Category: Launches & Spacecraft

Blue Origin's big rocket is getting a little bigger.

Jeff Bezos' company announced today (Nov. 5) that it has developed a third stage for its New Glenn rocket, which it says will make the powerful launcher more capable and flexible.

The stage, called the GS3, "enhances New Glenn's capabilities," Blue Origin said in a blog post today. "The third stage enables direct deployment of satellite constellations to GEO [geostationary orbit] and supports heavy-lift science and exploration missions to the moon and deep space."

New Glenn is a two-stage vehicle at the moment. Its reusable first stage is powered by seven of Blue Origin's BE-4 engines, and its second stage features two of the company's BE-3Us. The rocket stands 322 feet (98 meters) tall and can haul 14.3 tons (13 metric tons) to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) and 50 tons (45 metric tons) to low Earth orbit (LEO).

These are the specs for the standard, or "7x2," version of New Glenn. Last year, Blue Origin announced that it's developing a super-heavy variant known as the 9x4, because it will feature nine first-stage BE-4s and four upper-stage BE-3Us. The 9x4 will be nearly 400 feet (122 m) tall, and it will be able to loft 15.4 tons (14 metric tons) to GTO and 77 tons (70 metric tons) to LEO, according to Blue Origin.

New Glenn has flown three times to date, each time in the 7x2 configuration. The rocket debuted in January 2025, then launched again in November 2025 and again on April 19 of this year.

Things didn't go according to plan on that latest mission. The rocket deployed AST SpaceMobile's BlueBird 7 communications satellite into the wrong orbit, and the spacecraft ended up being lost.

Another setback came just a month later: On May 28, New Glenn exploded on the pad during a routine engine test at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Blue Origin has been working ever since to rebuild the pad and get New Glenn ready for its fourth flight, which is expected to occur late this year.

We now know that Blue Origin has also been working on the GS3 while those repairs were underway. The new stage will be powered by one BE-7 engine, which the company developed for use on its Blue Moon spacecraft, one of the two private vehicles that NASA selected to be crewed lunar landers for its Artemis program. (The other is SpaceX's Starship.)

Blue Moon landing missions won't need to launch on GS3-equipped New Glenn rockets, according to Blue Origin. But the third stage "can support sustained operations around the moon," the company wrote in today's blog post. "By delivering significant payload mass directly to trans-lunar injection (TLI), GS3 enables faster transit times while preserving propellant for on-orbit operations."

And there's already demand for such services: Blue Origin also announced today that a government customer (which it did not name) has booked a GS3 mission to cislunar (Earth-moon) space, with launch targeted for 2028.

And the company dropped yet more news today — that it's working on a new first-stage engine, called Northstar.

Like Blue Origin's other booster engine, the BE-4, Northstar burns liquid oxygen and liquid methane propellant, a combination known as methalox. But the new engine is more powerful and less complex.

"Compared to the BE-4 engine, Northstar reduces mass by 30% and parts count by 50%, while increasing thrust from 640,000 to 715,000 pounds-force," Blue Origin said in a second blog post today. "Manufacturing advancements have also significantly shortened production timelines, enabling assembly in less than a day."

Northstar went from program approval to development testing in just 11 months, according to the company. But today's update did not say when the new engine will fly for the first time.

The launch of NASA's Artemis II mission in April 2026 caused significant disturbances in Earth's ionosphere that could have triggered temporary, localized errors in GPS positioning, a new study has found.

The study, by a team of researchers from National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan, analyzed data from high-precision networks of fixed, ground-based GPS receivers, used by U.S. scientific institutions to measure the minuscule motions of Earth's tectonic plates in the lead-up to earthquakes. By measuring how long it takes GPS signals to travel from space to ground stations, the researchers were able to reconstruct how the passage of the Artemis II mission's Space Launch System (SLS) rocket changed the concentrations of free electrons in the ionosphere — the electrically charged layer of Earth's atmosphere at altitudes above 30 miles (50 kilometers).

The measurements found that the ionospheric disturbances resulting from the sheer power of the Artemis II launch were more significant than any caused by other rocket launches to date and up to ten times more intense than those observed following the test launches of SpaceX's Starship, which is twice as powerful as the SLS based on liftoff thrust.

Artemis II saw humans return to the lunar space for the first time in more than fifty years, a mission that NASA hopes will pave the way for lunar landings and eventually the establishment of a sustained human presence on the moon.

During the mission's launch, ground-based GPS stations detected changes in the ionospheric electron density equivalent to positioning errors of several meters. Such inaccuracies could easily throw self-driving cars off track, potentially causing traffic collisions, according to Charles Lin, an earth science professor at National Cheng Kung University and one of the co-authors of the paper.

"A positioning error of a couple of meters is enough to cause an autonomous car to change lanes," Lin told Space.com. "It could have a strong impact not only on self-driving cars but also on drone positioning."

GPS receivers determine their position on Earth's surface at any single moment by measuring their distance to four different GPS satellites. When concentrations of free electrons in the upper atmosphere change — for example during a solar storm or after a rocket passage — the signal reaches Earth either faster or more slowly, resulting in inaccurate measurements.

