Rocket Report: European rockets finally fly; Artemis II core stage issues

Welcome to Edition 6.15 of the Rocket Report! We're now more than three-quarters of the way through the year, and as of Thursday, there have been 156 orbital launches since January 1. Last year, which set a record for global launch activity, we didn't reach 156 orbital launches until mid-November. At the cadence set so far in 2023, we could end the year at roughly 200 orbital launches. We'll see if the world's launch providers, led by SpaceX and China, keep pace for the next couple of months. I'm betting they do.

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.

A Spanish rocket startup launched its first test flight. A Spanish launch company, named PLD Space, claimed success on Saturday after its suborbital Miura 1 rocket lifted off and achieved an altitude of 46 kilometers (29 miles) before plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean, Ars reports. Saturday's launch from Southern Spain is exciting for several reasons, but most notably because PLD Space is the first of Europe's new space launch companies to have some credible success. To that end, Saturday's modest flight represented the dawn of the European commercial space age.

One small step ...Before the launch, PLD Space said its goals for the debut launch of Miura 1 were to achieve 12 minutes of flight and six minutes of microgravity for a scientific payload provided by a German research institute. The liquid-fueled rocket was to reach an altitude of 80 kilometers, and PLD Space intended to recover the rocket and payload from the sea. As it ended up, the Miura 1 flew a little more than half as high as its goal, and PLD Space said it could not recover the rocket. But this was a step in the right direction for PLD Space, which said the Miura 1 test flight was an important validation for the development of the larger Miura 5 rocket, which will be capable of reaching orbit. PLD Space Aims to launch the Miura 5 as early as 2025 from the European spaceport in French Guiana.

A Vega rocket deployed 12 satellites into polar orbit. A European Vega rocket launched Sunday night from Kourou, French Guiana, with a dozen small satellites, Space News reports. This successful launch was the first time a light-class Vega rocket has flown since Europe's upgraded Vega variant, the Vega C, failed during a mission last December. Investigators determined the December launch failure was caused by a problem with the Vega C's second stage, which has a different design than the second-stage motor used on the base model of the Vega rocket. This meant Avio and Arianespace, the Vega rocket's prime contractor and launch operator, could press on with launching the two Vega rockets still in their inventory. Production of the basic version of Vega is being discontinued in favor of the larger Vega C, which remains grounded until late 2024 to allow for a redesign of its second-stage nozzle.

An international mission ... During this week's mission, the Vega rocket placed 12 small satellites into orbit. The largest two payloads were Thailand's THEOS-2 Earth observation satellite, which carries a high-resolution optical camera to collect 50-centimeter resolution images for the Thai government, and a Taiwanese satellite named FORMOSAT-7R/TRITON to measure wind speeds across the world's oceans. The mission also launched 10 CubeSats from institutions and companies across Europe, although Arianespace was not immediately able to confirm the deployment of two of the CubeSats. The final flight of the Vega rocket is scheduled for the second quarter of 2024. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Virgin Galactic maintains its monthly flight cadence. Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic sent six people, including three space tourists and three company employees, on a brief ride to the edge of space over New Mexico on October 6, CBS News reports. This was the company's fourth suborbital spaceflight with paying customers aboard, maintaining a monthly flight rate since Virgin Galactic's air-launched rocket plane started commercial service in late June. Virgin Galactic's recent success stands in contrast to its top competitor in the suborbital space tourism market. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, has been grounded with its suborbital New Shepard rocket more than a year after an in-flight failure last September.

Who flew? ... Joining two Virgin Galactic pilots and the company's chief astronaut trainer aboard the VSS Unity spaceplane were British advertising executive Trevor Beattie, American science popularizer Ron Rosano, and Namira Salim, the first Pakistani to fly in space. Virgin Galactic reported the craft reached an apogee, or high point, of about 87 kilometers (54 miles) and a top speed just shy of three times the speed of sound. The VSS Unity rocket plane landed on the runway at Spaceport America in New Mexico for refurbishment ahead of Virgin Galactic's next commercial suborbital mission.

