Forty years ago, the future seemed just around the corner—and the vehicle that was going to take us there was NASA's Space Shuttle. Originally envisioned as part of a larger integrated space transportation system, the shuttle was billed as a fully reusable vehicle, totally unlike the one-and-done capsules of the fading Apollo era, capable of making monthly (and perhaps even weekly) ferry flights to low Earth orbit.

The shuttle, it was hoped, would transform human space flight from extraordinary to mundane. Brands like Coke and Pepsi were quick to hop aboard and expand the Cola Wars into space, and there were even plans to blast Sesame Street's Big Bird into orbit.

The loss of Challenger in January 1986—carrying educator Christa McAuliffe, who would have been the first private citizen in space—put the kibosh on all of that. The shuttle, while fantastically advanced, would never be the vehicle to help humankind slip all of our surly bonds, so to speak. Even operating at its most frantic peak in 1985 just before Challenger's loss, the shuttle hardware managed a maximum of nine flights in one calendar year; for most of the 1990s, it performed at five or six flights per year. Civilians in space—to say nothing of Big Bird—would have to wait.

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Welcome to Edition 8.43 of the Rocket Report! A disclaimer: No one yet fully appreciates the ramifications of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket explosion Thursday night on its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida. What we know as of this writing is that much of Blue's sole orbital-class launch pad has been destroyed, and the New Glenn rocket will be grounded for an extended period of time. It is too soon for any hot takes, at least until the Sun rises at the Cape on Friday morning. One thing I am sure of is that we will be writing about this event for weeks, months, and years to come.

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.

Charting China's contribution to space junk. There's a problem with the drastic uptick in Chinese space launches over the last decade. China appears to be ignoring long-established norms about disposing of the upper stages of rockets, Ars reports. These are the parts of the vehicle that separate from the first stage of a rocket and push a satellite or spacecraft into orbit. In the early decades of spaceflight, launch operators routinely left upper stages in orbit after they released their payloads. But most launch companies today reserve enough propellant in their rockets to remove them from orbit to avoid the risk of spent upper stages becoming a source of space debris. But China is not following this trend. There has been striking growth in China’s rocket body mass. In the past five years, the mass of Chinese rocket bodies in long-lived orbits has risen from less than 100 metric tons to 252, according to a new analysis by Space Domain Awareness expert Jim Shell.

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Thursday night's detonation of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket during a static-fire test produced a spectacular fireball over Florida, sending shards of the rocket flying far and wide, into the sea and across the coastal scrubland nearby.

With sunrise on Friday teams from Blue Origin, the US Space Force, and NASA will be able to begin more thoroughly assessing the damage to Blue Origin's facilities and begin picking up pieces of the rocket.

pic.twitter.com/EfYn4QWW9M

— Nick Johnson (@NickJohnson315) May 29, 2026

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On Thursday evening, Blue Origin attempted to test fire its massive New Glenn rocket at its Florida launch site, but something went very wrong after engine ignition. The super heavy lift rocket exploded in spectacular and disastrous fashion.

The static fire test was being filmed by NASASpaceflight.com on its Space Coast Live feed, which captured video of the conflagration that followed the destruction of the booster. The first stage of New Glenn, fueled with methane, produced a massive fireball above the launch site along the Florida coast, LC-36A. It is possibly the most dramatic and powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet Union's N1 rocket was destroyed during a launch attempt in 1969.

Blue Origin's New Glenn just blew up at LC-36 while attempting to Static Fire ahead of NG-4.https://t.co/tANS0dWyIH pic.twitter.com/PztxFoBqIw

— NSF - NASASpaceflight.com (@NASASpaceflight) May 29, 2026

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It was less than two months ago that the third flight of Blue Origin's heavy-lift New Glenn rocket left a customer's payload in an unusable orbit. Investigators have now identified the cause of the failure, and Blue Origin is preparing to launch the next New Glenn mission as soon as next week.

The Federal Aviation Administration and Blue Origin announced the closure of the failure investigation May 22. Yesterday, officials confirmed Blue Origin's next launch will loft a payload of 48 commercial satellites for Amazon's broadband network in low-Earth orbit. This will be the most satellites Amazon has launched on a single rocket, surpassing previous flights on United Launch Alliance's Atlas V, SpaceX's Falcon 9, and Europe's Ariane 6.

Blue Origin and Amazon, each founded by Jeff Bezos, have not officially revealed a target launch date, but public notices of airspace and maritime closures suggest the mission is set to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, as soon as next Thursday, June 4. Blue Origin is expected to roll the New Glenn rocket to its launch pad in the coming days for a test-firing of its seven main engines, fueled by liquified natural gas and liquid oxygen.

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NASA satellites designed to observe cyclone wind speeds and collapsing ice sheets have also proven capable of identifying the approximate locations of GPS jammers. That could help monitor high-risk areas for aircraft and ships navigating the growing prevalence of GPS interference worldwide.

Two different NASA satellite systems showed how they could locate a known but mysterious GPS jammer within several kilometers of its position in Iran, according to an experiment by Sean Gorman, CEO and cofounder of the location-based technology company Zephr.xyz that was detailed in the magazine GPS World. Such jammers use strong signals to overpower the weaker radio signals coming from US-operated GPS satellites and other global navigation satellite systems.

