Enlarge / Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket on the launch pad for testing earlier this year. (credit: Blue Origin)

After years of lobbying, protests, and bidding, Jeff Bezos's space company is now a military launch contractor.

The US Space Force announced Thursday that Blue Origin will compete with United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for at least 30 military launch contracts over the next five years. These launch contracts have a combined value of up to $5.6 billion.

This is the first of two major contract decisions the Space Force will make this year as the military seeks to foster more competition among its roster of launch providers and reduce its reliance on just one or two companies.

Enlarge / The payload fairing for the first test flight of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket has been positioned around the small batch of satellites that will ride it into orbit. (credit: ESA/M. Pédoussaut)

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.

Enlarge / In this pool photo distributed by Sputnik agency, Russia's President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un visit the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur region in 2023. An RD-191 engine is visible in the background. (credit: Vladimir Smirnov/Pool/AFP/Getty Images)

Russian President Vladimir Putin will reportedly visit North Korea later this month, and you can bet collaboration on missiles and space programs will be on the agenda.

The bilateral summit in Pyongyang will follow a mysterious North Korean rocket launch on May 27, which ended in a fireball over the Yellow Sea. The fact that this launch fell short of orbit is not unusual—two of the country's three previous satellite launch attempts failed. But North Korea's official state news agency dropped some big news in the last paragraph of its report on the May 27 launch.

The Korean Central News Agency called the launch vehicle a "new-type satellite carrier rocket" and attributed the likely cause of the failure to "the reliability of operation of the newly developed liquid oxygen + petroleum engine" on the first stage booster. A small North Korean military spy satellite was destroyed. The fiery demise of the North Korean rocket was captured in a video recorded by the Japanese news broadcaster NHK.

Enlarge / An artist's concept of a Mars Ascent Vehicle orbiting the red planet. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

NASA announced Friday 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.

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, the cost and schedule for NASA's existing plan for Mars Sample Return (MSR). A NASA spokesperson told Ars the agency received 48 responses to the solicitation and selected seven companies to conduct more detailed studies.

Each company will receive up to $1.5 million for their 90-day studies. Five of the companies chosen by NASA are among the agency's roster of large contractors, and their inclusion in the study contracts is no surprise. Two other winners are smaller businesses.

Enlarge / Not a simulation. Plasma pours over the aerosurfaces of SpaceX's Starship during reentry high over the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX demonstrated Thursday that its towering Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket might one day soon be recovered and reused in the manner Elon Musk has envisioned for the future of space exploration.

For the first time, both elements of the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) rocket not only launched successfully from SpaceX's Starbase facility near Brownsville, Texas, but also came back to Earth for controlled splashdowns at sea. This demonstration is a forerunner to future Starship test flights that will bring the booster, and eventually the upper stage, back to land for reuse again and again.

The two-stage rocket took off from Starbase at 7:50 am CDT (12:50 UTC) and headed east over the Gulf of Mexico with more than 15 million pounds of thrust, roughly twice the power of NASA's Saturn V rocket from the Apollo lunar program of the 1960s and 1970s.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner capsule lifts off aboard United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

After years of delays, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft finally rocketed into orbit from Florida on Wednesday, sending two veteran NASA astronauts on a long-delayed shakedown cruise to the International Space Station.

The Starliner capsule lifted off at 10:52 am EDT (14:52 UTC) on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Fifteen minutes later, after shedding two strap-on boosters and a core stage powered by a Russian RD-180 engine, the Atlas V's Centaur upper stage released Starliner right on target to begin a nearly 26-hour pursuit of the space station. Docking at the space station is set for 12:15 pm EDT (16:15 UTC) Thursday, where NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will spend at least a week before coming back to Earth.

In remarks shortly after Wednesday's launch, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Wilmore and Williams, both former US Navy pilots, will "test this thing from izzard to gizzard" to ensure Boeing's Starliner is ready for operational six-month crew rotation missions to the ISS.

Enlarge / Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, wearing their Boeing spacesuits, leave NASA's crew quarters during a launch attempt May 6. (credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett)

Fresh off repairs at the launch pad in Florida, United Launch Alliance engineers restarted the countdown overnight for the third attempt to send an Atlas V rocket and Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on a test flight to the International Space Station.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were expected to awake early Wednesday, put on their blue pressure suits, and head to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to board the Starliner capsule on top of the 172-foot-tall Atlas V rocket.

Once more through the door

Wilmore and Williams have done this twice before in hopes of launching into space on the first crew flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. A faulty valve on the Atlas V rocket prevented liftoff May 6, then engineers discovered a helium leak on the Starliner capsule itself. After several weeks of troubleshooting, NASA and Boeing officials decided to proceed with another launch attempt Saturday.

Enlarge / The rocket for SpaceX's fourth full-scale Starship test flight awaits liftoff from Starbase, the company's private launch base in South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

The Federal Aviation Administration approved the commercial launch license for the fourth test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket Tuesday, with liftoff from South Texas targeted for just after sunrise Thursday.

