Small Space News Story Roundup 88

Suddenly it seems a lot of news broke in the last couple of days. Most of this is from Ars Technica's  Rocket Report.

There might be an unexpected answer to the (western world) launch shortage 

The approach might be more obvious if you think of it from a different point of view. What if the satellite makers decided to also make their own launch vehicles? The rocket makers obviously approach the issue as creating more versatile launchers, so why wouldn't the satellite makers say they can launch their own payloads? That's a story that appears on Ars Technica that didn't make this week's Rocket Report. 

AST SpaceMobile is a Texas-based company building very large satellites to provide direct-to-cell communications on Earth. They've been having trouble finding dependable rides into space, having lost their first satellite when Blue Origin lost the upper stage of their New Glenn back in April of '26. That led AST SpaceMobile to consider developing their own orbital class rocket, called Blacklift. 

They're saying it will have the capacity to lift 20 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, adding that it would start launching in late 2028.

“The Blacklift rocket is the springboard to significantly expand our total addressable market, providing AST SpaceMobile with regular unconstrained access to orbit and providing for most favorable owner’s economics in the industry,” said Abel Avellan, founder, chairman, and CEO of AST SpaceMobile, in a news release.

To anyone with even a basic understanding of rockets, that timeline is wildly, fantastically, and stupidly optimistic. Still, the announcement is worth examining because it underscores two important trends in today’s launch industry.

About that 20 metric tons to LEO number, it's in the ballpark that Falcon 9 lives in, and several times what Rocket Lab's Electron can lift. Their Neutron, which is expected to fly in '27, is in that 20 metric tons class. I've been writing about the Neutron since March of '21, so five years was passed eight months ago and Neutron is probably going to be No Earlier Than next March. We'll see, but that's six years for a very experienced company. For sure, it depends on how much investment they can attract, but the best time to develop a rocket in this class was probably SpaceX and the Falcon 9 at 4.7 years. 

What about other companies? Since 2015, a number of other US companies—United Launch Alliance (Vulcan), Rocket Lab (Neutron), Relativity Space (Terran R), Firefly/Northrop Grumman (Eclipse), and Stoke Space (Nova) have announced medium to heavy lift vehicles, ranging in payload capacity from about 7 to 27 metric tons (Blue Origin’s New Glenn is much larger than any of these).

Of these, only Vulcan has reached orbit. It took 8.7 years, with an incredibly experienced launch team behind the vehicle and about $2 billion in aggregate federal support across its suppliers.

China published a document saying they expect to land on the moon in three years

Chinese officials confirmed reports the nation plans to land its taikonauts (their word for astronauts) on the Moon before 2030. 

At the Seventh Manned Spaceflight Conference in Beijing, officials, including Wang Xiang, chief designer for the lunar exploration program, laid out the country’s most publicly detailed plans yet for a series of missions leading up to a crewed lunar landing “before 2030.” China’s lunar landings will involve a lunar-orbit rendezvous similar to what NASA did in the 1960s and early 1970s with the Apollo program. However, lacking a rocket as powerful as the Saturn V vehicle, the crew and lunar lander will launch separately to the Moon. 

China’s Long March 10 rocket family will be the workhorse for the country’s initial crew missions to the Moon. The source goes into more details on the succession of missions. The next big test will be the demonstration flight of a Long March 10A rocket, which flies with a single core booster, and China’s new Mengzhou Moon ship to low-Earth orbit in early 2027. 

I wanted to say the gauntlet has been thrown down, but that was thrown years ago and this is just another step along the way.

New Glenn won't be returning to flight this year 

This probably isn't going to be a surprise, I think everyone has been saying this since that New Glenn exploded on the launch pad the night of May 28. Immediately after the explosion, Blue was saying they'd be returning to launch before the end of the year. The healthiest response was "I'll believe it when I see it." 

The Jeff Bezos-backed company had been driving to launch New Glenn again before the end of the year in its quest to challenge SpaceX. But Blue Origin Chief Executive Officer Dave Limp told employees on Wednesday that they are now targeting a flight early in 2027.

What’s a month? … The slight delay is unsurprising, and a January launch would still put Blue Origin well head of initial fears of how long it would take to rebuild its launch pad in Florida. New Glenn has a busy launch manifest after the return-to-flight mission, including a crucial launch in the spring of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, an uncrewed precursor to the company’s future human-rated lander for NASA’s Artemis missions.

Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket erupts in a fireball at Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida on May 28, 2026. Credit: Adam Bernstein/Spaceflight Now

Blue Origin publicizes some upgrades to New Glenn

Blue Origin announced two significant upgrades to its New Glenn rocket today, Nov.5, intended to reduce the cost of manufacturing the rocket as well as increasing its capacity for payloads to high energy orbits well beyond low and medium Earth orbit as well as to the Moon.

Their stated goal is to, "launch more than 1000 times per year." 

“There has never been higher demand for launch, ever,” Dave Limp, chief executive officer of Blue Origin, said during the UP.Summit conference at the Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida.

Blue Origin has already begun test firing a new engine, called Northstar, that will eventually replace the BE-4 engine that powers the first stage of New Glenn. Separately, the company also said it was developing a hydrogen-oxygen third stage for the rocket, GS3, to give it an extra kick.

The Northstar engine is a simpler but more powerful version of their present BE-4 engines. Limp said it has half the number of parts, 30 percent less mass, and about 65 percent can be 3D-printed. 

Blue Origin believes it can manufacture the engine at 25 percent of the cost of a BE-4 engine, and eventually reach the point where each engine can be assembled in less than a day. The company is deep into development and testing of Northstar, having already begun a test-firing campaign.

Today's BE-4 has a thrust of 640,000 pounds and Limp said Northstar will have a starting thrust of 715,000 pounds - not quite 12% more. Like the BE-4 it's a Methalox engine - burning methane in liquid oxygen - using an oxygen-rich staged combustion cycle and a single-shaft turbopump architecture. 

That's just the start. They're also developing a third stage for the New Glenn called GS-3 (Glenn Stage 3) designed to go between the second stage and the payload fairings. It will be usable by both the 7x2 and 9x4 first stages of the New Glenn. 

According to Blue Origin, a GS3-equipped New Glenn 7×2 can carry 8 metric tons directly to geostationary orbit and 10 metric tons to translunar injection. Those figures increase to 14 tons and 20 tons, respectively, for the larger 9×4 variant. 

The only thing they've mentioned in this information dump that seems questionable to me is that the GS3 will be powered by the BE-7 engine that they're using on their lunar landers. The issue is the engine is optimized for in-space operations and uses liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants. Hydrogen is, of course, the smallest atom there is, and therefore the easiest fuel to leak through pipes, tank walls and pretty much everything. While it has been used since the earliest days of spaceflight, there have been times during the preparations for the two Artemis missions that I've wondered aloud if everyone who knew how to work with it has retired or otherwise left the business (here, for example).

