Rocket Report: Archimedes engine sees first light, New Glenn making moves

Welcome to Edition 7.06 of the Rocket Report! There has been a lot of drama over the last week involving NASA, the crew of Starliner on board the International Space Station, and the launch of the Crew-9 mission on a Falcon 9 rocket. NASA is now down to a binary choice: Fly Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home on Starliner, or send two astronauts to orbit on Crew-9, and return Wilmore and Williams next February on that spacecraft. We should know NASA's final decision next week.

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 inks another big Alpha contract. Firefly Aerospace said Wednesday that it has signed a multi-launch agreement with L3Harris Technologies for up to 20 launches on Firefly’s Alpha rocket, including two to four missions per year from 2027 to 2031, depending on customer needs. The new agreement is in addition to Firefly’s existing multi-launch agreement with L3Harris for three Alpha missions in 2026. What is not clear is exactly what satellites L3Harris wants to launch.

Putting skins on the wall ... "Firefly continues to see growing demand for Alpha’s responsive small-lift services, and we’re committed to providing a dedicated launch option that takes our customers directly to their preferred orbits," said Peter Schumacher, Interim CEO at Firefly Aerospace. This represents another significant win for the Alpha rocket, which can lift about 1 metric ton to low-Earth orbit. Under terms of a separate agreement announced in June, Lockheed purchased 15 launches from Firefly, with an option for 10 more, through the year 2029. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Electron pushing launch cadence. Rocket Lab announced Wednesday that it has scheduled the launch for its 52nd Electron mission, which will deploy a single satellite for American space tech company Capella Space. The mission is scheduled to launch during a 14-day window that opens on August 11 from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula.

Getting to ten much faster ... Should this launch take place at the opening of this window, this Electron flight would occur just eight days after the most recent Electron mission on August 3. This upcoming mission for Capella will be Rocket Lab’s tenth mission for 2024, equaling the company’s annual launch record set in 2023. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

PLD Space to start work on launch site. PLD Space plans to start building launch facilities for its Miura 5 rocket in October from the Diamant site at Guiana Space Centre, cofounder and Chief Business Development Officer Raúl Verdú said this week, Space News reports. Diamant has been dormant for decades after once being used for the French rocket of the same name, and “in the area where we are there is nothing,” Verdú said, “we have to do everything from scratch.”

Lots of things to build ... PLD Space, Germany’s Isar Aerospace and a handful of other small European launchers are working with France’s CNES space agency to convert the site into a multi-use facility. In June, the Spanish company announced a 10 million euro ($11 million) investment plan for 15,765 square meters of space at Diamant, divided between a launch zone and a preparation area comprising an integration hangar, clean room, control center, commercial and work offices. CNES is providing common infrastructure such as roads and electricity networks. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Japanese firm raises $21 million. Interstellar Technologies announced a new fundraising round that brings its total capital and government funding to $117 million, Payload reports. After building and launching a suborbital rocket called Momo, the company is building its first orbital rocket, dubbed ZERO, with a goal of flying in 2025. This rocket is intended to carry 800 kg of payload to low-Earth orbit, and be cheaper than Rocket Lab’s Electron, COO Keiji Atsuta said.

Big help from Japan ... Interstellar’s latest round was led by Japanese VC fund SBI and NTT Docomo, the country’s leading mobile firm. Previously, it received a large amount of funding, $96 million, from the Japanese government. “The Japanese government has explicitly expressed its support for private rockets due to the growing importance of the space industry, and being selected for this support program has significantly accelerated our business,” Interstellar CEO Takahiro Inagawa said. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Cross-border deal benefits Nova Scotia spaceport. The Canadian government says it has completed negotiations with the United States on an agreement that would allow the use of US space launch technology, expertise, and data for space launches in Canada, the AP reports. Maritime Launch Services, the company developing Canada’s first commercial spaceport in northeastern Nova Scotia, called the agreement a major step forward for the industry.

US rockets could launch from Canada ... Ottawa has said it hopes to position Canada as future leader in commercial space launches. The country has geographical advantages, including a vast, sparsely populated territory and high-inclination orbits. The agreement, which is yet to be signed, will establish the legal and technical safeguards needed while ensuring the proper handling of sensitive technology, the government said in a news release. (submitted by JoeyS-IVB)

Crew-9 launch delayed five weeks to work Starliner issues. During a news conference on Wednesday, NASA officials, for the first time, publicly discussed divisions within the agency about whether the Starliner spacecraft is really reliable enough to return two veteran astronauts—Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams—back to Earth from the International Space Station. The space agency also confirmed key elements exclusively reported by Ars over the last week, chiefly that NASA has quietly been working for weeks with SpaceX on a potential rescue mission for Wilmore and Williams and that the Crew-9 mission launch has been delayed to September 24 to account for this possibility.

