Rocket Report: Tough times for Astra and Virgin; SpaceX upgrading launch pad

Welcome to Edition 6.19 of the Rocket Report! While we wait for SpaceX to launch the second full-scale test flight of Starship, a lot of the news this week involved companies with much smaller rockets. Astra is struggling to find enough funding to remain in business, and Virgin Galactic says it will fly its suborbital Unity spaceplane for the last time next year to focus on construction of new Delta-class ships that should be easier to turn around between flights. It's a tough time to raise money, and more space companies will face difficult decisions to stay alive in the months ahead.

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 plans "pause" in flight operations. Virgin Galactic will reduce the frequency of flights of its current suborbital vehicle and stop them entirely by mid-2024 as it concentrates resources on the next generation of vehicles, Space News reports. This was unexpected news for anyone outside of the company. As Ars has previously reported, Virgin Galactic has ramped up the flight rate for its VSS Unity suborbital spaceplane to about one mission per month, a rather impressive cadence, especially when Blue Origin, the other player in the suborbital human spaceflight market, has not flown any people to space in more than a year.

Changing priorities and layoffs ... Although Virgin's Unity suborbital vehicle has been a technical success, the company reported just $1.7 million in revenue in the third quarter of this year and a net loss of $105 million over the same period. Each Unity flight has carried three paying customers, along with three Virgin Galactic crew members. Virgin Galactic needs a new spacecraft design to ferry more people to the edge of space at an even more rapid cadence, so the company will only fly Unity two or three more times before grounding the spaceplane and moving workers from Unity's home base in New Mexico to work on new Delta-class suborbital ships under construction near Phoenix. The new Delta-class vehicles will begin test flights in 2025 and can fly twice per week, with six customers, instead of the three or four passengers Unity is able to carry. Virgin Galactic also announced this week it has laid off 185 employees, or 18 percent of its workforce. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Astra may go private. The founders of struggling space company Astra have offered to take the company private at a value of about $30 million, CNBC reports. Chris Kemp, chairman and CEO, and Adam London, chief technology officer, delivered a proposal to the Astra board of directors Wednesday to acquire all the company’s outstanding stock at $1.50 a share. This development caps a rocky week for Astra, which defaulted on a loan as its cash reserve dropped below $10.5 million. On Monday, Astra raised financing from a pair of investors to pay off that outstanding debt.

Astra's $2.6 billion valuation seems like ancient history ... It was less than three years ago that Astra, which operated as a privately held company for the first few years of its existence, went public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). At that time, Astra had a valuation of $2.6 billion, with plans to develop a small satellite launcher that could fly cheaper and faster than pretty much any other rocket ever built. That didn't happen, and Astra abandoned its Rocket 3 launch vehicle after a series of failures. This year, Astra hoped to move forward with a new rocket called Rocket 4, but the company's dwindling cash reserve forced officials to lay off 25 percent of its workforce and shift focus on producing electric thrusters for small satellites, a business that has real customers. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Avio and Arianespace will go their separate ways. Earlier this week, European governments agreed to a proposal from Avio, the Italian company that builds the Vega rocket, to start selling launch services on its own. Since the rocket's inception more than a decade ago, the French launch services company, Arianespace, has been responsible for selling Vega launches on the commercial market. Now, Avio and Arianespace need to work out how to go through with the divorce, European Spaceflight reports. One of the topics up for negotiation is how to handle the 17 Vega flights currently in Arianespace's backlog.

Securing the future of Vega ... Avio expects to reach an agreement to manage all 17 flights in the Vega backlog. Avio's request to take over the responsibility for Vega sales was backed by the Italian government, which is eager to carve out a larger role for the country's space companies in the broader landscape of the European space industry. Italy's government is providing more than 300 million euros for Avio to develop a new methane-fueled engine and a test vehicle for a partially reusable rocket. Avio is also working on a new version of the Vega rocket, called the Vega-E, with a methane-fueled upper stage engine to replace the Ukrainian engine currently flown on Vega. A recent agreement will allow Avio to launch the Vega-E from the old Ariane 5 launch pad in French Guiana. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Rocket Lab reveals likely cause of launch failure. Rocket Lab announced Wednesday that engineers have determined the failure of the company's most recent Electron rocket flight in September was likely caused by an unexpected electrical arc occurring within the upper stage's power supply system. This arc shorted the battery packs that provided power to the upper stage, which could not fire its engine and deploy a radar imaging satellite for Capella Space. This was the fourth Electron launch failure in 41 flights. Rocket Lab is scheduled to resume Electron launches no earlier than November 28 with a small Japanese Earth observation satellite.

