The next test flight of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster could take off as soon as Thursday, and much of the hour-long mission will look a lot like the last Starship flight in May.

But there are a few key differences for this launch, set to occur during a launch window that opens at 5:45 pm CDT (22:45 UTC) on Thursday. The most notable change is the inclusion of real, functioning Starlink satellites inside Starship's cargo bay. SpaceX previously tested the ship's payload deployment mechanism using simulators mimicking the mass and dimensions of the company's next-generation Starlink Version 3 broadband satellites.

This time—Starship's 13th full-scale test flight and the second to use SpaceX's newest version of Starship—technicians have installed 20 Starlink V3 satellites into the ship's deployer, a system of pulleys and cables designed to eject a stack of satellites one at a time through an opening on the side of the spacecraft. The satellites will not be part of SpaceX's operational network, but engineers will attempt to briefly establish laser communication links between the Starlink V3s and other spacecraft flying in low-Earth orbit. If successful, these links will validate Starlink V3's interoperability with SpaceX's previous generation of Starlink satellites.

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China's sprawling state-owned rocket developer, maker of the country's Long March rocket family, announced it recovered a reusable orbital-class booster for the first time Friday in the South China Sea.

The milestone mission began with the liftoff of a Long March 10B rocket from the Wenchang Commercial Space Launch Site on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province. Powered by seven kerosene-fueled engines, the approximately 209-foot-tall (63.6-meter) rocket took off at 12:15 am EDT (04:15 UTC), or 12:15 pm local time at the seaside spaceport at Wenchang.

About 10 minutes later, the Long March 10B booster descended from space and guided itself into a four-legged frame affixed to an offshore vessel. Tensioned cables stretched over the ship in a grid pattern captured the rocket as it shut down its landing engines, leaving the smoldering booster hanging in midair. The rocket's upper stage continued into orbit and deployed a payload known only as CX-26. Chinese officials hailed the flight as a "complete success."

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It wasn't easy to find anyone outside of SpaceX clamoring for a rocket like Starship just 10 years ago. Today, the space industry can't wait for Starship to finally deliver.

With a payload capacity of more than 100 metric tons (220,000 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, SpaceX's new rocket is changing the thinking of just about everyone in the space industry. With the unrealized but potentially game-changing benefits of refueling, Starship could carry the same amount of payload to higher orbits, the Moon, or Mars.

It's important to note that Starship is still very much in its experimental phase, far from proving Elon Musk's loftiest claims about what it can do. Still, NASA and the US military are considering novel ways to use Starship to fly to the Moon or transport cargo to far-flung war zones. Scientists are eager to use its enormous volume to launch giant space telescopes. Competitors are taking notice. China, the strongest strategic adversary America has ever faced, is looking for its own Starship. Now, some US satellite manufacturers are adapting for the substantial capacity of the world's most powerful rocket.

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The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology.

It's a long way from launching a bona fide nuclear reactor, a breakthrough that could help power a permanent Moon base and efficiently drive rockets throughout the Solar System. But you have to start somewhere.

The satellite from Miami-based City Labs is named BOHR, short for Betavoltaic Orbital High-Reliability, and it launched on a SpaceX rideshare mission Tuesday alongside 80 other payloads. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket released the BOHR satellite into an orbit between 350 and 400 miles (nearly 600 km) in altitude.

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The final flight of United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket is still several years off, but an important era for the once-dominant launch company came to a close last week.

The final flight of an Atlas V for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 12:30 am EDT (04:30 UTC) last Thursday, sending 29 satellites to orbit to move the network closer to providing initial services.

All 29 spacecraft deployed from the Atlas V rocket less than an hour after launch. They will use onboard propulsion to raise their orbits from an altitude of approximately 289 miles (465 kilometers) to their final operating positions at 392 miles (630 kilometers) above the Earth.

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High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite perilously close to falling out of orbit.

The endeavor to rescue NASA's Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind. NASA put out a call for commercial companies less than a year ago to propose how they could rapidly build and launch a small satellite to latch onto the Swift spacecraft and boost its altitude so that it doesn't come down in a few months.

