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)

Few people were happier with the successful outcome of last week's test flight of SpaceX's Starship launch system than a NASA engineer named Catherine Koerner.

In remarks after the spaceflight, Koerner praised the "incredible" video of the Starship rocket and its Super Heavy booster returning to Earth, with each making a soft landing. "That was very promising, and a very, very successful engineering test," she added, speaking at a meeting of the Space Studies Board.

A former flight director, Koerner now manages development of the "exploration systems" that will support the Artemis missions for NASA—a hugely influential position within the space agency. This includes the Space Launch System rocket, NASA's Orion spacecraft, spacesuits, and the Starship vehicle that will land on the Moon.

Enlarge / A drone camera captures the hotfire test of Stoke Space's full-flow staged combustion engine at the company's testing facility in early June. (credit: Stoke Space)

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.

"Data point one is that the engine is still there," said Andy Lapsa, chief executive of the Washington-based launch company, in an interview with Ars.

The test took place at the company's facilities in Moses Lake, Washington. Seven of these methane-fueled engines, each intended to have a thrust of 100,000 pounds of force, will power the company's Nova rocket. This launch vehicle will have a lift capacity of about 5 metric tons to orbit. Lapsa declined to declare a target launch date, but based on historical developmental programs, if Stoke continues to move fast, it could fly Nova for the first time in 2026.

Enlarge / Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity spacecraft launches on Saturday. (credit: Virgin Galactic)

On Saturday, the VSS Unity space plane made its final flight, carrying four passengers to an altitude of 54.4 miles (87.5 km) above the New Mexico desert. The spacecraft will now be retired after just seven commercial space flights, all made within the last year.

Although the flight was characterized by its chief executive Michael Colglazier as a "celebratory moment" for Virgin Galactic, the company now finds itself at a crossroads.

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. 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.

Launched in 2000, the Zvezda Service Module provides living quarters and performs some life-support system functions. (credit: NASA)

NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, still have not solved a long-running and worsening problem with leaks on the International Space Station.

The microscopic structural cracks are located inside the small PrK module on the Russian segment of the space station, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module. After the leak rate doubled early this year during a two-week period, the Russians experimented with keeping the hatch leading to the PrK module closed intermittently and performed other investigations. But none of these measures taken during the spring worked.

"Following leak troubleshooting activities in April of 2024, Roscosmos has elected to keep the hatch between Zvezda and Progress closed when it is not needed for cargo operations," a NASA spokesperson told Ars. "Roscosmos continues to limit operations in the area and, when required for use, implements measures to minimize the risk to the International Space Station."

Enlarge / The fourth full-scale test flight of SpaceX's Starship rocket took off from Starbase, the company's privately-owned spaceport near Brownsville, Texas.

Welcome to Edition 6.47 of the Rocket Report! The monumental news of late is that Boeing's Starliner spacecraft not only successfully launched on an Atlas V rocket, but then subsequently docked with the International Space Station. Congratulations to all involved. It's been a long road to get here.

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.

Firefly lands massive launch contract. Firefly Aerospace announced Wednesday that it has signed a multi-launch agreement with Lockheed Martin for 25 launches on Firefly’s Alpha rocket through the end of this decade. This agreement commits Lockheed Martin to 15 launch reservations and 10 optional launches. Alpha will launch Lockheed Martin spacecraft into low-Earth orbit from Firefly’s facilities on the West and East Coast. The first mission will launch on Alpha flight 6, from Firefly’s SLC-2 launch site at the Vandenberg Space Force Base later this year.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner spacecraft approaches the International Space Station on Thursday. (credit: NASA TV)

A little more than a day after launching into space, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft flew up to the International Space Station and docked with the orbiting laboratory on Thursday.

The journey through space was not always easy. In the immediate hours after launch on Wednesday, the spacecraft was beset by two helium leaks in its propulsion system. Then, on Thursday, several of Starliner's spacecraft thrusters went offline for a time. Far more often than originally planned, spacecraft commander Butch Wilmore had to take manual control of Starliner while engineers on the ground worked on these and other issues.

However, at 1:34 pm ET on Thursday, Wilmore and the mission's other crew member, Suni Williams, successfully docked with the space station. A couple of hours later, they floated through the hatch, making a triumphant entry onto the station—and making history.

Enlarge / Hubble Space Telescope above Earth, photographed during STS-125, Servicing Mission 4, May 2009. (credit: NASA)

The venerable Hubble Space Telescope is running out of gyroscopes, and when none are left, the instrument will cease to conduct meaningful science.

To preserve the telescope, which has been operating in space for nearly three and a half decades, NASA announced Tuesday that it will reduce the Hubble's operations such that it will function on just a single gyroscope. This will limit some scientific operations, and it will take longer to point the telescope to new objects and lock onto them.

But in a conference call with space reporters, Hubble officials stressed that the beloved scientific instrument is not going anywhere any time soon.

Enlarge / A Long March 5 rocket carrying the Chang'e 6 lunar probe blasts off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on May 3, 2024, in Wenchang, China. (credit: Li Zhenzhou/VCG via Getty Images)

China landed a spacecraft on the Moon this weekend for the fourth time, successfully placing its Chang’e 6 lander in the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the Moon.

After the landing on Saturday evening (United States time), the autonomous spacecraft will spend about 48 hours collecting samples. It will do so by two different means, drilling to collect material from beneath the ground, as well as using a robotic arm to gather regolith from the surface.

Then a part of the spacecraft is due to blast off from the surface of the Moon—likely on Monday evening, US time—before making a return flight to China. If successful, this would be the first time samples have been returned to Earth from the far side of the Moon.

