Small Space News Story Roundup 85

It surprised me how long it has been since I did #84. These short items are primarily from Ars Technica's Rocket Report. 

Isar Aerospace to try for Flight Test 2  

Isar Aerospace is in a unique place for a private space corporation in Europe. They've actually launched a rocket once, back on March 30 of '25 but their Spectrum rocket didn't make orbit, and honestly didn't get much higher than a few launch towers. You may remember seeing it lose control less than one minute after launch as engines either couldn't or wouldn't run, then it crashed in to the water around Andøya spaceport in Norway and exploded. 

They've been working toward a second launch since then and are in the books to try again tomorrow at 4:00 PM EDT (Eastern US Daylight Time) from the same spaceport. It sounds like it's a bit more ambitious than just a test of whether or not they can make it to orbit.

This launch will carry 5 cubesats and 1 non-separable experiment as part of European Space Agency (ESA)'s “Boost!” program: 

• CyBEEsat (TU Berlin) 
• TriSat-S (University of Maribor)
• Platform 6 (EnduroSat)
• FramSat-1 (NTNU)
• SpaceTeamSat1 (TU Wien Space Team)
• Let It Go (Dcubed, non-separable experiment) .

The March of '25 Isar Aerospace Spectrum Rocket's launch at nearly it's maximum height. I don't know how high that little mesa is on the left, but it's not even a piece of gravel compared to even the lowest orbits. (The whole video this is from) 

Starship Flight 14 has a date

They just don't have a specified launch time, yet. Just No Earlier Than September 15. That's a week from Tuesday, or 10 days from Saturday.

The scuttlebutt I'm seeing is that they're not going to try to catch the ship with the giant chopsticks, the only goal for this one is to have an orbital flight - and deploy some of the new Starlink satellites that are too big for a Falcon 9 to carry the numbers they deployed of the earlier generation sats. I consider that as a rumor. Completely unofficial. 

The rocket’s enormous first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, lit its 33 engines on the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, on August 28. The static fire on Super Heavy followed a test-firing of the six-engine Starship upper stage earlier in August. This is the rocket that will power Flight 14 of Starship, scheduled for launch later this month. Flight 14 is expected to be the first Starship flight to low-Earth orbit after the previous 13 test flights targeted suborbital trajectories.

Unleashing Starlink V3… The orbital flight will allow SpaceX to deploy operational payloads. A batch of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink “Version 3” satellites will launch on Flight 14. The new Starlink V3s are too large to fit on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, and they offer significant performance upgrades over the Starlink V2s that currently populate the network. SpaceX has not said how many Starlink V3s will launch on Flight 14. The company deployed 20 Starlink V3s on the previous Starship flight in July, but those satellites did not enter orbit. They reentered the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean, as intended, as Starship headed for a controlled splashdown northwest of Australia.

Blue Origin breaks ground on a satellite hangar

The reconstruction of Launch Complex 36 isn't the only big construction job Blue Origin is doing. 

... it is also moving forward with new construction of an adjacent facility that will help the US Space Force, the Orlando Sentinel reports. Jeff Bezos’ company was awarded a $78 million contract last year by Space Systems Command to construct a space vehicle processing facility on Florida’s Space Coast by 2028. The hangar won’t be just for Blue Origin, though, but will support any launch provider flying national security payloads. 

Thinking big… The Payload Processing Facility (PPF) will cover 120,000 square feet and will be large enough to accommodate Blue Origin’s planned 25.5-foot-diameter (8.7-meter) payload fairing for the company’s upgraded New Glenn rocket. Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, said the facility will house four payload processing bays, two encapsulation bays, and a multi‑manifest area supporting National Security Space Launch, civil, and commercial missions.

Blue is on a construction spree up on the Cape. In addition to LC36 and this PPF, they're adding a second launch pad for New Glenn rockets - the bigger 9x4 version of the rocket. 

With the new companies moving into central Florida to take advantage of the facilities on Cape Canaveral, we have the potential of being a rather busy place for watching launches. 

The 8 year mission to Mercury of BepiColombo began a new phase

The program called BepiColombo is a joint mission between the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) that was first launched on its convoluted and difficult journey to Mercury in October of 2018. Today, the spacecraft, consisting of three separate modules, began preparing for its final arrival at Mercury today, at around 8AM EDT. This diagram shows the major events and their dates over the next seven months. 

UPDATE for Sept. 3: BepiColombo mission to Mercury successfully began its arrival sequence at the innermost planet with two spacecraft, one from Europe and the other from Japan, separating from its Mercury Transport Module. 

The confirmation that the first (leftmost) step in this series of major steps succeeded wasn't communicated back by BepiColombo until closer to 10:00AM EDT - two hours after the maneuver was scheduled. 

Mercury holds the dubious honor of being the least explored planet of the solar system inside the orbit of Saturn. Only Uranus, Neptune and Pluto have had fewer satellites monitoring them (one visit to each planet). Mercury had Mariner 10 making a three flybys between 1974 and 1975, and vastly increasing our knowledge of the smallest planet in the solar system. The next visitor was almost 40 years later when NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft arrived in 2011. Both the Mariner and MESSENGER missions dramatically improved our knowledge of the little planet, but they also had strong points and weak points - meaning there were gaps in this knowledge, too.

As you can tell in the mission plan or schedule above, by March, the two BepiColombo modules will be orbiting Mercury and getting ready to start gathering data.

Europe's Mercury Planetary Orbiter, or MPO, will focus on the planet proper. It's packed with 11 science instruments that will map the terrain, minerals in the crust, and the gravity field, investigate the hollows and volcanic deposits, and observe how the barrage of charged particles from the sun affects this innermost planet.

Japan's Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, or Mio, meanwhile, will focus on the planet's surroundings — its magnetosphere and wispy atmosphere, as well as the dust cluttering up its neighborhood. 

After eight years to get to this point, the researchers are excited about being this close to actually getting the data they've been working toward getting. Space.com has several articles on this mission and the milestone they accomplished today. The articles seem to overlap, and quite a bit in some places. If this is your kind of stuff, you might find it worthwhile to go read. 

• https://www.space.com/astronomy/mercury/2-spacecraft-will-soon-reach-mercury-after-8-years-in-space-heres-what-bepicolombo-can-do  
• https://www.space.com/space-exploration/missions/a-new-mission-starting-today-8-years-after-launch-bepicolombo-begins-mercury-arrival 
• https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/bepicolombo-mission-begins-mercury-arrival-phase-esa-jaxa 

Flying over Mercury's north pole gave BepiColombo's monitoring camera 1 (M-CAM 1) a unique opportunity to peer down into the shadowy polar craters on Jan. 8, 2025. (Image credit: ESA/BepiColombo/MTM)

I beg your pardon, but...

