Tag: commercial

Another company enters the military’s hypersonic test market

9:57 am

UP Aerospace today announced the successful launch of its suborbital small Spyder rocket, designed expressly for hypersonic flight testing.

The maiden flight took place at 7:00 AM MST at Launch Complex 36 [at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico], marking a new era in hypersonic mission capabilities. The mission reached the threshold of hypersonic speeds similar to the UP Aerospace SpaceLoft rocket missions that have been operational for 20 years.

In the U.S. the military now can do hypersonic flight tests using this small rocket, Stratolaunch’s giant Roc plane and Talon-A flight vehicle, Rocket Lab’s Haste reconfiguration of its Electron rocket, and Varda’s orbital capsules on their return from space. In addition there is at least one other startup, Radian, that hopes to build a space plane for hypersonic testing as well.

I also expect this testing to result in some new technologies for both commercial aircraft as well as rockets.

2 comments

Europe’s old aerospace industry struggles with the concept of competition

9:46 am

Made in European Union

Two stories today from Europe’s aerospace industry suggest that its older big space companies are having real difficulties dealing with the new space landscape of competition and freedom.

First, Arianespace and Avio issued a statement demanding that Europe require that all European launches occur on European rockets.

The statement warned that without “sustained support,” European rocket builders were at risk of losing out to institutionally backed competitors from the US. “Major space powers support their industries through stable and guaranteed institutional markets, enabling long-term investments, innovation, and the preservation of leadership,” explained the statement.

…The pair argue that Europe risks falling behind not due to a lack of technical capability, but because of structural market weaknesses. While Ariane 6 and Vega-C have demonstrated competitiveness and reliability, they caution that this progress is fragile in the absence of guaranteed long-term demand.

While a preference for European launch providers is clearly in the best interest of both Avio and Arianespace, the pair did reserve a slice for new entrants to the market. “Enshrining European preference as an untouchable principle would support not only Ariane and Vega, but also foster the development of emerging projects in the small launcher sector.” [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence reveals the true reasons behind this call against competition. » Read more

5 comments

NASA/Axiom announce another four-day launch delay for Axiom’s fourth manned mission

8:55 am

NASA and Axiom today announced that they have rescheduled the launch of Axiom’s fourth manned mission to ISS, dubbed Ax-4, to June 22, 2025 in order to give Russian and American engineers more time to assess the leak repairs in the station’s Russian Zvezda module.

The press announcement provided little information, simply stating that:

The change in a targeted launch date provides NASA time to continue evaluating space station operations after recent repair work in the aft (back) most segment of the International Space Station’s Zvezda service module.

It would be nice if the agency would release some actual data. Earlier reports had suggested that the repairs had completely sealed the leaks and that the station was no longer losing air. The vagueness of today’s report suggests that the repairs might not have been as successful as hoped. It could also be engineers simply want more data for a longer period to prove the repairs have worked.

The lack of detailed information causes unnecessary speculation.

1 comment

SpaceX launches 28 Starlink satellites

8:47 am

The beat goes on! SpaceX successfully launched another 28 Starlink satellites early this morning, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

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

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

76 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 76 to 55.

0 comments

Honda’s grasshopper rocket successfully completes vertical take-off and landing

10:48 am

Honda today successfully completed the first test of its own grasshopper prototype rocket, with the rocket reaching a height of 890 feet before landing vertically 56 seconds after launch.

I have embedded the video of the flight below.

Honda had announced this project back in 2021, but since then had published no updates of note. This flight indicates that project is real and is on going.

In 2021 the company said it was targeting the first orbital flights by 2030. Today’s update says it will be doing suborbital flights in 2029, which suggests the orbital flights will not occur in 2030.
» Read more

8 comments

Under Trump FCC shifts from regulating satellite construction and de-orbit to streamlining red tape

9:15 am

FCC seal

According to a Space News article yesterday, the FCC’s regulatory focus since January and the advent of the Trump administration has shifted significantly from its focus during the Biden administration.

The article describes in detail the present focus to streamline regulations and speed license approvals.

One early result of this push is a reduction in the FCC’s licensing backlog. Schwarz said the space bureau has reduced pending applications by 35 percent since January, including those for new space stations and ground infrastructure.

