Tag: commercial

Axiom signs deals with Egypt and the Czech Republic

2:39 pm

Axiom sent out two press releases yesterday touting separate agreements it has reached with two different countries that will either involve research or a future tourist flight to ISS or to its own station.

First the company announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with the Egyptian Space Agency to partner on a range of space-related research. The language describing this work was typically vague, and is so likely because it depends on the time table for the development and launch of Axiom’s station.

Second Axiom announced that the Czech Republic has signed a letter of intent to fly one of its own astronauts on a future Axiom manned flight. Like the Egyptian press release, view specifics were given, likely for the same reasons.

What both deals signal is that there is an international market for the commercial space stations under development and Axiom is aggressively working to garner that business. Its fourth commercial manned mission, set to launch in early June, carries paid government astronauts from Poland, Hungary, and India. The two new announcements add Egypt and the Czech Republic to the company’s international customers.

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Johannes – The Most Beautiful Wingsuit Flight I’ve Done

6:01 pm

An evening pause: From the peak of the Wetterhorn, 12,106 feet. As always, these videos don’t show the work required to get to that peak, but he does describe it on the youtube page:

We climbed over the Willsgrätli, taking around 4 hours to reach the summit of the Wetterhorn. Holy moly… this climb was serious. We didn’t use ropes, and the heavy backpack caused me some problems in certain climbing sections.

What are you planning to do this Memorial Day weekend?

Hat tip Judd Clark.

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Cargo Dragon undocks from ISS

2:55 pm

That this story is not news anymore is really the story. A cargo Dragon capsule that has been docked to ISS since April 22, 2025 today undocked successfully and is scheduled to splashdown off the coast of California on Sunday, May 25, 2025 in the early morning hours.

SpaceX’s Dragon missions to ISS have become so routine that NASA is not even planning to live stream the splashdown, posting updates instead online. This is not actually a surprise, since NASA has practically nothing to do with the splashdown. Once the capsule undocked from ISS, its operation and recovery is entirely in the hands of SpaceX, a private American company.

For NASA, SpaceX is acting as its UPS delivery truck, bringing back to several tons of experiments. And like all UPS delivery trucks, making a delivery is not considered news.

And yet, this is a private commercial spacecraft returning from space, after completing a profitable flight for its owners! That this is now considered so routine that it doesn’t merit much press coverage tells us that the industry of space is beginning to mature into something truly real and sustainable, irrelevant to government.

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Dawn Aerospace begins offering its suborbital spaceplane to customers

12:15 pm

Though the company has only so far flown a small prototype on low altitude supersonic test flights, the spaceplane startup Dawn Aerospace is now taking orders for those who wish to put payloads on its proposed Aurora suborbital spaceplane, targeting a first flight in late 2026.

Dawn Aerospace is taking orders now for the Aurora spaceplane for deliveries starting in 2027. The company has not disclosed pricing for the vehicle, and [CEA Stefan] Powell suggested the company would tailor pricing to each customer. He said that the company estimates, based on market research, that a per-flight price of $100,000 is “absolutely tenable,” and the price could go higher for missions with more customized flight needs. He projects Aurora could fly 100 times a year and has a design life of 1,000 flights, with a total revenue per vehicle of about $100 million.

Though the company had originally touted itself as developing an orbital spaceplane, it recently shifted its goals, at least for the present, to building a very powerful jet comparable in some ways to the X-15, capable of reaching altitudes exceeding 50 miles for short periods and short periods of weightlessness. This capability has some value, and Dawn Aerospace has decided to market it for profit, rather than wait for the orbital version that might be years away.

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Pentagon official blasts ULA’s slow Vulcan launch pace to Congress

10:00 am

In written testimony to Congress submitted on May 14, 2025, the acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for Space Acquisition and Integration, Major General Stephen Purdy, blasted ULA’s very slow effort to get its new Vulcan rocket operational, causing launch delays for four different military payloads.

“The ULA Vulcan program has performed unsatisfactorily this past year,” Purdy said in written testimony during a May 14 hearing before the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Strategic Forces. This portion of his testimony did not come up during the hearing, and it has not been reported publicly to date. “Major issues with the Vulcan have overshadowed its successful certification resulting in delays to the launch of four national security missions,” Purdy wrote. “Despite the retirement of highly successful Atlas and Delta launch vehicles, the transition to Vulcan has been slow and continues to impact the completion of Space Force mission objectives.”

The full written testimony [pdf] is worth reading, because Purdy outlines in great detail the Pentagon’s now full acceptance of the capitalism model. It appears to be trying in all cases to streamline and simplify its contracting system so as to more quickly issue contracts to startups, which were not interested previously in working with the military because they could not afford the long delays between proposal acceptance and the first payments.

In the last decade it appears this process is having some success, resulting for example in the space field the launch of multiple hypersonic tests by a variety of rocket startups. Purdy’s written testimony outlines numerous other examples.

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SpaceX confirms 9th test flight of Starship/Superheavy now scheduled for May 27, 2025

9:19 am

Starship/Superheavy on March 6, 2025 at T-41 seconds
Starship/Superheavy on March 6, 2025 at T-41 seconds

SpaceX has now confirmed May 27, 2025 as the launch date for the ninth test flight of Starship/Superheavy out of its Starbase spaceport at Boca Chica.

