Rocket Report: ULA is losing engineers; SpaceX is launching every two days

Welcome to Edition 7.07 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX has not missed a beat since the Federal Aviation Administration gave the company a green light to resume Falcon 9 launches after a failure last month. In 19 days, SpaceX has launched 10 flights of the Falcon 9 rocket, taking advantage of all three of its Falcon 9 launch pads. This is a remarkable cadence in its own right, but even though it's a small sample size, it is especially impressive right out of the gate after the rocket's grounding.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. 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 quick turnaround for Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab launched its 52nd Electron rocket on August 11 from its private spaceport on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, Space News reports. The company's light-class Electron rocket deployed a small radar imaging satellite into a mid-inclination orbit for Capella Space. This was the shortest turnaround between two Rocket Lab missions from its primary launch base in New Zealand, coming less than nine days after an Electron rocket took off from the same pad with a radar imaging satellite for the Japanese company Synspective. Capella's Acadia 3 satellite was originally supposed to launch in July, but Capella requested a delay to perform more testing of its spacecraft. Rocket Lab swapped its place in the Electron launch sequence and launched the Synspective mission first.

Now, silence at the launch pad ... Rocket Lab hailed the swap as an example of the flexibility provided by Electron, as well as the ability to deliver payloads to specific orbits that are not feasible with rideshare missions, according to Space News. For this tailored launch service, Rocket Lab charges a premium launch price over the price of launching a small payload on a SpaceX rideshare mission. However, SpaceX's rideshare launches gobble up the lion's share of small satellites within Rocket Lab's addressable market. On Friday, a Falcon 9 rocket is slated to launch 116 small payloads into polar orbit. Rocket Lab, meanwhile, projects just one more launch before the end of September and expects to perform 15 to 18 Electron launches this year, a record for the company but well short of the 22 it forecasted earlier in the year. Rocket Lab says customer readiness is the reason it will be far short of projections.

Defense contractors teaming up on solid rockets. Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are joining forces to kickstart solid rocket motor production, announcing a strategic teaming agreement today that could see new motors roll off the line as early as 2025, Breaking Defense reports. The new agreement could position a third vendor to enter into the ailing solid rocket motor industrial base, which currently only includes L3Harris subsidiary Aerojet Rocketdyne and Northrop Grumman in the United States. Both companies have struggled to meet demands from weapons makers like Lockheed and RTX, which are in desperate need of solid rocket motors for products such as Javelin or the PAC-3 missiles used by the Patriot missile defense system.

Pressure from startups ... Demand for solid rocket motors has skyrocketed since Russia's invasion of Ukraine as the United States and its partners sought to backfill stocks of weapons like Javelin and Stinger, as well as provide motors to meet growing needs in the space domain. Although General Dynamics has kept its interest in the solid rocket motor market quiet until now, several defense tech startups, such as Ursa Major Technologies, Anduril, and X-Bow Systems, have announced plans to enter the market. (submitted by Ken the Bin)

Going polar with crew. SpaceX will fly the first human spaceflight over the Earth’s poles, possibly before the end of this year, Ars reports. The private Crew Dragon mission will be led by a Chinese-born cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Chun Wang, and he will be joined by a polar explorer, a roboticist, and a filmmaker whom he has befriended in recent years. The "Fram2" mission, named after the Norwegian research ship Fram, will launch into a polar corridor from SpaceX's launch facilities in Florida and fly directly over the north and south poles. The three- to five-day mission is being timed to fly over Antarctica near the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, to afford maximum lighting.

Wang's inclination is Wang's prerogative ... Wang told Ars he wanted to try something new, and flying a polar mission aligned with his interests in cold places on Earth. He's paying the way on a commercial basis, and SpaceX in recent years has demonstrated it can launch satellites into polar orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, something no one had done in more than 50 years. The highest-inclination flight ever by a human spacecraft was the Soviet Vostok 6 mission in 1963 when Valentina Tereshkova's spacecraft reached 65.1 degrees. Now, Fram2 will fly repeatedly and directly over the poles.

Russia's launch rate has plummeted. A Progress cargo supply spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan early on Thursday, local time. The mission was successful, and Russia has launched hundreds of these spacecraft before. So it wasn't all that big of a deal, except for one small detail: This was just Russia's ninth orbital launch of the year, Ars reports. At this pace, it appears that the country's space program is on pace for the fewest number of Russian or Soviet space launches in a year since 1961. That was when Yuri Gagarin went to space at the dawn of the human spaceflight era.

Thanks, Putin ... There are myriad reasons for this, including a decision by Western space powers to distance themselves from the Russian space corporation, Roscosmos, after the invasion of Ukraine. This has had disastrous effects on the Russian space program, but only recently have we gotten any insight into how deep those impacts have cut. In a recent interview with Russian state-owned media, Andrei Yelchaninov, the first deputy director of Roscosmos, said the contract cancellations by "unfriendly contacts"—a presumed reference to former US and European customers—has cost Russia's space program 180 billion rubles, or about $2.1 billion.

