-plus contracts with the companies building SLS and Orion, meaning the government is on the hook for cost overruns. And there have been many.

Artist’s concept of Blue Ring, a propulsive spacecraft platform Blue Origin says it is developing to carry payloads to different orbits, and possibly all the way to Mars, at lower costs than feasible today. Credit: Blue Origin

NASA’s robotic science probes are also getting more expensive, even when accounting for inflation. Given the way NASA procures science probes, it would cost NASA more today to send an orbiter to Mars than it did for a similarly sized spacecraft a quarter-century ago.

This has to change in order for NASA and private companies like Blue Origin and SpaceX to make their ambitions a reality, Limp said Thursday.

“I think commercial folks can worry about the infrastructure,” he said. “We can do the launch. We can build the satellite buses that can get you to Mars much more frequently, that don’t cost billions of dollars. We can take a zero, and over time, maybe two zeros off of that. And if the governments around the world leave that to the commercial side, then there are a lot more resources that are freed up for the science side, for the national prestige side, and those types of things.”

The bottom line

Limp followed these comments with a dose of realism you don’t often hear from space industry executives. While there’s a growing list of commercially viable markets in space (things like Starlink and satellite servicing wouldn’t have been money-makers 20 years ago), the market for human spaceflight still requires some level of government commitment.

“I think the thing about bringing commercial aspects to exploration, to science, to the Moon, to Mars, is that we have to see a business prospect for it,” Limp said. “We have to turn it into a business, and that benefits American taxpayers because we will use that capital as efficiently as we can to get to the Moon, to get to Mars in a safe way, but in a way that’s the most efficient.

“We’re committed to that, no matter what the architecture looks like, but it does take the US government and international governments to have the motivation to do it,” he continued. “There’s not yet a commercial reason only to go to the Moon with humans. There are lots of commercial reasons to put robotics on the Moon and other types of things. So, we do need to have conviction that the Moon is important and Mars is important as well.”

Trump and Musk, an ally and advisor to the president, rekindled the question of Moon or Mars in a series of remarks during the early weeks of the new Trump administration. The Artemis Moon program began during the first Trump administration, with the goal of returning astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972. NASA would establish a sustained presence at the Moon, using our nearest planetary body as a proving ground for the next destination for humans in Solar System exploration: Mars.

Space industry rivals Jeff Bezos, second from left, and Elon Musk, second from right, inside the US Capitol for President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

SpaceX’s Starship, while capable of one day landing on the Moon, was designed for long-duration cruises to Mars. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon is tailored for lunar landings.

“As an American, I don’t want another Sputnik moment,” Limp said. “From my standpoint, getting boots on the Moon and setting the groundwork for permanence on the Moon is of national importance and urgency. Rest assured, Blue will do everything in its power to try to make that happen, but in a cost-effective way.”

NASA, please don’t leave us

Since retaking office in January, Trump has mentioned human missions to Mars multiple times, but not the Moon. Isaacman, who may be confirmed as NASA administrator by the Senate as soon as next week, told lawmakers in April that the agency should pursue human missions to the Moon and Mars simultaneously. The details of how that might work haven’t been released but could come out in the White House’s detailed budget proposal for fiscal-year 2026.

A blueprint of Trump’s spending proposal released May 2 includes a 25 percent cut to NASA’s overall budget, but the plan would provide additional money for human space exploration at the Moon and Mars. “The budget funds a program to replace SLS and Orion flights to the Moon with more cost-effective commercial systems that would support more ambitious subsequent lunar missions,” the White House budget office wrote.

This part of the budget request is not controversial for industry leaders like Limp. On the other hand, the budget blueprint proposes slashing NASA’s space science budget by nearly $2.3 billion, Earth science by almost $1.2 billion, and space technology by $531 million.

While Limp didn’t directly address these budget proposals, these parts of NASA are largely focused on research projects that lack a commercial business case. Who else but a government space agency, or perhaps an especially generous type of philanthropic multi-billionaire, would pay to send a probe to study Jupiter’s icy moon Europa? Or a robot to zip by Pluto? Or how about a mission like Landsat, which documents everything from water resources to farms and urban sprawl and makes its data freely available to anyone with an Internet connection?

Most experts agree there are better ways to do these things. Reusable rockets, mass-produced satellite platforms, and improved contracting practices can bring down the costs of these missions. Bezos’ long-term goal for Blue Origin, which is to move all polluting factories off the Earth and into space, will be easier to achieve with government support, not just funding, Limp said.

“Getting up there, building factories on the Moon is a great step, and the government can really help with research dollars around that,” he said. “But it still does need the labs. The science missions need the JPLs [Jet Propulsion Laboratory] of the world. To make the human experience right, we need the Johnson Space Centers of the world to be able to kind of use that gold mine of institutional knowledge.

“I would say, and it might be a little provocative, let’s have those smart brains look on the forward-thinking types of things, the really edge of science, planning the really exotic missions, figuring out how to get to planetary bodies we haven’t gotten to before, and staying there,” Limp said.

Mark it down

For the first decade after Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, the company operated under the radar and seemed to move at a glacial pace. It launched its first small rocket in 2006 to an altitude of less than 300 feet and reached space with the suborbital New Shepard booster in 2015. Blue Origin finally reached orbit in January of this year on the debut test flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket. Meanwhile, Blue Origin inked a deal with United Launch Alliance to supply a version of its New Glenn main engine to power that company’s Vulcan rocket.

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 lander, seen in the center, is taller than NASA’s Apollo lunar lander, currently the largest spacecraft to have landed on the Moon. Blue Moon MK2 is even larger, but all three landers are dwarfed in size by SpaceX’s Starship, NASA’s other Artemis lunar lander. Credit: Blue Origin

The next big mission for Blue Origin will be the first flight of its Blue Moon lander. The first version of Blue Moon, called MK1, will launch on a New Glenn rocket later this year and attempt to become the largest spacecraft to ever land on the Moon. This demonstration, without anyone onboard, is fully funded by Blue Origin, Limp said.

A future human-rated version, called MK2, is under development with the assistance of NASA. It will be larger and will require refueling to reach the lunar surface. Blue Moon MK1 can make a landing on one tank.