While it increases my pucker factor, Blue has been working with it on those BE-7 engines for a while and has already begun testing the tanks tentatively designed into the new GS-3. 

The company recently had a breakthrough at Launch Site One in Texas, when it completed its first composite liquid hydrogen tanking test. During the test, the tank was pressurized to 100 percent of the maximum force expected during operation for 2.5 hours. It was even successfully tested at 150 percent of this maximum pressure for 10 minutes. 

I honestly don't know what to think of that. It says the tank held 100% of the expected pressure for 2.5 hours. How many days does this tank need to hold that pressure? 

The Northstar engine. Blue Origin is planning to build one about every 10 days. Credit: Blue Origin

I suppose the important answer to that "how many days" question is that Blue feels confident enough in the tanks to commit to the hydrogen/oxygen system on GS-3 and they've got a government customer that's comfortable enough to contract Blue Origin for a 2028 mission to cislunar space.

SWIFT space telescope reentered this morning

To tie a "completed" ribbon on the stories here about the SWIFT gamma ray observing satellite, SWIFT crashed to Earth today, November 4th, 22 years after its launch. 

The 3,200-pound (1,450 kilograms) observatory reentered Earth's atmosphere at 7:39 a.m. EST (1239 GMT) today over northern Sumatra, according to satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who cited U.S. Space Force data. The fall likely didn't make much of an impact; NASA officials predicted beforehand that most of the minibus-sized Swift would burn up as it fell, and they put the odds of any of the surviving pieces hurting anyone on Earth at just 1 in 2,100.

You'll recall that just Monday, I relayed a prediction from the Aerospace Corporation saying it would reenter on Nov. 4th at 09:30 UTC +/- 26 hours. The actual reentry was pretty much 3 hours 9 minutes later than that predicted time, which is a heck of a lot less than the +/- 26 hours they predicted. 

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory orbits above Earth in this artist’s concept. (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab)

“Swift delivered an incredible, lasting return on investment for the nation, designed for a two-year primary mission but productive for more than 10 times as long,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “In that time, Swift played a major role in advancing our understanding of the changing universe and was part of a revolution in astrophysics that showed how critical rapid-response observations are to the entire community. To support rapid response to cosmic events in a post-Swift world, we’re exploring our ability to use and augment NASA’s fleet of existing space telescopes, from fast-to-orbit commercial capabilities to efficient, innovative new missions. And Swift leaves us with an extraordinary archive of multiwavelength observations that will fuel new discoveries for decades more.”

That's from NASA's Science hub, science.nasa.gov and the dedicated page for this mission. That's a good easy read, they say 4 minutes, but I don't find those notes particularly meaningful. That said, it's an easy and interesting read.

In its storied career, Swift has observed more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the cosmos. It has studied more than 1,400 supernova explosions, witnessed stars shredded by black holes, monitored active galaxies, conducted an all-sky X-ray survey, studied asteroids and comets, and more. Swift data has contributed to about 7,000 published scientific papers. 

This SpaceX headline snuck by me

The headline snuck by me. I mean, yeah, "it's just another Falcon 9 launch"- except it wasn't. It was a milestone launch, the 700th successful flight of a Falcon 9. Friday night, October 30th or "Halloween Eve" at 9:04 PM.PDT (12:04 AM. EDT / 0404 UTC). 

The Starlink 15-18 mission on the eve of Halloween will add another 27 broadband internet satellites to the company’s low Earth orbit constellation.

SpaceX launched the mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number 1093. This was its 18th flight following the launches of Transporter-16, two missions for the Space Development Agency, and 14 batches of Starlink satellites.

Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1093 landed on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 231st landing on this vessel and the 675th Falcon booster landing to date.

While the article linked on Spaceflight Now doesn't mention it, 700 launches is still pretty far off the record for the most launches of a launch vehicle. While slightly out of date, SpaceStats shows the old Russian Soyuz-U is the all time leader at 765 launches. The Soyuz-U is retired, though, having last flown in 2017. Falcon 9 is still flying although its rate of launches per year is down, and it's expected to keep flying through the "early 2030s". With only 66 launches left to take the top rank, it's likely to happen. Today's launch was the 108th of this year for the workhorse rocket. 

The Starlink 15-18 mission lifts off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Oct. 30, 2026, local time. Image: SpaceX.

Lessee.... this is the 108th launch and it's the 45th week of the year, so that's 2.4 week. At that rate, adding another 66 launches should take 27-1/2 weeks - call it 28 weeks. That says 28 weeks minus the 7 weeks of 2026, so 21 weeks into 2027, which sounds like by the middle of next May Falcon 9 will have the record for the rocket with the most launches. There's a mess of numbers that can change in there, but it's a rough number to keep a look on. 

Pardon me. I just realized that there's only seven weeks left in the year! Thanksgiving!! Christmas!!!

A couple of space telescope stories

Neither one is a particularly good story - they're both End Of Life stories. 

The long lead time story is about the Hubble Space Telescope 

If we were to mention just the phrase "space telescope", my impression is that a fairly large percentage of the population would only know about the HST; it has been up there the longest and gotten the most press mentions over the years. Proportionally fewer people will know that the Hubble has been slowly getting superseded by the James Webb and now the Nancy Grace Roman telescopes. 

If you've been aware of the HST since its launch, this story is even a redo of a similar story years ago, but NASA is now asking for ideas of how to save the HST and keep it doing science after its expected EOL. Something I suspect very few HST fans know is that the last time the telescope was lifted to a higher orbit to help delay its reentry into the atmosphere and destruction was by a Space Shuttle (Columbia) and not in 2011's last couple of shuttle flights. It was in 2002 - Columbia's disaster was in '03. The current estimates for when Hubble reenters and burns up are in "the early-to-mid-2030s". There are orbital dynamicists that currently predict probable reentry in 2033 or 2034, but solar activity can interfere with that prediction. In either case, it's not exactly really soon, but time to ask for ways to keep it running. 

The space agency released a Request For Information (RFI) on Thursday (10/29) asking commercial companies for ideas on how to reboost, service, or conduct a controlled disposal of Hubble. Responses are due November 30. Specifically, NASA is looking for information about companies’ current and near-term capabilities for capturing Hubble and boosting it to an altitude of at least 373 miles (600 km), enhancing the telescope’s performance, or guiding Hubble to a controlled reentry.

“The requirement includes that the boost and/or servicing mission must not harm the HST and that this mission is expected to occur by 2032,” NASA wrote in the RFI. The contractor would be responsible for providing the launch vehicle, servicing spacecraft, mission operations, and “crew if applicable.”