Katalyst Space Technologies responded with the best offer. NASA awarded the company a contract last September to build and launch a mission to rescue Swift. A little more than nine months later, Katalyst's nearly half-ton Link satellite is safely in orbit. For anyone who follows the space industry, building, testing, and launching a functioning first-of-its-kind satellite of that size in less than a year is a remarkable achievement; it would usually take several years.

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Welcome to Edition 9.01 of the Rocket Report! Back in January, I wrote about the 20 launches and landings we were most excited about in 2026. The list included things that were, at the time, officially scheduled to occur this year. I also gave my own view of the probability of each of these events actually happening before December 31. Halfway through the year, we can only count one of the events as completed, and that was NASA's Artemis II mission in April. Many are now scheduled for next year, proving again that delays are a constant in the space industry. A couple of them—such as the launch of NASA's Roman Space Telescope—do appear to be on track to happen soon.

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.

Swift Boost Mission reaches orbit. A pioneering commercial mission to reboost the orbit of NASA's Swift astronomy satellite launched early Friday after attempts earlier in the week were thwarted by bad weather and a technical issue. The Link servicing satellite developed by Katalyst Space Technologies soared to orbit on the tip of a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket that dropped from the belly of a modified L-1011 jetliner over the remote Pacific Ocean. Mission managers called off two launch attempts Tuesday and Wednesday due to poor weather around the L-1011's staging base on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. On Thursday, "a launch vehicle issue temporarily prevented teams from deploying the rocket" after takeoff of the L-1011.

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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on Tuesday to test a new reentry vehicle designed to deliver cargo anywhere in the world from low-Earth orbit.

The company developed the new saucer-shaped reentry pod, called Starfall, under a veil of secrecy. Its purpose is to support the "transport and delivery of goods through space," according to an environmental assessment published by the Federal Aviation Administration last month.

The first demonstration of the Starfall vehicle began at 6:53 am EDT (10:53 UTC) with liftoff aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. At least one Starfall reentry pod rode to orbit on the Falcon 9, perhaps alongside another undisclosed payload. After circling the planet two times, the Falcon 9's upper stage was expected to release Starfall for atmospheric reentry, targeting a parachute-assisted splashdown in the Pacific Ocean around 800 miles west of California.

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Rocket Lab quietly launched a small satellite from New Zealand on Friday in a high-flying military exercise to test the US Space Force's ability to rapidly respond to a crisis in low-Earth orbit.

The launch was scarcely announced in advance. The only public indication of an impending launch was the release of a warning for pilots and sailors to steer clear of the rocket's flight path. Rocket Lab did not provide a livestream of the launch, as it does for most of its missions. As of Monday morning, officials from Rocket Lab and the Space Force had not acknowledged the launch in any official public statements.

But the US military's catalog of space objects was updated over the weekend to reflect the launch. A new satellite, designated Victus Haze Puma, showed up in the catalog with a launch date of Friday from Rocket Lab's privately run spaceport at Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand. The Space Force cataloged the spacecraft in a polar orbit ranging between 215 miles and 286 miles (347-by-461 km), with an inclination of about 97.5 degrees from the equator.

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Welcome to Edition 8.46 of the Rocket Report! We don't mention Starship in the body of this week's report, so I'll give a brief update here. The next test flight of SpaceX's mega-rocket—Flight 13—could happen as soon as next month, according to Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and chief operating officer, in a recent interview with CNBC. There's still a fair bit of work to do before Flight 13, so don't count on a launch next month just yet. What we do know, based on Shotwell's comments to CNBC, is the next Starship test flight will look a lot like the previous one last month, with a suborbital flight path and a splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX is holding off on an orbital flight until at least the following launch, Flight 14, after the ship was unable to complete a critical engine restart in space on the last flight.

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.