Not much of a post today. Been working on a problem with our refrigerator for about a full, eight hour day. 

We've been having a recurring problem with our refrigerator's freezer section dripping water which ends up on the floor below the freezer door. It has been happening intermittently and only small amounts we can see. I haven't kept a log, but it started out over a week ago, then has been a mix of sometime it's obviously bad while other days it can go all day without leaking. For most of the time, there has been a deposit of ice on the freezer's floor (inside), and I've tried to troubleshoot it to determine if it's the system auto-defrosting circuit, or just what's going on.

A complication popped up today and it stopped me for at least an hour. This refrigerator has a built-in icemaker and while it's a longer story than this, three years ago last month I moved its input hose from the input of a water filter we use on the kitchen sink, to that filter's output, so that our ice was made with filtered water, not "just" city water. Today, with everything off and cleaning behind the refrigerator, I heard a quiet little hissing sound. It turned out to be that hose was leaking - spraying a very fine mist of the filtered water out behind the refrigerator. I had to turn off the cold water under the sink to stop that spraying.

My fix was to disconnect the icemaker from that water filter, which means there is no connection to water for the icemaker at all. I had to go up to the corner hardware store to buy an adapter to not hook that hose back to the filtered water. The hose is just hanging there, not attached to anything. I think from now on we're just going to live without an icemaker. It's not like we use a lot of ice and neither one of us thinks it's an essential appliance. Since the water in the bottom of the freezer had to come from somewhere it was either the water going to the icemaker, or the refrigerator's defrosting system not working properly, and everything else in freezer looks normal, not too much frost. I think what comes next is I'm going to go buy some ice cube trays and we'll just fill 'em up in the kitchen sink and freeze them on a shelf in the freezer. Just like we used to do 60 years ago.

Anyway, that's why it's an odd day. Back to normal tomorrow.  

The first report on Artemis II's heat shield is out

Going into the Artemis II mission last spring, probably the biggest concern we'd hear about was the heat shield issues that were seen on the unmanned Artemis I mission back in late 2022. Probably the best set of pictures I've got were posted in January of this year. The heat shield on an Orion capsule uses the ablative technique that has been used since the early days of spaceflight; the base of the capsule is coated with an ablative material called Avcoat that's supposed to essentially disintegrate slowly and in a controlled way. Instead, large chunks were missing. Lots of chunks. Back when the capsule was recovered, a single picture taken by a recovery diver was released. The heat shield was obviously much, much better than Artemis I's shield.

The Artemis 2 Orion heat shield underwater after splashdown on April 10, 2026. (Image credit: U.S. Navy) Some image processing by me to bring up the overall brightness of the image and get more of the shield to show up.

A report on the detailed examination performed on the Artemis II heat shield was released and reported on today. 

After the Artemis I mission in 2022, there were more than 100 char loss sites observed across the dish-shaped heat shield at the base of Orion, some of which were more than an inch deep. On the Artemis II heat shield, he said, there were approximately nine char loss sites observed. “So it was a big improvement,” said Hill, former director of Mission Operations at NASA.
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At the base of Orion are 186 blocks of a material called Avcoat; they are individually attached to provide a protective layer that allows the spacecraft to survive the heating of atmospheric reentry. Analysis after the Artemis I mission found that this Avcoat material was “impermeable,” essentially meaning it could not breathe. During reentry, gases became trapped in the heat shield, leading to cracking.

After considering several options, including swapping the heat shield out for a newer one with more permeable Avcoat, NASA decided instead to change Orion’s reentry profile. For Artemis II, it would return through Earth’s atmosphere at a steeper angle, spending fewer minutes in the environment where this outgassing occurred during Artemis I.

A quote about engineering I was told while I was still in school, and that I've stated here before, is that "engineering is the art of compromise" - it's practically always the case that when you improve the performance of something that you're struggling to improve, you make something else worse. The final design you end with is better at the one characteristic that you worked to change but something you weren't trying to improve got worse. In this case, the performance of the heat shield was remarkably better but "the new reentry profile reduced the vehicle’s “downrange” capability from 4,800 nautical miles to 1,775 miles. Downrange capability is the distance a spacecraft can travel, relative to the Earth’s surface, from the point of atmospheric reentry." 

Does reducing the downrange capability to less than 40% of what it started out as matter? It's not as good as it was, so that has to be considered differently for every mission. The trade is that reduction in downrange capability reduced the number of missing chunks from 100 to 9.

An interesting side note here is that this was talked about at a meeting of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel and let's just say they haven't exactly always been fanboys of NASA management.  

Toward the end of the safety panel’s meeting on Monday, a few members made some striking comments about their experiences working with NASA this year. For long-time listeners to meetings of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, which is distinctly independent from NASA and tasked with identifying safety issues, these were eye-opening statements.

In describing the panel’s deliberations during its quarterly meeting, Hill said, “Words like impressive, stunning, and shocking were all brought up about the progress that the agency has made in the last year, and even more rapidly just in the last four months.”

The bottom line here is that Panel's members and the other people they interviewed seem convinced the improvement is all due to Jared Isaacman, and they praise him for it. 

“In an empowering or enabling way, the changes that we are hearing in the leadership voice at the very top of the agency, and then down into the agency, are aligning the team on a coherent strategy and then taking the steps to execute on that strategy,” Hill said. “Again, it’s nothing short of impressive, and it’s directly related to recommendations we’ve had open for a number of years.” 

SpaceX, NASA delay crew-13 mission due to a leak in Dragon

The Crew-13 flight to the Space Station for a crew change out had been scheduled for Wednesday, September 12, but on Saturday, August 29, it was announced that an oxidizer leak in Dragon’s propulsion system had been detected during standard prelaunch spacecraft processing. NASA and SpaceX quickly announced the launch date was being cancelled while the system is undergoing troubleshooting. 

"Joint NASA and SpaceX teams are performing additional tests and data review and will complete any necessary rework prior to launch," NASA officials wrote in an update on Saturday. "A new target date will be announced once available."

The mission name, of course, doesn't mean the 13th crew swap in the life of the ISS; it's just the 13th crew that SpaceX has lifted to the ISS since they began flying the crew dragon spacecraft for NASA.  

The four members of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-13 mission to the International Space Station display their mission plaque inside a training mockup of a space station module. From left: Commander Jessica Watkins and Pilot Luke Delaney, both from NASA, and Mission Specialists Joshua Kutryk of the Canadian Space Agency and Sergey Teteryatnikov of Roscosmos. (Image credit: NASA/Morgan Gridley)

"We expect a very busy mission with lots of station maintenance, both internal and external, with a few EVAs [extravehicular activities, or spacewalks] on the docket," Watkins said during an Aug. 3 press conference.