These are tangible achievements that would be the envy of any space industry startup not named SpaceX. But Musk’s rocket company left Blue Origin in the dust as it broke launch industry records repeatedly and began delivering NASA astronauts to the International Space Station in 2020. My colleague, Eric Berger, wrote a story in January describing Blue Origin’s culture. For much of its existence, one former employee said, Blue Origin had “zero incentive” to operate like SpaceX.

To ensure he would be in lock-step with his boss, Limp felt he had to ask a question that was on the minds of many industry insiders. He got the answer he wanted.

“The only question I really asked Jeff when I was talking about taking this job was, ‘What do you want Blue to be? Is it a hobby, or is it a business?'” Limp said. “And he had the right answer, which is, it’s a business, because I don’t know how to run a hobby, and I don’t think it’s sustainable.”

Blue Origin boss: Government should forget launch and focus on “exotic” missions Read More »

Rocket Report: Northrop backs Firefly and names its rocket; Xodiac will fly no more

rocket report, Space / DJ Henderson / May 30, 2025

“This is a design change that I really had to push the team very hard to do.”

An artist’s rendering of the Eclipse rocket on the launch pad at Wallops. Credit: Northrop Grumman

Welcome to Edition 7.46 of the Rocket Report! As I write this, the date is May 29. From a meteorological standpoint, “spring” ends in fewer than three days. Summer lasts from June 1 through August 31. Consider this a public service announcement for launch companies targeting “spring” and “summer” launches for various missions.

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.

Xodiac rocket makes its final flight. Originally built by Masten Space Systems, the suborbital Xodiac rocket had flown 175 successful missions before a flight from Mojave, California, on Wednesday. But now, it will fly no more. “While the vehicle remained within its planned flight envelope, it detected an anomalous condition and commanded a flight termination,” said Astrobotic, which acquired Masten a couple of years ago. “This resulted in a rapid descent and caused a loss of the vehicle upon impact with its launch pad.”

Now entering the Xogdor waiting room … There were no injuries or significant damage to the company’s infrastructure in Mojave. The vehicle is essentially a hopper and has been used in recent years by various customers, including companies building commercial lunar landers, to test their hazard-detection systems. Astrobotic has been working on a larger version of Xodiac, which it is calling Xogdor.

Chinese firm tests Grasshopper-like rocket. Chinese private rocket firm Space Epoch said Thursday it had successfully run a flight recovery test, Reuters reports. Beijing-based Space Epoch, or SEPOCH, said its Yuanxingzhe-1 verification rocket was launched at 4: 40 am from a sea-based platform off the waters of the eastern province of Shandong. The rocket soared upward, its engines briefly shutting down after the peak of its trajectory, then reigniting as it began its vertical descent to enter the Yellow Sea in a circle of fire, a video posted on Space Epoch’s WeChat account showed.

Chasing the Falcon 9 … The flight lasted 125 seconds, reaching a height of about 2.5 km (1.6 miles), the company said. Last year, another Chinese launch company, LandSpace, completed a 10-km (6.2-mile) VTVL test, marking China’s first in-flight engine reignition in descent. Both companies are pushing to make debut tests of their reusable rockets later this year.

The easiest way to keep up with Eric Berger’s and Stephen Clark’s reporting on all things space is to sign up for our newsletter. We’ll collect their stories and deliver them straight to your inbox.

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Florida company aims to acquire F-4 Phantoms for launch. Starfighters International, a company best known for doing air shows, is now seeking to move into air launch. Based at Kennedy Space Center, the company is in the process of acquiring a dozen F-4 Phantoms, a Cold War-era fighter jet, TWZ reports. Starfighters International is seeking to acquire the F-4 aircraft from South Korea.

Press F-4 to doubt? … Based upon the information in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company is considering both a suborbital and orbital launch capability for small satellites, which would fly to space on a small rocket deployed from the F-4 Phantom. In my experience, air-based launch systems always seem like a better idea on paper than in reality. Perhaps there is some potential for hypersonics here, but I would be shocked to ever see a satellite launched into orbit from a fighter jet. (submitted by Biokleen)

Rocket Lab acquires Geost. Rocket Lab is expanding deeper into the defense sector with the acquisition of Geost, a supplier of electro-optical and infrared sensor payloads used in US military satellites, Space News reports. In a deal announced Tuesday, Rocket Lab will acquire Geost from the private equity firm ATL Partners for $125 million in cash and $150 million in stock, with an additional $50 million in potential cash payments tied to revenue targets in 2026 and 2027.

Seeking mil money … The acquisition gives Rocket Lab access to satellite sensor technology used by the US Department of Defense for missile-warning systems and space surveillance—capabilities that could help it win lucrative Pentagon contracts. “The acquisition of Geost will bring on board critical technology and payloads that are relied upon by the Department of Defense,” said Rocket Lab’s chief executive, Peter Beck. Rocket Lab has been seeking to expand its military contracts in recent years, and this move is consistent with that.

Northrop names rocket, invests in Firefly. Northrop Grumman announced Thursday that it is investing $50 million into Firefly Aerospace to further development of a medium-lift rocket. The company also revealed that the rocket will be named “Eclipse.” The rocket will be capable of launching up to 16,300 kg of cargo to low-Earth orbit or 3,200 kg of cargo to geosynchronous transfer orbit, and initially it will likely be used for Cygnus cargo missions to the International Space Station.

A match made in heaven? … Eclipse will use the same first stage Firefly is developing for the Northrop Grumman Antares 330 rocket. Both launch vehicles will use seven of Firefly’s Miranda engines. The new rocket is expected to make its debut no earlier than 2026 (and, if history is any guide, probably later). “Eclipse gives customers the right balance of payload capacity and affordability,” Northrop Vice President Wendy Williams said in a statement. “Our partnership with Firefly builds on our capacity to provide crucial space-based communication, observation, and exploration for civil and national security customers.”

China launches asteroid mission. A Chinese spacecraft built to collect specimens from an unexplored asteroid and return them to Earth launched Wednesday from a military-run spaceport in the country’s mountainous interior, Ars reports. The liftoff aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang launch base kicked off the second mission in a series of Chinese probes to explore the Solar System. This mission, designated Tianwen-2, follows the Tianwen-1 mission, which became the first Chinese spacecraft to land on Mars in 2021.