Isar test flight scrubbed again. Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company’s efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks, Ars reports. The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle’s fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause." Isar is flush with cash, having raised nearly $1 billion to date, but is still lacking in the critical currency of flight experience. The Spectrum rocket has flown just once to date, on a failed launch last year that lasted less than 30 seconds.

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WALLOPS ISLAND, Va.—Just 10 months ago, NASA asked three companies if they could do something nobody had done before. Could they build and launch a satellite to save a $500 million astronomy mission at risk of crashing back to Earth? What's more, could they do it in less than a year on a tight budget?

Katalyst Space Technologies, a startup founded in 2020, presented the most compelling solution. "They came back with a response that was technically and programmatically plausible, and then we were like, 'Yeah, let’s do it,'" said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division.

That was in August of last year. In September, NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract to build, test, and launch a small satellite to chase down Swift and latch onto it with three robotic arms. Then, Katalyst's Link servicing spacecraft will boost Swift's orbit back to a safe operating altitude, allowing it to resume scientific observations. Easier said than done.

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Isar Aerospace still commands top position among a new generation of European rocket startups, but the company's efforts to launch a critical test flight of its Spectrum rocket continue to encounter roadblocks.

The latest delay came Monday, when Isar scrubbed a launch attempt after "detecting off nominal behavior in the vehicle's fluid systems," according to a social media post. "The teams are analyzing the new data to isolate the root cause."

The two-stage, 92-foot-tall (28-meter) Spectrum rocket was awaiting liftoff from Andøya Spaceport in northern Norway. It was the fourth time in five months that Isar Aerospace, headquartered near Munich, Germany, had reached a target launch date for the second test flight of the Spectrum launch vehicle.

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The upper stage from a commercial Chinese rocket that launched last week has broken apart in space, spreading debris in a heavily trafficked part of low-Earth orbit home to the International Space Station and a significant portion of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network.

The breakup occurred shortly after the Zhuque-2E rocket reached orbit on June 9 with two satellites providing direct-to-cell communications, perhaps around the time the upper stage was expected to perform a disposal burn. The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public.

"The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing."

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NASA pushed its Deep Space Network beyond its limits during the Artemis I mission nearly four years ago. The global array of deep space communications antennas couldn't keep up with the routine demands of 40 robotic science missions and the extraordinary surge required by NASA's Orion space capsule as it flew around the Moon.

The experience in late 2022 reduced or delayed downlinks from several high-profile science missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope and Mars rovers, as the data-hungry Artemis I mission took priority on NASA's communications network. And that was before the first Artemis mission with astronauts onboard. When Artemis II launched April 1, NASA called upon the Deep Space Network (DSN) again to connect Mission Control to the Orion capsule as it soared more than a quarter of a million miles from Earth.

With a crew of four flying inside the spacecraft, the agency's appetite for data from Orion on Artemis II was even higher than it was on Artemis I. But at a little more than nine days, the Artemis II mission was shorter than the 25 days Artemis I spent in space, helping alleviate the communications overload. Artemis I also launched 10 small CubeSats into deep space, many of which required tracking and telecom services from the DSN. Artemis II carried fewer CubeSats.

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The Federal Communications Commission has waived a requirement for Amazon to launch half of its satellite broadband constellation by the end of July, a key regulatory reprieve that buys the tech giant time to get more of its spacecraft into orbit.

Amazon won regulatory approval for the Amazon Leo network in July 2020. The FCC's authorization came with two deadlines. First, Amazon had to launch half of its 3,232 satellites by July 30, 2026, in order to maintain authorization to launch the rest of the network. The regulator gave Amazon a deadline of July 30, 2029, to have all of its first-generation satellites in orbit.

It has been apparent for some time that Amazon would not meet the FCC's requirement to launch half of its satellites—1,616 spacecraft—by the end of next month. Amazon filed an application in January requesting the FCC extend the deadline to July 2028 or waive it altogether. The commission decided on the latter option, removing any time limit for the 50 percent deployment milestone, but keeping the July 2029 deadline in place for the entire constellation.

