Welcome to Edition 8.02 of the Rocket Report! It's worth taking a moment to recognize an important anniversary in the history of human spaceflight next week. Fifty years ago, on July 15, 1975, NASA launched a three-man crew on an Apollo spacecraft from Florida and two Russian cosmonauts took off from Kazakhstan, on course to link up in low-Earth orbit two days later. This was the first joint US-Russian human spaceflight mission, laying the foundation for a strained but enduring partnership on the International Space Station. Operations on the ISS are due to wind down in 2030, and the two nations have no serious prospects to continue any partnership in space after decommissioning the station.
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.
Sizing up Europe's launch challengers. The European Space Agency has selected five launch startups to become eligible for up to 169 million euros ($198 million) in funding to develop alternatives to Arianespace, the continent's incumbent launch service provider, Ars reports. The five small launch companies ESA selected are Isar Aerospace, MaiaSpace, Rocket Factory Augsburg, PLD Space, and Orbex. Only one of these companies, Isar Aerospace, has attempted to launch a rocket into orbit. Isar's Spectrum rocket failed moments after liftoff from Norway on a test flight in March. None of these companies is guaranteed an ESA contract or funding. Over the next several months, ESA and the five launch companies will negotiate with European governments for funding leading up to ESA's ministerial council meeting in November, when ESA member states will set the agency's budget for at least the next two years. Only then will ESA be ready to sign binding agreements.
Russia is a waning space power, but President Vladimir Putin has made sure he still has a saber to rattle in orbit.
This has become more evident in recent weeks, when we saw a pair of rocket launches carrying top-secret military payloads, the release of a mysterious object from a Russian mothership in orbit, and a sequence of complex formation-flying maneuvers with a trio of satellites nearly 400 miles up.
In isolation, each of these things would catch the attention of Western analysts. Taken together, the frenzy of maneuvers represents one of the most significant surges in Russian military space activity since the end of the Cold War. What's more, all of this is happening as Russia lags further behind the United States and China in everything from rockets to satellite manufacturing. Russian efforts to develop a reusable rocket, field a new human-rated spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz, and launch a megaconstellation akin to SpaceX's Starlink are going nowhere fast.
Maxim Reshetnikov, left, said the Russian economy is cooling.
Contributor/Getty Images
Russia's economy is on the brink of recession, the country's economy minister said.
Maxim Reshetnikov said at an economic forum that data shows its economy is cooling.
Russia is facing stubborn inflation, labor shortages, and the impact of Western sanctions.
The Russian economy is "on the brink" of entering a recession, the country's economy minister warned on Thursday.
Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a major annual business event in Russia, Maxim Reshetnikov said data showed the economy "cooling."
When a moderator asked him to describe the state of the economy, he said it seemed that the country was "on the verge of going into recession," according to Russian news agency Interfax.
He later clarified that he wasn't making an outright prediction. "I said that we were on the brink," Reshetnikov said. "From here on out, everything will depend on our decisions."
Reshetnikov has already raised concerns about the direction of the Russian economy. In May, while addressing the State Duma, he said that the economy was cooling so sharply it risked entering a state of economic "hypothermia."
In that address, Reshetnikov urged Russia's central bank to take into account easing inflation when setting interest rates. On June 6, the bank did just that, cutting its key interest rate from 21% to 20%, citing signs of declining inflation.
While inflation is easing slightly, it has remained stubbornly high — now hovering around 10% — since spiking in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Hard or soft landing?
The central bank's moves to dampen inflation meant a sharp economic slowdown was inevitable and even intentional, said Brigitte Granville, professor of international economics and economic policy at Queen Mary, University of London.
"The key question has always been whether the Russian economy would undergo a 'hard landing' — meaning inflation would be brought under control at the cost of tipping the economy into recession — or a 'soft landing,' where inflation moderates without triggering a recession," she told BI in an email.
Even if a technical recession did occur, Granville said Russia's labour market remained extremely tight, supporting wage growth. "Even a hard landing would not have serious consequences for the sustainability of Russia's war effort."
It's on track to spend about $130 billion on defense, roughly a third of its federal budget, up from 28.3% in 2024.
It's also potentially running low on cash, with one Swedish economist predicting that Russia could run out of liquid reserves as soon as this fall.
The country is still grappling with the effects of Western sanctions, which have targeted its oil and gas exports and largely cut financial institutions off from the international financial communication system SWIFT.
Russia's economy is also suffering from a severe labor shortage, driven in part by the military mobilization, as well as a brain drain of young professionals leaving the country.