There will also be "visiting vehicle capture and stowage operations, lots of science — very interesting science experiments that will be flying with us as well — and plenty of outreach," she added.

The launch will be from SLC-40 (usually just called "slick 40") on the Space Force Station side of Cape Canaveral rather than LC-39 on the Kennedy Space Center side. The first Crew Dragon missions were from LC-39 but SpaceX modernized the SLC-40 hardware to accommodate manned flights. The first crewed flight from SLC-40 was in September of 2024, while the first crewed Dragon launch was the May 2020 first flight of the spacecraft. 

It's hard not to talk about the NGRST launch

It's easy to get used to how smoothly and flawlessly these missions are tending to go these days. I had my alarm set to 7:00 AM specifically so that I wouldn't sleep so long I'd miss the coverage, and woke up closer to 6:30. Once I fed the boss, it was plain I wasn't going back to bed and it gave me plenty  of time to grab a coffee and watch the last half hour of the countdown. 

Like virtually all SpaceX launches, every event called out in the schedule was exactly on time. One of the guys would say something, like "booster 1 will get its fueling start call soon" and most of the time the call out happened either during the last few seconds of what he was saying or a few seconds right after. We started watching right after 0700 and that accuracy held for the entire time we were watching. The view outside was good, minimal thin clouds and good visibility the whole time. Our usual approach is to watch until just after the boosters are dropped and begin their approach to their landing destination. By the time we walk into the house and sit down, it's less than a minute from the booster landing.

The first rumble, the one that seems to come from the launch and gets here pretty much at the same time as Booster Engine Cut Off (BECO) happens, wasn't very impressive, but it got louder and shook things more noticeably a bit later. I didn't make note of the time, but it might have been a minute or two after BECO and the boosters being dropped to start their return trip to the KSC to land for reuse.  

A "standard" liftoff view photo found on Space.com. 

SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launches with NASA’S Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope onboard from Launch Complex 39A, Sunday, Aug. 30, 2026, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Image credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

And an artsy view that I also got from Space.com. 

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying NASA's Roman Space Telescope crosses the sun during launch from Pad 39A of NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Florida on Aug. 30, 2026. (Image credit: Space.com / Josh Dinner)

I started this off saying that it's easy to get used to how smoothly and flawlessly these missions are tending to go these days. That's leaving out that part of that "smoothly and flawlessly" is things like landing the boosters back on the Cape, and that has been at industrial scale for only a few years. It's so easy to take success like that for granted. 

The last launch of August

I shouldn't call it a no news day, it's just that the biggest story in the Space domain is the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Sunday morning at 7:26 AM EDT and we've covered that many times, most recently just two days ago. Weather permitting, I'll be watching from the side yard as long as I can. 

Chelsea Gohd, Content Manager and writer at Space.com tells a nice story of meeting Dr. Roman in 2017, nine years ago. She was already referred to as "the Mother of Hubble" at that point, making her legendary to the writers there. That was around one year before Dr. Roman passed away, on Dec. 25, 2018 at the age of 93. 

Nancy Grace Roman stands next to a scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope outside the Hubble control center at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. “Mother of Hubble” with her brainchild. (Image credit: NASA) 

The source article doesn't associate a date with this image. My guess is simply after Hubble had begun its mission, so between maybe 1995 (after the COSTAR optics fix was done) and before the end of the Shuttle program in 2011. Somewhere in the early 2000s.

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The second most interesting news of the last day or so is that SpaceX Boca Chica static fire tested the booster for flight test 14 (that's a YouTube "short") and the general feeling from the coverage is that it went by the book. There is no date for FT-14 published yet. A rough guess based on how previous flights have gone past this point lean me toward the middle of September, around two weeks from now. 

The US Space Academy?

President Trump visited NASA's Johnson Space Flight center this morning with little fanfare before but a big important visit. He signed an executive order to establish a new commission with the purpose of creating the first national space academy. 

“It’s clear that we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators, and everything else to do what we have to do,” Trump said. “I will sign an executive order to begin the process of creating a new national academy. It’s called the US Space Academy. That’s a big deal.”

The proposed United States Space Academy would fall under the jurisdiction of NASA, and according to US space officials, is not intended be a traditional service academy in the sense that it educates and trains officers for the armed services, such as the Air Force Academy.

The appearance was talked about on news services because they said he was there to present the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to the four astronauts who flew on Artemis II earlier this year, which he did as well.

The idea of a Space Force academy this time goes back to Administrator Jared Isaacman, but I'm pretty sure I've heard of it before. The military services have academies similar to this idea, where high school students have to get selected by their state's Senator, then go through a rigorous selection process to get into those academies. Isaacman included the development of an “academy” in his plans to seed the future NASA workforce as part of his Project Athena plan to revamp US civil space efforts. Like West Point, Annapolis, and the others, the idea is for this academy to be an elite institution.  

The goal is to create a top-tier educational institution with free tuition and, in return, graduating students to fulfill a service commitment of several years. Graduates will have the choice of going into the US Space Force, but the majority of slots will be allocated to NASA and civilian positions, according to people familiar with the project.
...
This would be an entirely new academy, perhaps similar in design to the US Merchant Marine Academy, which is based in Kings Point, New York. Students would apply after high school for admission and be taught by leaders in both the civil and commercial spaces. Students would earn a four-year degree. No location has been chosen for the academy, but it may be near existing NASA facilities or workforce expertise. “I’m going to be choosing a location very shortly,” Trump said Friday.

As functions like creating and running a Space Academy are so close to military activity, there's likely to be the usual political reactions to this, and especially since it started with Donald Trump and Jared Isaacman. The folks who scream at every idea that Trump ever has are doing what you expect. There's some mention of that sort of stuff in the Ars Technica news piece I linked to. I don't pay attention to it because we pretty much know what they'll say to any news. 

Astronauts look on as US President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a Congressional Space Medal of Honor presentation at Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on August 28, 2026. Credit: Kent NISHIMURA / AFP via Getty Images

It's a news day for Europe's Ariane 6

If you tend to always look at when news events line up to wonder if it's coincidence or pre-planned, especially if you're oriented toward watching the European Space Agency, today's your day to ask yourself the big questions. 

The bigger news item is even hard to pick, but today the Ariane 6 launched its first payload to a Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO), a large weather satellite called the MTG-I2, from their Kourou, French Guiana launch facilities. Liftoff was at 4:10 PM EDT in the US or 2010 UTC.