Astrobotic breathes new life into Masten's rocket program. A small vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing rocket originally built by Masten Space Systems has resumed flights under the management of Astrobotic, which purchased the assets of bankrupt Masten last year, Space News reports. Astrobotic announced this week it has flown the Xodiac rocket four times in Mojave, California, hovering just off the ground to test plume-surface interactions ahead of future lunar landing missions, supporting research by the University of Central Florida.

High demand ... Astrobotic says there's strong interest in the Xodiac vehicle from various customers, including NASA, which will fly payloads on future Xodiac test flights to demonstrate hazard detection technology from an altitude of 250 meters. These sensors will support landings on the Moon in the dark. Other customers include Draper and Astrobotic itself, both of which are developing commercial lunar landers. An Astrobotic official said the company has about 20 flights of the Xodiac rocket scheduled for the rest of this year. Meanwhile, Astrobotic is working on a larger suborbital rocket, with the help of NASA funding, that could fly above the 100-kilometer Kármán line frequently used as the boundary of space. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Astra is considering selling its spacecraft propulsion division. Continuing to face financial struggles, Astra is considering selling off a majority stake in its in-space propulsion business, Bloomberg reports. This could be a step to shore up Astra's financial situation, at least in the short term, as the company appears to be just months away from running out of money. According to Bloomberg, Astra may sell a 51 percent stake in its spacecraft engines business, which builds small thrusters used on satellites. This business unit operates alongside Astra's launch division, which currently focuses on the development of a new launch vehicle called Rocket 4 to replace the company's now-retired Rocket 3 vehicle after it suffered a series of failures.

From the stars, down to Earth ... Astra has fallen far since it went public in 2021, when investors valued the company at $2.1 billion. The company's market value is now less than $15 million, based on the price of its shares on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Astra's launch division was already on ice after the company announced layoffs and a reallocation of 70 employees from its rocket program to the more lucrative spacecraft engines division. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

ArianeGroup is seeking more taxpayer money. It's no secret that Europe's Ariane 6 rocket program is falling short of its goals. The rocket, conceived to be Europe's workhorse launch vehicle, is years behind schedule and won't fly until next year at the earliest. It also won't achieve the cost savings its developers promised at the start of the program. Now ArianeGroup, the company that designs and develops the Ariane 6, is asking for more public money to subsidize the costs of building Ariane 6 rockets so they will be more attractive to private satellite operators seeking a ride to space, Ars reports.

What cost savings? ... The European Space Agency has provided an annual 140 million euro subsidy to ArianeGroup since 2021. According to the French financial newspaper La Tribune, ArianeGroup is now asking for a substantial increase to this subsidy, to 350 million euros per year. Ars has previously reported that the Ariane 6 rocket will not meet the program's goal of realizing a 50 percent cost reduction compared to the Ariane 5 rocket, which retired earlier this year. When you account for this larger subsidy, if approved, the real cost of each Ariane 6 rocket will closely match the Ariane 5 rocket.

Atlas V delivers for Amazon. The first two prototype satellites for Amazon's broadband network launched October 6 from Florida, Ars reports. This was the first in a series of at least 77 rocket launches the retail giant has booked over the next six years to deploy a fleet of more than 3,200 spacecraft to rival SpaceX's Starlink system. A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carried the first two satellites for Amazon's $10 billion Internet megaconstellation, called Project Kuiper, into orbit following liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Overkill? ... Although Amazon has not released any design details of the Kuiper satellites, these first two prototypes probably weighed a few hundred kilograms at launch, well below the lift capacity of the Atlas V rocket, which likely cost somewhere near $100 million. These test satellites were originally supposed to launch on a small rocket from ABL Space Systems, but Amazon switched them to the first flight of ULA's new Vulcan rocket after ABL's launch vehicle ran into delays. The Vulcan, likewise, has repeatedly been delayed and is now expected to launch no sooner than December. Amazon saw these schedule slips and decided to launch the prototype satellites on a dedicated flight of an Atlas V, one of five Atlas rockets the company had already reserved from ULA for future missions with operational Kuiper satellites.