Enlarge / AI weather models are arriving just in time for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Much like the invigorating passage of a strong cold front, major changes are afoot in the weather forecasting community. And the end game is nothing short of revolutionary: an entirely new way to forecast weather based on artificial intelligence that can run on a desktop computer.

Today's artificial intelligence systems require one resource more than any other to operate—data. For example, large language models such as ChatGPT voraciously consume data to improve answers to queries. The more and higher quality data, the better their training, and the sharper the results.

However, there is a finite limit to quality data, even on the Internet. These large language models have hoovered up so much data that they're being sued widely for copyright infringement. And as they're running out of data, the operators of these AI models are turning to ideas such as synthetic data to keep feeding the beast and produce ever more capable results for users.

Enlarge / Elon Musk speaks as Yusaku Maezawa, founder and president of Start Today Co., looks on at an event at the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, in 2018. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

On Friday night the dearMoon project—a plan to launch a Japanese billionaire and 10 other 'crew members' on a circumlunar flight aboard SpaceX's Starship vehicle—was abruptly canceled.

"It is unfortunate to be announcing that 'dearMoon', the first private circumlunar flight project, will be cancelled," the mission's official account on the social media site X said. "We thank everyone who has supported us and apologize to those who have looked forward to this project."

Shortly afterward the financial backer of the project and its 'crew leader,' Yusaku Maezawa, explained this decision on X. When Maezawa agreed to the mission in 2018, he said, the assumption was that the dearMoon mission would launch by the end of 2023.

Enlarge / Behold, the most distant galaxy found to date. (credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI et al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's June 1, and today's photo comes from the James Webb Space Telescope. It's a banger.

This telescope, launched 18 months ago now, had as one of its express goals to deliver insights about the early Universe. The most straightforward way of doing so is to collect the faintest, most distant light that has spent the longest time traveling to reach Earth.

Enlarge / A stack of 60 Starlink satellites launched in 2019. (credit: SpaceX / Flickr)

SpaceX began launching operational Starlink satellites five years ago this month. Since then, the company has been rapidly developing its constellation of broadband satellites in low-Earth orbit. SpaceX has now launched about 6,000 satellites with its Falcon 9 rocket and has delivered on its promise to provide fast Internet around the world. Today, the company is the largest satellite operator in the world by a factor of 10.

But is this massive enterprise to deliver Internet from space profitable?

According to a new report by Quilty Space, the answer is yes. Quilty built a model to assess Starlink's profitability. First, the researchers assessed revenue. The firm estimates this will grow to $6.6 billion in 2024, up from essentially zero just four years ago. In addition to rapidly growing its subscriber base of about 3 million, SpaceX has also managed to control costs. Based upon its model, therefore, Quilty estimates that Starlink's free cash flow from the business will be about $600 million this year.

Enlarge / Processed image of Venus captured by the Akatsuki spacecraft. (credit: JAXA/ISAS/DARTS/Kevin M. Gill)

JAXA, the Japanese space agency, confirmed Wednesday that it has lost communication with its Akatsuki spacecraft in orbit around Venus.

In its update, the space agency said it failed to establish communications in late April after the spacecraft had difficulty maintaining its attitude. This likely means there is some sort of thruster issue on the spacecraft that is preventing it from being able to orient itself back toward Earth.

"Since then, we have implemented various measures to restore service, but communication has not yet been restored," the agency stated. "We are currently working on restoring communication." JAXA added that it will announce further actions, if any, as soon as they've been decided upon.

A field of sand dunes in the Martian springtime. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 29, and today's photo comes from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is, you guessed it, in orbit around Mars.

The image shows an area of sand dunes on Mars in the springtime, when carbon dioxide frost is sublimating into the air. According to NASA, the pattern of dark spots is due to the fact that the sublimation process is not uniform.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship vehicle undergoes a wet dress rehearsal prior to its fourth launch attempt. (credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX is targeting June 5 for the next flight of its massive Starship rocket, the company said Friday.

The highly anticipated test flight—the fourth in a program to bring Starship to operational readiness and make progress toward its eventual reuse—will seek to demonstrate the ability of the Super Heavy first stage to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico and for the Starship upper stage to make a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere before it falls into the Indian Ocean.

This mission will carry no payloads as SpaceX seeks additional flight data about the performance of the complex Starship vehicle. It is simultaneously the largest and most powerful rocket ever built and the first launch system ever intended to be fully and rapidly reusable.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket launches the NROL-146 mission from California this week. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 6.45 of the Rocket Report! The most interesting news in launch this week, to me, is that Firefly is potentially up for sale. That makes two of the handful of US companies with operational rockets, Firefly and United Launch Alliance, actively on offer. I'll be fascinated to see what the valuations of each end up being if/when sales go through.

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.

Firefly may be up for sale. Firefly Aerospace investors are considering a sale that could value the closely held rocket and Moon lander maker at about $1.5 billion, Bloomberg reports. The rocket company's primary owner, AE Industrial Partners, is working with an adviser on "strategic options" for Firefly. Neither AE nor Firefly commented to Bloomberg about the potential sale. AE invested $75 million into Texas-based Firefly as part of a series B financing round in 2022. The firm made a subsequent investment in its Series C round in November 2023.

Enlarge / Messier 78 is a nursery of star formation enveloped in a shroud of interstellar dust. (credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA et. al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 24, and today's photo comes from the European Space Agency's new Euclid space telescope.

Launched in July 2023, the mission is intended to create a giant map of the Universe, across more than one-third of the nighttime sky. Its big-ticket goal is to help scientists better understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which account for the vast majority of the mass in the Universe—but about which we know almost nothing.