The Ariane 6 successfully released the MTG-I2 into its GTO 36 minutes after liftoff. 

The 8,400-pound (3,800 kilograms) MTG-I2 is the second imaging satellite in the Meteosat Third Generation network (hence the name). It will complete the three-spacecraft constellation in geostationary orbit, which lies 22,236 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth.

Its companions, MTG-I1 and MTS-S1, launched in December 2022 and July 2025, respectively. MTG-I1 is an imaging craft and MTS-S1 is a "sounder," using an infrared instrument to probe different layers of Earth's atmosphere. 

Note that the MTG-I1 launch was on the Ariane 5, not 6, and the MTS-S1 launch was on a Falcon 9. 

An Ariane 6 rocket launches the MTG-I2 weather satellite from Kourou, French Guiana on Aug. 27, 2026. (Image credit: Arianespace)

Today's launch was the ninth to date for the Ariane 6, which can deliver up to 12.7 tons (11.5 metric tons) to GTO in its burliest configuration. For comparison, SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket has a GTO payload capacity of 9.15 tons (8.3 metric tons).

For the rest of the day's story, we need to switch to European Spaceflight which informs us that a group of planned upgrades to the Ariane 6 called Block 3 have been shelved. 

The European Space Agency has confirmed to European Spaceflight that it is no longer considering the Ariane 6 Block 3 evolution, saying there is “no programme need or justification” for the evolution at this time.

Questions regarding the scrapping of the Block 3 upgrades arose earlier this month after SpaceScout reported that an ESA study team had been told Ariane 6 Block 2 would be the rocket’s final major version, forcing it to rework a proposed Enceladus mission, a planned probe to Saturn’s icy moon, that had been based on the more capable Block 3 variant of the four-booster Ariane 64 rocket. A key element of this now-scrapped evolution of Ariane 6 was the ICARUS lightweight upper stage.

The big picture gets a bit less clear as you keep reading, presumably because it talks about Ariane 6 features and plans that (as an "outsider") I have never heard of. Their conclusions, in two successive sentences are, "Ariane 6 would “not be developed further,”" and "“Ariane 6 will continue to evolve whenever new mission requirements justify further developments.”" 

Today's mission certainly seems to have been successful, although we have no reports on the MTG-I2 itself, but it seems that the rocket did everything it should have done, so if there are failures in the weather satellite, it's the satellite's design and construction that are in question and not the Ariane 6. At the moment. Probably. 

Some background on the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

I've mentioned a couple of times that NASA's next big telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is launching Sunday morning on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26AM EDT, but I suppose I was quietly assuming that everyone has an idea about what that telescope is. 

I've been covering the NGRST since I first heard of it in February of 2022, and I thought maybe the good thing to do would be repost important parts of what I've covered. Rather than just post links to older posts, I'll "cut and paste" the important stuff.  

From NASA's Next Big Space Telescope 

I stumbled across a story today of an instrument that I should have known about but that had undergone a name change.  It was first referred to as the WFIRST, Wide Field Infra Red Space Telescope, a long but descriptive name for its mission.  It was recently renamed the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope by NASA; the name pays tribute to the late NASA executive and first Chief Astronomer who was one of the driving forces in getting the Hubble Space Telescope program through its hurdles.  

The telescope was named in a poll of astronomers as the next most important space telescope behind the James Webb Space Telescope.  Why?  The old name said wide field and that's the telescope's feature. 

That graphic gives the impression that the NGRST can capture 2,000 square degrees of sky in one shot, compared to 1.6 square degrees from the Hubble Space Telescope.  That's not quite right.  The NGRST's field of 2,000 degrees divided by the 1.6 of the HST says NGRST is 1,250 times bigger.  The NGRST website's FAQ says it's field of view is 100 times larger:

It has a primary mirror that is 2.4 meters in diameter (7.9 feet), and is the same size as the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror. The mirror has the same sensitivity as Hubble’s primary mirror but will only be one fifth the weight, showcasing an advancement in telescope technology. It will have the sensitivity and resolution comparable to Hubble, but with a field of view 100 times larger, combining excellent image quality with survey power.

Like the JWST, the NGRST will be sent to orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, about 930,000 miles away from earth in the direction radially away from Earth.  The mission is focused on the search for dark matter, dark energy and exoplanets, and will only carry two instruments:

The Roman Space Telescope will have two instruments, the Wide Field Instrument (WFI) and the Coronagraph Instrument (CGI) technology demonstration. The WFI provides wide field imaging and spectroscopy, with performance characteristics optimized for cosmology and exoplanet surveys. The CGI provides high contrast imaging and spectroscopy for observations of exoplanets and debris disks. The WFI is a 288-megapixel multi-band near-infrared camera, providing a sharpness of images comparable to that achieved by the Hubble Space Telescope over a 0.28 square degree field of view, 100 times larger than that of Hubble. The Coronagraphic Instrument is a high-contrast, small field of view camera and spectrometer covering visible and near-infrared wavelengths using novel starlight-suppression technology.

Rendering of NGRST, from NASA

Let me bounce back to the present to throw in that the one thing that stood out to me in that first article was that it said, "target date for launch is currently set for May of '27 and they claim to be on schedule" and, of course, August of '26 is pretty far ahead of "on schedule" when they said it would be ready to fly by May of '27. Fortuitously, they had to schedule the launch on the Falcon Heavy because when they were getting bids, nothing else was available. I've always thought that if you called Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX CEO, to arrange a launch like this, you'd give her all the details and she'd come back with something like "gee, it's too big for a Falcon 9... how about next month?" or something that knocked your socks off like that. 

Moving up to a recent post from this April, The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is complete

Here's where it gets wild. The September launch for the NGRST is eight months ahead of schedule, and under budget. When's the last time you heard something like that? I'm not sure I ever have.

According to NASA, Roman's primary mirror measures about 7.9 feet (2.4 meters) wide, which is similar to Hubble's. However, Roman has the ability to take images that capture a patch of the sky at least 100 times larger than Hubble can.

"Its surveying capabilities are over 1,000 times faster than Hubble, and can chart 200 times more sky in a single image," NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said during the conference. "What would take Hubble 2,000 years to process, Roman can do in a year — the images it captures will be so large there is not a screen in existence large enough to show them."

To put that into context, over its approximately 35 years of service so far, Hubble has gathered about 400 terabytes of data; once fully operational at its workstation in space, Roman should be able to create 500 terabytes of data per year.

The collection of different space telescopes; the Hubble, James Webb, and more, allow ground based astronomers to choose the right instrument for the objects they want to study in the sky.