Sending samples home … China has two objectives for Tianwen-2. First, Tianwen-2 will fly to a near-Earth asteroid designated 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, or 2016 HO3. Once there, the spacecraft will retrieve a rocky sample from the asteroid’s surface and bring the material back to Earth in late 2027 for analysis in labs. After the spacecraft releases its sample carrier to land on Earth, Tianwen-2 will change course and head to a mysterious comet-like object found between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Next Kuiper launch gets a June date. United Launch Alliance said Thursday that an Atlas V rocket will launch its second batch of Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites next month. The Atlas V 551 rocket launch is planned for 2: 29 pm ET on June 13 from Space Launch Complex-41, pending range approval.

A speedy turnaround … Amazon also confirmed that it has finished processing the Kuiper satellites for the launch, saying all 27 spacecraft have been integrated onto the rocket. Getting to space in June with this mission will mark an impressive turnaround from Amazon, given that its KA-01 mission, also with 27 Internet satellites, launched on April 28.

SpaceX set to launch another GPS satellite. SpaceX is gearing up to launch a Global Positioning System satellite for the US military on Friday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, marking another high-profile national security mission that shifted from United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan to the Falcon 9 rocket, Space News reports. The launch of GPS III SV-08—the eighth satellite in the GPS III constellation—was originally assigned to United Launch Alliance but was switched to SpaceX as the military prioritizes getting advanced anti-jamming capabilities into orbit as quickly as possible.

Gotta go fast … This marks the second consecutive GPS III satellite to be switched from ULA to SpaceX, following December’s launch of GPS III SV-07. ULA’s Vulcan, which received certification to launch national security missions, continues to face delays and has accumulated a backlog of military launches. In a press call this week, Space Force officials said the mission was executed on an unusually accelerated timeline. Launch planning for GPS III SV-08 kicked off in February, with Lockheed Martin receiving a formal request on February 21 and SpaceX following on March 7, just under three months ahead of liftoff. That’s an extraordinary pace for a national security launch, they said, which typically takes 18 to 24 months from contract award.

Another Starship launch, another second-stage issue. SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program’s two previous launches, Ars reports. But minutes into the mission, SpaceX’s Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company’s privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border. During the rocket’s two previous test flights—each using an upgraded “Block 2” Starship design—problems in the ship’s propulsion system led to leaks during launch, eventually triggering an early shutdown of the rocket’s main engines.

Not great, not terrible … On both flights, the vehicle spun out of control and broke apart, spreading debris over an area near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands. The good news is that that didn’t happen on Tuesday. The ship’s main engines fired for their full duration, putting the vehicle on its expected trajectory toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. For a short time, it appeared the ship was on track for a successful flight. The bad news is that Tuesday’s test flight revealed more problems, preventing SpaceX from achieving the most important goals Musk outlined going into the launch, including testing Starship’s reentry tiles.

Elon Musk talks Starship version 3. In an interview with Ars Technica, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said he expects that an upgraded version of Starship—essentially Block 3 of the vehicle with upgraded Raptor engines—should fly before the end of the year. The business end of the rocket will have a sleek look: “The upgraded Raptors have a complete redesign of the aft end of the booster and the ship,” Musk said. “So, because we don’t need the heat shield around the upper portion of the engine, it greatly simplifies the base of the booster and the ship. It’ll look a little, frankly, naked, especially on the booster side, because the engines will just be there, like, not with stuff around them.”

A difficult upgrade to work through … “This is a design change that I really had to push the team very hard to do, to get rid of any secondary structure, and any parts that could get burned off because there will be no heat shield,” Musk added. “So it’ll be very clear when we have a Raptor 3. Version 3 of the Ship and Booster has quite a radical redesign.” Given the challenges that version 2 of Starship has faced with its recent flights, an upgrade in the overall design appears to be much-needed.

Next three launches

May 30: Falcon 9 | GPS III SV-08 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17: 23 UTC

May 31: New Shepard | NS-32 | Launch Site One, West Texas | 13: 30 UTC

May 31: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-18 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 20: 01 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.

Rocket Report: Northrop backs Firefly and names its rocket; Xodiac will fly no more Read More »

China extends its reach into the Solar System with launch of asteroid mission

asteroids, china, launch, long march 3b, sample return, Science, solar system, Space, tianwen, tianwen 2 / Mike M. / May 29, 2025

Comet 311P/PanSTARRS was observed by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2013 with a set of six comet-like tails radiating from its main body. This object, also called P/2013 P5, is known as an active asteroid. Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA)

Tianwen-2’s mothership, with 11 scientific instruments, will commence the second phase of its mission after dropping off the asteroid specimens at Earth. The probe’s next journey will bring it near an enigma in the asteroid belt, named 311P/PanSTARRS, in the mid-2030s. This object is one in a rare class of objects known as active asteroids or main-belt comets, small worlds that have tails and comas like comets but loiter in orbits most commonly associated with asteroids. Tianwen-2 will be the first mission to see such an object up close.

Stepping into the Solar System

Until the last few years, China’s space program has primarily centered on the Moon as a destination for scientific exploration. The Moon remains the main target for China’s ambitions in space, with the goal of accomplishing a human lunar landing by 2030. But the country is looking farther afield, too.

With the Tianwen-1 mission in 2021, China became the second country to achieve a soft landing on Mars. After Tianwen-2, China will again go to Mars with the Tianwen-3 sample return mission, slated for launch in 2028.

Tianwen, which means “questions to heaven,” is the name given to China’s program of robotic Solar System exploration. Tianwen-3 has a chance to become the first mission to return pristine samples from Mars to Earth. At the same time, NASA’s plans for a Mars Sample Return mission are faltering.

China is looking at launching Tianwen-4 around 2029 to travel to Jupiter and enter orbit around Callisto, one of its four largest moons. In the 2030s, China’s roadmap includes a mission to return atmospheric samples from Venus to Earth, a Mars research station, and a probe to Neptune.

Meanwhile, NASA has sent spacecraft to study every planet in the Solar System and currently has spacecraft at or on the way to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, a metal asteroid, and to interstellar space. Another US science mission, Dragonfly, is scheduled for launch in 2028 on a daring expedition to Saturn’s moon Titan.

But NASA’s science division is bracing for severe budget cuts proposed by President Donald Trump. In planetary science, the White House’s budget blueprint calls for canceling a joint US-European Mars Sample Return mission and several other projects, including the DAVINCI mission to Venus.

China extends its reach into the Solar System with launch of asteroid mission Read More »

Ars Live: Four space journalists debate whether NASA is really going to Mars

ars live, Mars, NASA, Space / Shannon Garcia / May 28, 2025

I’m incredibly excited, as part of the Ars Live series, to host a conversation with three of the very best space reporters in the business on Thursday, May 29, 2025, at 3: 00 pm EDT about the future of NASA and its deep space exploration ambitions.

Joining me in a virtual panel discussion will be:

Christian Davenport, of The Washington Post
Loren Grush, of Bloomberg
Joey Roulette, of Reuters

The community of professional space reporters is fairly small, and Chris, Loren, and Joey are some of my smartest and fiercest competitors. They all have deep sourcing within the industry and important insights about what is really going on.

And there are some juicy things for us to discuss: expectations for soon-to-be-confirmed NASA administrator Jared Isaacman; the viability of whether humans really are going to Mars any time soon; Elon Musk’s conflicts of interest when it comes to space and space policy; NASA’s transparency in the age of Trump, and more.

Please join us for what will be a thoughtful and (if I have anything to say about it, and I will) spicy conversation about NASA in the age of a second Trump administration.

Add to Google Calendar | Add to calendar (.ics download)

Ars Live: Four space journalists debate whether NASA is really going to Mars Read More »

SpaceX may have solved one problem only to find more on latest Starship flight

Commercial space, elon musk, launch, NASA, Science, Space, spacex, Starbase, starship, starship flight 9, texas / Shannon Garcia / May 28, 2025

SpaceX’s ninth Starship survived launch, but engineers now have more problems to overcome.

An onboard camera shows the six Raptor engines on SpaceX’s Starship upper stage, roughly three minutes after launching from South Texas on Tuesday. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world’s most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program’s two previous launches.

But minutes into the mission, SpaceX’s Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company’s privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border.

SpaceX’s next-generation rocket is designed to eventually ferry cargo and private and government crews between the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The rocket is complex and gargantuan, wider and longer than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and after nearly two years of steady progress since its first test flight in 2023, this has been a year of setbacks for Starship.

During the rocket’s two previous test flights—each using an upgraded “Block 2” Starship design—problems in the ship’s propulsion system led to leaks during launch, eventually triggering an early shutdown of the rocket’s main engines. On both flights, the vehicle spun out of control and broke apart, spreading debris over an area near the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The good news is that that didn’t happen Tuesday. The ship’s main engines fired for their full duration, putting the vehicle on its expected trajectory toward a splashdown in the Indian Ocean. For a short time, it appeared the ship was on track for a successful flight.

“Starship made it to the scheduled ship engine cutoff, so big improvement over last flight! Also, no significant loss of heat shield tiles during ascent,” wrote Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, on X.

The bad news is that Tuesday’s test flight revealed more problems, preventing SpaceX from achieving the most important goals Musk outlined going into the launch.

“Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and reentry phase,” Musk posted on X. “Lot of good data to review.”

With the loss of tank pressure, the rocket started slowly spinning as it coasted through the blackness of space more than 100 miles above the Earth. This loss of control spelled another premature end to a Starship test flight. Most notable among the flight’s unmet objectives was SpaceX’s desire to study the performance of the ship’s heat shield, which includes improved heat-absorbing tiles to better withstand the scorching temperatures of reentry back into the atmosphere.

“The most important thing is data on how to improve the tile design, so it’s basically data during the high heating, reentry phase in order to improve the tiles for the next iteration,” Musk told Ars Technica before Tuesday’s flight. “So we’ve got like a dozen or more tile experiments. We’re trying different coatings on tiles. We’re trying different fabrication techniques, different attachment techniques. We’re varying the gap filler for the tiles.”

Engineers are hungry for data on the changes to the heat shield, which can’t be fully tested on the ground. SpaceX officials hope the new tiles will be more robust than the ones flown on the first-generation, or Block 1, version of Starship, allowing future ships to land and quickly launch again, without the need for time-consuming inspections, refurbishment, and in some cases, tile replacements. This is a core tenet of SpaceX’s plans for Starship, which include delivering astronauts to the surface of the Moon, proliferating low-Earth orbit with refueling tankers, and eventually helping establish a settlement on Mars, all of which are predicated on rapid reusability of Starship and its Super Heavy booster.

Last year, SpaceX successfully landed three Starships in the Indian Ocean after they survived hellish reentries, but they came down with damaged heat shields. After an early end to Tuesday’s test flight, SpaceX’s heat shield engineers will have to wait a while longer to satiate their appetites. And the longer they have to wait, the longer the wait for other important Starship developmental tests, such as a full orbital flight, in-space refueling, and recovery and reuse of the ship itself, replicating what SpaceX has now accomplished with the Super Heavy booster.

Failing forward or falling short?

The ninth flight of Starship began with a booming departure from SpaceX’s Starbase launch site at 6: 35 pm CDT (7: 35 pm EDT; 23: 35 UTC) Tuesday.

After a brief hold to resolve last-minute technical glitches, SpaceX resumed the countdown clock to tick away the final seconds before liftoff. A gush of water poured over the deck of the launch pad just before 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines ignited on the rocket’s massive Super Heavy first stage booster. Once all 33 engines lit, the enormous stainless steel rocket—towering more than 400 feet (123 meters)—began to climb away from Starbase.

SpaceX’s Starship rocket, flying with a reused first-stage booster for the first time, climbs away from Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

Heading east, the Super Heavy booster produced more than twice the power of NASA’s Saturn V rocket, an icon of the Apollo Moon program, as it soared over the Gulf of Mexico. After two-and-a-half minutes, the Raptor engines switched off and the Super Heavy booster separated from Starship’s upper stage.

Six Raptor engines fired on the ship to continue pushing it into space. As the booster started maneuvering for an attempt to target an intact splashdown in the sea, the ship burned its engines more than six minutes, reaching a top speed of 16,462 mph (26,493 kilometers per hour), right in line with preflight predictions.

A member of SpaceX’s launch team declared “nominal orbit insertion” a little more than nine minutes into the flight, indicating the rocket reached its planned trajectory, just shy of the velocity required to enter a stable orbit around the Earth.

The flight profile was supposed to take Starship halfway around the world, with the mission culminating in a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. But a few minutes after engine shutdown, the ship started to diverge from SpaceX’s flight plan.

First, SpaceX aborted an attempt to release eight simulated Starlink Internet satellites in the first test of the Starship’s payload deployer. The cargo bay door would not fully open, and engineers called off the demonstration, according to Dan Huot, a member of SpaceX’s communications team who hosted the company’s live launch broadcast Tuesday.

That, alone, would not have been a big deal. However, a few minutes later, Huot made a more troubling announcement.

“We are in a little bit of a spin,” he said. “We did spring a leak in some of the fuel tank systems inside of Starship, which a lot of those are used for attitude control. So, at this point, we’ve essentially lost our attitude control with Starship.”

This eliminated any chance for a controlled reentry and an opportunity to thoroughly scrutinize the performance of Starship’s heat shield. The spin also prevented a brief restart of one of the ship’s Raptor engines in space.

“Not looking great for a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,” Huot said.

SpaceX continued streaming live video from Starship as it soared over the Atlantic Ocean and Africa. Then, a blanket of super-heated plasma enveloped the vehicle as it plunged into the atmosphere. Still in a slow tumble, the ship started shedding scorched chunks of its skin before the screen went black. SpaceX lost contact with the vehicle around 46 minutes into the flight. The ship likely broke apart over the Indian Ocean, dropping debris into a remote swath of sea within its expected flight corridor.

Victories where you find them

Although the flight did not end as well as SpaceX officials hoped, the company made some tangible progress Tuesday. Most importantly, it broke the streak of back-to-back launch failures on Starship’s two most recent test flights in January and March.

SpaceX’s investigation earlier this year into a January 16 launch failure concluded vibrations likely triggered fuel leaks and fires in the ship’s engine compartment, causing an early shutdown of the rocket’s engines. Engineers said the vibrations were likely in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency, intensifying the shaking beyond the levels SpaceX predicted.

Engineers made fixes and launched the next Starship test flight March 6, but it again encountered trouble midway through the ship’s main engine burn. SpaceX said earlier this month that the inquiry into the March 6 failure found its most probable root cause was a hardware failure in one of the upper stage’s center engines, resulting in “inadvertent propellant mixing and ignition.”

In its official statement, the company was silent on the nature of the hardware failure but said engines for future test flights will receive additional preload on key joints, a new nitrogen purge system, and improvements to the propellant drain system. A new generation of Raptor engines, known as Raptor 3, should begin flying around the end of this year with additional improvements to address the failure mechanism, SpaceX said.

Another bright spot in Tuesday’s test flight was that it marked the first time SpaceX reused a Super Heavy booster from a prior launch. The booster used Tuesday previously launched on Starship’s seventh test flight in January before it was caught back at the launch pad and refurbished for another space shot.

Booster 14 comes in for the catch after flying to the edge of space on January 16. SpaceX flew this booster again Tuesday but did not attempt a catch. Credit: SpaceX

After releasing the Starship upper stage to continue its journey into space, the Super Heavy booster flipped around to fly tail-first and reignited 13 of its engines to begin boosting itself back toward the South Texas coast. On this test flight, SpaceX aimed the booster for a hard splashdown in the ocean just offshore from Starbase, rather than a mid-air catch back at the launch pad, which SpaceX accomplished on three of its four most recent test flights.

SpaceX made the change for a few reasons. First, engineers programmed the booster to fly at a higher angle of attack during its descent, increasing the amount of atmospheric drag on the vehicle compared to past flights. This change should reduce propellant usage on the booster’s landing burn, which occurs just before the rocket is caught by the launch pad’s mechanical arms, or “chopsticks,” on a recovery flight.

During the landing burn itself, engineers wanted to demonstrate the booster’s ability to respond to an engine failure on descent by using just two of the rocket’s 33 engines for the end of the burn, rather than the usual three. Instead, the rocket appeared to explode around the beginning of the landing burn before it could complete the final landing maneuver.

Before the explosion at the end of its flight, the booster appeared to fly as designed. Data displayed on SpaceX’s live broadcast of the launch showed all 33 of the rocket’s engines fired normally during its initial ascent from Texas, a reassuring sign for the reliability of the Super Heavy booster.

SpaceX kicked off the year with the ambition to launch as many as 25 Starship test flights in 2025, a goal that now seems to be unattainable. However, an X post by Musk on Tuesday night suggested a faster cadence of launches in the coming months. He said the next three Starships could launch at intervals of about once every three to four weeks. After that, SpaceX is expected to transition to a third-generation, or Block 3, Starship design with more changes.

It wasn’t immediately clear how long it might take SpaceX to correct whatever problems caused Tuesday’s test flight woes. The Starship vehicle for the next flight is already built and completed cryogenic prooftesting April 27. For the last few ships, SpaceX has completed this cryogenic testing milestone around one-and-a-half to three months prior to launch.

A spokesperson for the Federal Aviation Administration said the agency is “actively working” with SpaceX in the aftermath of Tuesday’s test flight but did not say if the FAA will require SpaceX to conduct a formal mishap investigation.

Shana Diez, director of Starship engineering at SpaceX, chimed in with her own post on X. Based on preliminary data from Tuesday’s flight, she is optimistic the next test flight will fly soon. She said engineers still need to examine data to confirm none of the problems from Starship’s previous flight recurred on this launch but added that “all evidence points to a new failure mode” on Tuesday’s test flight.

SpaceX will also study what caused the Super Heavy booster to explode on descent before moving forward with another booster catch attempt at Starbase, she said.

“Feeling both relieved and a bit disappointed,” Diez wrote. “Could have gone better today but also could have gone much worse.”

SpaceX may have solved one problem only to find more on latest Starship flight Read More »

Elon Musk: There is an 80 percent chance Starship’s engine bay issues are solved

elon musk, Mars, Space, spacex / DJ Henderson / May 28, 2025

Ars: Ten years ago you kind of made big bets on Starship and Starlink, and most people probably expected one or both of them to fail.

Musk: Including me.

Ars: Yeah. These were huge bets.

Musk: I was interviewed in the early days of Starlink, and they were asking me what’s the goal of Starlink? I said goal number one: don’t go bankrupt, as every other [low-Earth orbit] communications constellation has gone bankrupt, and we don’t want to join them in the cemetery. So any outcome that does not result in death would be a good outcome.

Ars: Starlink has become really successful. It helped me during a hurricane. And Starship is coming along. As you look out for the next 10 years, what are you betting on big now that will really bear fruit for SpaceX a decade from now?

Musk: Well, by far the biggest thing is Starship. If the Starship program is successful—and we see a path to success—it’s just a question of when we will have created the first fully reusable orbital launch vehicle, which is the holy grail of rocketry, as you know. So no one has ever made a fully reusable orbital vehicle, and even the parts that have been reusable have been extremely arduous to reuse, such that the economics actually were worse than an expendable rocket in a lot of cases. The canonical example being the shuttle, where the shuttle’s fully loaded, cost of the whole program, I believe, was about a billion dollars a flight.

Ars: I saw one research paper that estimated the fully loaded cost was about $1.5 billion.

Musk. Yeah. And that is roughly equivalent to a Saturn V cost. But the Saturn V as an expendable rocket had four times the payload capacity of the shuttle. So the shuttle was like the principle of reusability was a good one, but the execution, unfortunately, was not. The shuttle got burdened by so many crazy requirements. You know, I’ve got this five-step first principles process thing for making things better. And step one of my five-step process is make the requirements less dumb. And for the government, it’s the opposite. The government is making requirements more dumb.

Ars: So getting a rapid and reusable Starship is the main goal for SpaceX over the next 5 to 10 years?

Musk: Yeah, absolutely.

Ars: You’ve been in the space industry now for almost 25 years. And in that time, SpaceX has gone a long way toward solving launch. So if you were coming into the industry today as a 20-something, you know, with a couple $100 million, what would be the problem you would want to solve? What should new companies, philanthropists, and others be working on in space?

Musk: We’re building the equivalent of the Union Pacific Railroad and the train. So once you have the transportation system to Mars, then there’s a vast set of opportunities that open up to do anything on the surface of Mars, which includes, you know, doing everything from building a semiconductor fab to a pizza joint, basically building a civilization. So we want to solve the transport problem, and that can enable philanthropists and entrepreneurs to do things on Mars, which is everything needed for civilization. Look at, say, California. There were very few people in California until the Union Pacific was completed, and then California became the most populous state in the nation. And look at Silicon Valley and Hollywood and everything. So that’s our goal. We want to get people there, and if we can get people there, then there’s a literal world of opportunity.

Elon Musk: There is an 80 percent chance Starship’s engine bay issues are solved Read More »

Rocket Report: SpaceX’s expansion at Vandenberg; India’s PSLV fails in flight

rocket report, Science, Space / DJ Henderson / May 23, 2025

China’s diversity in rockets was evident this week, with four types of launchers in action.

Dawn Aerospace’s Mk-II Aurora airplane in flight over New Zealand last year. Credit: Dawn Aerospace

Welcome to Edition 7.45 of the Rocket Report! Let’s talk about spaceplanes. Since the Space Shuttle, spaceplanes have, at best, been a niche part of the space transportation business. The US Air Force’s uncrewed X-37B and a similar vehicle operated by China’s military are the only spaceplanes to reach orbit since the last shuttle flight in 2011, and both require a lift from a conventional rocket. Virgin Galactic’s suborbital space tourism platform is also a spaceplane of sorts. A generation or two ago, one of the chief arguments in favor of spaceplanes was that they were easier to recover and reuse. Today, SpaceX routinely reuses capsules and rockets that look much more like conventional space vehicles than the winged designs of yesteryear. Spaceplanes are undeniably alluring in appearance, but they have the drawback of carrying extra weight (wings) into space that won’t be used until the final minutes of a mission. So, do they have a future?

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.

One of China’s commercial rockets returns to flight. The Kinetica-1 rocket launched Wednesday for the first time since a failure doomed its previous attempt to reach orbit in December, according to the vehicle’s developer and operator, CAS Space. The Kinetica-1 is one of several small Chinese solid-fueled launch vehicles managed by a commercial company, although with strict government oversight and support. CAS Space, a spinoff of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said its Kinetica-1 rocket deployed multiple payloads with “excellent orbit insertion accuracy.” This was the seventh flight of a Kinetica-1 rocket since its debut in 2022.

Back in action … “Kinetica-1 is back!” CAS Space posted on X. “Mission Y7 has just successfully sent six satellites into designated orbits, making a total of 63 satellites or 6 tons of payloads since its debut. Lots of missions are planned for the coming months. 2025 is going to be awesome.” The Kinetica-1 is designed to place up to 2 metric tons of payload into low-Earth orbit. A larger liquid-fueled rocket, Kinetica-2, is scheduled to debut later this year.

Sign Me Up!

French government backs a spaceplane startup. French spaceplane startup AndroMach announced May 15 that it received a contract from CNES, the French space agency, to begin testing an early prototype of its Banger v1 rocket engine, European Spaceflight reports. Founded in 2023, AndroMach is developing a pair of spaceplanes that will be used to perform suborbital and orbital missions to space. A suborbital spaceplane will utilize turbojet engines for horizontal takeoff and landing, and a pressure-fed biopropane/liquid oxygen rocket engine to reach space. Test flights of this smaller vehicle will begin in early 2027.

A risky proposition … A larger ÉTOILE “orbital shuttle” is designed to be launched by various small launch vehicles and will be capable of carrying payloads of up to 100 kilograms (220 pounds). According to the company, initial test flights of ÉTOILE are expected to begin at the beginning of the next decade. It’s unclear how much CNES is committing to AndroMach through this contract, but the company says the funding will support testing of an early demonstrator for its propane-fueled engine, with a focus on evaluating its thermodynamic performance. It’s good to see European governments supporting developments in commercial space, but the path to a small commercial orbital spaceplane is rife with risk. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Dawn Aerospace is taking orders. Another spaceplane company in a more advanced stage of development says it is now taking customer orders for flights to the edge of space. New Zealand-based Dawn Aerospace said it is beginning to take orders for its remotely piloted, rocket-powered suborbital spaceplane, known as Aurora, with first deliveries expected in 2027, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. “This marks a historic milestone: the first time a space-capable vehicle—designed to fly beyond the Kármán line (100 kilometers or 328,000 feet)—has been offered for direct sale to customers,” Dawn Aerospace said in a statement. While it hasn’t yet reached space, Dawn’s Aurora spaceplane flew to supersonic speed for the first time last year and climbed to an altitude of 82,500 feet (25.1 kilometers), setting a record for the fastest climb from a runway to 20 kilometers.

Further along … Aurora is small in stature, measuring just 15.7 feet (4.8 meters) long. It’s designed to loft a payload of up to 22 pounds (10 kilograms) above the Kármán line for up to three minutes of microgravity, before returning to a runway landing. Eventually, Dawn wants to reduce the turnaround time between Aurora flights to less than four hours. “Aurora is set to become the fastest and highest-flying aircraft ever to take off from a conventional runway, blending the extreme performance of rocket propulsion with the reusability and operational simplicity of traditional aviation,” Dawn said. The company’s business model is akin to commercial airlines, where operators can purchase an aircraft directly from a manufacturer and manage their own operations. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

India’s workhorse rocket falls short of orbit. In a rare setback, Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) launch vehicle PSLV-C61 malfunctioned and failed to place a surveillance satellite into the intended orbit last weekend, the Times of India reported. The Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle lifted off from a launch pad on the southeastern coast of India early Sunday, local time, with a radar reconnaissance satellite named EOS-09, or RISAT-1B. The satellite was likely intended to gather intelligence for the Indian military. “The country’s military space capabilities, already hindered by developmental challenges, have suffered another setback with the loss of a potential strategic asset,” the Times of India wrote.

What happened? … V. Narayanan, ISRO’s chairman, later said that the rocket’s performance was normal until the third stage. The PSLV’s third stage, powered by a solid rocket motor, suffered a “fall in chamber pressure” and the mission could not be accomplished, Narayanan said. Investigators are probing the root cause of the failure. Telemetry data indicated the rocket deviated from its planned flight path around six minutes after launch, when it was traveling more than 12,600 mph (5.66 kilometers per second), well short of the speed it needed to reach orbital velocity. The rocket and its payload fell into the Indian Ocean south of the launch site. This was the first PSLV launch failure in eight years, ending a streak of 21 consecutive successful flights. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

SES makes a booking with Impulse Space. SES, owner of the world’s largest fleet of geostationary satellites, plans to use Impulse Space’s Helios kick stage to take advantage of lower-cost, low-Earth-orbit (LEO) launch vehicles and get its satellites quickly into higher orbits, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. SES hopes the combination will break a traditional launch conundrum for operators of medium-Earth-orbit (MEO) and geostationary orbit (GEO). These operators often must make a trade-off between a lower-cost launch that puts them farther from their satellite’s final orbit, or a more expensive launch that can expedite their satellite’s entry into service.

A matter of hours … On Thursday, SES and Impulse Space announced a multi-launch agreement to use the methane-fueled Helios kick stage. “The first mission, currently planned for 2027, will feature a dedicated deployment from a medium-lift launcher in LEO, followed by Helios transferring the 4-ton-class payload directly to GEO within eight hours of launch,” Impulse said in a statement. Typically, this transit to GEO takes several weeks to several months, depending on the satellite’s propulsion system. “Today, we’re not only partnering with Impulse to bring our satellites faster to orbit, but this will also allow us to extend their lifetime and accelerate service delivery to our customers,” said Adel Al-Saleh, CEO of SES. “We’re proud to become Helios’ first dedicated commercial mission.”

Unpacking China’s spaceflight patches. There’s a fascinating set of new patches Chinese officials released for a series of launches with top-secret satellites over the last two months, Ars reports. These four patches depict Buddhist gods with a sense of artistry and sharp colors that stand apart from China’s previous spaceflight emblems, and perhaps—or perhaps not—they can tell us something about the nature of the missions they represent. The missions launched so-called TJS satellites toward geostationary orbit, where they most likely will perform missions in surveillance, signals intelligence, or missile warning.

Making connections … It’s not difficult to start making connections between the Four Heavenly Gods and the missions that China’s TJS satellites likely carry out in space. A protector with an umbrella? An all-seeing entity? This sounds like a possible link to spy craft or missile warning, but there’s a chance Chinese officials approved the patches to misdirect outside observers, or there’s no connection at all.

China aims for an asteroid. China is set to launch its second Tianwen deep space exploration mission late May, targeting both a near-Earth asteroid and a main belt comet, Space News reports. The robotic Tianwen-2 spacecraft is being integrated with a Long March 3B rocket at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwest China, the country’s top state-owned aerospace contractor said. Airspace closure notices indicate a four-hour-long launch window opening at noon EDT (16: 00–20: 00 UTC) on May 28. Backup launch windows are scheduled for May 29 and 30.

New frontiers … Tianwen-2’s first goal is to collect samples from a near-Earth asteroid designated 469219 Kamoʻoalewa, or 2016 HO3, and return them to Earth in late 2027 with a reentry module. The Tianwen-2 mothership will then set a course toward a comet for a secondary mission. This will be China’s first sample return mission from beyond the Moon. The asteroid selected as the target for Tianwen-2 is believed by scientists to be less than 100 meters, or 330 feet, in diameter, and may be made of material thrown off the Moon some time in its ancient past. Results from Tianwen-2 may confirm that hypothesis. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Upgraded methalox rocket flies from Jiuquan. Another one of China’s privately funded launch companies achieved a milestone this week. Landspace launched an upgraded version of its Zhuque-2E rocket Saturday from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China, Space News reports. The rocket delivered six satellites to orbit for a range of remote sensing, Earth observation, and technology demonstration missions. The Zhuque-2E is an improved version of the Zhuque-2, which became the first liquid methane-fueled rocket in the world to reach orbit in 2023.

