Commercial spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, private space stations, and the new space economy.
SpaceX says Starship Flight 15 will try to catch both the Super Heavy booster and the never-caught Ship upper stage, and Musk wants weekly flights in early 2027. The milestone is real; the timeline still has to be earned.
Read the story →Make operators post a $200,000 refundable bond before launch and give it back once the satellite deorbits: a new Nature Communications model says that cuts the derelict mass left in low Earth orbit each year by more than a third, and it still helps when only a fifth of the market takes part.
A Falcon 9 on SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 rideshare carried Viasat's Rocket Lab-built Maxwell and an SES Space and Defense demonstrator to orbit Oct. 20. Both test whether commercial networks can take over the relay work done by NASA's aging TDRS fleet.
After a weather scrub, SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 now targets Oct. 20 with 32 payloads, including a second Starfall reentry capsule and Varda's W-7 drug-research capsule. Getting things back from orbit is turning into a business of its own.
Months after a static-test explosion at LC-36A, Blue Origin is announcing new Florida pads, two landing vessels and a $330 million upper-stage factory expansion, while the FAA weighs raising New Glenn's annual cap at the pad from 12 launches to 50.
The FAA has opened an environmental review of SpaceX's plan to go from 25 Starship launches a year at Boca Chica to as many as 456, with up to 912 landings. Public comments are due Nov. 30.
Varda Space Industries put two reentry capsules, W-8 and W-9, into orbit on one Falcon 9 rideshare, plans to bring three vehicles home to South Australia before Christmas and has seven missions lined up for 2027. Its CEO is already worried about a rocket shortage once Falcon 9 retires.
NASA has released its final request for proposals for commercial space stations in low Earth orbit. Bids are due Dec. 8 and awards are expected in spring 2027, so industry now has two months to show that a privately run station can pay for itself.
NASA has given Modulate Space a roughly $38 million fixed-price contract to build a 5G network with Wi-Fi 6, first as a lab "Network-in-a-Box" and then as a flight demonstration on the lunar surface in late 2028.
Katalyst's LINK spacecraft deorbited Sept. 25 after an 85-day, $30 million attempt to reboost NASA's Swift Observatory failed to reach capture — but Swift itself is back doing science as it sinks toward reentry.
NASA added Blue Origin's New Glenn 9x4 to its NLS II launch contract on Sept. 29, 2026. It makes the rocket eligible to compete for missions, but no mission, first-flight date or orbital demo has been announced.
On its 14th flight, Starship finally reached orbit despite early engine shutdowns on both stages, deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, and splashed down north of Hawaii about three hours after liftoff.
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