Every Cosmic Herald story on Rocket Lab — missions, launches, discoveries, and the business of space, newest first.
Rocket Lab filed a GAO protest on September 11 against NASA's ~$700 million award of the Mars Telecommunications Network orbiter to Blue Origin, arguing the evaluation broke with Congress's own eligibility rules.
Read the story →NASA picked Blue Origin over a competing Rocket Lab bid for a ~$700 million contract to build a Blue Ring-based Mars telecom orbiter due at the Red Planet by 2030.
Rocket Lab launched its 94th Electron before dawn on September 3, deploying a Synspective radar satellite in a mission that also doubled as a routine demonstration of the FAA's new unified Part 450 launch licensing rules.
Amazon, Lockheed, Northrop, Rocket Lab, and York each pocket roughly $12M to prove their satellites can talk to a backbone SpaceX is building — and to each other.
Firefly Aerospace's Q2 10-Q and August 11 investor call confirm the Alpha Block 2 debut has slipped to Q4 2026, after an in-flight booster rupture and a September 2025 test-stand explosion forced a heavier redesign.
Space Systems Command handed Rocket Lab $397 million to build orbital jet-tracking satellites for launch on its still-unflown Neutron rocket, part of a $615 million multi-vendor push to watch the skies from space instead of AWACS planes.
In a Space Force demo, True Anomaly's autonomous Jackal-0004 tracked, planned, and closed to 10 km of a dodging Rocket Lab satellite in under an hour of decision-to-intercept time.
The Space Force tripled its NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 ceiling to $17 billion across seven launch providers on July 17, 2026 — but a GAO report showing commercial launches at federal ranges have more than quadrupled since 2021 suggests the real bottleneck isn't rockets, it's the ground beneath them.
L3Harris and Sierra Space will build 36 new missile-tracking satellites for $1.75 billion, pushing the Space Development Agency's Tranche 3 constellation to 104 spacecraft in support of the Golden Dome missile-defense architecture.
Latitude, launch azimuth, and downrange safety corridors dictate where a rocket can lift off. A tour of Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg, Baikonur, Kourou, Wenchang, and Mahia shows the physics — and the history — behind each choice.
Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship, New Glenn, Vulcan Centaur, Neutron, Ariane 6, and six more launch vehicles compared on payload, cost per launch, and reusability, including China's Long March 10B, which on July 10 became just the third rocket in history to catch its own booster.
Space Systems Command has admitted Relativity Space and Impulse Space to the NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 contract pool, giving the two commercial newcomers a shot at up to $5.6 billion in military launch task orders.
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