Tag: commercial

Spanish rocket startup PLD raises $209 million in new investment capital

9:16 am

The Spanish rocket startup PLD, which hopes to launch its orbital Miura-5 rocket this year, has now raised an additional $209 million in new investment capital, bringing the total capital it has raised to more than $400 million.

PLD Space, an international space transportation company, has closed a €180 million Series C equity funding round led by the renowned Japanese manufacturer Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, alongside with other investors.

The Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, through the Centre for the Development of Technology and Innovation (CDTI) and its INNVIERTE fund, and the Spanish public funds management company COFIDES, through its FOCO investment fund, have co-invested in this round. Ultimately, the European renowned Spanish fund Nazca Capital, via Nazca Aeroespacial y Defensa INNIVERTE I FCR Fund, close the round.

The company hopes to ramp up its launch pace to as many as 30 launches per year by 2030, though these numbers are clearly aspirational. It has already won two launch contracts, and it is building its own launchpad in French Guiana, where that first launch will take place, and has also signed a deal with Oman to launch from its proposed spaceport in Duqm. PLD has also said it is in negotiations for a third launch site, not yet named.

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Varda rents new 200K-square-foot facility in California

8:57 am

Varda's W-5 capsule after landing today
Varda’s fifth capsule after landing on January 29, 2026

The startup Varda, which launches returnable capsules for manufacturing products in space, has now rented a large building in California to build those capsules.

In an expansion of its business of processing pharmaceuticals in Earth’s orbit, Varda Space Industries is renting a large El Segundo plant where toy manufacturer Mattel used to design Hot Wheels and Barbie dolls. The plant in El Segundo’s aerospace corridor will be an extension of Varda Space Industries’ headquarters in a much smaller building on nearby Aviation Boulevard.

Varda will occupy a 205,443-square-foot industrial and office campus at 2031 E. Mariposa Ave., which will give it additional capacity to manufacture spacecraft at scale, the company said

The company will take control of the building in December, and will then need another four to eight months to install its production facilities.

Varda has launched and recovered five capsules so far. Some produced pharmaceuticals for sale on Earth, others other products, while two did hypersonic tests for the Pentagon during re-entry. It has a deal in Australia to land as many as 20 more capsules, and presently has ten more missions scheduled on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket.

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SpaceX launches 29 more Starlink satellites

8:32 am

SpaceX early this morning successfully placed another 29 Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The first stage completed its 25th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The 2026 launch race:

28 SpaceX
8 China
2 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
1 ULA
1 Europe (Arianespace)

Not only is SpaceX this year leading the entire world combined in total launches — as it did in both ’24 and ’25 — at the moment it has launched twice as much as the rest of the globe.

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Japan to do vertical tests of its own Grasshopper-type demo stage this month

9:13 am

Japan’s space agency is about to attempt two test vertical take-off-and-landing test flights of of its own Grasshopper-type demo stage, dubbed RV-X later this month.

First flight of a small experimental version of a reusable launch vehicle has been scheduled for March 6 by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The 24-ft.-tall vertical-takeoff-and-vertical-landing (VTVL) RV-X is planned to make a short hop at the agency’s Noshiro Rocket Testing Center on the Sea of Japan coast.

RV-X is the first of two flight experiments planned by JAXA on the path to development of a reusable first stage for a next-generation launch vehicle. A second vehicle is planned to fly in 2027 under the multinational Callisto program.

Callisto is being developed jointly with the European Space Agency. Both it and RV-X have been in development for about a decade. Both were initiated in response to SpaceX’s successful reuse of its Falcon 9 first stage. Both projects however appeared stalled until the last two years or so, with little happening.

The JAXA engine on RV-X is apparently the engine it is providing for Callisto. If the flight tests are successful this March, it will be the be transferred to French Guiana for Callisto tests planned no sooner than ’27.

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Indian rocket startup Agnikul completes static fire test of three-engine cluster

8:59 am

The Indian rocket startup Agnikul has now released a video of a 40-second static fire test of three-engine cluster it hopes to use on its Agnibaan orbital rocket.

The engines, powered by electric motor-driven pumps, were designed and manufactured in-house at Agnikul’s Rocket Factory-1. All three were fully 3D-printed as single-piece hardware units, reflecting the startup’s focus on advanced manufacturing and indigenous engineering.

Co-founder and chief executive Srinath Ravichandran said that increasing the number of engines improves rocket performance and that a three-engine system is required for commercial missions. The clustered test involved calibrating six pumps and six motors and fine-tuning six independent speed control algorithms to function in synchronisation. The goal was to achieve uniform startup, steady-state operation and shutdown performance across all three engines, a technically complex process given the precision required in semi-cryogenic propulsion systems.

The company has completed one suborbital test launch in May 2024, and in September 2025 said its orbital rocket’s first stage will land vertically and be reused.

Agnikul however has not released any schedule for launch, and based on this static fire test appears years from a first launch. It is making progress, but slowly. At the same time, it says it has raised $500 million in private investment capital, giving it the resources to build the rocket.

Based on testing and published progress, Agnikul appears to be trailing India’s other rocket startup Skyroot, though this could change in the coming year.

