Commercial
Commercial spaceflight news from Cosmic Herald — SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, private space stations, and the new space economy.
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Commercial
Starship made it to orbit. What that actually means for space access.
SpaceX's Starship — the largest rocket ever built — has now completed an orbital test flight with both stages recovered. The implications for what space access could cost over the next decade are difficult to overstate, and the aerospace industry is quietly reorganizing around that possibility.
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Commercial
ULA's Vulcan rocket is flying. What it means for the launch market.
United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur has completed its certification flights and is entering regular commercial service. The rocket is designed to handle everything ULA's Atlas V and Delta IV carried — and it's arriving at a moment when the launch market is more competitive than it has ever been.
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Commercial
New Glenn flew. Now Blue Origin has to prove it can do it again.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket reached orbit on its first attempt — a significant achievement for a company that spent years being compared unfavorably to SpaceX. But a single successful launch is a beginning, not a business. What comes next will define whether New Glenn becomes a serious player.
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Commercial
A startup is building a space station. Haven-1 is closer than most people realize.
Vast Space is developing Haven-1, a small commercial space station aimed at hosting private astronauts and eventually science payloads. SpaceX is launching it. The timeline is aggressive and the company is a newcomer, but the hardware is real and the contracts are signed.
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Commercial
Some things can only be made in zero gravity. A small industry is building the infrastructure to make them.
Microgravity enables manufacturing processes impossible on Earth: near-perfect optical fibers, protein crystals for drug development, organs grown without scaffolding, and alloys that separate under gravity. A nascent commercial sector is building the satellites and ISS platforms to exploit these properties.
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Commercial
SpaceX has launched more than 6,000 satellites. Astronomers are not happy about it.
Starlink is the largest satellite constellation in history — and the most disruptive to ground-based astronomy. SpaceX has made mitigation efforts, but the fundamental tension between dense LEO constellations and telescope surveys remains unresolved as competitors plan their own systems.
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Commercial
SpaceX cut the cost of reaching orbit by 90 percent. Here's what that has and hasn't changed.
The cost of putting a kilogram in low Earth orbit dropped from roughly $50,000-$70,000 in the Space Shuttle era to under $3,000 on a Falcon 9 rideshare. This 90-percent price reduction has transformed who can access space — but it hasn't yet transformed what they do there.
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Commercial
Planet Labs photographs every point on Earth every day. What that means for science and surveillance.
Planet Labs operates the largest commercial Earth observation constellation in history — over 200 Dove cubesats producing daily global coverage. The dense time series enables monitoring of agriculture, deforestation, urban growth, and disaster response at scales and cadences previously impossible.
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Commercial
Satellites are replaced when they run out of fuel. A nascent industry wants to refuel and repair them instead.
In-space servicing — refueling, repairing, and repositioning satellites — could extend the operational life of billion-dollar space assets by decades. Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicles have already done it commercially. The next generation aims to do it at scale.
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Commercial
The company quietly building the ISS's replacement, one pressurized module at a time
Axiom Space has flown four private astronaut missions to the ISS, is designing the spacesuits for Artemis moon walks, and is under contract to attach its own commercial module to the station before 2030. When the ISS is decommissioned, Axiom's section will detach and operate independently.
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Commercial
The satellites won. Now astronomers are learning to live with 40,000 of them.
Starlink, OneWeb, and their competitors have fundamentally changed the night sky. The question is no longer whether to stop the constellations — it's whether engineering fixes and international regulation can preserve professional astronomy before Vera Rubin comes online.
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Commercial
With the ISS nearing retirement, the race to build its replacement is on
The International Space Station is slated to retire around 2030, and NASA is betting that private companies will build what comes next. A wave of record funding in 2026 is fueling a contest among several rival stations to be first.