A "highly complex set of conditions" ... In Wednesday's update, Rocket Lab detailed how the electrical arc was only possible through the "rare interaction of multiple conditions" encountered on the September launch. "These factors combined, including electricity in the presence of both helium and nitrogen, while under a partial pressure environment, unrestrained by a fault in the high voltage loom, and exacerbated by an alternating current, aligned at a point on the Paschen curve that allows an electrical arc to form and travel," Rocket Lab said. Engineers went through exhaustive tests to determine the "evasive" cause of the launch failure, said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab's founder and CEO. The company is implementing two corrective measures to improve testing on the ground and eliminate the possibility of similar electrical arcs occurring in flight. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Rocket Factory Augsburg gets a public funding boost. The UK Space Agency is providing more than 4 million euros in funding to the German launch company Rocket Factory Augsburg, officials announced this week. This money will help Rocket Factory Augsburg (RFA) develop and operate launch infrastructure at the SaxaVord Spaceport in the Shetland Islands of northern Scotland. This funding comes from the European Space Agency's Boost! program. RFA plans to launch its RFA One rocket from Scotland next year, bringing about 90 skilled jobs to the Shetland Islands when the spaceport reaches full operational capability.

OK, but when will it be ready to fly? ... 4 million euros is a relatively small sum for a rocket company, but RFA is primarily backed by private investment. This also isn't the only funding RFA has received from ESA and other space agencies. An orbital transfer vehicle being developed by RFA is getting a boost with more than 3.5 million euros from ESA. RFA won a micro-launcher competition managed by DLR, the German space agency, last year, receiving 11 million euros in a contract that allows Germany to place a payload on one of the first two flights of the RFA One rocket. The French space agency CNES has also agreed to allow RFA to launch its rocket from a disused launch pad at the Guiana Space Center in South America. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

European governments agree to more Ariane 6 subsidies. European Space Agency member states agreed Monday to increase subsidies flowing to ArianeGroup, the developer of the Ariane 6 rocket, Ars reports. European governments will provide up to 340 million euros to ArianeGroup to subsidize the construction and launch of 27 Ariane 6 rockets that will fly in 2027, 2028, and 2029. That's up from the 140 million euro annual subsidy since 2021. Some of these rockets will presumably launch Amazon's Internet satellites, along with payloads for other commercial customers, ESA, and the European Union. While ESA is funding most of the Ariane 6's development costs, the new rocket was supposed to be commercially viable without requiring government financial support once operational. But that isn't the way the program is going after delays, inflation, and competitive pressures from other launch companies, namely SpaceX.

A new way of buying rockets in Europe ... At the same time ESA member states increased Ariane 6 subsidies, government officials agreed to start a competition among European rocket companies to develop new launch vehicles on a commercial basis, rather than the top-down, government-driven approach used on Ariane 6 and Europe's previous rockets. The agreement means the new Ariane 6 rocket, which is running four years late and still hasn't flown, should be the last launch vehicle developed by ESA. Europe's old way of developing rockets just isn't working anymore. Now, rather than being a rocket developer, ESA will move to a "competition model, where we buy a service as an anchor customer," Aschbacher said. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

The busiest launch pad in the world will now host crew missions. SpaceX this week installed a crew access arm to a new tower at Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, Spaceflight Now reports. SpaceX is racing to complete the new launch tower and crew access arm in time for the company's next astronaut mission, the commercial Ax-3 flight for Axiom Space, scheduled for liftoff in January. All of SpaceX's previous crew missions have launched from Launch Complex 39A, a few miles north of SLC-40. SpaceX is adding launch capability for crew and space station cargo missions to SLC-40 to ensure there's another pad capable of launching crews and supplies to the International Space Station, especially as the company plans to fly its giant new Starship rocket from Pad 39A.

