commercial space

27 Articles

NASA Announces Artemis III Crew And Ambitious Goals

June 10, 2026 by 46 Comments

When the Artemis lunar program was first conceived, the third mission would have seen astronauts step foot on the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. But as hard as getting into space is, a sojourn to our nearest celestial neighbor is even more mindbogglingly complex, and so earlier this year it was announced that actually landing on the Moon would be pushed out to the fourth mission.

In turn Artemis III would take a page out of the Apollo 9 playbook and test out rendezvous and docking procedures with commercial landers while operating in the relative safety of low Earth orbit. Moving the target date for the landing a few years down the road gave all involved parties a little more breathing room, but it also provided a valuable opportunity to gain insight into the performance of the vehicles and systems ahead of the critical moment. In the original timeline, the first time Orion would attempt to dock with the lander would have been just before descending to the lunar surface — leaving precious little time to troubleshoot should anything go wrong.

Yesterday NASA held a press conference to update the public on their progress towards the planned 2027 launch of Artemis III, which included the long-awaited announcement of the crew that will kick the tires on the next-generation lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin

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A New Generation Of Spacecraft Head To The ISS

September 18, 2025 by 22 Comments

While many in the industry were at first skeptical of NASA’s goal to put resupply flights to the International Space Station in the hands of commercial operators, the results speak for themselves. Since 2012, the SpaceX Dragon family of spacecraft has been transporting crew and cargo from American soil to the orbiting laboratory, a capability that the space agency had lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle. Putting these relatively routine missions in the hands of a commercial provider like SpaceX takes some of the logistical and financial burden off of NASA, allowing them to focus on more forward-looking projects.

SpaceX Dragon arriving at the ISS for the first time in 2012.

But as the saying goes, you should never put all of your eggs in one basket. As successful as SpaceX has been, there’s always a chance that some issue could temporarily ground either the Falcon 9 or the Dragon.

While Russia’s Progress and Soyuz vehicles would still be available in an emergency situation, it’s in everyone’s best interest that there be multiple backup vehicles that can bring critical supplies to the Station.

Which is precisely why several new or upgraded spacecraft, designed specifically for performing resupply missions to the ISS and any potential commercial successor, are coming online over the next few years.

In fact, one of them is already flying its first mission, and will likely have arrived at the International Space Station by the time you read this article.

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Dragon Is The Latest, And Final, Craft To Reboost ISS

September 11, 2025 by 48 Comments

The International Space Station has been in orbit around the Earth, at least in some form, since November of 1998 — but not without help. In the vacuum of space, an object in orbit can generally be counted on to remain zipping around more or less forever, but the Station is low enough to experience a bit of atmospheric drag. It isn’t much, but it saps enough velocity from the Station that without regular “reboosts” to speed it back up , the orbiting complex would eventually come crashing down.

Naturally, the United States and Russia were aware of this when they set out to assemble the Station. That’s why early core modules such as Zarya and Zvezda came equipped with thrusters that could be used to not only rotate the complex about all axes, but accelerate it to counteract the impact of drag. Eventually the thrusters on Zarya were disabled, and its propellant tanks were plumbed into Zvezda’s fuel system to provide additional capacity.

An early image of ISS, Zarya module in center and Zvezda at far right.

Visiting spacecraft attached to the Russian side of the ISS can transfer propellant into these combined tanks, and they’ve been topped off regularly over the years. In fact, the NASA paper A Review of In-Space Propellant Transfer Capabilities and Challenges for Missions Involving Propellant Resupply, notes this as one of the most significant examples of practical propellant transfer between orbital vehicles, with more than 40,000 kgs of propellants pumped into the ISS as of 2019.

But while the thrusters on Zvezda are still available for use, it turns out there’s an easier way to accelerate the Station; visiting spacecraft can literally push the orbital complex with their own maneuvering thrusters. Of course this is somewhat easier said than done, and not all vehicles have been able to accomplish the feat, but over the decades several craft have taken on the burden of lifting the ISS into a higher orbit.

Earlier this month, a specially modified SpaceX Cargo Dragon became the newest addition to the list of spacecraft that can perform a reboost. The craft will boost the Station several times over the rest of the year, which will provide valuable data for when it comes time to reverse the process and de-orbit the ISS in the future.

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Relativity Space Changes Course On Path To Orbit

March 17, 2025 by 25 Comments

In 2015, Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone founded Relativity Space around an ambitious goal: to be the first company to put a 3D printed rocket into orbit. While additive manufacturing was already becoming an increasingly important tool in the aerospace industry, the duo believed it could be pushed further than anyone had yet realized.

Rather than assembling a rocket out of smaller printed parts, they imagined the entire rocket being produced on a huge printer. Once the methodology was perfected, they believed rockets could be printed faster and cheaper than they could be traditionally assembled. What’s more, in the far future, Relativity might even be able to produce rockets off-world in fully automated factories. It was a bold idea, to be sure. But then, landing rockets on a barge in the middle of the ocean once seemed pretty far fetched as well.

An early printed propellant tank.

Of course, printing something the size of an orbital rocket requires an exceptionally large 3D printer, so Relativity Space had to built one. It wasn’t long before the company had gotten to the point where they had successfully tested their printed rocket engine, and were scaling up their processes to print the vehicle’s propellant tanks. In 2018 Bryce Salmi, then an avionics hardware engineer at Relatively Space, gave a talk at Hackaday Supercon detailing the rapid progress the company had made so far.

Just a few years later, in March of 2023, the Relativity’s first completed rocket sat fueled and ready to fly on the launch pad. The Terran 1 rocket wasn’t the entirely printed vehicle that Ellis and Noone had imagined, but with approximately 85% of the booster’s mass being made up of printed parts, it was as close as anyone had ever gotten before.

