Welcome to Edition 8.23 of the Rocket Report! Several new rockets made their first flights this year. Blue Origin’s New Glenn was the most notable debut, with a successful inaugural launch in January followed by an impressive second flight in November, culminating in the booster’s first landing on an offshore platform. Second on the list is China’s Zhuque-3, a partially reusable methane-fueled rocket developed by the quasi-commercial launch company LandSpace. The medium-lift Zhuque-3 successfully reached orbit on its first flight earlier this month, and its booster narrowly missed landing downrange. We could add China’s Long March 12A to the list if it flies before the end of the year. This will be the final Rocket Report of 2025, but we’ll be back in January with all the news that’s fit to lift.

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.

Rocket Lab delivers for Space Force and NASA. Four small satellites rode a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle into orbit from Virginia early Thursday, beginning a government-funded technology demonstration mission to test the performance of a new spacecraft design, Ars reports. The satellites were nestled inside a cylindrical dispenser on top of the 59-foot-tall (18-meter) Electron rocket when it lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility. A little more than an hour later, the rocket’s upper stage released the satellites one at a time at an altitude of about 340 miles (550 kilometers). The launch was the starting gun for a “proof of concept” mission to test the viability of a new kind of satellite called DiskSats, designed by the Aerospace Corporation.

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Four small satellites rode a Rocket Lab Electron launch vehicle into orbit from Virginia early Thursday, beginning a government-funded technology demonstration mission to test the performance of a new spacecraft design.

The satellites were nestled inside a cylindrical dispenser on top of the 59-foot-tall (18-meter) Electron rocket when it lifted off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at 12:03 am EST (05:03 UTC). A little more than an hour later, the rocket’s upper stage released the satellites one at a time at an altitude of about 340 miles (550 kilometers).

The launch was the starting gun for a “proof of concept” mission to test the viability of a new kind of satellite called DiskSats. These satellites were designed by the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit federally funded research and development center. The project is jointly financed by NASA and the US Space Force, which paid for DiskSat’s development and launch, respectively.

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When the Perseverance rover arrived on Mars nearly five years ago, NASA officials thought the next American lander to take aim on the red planet would be taking shape by now.

At the time, the leaders of the space agency expected this next lander could be ready for launch as soon as 2026—or more likely in 2028. Its mission would have been to retrieve Martian rock specimens collected by the Perseverance rover, then billed as the first leg of a multilaunch, multibillion-dollar Mars Sample Return campaign.

Here we are on the verge of 2026, and there’s no sample retrieval mission nearing the launch pad. In fact, no one is building such a lander at all. NASA’s strategy for a Mars Sample Return, or MSR, mission remains undecided after the projected cost of the original plan ballooned to $11 billion. If MSR happens at all, it’s now unlikely to launch until the 2030s.

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A few weeks ago, technicians inside a cavernous clean room in Maryland made the final connection to complete assembly of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Parts of this new observatory, named for NASA’s first chief astronomer, recently completed a spate of tests to ensure it can survive the shaking and intense sound of a rocket launch. Engineers placed the core of the telescope inside a thermal vacuum chamber, where it withstood the airless conditions and extreme temperature swings it will see in space.

Then, on November 25, teams at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, joined the inner and outer portions of the Roman Space Telescope. With this milestone, NASA declared the observatory complete and on track for launch as soon as fall 2026.

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A startup established three years ago to churn out a new class of high-power satellites has raised $250 million to ramp up production at its Southern California factory.

The company, named K2, announced the cash infusion on Thursday. K2’s Series C fundraising round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with additional funding from investment firms in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. K2 has now raised more than $400 million since its founding in 2022 and is on track to launch its first major demonstration mission next year, officials said.

K2 aims to take advantage of a coming abundance of heavy- and super-heavy-lift launch capacity, with SpaceX’s Starship expected to begin deploying satellites as soon as next year. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket launched twice this year and will fly more in 2026 while engineers develop an even larger New Glenn with additional engines and more lift capability.

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NASA has lost contact with one of its three spacecraft orbiting Mars, the agency announced Tuesday. Meanwhile, a second Mars orbiter is perilously close to running out of fuel, and the third mission is running well past its warranty.

Ground teams last heard from the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft on Saturday, December 6. “Telemetry from MAVEN had showed all subsystems working normally before it orbited behind the red planet,” NASA said in a short statement. “After the spacecraft emerged from behind Mars, NASA’s Deep Space Network did not observe a signal.”

NASA said mission controllers are “investigating the anomaly to address the situation. More information will be shared once it becomes available.”

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Near the end of the film A House of Dynamite, a fictional American president portrayed by Idris Elba sums up the theory of nuclear deterrence.

“Just being ready is the point, right?” Elba says. “It keeps people in check. Keeps the world straight. If they see how prepared we are, no one starts a nuclear war.”

There’s a lot that goes wrong in the film, namely the collapse of deterrence itself. For more than 60 years, the US military has used its vast arsenal of nuclear weapons, constantly deployed on Navy submarines, at Air Force bomber bases, and in Minuteman missile fields, as a way of saying, “Don’t mess with us.” In the event of a first strike against the United States, an adversary would be assured of an overwhelming nuclear response, giving rise to the concept of mutual assured destruction.

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Welcome to Edition 8.21 of the Rocket Report! We’re back after the Thanksgiving holiday with more launch news. Most of the big stories over the last couple of weeks came from abroad. Russian rockets and launch pads didn’t fare so well. China’s launch industry celebrated several key missions. SpaceX was busy, too, with seven launches over the last two weeks, six of them carrying more Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. We expect between 15 and 20 more orbital launch attempts worldwide before the end of the year.

