Rocket Report: Starship is on the clock; Virgin Galactic at a crossroads

Welcome to Edition 6.48 of the Rocket Report! Fresh off last week's dramatic test flight of SpaceX's Starship, teams in Texas are wasting no time gearing up for the next launch. Ground crews are replacing the entire heat shield on the next Starship spacecraft to overcome deficiencies identified on last week's flight. SpaceX has a whole lot to accomplish with Starship in the next several months if NASA is going to land astronauts on the Moon by the end of 2026.

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.

Virgin Galactic won't be flying again any time soon. After an impressive but brief flurry of spaceflight activity—seven human spaceflights in a year, even to suborbital space, is unprecedented for a private company—Virgin Galactic will now be grounded again for at least two years, Ars reports. That's because Colglazier and Virgin Galactic are betting it all on the development of a future "Delta class" of spaceships modeled on VSS Unity, which made its last flight to suborbital space Saturday. Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, now finds itself at a crossroads as it chases profitability, which VSS Unity had no hope of helping it achieve despite two decades of development and billions of dollars spent.

An uncertain future ... Now, Virgin Galactic's already anemic revenue numbers will drop to near zero as the company spends more capital to bring two Delta-class spaceships online. The goal is to start flying them in 2026. These vehicles are designed to be more easily reusable and carry six instead of four passengers. This timeline seems highly ambitious given that, at this point, the company is only developing tooling for the vehicles and won't begin major parts fabrication until later this year. Virgin Galactic is betting on the Delta-class ships as its stock price has precipitously fallen over the last couple of years. In fact, Virgin Galactic announced a reverse stock split this week in a bid to maintain its listing on the New York Stock Exchange. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Unpacking North Korea's advancements in rocketry. Late last month, North Korea signaled it has made—or more accurately, is still trying to make—a pretty big leap in rocket technology. The isolated totalitarian state's official news agency said it tested a new type of satellite launcher on May 27 powered by petroleum fuel and cryogenic liquid oxygen propellant. This is a radical change in North Korea's rocket program, and it took astute outside observers by surprise. Previous North Korean rockets used hypergolic propellants, typically hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, or solid fuels, which are also well-suited for military ballistic missiles. Kerosene and liquid oxygen, on the other hand, aren't great propellants for missiles but are good for a pure space launcher.

Who's helping?... The May 27 launch failed shortly after liftoff, while the unnamed rocket was still in first stage flight over the Yellow Sea. But there is tangible and circumstantial evidence that Russia played a role in the launch. The details are still murky, but North Korean leader Kim Jong Un visited a Russian spaceport last September and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who suggested Russian help for the North's satellite launch program was on the agenda at the summit. South Korean defense officials said Russian experts visited North Korea in the run-up to the May 27 launch. If Russia exported a kerosene-fueled rocket engine, or perhaps an entire booster, to North Korea, it wouldn't be the first time Russia has shipped launch technology to the Korean Peninsula. Russia provided South Korea's nascent space launch program with three fully outfitted rocket boosters for test flights in 2009, 2010, and 2023 before the South developed a fully domestic rocket on its own.

ABL signs deal with a new launch customer. ABL Space Systems, which is still trying to get its light launcher into orbit, has a new customer. Scout Space announced this week it has signed a launch agreement with ABL for the launch of a small spacecraft called "Owlet-01" on the third flight of ABL's RS1 rocket, Space News reports. Scout Space, which describes itself as focused on space security and comprehensive space domain awareness, develops optical sensors to monitor the space environment. Owlet-01 will fly a telescope designed to detect other objects in space, a capability highly sought by the US military.

Still waiting on Flight 2 ... The launch agreement between ABL and Space Scout is contingent on the outcome of the second flight of the RS1 rocket, which ABL has been preparing for the last few months. ABL hasn't provided any public updates on the status of the second RS1 test flight since announcing in March that pre-flight preparations were underway at Kodiak Island, Alaska. The first RS1 rocket fell back on its launch pad in Alaska a few seconds after lifting off in January 2023. The RS1 is capable of hauling a payload of more than 1.3 metric tons to low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

UK launch company to expand footprint in Denmark. Innovation Fund Denmark, backed by the Danish government, has awarded the British launch company Orbex roughly $3.4 million to establish a facility in Copenhagen to design, produce, and test green propulsion systems for its rockets, European Spaceflight reports. Orbex's Prime rocket, designed to loft up to 180 kilograms of payload into low-Earth orbit, will use a "green" fuel called BioLPG, which the company says is "a clean-burning propane produced from renewable feedstocks such as plant and vegetable waste material."

Stealth mode or stalled development? ... An infusion of $3.4 million is a small step forward for Orbex, but there's little evidence of any significant recent progress in getting the Prime rocket to the launch pad. The company has undergone a shakeup among its senior executives since its founder and CEO stepped down in April 2023, and progress on its launch facility in Scotland appears to be slow. A year after Orbex announced construction began, there's been no meaningful work on the launch pad itself. The company was founded in 2015 but hasn't announced any recent milestones in the development of Prime since it stacked a full-scale mock-up of the rocket in 2022. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

A new player in solid-fueled missiles. The US Navy has awarded a $19 million contract to Anduril Industries for the development of a 21-inch solid rocket motor for the second stage of the Standard Missile 6, a ship-based surface-to-air weapon to intercept aircraft and ballistic missiles, Space News reports. Founded in 2017 with an eye toward disrupting the entrenched military industrial base, Anduril is seeking to become the third supplier of solid rocket motors to the Defense Department alongside Northrop Grumman and L3Harris. The military, meanwhile, is eager for more domestic sources of munitions, such as missile motors, to ramp up production amid wars in Ukraine, the Middle East, and a potential future conflict with China.

