SpaceX has begun transporting an upgraded Super Heavy booster to its South Texas launch facilities, where the rocket will likely be tested with a rarely used stand known as the ‘can crusher’. On Wednesday, March 30th, SpaceX scheduled a temporary road closure – indicative of transport operations – on March 31st. The Friday prior, Super…
Reuters reports that SpaceX has begun to shut down Crew Dragon capsule production after assembling a fleet of four reusable spacecraft, highlighting the company’s ever-growing desire to pivot to Starship. According to SpaceX president and chief operating officer (COO) Gwynne Shotwell, who spoke with Reuters reporter Joey Roulette, the company has already ended production of new Crew Dragon…
NASA says it exercised a contract option to purchase a second crewed Starship Moon landing from SpaceX. Aside from its general existence, though, very little else is known about the new contract. NASA has yet to discuss when it will launch or which Artemis mission it will be attached to. A step further, it’s not…
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced that the completion of a crucial ‘environmental assessment’ SpaceX needs to begin orbital-class Starship launch attempts out of South Texas has been delayed for the third time. Official known as a programmatic environmental assessment or PEA, the FAA says it started the process in late June 2021 with…
After several weeks of work and occasional glimpses of the hardware and installation process, it’s now clear that SpaceX has outfitted part of its next Starship prototype with a truly unique Starlink satellite dispenser. It remains to be seen if this particular assembly is simply a pathfinder – an experiment never meant for flight –…
NASA, SpaceX, and private customer Axiom Space have decided to slightly delay two of the company’s upcoming Crew Dragon launches, both of which are now scheduled to occur in April. Originally planned to launch as early as late 2021 and more recently delayed from February 21st to March 30th, Axiom Space’s Ax-1 mission has been…
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that Super Heavy Booster B4 and Starship S20 are no longer scheduled to support the first orbital-class test flight of the world’s largest rocket. Rumors, signs, and reports of the significant change have been flowing among unofficial spaceflight communities for months. Booster 4 and Ship 20 were first confirmed by…
Demonstrating a level of flexibility that no other commercial launch provider on Earth can likely match, SpaceX and OneWeb have entered into a major launch contract barely three weeks after Russia kicked the satellite internet company off of its Soyuz rockets. Beginning in early 2020, OneWeb has launched approximately 430 operational small internet satellites –…
Defense and space industry experts may have reservations about whether Starlink is useful in Ukraine as the country fights back against the Russian invasion, but Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov believes in satellite internet service’s effectiveness. In a recent interview, Fedorov noted that Starlink terminals have been “very effective” in helping his country stay…
After rapidly stacking Ship 20 and Booster 4 the evening prior, SpaceX appears to have begun testing a fully stacked Starship rocket for the first time ever. Though the test SpaceX subjected Starship to was by no means ambitious and in spite of the fact that it no longer appears that Ship 20 and Booster…