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.

Another Sarmat failure. A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern steppe on November 28 on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even make it 4,000 feet, Ars reports. Russia’s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile’s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border. A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site.

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China’s first attempt to land an orbital-class rocket may have ended in a fiery crash, but the company responsible for the mission had a lot to celebrate with the first flight of its new methane-fueled launcher.

LandSpace, a decade-old company based in Beijing, launched its new Zhuque-3 rocket for the first time at 11 pm EST Tuesday (04:0 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan launch site in northwestern China.

Powered by nine methane-fueled engines, the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) rocket climbed away from its launch pad with more than 1.7 million pounds of thrust. The 216-foot-tall (66-meter) launcher headed southeast, soaring through clear skies before releasing its first stage booster about two minutes into the flight.

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There’s a race in China among several companies vying to become the next to launch and land an orbital-class rocket, and the starting gun could go off as soon as tonight.

LandSpace, one of several maturing Chinese rocket startups, is about to launch the first flight of its medium-lift Zhuque-3 rocket. Liftoff could happen around 11 pm EST tonight (04:00 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China.

Airspace warning notices advising pilots to steer clear of the rocket’s flight path suggest LandSpace has a launch window of about two hours. When it lifts off, the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) rocket will become the largest commercial launch vehicle ever flown in China. What’s more, LandSpace will become the first Chinese launch provider to attempt a landing of its first stage booster, using the same tried-and-true return method pioneered by SpaceX and, more recently, Blue Origin in the United States.

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A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) fired from an underground silo on the country’s southern steppe Friday on a scheduled test to deliver a dummy warhead to a remote impact zone nearly 4,000 miles away. The missile didn’t even make it 4,000 feet.

Russia’s military has been silent on the accident, but the missile’s crash was seen and heard for miles around the Dombarovsky air base in Orenburg Oblast near the Russian-Kazakh border.

A video posted by the Russian blog site MilitaryRussia.ru on Telegram and widely shared on other social media platforms showed the missile veering off course immediately after launch before cartwheeling upside down, losing power, and then crashing a short distance from the launch site. The missile ejected a component before it hit the ground, perhaps as part of a payload salvage sequence, according to Pavel Podvig, a senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research in Geneva.

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Around this time last year, officials at United Launch Alliance projected 2025 would be their busiest year ever. Tory Bruno, ULA’s chief executive, told reporters the company would launch as many as 20 missions this year, with roughly an even split between the legacy Atlas V launcher and its replacement—the Vulcan rocket.

Now, it’s likely that ULA will close out 2025 with six flights—five with the Atlas V and just one with the Vulcan rocket the company is so eager to accelerate into service. Six flights would make 2025 the busiest launch year for ULA since 2022, but it would still fall well short of the company’s forecast.

Last week, ULA announced its next launch is scheduled for December 15. An Atlas V will loft another batch of broadband satellites for the Amazon Leo network, formerly known as Project Kuiper, from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. This will be ULA’s last launch of the year.

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An unpiloted Chinese spacecraft launched late Monday and linked up with the country’s Tiangong space station a few hours later, providing a lifeboat for three astronauts stuck in orbit without a safe ride home.

A Long March 2F rocket fired its engines and lifted off with the Shenzhou 22 spacecraft, carrying cargo instead of a crew, at 11:11 pm EST Monday (04:11 UTC Tuesday). The spacecraft docked with the Tiangong station nearly 250 miles (400 kilometers) above the Earth about three-and-a-half hours later.

Chinese engineers worked fast to move up the launch of the Shenzhou 22, originally set to fly next year. On November 4, astronauts discovered one of the two crew ferry ships docked to the Tiangong station had a damaged window, likely from an impact with a small fragment of space junk. The crew members used a microscope to photograph the defect from different angles, confirming a small triangular area with a crack, Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s human spaceflight program, told Chinese state media.

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The commander of the military unit responsible for running the Cape Canaveral spaceport in Florida expects SpaceX to begin launching Starship rockets there next year.

Launch companies with facilities near SpaceX’s Starship pads are not pleased. SpaceX’s two chief rivals, Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, complained last year that SpaceX’s proposal of launching as many as 120 Starships per year from Florida’s Space Coast could force them to routinely clear personnel from their launch pads for safety reasons.

This isn’t the first time Blue Origin and ULA have tried to throw up roadblocks in front of SpaceX. The companies sought to prevent NASA from leasing a disused launch pad to SpaceX in 2013, but they lost the fight.

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Welcome to Edition 8.20 of the Rocket Report! For the second week in a row, Blue Origin dominated the headlines with news about its New Glenn rocket. After a stunning success November 13 with the launch and landing of the second New Glenn rocket, Jeff Bezos’ space company revealed a roadmap this week showing how engineers will supercharge the vehicle with more engines. Meanwhile, in South Texas, SpaceX took a step toward the first flight of the next-generation Starship rocket. There will be no Rocket Report next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. We look forward to resuming delivery of all the news in space lift the first week of December.

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.

Northrop’s Pegasus rocket wins a rare contract. A startup named Katalyst Space Technologies won a $30 million contract from NASA in August to build a robotic rescue mission for the agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory in low-Earth orbit. Swift, in space since 2004, is a unique instrument designed to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the Universe. The spacecraft lacks a propulsion system and its orbit is subject to atmospheric drag, and NASA says it is “racing against the clock” to boost Swift’s orbit and extend its lifetime before it falls back to Earth. On Wednesday, Katalyst announced it selected Northrop Grumman’s air-launched Pegasus XL rocket to send the rescue craft into orbit next year.

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