Compared to the JWST, Roman's images — taken with its aptly named Wide Field Instrument (WFI) — will be 50 times wider but more shallow, because Roman doesn't need to access the deep universe the way the JWST does. As we discussed, it can't see infrared like the JWST can and therefore would be wasted in looking too far back.

More specifically, WFI is composed of a 300-megapixel visible-to-near-infrared imaging camera and slitless spectrometer (a special tool that allows scientists to capture light dispersion of objects in a field of view). But there is something uniquely special about that shallow, panoramic view.

The wide and shallow field will be well suited to surveying space, not getting too much information from things that it can't look closer at. 

They can just survey and hope to find a cool lead to zoom in on. This offers Roman the ability to catch events that transpire very quickly, such as fast radio bursts, and increases the chances that scientists can witness remarkable supernovas, colliding neutron stars and other easy-to-miss phenomena right as they happen.

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Well, as the kids used to say, whoomp there it is. I think that's more science on the NGRST than you're going to get anywhere else.

SpaceX sets B1067's new record and then turns the world upside down

... at least the world around the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was turned upside down in the afternoon. 

As mentioned in yesterday's post, booster B1067 flew for the 37th time setting a new corporate record for the number of missions it has flown. When I read about these milestones being set, there's a common comparison to Space Shuttle Discovery having flown 39 times. I don't particularly think that's a meaningful comparison for a few reasons. The biggest is that Shuttle missions were always manned while Falcon 9 missions are only manned rarely, and the rework to fly a manned mission vehicle is always done more carefully than non-manned. Still, if they're trying to break Discovery's 39 flights record, that means that three more flights of B1067 sets a new world record for spacecraft reusability. I have regularly wondered if SpaceX has that as an explicit goal inside the company. 

As (bad) luck would have it, my side note of probably sleeping through the launch rather than going out in the yard to watch it turned into reality, but worse than that in a way. I was up at the launch time but it was because I was having a bad allergy attack (itchy, burning eyes, runny nose, sneezing...) While lying in bed trying to decide what to do, I suddenly heard the launch. By the time the noise gets here it's close to three minutes after launch and the chance of seeing anything approaches zero, unless you have a pretty solid idea of where to look. 

But, as noted at the start, the real big change of the day was in the afternoon. 

SpaceX made Florida’s Space Coast home to the world’s busiest spaceport for a decade, but that will change this year. The company is significantly cutting the number of launches from Florida until Starship arrives, a senior SpaceX official confirmed Tuesday. 

Last year, the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station provided 165 Falcon 9 launches, pretty much three flights per week—and about 75 percent of them carried Starlink satellites. To borrow the saying, "that was last year, this is now." So far Vandenberg Space Force Base has launched more Falcon 9 missions than Cape Canaveral, and it looks as if that will continue for the rest of the year. 

Kiko Dontchev, the company’s vice president of launch, said today that this morning's launch from the Cape was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral until SpaceX begins flying Starship missions from Florida. A quick search of NextSpaceflight.com shows it to be the case. There are launches from CCSFS, the manned Crew-13 flight on September 12th, the O3b mPOWER 11, 12 & 13 satellites on Sept. 19th (and satellites with names in the "O3b mPOWER" world have launched here before). There are no missions labelled Starlink. 

It's easy to overlook that while launches have been categorized as "Starlink" that those satellites have gotten bigger in every generation - and we can expect that to continue. The coming Starlink Version 3 sats won't be a reasonable payload for Falcon 9, much more reasonable for Starship, but for at least the remainder of the year, instead of the two (and sometimes three) Falcon 9 launches per week, that will drop to perhaps two per month. Starlink V3 satellites have not been launched yet because the Falcon 9 can only carry a few

It wasn’t long ago when two launches per month was the norm, an indication just how quickly SpaceX’s launch cadence has grown. Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center sit on adjoining property and share the same range on Florida’s east coast, so it is worth considering them a single spaceport. The last time the Florida spaceport did not lead the world in space launches was in 2015.
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Starship is sized to launch up to 60 Starlink Version 3 satellites, which are larger, heavier, and more powerful than the Starlink V2s flying on Falcon 9. SpaceX plans to use the next test flight of Starship, designated Flight 14, to launch the first Starlink V3s into low-Earth orbit from Starbase, Texas, as soon as next month.

The upper stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket flies over Lower Manhattan in New York City on Tuesday morning. Credit: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

Of course, this doesn't impact anything else launching from the CCSFS and KSC - it probably makes life easier for Blue Origin and ULA by reducing crowding. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches this Sunday on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26AM EDT. The next SpaceX mission is the Crew-13 mission to the ISS on Saturday, September 12.

EDIT 08/28 3:20  PM EDT to Add:  While I linked to a source article on Ars Technica, I first learned about SpaceX's announcement to halt Falcon 9 launches of Starlink satellites from comments to Monday's post and especially from this anonymous comment down with info from BillB

 

 

SpaceX going for yet another Falcon 9 reuse record

It's early for all US time zones, but tomorrow morning at 0533 AM, the one booster that I've written about long enough for it to feel like a friend, B1067, will be taking its 37th flight, launching Starlink group 10-49. B1067's last flight was July 9, for a 47 day turnaround. It will also be the 100th Falcon 9 launch of the year - their 100th launch of everything for the year was three launches ago on August 19th. 

The Falcon 9 is by far the busiest rocket in operation today. Last year, it flew 165 missions — more than all of the world's other orbital rockets combined. And all 165 of those flights were fully successful.

Clearly the rocket is well-designed and the crews that work on them are very well practiced. The "secret sauce" of the Falcon 9 is obviously its reusability. The rest of the world is turned on to this, as we've seen in the reports of China reporting two successes with landing two very different boosters for reuse in this month alone. Long-opposed to it, the European Space Agency is talking about reusability now.

But neither one of those newcomers has made it back to the pad for a second flight. SpaceX, meanwhile, has six Falcon 9 boosters with at least 30 flights under their belts, led by B1067's 36. (The others are B1077 and B1078 with 30, B1069 with 32, B1063 with 34 and B1071 with 35). 

While SpaceX has established many records for re-use and number of flights, they've always said that some orbits that customers will want will use every ounce of thrust and every second of fuel that the booster can manage. Back in July, one mission's requirements pushed the booster beyond the point where reuse was possible. The booster was B1069 on its 32nd flight - mentioned in that Space.com article's paragraph.

The combination of the time and direction of the launch (toward the NE) may make me lean toward staying in bed and watching a replay later in the morning. Launches to the NE tend to stay behind neighbors' trees and barely even light the sky. They tend to be more likely to be visible in the winter when the trees are "thinner." 