Modernizing regulations for non-geostationary satellite systems is another priority. The FCC is considering revising so-called “power limit” rules aimed at preventing interference between low-orbit constellations and traditional geostationary satellites and earth stations. Schwarz said these reforms could help pave the way for higher-throughput services that rival terrestrial broadband.

This focus appears correctly centered on the FCC’s actual legal statutory authority to regulate the limited bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum to avoid conflicts in its use.

Under Biden, the FCC instead focused on expanding its power beyond that statutory authority, claiming it had the right to determine how satellites were built, when they would be de-orbited, and in what manner. None of those activities have anything to do with bandwidth and the FCC’s legal responsibilities.

There was some legislative push back from Congress during the Biden administration, but it was slow and relatively weak. Now that push back has become unnecessary, because the FCC under Trump is back to doing its actual job instead of trying to build empires of regulation.

The agency also appears, for the moment, to have ended its partisan abuse of red tape for political reasons. Under Biden it used its regulatory power against SpaceX in retaliation to Elon Musk’s decision to publicly support Biden’s political opponents. It appears the present effort to speed license approvals for everyone has ended this practice.

0 comments

Rocket Lab gets a quick launch contract from unnamed customer

8:50 am

Rocket Lab today announced it has been awarded a launch contract from an unnamed “confidential commercial customer” calling for two launches before the end of this year, with the first to occur only four days from today.

Launching from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, the first dedicated mission on Electron – named “Symphony In The Stars” – will take place no earlier than June 20, 2025 to deploy a single spacecraft to a 650km circular Earth orbit. A second dedicated launch on Electron to meet those same mission requirements is scheduled for launch before the end of 2025.

That the customer name is classified suggests these are both military launches, and are designed to demonstrate Rocket Lab’s ability to launch something fast under short notice. The new contract also increases the chances that Rocket Lab will manage two dozen launches in 2025, a pace of twice a month.

0 comments

SpaceX launches 26 more Starlink satellites

8:44 am

SpaceX last night successfully placed 26 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

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

A comparison between this launch of SpaceX’s Starlink with Amazon’s scrubbed ULA launch of 27 Kuiper satellites yesterday is worth noting. This launch of 26 Starlink satellites was utterly routine, and just one of four in just the past week, all of which put 98 satellites into orbit. Thousands of such satellites have been launched since the first launch in 2018.

Amazon’s attempt to launch 27 Kuiper satellites was scrubbed, and would have only been the second launch total, separated by about six weeks. The constellation only has 27 satellites in orbit, and its launches are anything but routine, despite signing launch contracts with four different rocket companies. And yet, Amazon proposed Kuiper at almost the same time SpaceX proposed Starlink, in the mid-2010s.

I will let my readers draw their own conclusions from this comparison.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

75 SpaceX
34 China
8 Rocket Lab
6 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 75 to 55.

2 comments

Spinlaunch signs deal to build its spin launch facility on island in Alaska

12:30 pm

Spinlaunch prototype launcher

Spinlaunch has now confirmed that it has signed a deal to build its spin launch facility on Adak island in the far western extent of the Alaskan island chain.

The facility will be a scaled up version of its spin launch test facility in New Mexico, shown to the right, that was used for tests back in 2022, hurling payloads 35,000 feet into the sky up by spinning them up.

Since then the company changed its leadership and shifted focus to building a satellite constellation that will at least initially will be launched by conventional rockets. This new agreement, actually signed in October 2024 but kept secret until now, suggests that it has not yet abandoned its spin launch technology.
» Read more

7 comments

ULA scrubs 2nd Kuiper constellation launch due to technical issue

10:24 am

ULA today scrubbed its second Atlas-5 launch to place 27 more of Amazon’s Kuiper constellation satellites into orbit due to “an engineering observation of an elevated purge temperature within the booster engine.”

At the moment no new launch date has been scheduled.

So far Amazon has only placed 27 operational Kuiper satellites into orbit, on a single Atlas-5 launch in April. According to its FCC license, it must have 1,600 satellites in orbit by July 2026. Though it has contracts to launch these satellites 46 times on ULA rockets (8 on Atlas-5 and 36 on Vulcan), 27 times on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 18 times on ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, and 3 times on SpaceX’s Falcon-9, except for SpaceX all these companies have had problems getting off the ground.

Whether Amazon can meet the FAA licence requirement by next year is becoming increasingly questionable.

7 comments
1 … 79 80 81 82 83 … 897