A relief valve for 39A ... Adding crew and cargo launch capability to SLC-40 also helps relieve schedule pressures for missions that need to take off from historic LC-39A, which is also the only launch pad designed to support flights of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket. Crew missions and Falcon Heavy launches often tie up operations at LC-39A for several weeks at a time, limiting SpaceX's flexibility to launch other missions from that pad, such as Starlink satellites or Falcon 9 rockets for other customers. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

SpaceX will launch European navigation satellites next year. The European Union plans to launch four Galileo navigation satellites on a pair of SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets in April and July, Reuters reports. Thierry Breton, the EU's internal market commissioner, said the union has signed a "provisional contract" with SpaceX valued at 180 million euros ($192 million) to cover both launches next year. This is a bitter pill for European officials to swallow because the EU prides itself on its independent access to space, but the new European Ariane 6 rocket has now been delayed four years, and the Ariane 5 rocket has retired.

Outsourcing and exporting ... The provisional contract to launch the Galileo satellites on SpaceX rockets is pending an EU security review. This will be the first time Galileo satellites, which are used for both civilian and military purposes, have been exported outside of European territory. This continues a trend of European space missions that have launched on SpaceX rockets as Europe waits for the Ariane 6 to enter service. Earlier this year, ESA launched its Euclid space telescope on a Falcon 9 rocket, and next year, an ESA Earth observation satellite and an ESA asteroid probe will launch on Falcon 9 rockets. With the EU's agreement to launch Galileo satellites from US soil, you can now add two more Falcon 9 launches to this list. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

If Starship makes it through staging, you can call that a win. SpaceX will have answers to some burning questions in the first three minutes of the next Starship test flight, Ars reports. Did the upgrades to the Starship launch pad in Texas hold up to the rocket's powerful thrust? Are the rocket's Raptor engines more reliable than on the first Starship test flight in April? And did the rocket's Super Heavy booster safely separate from Starship's upper stage? The answers to these questions will show how quickly SpaceX can move forward with everything else it wants to do with Starship.

There's a lot to do with Starship ... These next steps include launching Starlink Internet satellites, which will expedite the network's ability to directly connect with consumer cell phones. SpaceX needs to test in-orbit refueling for Starship flights to the Moon for NASA, and engineers want to demonstrate recovering Starship's giant booster and upper stage, necessary steps to make the rocket fully reusable. But first, the rocket needs to make it into space. The program is still very much in an experimental phase. Engineers are continually iterating on the design, finding problems, then fixing and testing them. So the second full-scale Starship test launch is, first and foremost, a learning exercise. But let's face it—some outcomes are better than others.

The military's X-37B spaceplane needs a bigger rocket. The US military's reusable X-37B spaceplane will launch on the next flight of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket, scheduled for December 7, Ars reports. This was unexpected because the spaceplane's six previous missions launched on medium-lift Atlas V or Falcon 9 rockets. This next mission, the seventh by an X-37B spaceplane, will fly on a heavy-lift launcher for the first time. The Pentagon wants everyone to know the X-37B spaceplane exists, but military officials are mum about the details of the vehicle's missions. The Space Force's statement Wednesday was similarly vague on details of the upcoming flight.

Going higher?… Objectives of the next X-37B mission include "operating the reusable spaceplane in new orbital regimes, experimenting with future space domain awareness technologies, and investigating the radiation effects on materials provided by NASA," the Space Force said. Officials also said the next X-37B will "expand the envelope" of the spaceplane's capabilities. The military's talk of expanding the envelope and operating in new orbital regimes seems to suggest the next X-37B mission will fly in a higher orbit than its predecessors. That makes sense with the spaceplane launching on top of a Falcon Heavy rocket, with significantly more lift capability than the Falcon 9 or Atlas V used to launch the previous X-37B missions. We'll see if this is true as the launch date gets closer. (submitted by Ken the Bin and EllPeaTea)

Next three launches

November 11: Falcon 9 | Transporter 9 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 18:49 UTC

November 12: Falcon 9 | O3b mPPOWER 5 & 6 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 21:08 UTC

Mid-November: Starship | Second Flight Test | Starbase, Texas | 14:00 UTC