This has to be bounded by reality and part of that has to be that HST was launched in 1990, so it's undoubtedly the best of mid-1980s technology (to be charitable) and just turned 36 years old. How much money is it worth spending on the HST? Being 36 years old implies that there's a better chance that they could drop a couple of hundred million on boosting its orbit higher and another important part then fails almost immediately. 

Last year, on Hubble's 35th "birthday", I did a post that was a bit of overview of the 35 years including details on problems with Hubble's main mirror, the Corrective Optics fix (COSTAR) and more history. 

The other mission will be over within weeks

The other mission is the SWIFT Gamma Ray observatory, which we spent a lot of time talking about back earlier in the year, because of the effort to send a rescue satellite up to SWIFT's orbit, grab onto it, and push it to a higher orbit. The mission, which was remarkable in many ways, eventually failed and NASA had no choice but to end the mission and prepare for SWIFT to reenter. 

The telescope launched to Earth orbit in November 2004, tasked with studying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) — the most powerful explosions in the cosmos. Swift was designed to operate for two years, but it continued studying the high-energy universe for more than two decades.

Launching in 2004 and making it to 2026 isn't as impressive as HST's 36 years (so far), but it's still a good performance from that satellite. IMO, the conversation about saving SWIFT got started too late, and a contract wasn't awarded until September 2025. Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies came up with a concept, a design, and launched it on July 3rd, a little over nine months after they won the $30 million contract. 

NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, shown in this artist’s concept, has orbited Earth for more than 20 years, studying the ever-changing universe. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab

Spaceweather.com adds:

NASA's Space Weather Operational Readiness Development Center predicts reentry on Nov. 3rd at 16:18 UTC +/- 12 hours. The Aerospace Corporation says Nov. 4th at 09:30 UTC +/- 26 hours. Uncontrolled reentries are hard to pin down, and the orbit is decaying fast. Only in the final hours will we know for sure when and where it will re-enter. 

So, yeah, it seems to be fixed

To rip off on last Sunday's dive into troubleshooting my audio oscillation problem in my ham shack. I haven't seen a single repeat of that issue since the one I described in a comment to that post on Monday  10/26.

After cleaning the two USB B connectors on the one side of the SignaLink I did last weekend, I did 10 tests of 10 transmissions on all five bands that my one antenna covers (a Tennadyne T6 log periodic) and the first transmission on the band that was giving me the most troubles started the comb problem. After Monday's test, I decided to move a clamp-on ferrite bead on the back of the SignaLink from one side to the other. Before I did that, though, I operated hours on that band (17m) without a repeat of the problem.

It looks like this now. That's the back of the SignaLink on the right edge of the photo: 

In this picture, the cable closest to the camera is the USB B (square) connector I cleaned with Deoxit5. It has one clamp-on ferrite bead now, but had two before. I moved the second bead just over to the next cable.

The connector closest to the camera is just labelled USB on the SignaLink box, and you can see that far cable looks more like a phone cable. That black plastic part between the molded part of that cable and the ferrite bead I moved onto that cable might well be holding a ferrite bead as well. 

From the pilot's seat, the station looks like this now. 

At the top of this frame, you can see a string of white LEDs that produce an even light in the area that I do things. You can see a piece of wood running left to right at the top, and that's the front of relatively large, table-like area, about 2'x6' (it has been years since I measured that, so it's a SWAG - but close). On top of that is the computer that controls all this, a huge monitor (well, 27" - biggest monitor we have) so I can watch several pieces of software running at once. There are my antenna and radio selector switches, the manual antenna rotator controller (I do that from the computer most of the time), a power distribution box and some odds. Or ends.   

Happy Halloween 2026

A slightly edited repost from four years ago...

I'm not big on Halloween and never really have been.  Yeah, I went trick or treating as kid, maybe up to age 12, when Mom used to say, "have fun and be back by 9" instead of coming with us.  It's gotten even less involved since the kids are long out of the house and PGD (Precious Grand Daughter) is over a thousand miles away.  We don't even buy candy for the neighborhood munchkins because there's always leftovers that neither one of us would eat and I don't have the convenient "I'll leave the rest near the coffee pots at work" backup I used when I was working. 

That said, there are some aspects of the holiday that I like. 

When I think Halloween, I think Jon Neill, the professional artist who has become famous for carving pumpkins.  This guy has "mad skilz" as they say.

Meet Slushy the Cyclops.  Like most of Jon's work, Slushy is apparently done with your average, grocery store pumpkin, but another pic from his website appears to show a carving made from an entry in one of those biggest pumpkin contests we hear about this time of year; in this case something called the Fair Oaks Farms Cowtoberfest.  This particular pumpkin was in Cowtoberfest '19.  No mention of how big it was.

While these are impressive, I think it's more impressive to carve recognizable faces out of a pumpkin.  I looked at a couple from his website, two musicians: Guns 'n Roses guitarist Slash and Alice Cooper.  Of the two, I think Alice Cooper is a more impressive carving.  His carving of Slash has less details because of large sunglasses Slash wears. 

Go look around on his website.  The guy has some serious talent.

And Happy Halloween!  I think most people will see this on November 1st: All Saints Day or All Hallows' Day. Something to lighten the mood for Tuesday, the 3rd. 

An unexpected Halloween scare

Over the course of the last several months, I've run stories saying SpaceX is cutting launches of their ultra-reliable workhorse Falcon 9 on the way toward completely shutting down Falcon 9 operations "real soon now" and a shortage of launch capabilities - worldwide - is coming.  

To borrow a joke we used to throw around at work all the time, "don't worry - it's not that bad. It's worse." 

Along that line, yesterday, Ars Technica's senior space editor Eric Berger ran a longer than usual post based on the evidence that for roughly the last 25 years, SpaceX needed NASA - sometimes desperately - and that has changed to the point that now NASA needs SpaceX far more than SpaceX needs NASA. In a way, this should be completely obvious; I mean, in calendar 2025, SpaceX launched more than the rest of the world combined. Of the US' global leading 181 launches, 165 of them - 91.1% - were SpaceX launches. China launched 91 times.

Today, Ars follows up with a headline that Analysts find that the looming launch crisis is “more severe” than anticipated. The short version of the story is that the US will be really pinched for at least the next five years, and probably won't be over the shortage until more like "the late 2030s".

A new report from the analytics firm Quilty Space confirms that, outside of China, the world faces a significant shortage of rockets over the next five years.

The firm estimates that between now and 2030, there will be a shortfall of about 150 launches compared to demand from satellite operators and civil space agencies. If demand from the US military is added in—and SpaceX does not extend the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy program to accommodate increased national security needs—the shortage could be doubled.