Such NASA satellites cannot perform “near-real time monitoring” or pinpoint the exact location of GPS jammers, said Clara Chew, principal scientist and lead of the GNSS systems and data team at the California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space, who was not involved in the study. But Chew told Ars that identifying the approximate locations of GPS jammers “could potentially be helpful for flight planning” or for “indicating high risk areas for maritime shipping.”

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SpaceX has won a lucrative contract to provide the US military with a means of distributing space-based sensing and targeting data, forming the "backbone" of a rearchitected network after separate Pentagon initiatives stalled, officials announced Tuesday.

Space Systems Command, the Space Force's primary procurement and acquisition center, announced the $2.29 billion firm-fixed-price agreement, confirming long-simmering reports that the Pentagon was likely to tap SpaceX for a new communications network in low-Earth orbit. SpaceX's selection for the Space Data Network (SDN) Backbone contract "accelerates the delivery of a resilient, high-speed communications network in space," Space Systems Command said in a statement.

The network will be based on technology originally developed for SpaceX's Starlink global Internet constellation. SpaceX already builds and launches specially designed satellites, called Starshield, for military applications. The SDN Backbone network in low-Earth orbit (LEO) will presumably use the Starshield platform.

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NASA officials announced contract awards for the initial elements of a lunar base on Tuesday, including two rovers that will provide mobility to astronauts.

With the series of announcements, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sought to maintain momentum around a Moon Base initiative revealed two months ago as part of the space agency's return to the Moon. "For those waiting patiently, the grand return is close at hand, and we will not slow down," he said.

The manager for the lunar base, Carlos Garcia-Galan, said the space agency had selected two companies, Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, to build approximately 1-ton rovers that would be ready for delivery to the Moon in 2028. Astrolab will receive $219 million for its "CLV-1" rover, and Lunar Outpost $220 million for its "Pegasus" rover, building upon initial contracts awarded two years ago. Each rover is expected to have a range of 200 km and be capable of driving autonomously, with guidance from operators on Earth, in addition to being driven by astronauts.

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Up until a decade ago, China had never launched as many as 20 orbital rockets a year. But beginning in 2022, the Asian country launched 64 rockets and last year reached a record total of 93, marking it as the second-most productive space power in the world.

Further growth is anticipated from both the company's state-owned enterprises as well as a rapidly expanding number of private launch companies. There is nothing wrong with this, as China's rapid growth in launch has been mirrored by the United States and, in particular, SpaceX.

However there is an issue with these launches, as China appears to be ignoring long-established norms about disposing of the upper stages of rockets. These are the parts of the vehicle that separate from the first stage of a rocket and push a satellite or spacecraft into orbit.

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SpaceX launched the first test flight of its upgraded Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster Friday, with mostly positive results.

The powerful rocket, propelled by 33 methane-fueled main engines, climbed away from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in South Texas at 5:30 pm CDT (6:30 pm EDT; 22:30 UTC) Friday. Within a few seconds, the 408-foot-tall (124-meter) rocket, the largest ever built, cleared the launch tower and turned onto an eastward heading over the Gulf of Mexico.

Starship splashed down on target in the Indian Ocean a little more than an hour later to conclude the first flight of the latest version of SpaceX's stainless-steel mega-rocket. Starship V3 fared better on its debut than the first flights of Starship V1 and V2 in 2023 and 2025. Both past versions of Starship broke apart during launch on their inaugural flights.

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Tom Akers and Joe Tanner are finally in the same class.

The two veteran space shuttle crew members were inducted into the US Astronaut Hall of Fame together on May 16. They could also have been in the same NASA astronaut selection group, too, had history played out a little differently.

In 1984, Tanner reported to the Johnson Space Center (JSC) to fly as an instructor pilot and then applied for the next class of astronaut candidates.

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At least four Russian military satellites changed their orbits to match that of a Finnish-American radar surveillance satellite in the last week, raising questions about Russia's intentions amid an ever-expanding standoff high above Earth.

The maneuvers were identified through open source orbital tracking data. Greg Gillinger, a retired Air Force space intelligence officer, revealed the orbit changes Friday in a special edition of his Integrity Flash newsletter, published by Integrity ISR, a private business that provides "combat-proven operational support and elite training that enhances mission success across ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), cyber, space, and targeting domains."

The Russian satellites in question, designated Kosmos 2610 through 2613, launched together on April 16 on a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia. Over the last week or so, the four satellites adjusted their inclinations—the angles of their orbits to the equator—by less than a degree.

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Humans do not just visit space; they live there, but a major part of that is coming to an end. The platform that made the longest continuous human presence in space possible is becoming history.

With NASA and its partners beginning preparations for the destructive end of the International Space Station (ISS) as soon as 2030, those who collect, curate, and study the station are now asking how to preserve the historic and culturally significant artifact, given that it is far too large and complex to keep intact.

The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on Thursday hosted a three-part panel discussion, bringing together space program officials, museum curators, an archeologist, and an astronaut to begin answering the why, what, and how the ISS might be saved. The sessions were part of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics' (AIAA) ASCEND conference in Washington, DC.

