Welcome to the 6.48 release of Rocket Report! After the dramatic test flight of the SpaceX spacecraft last week, teams in Texas are wasting no time preparing for the next launch. Ground crews are replacing the entire heat shield on the next Starship spacecraft to overcome deficiencies found on last week’s flight. If NASA is going to land astronauts on the moon by the end of 2026, SpaceX has a lot to do with Starship in the next few months.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form won’t appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small, medium and heavy rockets, as well as a quick look at the next three launches on the calendar.
Virgin Galactic will not fly again anytime soon. After an impressive but brief flurry of spaceflight — 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 everything on developing a future “Delta class” of spaceships modeled after VSS unity, which made its last flight into suborbital space on Saturday. Virgin Galactic, founded by Richard Branson, now finds itself at a crossroads as it chases profitability that VSS unity he had no hope of helping him achieve this despite two decades of development and billions of dollars spent.
An uncertain future … Now, Virgin Galactic’s already anemic revenue will drop to near zero as the company spends more capital to bring two Delta-class spacecraft online. The goal is to begin flying them in 2026. These vehicles are designed to be more easily reusable and carry six instead of four passengers. This timeline seems very ambitious given that the company is only developing tooling for the vehicles at this point and won’t begin production of major parts until later this year. Virgin Galactic is betting on Delta-class ships as its stock price has plummeted over the past few years. In fact, Virgin Galactic announced a reverse stock split this week in an effort to keep its listing on the New York Stock Exchange. (submitted by Ken the Bin)
Unpacking North Korea’s Missile Technology Advances. Late last month, North Korea indicated that it had made—or, more accurately, is still trying to—make a pretty big leap in missile technology. The isolated totalitarian state’s official news agency said it tested a new type of satellite launcher powered by petroleum and cryogenic liquid oxygen on May 27. It is a radical change in North Korea’s missile program that has caught astute outside observers by surprise. Previous North Korean missiles have used hypergolic propellants, typically hydrazine and nitrogen dioxide, or solid fuels, which are also well-suited to military ballistic missiles. Kerosene and liquid oxygen, on the other hand, are not great propellants for rockets, but they are good for pure space launchers.
Who helps?… The May 27 launch failed shortly after launch while the unnamed rocket was still in its first stage over the Yellow Sea. But there is tangible and circumstantial evidence that Russia played a role in the launch. Details are still unclear, but North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visited a Russian cosmodrome last September and met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who suggested Russian help for the North’s satellite launch program be on the agenda at the summit. South Korean defense officials said Russian experts visited North Korea ahead of the May 27 launch. If Russia were to export a kerosene-fueled rocket motor, or perhaps an entire booster, to North Korea, it would not be the first time Russia has shipped launch technology to the Korean Peninsula. Russia provided South Korea’s nascent space program with three fully equipped rocket boosters for test flights in 2009, 2010 and 2023, before the South developed a fully indigenous rocket itself.
ABL signs deal with the new startup customer. Still trying to get its light carrier into orbit, ABL Space Systems has a new customer. Scout Space announced this week that it has signed an agreement with ABL to launch a small spacecraft called “Owlet-01” on the third flight of ABL’s RS1 rocket, Space News reports. Scout Space, which describes itself as focused on space security and comprehensive space domain awareness, develops optical sensors for monitoring the space environment. Owlet-01 will fly with a telescope designed to detect other objects in space, a capability highly sought after by the US military.
Still waiting for flight 2 … The launch agreement between ABL and Space Scout is dependent on the outcome of the second flight of the RS1 rocket, which ABL has been preparing for the past few months. ABL has not provided any public updates on the status of the second RS1 test flight since March, when it announced that pre-flight preparations were underway on Kodiak Island, Alaska. The first RS1 rocket touched down back on the launch pad in Alaska seconds after launch in January 2023. The RS1 is capable of carrying a payload of more than 1.3 metric tons into low Earth orbit. (submitted by Ken the Bin)