According to state media, Russia had a shortfall of some 2.6 million workers at the end of 2024, with shortages hitting the manufacturing, trade, and transportation sectors especially hard.
General Wieslaw Kukula, the Polish armed forces chief of staff, said at a Friday press conference that "we have decided to change the priorities of the helicopter programs" in order to "better adapt to the challenges of future warfare," Reuters reported.
Poland's deputy defense minister, Pawel Bejda, said on X that his country's military, pilots, and experts were analyzing the geopolitical situation, as well as "the war in Ukraine" and what Russia is buying and equipping its military with.
Poland shares a land border with Ukraine.
Grzegorz Polak, a spokesman for Poland's Armament Agency, which buys equipment for its military, told Reuters that its priorities needed "some correction" and that it might be necessary to buy other equipment instead of the helicopters, "such as drones, or tanks, or some kind of communication."
He also told Polish outlet Defence24 that the armed force's priorities have changed amid evolving threats.
Its prime minister, Donald Tusk, warned in March that Russia's big military investments suggest it's readying for a conflict with someone bigger than Ukraine in the next three to four years.
Poland is already the highest spender on defense in NATO, as a proportion of its GDP, and has been a major ally of Ukraine throughout the invasion.
Helicopters over Ukraine
Helicopters have played a role in Russia's invasion, with both sides using them to counter drones, offer air support, and launch attacks.
They were particularly effective for Ukraine against Russia's attempts to seize a key airfield shortly after the invasion began in February 2022, and for Russia during Ukraine's 2023 counteroffensive.
A Russian Ka-52 "Alligator" attack helicopter launches missiles during a demonstration.
Leonid Faerberg/Getty Images
But they have also proved vulnerable.
The proliferation of air defenses has meant that they, like other aircraft, have had to hang back from frontline fighting more than in past conflicts, making them far less useful.
Even so, losses could have been higher. Mark Hertling, a former commander of United States Army Europe, told BI in January that Russia has been "very poor" in the way it used helicopters and other air assets, but also that Ukraine's air-defense shortages have protected them.
Andrew Curtis, an independent defence and security researcher who spent 35 years as a UK Royal Air Force officer, told BI last year that one lesson Western countries could take from the war is "about the vulnerability of helicopters in the modern battlefield where hiding and seeking is not a child's game, it's a matter of life and death."
A still from video footage shows a Russian helicopter before it appeared to be taken out.
YouTube/Defence Intellegence of Ukraine
A helicopter strategy
The S-70i is a variant of the UH-60 Black Hawk made by PZL Mielec, a Polish company owned by the US's Lockheed Martin.
Poland's plan to buy them began in 2023, under a previous government. The aim was for the helicopters to be used for combat and logistics, and to work with AH-64E Apache Guardian attack helicopters ordered from the US.
Bejda, the deputy defense minister, said the latest move did not involve terminating a contract, as one was never signed.
But it has still led to some domestic issues.
Mariusz Blaszczak, Poland's former defense minister, described the decision as a disgrace in a post on X, saying it would lead to job losses, delays in replacing the country's helicopter fleet, and a loss of interoperability because Poland's military already uses some Black Hawks.
A US UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.
U.S. Army National Guard photo by Staff Sgt. Cesar Rivas
The postponement comes after Poland spent years investing in helicopter technology, including ordering 96 Apache Guardians in a deal signed last year, and 32 Leonardo AW149s in a deal signed in 2022.
Bejda said Poland would still prioritize some helicopters, including training and combat helicopters, a heavy transport helicopter, and search and rescue helicopters.
But the government, which took office at the end of 2023, clearly views increasing the fleet as less important than investing in other military assets.
The war in Ukraine has led Western countries to boost their own defense spending and to change their priorities, including through buying more air defenses and drones, investing more in tanks, and even bringing back old types of training like trench warfare.
Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth's atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.
On average, a piece of space junk the size of Kosmos 482, with a mass of about a half-ton, falls into the atmosphere about once per week. What's different this time is that Kosmos 482 was designed to land on Venus, with a titanium heat shield built to withstand scorching temperatures, and structures engineered to survive atmospheric pressures nearly 100 times higher than Earth's.
So, there's a good chance the spacecraft will survive the extreme forces it encounters during its plunge through the atmosphere. Typically, space debris breaks apart and burns up during reentry, with only a small fraction of material reaching the Earth's surface. The European Space Agency, one of several institutions that track space debris, says Kosmos 482 is "highly likely" to reach Earth's surface in one piece.
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.
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