Caleb Henry, director of research at Quilty Space, put it this way. “What we wanted to get at is to understand how severe this launch crisis is and when will it be resolved. What we learned is that the launch crisis is more severe than we thought and that it will not go away this decade for sure, and it might not abate until sometime late in the 2030s.” 

It's true that SpaceX is a major contributor to the problem - since they did over 91% of last year's US launches, how could they not be? There's more than one reason for that, and the two big ones are that Starship is far behind schedule and that SpaceX has gone public on the stock market. To remain a good investment they need to be making money. The biggest chip that SpaceX has that can pay them well isn't putting small satellites into orbit, it's Starlink, and the biggest thing they can do for Starlink is to continually upgrade their network. Launching the V3 Starlink satellites is a job for Starship. 

Of course, SpaceX isn't the only factor, they're just the big, obvious one. In addition, the war in Ukraine took Russian launches off the Western market, Amazon's Leo constellation's demand is using up Atlas Vs and European Space Agency's Ariane 6s, developmental delays like the Vulcan being grounded, the New Glenn blowing up its launch complex, Rocket Lab's Neutron not being quite ready, along with Relativity Space's Terran R, and Nova. The retirement of the Falcon 9 as a rocket for commercial service is looking to be in the early 2030s, but that still adds into the big picture Quilty is trying to understand.

At a time when the supply of commercial rockets is contracting, demand for satellite launch is soaring, from megaconstellation operators such as Amazon to a flurry of small satellite startups. The report estimates the crunch will become most acute in 2028 but should then slowly improve.

“How should people react and plan around this?” Henry asked. “To be honest, I don’t have a good answer. If you haven’t booked your launch already, and you need one, you’re late.”

It seems to me that this could be temporary. Starship isn't operational, yet, but it could well be that the talk about launching not just more than once a week, but more than just once a day is the way out of this. Now it's true that we haven't seen a model Starship with a more conventional or typical looking cargo bay, just the Pez dispensers, but it doesn't seem like something that should take a lot of development. Not much design effort, just coordination, meaning a subcontractor could do that. It's true that, as Quilty points out, “SpaceX has also stopped affirming Starship as a commercial launcher” and there's no evidence that the company is putting effort into developing a conventional payload fairing door for the vehicle to accommodate traditional satellites and spacecraft.

I can see someone like a major satellite launch customer (cough, like Amazon Leo, cough) coming to Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX saying, "if we can get the launches to put up our satellites, we'll design the Starship Payload door and the stuff behind it, and qualify it for flight so that you don't have to stretch staff to do it." Or, as Dan Goldberg, president and chief executive of Telesat, said, they could design their satellites to fit in the SpaceX Pez dispenser's layout. Granted not every satellite could be "Pez-shaped," but it's a starting point. 

This isn't a recent picture - I took it from a 2025 post - but it always struck me as an essential, if not the essential, Falcon 9 picture. One taking off while another sits on its launch pad waiting to be next. Image credit: SpaceX

It's never a good time for this

Word is breaking this afternoon/evening East Coast time that the world has lost Sir Patrick Stewart. Sir Patrick was 86.

While perhaps being best known as Captain Jean Luc Picard in "Star Trek, the Next Generation", or perhaps as "Professor X", Charles Xavier in the Marvel X-Men movies, he was in many important roles over his years in the industry. 

Zendo Deb at 357 Magnum posted what I'm posting as flat image (.png) file but hers is a live link to X - best if you have an account. (That text on the right of his photo does enlarge if you click on it and is readable.)

To her point, we sure seem to be losing a lot of a generation of actors these days. It was less than a week ago that we lost Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Chekov in the original (late 1960s) Star Trek series.

ULA Announces Return to Flight for Vulcan

ULA has announced a planned date for the next Vulcan mission, return to service nine months after the Space Force grounded the vehicle after the February 12, 2026 launch of the fourth Vulcan mission. The date is Friday, November 13th - yes, "Friday the 13th."

The return-to-flight mission will launch 40 satellites for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation, the first of 38 Vulcan flights Amazon has booked to deploy the bulk of its network. The mission will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, and ULA said the launch date is pending range approval.

The launch is critical for ULA after its new flagship rocket suffered nozzle failures on its solid rocket boosters on two of its first four missions, most recently during a flight in February. In both cases, the rocket overcame the nozzle failure and completed its mission, but officials at the US Space Force, ULA’s primary customer, lost confidence in Vulcan.

The mission is in the NextSpaceflight line up already (IIRC, earlier in the week, it said, "NET November") where NET is the standard abbreviation for No Earlier Than. It does not include a liftoff time.  

As much as this mission is critical for ULA, demonstrating that their vehicle is trustworthy, it's critical for their customers - both Amazon Leo and US Space Force. The Pentagon has tasked ULA with around half of their classified launches through the early 2030s. The Space Force certified the Vulcan in 2025, then flew the two missions on which the Solid Rocket Boosters' nozzle failures occurred. The second failure triggered grounding the vehicle until it passes tests. 

In a statement, United Launch Alliance said engineers “made great strides” in understanding the booster anomaly that occurred in February. Engineers “have identified several potential contributors, which have been mitigated through design and process improvements to the nozzle,” ULA said. 

ULA also said, “To support our customers, this upcoming launch will utilize the improved nozzle design, and additional testing and analysis will continue in parallel with the mission. By flying the improved design, ULA gains valuable flight data that validates these improvements and is the most beneficial path in support of all our customers.”

Vulcan has a very full agenda in front of it. The Amazon LEO constellation is far from the extent of it - you might recall that SpaceX and ULA were chosen by Space Force to launch classified missions, with a contract that will actively swap missions between the two providers. That means in a case like this, Space Force may be moving payloads that they view as more critical to SpaceX and they'll tell SpaceX which future mission on their schedule to move to ULA in trade - more or less. 

For example:

A launch carrying the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Oracle-M lunar mission will now fly on SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket instead of ULA’s Vulcan, which will receive a future SpaceX-assigned launch in compensation. Space Systems Command completed a similar swap to move a large strategic missile warning satellite from Vulcan to Falcon Heavy.

So far the swaps have had no effect on the number of missions the Space Force has awarded to ULA and SpaceX. The trades are separate from the Space Force’s assignment of unallocated future missions to launch providers, which may already be hamstrung by SpaceX’s plans to retire the Falcon rocket family.

ULA’s Vulcan rocket is fully stacked with 40 Amazon Leo satellites in its payload fairing. This version of the rocket will debut an extended fairing, bringing the rocket’s total height to 221 feet (67.4 meters). Credit: United Launch Alliance

The next launch (two weeks from this Friday) will be the first Vulcan to fly with six SRBs. That increases the chances of getting a bad booster nozzle (if it really was a random 1 of 4 chance on the previous two failures). They plan on two flights before Vulcan could be certified again.