Relativity gets a major customer for Terran R. Relativity Space and Intelsat have announced an agreement for multiple launches of Intelsat satellites on Relativity's partially reusable Terran R rocket. This agreement would cover launches on the Terran R rocket beginning in 2026. Relativity is developing the Terran R with a reusable first stage following a single test flight of its smaller Terran 1 rocket in March. Intelsat operates one of the largest fleets of communications satellites in geostationary orbit and has typically put its payloads on rockets from established launch providers such as SpaceX and Arianespace.

A feather in Relativity's cap ... There's an eagerness among commercial satellite operators for more launch capacity. If you want to secure a launch on a large rocket in the next year, your only option today is probably SpaceX. Market forecasts show launch demand growing through the 2020s, and launch companies like Relativity and Rocket Lab are developing larger rockets to answer this need. Relativity now says it has a backlog of $1.8 billion across nine customers for Terran R. OneWeb and Relativity signed a similar multi-launch agreement last year, making Terran R an option to launch second-generation broadband satellites for OneWeb's megaconstellation in low-Earth orbit. While the value and other details of these agreements haven't been released, these deals don't appear to have firm payload assignments attached to them, giving Intelsat and OneWeb maximum flexibility to delay their use of Terran R if the rocket runs into problems during development or during test flights. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

NASA's Falcon Heavy era is about to begin. The launch of the Psyche asteroid mission this week is the opening act among five launches the space agency has directly reserved on SpaceX's heavy-lift rocket over the next few years, Ars reports. These Falcon Heavy flights will cut across NASA's portfolio of robotic space missions, dispatching probes deep into the Solar System, deploying a flagship-class astronomical observatory, sending up a weather satellite, and launching the keystone to NASA's Gateway mini-space station around the Moon. All told, we know of up to 10 Falcon Heavy missions on contract with SpaceX, including NASA payloads, commercial flights, and one US Space Force launch.

The government loves Falcon Heavy ... Traditional commercial satellite operators, the types of companies that regularly buy Falcon 9 launches, haven't been as gung-ho about Falcon Heavy. Three of the seven Falcon Heavy missions to date have carried large commercial communications satellites toward positions in geostationary orbit, a location favored by many conventional satellite operators working in the video and television broadcast markets. But there are no such missions currently in SpaceX's Falcon Heavy backlog. In fact, the London-based commercial communications satellite company Inmarsat had a contract option to launch one of its payloads on a Falcon Heavy rocket but decided instead to launch the spacecraft on a Falcon 9 earlier this year.

NASA is still waiting on Artemis II's core stage. The completion of the core stage of the Space Launch System rocket for the Artemis II mission has been delayed until December due to supply chain issues and technical problems at Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, NASASpaceflight reports. One of the major hold-ups this year was due to a liquid oxygen feedline segment that had to be reworked at a supplier. The Boeing production team at Michoud also completed unplanned troubleshooting on valves inside the core stage.

Delivery slipping…  At the beginning of the year, NASA officials expected the Artemis II core stage to be ready for shipment from Louisiana to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida by the summer. That is now unlikely to happen before the end of the year. However, according to NASA, the readiness of the SLS rocket is not the driver of the launch date for Artemis II, which is likely to be in 2025. The primary schedule driver is the status of the Orion spacecraft that will carry a team of four astronauts around the far side of the Moon on the first crew flight of NASA's Artemis program. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Next three launches

October 13: Falcon Heavy | Psyche | Kennedy Space Center, Florida | 14:19 UTC

October 13: Falcon 9 | Starlink 6-22 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 23:00 UTC

October 15: Long March 2D | Unknown Payload | Jiuquan, China | 01:00 UTC