Year: 2026

ULA’s new management predicts it will achieve 18-22 launches in 2026

10:03 am

Before Tory Bruno resigned as CEO of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) to go work for Blue Origin, he had predicted in August last year that ULA was primed to complete two launches per month for the rest of ’25 and throughout ’26.

That prediction did not happen, as the company was only able to do four launches in the last five months of 2025, and no launches so far in 2026.

Yesterday the new management of ULA insisted that Bruno’s prediction was still reasonable, and that the company will complete between 18 to 22 launches before the end of this year.

Speaking during a virtual media roundtable on Feb. 10, Gary Wentz, ULA’s vice president of Atlas and Vulcan Programs, said the company aims to launch two to four Atlas 5 missions and 16 to 18 Vulcan missions. He said the Vulcan rockets will be split between pad 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and pad 3 at Vandenberg Space Force Base. “It’s a balance. We’re working with our customers to determine specific priorities and order of missions and in the case of Space Force and NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), to determine which missions they wan to get off with higher priority,” Wentz said. “And as we finalize that over the next about six to eight months out of the mission, then we’ll assign whether or not its going to be an Atlas mission or a Vulcan mission.”

John Elbon, the interim CEO following the departure of Tory Bruno in December, said that the company has a “strong commitment” from their commercial and government customers, citing a backlog of more than 80 missions.

That backlog is mostly split between ULA’s big contract to launch Amazon’s Leo satellites and a variety of different agencies in the Pentagon. Both are desperate to get their satellites into space, and it appears ULA is struggling to figure out how to do it. In its early years (from 2007 to 2016) the company was generally able to average about one launch a month, but since then that launch rate as been less than half that. To not only return to those launch rates from a decade ago but to almost double them will be challenging, to say the least.

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OHB Italia wins $96 million contract to build Ramses probe to visit the asteroid Apophis

9:39 am

Apophis' path past the Earth in 2029
A cartoon (not to scale) showing Apophis’s
path in 2029

The European Space Agency (ESA) yesterday announced that it has awarded the aerospace company OHB Italia a $96 million contract to build Ramses probe to rendezvous with the potentially dangerous asteroid Apophis when it makes its next close fly-by of Earth in 2029.

This contract is in addition to the $75 million development contract awarded OHB Italia in 2024. According to the company’s press release here:

The launch is scheduled for April 2028, with a rendezvous with Apophis planned for February 2029, approximately two months before its close approach to Earth. The spacecraft will accompany the asteroid until August 2029, in order to observe in detail how Earth’s tidal forces modify its shape, rotation, orbit and surface characteristics.

The initiative also benefits from strong international cooperation. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), drawing on its well-established expertise in asteroid science, will contribute by providing launch service onboard an H3 rocket, the spacecraft’s solar arrays and a Thermal Infrared Imager, further reinforcing the project’s global dimension.

In addition, two cubesats will be launched with Ramses and deployed once the spacecraft reaches Apophis.

This schedule is very tight, which places great pressure on OHB, especially because European space projects are traditionally built slowly after years of planning. ESA almost never does things fast like this.

At the moment, Osiris-Apex (formerly Osiris-Rex) is the only spacecraft that is on its way to Apophis.

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Rocket startup Stoke Space raises an additional $350 million in private investment capital

9:22 am

Stoke's Nova rocket
Stoke’s Nova rocket, designed to be
completely reusable.

The rocket startup Stoke Space yesterday announced that its most recent fund-raising round has raised an additional $350 million in private investment capital above the original target of $510 million.

Stoke Space Technologies, the rocket company developing fully and rapidly reusable medium-lift launch vehicles, announced today an extension of its previous Series D financing, bringing the total amount raised in the round to $860 million. The round was initially announced in October 2025 at $510 million. That funding focused on completing activation of Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Fla., and expanding production capacity for the Nova launch vehicle. Stoke will use the additional capital to accelerate future elements of its product roadmap.

In total the company has now raises $1.34 billion. Though it has been moving steadily towards the first test launch of its totally reusable Nova rocket, it has so far refused to announce any launch dates. Based on all accounts, it appears that launch could occur before the end of this year, but nothing is confirmed.

Stoke’s ability to raise so much capital contrasts sharply with the failure of the British rocket startup Orbex, as noted in my previous post. Investors know that when Stoke is ready to launch from Florida, it will be able to do so, and so they have confidence in the company. With Orbex no one was willing to invest because the investors recognized that red tape was handicapping the company.

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British rocket startup Orbex goes under

9:10 am

Prime rocket prototype on launchpad
The prototype of Orbex’s never-launched Prime rocket,
on the launchpad in 2022

After waiting four years to get the necessary launch licenses from the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), delays that forced it to abandon its preferred spaceport in Sutherland to go to the SaxaVord spaceport in the Shetland Islands, the British rocket startup Orbex today announced its effort to find a buyer or new financing had failed and it is going into receivership with the goal of selling off its assets.