The launch window opens at 6:30 pm (Central), with the live stream beginning 30 minutes earlier. The flight will attempt to refly the Superheavy booster used on flight seven. To push the booster’s limits, it will test “off-nominal scenarios” upon return, requiring for safety that it land in the Gulf of Mexico and not be recaptured by the chopsticks. (Just as I don’t change names or my language willy-nilly because leftists demand it, I won’t play Trump’s name-changing game here. The Gulf of Mexico was given that name more than two centuries ago, most likely by the early Spanish explorers, and that name has been good enough since.)

Starship meanwhile attempt the same test profile planned for the previous two flights but stymied by the failure of the spacecraft before reaching orbit. It will test a Starlink satellite deployment system, do a relight of one of its Raptor engines, and test its thermal ability to survive re-entry.

The company also released a report describing the results of its investigation into the previous launch failure on March 6, 2025.
» Read more

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South Africa courts Starlink; Musk says no

9:33 am

The South African government appears to be offering Starlink some concessions in order to get it approved in that country, but it also appears that Elon Musk is not interested in the deal, because it would still require the company to impose racial quotas on hiring and ownership that he not only considers immoral, but are illegal by U.S. law.

In an interview at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha, Musk did not confirm whether a deal had been made with South Africa, as suggested in the reports. However, he maintains that Starlink’s failure to secure a license is attributed to his not being black.

“First of all, you should be questioning why there are racist laws in South Africa; that’s the problem. That’s the issue you should be attacking. The whole idea with Nelson Mandela, he was a great man, was that all races should be on equal footing in South Africa, that’s the right thing to do, not to replace one set of racist laws with another set of racist laws.”

“I was born in South Africa but can’t get a licence to operate in Starlink because I’m not black,” Musk said.

The first link notes that South Africa requires a 30% ownership by “historically disadvantaged groups, primarily Black South Africans,” a racist quota that Musk is likely to reject whole-heartedly.

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SpaceX launches another 23 Starlink satellites

8:28 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully placed another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit (including 13 with cell-to-satellite capabilities), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its first flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. This was the third new booster SpaceX has launched since February. In previous years the company would about this number per year. This new crop so early this year suggests it is finding some of its older boosters might need retirement and its fleet therefore needs replenishment.

More likely the company is anticipating the planned major increases in its launch rate in both Florida and Vandenberg, and is increasing that fleet to meet the demand.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

60 SpaceX
29 China
6 Rocket Lab
5 Russia

SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 60 to 47.

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Space station startup Voyager Technologies about to go public

10:52 am

Starlab design in 2025
The Starlab design in 2025. Click
for original image.

The space station startup Voyager Technologies (formerly Voyager Space) has filed its paperwork for its expected initial public offering (IPO) of stock as it competes for a major contract from NASA to build its Starlab space station.

Voyager filed a preliminary prospectus for its planned initial public offering (IPO) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission May 16. The company previously confidentially filed plans for its IPO with the SEC. The draft prospectus does not yet disclose how many shares the company plans to sell or the amount the company expects to raise in the IPO. It does, though, offer financial details about Voyager.

The company reported $144.2 million in revenue in 2024 and a net loss of $65.6 million, versus $136.1 million in revenue and a net loss of $25.2 million in 2023. The company also reported revenue of $34.5 million in the first quarter of 2025, and a net loss of $27.9 million.

This story actually made me less confident about this company’s plans, with this quote the most revealing:

The company received a funded Space Act Agreement from NASA to support initial design work on the station, currently worth $217.5 million with $70.3 million yet to be paid. … The NASA award covers only initial work on Starlab, and the company will have to compete for a second phase of NASA’s Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development program that will offer additional funding for station development. Voyager revealed in the prospectus that it projects Starlab to cost $2.8 billion to $3.3 billion to develop.

So far it appears Voyager has built nothing. Instead it has used NASA’s preliminary money to do and redo its on-paper design of Starlab (compare the more recent design concept in the image on the right with this older image from 2022), which as a concept is intended to be launched whole on a single Starship launch. No metal has been cut. The company appears to be following the old big space company approach of investing nothing of its own in development.

This does not mean its station will be a failure, but I expect it will not launch as scheduled in 2029 if it wins that major NASA contract. The company will have to build it all in less than three years, something that I doubt it will be able to do.

My present rankings for the four proposed commercial stations:

  • Haven-1, being built by Vast, with no NASA funds. The company is moving fast, with Haven-1 to launch and be occupied in 2026 for an estimated 30 days total. It hopes this actual hardware and manned mission will put it in the lead to win NASA’s phase 2 contract, from which it will build its much larger mult-module Haven-2 station..
  • Axiom, being built by Axiom, has launched three tourist flights to ISS, with a fourth scheduled for early June, carrying passengers from India, Hungary, and Poland. Though there have been rumors it has cash flow issues, development of its first module has been proceeding more or less as planned.
  • Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin and Sierra Space. Overall, Blue Origin has built almost nothing, while Sierra Space has successfully tested its inflatable modules, including a full scale version, and appears ready to start building its module for launch.
  • Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, Airbus, and Northrop Grumman, with an extensive partnership agreement with the European Space Agency. It recently had its station design approved by NASA, but it has built nothing, and appears unwilling to cut any metal until it wins NASA’s full contract.
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