Aspiring competitor to SpaceX introduces themselves

Back in 2024 a company called Aetherflux was founded with the intent to put up huge solar power arrays and beam the power back down to Earth. That goal apparently didn't last very long because the California-based company with everything named as if it's Texan, called Cowboy Space, has made it known their intent now is to launch a fleet of orbital data centers, which means to compete directly with SpaceX. 

The California-based company, which is run by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, intends to operate a constellation of 20,000 AI data centers in low Earth orbit (LEO). It will build those satellites in house and launch them on a homegrown rocket — a vehicle Cowboy Space unveiled here on Monday night (Oct. 26), at an event it called "Big Sky Rising."

"It's a fundamentally novel approach to rocketry in the modern era, in our opinion," Bhatt said during the event. "The idea is that you have a two-stage rocket where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite." 

The rocket is named Big Iron, as is the data-center satellite, which I suppose is another way of saying it's a two stage rocket where the upper stage stays in orbit to become that satellite. Founder Baiju Bhatt is an Indian billionaire and absolutely can't be accused of not having visions for developing businesses. 

The stainless-steel rocket will be 282 feet (86 meters) tall and 15.4 feet (4.7 m) wide. It will be powered by Cowboy Space's Clydesdale engines — nine in the first stage and one in the upper stage, the same configuration employed by SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. And, like the Raptor engines that power another SpaceX launcher, the giant Starship, Clydesdale will burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, a combo known as methalox.

The first stage of the Big Iron rocket will be reusable and while they don't have a launch site named yet, they plan to be close enough to an ocean to recover the booster on a barge ship, like the vast majority of Falcon 9 launches. The upper stage, as mentioned, will stay in orbit as a Big Iron satellite and if there are going be tens of thousands of these on orbit, I'm sure they'll have something like a serial number or other Data Center identifier. The spacecraft will tip the scales here on Earth at about 33,000 pounds, and after unfurling its solar panels will be about 433 feet long.

During launch, the Big Iron will have a nose cone to protect the rest of the upper stage from the first minute or two of ascent, but it will not be dropped, as the Falcon 9 drops its payload fairings for recovery and reuse. Instead, the fairing will turn into a radiator, to dump the prodigious heat generated by Big Iron's GPUs (general processing units) into space. 

Don't forget there will be 20,000 of these GPU satellites up there. That's a lot of GPUs: each satellite will carry five racks of them and will provide about 1 megawatt of compute payload. 

Cowboy Space plans to operate about 20,000 Big Iron satellites in LEO, a constellation it calls Stampede. Each rocket will carry just one of these satellites to orbit, so it will take 20,000 launches to build Stampede — and, likely, several thousand more every year to maintain it at that number.

Cowboy Space therefore intends to launch very often — multiple times per day, from launch complexes it calls Trailheads. The company has not yet announced where these complexes will be, but each one will likely feature four active launch mounts, Bhatt said on Monday night.

So when does all this go live? In their minds, they're going now, but if you're wondering about when we'll see launches starting, I've got to think mid- to late-'29. At best. 

Artist's illustration of Cowboy Space's newly announced Big Iron rocket lifting off. Note one on the right 30 seconds or so into its flight curving toward the upper right corner and one on a pad near the left edge that seems to be releasing some cold gas, so possibly in some part of a countdown. (Image credit: Cowboy Space)

An interesting note to end this with is that Cowboy Space is operating one piece of space hardware at the moment. It's a satellite called Reason-1, launched on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission back on Oct. 1.

"Its job is to prove out power beaming: using a high-power laser to transfer energy from low Earth orbit to a receiver on the ground," Cowboy Space said via X on Sept. 28. "If you want to build data centers in space, you have to master the optical systems between orbit and Earth. This is where that journey begins." 

'More missions, more often' - NASA on selecting science missions

NASA is talking about overhauling how it selects and develops science missions, in an effort to reduce costs, and increase the pace of missions.  

The new approach, called Competition Model 2.0 (CM 2.0), was announced on Oct. 21 in an open letter from Nicky Fox, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD), to the NASA science community. The changes, directed by NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, could significantly reshape how scientists, universities, NASA centers and commercial companies vie for future missions.

"We have heard you. We have listened. We know that the burden of bringing great ideas forward has been too heavy for too long," Fox stated in the letter. 

Fox and other top NASA science officials provided an overview of the reforms during a virtual town hall today (Oct. 26) at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT). 

The current process for deciding on and conducting science missions is that NASA announces intended missions in what's called an Announcement of Opportunity (AOs), inviting scientists and research institutions to submit proposals. Groups or companies interested in doing the missions go through a two step process in which the competing teams create thorough engineering and financial details as part of their proposals before NASA selects finalists for further study. The process can take up to three years, neither fast nor low cost for providers working toward getting the missions. 

CM 2.0 aims to reduce that burden by emphasizing scientific distinction during initial evaluations, allowing teams to defer much of the engineering and financial planning until later. Instead, initial proposals will focus on the scientific objectives of a mission and a preliminary plan for how to accomplish them. 

Currently, NASA organizes missions ranging from smaller Explorer missions to large, expensive flagships like the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). 

Under CM 2.0, programs including smaller Discovery planetary missions, larger New Frontiers spacecraft and Astro-Probes, a program that focuses on mid-sized astronomy missions, will retain a streamlined version of the existing two-step process, but with nearly half of the material required for initial proposals. "This means that the original 35-months timeline will be reduced to about 19.5 months, all while having a stronger, more mature mission at the time of selection," Fox wrote. 

Flagship missions, meanwhile, will continue following their current procedures, which were recently revised based on lessons learned from a study of best practices examining the development of JWST.

Medium-sized missions (between those two major classes) will continue to exist and be open to smaller companies and schools. NASA plans to evaluate these missions based on their track records with projects of similar size, cost and complexity. Fox specifically mentioned that missions with a principal investigator will be able to request support from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center or Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) during the first stage of selection. That could conceivably help the customer and NASA doing the review.

Smaller, lower-cost science programs will see a more substantial selection process shakeup. "Our smallest missions will be riding the momentum of a maturing commercial space economy and will move even faster," Fox wrote. 

These are specifically listed as 

Small Explorer (SMEX) and Earth Venture missions, which conduct astronomy and heliophysics research, and targeted studies of Earth and its climate. Missions of Opportunity, which allow researchers to piggyback scientific investigations onto other missions, as well as hosted payloads and rideshares, will fall under the same one-step umbrella, which is expected to drop final selection timelines from approximately 32 months to just 19.

"This means more missions, more often, with more incredible science at a lower cost," Fox wrote.

