Welcome to Edition 7.49 of the Rocket Report! You may have noticed we are a little late with the report this week, and that is due to the Juneteenth holiday celebrated in the United States on Thursday. But that hasn't stopped a torrent of big news this week, from exploding Starships to significant reuse milestones being reached in Asia.

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.

Honda stamps passport to the skies with a hopper . An experimental reusable rocket developed by the research and development arm of Honda Motor Company flew to an altitude of nearly 900 feet (275 meters) Tuesday, then landed with pinpoint precision at the carmaker's test facility in northern Japan, Ars reports . Honda's hopper is the first prototype rocket outside of the United States and China to complete a flight of this kind, demonstrating vertical takeoff and vertical landing technology that could underpin the development of a reusable launch vehicle.

Read full article

Comments

Look, no one said building a large harvester to roam around the Moon and sift through hundreds of tons of regolith to retrieve small amounts of helium-3 would be easy. And that's to say nothing of the enormous challenge of processing and then launching any of this material from the lunar surface before finally landing it safely on Earth.

If we're being completely honest, doing all of this commercially is a pretty darn difficult row to hoe. Many commercial space experts dismiss it out of hand. So that's why it's gratifying to see that a company that is proposing to do this, Interlune, is taking some modest steps toward this goal.

Moreover, recent changes in the tides of space policy may also put some wind in the sails of Interlune and its considerable ambitions.

Read full article

Comments

A robotic lander developed by a Japanese company named ispace plummeted to the Moon's surface Thursday, destroying a small rover and several experiments intended to demonstrate how future missions could mine and harvest lunar resources.

Ground teams at ispace's mission control center in Tokyo lost contact with the Resilience lunar lander moments before it was supposed to touch down in a region called Mare Frigoris, or the Sea of Cold, a basaltic plain in the Moon's northern hemisphere.

A few hours later, ispace officials confirmed what many observers suspected. The mission was lost. It's the second time ispace has failed to land on the Moon in as many tries.

Read full article

Comments

Welcome to Edition 7.47 of the Rocket Report! Let's hope not, but the quarrel between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk may be remembered as "Black Thursday" for the US space program. A simmering disagreement over Trump's signature "One Big Beautiful Bill" coursing its way through Congress erupted into public view, with two of the most powerful Americans trading insults and threats on social media. Trump suggested the government should terminate "Elon's governmental contracts and subsidies." Musk responded with a post saying SpaceX will begin decommissioning the Dragon spacecraft used to transport crew and cargo to the International Space Station. This could go a number of ways, but it's hard to think anything good will come of it.

As always, we welcome reader submissions . 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.

Blue Origin flies aces suborbital space shot. Blue Origin, the space company founded and owned by Jeff Bezos, launched six people to the edge of space Saturday, May 31, from Bezos' ranch in West Texas, CBS News reports . A hydrogen-fueled New Shepard booster propelled a crew capsule, equipped with the largest windows of any operational spaceship, to an altitude of nearly 65 miles (105 kilometers), just above the internationally recognized boundary between the discernible atmosphere and space, before beginning the descent to landing. The passengers included three Americans—Aymette Medina Jorge, Gretchen Green, and Paul Jeris—along with Canadian Jesse Williams, New Zealand's Mark Rocket, and Panamanian Jaime Alemán, who served as his country's ambassador to the United States.

Read full article

Comments

Negotiations over the US federal budget for fiscal year 2026 are in the beginning stages, but when it comes to space, the fault lines are already solidifying in the Senate.

The Trump White House released its budget request last Friday, and this included detailed information about its plans for NASA. On Thursday, just days later, the US Senate shot back with its own budget priorities for the space agency.

The US budget process is complicated and somewhat broken in recent years, as Congress has failed to pass a budget on time. So, we are probably at least several months away from seeing a final fiscal year 2026 budget from Congress. But we got our first glimpse of the Senate's thinking when the chair of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released his "legislative directives" for NASA on Thursday

Read full article

Comments

A remarkable schoolyard brawl erupted online Thursday between President Donald Trump and his former "First Buddy" Elon Musk during which the pair traded insults and barbs. The war of words reached a crescendo during the afternoon when Trump threatened Musk's federal contracts.

"The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon's Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised that Biden didn't do it!" Trump wrote on his social media network, Truth Social, at 2:37 pm ET.

Anyone with a reasonable grasp of reality understood that the "bromance" between the president of the United States and the most wealthy person in the world was going to blow up at some point, but even so, the online brouhaha that has played out Thursday is spectacular—at one point Musk suggested that Trump was in the Epstein files, for goodness' sake.

Read full article

Comments

In a revealing interview published by the All-In Podcast on Wednesday, the private astronaut nominated to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, spoke at length on what he thought about the nomination process, how he would have led NASA, and the factors that led to the abrupt rescission of his nomination by President Trump.

"I got a call Friday, of last week, that the president has decided to go in a different direction," Isaacman said. "It was a real bummer."

It was a real bummer for most of the space community, myself included. To be clear, I am biased. I have gotten to know Isaacman over the last five years rather well, talking with him about his passion for spaceflight, what is working, and what is not. What I have discovered in Isaacman is a person who cares deeply about the future of US spaceflight and wants to make a meaningful contribution to its advancement. To see him done wrong like this, well, it's a very sordid affair.

Read full article

Comments

This week an in-space propulsion company, Impulse Space, announced that it had raised a significant amount of money, $300 million. This follows a fundraising round just last year in which the Southern California-based company raised $150 million.

This is one of the largest capital raises in space in a while, especially for a non-launch company. To understand why Impulse was able to raise so much additional money so quickly, Ars caught up with founder Tom Mueller and the company's chief executive, Eric Romo. They explained that demand for Impulse's efficient in-space vehicles is high, and since early missions have worked well, the company wants to seize the moment to scale up its operations.

"We had been operating relatively conservatively, in how many people we were allowing ourselves to hire and capital expenditures," Romo said. "This will allow us to release a little bit of that conservatism and lean into some stuff like electric propulsion and potentially other vehicles that are going to allow us to grow long-term."

Read full article

Comments

New details of the Trump administration's plans for NASA, released Friday, revealed the White House's desire to end the development of an experimental nuclear thermal rocket engine that could have shown a new way of exploring the Solar System.

Trump's NASA budget request is rife with spending cuts. Overall, the White House proposes reducing NASA's budget by about 24 percent, from $24.8 billion this year to $18.8 billion in fiscal year 2026. In previous stories, Ars has covered many of the programs impacted by the proposed cuts, which would cancel the Space Launch System rocket and Orion spacecraft and terminate numerous robotic science missions, including the Mars Sample Return, probes to Venus, and future space telescopes.

Instead, the leftover funding for NASA's human exploration program would go toward supporting commercial projects to land on the Moon and Mars.

Read full article

Comments