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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman sent a long email to employees on Friday morning outlining several structural changes that are intended to make the sprawling agency more efficient and allow it to better accomplish major goals, such as returning to the Moon and building a base there.

"I believe it is imperative to concentrate resources towards the highest priority objectives in the National Space Policy and liberate the best and brightest from needless bureaucracy and obstacles that impede progress," Isaacman wrote in his 3,000-word letter.

Isaacman's message stressed that no one at NASA will lose their jobs, and no field centers will be closed as part of these changes. Rather, the overall intent is to improve operational efficiency and focus on the agency's core missions. Isaacman laid these out as: execute on the Artemis Program to return humans to the Moon; build an enduring Moon Base; develop a "Space Reactor Office" to get America underway on nuclear power in space; ignite an economy in low-Earth orbit; and build more X-planes and launch more science missions.

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Welcome to Edition 8.42 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX nearly launched its Starship rocket on Thursday amid much pomp and circumstance in South Texas, only to be foiled by a ground system issue. Such delays are to be expected, with almost entirely new hardware on both the rocket and the ground side of things. The company will try again as soon as Friday evening, and as we discuss in this week's report, the stakes are quite high for SpaceX and much of the rest of the US spaceflight enterprise.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

Firefly expands Central Texas footprint. Firefly Aerospace on Tuesday announced that it has moved into a new headquarters, expanded its cleanroom space, and added an innovation lab to support its growing workforce and accelerate spacecraft production. The expansion includes two new buildings adjacent to Firefly’s existing spacecraft facility in Cedar Park, Texas, enabling a single campus with 144,000 total square feet for spacecraft assembly and testing, mission control, avionics and component production, engineering, and business operations.

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SpaceX got within 40 seconds of launching the first flight of a taller, more powerful version of its Starship rocket Thursday, but a pesky problem with the launch tower kept the vehicle bound to Earth for at least one more day.

Clouds and rain showers cleared the area around SpaceX's launch site in South Texas, leaving mostly sunny skies over the Starship launch pad Thursday afternoon. SpaceX pushed back the launch time by one hour, but the countdown appeared to proceed smoothly once propellants began loading into the rocket.

That was true, at least, until the countdown clock paused 40 seconds before liftoff. The launch team repeatedly attempted to resume the countdown, only for the computer controlling the launch sequence to stop the clock again. There were five holds in all before SpaceX called off the launch attempt.

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NASA confirmed Thursday that the Russian segment of the International Space Station has begun leaking atmosphere into space again. It's an old problem that NASA recently hoped was resolved.

For more than half a decade, engineers from Roscosmos and NASA have been tracking the leak rate from a small Russian module attached to the space station that leads to a docking port. The source of these leaks, microscopic structural cracks, have been difficult to find and address.

In January, NASA said that after multiple inspections and sealant applications, the pressure inside this segment, known as the PrK module, had reached a "stable configuration." The PrK module is essentially a transfer tunnel attached to the Zvezda Service Module on the Russian segment of the space station.

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After nearly a quarter of a century operating as a private company, with its financial accounts a closely guarded secret, SpaceX on Wednesday afternoon released a detailed accounting of its business in a nearly 400-page S-1 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

SpaceX, founded in 2002 and still led by Elon Musk, submitted the filing in anticipation of an initial public offering of its stock as soon as June 12.

The document revealed no major surprises about the company's space operations, but there was a trove of details about its sprawling operations, which now encompass launch, spaceflight, space-based Internet, and, thanks to its recent acquisition of Musk's xAI, social media and AI.

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Not quite halfway through a six-year sojourn through the Solar System, a NASA spacecraft used a close encounter with Mars last week as a dress rehearsal for its arrival at the Solar System's largest metal asteroid in 2029.

The Psyche mission launched more than two-and-a-half years ago, in October 2023, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, to kick off a journey of some 2.2 billion miles (3.6 billion km) to reach its unexplored namesake, the asteroid Psyche. The robotic research mission got an initial lift from a powerful SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. It uses plasma engines to gradually build up the impulse needed to reach its destination in the asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

A flyby of Mars last Friday gave the spacecraft its most significant boost since launch. Navigators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California set up the spacecraft for a course taking it 2,864 miles (4,609 km) from the Martian surface, well above the planet's tenuous atmosphere. Psyche used Martian gravity like a slingshot to gain enough speed to reshape its orbit around the Sun, putting the probe on a path to intercept its asteroid target.

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It's difficult to know the true state of the Russian economy, both because the country's financial reporting is sparse and because official figures are unreliable. But things probably aren't great.

This week, Sweden's minister of foreign affairs, Maria Malmer Stenergard, shared her country's assessment that the Russian economy has likely contracted over the last five years amid the war in Ukraine. Inflation is also high, and international sanctions have cost Russia $450 billion since the onset of the war in February 2022. Russia's economy is currently smaller than that of Texas, Stenergard said.

By most measures, then, the economy is not in tip-top shape. Moreover, the war is draining a large amount of the country's financial resources, with defense spending reaching a post-Soviet record of about 7 percent of government spending.

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