Rocket Report: Falcon Heavy is back; Russia's Soyuz-5 finally debuts - Ars Technica

Overview

Rocket Report: Falcon Heavy is back; Russia’s Soyuz-5 finally debuts

Two launches this week delivered 61 more satellites to orbit for the Amazon Leo broadband network.

Details

Welcome to Edition 8.39 of the Rocket Report! There’s a lot of news to share in the universe of powerful rockets this week, and we’re delighted to sum it up in this week’s edition. The biggest rocket of them all, Starship, had a relatively quiet week as Space X aims to launch the vehicle’s next test flight, perhaps sometime in May. The results of that flight and the outcome of Blue Origin’s first attempt to land on the Moon with its Blue Moon cargo lander in the coming months should tell us a lot about NASA’s actual chances of putting astronauts on the lunar surface in 2028.

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.

These 12 companies are developing SBIs. The US Space Force released a list April 24 of a dozen companies working on Space-Based Interceptors for the Pentagon’s Golden Dome initiative, a multilayer defense system to shield US territory from drones and ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missile attacks, Ars reports. The roster of Golden Dome Space-Based Interceptor (SBI) contractors, some of which were previously reported, includes Anduril Industries, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics Mission Systems, GITAI USA, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Quindar, Raytheon, Sci-Tec, Space X, True Anomaly, and Turion Space. The companies will contribute in different areas to develop and deliver SBI prototypes for testing. The agreements have a maximum combined value of $3.2 billion. Contracts for full-scale production will come later with a significantly higher price tag.

If they’re ever built… SBIs are widely seen as the most challenging and expensive element for Golden Dome, but they may not be the panacea administration officials argued for when President Donald Trump signed the executive order for Golden Dome in January 2025. Gen. Michael Guetlein, director of the Golden Dome program, suggested SBIs for boost-phase missile intercepts, which Trump’s executive order originally called for, may not be built. “We are so focused on affordability. If we cannot do it affordably, we will not go into production,” Guetlein said in a hearing before the House Armed Services Strategic Forces subcommittee earlier this month. “We are looking at the threats from a multi-domain perspective to make sure I have redundant capabilities and I don’t have single points of failure,” he added. “So, if boost-phase intercept from space is not affordable and scalable, we will not produce it, because we have other options to get after it.”

Hello to Virgin Galactic’s new rocket plane. Virgin Galactic has completed structural assembly of the first Delta-class Space Ship and moved the vehicle into an adjacent facility in Mesa, Arizona, to begin ground tests, bringing the company a step closer to resuming commercial suborbital flights later this year, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. That is the plan, at least. A photo released by Virgin Galactic shows there’s much work to do inside and outside the vehicle. The most recent schedule update from Virgin Galactic called for flight testing of the first Delta-class spaceship to begin in the third quarter, followed by commercial private astronaut flights to suborbital space by the end of the year.

The only game in town... Virgin Galactic hasn’t flown to space since June 2024, but the company finds itself leading the suborbital human spaceflight market after Blue Origin suspended flights of its New Shepard suborbital booster earlier this year. Virgin decided to move on to the Delta-class program after completing 12 flights to the edge of space—above 80 km or 50 miles, as defined by the US government—with the previous-generation VSS Unity rocket plane. The Delta-class ships are designed for a higher flight rate.

The Moon as a dart board. Astronomers say the upper stage of a Falcon 9 rocket that launched in early 2025 will strike the Moon later this summer, likely on the near side of the Moon, Ars reports. Bill Gray, who writes the widely used Project Pluto software to track near-Earth objects, has published a comprehensive report on the impact expected to occur at 2:44 am ET (06:44 UTC) on August 5. The Falcon 9 rocket’s upper stage is 13.8 meters (45 feet) tall and has a 3.7-meter (12 feet) diameter. Since the Moon has no atmosphere, it will strike the lunar surface intact. Although the Moon will be visible to the eastern half of the US and Canada, and in much of South America, Gray said he believes the impact will probably be too faint to be seen by Earth-based telescopes.

This happens... Four years ago, Ars reported that astronomers believed another Falcon 9 upper stage would strike the Moon. However, subsequent analysis revealed that the object was, in fact, an upper stage from the Chinese Chang’e 5-T1 mission. Gray said there is no doubt that this object is the Falcon 9 upper stage because it has been tracked since launch. There is no risk from its impact to anything on the Moon. It is a dead world, and there are no human-landed objects nearby.