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Rocket Lab completes in-space commissioning of two Escapade Mars orbiters

8:38 am

Built by Rocket Lab for NASA and launched in November 2025, the company has now completed the in-space commissioning of two Escapade Mars orbiters and is about to hand operations over to the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory (UC-Berkeley).

With both spacecraft now fully commissioned and successfully operating at the Earth–Sun Lagrange Point 2 (L2), Rocket Lab is preparing to hand over operational control to [UC-Berkeley], who will lead science operations at L2 and prepare the mission for its cruise to Mars.

Under contract from [UC-Berkeley], Rocket Lab was selected to design, build, and provide commissioning operations of the two high delta-V Explorer-class interplanetary spacecraft for ESCAPADE. Rocket Lab moved from concept to launch readiness in just over three years, proving commercial collaboration can deliver important science key to supporting future human and robotic exploration of Mars on ambitious schedules and for significantly smaller budgets than typical interplanetary missions. This speed was made possible through Rocket Lab’s vertically integrated spacecraft production, with key components including solar arrays, reaction wheels, propellant tanks, star trackers, radios, avionics, and flight software designed and built in-house.

Launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in November 2025, the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft, known as Blue and Gold, completed spacecraft commissioning and executed two precise trajectory correction maneuvers, placing both spacecraft into their loiter trajectory near L2, approximately 1.5 million kilometers from Earth.

Both spacecraft will be sent on their way to Mars in December 2026 when orbital mechanics between the Red Planet and Earth are right for the journey. Once in Mars orbit the two orbiters will allow for a three-dimensional study of the interaction between the solar wind and Mars’ atmosphere.

Though this is a NASA-funded mission, note that it was built a commercial company and operated not by NASA but by a university. For this reason, it was not only built fast and at a low cost, it uses an innovative flight path that allowed it to be launched anytime and wait in orbit for the right moment to go to Mars. This last innovation provides for a lot more flexibility.

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SpaceX completes its second Starlink launch today; Firefly scrubs launch

8:05 pm

SpaceX successfully placed another 29 Starlink satellites in orbit this evening during its second launch today, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The first stage completed its 26th launch, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Firefly meanwhile scrubbed its launch of its Alpha rocket due to high winds. No new launch date as yet been scheduled. This would be Firefly’s first launch since it had a launch failure in April 2025, followed by a static fire test explosion in September 2025. According to the company, this Alpha launch will be the last of this version before it begins flying an upgraded rocket.

The 2026 launch race:

27 SpaceX
8 China
2 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
1 ULA
1 Europe (Arianespace)

As it did in both ’24 and ’25, SpaceX in ’26 so far has more launches than the entire rest of the world combined.

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SpaceX launches 25 more Starlink satellites

8:37 am

SpaceX early this morning successfully placed another 25 Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The first stage completed its 20th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The 2026 launch race:

26 SpaceX
8 China
2 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
1 ULA
1 Europe (Arianespace)

As it did in both ’24 and ’25, SpaceX in ’26 so far has more launches than the entire rest of the world combined.

Both SpaceX and Firefly have launches scheduled for later today. The Japanese rocket startup Space One has now rescheduled the third launch attempt of its Kairos rocket for March 3, 2026.

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Cargo Dragon successfully returns to Earth

11:49 am

A cargo Dragon capsule successfully splashed down in the Pacific late Thursday, February 26, 2026, bringing back several thousand pounds of hardware and experiments.

The ship had been docked at ISS for the past six months, during which it used its engines six different times to raise the station’s orbit. That capability has traditionally been done by Russian Progress freighters, but NASA has been testing other options as they are unsure Russia will remain with the station after 2028. Furthermore, there are risks using Progress to do these reboosts, as the burns take place when Progress is docked to its Zvezda module port, and the hull of the Zvezda module has been developing stress fractures in the past five years that could catastrophically fail.

Not only has Dragon now demonstrated this boost capability, so has Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus capsule.

I strongly expect Russia to stick with ISS for as long as it can, mainly because its own proposed new space station is not likely to launch as presently scheduled later this decade. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Roscosmos has consistently been unable to complete almost any new proposed projects, and the few it has completed launched literally decades late.

Figure 3 from September Inspector General report
Figure 3 from September 2024 Inspector General report, showing Zvezda’s location on ISS, as well as the station’s leak rate at that time. The leaks in Zvezda now appear to have been sealed, but there is no guarantee more stress fractures will not appear as dockings continue at its port.

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Rocket Lab completes another HASTE suborbital mission

10:45 am

Rocket Lab late yesterday successfully completed its seventh HASTE suborbital mission, using the first stage of its Electron rocket to do a hypersonic test mission for the War Department.

In this case, the test vehicle was from the Australian company Hypersonix, and it lifted off from Rocket Lab’s Electron launchpad at Wallops Island in Virginia.

This was Rocket Lab’s second flight for this particular military agency in the past three months, and its eleventh overall launch from Wallops Island. The company’s quick reconfiguration of Electron for hypersonic suborbital testing made it possible for it to capture a bulk of the military’s suborbital hypersonic testing business that others, such as Stratolaunch, had hoped to win.

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