Rocket Report: FAA eyes more Starbase traffic; India's Skyroot snares US customer

The pioneering reusable upper stage for Stoke Space’s Nova rocket ships out for testing. The upper stage for Stoke Space's Nova rocket at the company's test facility in Moses Lake, Washington. Credit: Stoke Space Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I’m most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it’s set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest. 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. Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot’s Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U. Shining a light … Reflect Orbital plans to launch its first satellite on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare next year. The company’s business model involves flying a constellation of some 50,000 mirrors in orbit to beam sunlight to the ground for power generation and illumination. The FCC approved Reflect’s first in-space mirror satellite earlier this year. The company’s selection of India’s Skyroot also shines a light on what satellite operators fear is a coming under-supply of launch capacity in the United States as SpaceX phases out its Falcon 9 rocket in favor of the much larger, but relatively unproven, Starship. LEAP targets smallsat launch market. A Colorado rocket startup named LEAP is aiming to enter the market for dedicated small-satellite launches in 2028 as growing demand for access to orbit creates new opportunities for smaller rockets, Space News reports. LEAP’s Bighorn rocket is designed for an initial payload capacity of 320 pounds (145 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit, with a first orbital launch slated for 2028. Bighorn is sized for dedicated launch services, with a single-engine booster stage and a kick stage named Cottontail for orbit insertion. Rockets of mass production … LEAP says its Bighorn rocket is engineered for mass production. The company’s new factory, located in a Denver suburb, will support initial production of six Bighorn vehicles per year, with capacity to scale to two per month. “We know how to build remarkable vehicles. The challenge is building enough of them fast enough,” said Chris Beckman, CEO of LEAP, in a statement last month announcing the company’s new headquarters. LEAP launched a smaller suborbital rocket, named Bullfrog, for the first time in May, reaching an altitude of approximately 130,000 feet (40 kilometers). Keep up with the latest in space exploration and rocket launches. Sign Me Up! Neutron debut delayed. Rocket Lab announced Wednesday that its Neutron launch vehicle won’t fly until 2027, citing an issue discovered during manufacturing of the rocket’s carbon composite structures, Ars reports. The announcement was public confirmation of what nearly everyone inside Rocket Lab and the wider space industry already knew. The most recent official update from Rocket Lab in August suggested the company still held hope of delivering the first Neutron rocket to its launch pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, before the end of this year, a schedule that would have almost certainly pushed the first flight into 2027. Altered carbon … Rocket Lab’s statement Wednesday about Neutron’s schedule suggests the company is still struggling with manufacturing the rocket’s large booster stage. Neutron’s reusable first stage is made of carbon composite structures, which offer low weight, high strength, and corrosion resistance. But carbon composites in aerospace are generally harder to manufacture than metallic structures. That latest problem discovered in Rocket Lab’s factory involves small air pockets, or voids, amid carbon fiber layers making up the forward dome of Neutron’s first stage propellant tank. (submitted by zapman987) Stoke ships second stage for testing. The reusable upper stage for Stoke Space’s Nova rocket has left the company’s factory in Kent, Washington, for what would be the last time, Stoke wrote on X this week. Now at Stoke’s test facility in Moses Lake, the second stage will undergo cryo-proof testing and a hotfire campaign with its Andromeda engine. The milestone follows the completion of “proto-qualification” testing on Nova’s first stage earlier this year. Nova’s booster section is a rather conventional reusable first stage, but the upper stage is what sets the rocket apart. Stoke designed Nova for full reusability, with the upper stage protected by a regeneratively cooled heat shield and powered by a ring of 24 thrusters, an engine collectively named Andromeda. Next stop, Cape Canaveral … The upcoming tests at Moses Lake will be a linchpin for Stoke’s ambition to launch the Nova rocket next year. If all goes according to plan, Stoke will ship the reusable rocket stage to Cape Canaveral, Florida, where it will meet the other elements of the rocket for final launch preparations. The medium-lift Nova is the only fully reusable Western rocket other than SpaceX’s Starship in an advanced stage of development. Falcon 9 launches US military data transport satellites. A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried the Space Development Agency’s fourth plane of Tranche 1 Transport Layer satellites to low-Earth orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, on Saturday, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The launch continues the deployment of the SDA’s network of data relay satellites to support space-based missile warning and tracking and tactical communications and targeting. The SDA has contracts with multiple companies to build the network’s data relay and missile-tracking satellites. This was the first launch of a batch of satellites from Northrop Grumman. Overcoming an abort … That mission was originally slated to launch October 5, but the Falcon 9’s automated systems halted the initial countdown just before liftoff. The launch was then pushed off two more times as SpaceX conducted extra safety checks on the vehicle and worked with the US Space Force to deconflict with other mission deployments. SpaceX completes 35th ISS cargo delivery. On Tuesday morning, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket roared away from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to begin a cargo run to the International Space Station, Spaceflight Now reports. The 35th Commercial Resupply Services (CRS-35) mission carried 6,322 pounds (2,868 kilograms) of science and supplies to the orbiting outpost, where it arrived Thursday with an automated docking of the Dragon capsule to the lab’s Harmony module. Bringing the goods … SpaceX’s latest resupply mission delivered two new roll-out solar arrays to augment the ISS power system. The other payloads will support more than 40 scientific investigations in orbit, including a materials science experiment testing a more flexible and durable type of glass in the environment of space. Dragon also brought up fresh food for the lab’s seven-person crew. Let us launch more, SpaceX asks FAA. Federal aviation regulators are reviewing a plan that could allow hundreds more Starship rocket launches and landings a year at SpaceX’s Starbase in South Texas, the San Antonio Express-News reports. The proposal calls for as many as 456 launches and 912 landings a year at the complex outside Brownsville, roughly 18 times the currently allowed 25 launches and 50 landings. Starship recovery coming soon … The giant rockets have an upper stage, named Starship, and a lower stage booster, called Super Heavy. Both sections are expected to eventually land at Starbase, hence twice the number of landings. SpaceX has successfully landed boosters back at Starbase, but it has not attempted the feat with a Starship. That could happen as soon as the next Starship test flight later this year, according to Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO. Ship 40 is back at Starbase. In other news at Starbase, SpaceX has returned the first Starship spacecraft to survive an ocean splashdown back to the South Texas launch site for inspection, Space.com reports. The rocket completed a trip halfway around the world in July before descending to a pinpoint splashdown in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. Surprisingly, the rocket survived splashdown without exploding or breaking apart, as SpaceX expects Starships to do after ocean landings. The company towed the rocket to calmer waters off Christmas Island, then loaded it onto a barge for the journey back to Texas. Vertical again … SpaceX teams lifted Starship upright after unloading it from its transport ship, moving it inside Starbase’s Megabay hangar alongside a trio of its successor spacecraft awaiting their opportunities to fly to space. Inspections of the flight-proven Starship will “provide first-of-its-kind data on a flown Starship heatshield, Raptor engines, avionics, and more,” SpaceX wrote in a post on X. Next three launches October 19: Falcon 9 | Bandwagon-5 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 10:30 UTC October 19: H3 | Martian Moons Exploration mission | Tanegashima Space Center, Japan | 19:41 UTC October 20: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-15 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 22:14 UTC Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet. 2 Comments