Ukraine has a Russian spaceport in its sights. If you believe official Russian reports, the country’s northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months, Ars reports. The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to Space X’s Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine’s military communications infrastructure. Plesetsk is a military base located in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region, some 500 miles north of Moscow. Russian officials have not identified the source of the drones, but Russia’s defense ministry has ascribed other drone swarms in the Arkhangelsk region to Ukraine. Ukrainian drones have routinely struck deep into Russian territory, hitting Russian military bases, oil refineries, and the Russian capital.

Cloaked launch schedule… Since the reported drone incursions, the Russian government put a tighter lid on information about its launches from Plesetsk. Authorities typically publish airspace warning notices called NOTAMs advising pilots to steer clear of a rocket’s flight path and downrange drop zones where spent booster rockets fall back to Earth. These NOTAMs usually cover a few minutes to a few hours for a primary launch date, and perhaps a backup date in the event of a delay. The notices accompanying the most recent launches from Plesetsk covered much longer time periods, with daily windows of up to 10 hours over up to 14 consecutive days. This makes it more difficult to pin down when a launch will occur ahead of time.

Russia debuts new rocket. Russia’s new Soyuz-5 rocket has taken to the skies at long last, Space.com reports. The Soyuz-5 lifted off for the first time ever on Thursday, rising off a pad at the Russia-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 2 pm EDT (18:00 UTC). Things apparently went well on the flight, which was a brief suborbital shakeout cruise. “The first and second stages of Soyuz 5 performed as planned, and a mockup was launched onto the calculated suborbital trajectory, followed by a reentry into an area in the Pacific Ocean previously closed to shipping and aviation,” officials with Russia’s federal space agency, Roscosmos, said via the Telegram app on Thursday.

Resurrecting Zenit… Russia has been developing the Soyuz-5 rocket since 2017. It is a new vehicle, but does not represent a major leap forward in technology, Ars reported last year. The Soyuz-5 is a replacement for the medium-class Zenit rocket, which had tanks manufactured in Ukraine coupled with Russian-made engines. The Zenit last flew in 2017. It was developed in the 1980s, before the breakup of the Soviet Union, and continued flying for decades while Russia and Ukraine remained on good terms. That changed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The Soyuz-5 uses the same basic type of Russia-built RD-171 engine that flew on the Zenit rocket, but the tanks and structures are also built within Russia’s borders. Soyuz-5’s performance slots it in between Russia’s smaller legacy Soyuz-2 rocket and the heavy-lift Angara-A5. (submitted by Ell Pea Tea)

FAA tells launch companies it’s time to pay up. The Federal Aviation Administration is ready to begin collecting user fees for the first time for commercial launches and reentries, which could generate millions of dollars annually, Space News reports. The legal foundation for the user fees was signed into law last year by President Donald Trump as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which called for the FAA to phase in user fees over eight years, beginning in 2026. The money will go into a trust fund to help pay for the operating costs of the FAA’s commercial space office. The FAA will assess the user fee as the lesser of two amounts. For 2026, that fee is 25 cents per pound of payload, capped at $30,000 per launch or reentry. The FAA will retroactively charge launch and reentry operators for fees accrued since the beginning of this year.

Space X will pay most… The company most impacted by the user fees will be Space X, which owns and operates the vast majority of US launch and reentry vehicles. Based on the assessment of 25 cents per pound of payload, Space X initially would pay a fee of between

Atlas V launches again for Amazon. United Launch Alliance completed its second Atlas V rocket launch of the month Monday, marking the company’s fastest turnaround between two Atlas V missions from the same launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Spaceflight Now reports. It beats the previous record by nearly three days. Onboard the Atlas V rocket was a batch of 29 Amazon Leo satellites. This was ULA’s sixth flight delivering production versions of Amazon’s broadband Internet satellites to orbit and its seventh overall, including the two demo satellites launched on the Protoflight mission in October 2023.

The end is near… This was the 108th launch of an Atlas V to date. ULA is hitting a stride with the Atlas V rocket as the company’s new Vulcan launch vehicle remains grounded due to a booster anomaly on its most recent flight in February. But the Atlas V program is winding down, with hardware for just eight more Atlas Vs in ULA’s inventory, including two more for the Amazon Leo constellation. ULA is on contract to launch 38 Vulcan rockets to deploy satellites for the Amazon Leo network, but those missions are on hold pending the investigation into Vulcan’s solid rocket motor problem. (submitted by Ell Pea Tea)

Ariane launches for Amazon, from the Amazon. Less than three days after the Atlas V launch from Florida, another cluster of 32 Amazon Leo satellites rode a European Ariane 6 rocket into orbit from the Guiana Space Center in South America, European Spaceflight reports. The rocket launched in its Ariane 64 configuration that features four solid-fuel boosters. The first of the 32 satellites was separated from the rocket’s upper stage just under an hour-and-a-half after liftoff. All 32 satellites were deployed over 12 separation events lasting roughly 25 minutes in total.

