Launch

Relativity Space will occupy one of largest headquarters facilities in the commercial space industry after signing the lease on Boeing‘s former C-17 manufacturing plant in Long Beach, California. The 3D printing launch company announced June 30 that it will move its headquarters and a planned workforce of more than 2,000 employees into the 1 million-square...

The billionaire race to space is heating up, as Virgin Galactic bumped plans to fly Sir Richard Branson to space ahead of Blue Origin’s timeline for Jeff Bezos.  Virgin Galactic announced July 1 that the flight window for its next SpaceShipTwo Unity flight opens July 11. This will be the company’s fourth crewed spaceflight, but...

Airbus has shipped Eutelsat’s QUANTUM satellite to French Guiana ahead of its July launch. The QUANTUM launch has been pushed back multiple times, and is now set for Arianespace launch from French Guiana in the third quarter.  The QUANTUM satellite is software-defined, and is pitched as the first universal satellite to repeatedly adjust to business...

Astra is now the first launch company to be publicly traded on the Nasdaq Global Select Market after its special purpose acquisition (SPAC) merger was approved.  Shareholders of SPAC Holicity Inc. approved the merger on Wednesday, and Astra became a publicly traded company on July 1 under the ticker ASTR. Trading closed at 12.9 per...

London-based Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation operator OneWeb sent a critical batch of 36 new satellites into space early Thursday morning, following a successful launch on an Arianespace Soyuz rocket. The new batch brings OneWeb’s total constellation to 254 satellites, which it says is enough to start offering commercial high-speed internet connectivity services to a large...

SpaceX conducted the second mission in its dedicated service on Wednesday afternoon, carrying 88 spacecraft to Low-Earth Orbit (LEO).  The Falcon 9 rocket took off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida at 3:31 p.m. After stage separation, the booster was recovered for the eighth time. This booster was...

Virgin Orbit has kicked off commercial service with a successful LauncherOne mission on Wednesday, June 30.  As part of Virgin Orbit’s air-launch system, carrier aircraft Cosmic Girl took off from a flight runway at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California at 6:50 a.m. PDT. Cosmic Girl, a modified Boeing 747, dropped the rocket at...

Virgin Orbit has appointed a SpaceX veteran to be its new Vice President of Flight and Launch. It has appointed Tyler Grinnell to the position, the company announced June 25. As the company works to further evolve its commercial launch services, Grinnell will play a key role in enabling the Flight and Launch teams to...

The smallsat launch market is set to get a bump in launch capacity as new launch providers come to market over the next year. Astra is one of those companies, and its strategy is simple — capture the market by building and launching rockets more quickly and more cheaply than its competitors. In this interview,...

Korean Air, South Korea’s largest airline, is getting further involved in the space sector. The airline will develop common bulkhead propellant tanks for small satellite launch vehicles as part of the Ministry of Science and ICT’s ‘Space Pioneer’ project. Korean Air announced the collaboration, June 24. The common bulkhead propellant tank will combine fuel and...