AerospaceSpace Launch
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Elon Musk signaled on social media that SpaceX is aiming for a March launch of the next Starship test, roughly six weeks after his post. The flight will debut the third-generation Starship from a newly built Pad 2 at Starbase and carries hardware changes intended to expand payload capacity and enable in-orbit refueling for lunar missions.
SpaceX conducted two Falcon 9 launches on consecutive days from California and Florida, placing 54 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit and advancing fleet scale. Both flights reused previously flown boosters and nudged the Starlink inventory past the 9,600-satellite mark, reinforcing SpaceX’s deployment tempo and service capacity.
Beijing-based iSpace closed a roughly $729 million financing round to speed development of a reusable medium‑lift launcher while multiple national and commercial actors accelerated test campaigns, recovery operations, and sovereign launch investments. SpaceX restarted booster returns near the Bahamas, China advanced recoverable-stage testing, and several governments committed fresh capital to domestic launch chains, reshaping procurement and manifest choices.
China conducted an in-flight abort trial that recovered a Long March 10 booster and validated critical reentry and restart technologies while a Mengzhou crew capsule completed a splashdown test. The demonstrations accelerate Beijing’s reusable-launch ambitions and advance preparations for a crew-capable lunar vehicle slated for orbital trials later this year.
A US startup, General Galactic, will attempt an orbital test of a satellite using water as its only propellant, riding a Falcon 9 later this fall. The mission will trial both electrolysis-driven chemical burns and a water-fed Hall-effect electric thruster, a dual approach that, if successful, could reshape satellite refueling and maneuverability strategies.
A wet‑dress rehearsal for Artemis II was aborted after a renewed liquid‑hydrogen leak at a ground‑to‑vehicle interface, despite component‑level fixes and a redesigned valve. The failure — coming after the stack’s transfer to Launch Complex 39B and a campaign already squeezed by a weather delay — highlights how the SLS’s very low flight cadence and high per‑unit cost force each tanking and launch to behave like an experiment rather than routine operations.
Jeff Bezos’ brief social post telegraphed a concrete, compressed lunar architecture Blue Origin has been drafting: leaked plans describe a three‑launch uncrewed demo and a four‑launch crewed profile that avoid orbital refueling by stacking transfer stages. The effort coincides with a formal pause of New Shepard operations to free people and hardware for New Glenn and Blue Moon work, but the timeline depends on unproven multi‑vehicle rendezvous, deep‑space propulsion sequencing and a reliable New Glenn cadence.
NASA’s heavy‑lift rocket completed a slow crawl to Launch Complex 39B, beginning months of integrated checks and rehearsals ahead of a potential early‑February launch date. The rollout turns abstract timelines into near‑term operational gates while commercial launch market shifts and recent programmatic tradeoffs elsewhere underscore how supplier readiness and procurement choices could influence Artemis schedules.