Orbex has filed a notice of intention to appointment Administrators and will continue trading while all options for the future of the company are explored, including potential sale of all or parts of its business or assets. The notice provides short-term protection and allows the business time to secure as positive an outcome as possible for its creditors, employees and wider stakeholders.

The funding required for Orbex to remain a viable business was sought from a variety of public and private investors during its Series D funding round, which has ultimately failed. Several merger and acquisition opportunities have also been explored, with none resulting in a favourable outcome.

To repeat this company’s sad story, Orbex had hoped to do its first launch from the proposed Sutherland spaceport on the north coast of Scotland in 2022, but was blocked for four years because of red tape. First, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority would not issue the spaceport and launch licenses. Second, local opposition delayed approvals as well. Those delays ate into the company’s resources, until it became entirely dependent on grants from the UK government (some through the European Space Agency) to keep it afloat.

By 2024 Orbex realized launching from Sutherland was impossible, and it then switched to the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands. This forced more delays because the company had no facilities there. It had already spent a fortune building everything for Sutherland.

There will be many who will blame this failure on the difficulty of rocket science, but it appears the fault almost entirely lies with the UK government and its odious regulatory regime. Neither Sutherland nor SaxaVord have been able to get anything off the ground, and it appears right now that rocket companies are going everywhere else to find launch sites. New rockets must launch and fail so that they can eventually succeed. The sense I get from the CAA is that it is treating every launch not as a test but as an operational launch that must succeed. Orbex couldn’t meet that standard.

Nor can any other rocket startup. At the moment SaxoVord has only one customer planning to launch, the German startup Rocket Factory Augsburg, but after a static fire explosion in 2024 blocked the launch nothing has happened since. I suspect the company is having problems getting new launch approvals from the CAA.

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China completes launch abort test of Mengzhou capsule; also vertically lands Long March 10A 1st stage in ocean

7:50 am

Long March 10A 1st stage splashing down softly on test flight
Click for source.

China today completed a major test for its future manned lunar program. In launch for the first time the first stage of its new Long March 10A, it not only succeeded in completing a launch abort of its next generation Mengzhou manned capsule — intended not only for its space station but for its manned lunar program — the first stage successfully completed a vertical soft splashdown in the ocean.

The uncrewed vessel took off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on the southern island of Hainan aboard a Long March-10 prototype test rocket at 11am on Wednesday.

The Mengzhou vessel separated from the rocket shortly after launch, before splashing down in the ocean at its designated landing spot, according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).

The first stage of the Long March-10 rocket also safely splashed down in its designated ocean landing spot, CASC said. The state-owned aerospace contractor developed both the rocket and the crewed spacecraft.

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, video of the launch can be seen here. Jay also found two additional images, one showing the stage just before splashdown standing vertical (as shown in the picture to the right) and the other of the stage floating in the water just before it was picked up by a recovery vessel. According to comments at these tweets, it is speculated that the interstage unit that connected the capsule to the stage was either ejected at landing or was torn off when the stage hit the water.

This is a major achievement for China. It gets it closer to being able to use Mengzhou for longer missions to places like the Moon.

The modular Mengzhou spacecraft has two variants: a seven-astronaut near-Earth model designed to support the country’s Tiangong space station and a model with a smaller crew capacity for missions to the moon. The latter is expected to work in tandem with the Lanyue lunar surface lander, designed to carry two astronauts to the moon’s surface.

The soft splashdown of the Long March 10A first stage also gets China closer to its first reuse of a rocket.

I must note that this success is part of a larger story about China’s space industry that is not so hopeful.
» Read more

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February 10, 2026 Quick space links

2:55 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

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Hubble eyes the Egg Nebula

10:48 am

Hubble eyes the Egg Nebula
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a study of “preplanetary nebula,” the initial stages of a planetary nebula that forms as some star types begin dying. From the caption:

Many preplanetary nebulae are relatively dim and hard to spot. They are made of layers of gas ejected by the star, but that star is not yet hot enough to ionise the gas and cause it to glow. The Egg Nebula is relatively unique, easily visible as a sparkling jewelled egg in space. Powerful beams of starlight blast out of the inner cloud, two a-side, giving a breathtaking illumination to this cosmic structure. Fast-moving outflows of hot molecular hydrogen also emerge from within the dust cloud, visible just at the base of the searchlight beams. These outflows glow with infrared light, which is shown in this image by orange highlights.

The central cloud of dust is surrounded by concentric rings, themselves made up from thin, faint arcs of gas. These were created by successive outbursts from the central star, which ejected a little more material from its outer surface every few hundred years. The beams of starlight are reflected by these layers of gas, creating an appearance like ripples on the surface of water. The way that gas molecules reflect and scatter light gives a bluish colour to the arcs. The reflected starlight reveals important details about the central star, which is impossible to view directly in its dusty shell.

Many planetary nebula get their spectacular shapes because they have a binary star system in their center, that act like the blades in a blender as they circle each other, mixing the materials the stars’ eject to form those shapes. Because of those surrounding shells, it is often impossible to determine with the nebula has a single central star, or a binary system.