"The FAA has approved a license authorization for SpaceX Starship Flight 4," the agency said in a statement. "SpaceX met all safety and other licensing requirements for this test flight."

Shortly after the FAA announced the launch license, SpaceX confirmed plans to launch the fourth test flight of the world's largest rocket at 7:00 am CDT (12:00 UTC) Thursday. The launch window runs for two hours.

Enlarge / NASA commander Butch Wilmore exits the Starliner spacecraft Saturday following the scrubbed launch attempt.

A computer controlling the Atlas V rocket's countdown triggered an automatic hold less than four minutes prior to liftoff of Boeing's commercial Starliner spacecraft Saturday, keeping the crew test flight on the ground at least a few more days.

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams were already aboard the spacecraft when the countdown stopped due to a problem with a ground computer. "Hold. Hold. Hold," a member of Atlas V launch team called out on an audio feed.

With the hold, the mission missed an instantaneous launch opportunity at 12:25 pm EDT (16:25 UTC), and later Saturday, NASA announced teams will forego a launch opportunity Sunday. The next chance to send Starliner into orbit will be 10:52 am EDT (14:52 UTC) Wednesday. The mission has one launch opportunity every one-to-two days, when the International Space Station's orbital track moves back into proper alignment with the Atlas V rocket's launch pad in Florida.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft sits on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

NASA and Boeing officials are ready for a second attempt to launch the first crew test flight on the Starliner spacecraft Saturday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

Liftoff of Boeing's Starliner, capsuled atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, is set for 12:25 pm EDT (16:25 UTC). NASA commander Butch Wilmore and pilot Suni Williams, both veteran astronauts, will take the Starliner spacecraft on its first trip into low-Earth orbit with a crew on board.

You can watch NASA TV's live coverage of the countdown and launch below.

Enlarge / A sea-borne variant of the commercial Ceres 1 rocket lifts off near the coast of Rizhao, a city of 3 million in China's Shandong province. (credit: VCG via Getty Images)

Welcome to Edition 6.46 of the Rocket Report! It looks like we will be covering the crew test flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft and the fourth test flight of SpaceX's giant Starship rocket over the next week. All of this is happening as SpaceX keeps up its cadence of flying multiple Starlink missions per week. The real stars are the Ars copy editors helping make sure our stories don't use the wrong names.

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.

Another North Korean launch failure. North Korea's latest attempt to launch a rocket with a military reconnaissance satellite ended in failure due to the midair explosion of the rocket during the first-stage flight this week, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reports. Video captured by the Japanese news organization NHK appears to show the North Korean rocket disappearing in a fireball shortly after liftoff Monday night from a launch pad on the country's northwest coast. North Korean officials acknowledged the launch failure and said the rocket was carrying a small reconnaissance satellite named Malligyong-1-1.

Enlarge / A rendering of the European cargo reentry vehicle proposed by Thales Alenia Space. (credit: Thales Alecia Space)

The European Space Agency has awarded initial contracts to a German-based startup and one of the continent's established aerospace companies to develop spacecraft to ferry cargo to and from space stations in low-Earth orbit.

ESA announced the two 25 million euro ($27 million) contracts May 22. The Exploration Company, co-located in France and Germany, and Thales Alenia Space of Italy beat out four other companies in the competition for ESA funding through the LEO Cargo Return Service program.

These contracts will run for two years, until June 2026. In this first phase of the program, The Exploration Company and Thales Alenia Space will refine their concepts, mature technologies, and focus on requirements for their cargo vehicles. ESA plans to award contracts for the second phase of the LEO Cargo Return Service program in 2026, eyeing a round-trip demonstration flight to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2028.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft atop its Atlas V rocket on the launch pad earlier this month. (credit: NASA/Joel Kowsky)

Senior managers from NASA and Boeing told reporters on Friday that they plan to launch the first crew test flight of the Starliner spacecraft as soon as June 1, following several weeks of detailed analysis of a helium leak and a "design vulnerability" with the ship's propulsion system.

Extensive data reviews over the last two-and-a-half weeks settled on a likely cause of the leak, which officials described as small and stable. During these reviews, engineers also built confidence that even if the leak worsened, it would not add any unacceptable risk for the Starliner test flight to the International Space Station, officials said.

But engineers also found that an unlikely mix of technical failures in Starliner's propulsion system—representing 0.77 percent of all possible failure modes, according to Boeing's program manager—could prevent the spacecraft from conducting a deorbit burn at the end of the mission.

Enlarge / A Russian Soyuz rocket climbs away from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on May 16.

The launch of a classified Russian military satellite last week deployed a payload that US government officials say is likely a space weapon.

In a series of statements, US officials said the new military satellite, named Kosmos 2576, appears to be similar to two previous "inspector" spacecraft launched by Russia in 2019 and 2022.

"Just last week, on May 16, Russia launched a satellite into low-Earth orbit that the United States assesses is likely a counter-space weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low-Earth orbit," said Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the United Nations. "Russia deployed this new counter-space weapon into the same orbit as a US government satellite."