Welcome to Edition 7.48 of the Rocket Report! The shock of last week's public spat between President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has worn off, and Musk expressed regret for some of his comments going after Trump on social media. Musk also backtracked from his threat to begin decommissioning the Dragon spacecraft, currently the only way for the US government to send people to the International Space Station. Nevertheless, there are many people who think Musk's attachment to Trump could end up putting the US space program at risk, and I'm not convinced that danger has passed.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Quebec invests in small launch company. The government of Quebec will invest CA$10 million ($7.3 million) into a Montreal-area company that is developing a system to launch small satellites into space, The Canadian Press reports. Quebec Premier François Legault announced the investment into Reaction Dynamics at the company's facility in Longueuil, a Montreal suburb. The province's economy minister, Christine Fréchette, said the investment will allow the company to begin launching microsatellites into orbit from Canada as early as 2027.
Musk said in a post on X Thursday that SpaceX "will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately" in light of Trump's statement that floated canceling the billionaire's government contracts and subsidies.
The SpaceX CEO included a screenshot of Trump's earlier Truth Social post, which said terminating Musk's government contracts would be the "easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars."
Musk walked that decision back around five hours later.
"This is a shame this back and forth. You are both better than this. Cool off and take a step back for a couple days," X user Fab25june wrote on the platform.
"Good advice. Ok, we won't decommission Dragon," Musk said.
SpaceX's Dragon spaceships are used to transport NASA astronauts and supplies to and from the International Space Station.
In a statement to Business Insider, Bethany Stevens, NASA press secretary, said: "NASA will continue to execute upon the President's vision for the future of space. We will continue to work with our industry partners to ensure the President's objectives in space are met."
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
The comments came as the feud between the former allies exploded on Thursday, with Trump and Musk publicly trading insults on their respective social media platforms, Truth Social and X.
Musk's government contracts are worth billions, with SpaceX working closely with NASA. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, designed to be reusable, can carry up to seven passengers to and from orbit and is the first private spacecraft to transport humans to and from the ISS, the company says.
Since 2020, NASA has relied on SpaceX's Dragon to transport astronauts to and from orbit. The agency, which retired its space shuttle program in 2011, depended on Russian Soyuz spacecraft for crewed missions prior to partnering with SpaceX.
In 2024, NASA announced SpaceX was awarded a $843 million contract to help decommission the ISS by the early 2030s. The plan involved using a larger, super-powered Dragon spaceship to push the ISS out of orbit, eventually landing in a remote part of the ocean. NASA planned to transition to using privately-owned space stations in the future.
Steve Bannon, who served as the White House chief strategist in Trump's first term, said in an interview Thursday that Trump should act immediately in response to Musk's announcement about decommissioning the Dragon spacecraft.
"President Trump tonight should sign an executive order calling for the Defense Production Act," Bannon said, referring to a federal law that grants the president authority to influence or control domestic industry in the name of national defense,"and seize SpaceX tonight before midnight."
SpaceX made some progress on another test flight of the world's most powerful rocket Tuesday, finally overcoming technical problems that plagued the program's two previous launches.
But minutes into the mission, SpaceX's Starship lost control as it cruised through space, then tumbled back into the atmosphere somewhere over the Indian Ocean nearly an hour after taking off from Starbase, Texas, the company's privately owned spaceport near the US-Mexico border.
SpaceX's next-generation rocket is designed to eventually ferry cargo and private and government crews between the Earth, the Moon, and Mars. The rocket is complex and gargantuan, wider and longer than a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, and after nearly two years of steady progress since its first test flight in 2023, this has been a year of setbacks for Starship.
On Tuesday afternoon, just a few hours before a launch attempt of the ninth flight test of SpaceX's Starship vehicle, Elon Musk spoke with Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger to talk about where his space company goes from here.
In recent weeks, Musk has dialed back his focus on politics and said he wants to devote the majority of his time to SpaceX and his other companies. So what does that mean?
The conversation came just ahead of the opening of Starship's launch window, at 6:30 pm CT (23:30 UTC) in South Texas. Here is a lightly edited transcript of the interview.
The Federal Aviation Administration gave the green light Thursday for SpaceX to launch the next test flight of its Starship mega-rocket as soon as next week, following two consecutive failures earlier this year.
The failures set back SpaceX's Starship program by several months. The company aims to get the rocket's development back on track with the upcoming launch, Starship's ninth full-scale test flight since its debut in April 2023. Starship is central to SpaceX's long-held ambition to send humans to Mars and is the vehicle NASA has selected to land astronauts on the Moon under the umbrella of the government's Artemis program.
