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Welcome to Edition 6.34 of the Rocket Report! It’s Starship season again. Yes, SpaceX appears to be about a week away from launching the third full-scale Starship test flight from the company’s Starbase site in South Texas, pending final regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration. Ars will be there. SpaceX plans to build a second Starship launch pad at Starbase, and the company’s footprint there is also about to get a little bigger, with the expected acquisition of 43 acres of Texas state park land.
As always, we welcome submissions from readers, and if you don’t need to miss any issues, please subscribe to the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-compatible versions of the site). Each report will include information on small, medium, and heavy-range rockets, as well as a quick look at the next 3 scheduled launches.
Astra’s founders take the company private. Astra’s three-year run as a public company is over. Chris Kemp and Adam London, Astra’s co-founders, are taking the company private after a string of rocket failures and funding shortfalls, Ars reports. Kemp and London bought the company for 50 cents a share. Astra’s board approved the transaction, the company announced Thursday, as the only alternative to bankruptcy. Kemp and London founded Astra in 2016. After emerging from stealth mode in 2020, Astra launched its light-class launcher, called Rocket 3, seven times, but five of those flights were failures. Astra went public via a special purpose acquisition company (or SPAC) in 2021, reaching a valuation of more than $2 billion. Today, its market cap sits at approximately $13 million.
What’s next for Astra? Array. . . Astra’s address remains unknown. The company ditched its unreliable Rocket 3 vehicle in 2022 to focus on the larger Rocket 4 vehicle. But Rocket Four is most likely months or years away from the launch pad. It’s facing a tough festival not only from small, established launch players like Rocket Lab and Firefly, but also from new entrants adding ABL Space and Stoke Space. What’s more, the value of all those smaller launch ventures has been reduced through SpaceX’s Transporter missions, which release dozens of satellites at once on the Falcon 9 booster. In addition, Astra’s spacecraft engine business, acquired in the past from Apollo Fusion, may or may not be successful today, although there are also questions about its long-term viability.
Virgin Galactic retires its only operational spacecraft. Over the past year, Virgin Galactic has proven that it possesses the technical acumen to make monthly flights of its VSS Unity rocket plane, each carrying six other people on a suborbital ascent into the distant reveries of space. But VSS Unity has never been profitable. It costs too much and takes too long to reconfigure between flights. Virgin Galactic plans to fly the suborbital spacecraft once again before postponing flight operations, Ars reports. This, along with the layoffs announced last year, will allow the company to keep the money while it concentrates. about the next generation of rockets, called Delta-class ships, designed to fly more and with more people. Michael Colglazier, president and chief executive officer of Virgin Galactic, said the first of the Delta ships is ready to begin floor and flight testing. next year, with an advertising service planned for 2026 founded at Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Bigger and faster. . . Delta shipments will each carry six passengers in the ship’s pressurized passenger cabin, up to a maximum of 4 passengers on each VSS Unity flight. Virgin Galactic’s purpose is to fly everyone one at a time, Delta ships 8 times a month, and the company will achieve this by eliminating many of the inspections required between each of the VSS Unity flights. The company is currently building a structural verification element for Delta’s vessel to undergo extensive case checks, validating component life and cycle limits of the vehicle’s primary components. This will give engineers enough confidence to forgo many inspections, according to Mike Moses, president of regional operations for Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic has about a billion dollars. in money or monetary equivalents on your balance sheet, so you are not in immediate financial trouble. But the company reported only $7 million in profit last year, with a net loss of $502 million. Therefore, there is a clear motivation to make a change.
This weekend a new Japanese rocket will be presented. A private Japanese company called Space One will enter orbit with the first flight of its Kairos rocket on Friday afternoon (US time), News on Japan reports. Space One will attempt the first Japanese personal corporation to put a rocket into orbit. Existing Japanese launch vehicles, such as the H-IIA, H3 and Epsilon, were developed with investment from the Japanese Space Agency. But the Japanese government is concerned about this theft. The Kairos rocket will feature a small “rapid response” spacecraft for the Cabinet Office of Research and Intelligence, responsible for Japan’s fleet of spy satellites. Kairos, meaning “speed” in ancient Greek, is composed of 3 forged fuel stages and a liquid fuel upper stage. It can place a payload of up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms) into low-Earth orbit.
Winning hearts and minds… The Kairos rocket will take off from Space One’s Space Port Kii, located on a south-facing peninsula on the main Japanese island of Honshu. This new launch site is hundreds of miles away from Japan’s existing spaceports. Local businesses see the arrival of the space industry in this remote part of Japan as a marketing opportunity. A local confectionery store, not wanting to miss the opportunity to attract visitors, is selling manju shaped like rockets. There are two paid viewing areas to watch the launch, and a total of 5,000 seats sold out in just two days, according to News on Japan. (submitted by tsunam)
UK spaceport project to get 10 million pounds from government. The UK government has pledged 10 million pounds in funding to SaxaVord Spaceport in Scotland, European Spaceflight reports. This funding is sorely needed for SaxaVord, which slowed construction last year after its developer ran into financial trouble. In the last couple of months, SaxaVord raised enough money to resume payments to the contractors building the launch site. The UK government’s pledge of 10 million pounds for SaxaVord apparently is not quite a done deal. The UK’s science minister posted on X that the funding was “subject to due diligence.” SaxaVord will eventually have three launch pads, one of which has been dedicated to German launch startup Rocket Factory Augsburg. This company’s rocket, RFA ONE, is expected to be the first orbital launch from SaxaVord later this year.
The UK spaceport scene. . . There are serious efforts across the UK government, local entities and industry personnel to free orbital releases in the British Isles. Spaceport Cornwall became the first UK facility to host an orbital attempt last year with the failed launch of Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne rocket, introduced from a transport plane taking off from Cornwall. Several vertical launch spaceports are in structure or in the concept progression phase. SaxaVord seems to be among the closest to reality, as the Sutherland spaceport, also in Scotland, will be used through the British startup Orbex Space. (submitted via Ken the Bin)
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