Welcome to Edition 8.26 of the Rocket Report! The past week has been one of advancements and setbacks in the rocket business. NASA rolled the massive rocket for the Artemis II mission to its launch pad in Florida, while Chinese launchers suffered back-to-back failures within a span of approximately 12 hours. Rocket Lab's march toward a debut of its new Neutron launch vehicle in the coming months may have stalled after a failure during a key qualification test. We cover all this and more in this week's Rocket Report.
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.
Australia invests in sovereign launch. Six months after its first orbital rocket cleared the launch tower for just 14 seconds before crashing back to Earth, Gilmour Space Technologies has secured 217 million Australian dollars ($148 million) in funding that CEO Adam Gilmour says finally gives Australia a fighting chance in the global space race, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. The funding round, led by the federal government's National Reconstruction Fund Corporation and superannuation giant Hostplus with $75 million each, makes the Queensland company Australia’s newest unicorn—a fast-growth start-up valued at more than $1 billion—and one of the country’s most heavily backed private technologyventures.
Welcome to Edition 8.24 of the Rocket Report! We're back from a restorative holiday, and there's a great deal Eric and I look forward to covering in 2026. You can get a taste of what we're expecting this year in this feature. Other storylines are also worth watching this year that didn't make the Top 20. Will SpaceX's Starship begin launching Starlink satellites? Will United Launch Alliance finally get its Vulcan rocket flying at a higher cadence? Will Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket be certified by the US Space Force? I'm looking forward to learning the answers to these questions, and more. As for what has already happened in 2026, it has been a slow start on the world's launch pads, with only a pair of SpaceX missions completed in the first week of the year. Only? Two launches in one week by any company would have been remarkable just a few years ago.
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.
New launch records set in 2025. The number of orbital launch attempts worldwide last year surpassed the record 2024 flight rate by 25 percent, with SpaceX and China accounting for the bulk of the launch activity, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. Including near-orbital flight tests of SpaceX’s Starship-Super Heavy launch system, the number of orbital launch attempts worldwide reached 329 last year, an annual analysis of global launch and satellite activity by Jonathan’s Space Report shows. Of those 329 attempts, 321 reached orbit or marginal orbits. In addition to five Starship-Super Heavy launches, SpaceX launched 165 Falcon 9 rockets in 2025, surpassing its 2024 record of 134 Falcon 9 and two Falcon Heavy flights. No Falcon Heavy rockets flew in 2025. US providers, including Rocket Lab Electron orbital flights from its New Zealand spaceport, added another 30 orbital launches to the 2025 tally, solidifying the US as the world leader in space launch.
The United States Navy has awarded Collins Aerospace a $20.3 million contract modification to produce and deliver three high-power transmit set modernization kits for the E-6B “doomsday plane,” according to a Department of the Navy contract announcement. The award was issued to Rockwell Collins Inc., operating as Collins Aerospace Government Systems, under a firm-fixed-price and […]
Brinc’s Responder drone launches from its charging station. The Seattle company stands to benefit as new FCC restrictions limit Chinese drone makers. (Brinc Photo)
New federal restrictions on foreign-made drones, announced this week, promise to boost Washington state as a hub for domestic drone manufacturing — adding thousands or even tens of thousands of jobs in the process.
That’s the prediction from Blake Resnick, CEO of Seattle-based Brinc Drones, who says the region’s concentration of aerospace talent makes it uniquely positioned to benefit from the shift. He cites the presence of companies including Boeing, Blue Origin, Amazon (with its Prime Air unit) and SpaceX, along with an existing base of aerospace suppliers and technicians.
“I don’t even think you have to look outside of Washington to find all the talent that’s needed to build an incredible, globally competitive drone company,” Resnick said in an interview.
The FCC this week added foreign-made drones to its list of equipment deemed national security threats. That blocks new foreign-made drone models from obtaining FCC equipment authorization — effectively preventing the import, marketing, and sale of new models.
The move primarily impacts Chinese giant DJI, which controls roughly 70% of the global drone market.
It has drawn sharp criticism from drone hobbyists, who worry it will drive up prices and limit access to affordable, high-quality options. The Academy of Model Aeronautics warned that the move will “have huge implications for both the hobbyist and commercial airspace industries moving forward.”
There is a carve-out: existing models that have received prior FCC approval can still be sold, which means that the impact will unfold over an extended period of time. But as current inventory depletes and DJI’s product line ages, U.S. manufacturers will need to scale up.
Resnick said he foresees a need for hundreds of thousands and potentially even millions of square feet of new manufacturing space across the U.S. drone industry.
Washington’s aerospace industry employs more than 77,000 workers directly and generates more than $71 billion in total economic activity, according to a July 2024 analysis by the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. That gives the region a major edge in drone production.
Resnick knows this first-hand. He relocated Brinc from Las Vegas to Seattle in 2021, drawn by the region’s engineering talent pool. The company, which employs about 140 people, develops drones and related technology for police, fire, and emergency response agencies. It closed a $75 million funding round and announced a strategic alliance with Motorola Solutions earlier this year.
Brinc CEO Blake Resnick at the company’s headquarters in 2024. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Brinc has spent $660,000 on lobbying over the past three years, including advocacy for controls on Chinese-made drones, Forbes reported in a story on Resnick earlier this month. The company’s prominence in the trade war has made it a target: In 2024, China formally sanctioned Brinc and Resnick, freezing any assets in the country and barring Resnick from entry.
Speaking with GeekWire this week, Resnick said DJI’s dominance stems from billions in Chinese government subsidies, making fair competition nearly impossible.