B1067 flies for the 35th time on the Starlink 9-35 mission the morning of June 8, 2026, a few minutes before sunrise. Image credit: SpaceX

About that "Sunday Chang'e 7" mission

Fuggedaboutit.  Word broke yesterday that the mission had been scrubbed and reset for Monday. As of this morning (US East coast time) the followup is that the Chang'e 7 mission has been cancelled and pushed out into 2027. 

China’s “Manned Space” program issued a terse announcement on Sunday regarding its much-anticipated Chang’e 7 lunar exploration mission.

The agency stated: “In keeping with the principle of proceeding prudently and reliably, and ensuring absolute success, after a comprehensive assessment it has been determined that the Chang’e 7 mission does not meet the conditions for launch and therefore cannot be carried out during the planned launch window this year.”

Maybe it's just me, but when I read something like that, I get the feeling that either nobody found a couple of big problems with the launch vehicle or the various payloads (lunar orbiter, lander, rover, and a mini-hopper probe) that were suddenly discovered in the past couple of days, or the mission was just pencil-whipped every step of the way despite someone somewhere being aware of conditions that they never should have tried to launch with. 

Eric Berger at Ars Technica speculates that the reason for the scrub of Sunday's launch is a typhoon in the vicinity, Typhoon Narra (Tropical Storm 18W (Narra) Warning #13), and the long range forecast shows Narra making a big loop in the Gulf of Tonkin - at least through landfall either late Tuesday or Wednesday the 26th. 

But that's not the big thing. 

Although official Chinese sources have provided no confirmed information, there has been social media chatter indicating that another suitable launch window may not open until next February or March. Why so long? It likely is a combination of factors, including sunlight conditions in polar landing zones as well as the mission plan that requires a 90-day lunar orbit reconnaissance before landing.

Another, lesser possibility, is that some technical issue was discovered at the last minute with either the complex Chang’e 7 payload, or the rocket. The large Long March 5 rocket shares an engine, the YF-100, with the Long March 7A vehicle that was lost during ascent two weeks ago. This engine issue seems unlikely to be the cause of the delay, however, as China had been proceeding toward launch in recent days.

The rush to get this mission off to land near the South Pole (Shackleton crater) is a core part of the 21st century moon race. No country has successfully landed a lunar probe in the south polar region. 

The delay of Chang’e 7 opens up the possibility that NASA could reach this terrain first, with the initial launch of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 vehicle. This large lander will carry two NASA probes to the South Pole. 

Blue Origin was on track to launch Blue Moon lander this year, before the New Glenn's explosion on their launch site at the end of May. At the moment, there's not an announced date for that mission although Blue Origin continues to stick with their previous statements - that New Glenn will fly before the end of '26. It seems to me to be too early to confidently predict when New Glenn will be launching again.

Shaded relief image of Shackleton crater at the Moon's south pole, with false-color interior constructed from elevation measurements by the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter Credit: NASA/GSFC/SVS. Image cropped and reduced in size here to fit with Blogger image requirements.

It appears that someone has stolen the E layer of the ionosphere

Longtime readers, and in particular those who are also hams, may well remember this meme I created and posted in November of '25. At that time, I was concerned about a different layer.  

The F-layer is the highest layer of the ionosphere and when solar flux is highest, it splits into an F and F2 layer that's even higher. In short, when the F-layer is propagating signals around globe, the stations we can work (contact) are the farthest ones we'll ever hear. Pretty much around world. 

So while it's the best for long range contacts, I've worked Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and several small island countries in the pacific on 6m, F-layer propagation is actually too long for working around the US. For that we tend to rely on the E-layer, and what's referred to as Sporadic E or Es propagation. Sporadic E is possible for more of the year than just summer, but Es is most dependable as summer mode. It's just not available for as large a part of the day as in the summer. 

The days when the Es first appears tend to be a celebrated surprise, but when it just suddenly stops, it's the ending of some of the best times of the year, depending on what you're pursuing. The last "good" opening in my neck of the woods, west to Montana and Idaho - for example - was on August 10th, so just under two weeks ago. 

I've mentioned before that I'm trying to work what's called The Fred Fish Memorial Award, or FFMA, for working all 488 Maidenhead Grid Squares (which are rectangles because they're two degrees in longitude by one degree in latitude) in the continental US. This ES season I added around 30 grids (I'd have to dig out some notes to be more accurate than saying "around 30"). I'm not quite at 100 left, but I'm close: something like 385 worked instead so 103 left. 

I also mentioned DXCC as a target, which I expect to achieve as opposed to the FFMA which I'll be lucky to be around long enough to get all 488. I have worked over 100 countries on 6m, but I'm at 97 confirmed. I could use the F layer, too. 

So whom do I report the theft of the E layer to? FCC? EPA? It's part of the environment, after all. I bet that Greta kid stole it. Someone convinced her the E layer added to global warmening. 

ULA names new CEO to replace Tory Bruno

Tory Bruno was CEO of United Launch Alliance when I first started blogging 80% or more on space, and became the only name I knew of for a CEO at ULA. He left ULA for Blue Origin last December. At Blue, instead of moving into the CEO role, he is now the president of national security. I have to assume he has knowledge of the people he needs to know and the procedures Blue needs to follow to climb higher into the national security world. ULA has been there, Blue Origin hasn't. 

This Monday, Aug. 17, ULA announced they had promoted Chief Operating Officer Mark Peller to president and CEO, finally naming a successor to that position since Bruno left. 

Peller joined ULA at the company’s formation in 2006 and most recently led development of the Vulcan rocket, which successfully debuted in 2024 but has been grounded since early this year by a problem with its solid rocket boosters. 

Peller will have his work cut out for him. ULA had been the Pentagon's preferred launch contractor, but lost that position to SpaceX in '25. ULA has some serious catching up to do.

That was before ULA grounded the Vulcan rocket following an anomaly with one of its strap-on solid-fueled boosters on a launch in February. The rocket overcame the malfunction and still delivered its payload to orbit, but it was the second time such an anomaly has occurred in the last three Vulcan missions. It’s not clear whether ULA will be able to resume Vulcan launches before the end of the year as engineers redesign parts of the booster’s nozzle structure. In the meantime, Boeing and Lockheed Martin last month confirmed they guaranteed a loan to ULA to help it through “financial challenges” caused by the grounding. 

ULA President and CEO Mark Peller. Image credit: United Launch Alliance

NASA and Katalyst end the Swift rescue mission

NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on the robotic mission to save the Swift gamma-ray telescope.  