Whenever we get information on proposals like this it's really hard to evaluate whether these attempts to fix a sub-optimal process will actually improve the results. Will having a smaller number of steps to go through really improve the processes? More to the point, will the people working on proposals do just as well as they do currently if we kept the same number of overall steps but cut the time allowed for each step?  What if we just had someone stand at their door, tapping their feet and practically chanting, "are you through yet? Are you through yet? ...' over and over all day? Deliberately absurd example. I hope to be shown this was a good thing to do. 

And speaking of "expensive flagships"... 

So Is It Fixed?

Followers of yesterday's post on the problem I'm having with my station have probably read my description of today's work, but I copy it here for everyone else. 

The most effective thing I did yesterday was to unplug and replug the USB cable into the audio input box on top of the rig. It's one of those square plugs, about 1/4 on a side, so I think those are USB A family. Today, I tried the station the way it was last night and it was doing better. I did about 10 transmit tests before it went into the "audio comb mode". Once I reset everything, I grabbed my can of "Deoxit 5" spray that's always on hand and gave a small spray into the end that plugs into the audio box on top of the rig.

Since then, I worked a couple of stations on 17m, figure about 10 T/R changes (both to and from that box), for them and ran around three dozen "tune" button transmissions. No returns of the "comb". 

So given that connector issues like this are about as common as can be - although I can't say I've seen one with these square USB-B connectors - and since I've done lots of transmissions without seeing the problem again, it might well be "all better." Between working the two new countries on 17m and my roughly "three dozen" transmit tests, that's more than I tend to transmit in most full days of making contacts on any band. 

Let me add some info that I should have included last night but wasn't prepared. 

First is the "red comb" effect, at the top of this screen capture. From the start of continuous lock out of the system until this screen grab is five 15 second intervals, and this was early this afternoon before the Deoxit5.

I've seen the red comb continue after I've turned off the radio that had been transmitting, so it's got to be coming from the audio system. The transmit audio is generated by the WSJT software running on the PC that gave us this plot. The audio from the computer goes over the USB cable that appears to have fixed it. That goes to a SignaLink USB box that controls both the transmit and receive audio levels. 

It has been a tricky problem to work on because it seemed different at different times. On the first day I spent time testing other bands, I found it on 20m and while I'm not 100% sure at the moment, I'd swear I saw it on 15m. I haven't seen it on any other band as much as 17m, and none on 20 and 15 since Thursday. Intermittent or "flaky" problems can suck up a lot of time.

So while I think it might be fixed, I'll be keeping an eye out for milder issues or more cases of this. 

A day of troubleshooting ...

... a very unusual problem that I've never heard of before in my ham shack, and I'm not sure I have anything to share. If you've been down the road of troubleshooting intermittent problems you're familiar with the idea that you may spend a lot of time deciding if you've fixed the intermittent problem, or just made it more intermittent. 

For one thing, I don't have single picture of the failure when it happens. I've been too distracted by trying to "make it stop!" 

Let me start from the beginning. Back in about 2018, I started running the various modes offered by physicist Joe Taylor, the vast majority of the time on what's called FT8. Yes I've used others, mostly FT4 which is like FT8 but less sensitive (less able to copy very weak signals) by using shorter transmit and receive intervals. The trade-off being you give up some sensitivity for shorter contacts - for those days (like today) when maybe you hear another state for a minute. I've used its meteor scatter mode, moonbounce mode, and more. 

Over the years, I've worked FT8 on all HF bands and 6m. My station has antennas for 80 to 6m except for 60m, a small chunk at around 5.5 MHz. 

A couple of nights ago, with 6 being as dead as it has been, I dropped down to HF, but instead of going to 80/40/30 as I typically go, on a spur of the moment decision, I went to 17m (18.068–18.168 MHz). It's a small band that hams were granted in the '79 World Administrative Radio Conference, or WARC, and the three bands that came out of that are known as the WARC bands. (If you've never heard of 17m, this seems to be a good overview). 

One the things I'm used to doing as last check on my station before I start to operate is hit the tune button, which just transmits a carrier at whatever your rig is set to. The (always there inline) power and VSWR meters looked perfectly normal, but nothing else did. Let me show you a screen capture of FT8 software (tuned to 30m - that's the only thing that's different) to make some points.

There are two windows here, the top one is the audio channel from 100 to 3100 Hz, each of the colored areas at the top are individual stations. In general the orange strands that are the most orange (like around 1700 Hz on the top scale) are the strongest, fading down to the more yellow ones (around 2000 Hz and that green rectangle). The spectrum at the bottom is more like a regular spectrum analyzer and is only showing the very topmost thin line of colors. The taller the spectrum the stronger the signal. 

When the "bad" happened, that topmost line was replaced by what looked like a continuous spectrum of lots of narrow "spikes," all red. Except spikes tend to have points and bases. This was just alternating big signal and nothing. Maybe like a comb, but all the red "teeth" were the same height and width. 

It gets weirder. The needle in the inline power meter that had previously measured the normal roughly 100 W transmit signal was now not showing any power at all. The receiver sounded muted, as it does during transmit. There's a transmit/receive indicator LED on the radio that stayed in transmit (red) instead of receive. 

It took a while to get it to stop; I had to reset everything. Turn the radio off and back on, reboot the computer, and several things. 

Yesterday, I started looking at it in more detail. I found that it did this on 20m but not higher: 15 to 10. This is helpful because 20 and 17 are on the same antenna, my Tennadyne T6 log periodic (LPDA). The other bands I've been tending to operate, 80, 40, 30 and 6m, haven't shown the issue. Then playing around on 17m, I found I could operate CW or SSB with no problems showing up. The frequency sensitivity made me think something in the LPDA's circuitry might be the problem. Looking up from the ground shows nothing, but it's at 25' above ground, so the view isn't that great. An easy next step seemed to be to check the grounds around the antenna. 

So that was today's start. All I could say was that the grounds looked just like the last time I did my routine inspection last spring. Nothing broken, nothing missing, nothing looking like the ground wire was replaced by weeds. They just looked like they've been outdoors and corroded a bit. The next thing to check was connections in the shack and while checking things on 17m again, I noticed the rig control software (Ham Radio Deluxe - HRD) would not always see the radio. So I did the old "unplug it then plug it back in" trick. That's a USB connection from the radio to a little box that sets up the modulation for these WSJT modes. That made a difference. It was easier to recover from the "red comb". 

Late in the day (it was nearly 5PM by this time) I decided to retest the setup on 17 and the problem was gone. I tested a couple of times and it worked. I tested 20m - no problems, and worked my way back up to 10 without seeing the problem again. Then I went back to 17 to "soak in the success" of just unplugging and re-plugging one cable. That's when it failed again. 

What was that thing about making the intermittent problem more intermittent? 