10 launches in 19 days. SpaceX suspended flights of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket for 15 days last month as engineers investigated why an upper stage failed to put a batch of Starlink Internet satellites into the correct orbit. Since resuming Falcon 9 launches on July 27, SpaceX's launch team has been working around the clock, flying 10 missions in 19 days at a pace matching the fastest launch cadence the company has ever achieved. Another launch is on tap for Friday. Seven of these flights have launched more batches of Starlink satellites, while the other three missions deployed a Cygnus supply ship en route to the International Space Station, two Norwegian communications satellites for Arctic coverage, and two commercial high-resolution Earth-imaging satellites for Maxar.

Stars aligning ... SpaceX has launched 80 flights with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket family so far this year. That comes out to an average of one launch every 2.9 days, so SpaceX's launch teams are used to firing off rockets at a high rate. But there are some limits to SpaceX's launch cadence. Those push points include the turnaround of SpaceX's three Falcon 9 launch pads—two in Florida and one in California—between flights, the production of brand-new second stages for each mission, and the availability of drone ships for offshore landings of reusable boosters. Three of the 10 Falcon 9 flights in the last three weeks employed mission profiles that allowed the booster to return to land on solid ground near the launch site, easing the strain on SpaceX's fleet of offshore landing platforms. This is one reason, perhaps along with stockpiled upper stages, that SpaceX was able to launch so many missions over the last 19 days.

Stoke Space wants to walk before running. Stoke Space has captured a lot of attention in the launch industry for its ambition to field a fully reusable rocket, with recoverable booster and upper stages, something no other company outside of SpaceX is seriously pursuing anywhere in the world. But for the initial flights of its Nova rocket, Stoke Space will take the same approach as SpaceX did with its Falcon 9 rocket—it will try to get to orbit first before experimenting with rocket landings and reuse, TechCrunch reports. A draft environmental assessment for Stoke's plans to launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, does not consider reusable operations at all, but only missions of the medium-class Nova rocket in a fully expendable configuration.

A familiar pattern ... This is exactly what SpaceX did with its Falcon 9 rocket, which didn't fly with landing legs until its ninth launch in 2014. SpaceX landed the first Falcon 9 booster intact in December 2015. In its draft environmental assessment report, Stoke is seeking authorization from the Space Force to conduct around two launches next year—the first year of operation—and then it anticipates a maximum launch cadence of 10 launches per year. According to TechCrunch, Stoke told regulators that Nova will be capable of carrying up to 7,000 kilograms to low-Earth orbit, the maximum payload capacity of the rocket when it will not be reused. (submitted by EllPeaTea and Ken the Bin)

Engineers are reportedly leaving ULA. With a record number of launches due next year, United Launch Alliance is losing key staff to competitors, including Blue Origin and SpaceX, Bloomberg reports. This year alone, ULA has lost about 45 of its 105 launch operations engineers—the people who test, assemble, and prepare every rocket and its cargo to fly—at its primary launch site in Florida, a source told Bloomberg. The lack of experienced personnel has postponed work for future missions, the person said. During preparations for two missions earlier this year, ULA had to fly in workers from other locations to help prepare rockets for liftoff.

Ramping up Vulcan ... Despite stiff competition from SpaceX, ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, has a relatively bright short- to medium-term future. ULA was once the only company certified to launch national security satellites for the US military. SpaceX is now winning nearly half of all available military launch contracts, but the Pentagon has booked ULA's new Vulcan rocket to launch the majority of its military space missions for the next few years. SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos's space company, are currently in a competition for rights to launch the next batch of military satellites from 2027 through 2032. Tory Bruno, ULA's CEO, says ULA is under pressure to ramp up operations with its Vulcan rocket (Vulcan's second test flight is scheduled for next month), but added he doesn't have concerns that the company is understaffed.

FAA postpones Starship hearings. The Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday it will postpone four in-person public meetings in South Texas and one virtual meeting to brief citizens and receive public comments on SpaceX's plans to launch and land up to 25 Starships annually from its Starbase facility at Boca Chica Beach. The FAA is in the process of reviewing SpaceX's proposal and issued a draft environmental assessment on the matter last month. It's unusual for the FAA to postpone such meetings, which are part of the government's standard process for granting environmental approvals. An agency spokesperson said the FAA is seeking additional information from SpaceX before rescheduling the public meetings, but he did not answer further questions from Ars on the nature of the information sought by the FAA.

Could this be the reason? … A few hours after the FAA announced the postponement of the public meetings, CNBC reported that SpaceX has violated environmental regulations by repeatedly releasing pollutants into or near bodies of water in Texas. CNBC cited a notice of violation issued by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) that focused on SpaceX’s water deluge system at its launch pad at Starbase. The Environmental Protection Agency also informed SpaceX that it violated the Clean Water Act with the same type of activity, according to CNBC. SpaceX called CNBC's report "factually inaccurate" in a statement published on X, adding that the launch pad's deluge system only uses "potable (drinking) water." SpaceX said the Texas environmental regulator and the EPA have allowed SpaceX to continue using the water system for Starship engine tests and launches if the company obtains a new permit from the TCEQ, which will cover SpaceX's plans to bring online a second launch pad with a new deluge system.

Next three launches

August 16: SSLV | EOS-08 | Satish Dhawan Space Center, India | 03:47 UTC

August 16: Long March 2D | Unknown Payload | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China | 07:35 UTC

August 16: Falcon 9 | Transporter 11 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 18:20 UTC