From eight days to eight months ... NASA has been studying various contingencies, but officials appear to have settled on two different options for bringing the two astronauts back to Earth. They could still fly back on Starliner if NASA engineers become more comfortable with the uncertainty about the thruster performance, and if so, they would do so during the second half of this month or the first part of September. Alternatively, NASA could launch the Crew-9 mission with a complement of two rather than four astronauts, and Wilmore and Williams would join that "increment" on the space station and fly back to Earth in February 2025.

Rocket Lab test-fires Archimedes engine. The launch firm has successfully hot-fired its new rocket engine Archimedes for the first time, it said Thursday. Rocket Lab’s engineers completed the hot fire test at the company’s Engine Test Complex within NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Hancock County, Mississippi. According to Rocket Lab, the Archimedes performed well and ticked off several key test objectives, including reaching 102 percent power.

Fast rocket, faster development ... This gives the company confidence in the design of the engine, which will power the medium-lift Neutron rocket. "Taking a new staged combustion liquid rocket engine from cleansheet design to hot fire in just a couple of years is industry-leading stuff," Rocket Lab chief executive Peter Beck said in the news release. The company is working toward the debut launch of Neutron in mid-2025, but a launch any time next year would be impressive.

China begins launching megaconstellation. A Long March 6A rocket delivered 18 Qianfan satellites into polar orbit following liftoff Tuesday from the Taiyuan launch base in northern China's Shanxi province. Qianfan translates to "Thousand Sails," and the 18 satellites launched Tuesday are the first of potentially thousands of spacecraft planned by Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology (SSST), a company backed by Shanghai's municipal government, Ars reports. Unfortunately, an issue with the rocket's upper stage created many pieces of debris.

A potential Starlink competitor ... Chinese officials have long signaled their interest in deploying a satellite network, or maybe several, to beam broadband Internet signals across China and other nations within its sphere of influence. Two serious efforts are underway in China to develop a rival to SpaceX's Starlink network, which the Chinese government has banned in its territory. One of these is Qianfan, and Shanghai officials only began releasing details of this constellation last year. A filing with the International Telecommunication Union suggests the developers of Shanghai-based megaconstellation initially plan to deploy 1,296 satellites at an altitude of about 1,160 kilometers (721 miles). (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Polaris Dawn launch date reset to late August. SpaceX is now targeting August 26 for the launch of Polaris Dawn, a crewed flight to Earth orbit that will feature the first-ever private spacewalk, Space.com reports. Those four crewmembers are billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who will command the mission; pilot Scott "Kidd" Poteet, a retired US Air Force lieutenant colonel; and mission specialists Sarah Gillis and Anna Menon, both of whom are SpaceX engineers.

Going for record heights ... Polaris Dawn will take the quartet to Earth orbit on a free-flying mission that does not link up with the International Space Station. The planned private spacewalk is not the only way this mission will make history: Polaris Dawn will orbit our planet at an altitude of about 870 miles (1,400 kilometers), taking the crew farther from Earth than any mission since the Apollo era. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Exploration Upper Stage is way late and way over budget. The NASA program to develop a new upper stage for the Space Launch System rocket is seven years behind schedule and significantly over budget, a new report from the space agency's inspector general finds. However, beyond these headline numbers, there is also some eye-opening information about the project's prime contractor, Boeing, and its poor quality control practices, Ars reports.

Lack of a trained workforce... At the Michoud Assembly Facility in southern Louisiana, where the Exploration Upper Stage is being manufactured, federal observers have issued a striking number of "Corrective Action Requests" to Boeing. "According to Safety and Mission Assurance officials at NASA and DCMA officials at Michoud, Boeing’s quality control issues are largely caused by its workforce having insufficient aerospace production experience," the report states. "The lack of a trained and qualified workforce increases the risk that the contractor will continue to manufacture parts and components that do not adhere to NASA requirements and industry standards." (submitted by EllPeaTea)

New Glenn making moves at the Cape. On Thursday, Blue Origin used the test module of the first stage of its New Glenn rocket to simulate recovery operations at Port Canaveral, Florida. "The operation validated our tooling and procedures for recovering our first stage from the landing vessel, bringing us another step closer to our first launch," the company said on the social media site X. The 200-foot-tall simulator was quite the striking object to see towering over the port.

Recovery rehearsal soon ... In an additional post, the chief executive of Blue Origin, Dave Limp, added, "The mobile harbor crane, remotely operated lift tool or 'ROLT,' and the breakover fixture work in tandem to lift and reorient the booster from vertical to horizontal so we can transport it back for refurbishment and re-flight. Coming soon: a full recovery rehearsal with our landing vessel." It's exciting to see Blue coming out with more and more information about the large rocket before its debut within the next few months.

Next three launches

August 9: Falcon 9 | Starlink 8-3 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 12:13 UTC

August 10: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-7 | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 11:21 UTC

August 11: Electron | "A Sky Full of SARs" | Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand | 11:15 UTC