Around the time I sat down to write this I realized, I could use far more pictures than I've got. So I went back to the shack, tuned to 17 and hit the tune button to transmit. No problem. Tried it again - surely it must fail by now? - Nope. I think I transmitted 10 times and it never had the failure. Then I tuned it to a band I've never seen it fail on, 30m, for the picture above. 

What's next? Can't say I really know. More experiments and measurements, but I sure don't know what to go after. It looks like it's in the computer control of the rig. I've tried two different versions of the WSJT software, the latest and a somewhat earlier release. I'm on the latest update of HRD. 

NASA lays out updates to Artemis III mission

NASA had a live teleconference today to talk about the coming Artemis III mission to prepare for the next moon landing. It's all in a slightly over two hour video on YouTube.  Ars Technica has a good summary, and since most of this info has been covered there, and I've brought it here, their summary is easy to read. 

An important thing to put out early is that NASA is still planning to launch Artemis III by next summer, but they don't get more specific than that. This is a demonstration mission in near Earth orbit involving docking with both Blue Moon and Starship. The lunar landing mission will be "in 2028" but nothing more specific about how long after Artemis III they think they'll need to prepare. Let's say III launches in July of '27; will IV be able to roll in January or February of '28, or will it be in November or December? 

“This is an achievable path we are on right now,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said. “We have the mandate, we have the resources, and the support from our stakeholders to be able to execute, and that’s what we intend to do.”

It is commendable that Isaacman and his leadership have taken a hard look every element of the Artemis Program and sought to make changes where they can help the lunar lander companies execute and accelerate their plans. But can they hold to those dates?

It's important to remember that among this mission's objectives is to rendezvous and dock with both Starship and Blue Moon, so there are really two complete mission plans at play and it's only fair to present both of those here. 

First, SpaceX. You'll recall that the starting point before Jared Isaccman and when the current version of Artemis involved a lunar-orbiting space station called the Lunar Gateway. When SpaceX won the Human Landing System contract, that was a requirement. Isaccman ditched Lunar Gateway earlier this year, and SpaceX has adapted their HLS to the current requirements. They will fuel a Starship lunar lander in low-Earth orbit before docking with Orion in high-Earth orbit. For the landing mission, the crew will fly to the Moon inside Orion before two of four astronauts transfer into Starship for a landing on the Moon.

The SpaceX version of Artemis III's requirements 

Image credit: NASA

This week, the Rumor Mill got excited when a NASA Safety Panel reported that the current number of Starship tanker launches that will be required is “about 22.” As always, that rumor went around world several times before Elon Musk heard of it and said that estimate was wrong, and the actual number will be six to eight. 

I think it's fair to say that nobody really knows because of the vast amount of unknowns to consider. Jared Isaacman said essentially he didn't accept Musk's statement and thought it meant maybe six to eight "some day." So say it'll be somewhere between six and 22. 

Blue Origin's version of Artemis III's requirements 

Under the concept of operations released Friday, a New Glenn rocket (this could be an expendable version of the smaller 7×2 variant of New Glenn, or a reusable 9×4 rocket) would launch three “transfer stages” to low-Earth orbit. These transfer stages are modeled after the Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, but have some significant modifications.

Then New Glenn would launch the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander into orbit, where it would rendezvous with the transfer stages that will push the stack to the Moon. This is not new information, as Ars first reported this architecture in March. However, NASA did reveal a potentially significant change on Friday.

Image Credit: NASA

The chart shared by NASA showed Orion docking with the Blue Moon lander in an elliptical lunar orbit, approximately 8,500 km above the Moon’s surface. However NASA is also working to have the option of docking with Orion in low-Lunar orbit.

The advantage of the low-Lunar orbit is it could significantly reduce the propellant needed by Blue Moon to bring astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up. As always, "engineering is the art of compromise" and the mass of propellant required to handle the higher orbit could be used elsewhere. Plus the different orbit could offer mission flexibility that's not available in the 8,500 km orbit. 

There's more to this conference than easily fits in this space. One of those is that since the SLS (Space Launch System) was designed, Artemis has been hampered by not having an upper stage (to include the Orion service module) that's got enough thrust to be useful. NASA announced they're working with ULA to specify and develop a different version of the Centaur Upper Stage of SLS. The concept is an upper stage replacement that would allow Orion to reach low-lunar orbit.

In fewer words, that's spending millions to fix a problem that SLS has had for as long as it has existed. For a rocket system that's already obscenely expensive to launch. As I've said so enough that I'm bored with it, a single SLS launch costs $4 billion. A Falcon Heavy costs a small percentage of that. It has less payload capacity than the SLS but not much less, so launch TWO modified Falcon Heavies for less than 10% of the cost of an SLS launch and get more payload to the moon. 

Europe's first reusable spacecraft has a major "oops!"

Europe has been working for some time on a spacecraft called Space Rider designed to be reused. The European Space Agency (ESA) performed a drop test back on October 6 intended to test out its parachute system, and it failed. Badly. 

The incident occurred during an Oct. 6 drop test of the full-scale Space Rider model, from the European Space Agency (ESA). The robotic vehicle's initial drogue parachute deployed successfully, but its main parafoil detached during deployment, leaving the prototype unable to slow its descent before crashing into the ground, according to ESA officials. The cause of the failure remains under investigation.

"Following several successful tests using representative vehicle masses, the latest system-level drop test in October was not completed as planned due to an anomaly during the parafoil deployment sequence," an ESA spokesperson confirmed in an email to Space.com. "An independent investigation is ongoing to determine its root cause and inform the next steps."

Render of ESA's Space Rider orbiter. (Image credit: European Space Agency)

Space Rider isn't intended as vehicle that takes a crew to a space station (ISS or another). It's designed to carry scientific experiments to orbit for up to two months, then return them to Earth for analysis. Its method of return, though, differs from that of any other spacecraft in use today. Space Rider's wingless, lifting-body design relies on a steerable parachute, or parafoil, to maneuver toward its landing area. This allows it to perform runway-style touchdowns, as opposed to the less accurate parachute-based systems in current use. The higher accuracy, in turn, allows heavier lift vehicles to recover the payloads, rather than picking up a capsule in a desert - like the picture of the capsule that returned the samples of asteroid Bennu in this post. The lifting body design is similar to something like the Dream Chaser or even the Space Shuttles, but neither of those systems had a lifting body-shaped parachute. 

According to Géraldine Naja, ESA's director of space transportation, the failure of the steerable parachute doesn't halt the program. 

"We hope that this test will not damage, or let's say lead us to modify, the remaining schedule and qualification activities," Naja said during an ESA Council media briefing on Oct. 22. "In any case, the remaining qualification activities are not on the critical path of the development of the Space Rider."

Naja described the incident as an unfortunate but important event. "We have had many successful tests before, but testing and validation is part of the development of a space system," she said.