Satellites of the U.S. GPS constellation and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems orbit Earth at an altitude of around 12,550 miles (20,200 kilometers), far above the upper edge of the ionosphere, meaning the positioning, navigation and timing signal these satellites transmit must pass through this volatile atmospheric layer to reach Earth.

Severe solar storms can disrupt GPS signals for days by dumping energy into the atmosphere in the form of charged particles from the sun. The impact of rocket launches, triggered by the supersonic flight of the rocket body through the high-altitude air, is much more short-lived. As the rocket soars up, it creates a shock wave, which virtually punches a hole into the ionosphere.

In the aftermath of the Artemis II launch, the researchers observed two such holes — one left behind by the 212-foot-long (65 meters) SSL core stage, and the other caused by two subsequent thruster burns of the rocket's upper stage. In both cases, these holes stretched across the American continent from East to West like giant 3,100-mile (5,000-kilometer) contrails.

Despite the enormous power of the SLS core stage, the disturbance caused by the second-stage burns directly inside the ionosphere was far more prominent.

Those two burns, at altitudes around 115 miles (185 kilometers), took place more than an hour after lift-off and allowed the Orion capsule to break free from Earth's gravity and head for the moon.

"Rocket launches from the ground to space produce that kind of effect, but we have never seen this kind of orbital maneuver in an interplanetary mission," said Lin. "In the future, as we are going to see many more missions going to the moon and to Mars, these space weather effects will become much more significant."

The study was published as a pre-print online in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Rocket Lab launched its 99th mission to date today (Nov. 2), sending a private Japanese Earth-observing satellite toward orbit.

An Electron rocket lifted off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site today at 11:41 a.m. EST (1641 GMT; 5:41 a.m. on Nov. 3 local New Zealand time).

The mission, which Rocket Lab calls "The Sea God Surveys," is carrying an Earth-observing radar satellite to low Earth orbit (LEO) for the Japanese company iQPS. All went according to plan: The spacecraft was deployed at an altitude of 357 miles (575 kilometers), Rocket Lab announced about 56 minutes after launch.

"The Sea God Surveys" was Rocket Lab's 10th launch to date for iQPS, which is assembling a constellation of three dozen synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites in LEO.

SAR satellites offer advantages over those that view our planet in optical wavelengths. They can peer through cloud cover, for example, and study our planet at night as well as during the day.

Today's launch was the 99th overall for Rocket Lab and the 90th for the two-stage, 59-foot-tall (18 meters) Electron, which gives small satellites dedicated rides to space. The workhorse vehicle has now flown 17 times this year.

Rocket Lab's other nine launches to date have been conducted by HASTE, a suborbital version of Electron that allows customers to test their tech in the hypersonic flight environment. HASTE (short for "Hypersonic Accelerator Suborbital Test Electron") debuted in June 2023 and generally flies classified payloads.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 11:55 a.m. ET on Nov. 2 with news of successful launch, then again at 1 p.m. EST with news of successful satellite deployment.

SpaceX celebrated Halloween with an early-morning launch from California.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base today (Oct. 31) at 12:04 a.m. EDT (0404 GMT; 9:04 p.m. on Oct. 30 local time), sending 27 of the company's Starlink internet satellites to low Earth orbit (LEO).

The Falcon 9's first stage came back to Earth as planned, touching down about 8.5 minutes after launch on the SpaceX drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You," which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean.

It was the 18th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1093. The record for a SpaceX first stage is 37, set this past August by the booster B1067.

The Falcon 9's upper stage did its job as well today, deploying the 27 Starlink satellites into LEO about 62 minutes after launch. They're joining more than 11,000 spacecraft in the Starlink megaconstellation, which is by far the largest satellite network ever assembled.

Today's launch was the 118th Falcon 9 flight of 2026 so far. More than 70% of these missions have been devoted to building out the Starlink network.

SpaceX has also launched its Falcon Heavy and Starship rockets three times apiece this year. Falcon Heavy is an operational vehicle, but Starship remains in the test-flight phase. The company is currently gearing up for another Starship launch, which is expected to take place sometime in November.

India bolstered its homegrown satellite-navigation system today (Oct. 30).

A GSLV Mark II rocket launched the nation's NVS-03 satellite from Satish Dhawan Space Centre today at 2:21 p.m. EDT (1821 GMT and 11:51 p.m. India Standard Time).

Everything went well: The rocket deployed NVS-03 into geostationary transfer orbit as planned, officials with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced on X about 30 minutes after liftoff.

NVS-03 is the third next-gen satellite that India has launched for the Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC), its version of the United States' Global Positioning System (GPS).

NavIC operates on a smaller scale than its American counterpart, however. It's "a regional navigation satellite system designed to provide accurate Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) service to users in India as well as the region extending about 1,500 km [930 miles] beyond the Indian landmass, which is its primary service area," ISRO officials wrote in the NVS-03 launch brochure.

The Indian constellation currently consists of three fully functioning satellites, and it requires four to provide PNT services. So today's launch was a big deal — and a lot of eyes will be watching NVS-03's commissioning and checkout phase.