In a statement Thursday, the FAA said SpaceX is authorized to launch the next Starship test flight, known as Flight 9, after finding the company "meets all of the rigorous safety, environmental and other licensing requirements."
Since Donald Trump took office, more than three dozen employees, allies, and investors of Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Palmer Luckey have taken roles at federal agencies, helping direct billions in contracts to their companies.
When SpaceX first launched the Starship, it blew up soon after liftoff. Since then, the world’s most powerful rocket has flown seven more times, with each test flight showing huge improvements in some areas of the vehicle’s design, but issues in others. One of the major achievements so far has involved the launch tower catching […]
Welcome to Edition 7.43 of the Rocket Report! There's been a lot of recent news in hypersonic testing. We cover some of that in this week's newsletter, but it's just a taste of the US military's appetite for fielding its own hypersonic weapons, and conversely, the Pentagon's emphasis on the detection and destruction of an enemy's hypersonic missiles. China has already declared its first hypersonic weapons operational, and Russia claims to have them, too. Now, the Pentagon is finally close to placing hypersonic missiles with combat units. Many US rocket companies believe the hypersonics sector is a lucrative business. Some companies have enough confidence in this emerging market—or lack of faith in the traditional space launch market—to pivot entirely toward hypersonics. I'm interested in seeing if their bets pay off.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Stratolaunch tests reusable hypersonic rocket plane. Stratolaunch has finally found a use for the world's largest airplane. Twice in the last five months, the company launched a hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific Ocean, accelerated it to more than five times the speed of sound, and autonomously landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, Ars reports. Stratolaunch used the same Talon-A vehicle for both flights, demonstrating its reusability, a characteristic that sets it apart from competitors. Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch's president and CEO, said his team aims to ramp up to monthly flights by the end of the year.
The US government is bringing up Starlink adoption in the midst of tariff trade talks with other countries, according to a report from The Washington Post. In recent weeks, several countries have moved forward with licensing the Elon Musk-owned satellite internet company, including India, Somalia, Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Vietnam.
Internal messages seen by The Post suggest that US embassies and the State Department are encouraging countries to make way for US satellite internet services like Starlink. The messages don’t promise lower tariffs in exchange for adopting Starlink, but “they do indicate that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has increasingly instructed officials to push for regulatory approvals for Musk’s satellite firm,” The Post reports.
Sources tell The Post that government officials in India rushed to secure regulatory approval for Starlink “with the understanding that doing so could help them cement trade deals with the administration.” This week, India cleared Starlink’s proposal, bringing it another step closer to establishing its service in the country.
In a statement to The Post, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said “the only consideration in the Trump administration’s trade negotiations with other countries is what’s best for the American people — which includes American companies succeeding at home and abroad” and that President Donald Trump “will not tolerate any conflicts of interest.” The State Department told the outlet that “any patriotic American should want to see an American company’s success on the global stage, especially over compromised Chinese competitors.” SpaceX didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Elon Musk’s Starlink has received anticipated state approval in India, opening the door to enter the world’s second-biggest internet market after China — over three years after SpaceX’s previous attempt to launch its satellite-based broadband in the country eventually failed. On Wednesday, India’s Department of Telecommunications gave its nod to Starlink to start working toward its […]
SpaceX has so far completed eight launches of its mighty Starship rocket — the most powerful ever to fly — with two of them taking place this year. Now the Elon Musk-led spaceflight company has permission to dramatically increase the number of annual Starship launches from its Starbase facility in Texas from five to 25. […]
Although we are still waiting for SpaceX to signal when it will fly the Starship rocket again, the company got some good news from the Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday.
After a lengthy review, the federal agency agreed to allow SpaceX to substantially increase the number of annual launches from its Starbase launch site in South Texas. Previously, the company was limited to five launches, but now it will be able to conduct up to 25 Starship launches and landings during a calendar year.