“Frankly, I think this just evens the playing field,” he said.
Brinc, which has manufacturing operations at its Seattle headquarters, has already shifted to a non-Chinese supply chain, sourcing components from Taiwan, Germany, the U.K., and Japan. Resnick said the new restrictions will require a further shift toward domestic suppliers: “Moving forward, we are going to have to do a lot more business with American companies.”
Resnick said this shift ensures the U.S. industrial base remains resilient even if international partners face constraints during a conflict. While the transition presents a hurdle, Resnick described it as an “organizational cost that we’re very happy to pay” in exchange for a market free of state-sponsored Chinese competition.
He acknowledged that there could be a price premium in the drone market overall as American suppliers scale up, a process he estimates will take two to three years.
When asked if he sees these events as an opening for Brinc to expand into other sectors, beyond public safety, Resnick didn’t entirely rule out the possibility. “The free world,” he said, “needs more drone manufacturing capacity in a whole bunch of different verticals.”
Outbound’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Jake Armenta, wheels a prototype aircraft along the runway during a flight test earlier this year. (Outbound Aerospace via YouTube)
Outbound’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Jake Armenta, announced on LinkedIn last week that the company was shutting down. He joked that the news would be greeted with celebration by “competitors such as Boeing, who have been rightly terrified of us.”
During an interview with GeekWire, Armenta took a more serious tone as he discussed why Outbound fell short: “The simplest answer is that we ran out of money, and hadn’t really secured customer commitments that were strong enough to secure the next stage of investment,” he said.
“We didn’t really plan on being a military vendor,” he said. “But I have a background in Boeing Phantom Works, and I spent a lot of time working on drones at Boeing … so I know exactly what kind of things the U.S. government’s looking for. In that regard, we were able to put together a pretty compelling kind of platform.”
Outbound’s team came up with a drone concept called the Gateway UAV, which closely resembles the 22-foot-wide, blended-wing prototype that was tested in March. Gateway would fly rapidly deployable “mission containers” that could carry cargo or a suite of sensors for national security missions.
Armenta said the concept attracted significant interest from potential military customers. “But the U.S. military is a slow customer to work with, and the truth is, they prefer to work with companies that are very well funded,” he said.
Unfortunately, Outbound was not that kind of company in the summer of 2025. The company had raised $1.3 million dollars in total investment — including $500,000 from Blue Collective, a matching amount from Antler, and the remainder from smaller private investors. But even $1.3 million goes only so far.
“By pivoting away from the big aircraft, we lost the interest of some of the initial investors who were really wanting to do big moonshot projects,” Armenta said. “And then the investors who wanted to invest in military drones wanted to see a lot more traction than we had.”
Outbound CEO Ian Lee told GeekWire that the company faced a “chicken-and-egg” problem.
“We got stuck with DoD customers who were saying, ‘Hey, this is amazing. We want to see it demoed. And then we can write a contract, and contract equals dollars,'” Lee recalled. “So, then we turned around and went to the investment community and said, ‘They want to see a demo, and we need to raise [money] to do that.’ It’s kind of a ‘we need money to go make money’ situation, and we were too far along to raise that young money, if you want to call it that.”
Armenta said the timing was bad for a shift in strategy. “You know, there’s a version of this where if we had decided early on, ‘Hey, we’re going to build a military drone first and put all of our effort into that’ … I think we would have been able to sell it without a problem in the time frame that we had,” he said. “But we didn’t really decide that until midway through.”
Ironically, at the same time Outbound Aerospace was running on empty, the buzz surrounding the venture was revving up.
“That post was leading into several discussions with investors to go do the DoD work that we needed to do,” Lee said this week. “We had half of our round secured at that point, we were talking to a number of other players, and we had the DoD product ready. … At that point, I was expecting investment to come on pretty quickly and [we could] start talking about that publicly. It never came through.”
Outbound CEO Ian Lee (far left) and chief technology officer Jake Armenta (far right) joined other members of the Outbound Aerospace team to take a selfie in 2024. (Photo Courtesy of Jake Armenta)
So, what’s next? Outbound’s website still touts the Gateway drone as well as the 254-passenger Olympic airliner, which is said to be “coming in 2033.”
Lee promised that those concepts won’t be “disappearing into the ether,” and Armenta plans to make sure they don’t.
“We designed not one or two, but five novel transport-category aircraft at Outbound … and all of them are pretty neat,” he said. “I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking about those more publicly over the next couple of months. Maybe next year.”
Both founders are taking time to consider their next steps.
“I’m doing some consulting,” Lee said. “I am advising a couple of friends and also interviewing at various companies. Actually, part of what I’m trying to do is pick what the next few years of projects look like. I’m taking a pause on running a startup directly. I’ll probably be back at that at some point, but not for the next few years.”
Armenta is also helping out some friends in the aerospace industry while he takes stock of what he’s learned over the past couple of years.
“We were a lot closer than we had any right to be,” he said. “The thing is, there’s so much hunger in the market, and in every market for new aircraft across the board. We saw that in the drone space, but it’s really there in the commercial space and even in the business-jet space.”
Even though Outbound’s fortunes have fallen back to earth, Armenta is still looking up. “This has been something that I’ve been wanting to do — literally — for 30 years,” he said. “I’m 34 years old, and I can remember being a very small child and wanting to build aircraft. This has never stopped.”
The lessons learned at Outbound have only heightened his resolve. “Through this journey over the last couple of years, I saw a small, constrained number of errors that we made,” Armenta said. “I think that in the future, with a slightly different strategy, with all the knowledge and information and preparation that I have now … I’ll be back. Like I said, I’ll be back.”
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