The test vehicle that was destroyed was a full-sized model, referred to as being "minivan-sized" for a mental picture, reproduced the size and flight characteristics of its reentry module, with avionics to control its autonomous guidance and navigation systems, but the vehicle was far from a space-ready article. 

The Oct. 6 test took place at a military range on the Italian island of Sardinia, where the mockup was released from a helicopter at an altitude of approximately 2 miles (3 kilometers). According to Naja, the vehicle's initial drogue parachute triggered as expected and began slowing the Space Rider mock-up's descent before its larger, steerable parafoil was supposed to unfurl. The parafoil, however, detached during deployment, leaving the vehicle in freefall before impacting the ground. ESA has subsequently recovered all the craft's components.

I'd like to say something like "parachutes fail... it happens," but that sounds a little lowbrow. It's certainly something that shouldn't happen on a real mission, but, it sounds like they're operating with the belief that they need to build a replacement model to continue or re-start the testing and just the fact it's a model means many retests are required. That means this failure doesn't affect the rebuild and retest much at all.

The target for a "real" mission of the Space Rider system is just "later this decade." The could mean tomorrow or it could mean December of 2029. 

Looks like it's time for the BIG test flight

Word has started getting around that the next Starship Flight Test, FT-15, will be set up to attempt recovery of both the Super Heavy booster - which has already been done - and Starship, which has never been attempted. 

During their recent 3rd quarter financial update meeting, both Elon Musk and SpaceX president and Chief Operating Officer, Gwynne Shotwell, provided new performance targets for the vehicle. 

It has been a little more than three weeks since the 14th test flight of the massive rocket, which largely went well despite some issues with the Raptor rocket engine. SpaceX has gleaned enough data from that test, Musk said, to attempt a catch of both the Super Heavy first stage of the rocket and the Starship upper stage on the next flight.

Musk said he believes success is “more likely than not” for these attempts, but he added the company is hardware rich if there are failures. Both catches would happen at the company’s launch site in South Texas, Starbase. SpaceX is currently targeting November for this 15th test flight.

While the technical hurdles are well-known, and it's hard to imagine that after almost 700 Falcon 9 flights there's any company that knows more about landing things like this, there's at least one new aspect to this mission. Since Starship has to fly over Mexican territory to return to Starbase, the Mexican equivalent of the FAA will have to approve the mission. 

“We have had significant constructive engagement with the FAA, and we expect the license for our Flight 15 to include return to launch site and tower catch for both stages,” Shotwell said.

SpaceX is doing all they can to increase the Starship flight cadence. At the start of the month, the long version of the NextSpaceflight "next launches" page had two Starship flights, one in Texas and the other from Cape Canaveral SFS shown as a Starlink mission (so a "working flight"). Now there's a second Starship launch from Texas between those two, also shown as a "working flight" full of Starlink Satellites. Saying it's "between" might imply a definite order, but without specific NET dates in order, I wouldn't interpret it that way. Both are shown as NET 2026. Which includes now.

After this, COO Shotwell said they're going to start working on the orbital refueling flights they'll need to be doing soon for Artemis “early” next year.  

The company will also seek to complete a long-delayed refueling test of Starship early in 2027. This Starship-to-Starship refueling demonstration is an important milestone for SpaceX and NASA to prove the viability of Starship being refueled in low-Earth orbit for lunar missions.

Refueling on this scale has never been done before, and the company needs to get data on the efficiency of such transfers and the rate of boil-off of liquid oxygen and methane in space. This data will refine projections for how many launches are needed to support a Starship landing on the Moon for NASA as part of the Artemis Program.

For SpaceX, the first priority is reaching a high flight cadence for Starship and pushing the boundaries of vehicle reuse to enable it. Musk says he has high confidence they'll be able to catch Starship, but one flawless, successful catch would silence a lot of critics. He has also said he expects to reach a “weekly” flight cadence during the first half of 2027 and to launch twice weekly during the second half of the year. The key will be how quickly Starship can be restored to flight ready. 

“The rate at which we launch Starship will increase dramatically as we solve rapid and complete reusability,” Musk said. “At first there will be a little bit of refurbishment that’s needed between each flight, and we’ll iron out the need for any refurbishment such that you can immediately land the rocket and launch it again, just like an airplane.”

That’s the vision, at least. Achieving complete reusability with an orbital rocket has never been done before, so SpaceX’s engineering team will undoubtedly face some significant hurdles. Over time, however, they are likely to get close to the vision of launching, landing, and reflying rockets.

SpaceX's 14th Starship test flight on Monday morning, Sept. 28 from Starbase, Texas, looking north along the gulf coast. Image Credit: SpaceX

EDIT to Add 10/22/26 11:15AM: Correct date in the image caption. Short circuit in the headset.

Since there's no real big news

Since it's a slow day, I'll fill in some pictures I took of this morning's Bandwagon mission from SpaceX. 

I told the story yesterday of getting up at 6:00 AM and immediately finding the launch had been scrubbed a few hours before. I repeated the setup for this morning and quickly found the mission had been slipped from 6:00 to 7:05 this morning. That's big because what was getting me up to watch the mission was just in case there was a repeat of the Space Jellyfish phenomenon that happened last week. It was big, beautiful and was visible over a wide area of the country. 

It didn't take terribly long to decide we'd just wait until launch time rather than try to nap for the extra half hour. Sunrise here was 7:27 so while the launch time was before sunrise it was still massively lighter than it was that 45 minutes earlier when I found out the mission was moved to 7:05AM, but after watching the lead-up to the launch on NASASpaceflight's YouTube channel, I grabbed my backup, more or less point and shoot camera and wandered out onto the back porch waiting to take some pictures. 

The first one is looking SE just after Main Engine CutOff (MECO). The white contrail off to the left was from the booster on this flight, then there's a clear spot when no engines were running, followed by the short white line from SES, Second Engine Start, which is the second stage's contrail. 

Next is several seconds later when both the main and second stage contrails are expanding a bit, and there's a start of Space Jellyfish starting up around the second stage. 

If you look closely in the jellyfish, you'll that the second stage engine is a visible bright spot with a triangular (almost fan-shaped) white spot and just behind that is a small white spot which (I think) is from the booster dropping away. 

Here's a zoomed in pic of just that jellyfish with things enlarged and spread out, so easier to see. 

By this time, around three minutes after launch, the show is moving farther southeast, which translates into lower in the sky and closer to behind a neighbor's tree, so we came back in to watch the booster land on the recovery drone ship. All pictures by me, SiG.

Unlike the enormously big and beautiful jellyfish produced last week, this one was neither unusually big or beautiful. It was more like the vast majority of these that we've seen. There are advantages to living near one of busiest spaceports in the world.