The last update I saw and posted was back on August 7th, and while the complete loss of attitude control that had occurred has been reduced to lower levels, Katalyst said that “ongoing attitude control issues” will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. While the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory and LINK rescue satellite remain close to each other in orbit, they won't try to rescue Swift, leaving it to re-enter the atmosphere. NASA had estimated they need to boost Swift before its orbit decays to lower than 186 miles, and estimated that will happen "by October." 

The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link’s remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite’s close-in navigation system.

“While the mission will not have the ending we originally intended, NASA and Katalyst are assessing what milestones remain ahead,” Katalyst said in a statement. “We will continue working to extract technical and operational value from the spacecraft.”

While the rescue will not be attempted, the two spacecraft are still close to each other in orbit, and LINK will still attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with Swift to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration. 

The Swift rescue was always a risky program, and was developed on an unprecedentedly short schedule compared to other NASA missions: NASA awarded Katalyst the $30 million contract less than a year ago to build and launch the Link satellite, by no later than early July - and the launch was July 3rd. A more typical contract for a new satellite for a mission that has never been attempted before would have been "several" years. 

“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future. We are going to learn everything we can from LINK’s rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow.” 
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“We knew this was a high-risk, high-reward mission – a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun’s activity,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We were all hoping for more science from Swift. But we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way, and we have gained so much through the series of accomplishments up to this point.”

Swift itself is a remarkable mission, launched on a planned two year mission to observe gamma ray bursts, some of the most energetic explosions in the universe. The two year mission launched in 2004. Nobody wants to see Swift burn up and get destroyed on reentry, but I think getting 22 years of results out of a two year mission is a pretty good return on investment. NASA has used this opportunity to advance U.S. spacecraft servicing technology,

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

Another Chinese company successfully lands a booster

It looks like booster reuse has landed in China, if you'll pardon the expression, and we can expect many more attempts and possibly even going full tilt into operational status. 

Back on last Monday (8/10) in the coverage of China's Long March 7A's inflight explosion and loss of vehicle there was mention in the source materials of a coming flight of a totally different vehicle, called a Zhuque-3 that was expected to be launched soon but after the explosion, they expected maybe the rocket would re-checked again, but the coverage included an expectation they'd try to recover the booster.  

The Zhuque-3 flew last December (12/3 local) and the rocket attained orbit but missed the booster landing. In that way, the overall picture resembles many other attempts at recovery we've seen, from early attempts with the Falcon 9 in 2014 and '15 to, well, pretty much everyone else on their first attempts to land. 

Meanwhile the engineers working on the rocket kept at it and while another Chinese rocket, the Long March 10B, landed its booster into a capture net on a vehicle offshore, they finally were ready to try the Zhuque-3 again today.  

The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, rocket lifted off from a commercial launch zone at China’s Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 7:35 pm EDT (23:35 UTC) Tuesday, about an hour after sunrise Wednesday at the spaceport in the Gobi Desert. Nine methane-fueled engines powered the 216-foot-tall (66-meter) rocket on a course southeast from Jiuquan, then the rocket’s upper stage took over the task of placing a single satellite into orbit.

The rocket’s first stage, made of stainless steel, soared to the edge of space, then maneuvered toward a prepared landing zone some 240 miles (390 kilometers) downrange, settling to a propulsive touchdown on four extendable landing legs. LandSpace, founded in 2015, declared the mission a total success.

NOTE: This is a screen grab, not the video and the "Continue watching on X" box is not a link. If you want to go to see the full video here's the link. 

While this Zhuque-3 isn't exactly a copy of a Falcon 9, it certainly looks like one, and the specifications look a lot like a Falcon 9's specs as well. The fact that the second flight of this booster successfully landed is the advantage to not developing everything first. And even watching SpaceX's "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" video. 

The Zhuque-3 is the design of what's called a private company named LandSpace (I'm skeptical there are any private companies in the PRC). There was a smaller Zhuque-2 that became the world’s first methane-fueled launcher to reach orbit in 2023, but has been replaced by this more powerful booster. 

The Zhuque-3’s basic design can place a payload of more than 17,600 pounds (8 metric tons) into low-Earth orbit after accounting for the fuel reserves required for booster recovery. LandSpace eventually plans to debut an upgraded Zhuque-3 carrying more propellant and using more powerful engines, raising its payload capacity to more than 40,000 pounds (18.3 metric tons) in reusable mode or a few tons more with an expendable booster. 

LandSpace says they intend to do a thorough inspection of this booster and fly it again ASAP. They claim they're aiming for "at least 20" flights for each booster.

This the strongest contender for competition for the Falcon 9 so far.  

Two missions to keep an eye out for

A couple of missions currently planned for tonight (Aug. 18) and Sunday (Aug. 23). The first one is "just" one of those milestone missions for SpaceX - tonight at 11:46 PM EDT, 8:46 local, the 100th mission of the year for SpaceX will launch from Vandenberg's SLC-4E. The mission will be covered at that previous link, NASA Spaceflight or SpaceX where it will be starting around 10 minutes before launch (11:36 EDT).

This is the 12th flight of booster B1097. It will be the 97th Falcon 9 launch of the year and the 100th mission of 2026 overall for SpaceX (the other three were one Falcon Heavy and two Starship test flights). Further, of the 97 Falcon 9 launches, 73 have been Starlink launches. 

The second one to be aware of is Sunday at 8:00PM EDT from the People's Republic of China. This a mission to the moon, in particular to Shackleton Crater, very nearly at the South Pole, and a target that gets interest from the US as well as China. This won't be televised live, as is generally the case, so you'll need to check for trustworthy sources of news on such a launch. 

It barely needs to be mentioned that China has been emphasizing doing missions to demonstrate to the rest of the world that they're not some primitive country, but can do anything the US can. This mission is part of that overall "space race." 

The mission will pack a punch: It contains a lunar orbiter with high-resolution cameras and other sophisticated tools, a lunar lander, a lunar rover, and a mini-hopper of a probe. Although the lander’s mass has not been disclosed publicly, it is several times larger than the NASA-backed probes that have recently landed on the Moon, such as Firefly’s Blue Ghost.

In case it has gotten by you, the reason for the interest in the south polar region on the moon and Shackleton crater is that the craters have a high rim and with the sun pretty much on the horizon all the time, the crater walls create permanent shadows that keep the prospects for finding water ice high. It's also thought that other materials that might be lost from solar heat influx might be more likely to have survived there. Water is critical to manned settlements on the moon not just for "human reasons" like drinking, cooking and all but potentially for use as liquid hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel. 

So we’re faced with the prospect of a Chinese rover rolling around this most interesting but heretofore unexplored region of the Moon. Undoubtedly, there will be stunning images and videos. And the rover and hopper, if successful, will provide the best available data on the presence and prevalence of water there. 