"The FAA has determined that modifying SpaceX’s vehicle operator license supporting the increased launch and landing cadence of the Starship/Super Heavy launch vehicle would not significantly impact the quality of the human environment," states the document, known as a Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact. This finding was signed by Daniel P. Murray, executive director of the FAA's Office of Operational Safety.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is getting its own official company town. Residents of an area around SpaceX’s Starbase launch site in southern Texas voted overwhelmingly on Saturday to incorporate as a city — also named Starbase. According to results posted online by the Cameron County Elections Department, there were 212 votes in favor and only six […]
SpaceX has marked its 250th dedicated Starlink launch with a breathtaking photo showing its Falcon 9 rocket heading to orbit. The long-exposure image shows the rocket on its way to space, and also includes numerous star trails and bright lights along Florida’s Space Coast. The mission got underway on Sunday shortly after 10 p.m. ET […]
Welcome to Edition 7.41 of the Rocket Report! NASA and its contractors at Kennedy Space Center in Florida continue building a new mobile launch tower for the Space Launch System Block 1B rocket, a taller, upgraded version of the SLS rocket being used for the agency's initial Artemis lunar missions. Workers stacked another segment of the tower a couple of weeks ago, and the structure is inching closer to its full height of 355 feet (108 meters). But this is just the start. Once the tower is fully assembled, it must be outfitted with miles of cabling, tubing, and piping and then be tested before it can support an SLS launch campaign. Last year, NASA's inspector general projected the tower won't be ready for a launch until the spring of 2029, and its costs could reach $2.7 billion. The good news, if you can call it that, is that there probably won't be an SLS Block 1B rocket that needs to use it in 2029, whether it's due to delays or cancellation.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Fresh details on Astra's strategic pivot. Astra, the once high-flying rocket startup that crashed back to Earth with investors before going private last year, has unveiled new details about its $44 million contract with the Department of Defense, Space News reports. The DOD contract announced last year supports the development of Rocket 4, a two-stage, mobile launch vehicle with ambitions to deliver cargo across the globe in under an hour. While Astra's ill-fated Rocket 3 focused on launching small satellites into low-Earth orbit, Astra wants to make Rocket 4 a military utility vehicle. Rocket 4 will still be able to loft conventional satellites, but Astra's most lucrative contract for the new launch vehicle involves using the rocket for precise point-to-point delivery of up to 1,300 pounds (590 kilograms) of supplies from orbit via specialized reentry vehicles. The military has shown interest in developing a rocket-based rapid global cargo delivery system for several years, and it has a contract with SpaceX to study how the much larger Starship rocket could do a similar job.
In an era of reusable rockets and near-daily access to space, NASA is still paying more than it did 30 years ago to launch missions into orbit, according to a study soon to be published in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica.
Launch is becoming more routine. Every few days, SpaceX is sending another batch of Starlink Internet satellites to orbit, and other kinds of missions fill up the rest of SpaceX's launch schedule. SpaceX, alone, has ample capacity to launch the handful of science missions NASA puts into space each year. If supply outpaces demand, shouldn't prices go down?
It's not so simple. NASA is one of many customers jockeying for a slot on SpaceX's launch manifest. The US military is launching more missions than ever before, and SpaceX is about to become the Pentagon's top launch provider. SpaceX already launches more missions for NASA than any other rocket company.
Welcome to Edition 7.39 of the Rocket Report! Not getting your launch fix? Buckle up. We're on the cusp of a boom in rocket launches as three new megaconstellations have either just begun or will soon begin deploying thousands of satellites to enable broadband connectivity from space. If the megaconstellations come to fruition, this will require more than a thousand launches in the next few years, on top of SpaceX's blistering Starlink launch cadence. We discuss the topic of megaconstellations in this week's Rocket Report.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
So, what is SpinLaunch doing now? Ars Technica has mentioned SpinLaunch, the company that literally wants to yeet satellites into space, in previous Rocket Report newsletters. This company enjoyed some success in raising money for its so-crazy-it-just-might-work idea of catapulting rockets and satellites into the sky, a concept SpinLaunch calls "kinetic launch." But SpinLaunch is now making a hard pivot to small satellites, a move that, on its face, seems puzzling after going all-in on kinetic launch and even performing several impressive hardware tests, throwing a projectile to altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Ars got the scoop, with the company's CEO detailing why and how it plans to build a low-Earth orbit telecommunications constellation with 280 satellites.
The business of moving goods in the United States is dominated by trucks, which handle about two-thirds of the 20.2 billion tons of freight that’s transported annually. Parallel Systems founder and CEO, Matt Soule, wants to change that by putting a modern autonomous and electric twist on the centuries-old railroad system. The Los Angeles-based company […]
In the last week, the US Space Force awarded SpaceX a $5.9 billion deal to make Elon Musk's space company the Pentagon's leading launch provider, and then it assigned the vast majority of this year's most lucrative launch contracts to SpaceX.
On top of these actions, the Space Force reassigned the launch of a GPS navigation satellite from United Launch Alliance's long-delayed Vulcan rocket to fly on SpaceX's Falcon 9. ULA, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is SpaceX's chief US rival in the market for military satellite launches.
Login