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First Vulcan rocket arrives at Vandenberg for launch later this year

8:53 am

ULA has now delivered parts of a Vulcan rocket to Vandenberg Space Force Base in California as it prepares for that rocket’s first launch from that spaceport later this year.

ULA’s RocketShip recently docked at the harbor on the South Base with the Vulcan rocket components stowed inside the huge cargo vessel. … Crews spent several days offloading the hardware while mindful of tides that could have delayed the delivery.

…On the first day, workers removed the Vulcan’s Centaur upper stage from the RocketShip, followed by the booster the next day. “We tried to take off the payload adapter and the interstage adapter and, unfortunately, the swells were pretty bad,” Fortson said. After pausing the unloading chores for two days, the swells cooperated so the team didn’t have to wait for the next opportunity for suitable tides a couple of weeks away.

ULA hopes to get the launch off by June 2026, but that schedule will depend on whether the launchpad conversion from the Atlas-5 rocket can be completed. It also depends on whether the payload is ready on time. It appears this launch will be one of ULA’s seven national security launches for the Pentagon, though this is not confirmed.

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Starfish gets a second satellite servicing contract from Pentagon

8:42 am

The orbital tug startup Starfish has now won a second major satellite servicing contract from the military to use its Otter tug to either service or de-orbit defunct military satellites.

The first contract, announced in late January, was from the Space Force’s Space Development Agency (SDA) for $52.5 million. Under that deal, Starfish would fly an Otter in 2027 to dock with a satellite and then de-orbit it.

The new contract, announced February 7, 2026, is with the Pentagon’s APFIT program, designed to encourage “innovative technologies”. It is for an additional $54.5 million, and calls for Otter to dock with a satellite in 2028 and service it rather than de-orbit it.

The Otter is designed to autonomously dock with and maneuver national security satellites, maximizing their operational capabilities while supporting SSC’s [Space Systems Command] need for sustained space maneuver. The spacecraft leverages autonomous rendezvous, proximity operations, and docking technology, allowing it to service satellites that were not originally designed for servicing.

As I noted in January when the first de-orbit contract was announced, while a number of contracts have been issued in the U.S., Europe, and Japan to demonstrate de-orbit technology, that was the first operational de-orbit contract. As for servicing, Northrop Grumman has already succeeded several times in prolonging the life of defunct commercial geosynchronous satellites with its Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV).

Starfish’s Otter however has only successfully demonstrated rendezvous and proximity capabilities on two missions, with a third a failure. As for docking, its Otter Pup tug has flown two missions, with the first failing in 2023 when both spacecraft began spinning unexpected. The second mission is presently ongoing, and was supposed to achieve a docking by now. After completing rendezvous maneuvers in September Starfish has provided no new updates. As far as we know, the docking never occurred or was a failure.

These contracts however suggest it has succeeded. Why else would the military suddenly issue more than $100 million in contracts to the company?

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Has Roscosmos gotten its Baikonur Soyuz-2 launchpad fixed already?

8:18 am

According to a short sentence added today at the end of Anatoli Zak’s ongoing report on the damaged Soyuz-2 launchpad in Baikonur, Russia’s space agency Roscosmos has completed repairs on that pad early.

According to rumors from Baikonur, the new service platform was installed at Site 31 by Feb. 10, 2026.

That’s it. No other information. Furthermore, this follows the last report from a Roscosmos official in late January where he said repairing the pad by March was facing difficulties due to winter weather and delays in getting replacement parts.

The launchpad had become unusable following the last launch in November when a platform used to prepare the rocket fell into the pad’s flame trench. It had not been attached properly.

As this report is based on rumors and very limited information, it must be treated with caution.

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Voyager wins four-year $24.5 million ISS management contract from NASA

8:01 am

The space station startup Voyager Technologies yesterday won a four-year $24.5 million contract from NASA to apparently manage the agency’s missions to ISS.

Under the task-order contract, Voyager will deliver end-to-end mission services spanning payload integration, mission operations, safety and compliance, and post-mission closeout. NASA may add options that extend the scope and value of the agreement over its life, providing Voyager with a multi-year framework for recurring mission execution. Voyager anticipates onboarding three payload missions over the next quarter, reflecting near-term demand and a steady pipeline of task orders supporting ongoing ISS operations.

The company has been doing similar ISS work for NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Texas, though this contract appears to expand that work considerably. This deal provides the company further experience operating space station missions, crucial for the Starlab station that Voyager is listed as the consortium’s lead company.

Of the five stations under development, Axiom has run tourist missions to ISS to demonstrate this capability, Vast is launching its own demo single module station to demonstrate this capability, and now Voyager is doing this work for NASA to demonstrate this capability.

Max Space, which only entered this race late last year, has no such contract or experience, but it has recently partnered with Voyager in other work, and plans to launch its own demo station module in ’27.

The last proposed space station, Orbital Reef, has no such deal as far as I know. Led by Blue Origin (partnered with Sierra Space), this station project continues to show no progress of any kind.

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