Larger envelope … This was the second flight of the Zhuque-2E rocket design, but the first to utilize a wider payload fairing to provide more volume for satellites on their ride into space. The Zhuque-2E is a stepping stone toward a much larger rocket Landspace is developing called the Zhuque-3, a stainless steel launcher with a reusable first stage booster that, at least outwardly, bears some similarities to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

FAA clears SpaceX for Starship Flight 9. The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year, Ars reports. The failures set back SpaceX’s Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket’s development back on track with the upcoming launch, Starship’s ninth full-scale test flight since its debut in April 2023. Starship is central to SpaceX’s long-held ambition to send humans to Mars and is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the Moon under the umbrella of the government’s Artemis program.

Targeting Tuesday, for now … In a statement Thursday, the FAA said SpaceX is authorized to launch the next Starship test flight, known as Flight 9, after finding the company “meets all of the rigorous safety, environmental and other licensing requirements.” SpaceX has not confirmed a target launch date for the next launch of Starship, but warning notices for pilots and mariners to steer clear of hazard areas in the Gulf of Mexico suggest the flight might happen as soon as the evening of Tuesday, May 27. The rocket will lift off from Starbase, Texas, SpaceX’s privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border. The FAA’s approval comes with some stipulations, including that the launch must occur during “non-peak” times for air traffic and a larger closure of airspace downrange from Starbase.

Space Force is fed up with Vulcan delays. In recent written testimony to a US House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the military, the senior official responsible for purchasing launches for national security missions blistered one of the country’s two primary rocket providers, Ars reports. The remarks from Major General Stephen G. Purdy, acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, concerned United Launch Alliance and its long-delayed development of the large Vulcan rocket. “The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year,” Purdy said in written testimony during a May 14 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. This portion of his testimony did not come up during the hearing, and it has not been reported publicly to date.

Repairing trust … “Major issues with the Vulcan have overshadowed its successful certification resulting in delays to the launch of four national security missions,” Purdy wrote. “Despite the retirement of highly successful Atlas and Delta launch vehicles, the transition to Vulcan has been slow and continues to impact the completion of Space Force mission objectives.” It has widely been known in the space community that military officials, who supported Vulcan with development contracts for the rocket and its engines that exceeded $1 billion, have been unhappy with the pace of the rocket’s development. It was originally due to launch in 2020. At the end of his written testimony, Purdy emphasized that he expected ULA to do better. As part of his job as the Service Acquisition Executive for Space (SAE), Purdy noted that he has been tasked to transform space acquisition and to become more innovative. “For these programs, the prime contractors must re-establish baselines, establish a culture of accountability, and repair trust deficit to prove to the SAE that they are adopting the acquisition principles necessary to deliver capabilities at speed, on cost and on schedule.”

SpaceX’s growth on the West Coast. SpaceX is moving ahead with expansion plans at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, that will double its West Coast launch cadence and enable Falcon Heavy rockets to fly from California, Spaceflight Now reports. Last week, the Department of the Air Force issued its Draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), which considers proposed modifications from SpaceX to Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6) at Vandenberg. These modifications will include changes to support launches of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, the construction of two new landing pads for Falcon boosters adjacent to SLC-6, the demolition of unneeded structures at SLC-6, and increasing SpaceX’s permitted launch cadence from Vandenberg from 50 launches to 100.

Doubling the fun … The transformation of SLC-6 would include quite a bit of overhaul. Its most recent tenant, United Launch Alliance, previously used it for Delta IV rockets from 2006 through its final launch in September 2022. The following year, the Space Force handed over the launch pad to SpaceX, which lacked a pad at Vandenberg capable of supporting Falcon Heavy missions. The estimated launch cadence between SpaceX’s existing Falcon 9 pad at Vandenberg, known as SLC-4E, and SLC-6 would be a 70-11 split for Falcon 9 rockets in 2026, with one Falcon Heavy at SLC-6, for a total of 82 launches. That would increase to a 70-25 Falcon 9 split in 2027 and 2028, with an estimated five Falcon Heavy launches in each of those years. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

May 23: Falcon 9 | Starlink 11-16 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 20: 36 UTC

May 24: Falcon 9 | Starlink 12-22 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17: 19 UTC

May 27: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-1 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 16: 14 UTC

Rocket Report: SpaceX’s expansion at Vandenberg; India’s PSLV fails in flight Read More »

The Pentagon seems to be fed up with ULA’s rocket delays

Air Force, rocket, Space, ula, vulcan / Shannon Garcia / May 23, 2025

Some of the displeasure was apparent in April when the US military announced that it would ask SpaceX to launch a plurality of its missions during the next round of national security launches, reversing the preeminent role that ULA had held for the last two decades.

ULA retired its Delta IV Heavy rocket in April 2024, and the handful of Atlas V rockets that remain are committed to other missions. This has left the Air Force dependent on SpaceX, with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles, as the only provider of launch services to get its most expensive and highest priority satellites into orbit.

ULA must “repair trust”

In his testimony, Purdy said ULA completed certification of the initial variant of its Vulcan rocket for military launches from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on March 25, but added that “open work” remains. The military and the company are currently working through “risk reduction plans” to limit the chances of an issue with the first launch of a military payload on Vulcan.

“To address these challenges ULA has increased its engineering resources and management focus to resolve design issues,” Purdy wrote. “Government and Federally Funded Research and Development Center personnel have increased involvement in technical and program management challenges.

Vulcan’s first military mission, USSF-106, currently has a no earlier than launch date of July 2025, Purdy wrote. These outstanding risks will ultimately be assessed during a Flight Readiness Review a week or two prior to this launch.

At the end of his written testimony, Purdy emphasized that he expected ULA to do better. As part of his job as the Service Acquisition Executive for Space (SAE), Purdy noted that he has been tasked to transform space acquisition and to become more innovative.

“For these programs, the prime contractors must re-establish baselines, establish a culture of accountability, and repair trust deficit to prove to the SAE that they are adopting the acquisition principles necessary to deliver capabilities at speed, on cost and on schedule,” Purdy said.

The Pentagon seems to be fed up with ULA’s rocket delays Read More »