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Five of the seven crew members on the International Space Station briefly sought refuge inside a SpaceX return capsule Friday morning as two Russian cosmonauts worked on an air leak on the other end of the complex.

NASA ordered US astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev into SpaceX's Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft around 9 am EST (14:00 UTC) on Friday. The foursome launched aboard the SpaceX crew capsule on the Crew-12 mission in February, and the ship serves as their lifeboat until the crew's scheduled return to Earth in September.

NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who flew to the station in a Russian Soyuz ferry ship, joined the Crew-12 astronauts inside the Dragon spacecraft.

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Welcome to Edition 8.44 of the Rocket Report! The news this week is decidedly weighted in favor of heavy-lift rockets, largely due to the fallout from last Thursday's explosion of Blue Origin's New Glenn on its launch pad in Florida. Blue Origin aims to resume launches at the badly damaged launch facility by the end of the year, but there's good reason to be skeptical of this timeline. With New Glenn grounded, will Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos approach Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch his Blue Moon lander to the lunar south pole? It sure sounds like NASA is pushing for that.

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.

Spaceport development moves forward in Canada. There's been a lot of talk about the Canadian government's recent commitment to invest in a sovereign launch capability. There was the announcement last year of a federal budget of 182.6 million Canadian dollars ($131 million) over three years to establish a sovereign launch program. In March, the government said it would lease a dedicated launch pad at a commercially developed spaceport in Nova Scotia for national defense purposes, committing 200 million Canadian dollars ($144 million) to the deal. The agreement is a boon for Maritime Launch Services, which is developing Spaceport Nova Scotia after years of slow progress at the coastal site, SpaceQ reports.

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Last week's explosion of a New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was clearly a setback for Blue Origin and NASA, but it was a learning experience for safety officials looking to open up the spaceport to hundreds more launches per year.

The launch base on Florida's Space Coast is gearing up for a flurry of new arrivals. SpaceX is building multiple launch pads for its super-heavy Starship rocket, which will operate within a few miles of launch pads operated by SpaceX rivals Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. Two other companies, Stoke Space and Relativity Space, are also developing launch sites along a narrow stretch of coastline at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

All of them have, or will soon have, rockets burning methane or liquified natural gas, replacing legacy launch vehicles fueled by kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or solid propellants. There are good technical reasons for making the switch, but until last week, engineers had scant real-world data on the damage that millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen would cause if a fully loaded rocket exploded on the launch pad or soon after liftoff.

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NASA's MAVEN spacecraft was in excellent shape when it disappeared behind Mars on December 6 of last year. The routine passage, called an occultation, was supposed to last less than an hour, but ground teams didn't hear from the spacecraft when it was supposed to regain contact with Earth.

The loss of communication triggered contingency plans for engineers to try to restore a link with MAVEN, which orbits Mars more than 200 million miles from Earth. To no avail, they listened for faint signals and uplinked commands in the blind. Hopes of saving the mission faded over time, and NASA officials announced Wednesday that they're giving up on it.

"NASA has ceased efforts to search for the MAVEN spacecraft and are beginning activities to decommission the mission," said Mike Moreau, MAVEN's project manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. 

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The race to field China's first reusable launch vehicle is far less predictable than a similar competition that played out in the United States a decade ago.

There was never any real question of which company would develop and demonstrate the first reusable orbital-class rocket in the United States. SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster for the first time in 2015, and a little more than a year later, it launched it back into space. It took nearly 10 years for anyone else to do the same. Blue Origin celebrated its first orbital-class booster landing last November with the successful recovery of one of its New Glenn boosters, followed by a relaunch of the same rocket in April.

In China, several companies and state-owned enterprises have a realistic shot at landing an orbital-class booster stage this year. For a time, it seemed like China's new crop of privately funded launch companies might have the advantage in accomplishing the first landing of an orbital-class booster. But Monday's launch of China's Long March 12B rocket, backed by the nearly unrestricted resources of the country's vast state-owned aerospace enterprise, suggests the industry's legacy players may now have a leg up.

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