Scientists created this mosaic of Shackleton crater using images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and the ShadowCam instrument on South Korea's Danuri orbiter, revealing the dark interior of Shackleton in new detail. Credit: NASA/KARI/ASU

While NASA administrator Jared Issacman is very aware of the Chinese competition, and NASA has done much since his arrival on the job to get rid of the needless complication that was embedded in Artemis when he took over, the real questions about a mission like this are about how China is going to behave. Are they going to claim the crater and say that the US missions aren't allowed to explore there? Are they going to live by treaties they've already signed about rights like those? 

Satellite operators near panic over not enough launch capacity

Their view is this should be the Golden Age of launch, especially in the US, which leads the world. Instead, they want to launch more and the prospects look to be a reduction in launch capability rather than continuous increase. 

Over the last three years, an average of 270 orbital rockets have launched from Earth, a more than threefold increase from only a decade ago. Apparently unexpectedly, demand for launches is going up while launch capability is expected to be declining. 

As part of his job as the director of research at Quilty Space, Caleb Henry speaks with satellite operators all the time. And he is hearing a constant and increasingly loud refrain from companies that want to put stuff into space.

“What we have is an industry in panic,” Henry said.

Stories from around the industry are pouring in. The Amazon LEO constellation can't get enough launches to keep up with the number of satellites they want to put up in orbit, so they're dropping the production rate. These are launches Amazon booked five years ago and enough boosters aren't ready to launch the payloads. AST SpaceMobile is waiting to get their constellation into orbit, and had to tell investors at an earnings call last Monday that they were unable to get enough launch capacity to remain on schedule. They told investors that launch availability was now pacing the deployment of the constellation.

With a growing number of constellations big and small, there is a huge and growing demand signal. The Commercial Space Federation predicts demand for thousands of satellite launches annually in less than a decade. Analysys Mason forecasted that more than 37,000 satellites will need to be launched between 2023 and 2033. Henry’s own firm, Quilty Space, has charted a change in the discussion from how many launch companies the US market can support to who can execute the fastest to meet surging satellite needs. 

For several years, SpaceX and the Falcon 9 have led the launch business. There are two aspects of this "more launches than the rest of the world combined" title that SpaceX has that need to be kept in mind. First, most of the Falcon 9 launches are their own Starlink network satellites so if they accelerate launches for everyone else, they have to either massively increase their launch cadence to add the new customer's launches, or cut their own Starlink business by launching other companies satellites over their own. Second, they've already been making statements that as Starship comes online, that Falcon 9 operations will be slowed and eventually stop. 

In financial documents, it’s clear that SpaceX views commercial launch as a rounding error compared to revenues from its own satellites in space. A majority of the company’s revenue ($4.3 billion out of $7.8 billion) during the second quarter of 2026 came from Starlink, whereas less than 12 percent was due to space services, of which commercial launch is but a fraction. This disparity is only likely to widen.

SpaceX has already moved beyond “peak” Falcon 9 operations. The company flew the rocket 165 times last year, and it will probably fly about 20 fewer missions this year. SpaceX is already making ground system changes to reflect these reductions.

The company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell, has previously said the operational lifetime of the Falcon 9 may end in 2030 or 2032. However, more recently, commercial satellite customers have been running into difficulties when trying to purchase a launch after 2028. One source said SpaceX has told the US government that it intends to end commercial launches after 2028 but will continue flying the Falcon 9 rocket for a limited number of federally contracted missions after that.

It's always best to look at numbers like that "life of the Falcon 9 may end in 2030 or 2032" as what we used to call BAGATOE (pronounced like BAG-A-TOE) an acronym for Best Available Guess At Time Of Estimate. Those dates are very much able and likely to move around. 

The bottom line is the biggest enabler of the start of the commercial space sector being the biggest contributor to growth has been the workhorse Falcon 9. As Eric Berger over at Ars Technica put it, “Without SpaceX, the Western launch market would have been completely screwed over the last half-decade.” Almost entirely due to one simple thing, the war in Ukraine. And the world's not so simple reactions to it. 

Amid all the opportunities to respond to Russia’s retreat from the Western market, only one company stood up. As Russian soldiers marched into Ukraine, SpaceX was beginning to perfect the reuse of the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage. The company flew the Falcon rocket 31 times in 2021. By 2023, this number nearly tripled to 91 rockets.

As SpaceX’s main competitors struggled to bring new vehicles online, the Falcon 9 rocket flew and flew. It backstopped the entire Western Hemisphere’s launch needs, boosting everything from Europe’s prized Galileo satellites to NASA astronauts to Jeff Bezos’ Amazon LEO vehicles into orbit.

Naturally, with a situation this dire, the pressure is on for new vehicles to come online. Ariane 6 has had a relatively smooth development to this point, but their production goal is 10 vehicles per year, and that's not going to have a big effect. The two that could, Blue Origin's New Glenn and ULA's Vulcan - both of which have often been referred to as competition for SpaceX are currently grounded. Worse than simply grounded, New Glenn has the problem of having to build an entirely new launch pad due to the explosion during the test at the end of May. Still, both of these are being built to be reusable, so they're like the Falcon 9 but able to lift bigger payloads.

In 2020, as part of the National Security Space Launch program, the US Space Force procured dozens of Vulcan launches for military missions. Two years later, Amazon purchased 38 Vulcan launches and options for up to 27 New Glenn flights for the Amazon program, which later would be renamed Amazon LEO. Both had more missions than they could fly for a while.
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Six years after the Space Force award, Vulcan has launched just two military missions. Vulcan has stumbled due to ongoing problems with the performance of its solid rocket boosters, which are provided by Northrop Grumman. The Pentagon has grown increasingly frustrated with the delays and has already moved several payloads previously intended for Vulcan onto SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

What about Starship itself? It's being built partly as replacement for putting the Starlink constellation into orbit, and one concern I've come across (not in the source article for this) is the industry is concerned about having to create satellites that will fit Starship's Pez dispenser for deploying satellites. It seems that would be a relatively minor change compared to the development of Starship itself, but this is the time to consider this.

Yes, there are other systems under development. Rocket Lab's Neutron isn't a heavy lift system, but in the size class of the Falcon 9. As we've talked about before, the goal is to fly Neutron before the end of this year, so compared to some other options, it's closer to being real. Firefly and Northrop Grumman are developing the Eclipse rocket, which will have a lift capacity of 16 metric tons. Less has been published about progress on this rocket, and it will most likely arrive later than the other vehicles on this list.

My personal bet is that no one vehicle is going to get the launch industry out of this current problem. It's going to take years and a mix of different vehicles. 

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