Enlarge / An artist's illustration of NASA's two Janus spacecraft as they would have appeared in space. (credit: Lockheed Martin )

Two small spacecraft should have now been cruising through the Solar System on the way to study unexplored asteroids, but after several years of development and nearly $50 million in expenditures, NASA announced Tuesday the probes will remain locked inside a Lockheed Martin factory in Colorado.

That’s because the mission, called Janus, was supposed to launch last year as a piggyback payload on the same rocket with NASA’s much larger Psyche spacecraft , which will fly to a 140-mile-wide (225-kilometer) metal-rich asteroid—also named Psyche—for more than two years of close-up observations. Problems with software testing on the Psyche spacecraft prompted NASA managers to delay the launch by more than a year.

An independent review board set up to analyze the reasons for the Psyche launch delay identified issues with the spacecraft’s software and weaknesses in the plan to test the software before Psyche’s launch. Digging deeper, the review panel determined that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Psyche mission, was encumbered by staffing and workforce problems exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Enlarge / India's Chandrayaan-3 lunar spacecraft undergoes accoustic testing. (credit: ISRO)

As anyone who has been paying attention to space exploration knows, the Moon is red-hot. Up to half a dozen missions may launch to the lunar surface in the next six months, heralding a new era of Moon exploration.

It has not always been so. Following the Space Race in the 1960s and early 1970s, NASA and the Soviet Union backed off their Moon exploration programs. NASA sent probes to the far-flung corners of the Solar System, and the US space agency and Russian space program focused their human activities in low-Earth orbit, constructing and inhabiting a series of space stations.

There have been three primary drivers of renewed interest in the Moon. The first was the discovery and confirmation in the 1990s and early 2000s that water ice is likely to exist at the lunar poles in permanently shadowed craters. The presence of abundant water, providing oxygen and hydrogen resources, has given space agencies a new reason to explore the poles.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 rocket streaks into the sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission Sunday night to deploy 22 more Starlink internet satellites. (credit: SpaceX )

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

The flight followed several months of inspections and refurbishment of SpaceX’s most-flown rocket, a process that included a “recertification” of the booster to prove, at least on paper, that it could fly as many as five more times after completing its 15th launch and landing last December.

Sunday night’s mission got the booster’s extended life off to a good start.

Enlarge / An artist impression of exoplanet LTT9779b orbiting its host star. The planet is around the size of Neptune and reflects 80 percent of the light shone on it.

It has been about four decades since the first confirmed exoplanet was discovered. In the following 40 years, using a variety of telescopes and instruments on the ground and in space, astronomers have cataloged more than 5,000 planets around other stars.

As part of this process of scientific discovery, astronomers have confirmed that our Milky Way galaxy teems with billions of planets. They exist around many (if not most) stars, and they come in all sizes and flavors. There are very large and very small planets and very hot and very cold ones. There are more than a few that could harbor life as we know it on Earth.

After this initial wave of discovery, powered by such NASA survey missions as the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, second-generation instruments like Europe's small Cheops satellite have sought to characterize the nature of these exoplanets. Launched less than three years ago on a Soyuz rocket, the Cheops instrument has delivered some valuable insights on planets orbiting other stars.

Enlarge / Home sweet home. (credit: SCIEPRO/Getty)

On August 25th, 2012, humanity became an interstellar species. There was no fanfare or galactic welcome party as a humble robotic probe, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, crossed an invisible threshold. It slipped between the region dominated by the physics of the Sun and into the thin milieu of plasma between the stars.

Whatever fate befalls us now, whatever future civilizations rise and fall, whether we heal the Earth or continue our self-destructive path, we will still, and always, have this. A monument, a marker, a testament to the existence of our species and the ingenuity of our minds. It’s unlikely that any alien civilization will encounter our spacecraft, yet it will still exist, circling the center of the Milky Way for eons to come.

In the coming decades, Voyager 1 will be joined by other craft sent along solar-escape trajectories: the Pioneer probes, New Horizons, and more. And now that we’ve crossed this astrophysical threshold, we are forced to ask a difficult question: Is this it? Is this all we’ll ever accomplish beyond the Solar System, a scattering of wayward probes sent out into the infinite night?

Enlarge / Varda Space's first "Winnebago" spacecraft, called W-Series 1, before its launch June 12. (credit: Rocket Lab )

The co-founder of California-based startup Varda Space Industries says his company’s first space mission—a miniature lab that has grown crystals of the drug ritonavir in orbit—is on track to end in the coming weeks with a first-of-its-kind re-entry and landing in Utah.

Varda’s spacecraft launched June 12 as part of a rideshare mission on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, then completed several weeks of checkouts before starting a 27-hour drug-manufacturing experiment last week. When ground controllers gave the go-ahead, the mini-lab began growing crystals of ritonavir, a drug commonly used to treat HIV.

The experiment’s 27-hour run was completed on June 30, and data downlinked from the spacecraft showed everything went well.

Enlarge / Artist's concept of a fuel depot in space. (credit: Orbit Fab )

Imagine you purchased a vehicle that needed to last eight years on a single tank of gas. You would probably avoid sharp accelerations, keep a close eye on the fuel gauge, and wouldn’t leave the driveway unless it was a vitally important trip.

That was the analogy outlined Thursday by Lt. Gen. John Shaw, deputy commander of US Space Command, for how the Space Force operates its reconnaissance satellites.

“The way we've been doing space operations since the dawn of the Space Age—we’ve been doing it wrong,” Shaw said in an event hosted by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

Enlarge / The final Ariane 5 launch vehicle liftoff for flight VA261 as seen from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on Wednesday. (credit: ESA/S. Corvaja)

Welcome to Edition 6.01 of the Rocket Report! Due to the fact that we are up to Edition 6, it means that Ars has been publishing this newsletter for five years. I genuinely want to thank everyone for their contributions over the years, whether you've submitted a story (Ken the Bin for MVP?) or just passed the newsletter along to a friend to subscribe. Also, starting next week our new space hire, Stephen Clark, will alternate publication of the newsletter with me. Hopefully, there will be no missed issues going forward.

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 flies commercial mission . The space tourism company founded by Richard Branson launched three Italian researchers and three company employees on the suborbital operator’s first commercial flight to the edge of space on June 29, Ars reports . The spacecraft rocketed to an altitude of more than 279,000 feet, higher than the 50-mile height recognized as the boundary of space by NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration.