Welcome to Issue 7.09 of Rocket Report! When will SpaceX launch Starship's next test flight? It certainly doesn't look like it's happening anytime soon, as SpaceX's ground crews in Texas are working feverishly to reinforce the launch pad to capture the rocket's massive Super Heavy Booster when it returns to the launch site on the next flight. In the meantime, the FAA is reviewing SpaceX's proposal to recover the booster on land for the first time. And on Thursday, a NASA official overseeing SpaceX's Starship efforts said the next test flight is planned for “fall,” suggesting it could be another month or more away. Additionally, we've listed the next three launches as “TBD” (To Be Determined) as SpaceX awaits FAA approval to resume Falcon 9 launches after a booster landing failure this week, and the Polaris Dawn mission is on hold due to an unfavorable weather forecast.
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Firefly has a new CEO. Jason Kim, former head of Boeing-owned satellite maker Millennium Space Systems, has been named CEO of Firefly Aerospace, effective Oct. 1, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Kim joins Firefly as the ambitious space startup, which has raised nearly $600 million from investors since its founding in 2021, aims to launch a commercial lunar lander for NASA before the end of the year. Firefly is also working on a medium-lift rocket in partnership with Northrop Grumman with the goal of competing for missions to resupply the International Space Station and launch payloads for the U.S. military and commercial customers.
Kim brings expertise in national security … At Millennium, Kim led several national security space missions to completion, including Victus Nox, a responsive satellite and launch mission for the U.S. Space Force. Millennium manufactured the satellite for the Victus Nox mission, and Firefly Aerospace successfully launched it on an Alpha rocket just 27 hours after it received the launch order from the military. This required Millennium and Firefly to integrate the satellite into the Alpha rocket on short notice. Kim replaces Bill Weber, who resigned as CEO of Firefly in July after being accused of having an inappropriate relationship with a female employee.
The new Shepard is flying again. Blue Origin sent six passengers, including a NASA-sponsored researcher and the youngest woman ever to fly in space, on a suborbital journey from the lower atmosphere on Thursday. It was the company's eighth manned spaceflight, CBS News reports. University of Florida researcher Rob Ferl, philanthropist Nicolina Elrick, adventurer Eugene Grin, Vanderbilt University cardiologist Elman Jahangir, American-Israeli entrepreneur Ephraim Rabin and Karsen Kitchen, a final year student at the University of North Carolina, blasted off aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket from Jeff Bezos' launch site in West Texas. Kitchen was the youngest woman to fly higher than 100 kilometers (62 miles), and Ferl was the first NASA-sponsored researcher to fly on a suborbital rocket. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, its competitor in the suborbital manned spaceflight market, have long boasted about the ability of their vehicles to support manned research in microgravity.
Three good slides … This was Blue Origin's first New Shepard flight since May 19, when one of the crew capsule's three main parachutes failed to fully open during descent. Passengers on that flight were fine, and Blue Origin says the capsule can return safely with just one parachute if two fail. Blue Origin said it had identified the cause of the parachute problem on the May flight, but did not provide further details other than that the investigation “focused on the de-reefing system that transitions the parachutes from the reefed to the de-reefed state, which did not function as designed on one of the NS-25's three parachutes,” Space News reports.
The failed ABL missile test damaged ground systems. A major malfunction at an Alaskan launch pad last month not only destroyed the RS1 rocket that ABL Space Systems was preparing for launch, but also damaged some ground systems on site, ABL said in an update posted on X. The company said a fire broke out “outside RS1's base” after the rocket's 11 engines failed during an aborted test run on Kodiak Island, Alaska. The fire was fed by fuel leaks from two of the engines, and ABL's launch team was able to suppress the fire with water and inert gases for more than 11 minutes. But the remote launch site has no direct water supply, and mobile water tanks ran dry, causing the fire to spread until the rocket collapsed. ABL said much of the piping and electrical connections to the launch pad were damaged, but the launch pad structure, flame deflector and other equipment were unscathed.
Some details on the next steps … ABL released a detailed update on its investigation into the test failure, and its candor is notable. Engineers found that two of the engines — the ones that leaked and fueled the fire — experienced “combustion instability” during their launch sequence. ABL said it believes differences in this RS1 rocket, called a Block 2 design, led to a higher-energy launch than expected. The company will return its damaged ground equipment from Alaska to a facility in Long Beach, California, for overhaul, and ABL says its next RS1 rocket is “well into production.” But the company did not provide information on corrective measures or a timeline for implementing them and returning to the launch pad with RS1. ABL wants to compete with other, more established small satellite launch companies like Rocket Lab and Firefly Aerospace, but its RS1 rocket hasn't made it far from the launch pad. ABL's first orbital launch attempt in January 2023 ended when the RS1 rocket lost power and fell back on its launch pad.