The launch of Terran 1 was a huge milestone for the company, and even though a problem in the second stage engine prevented the rocket from reaching orbit, the flight proved to critics that a 3D printed rocket could fly and that their manufacturing techniques were sound. Almost immediately, Relativity Space announced they would begin work on a larger and more powerful successor to the Terran 1 which would be more competitive to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Now, after an administrative shakeup that saw Tim Ellis replaced as CEO, the company has released a nearly 45 minute long video detailing their plans for the next Terran rocket — and explaining why they won’t be 3D printing it.

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Polaris Dawn, And The Prudence Of A Short Spacewalk

October 3, 2024 by 39 Comments

For months before liftoff, the popular press had been hyping up the fact that the Polaris Dawn mission would include the first-ever private spacewalk. Not only would this be the first time anyone who wasn’t a professional astronaut would be opening the hatch of their spacecraft and venturing outside, but it would also be the first real-world test of SpaceX’s own extravehicular activity (EVA) suits. Whether you considered it a billionaire’s publicity stunt or an important step forward for commercial spaceflight, one thing was undeniable: when that hatch opened, it was going to be a moment for the history books.

But if you happened to have been watching the live stream of the big event earlier this month, you’d be forgiven for finding the whole thing a bit…abrupt. After years of training and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, crew members Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis both spent less than eight minutes outside of the Dragon capsule. Even then, you could argue that calling it a spacewalk would be a bit of a stretch.

Neither crew member ever fully exited the spacecraft, they simply stuck their upper bodies out into space while keeping their legs within the hatch at all times. When it was all said and done, the Dragon’s hatch was locked up tight less than half an hour after it was opened.

Likely, many armchair astronauts watching at home found the whole thing rather anticlimactic. But those who know a bit about the history of human spaceflight probably found themselves unable to move off of the edge of their seat until that hatch locked into place and all crew members were back in their seats.

Flying into space is already one of the most mindbogglingly dangerous activities a human could engage in, but opening the hatch and floating out into the infinite black once you’re out there is even riskier still. Thankfully the Polaris Dawn EVA appeared to go off without a hitch, but not everyone has been so lucky on their first trip outside the capsule.

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Japan’s First Commercial Rocket Debuts With A Bang

March 27, 2024 by 11 Comments

Though it suffered through decades of naysayers, these days you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would still argue that the commercialization of space has been anything but a resounding success for the United States. SpaceX has completely disrupted what was a stagnant industry — of the 108 US rocket launches in 2023, 98 of them were performed by the Falcon 9. Even the smaller players, such as Rocket Lab and Blue Origin, are innovating and bringing new technologies to market at a rate which the legacy aerospace companies haven’t been able to achieve since the Space Race.

So it’s no surprise that other countries are looking to replicate that success. Japan in particular has been following NASA’s playbook by offering lucrative space contracts to major domestic tech companies such as Mitsubishi, Honda, NEC, Toyota, Canon, Kyocera, and Sumitomo. Over the last several years this has resulted in the development of a number spacecraft and missions, such as the Hakuto-R Moon lander. It’s also laid the groundwork for exciting future projects, like the crewed lunar rover Toyota and Honda are jointly developing for the Artemis program.

But so far there’s been a crucial element missing from Japan’s commercial space aspirations, an orbital booster rocket. While the country has state-funded launch vehicles such as the H-IIA and H3 rockets, they come with the usual bureaucracy one would expect from a government program. In comparison, a privately developed and operated booster holds the promise of reduced costs and a higher launch cadence, especially if there are multiple competing vehicles on the market.

With the recent test flight of Space One’s KAIROS rocket, that final piece of the puzzle may finally be falling into place. While the launch unfortunately failed shortly after liftoff, the fact that the private rocket was able to get off the ground — literally and figuratively — is a promising sign of what’s to come.

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Crippled Peregrine Lander To Make Fiery Return Home

January 18, 2024 by 9 Comments

Within a few hours of this post going live, Astrobotic’s Peregrine spacecraft is expected to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere — a disappointing end to a mission that was supposed to put the first US lander on the Moon since the Apollo program ended in 1972.

In their twentieth mission update since Peregrine was carried into space on the inaugural flight of the United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket, Astrobotic explains that the craft has been put on a trajectory designed to ensure it breaks up over a remote area of the South Pacific.

Predicted re-renty point for the Peregrine lander.

It was previously hoped the lander, which suffered a severe system malfunction just hours after liftoff, could have at least made a close pass of the Moon in lieu of touching down. But mission controllers felt the more responsible approach was to have Peregrine make a controlled re-entry while they still had the ability to maneuver it. The alternative, allowing the craft to remain in an uncontrolled orbit between the Earth and Moon, could potentially have caused problems for future Artemis missions.

Over the last ten days, ground controllers at Astrobotic have been working to piece together what happened to the doomed lander, while at the same time demonstrating a remarkable level of transparency by keeping the public informed along the way. It’s now believed that the stream of gas being expelled from a rupture in one of the craft’s propellant tanks was acting as a sort of impromptu thruster. This not only made the craft difficult to keep oriented, but also wasted the propellants that were necessary to perform a soft landing on the lunar surface.

Although the craft was eventually brought under control, the damage to the mission had already been done. While this obviously isn’t the ending that Astrobotic was hoping for, we have no doubt that the company collected valuable data during the craft’s flight through space, which took it approximately 390,000 kilometers (242,000 miles) from Earth.

As for us space nerds, we won’t have to wait long before another lunar lander makes its attempt. Japan’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) should be touching down at around 10 AM Eastern on Friday (YouTube Live Stream), and the Nova-C lander from Intuitive Machines is scheduled to be launched aboard a Falcon 9 rocket sometime next month.