Hitting a cadence… Arianespace has been contracted by Amazon to carry out a total of 18 missions supporting the deployment of its satellite constellation, which is intended to compete with Space X’s Starlink global broadband network. Arianespace has indicated that it plans to launch up to eight Ariane 6 flights in 2026, a significant portion of which will be dedicated to working through its backlog for Amazon. (submitted by Ell Pea Tea)

Lofty launch targets for New Glenn. Earlier this week, Blue Origin posted a job opportunity for a “senior manager” to oversee tank fabrication for “Quattro,” and the description contained some intriguing information, Ars reports. Quattro is the company’s nickname for a more powerful upper stage for the New Glenn rocket, which will feature four BE-3U engines instead of the two currently powering the booster. Blue Origin revealed plans for this more powerful variant of New Glenn, 9×4 (nine first stage engines, and four upper stage engines), last November. The 9×4 could debut as soon as next year, and the person Blue hires for upper stage tank fabrication will be charged with executing a “rate ramp” of 12 per year to 100 per year by 2029.

Miles to go… The upper stage is currently not reusable, so each new build will equate to one launch. Blue Origin has a long way to go before achieving 100 New Glenn flights, and doing it within three years sounds overly optimistic. The company has a lot on its plate with development of a human-rated Moon lander for NASA, a standardized spacecraft bus and space tug called Blue Ring, and other lesser known projects. The New Glenn rocket’s current upper stage, with two BE-3U engines, failed on the most recent launch earlier this month. But Blue Origin has talented engineers and deep pockets thanks to its owner Jeff Bezos, so it’s worth taking the goals seriously. Money solves many, if not all, ills.

Welcome back, Falcon Heavy. A triple-core Space X Falcon Heavy, the company’s most powerful operational rocket, blasted off from Florida Wednesday, boosting a Via Sat Internet satellite into space, the company’s third in a globe-spanning fleet of high-speed broadband relay stations, CBS News reports. Along with putting the Via Sat-3 satellite into its planned preliminary orbit, the rocket’s two side boosters, heralded by competing sonic booms, executed on-target touchdowns on separate pads at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station after boosting the vehicle out of the dense lower atmosphere. It was the 12th flight of a Falcon Heavy rocket since the booster’s maiden launch in 2018 and the first since October 2024 when Space X sent NASA’s Europa probe on the way to Jupiter.

A healthy backlog… Despite the long gap between flights, Space X has quite a few Falcon Heavy missions planned over the next few years. The next one is set to launch NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope from Florida in September. Another Falcon Heavy will launch a commercial lunar lander for Astrobotic, perhaps toward the end of this year. Space X has at least a dozen more Falcon Heavy flights on contract through the end of the decade. (submitted by Ell Pea Tea)

Artemis III core stage arrives at KSC. The largest piece of hardware for NASA’s Artemis III mission arrived at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on Monday after a trip by barge from its factory in New Orleans, Florida Today reports. Ground teams at Kennedy offloaded the core stage—still lacking its engine section—from the barge Tuesday and transferred it inside the Vehicle Assembly Building. There, technicians will install the core stage’s four RS-25 main engines and prepare the rocket for stacking.

Next year, maybe… NASA hopes to launch Artemis III next year on a mission to Earth orbit. The astronauts on Artemis III will perform rendezvous and docking tests in orbit between NASA’s Orion crew capsule and one or both human-rated lunar landers developed by Space X and Blue Origin. The agency’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, told lawmakers on Monday that Space X and Blue Origin say they could have their spacecraft ready for the Artemis III mission in Earth orbit in late 2027, somewhat later than NASA’s previous schedule of mid-2027. If Artemis III flies next year, NASA hopes to follow it with a human lunar landing attempt in 2028. (submitted by Ell Pea Tea)

May 1: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-38 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 17:35 UTC

May 3: Falcon 9 | CAS500-2 rideshare | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 06:59 UTC

May 6: Falcon 9 | Starlink 17-29 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 02:00 UTC

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Key Takeaways

• Rocket Report: Falcon Heavy is back; Russia’s Soyuz-5 finally debuts

• Two launches this week delivered 61 more satellites to orbit for the Amazon Leo broadband network

• As always, we welcome reader submissions

• These 12 companies are developing SBIs