Launch

Blue Origin reports that an engine nozzle issue led to the New Shepard rocket explosion during a test flight in September 2022. The New Shepard is the suborbital rocket that launches Blue Origin’s crew capsule, the same rocket that sent Jeff Bezos to the edge of space in July 2021.  A New Shepard rocket exploded...

OneWeb’s full first generation constellation has now been launched after a weekend mission from India, clearing the way for global service.  The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and NewSpace India Limited (NSIL) launched 36 satellites for OneWeb on March 26 on an Indian LVM3 rocket. OneWeb confirmed after the mission that all satellites were successfully...

Rocket Lab set a new record for turnaround time between missions after it launched two Electron missions seven days apart from two different hemispheres.  Rocket Lab completed a successful mission for customer BlackSky late Friday night in New Zealand, launching an Electron rocket at 10:14 p.m. local time, 5:14 a.m. EDT. This mission was seven...

Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) has completed the launch of a new mission to research space weather. The company announced on March 23 that it launched a sounding rocket BROR was launched from the Esrange Space Center in Sweden to a suborbital altitude of 240 km where it created an auroral light show on the evening...

Virgin Orbit, which paused operations last week to conserve capital, plans to incrementally resume operations on Thursday to prepare for the next mission as the company continues funding talks.  Virgin Orbit paused operations on March 16, disclosed in filings  to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The smallsat launcher has funding troubles, and had just...

SES’s SES-18 and SES-19 satellites have been successfully launched in what it is set to be a busy year of launches for the operator. The satellites, designed and built by Northrop Grumman were launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Friday, March 17. They are the fourth and fifth, and final satellites to be...

The surge in demand for smallsat launch raises a number of questions: What’s driving the growth? How do industries that want to get into Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) find the right partner? And how do industry stakeholders navigate challenges, like limited access to launchpads, supply chain issues, increased risks of space congestion? Speakers on the Tuesday...

SpaceX launched an additional batch of 40 satellites for OneWeb on Thursday, increasing OneWeb’s constellation to 582 satellites. OneWeb is a Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) connectivity provider and competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.  The Falcon 9 mission took off from Space Launch Complex 40 in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on March 9, at 2:13 p.m. The satellites...

The U.S. Space Force’s Space Launch Delta 45 will offer launch pads at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to four new commercial companies — ABL Space, Stoke Space, Phantom Space, and Vaya Space under a new strategy released on Tuesday.  The move is part of the launch pad allocation strategy to offer excess launch property...

The first launch of Japan’s new H3 rocket failed on Tuesday. Japan’s space agency JAXA said in a news dispatch that the mission was terminated via a destruct command.  The H3 rocket successfully lifted off from the launch site on Tanegashima at 10:37 a.m. Japan Standard Time on March 7. But seven minutes into the...