Industrial expansion ... Anduril is expanding its solid rocket motor production facility in southern Mississippi to scale up production capacity from 600 to more than 6,000 tactical-scale solid rocket motors per year. The company says it can also produce larger solid rocket motors, up to 42 inches in diameter, that could have applications for larger ballistic missiles or space launch vehicles. (submitted by EllPeaTea)

Stoke fires up its first booster engine. On Tuesday, Stoke Space announced the firing of its first stage rocket engine for the first time earlier this month, briefly igniting it for about two seconds. The company declared the June 5 test a success because the engine performed nominally and will be fired up again soon, Ars reports. "Data point one is that the engine is still there," said Andy Lapsa, chief executive of the Washington-based launch company. The test took place at Stoke's facilities in Moses Lake, Washington, and marks the beginning of a hot-fire campaign to qualify the methane-fueled engine for flight on the company's Nova rocket, scheduled to fly for the first time from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2026.

The "easy" part ... Stoke is developing the Nova rocket to be fully reusable, with its booster stage and upper stage designed for vertical landings back on Earth once their missions are complete. The company first took a bite at testing the novel design of its upper stage, which has an engine composed of 30 thrusters arranged in a ring to control its ascent into space and descent back to Earth. Last September, Stoke successfully performed a "hop test" to verify the design works. Lapsa's team focused on the upper stage first because the design was so radical, compared to any other existing rocket. Now, Stoke is proceeding with development of a more conventional booster engine for the first stage of Nova. But this engine is complex, too. It's a full-flow, staged combustion power plant capable of generating 100,000 pounds of thrust. Seven of these engines will power Nova's first stage. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Ariane 6's first payloads encapsulated for flight. Ground crews in French Guiana have closed the payload fairing for the first Ariane 6 rocket around a batch of small satellites and reentry vehicles that will hitch a ride to space on the maiden flight of the new European launcher. The European Space Agency released photos of the event, known as encapsulation. It's one of several major milestones leading up to the first launch of Ariane 6, which is set for July 9. This will be purely a test flight for Ariane 6, which is Europe's next-generation launch vehicle. But ESA made room available for nine small satellites and two commercial reentry vehicles to be deployed from Ariane 6's upper stage in space.

Next steps ... With the payload fairing now surrounding the Ariane 6's first passengers, teams at the Guiana Space Center in South America will transfer the entire unit from a payload processing facility to the launch pad, where the booster and its strap-on solid rocket boosters are already stacked for liftoff. The payload fairing will be hoisted atop the Ariane 6 ahead of a countdown dress rehearsal Tuesday, June 18. If that goes well, officials don't expect any showstoppers for the July 9 launch date.

Here's what NASA wants to see next from Starship. NASA officials were pleased with the outcome of SpaceX's Starship test flight on June 6. For the first time, the Starship spacecraft survived reentry to reach a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, raising hopes that SpaceX can soon check off other important milestones, such as an in-space restart of a Raptor engine and refueling demonstrations that are critical for NASA's Artemis program. SpaceX will need to master this still-untested capability many times in order to send Starship to the Moon as a lunar lander for astronauts, beginning with the Artemis III mission, officially slated for September 2026, Ars reports.

Nine months to get it done … Before SpaceX can make in-space refueling reliable and repeatable, engineers must first demonstrate it can be done at all. This will be the objective of a critical cryogenic transfer demonstration between two Starships in low-Earth orbit. NASA is closely tracking SpaceX's progress toward this milestone, which a senior agency official said is currently on schedule for early 2025. There's still a lot for SpaceX to do after this milestone to make a Starship lunar landing possible, including construction of multiple launch pads in Texas and Florida, development and testing of life support systems, and a ramp-up in production of Starships and Super Heavy boosters. SpaceX must also complete an uncrewed landing demonstration with Starship on the Moon before NASA entrusts it to carry astronauts to and from the lunar surface. For NASA and SpaceX to have even a fighting chance for a crew landing in September 2026, they need to successfully accomplish the ship-to-ship refueling demonstration in the next nine months or so.

SpaceX wants to show NASA what Starship can do on Mars. NASA announced on June 7 that it will award contracts to seven companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to study how to transport rock samples from Mars more cheaply back to Earth, Ars reports. The space agency put out a call to industry in April to propose ideas on how to return the Mars rocks to Earth for less than $11 billion and before 2040, which is the cost and schedule for NASA's existing plan for Mars Sample Return (MSR). NASA officials will use the study results from the seven commercial vendors, along with studies from three scientific institutions, to develop a new strategy for how to get Mars samples back to Earth.

Nine months to get it done … SpaceX will complete a study titled "Enabling Mars Sample Return with Starship" for NASA. SpaceX is already designing the privately funded Starship rocket with Mars missions in mind, and Elon Musk, the company's founder, has predicted Starship will land on Mars by the end of the decade. Musk has famously missed schedule predictions before with Starship, and a landing on the red planet before the end of the 2020s still seems unlikely. However, the giant rocket could enable delivery to Mars and the eventual return of dozens of tons of cargo. Blue Origin's study will look at applying its own rocket and spacecraft technology, such as the New Glenn launcher and Blue Moon lander, for Mars Sample Return.

Next three launches

June 14: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-2 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 20:35 UTC

June 17: Falcon 9 | Astra 1P | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21:35 UTC

June 18: Electron | No Time Toulouse | Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand | 18:13 UTC