Today's launch was the 14th to date for the GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) Mark II, a three-stage rocket that stands 170 feet (52 meters) tall. Twelve of those 14 liftoffs have been successful.

The GSLV Mark II debuted in 2010, the same year its predecessor retired. That previous launchers, the Mark I, flew a total of six times, with two failures.

NVS-03 was the fourth Indian launch of 2026 and the third operated by ISRO. The fourth was mounted by Skyroot Aerospace, which in July became the first Indian company ever to successfully reach orbit.

SpaceX just checked another big box on the path to its 15th Starship test flight, which promises to be pretty epic.

The company conducted static-fire tests with Starship's Ship upper stage on Monday (Oct. 26) and Tuesday (Oct. 27), igniting its Raptor engines while the vehicle, known as Ship 42, remained anchored to the ground.

"Ship 42 static fires complete. The Starship preparing for Flight 15 performed a full duration, six-engine static fire, and fired a single Raptor engine to simulate a deorbit burn," SpaceX said in a Wednesday (Oct. 28) X post that shared video of the tests.

The Ship 42 tests come on the heels of a successful 33-engine static fire with Booster 22, the Starship Super Heavy first stage that will conduct Flight 15. Everything therefore appears to remain on track for Flight 15, which SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk has said is targeted for sometime in November.

All Starship launches are worth watching, but this one should be particularly exciting. Musk said last week that SpaceX will try to catch both Ship and Super Heavy during Flight 15, provided the company can get regulatory approval to do so.

These catches are performed by the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower at Starbase, SpaceX's Starship launch and manufacturing hub in South Texas. The company has snagged Super Heavy on three Starship test flights to date but has not yet attempted a Ship capture.

Double chopstick catches will be the norm on operational Starship launches, if all goes to plan. This recovery strategy will reduce the time needed to get Super Heavy and Ship ready for reflight, significantly boosting launch cadences, according to SpaceX. (Starship is designed to be fully reusable, unlike SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, whose upper stages are expendable.)

SpaceX is already riding a historic success with Starship: The megarocket reached orbit for the first time ever on Flight 14, which took place on Sept. 28.

And Ship deployed 26 of the company's next-gen Starlink V3 satellites during that flight, starting the assembly of a new broadband constellation that Musk has said will eventually consist of 100,000 spacecraft.

Starlink V3 missions will therefore make up a significant percentage of Starship launches for the foreseeable future. But SpaceX also plans to use the megarocket to build an even bigger constellation in Earth orbit — Starmind, which could harbor one million of the company's AI data center satellites.

The U.S. Air Force is opening up about the SpaceX Starfall cargo capsule it flew on a recent rideshare mission to orbit — and showing off what the capsule carried.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) completed a point-to-point rocket cargo delivery test using the secretive uncrewed reentry vehicle, confirming on social media its recovery of the package in the Pacific Ocean. "With support from SpaceX, the AFRL agile cargo pods were recovered after splashdown," the AFRL wrote in an X post on Oct. 26.

The Starfall capsule launched on a Falcon 9 rocket as a part of SpaceX's Bandwagon-5 mission, which lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Oct. 20. Starfall carried a number of AFRL-developed cargo pods designed to transport military equipment through space and back to Earth. The successful recovery of the pods marks a big step forward in the Air Force's effort to examine the viability of point-to-point (P2D) rocket cargo missions.

"This was a critical achievement to demonstrate the potential of Rocket Cargo delivery for point-to-point rapid global mobility for the Future Force," said AFRL Technology Transition Office director Adam Remaly in a press release on Oct. 20.

Photos included in the AFRL social media post show military personnel unpacking a recovered cargo pod for inspection. Each pod contained sensors to monitor temperature conditions through launch, reentry and splashdown, as well as to measure the shock and vibration forces exerted on its cargo.

For its first Starfall mission, AFRL packed its cargo pods with representative items like medical equipment, food ration packs and other military kit that might be helpful for surviving an emergency somewhere that's tough to reach via conventional transportation. To that end, AFRL said it also conducted a fit check of a UNI-PAC III life raft inside Starfall, which could potentially be included in future tests.

"Researchers paid special attention to the electronics equipment and survival gear, including a SATCOM-enabled tracker, batteries, a reverse osmosis desalinator, survival gear and emergency medical equipment," AFRL said in its release.

SpaceX's disk-shaped Starfall capsule made a quiet debut on a Falcon 9 launch in June, and the company has remained relatively quiet about the vehicle to date. Most of what we do know comes from a Federal Aviation Administration environmental assessment published earlier this year.

The hockey-puck-looking vehicle measures approximately 10.2 feet (3.1 meters) across and can return up to 2,200 pounds (1,000 kilograms) of cargo from orbit, according to that report. And it sports a carbon fiber heat shield and compressed gas thrusters for attitude control during reentry, as well as a parachute system for precision landings.

AFRL will assess the data recovered from the Oct. 20 mission to contribute to its broader Rocket Cargo initiative, which the Air Force hopes can evolve to the transportation of tens of tons of cargo per launch. That would exceed Starfall's mass capacity, but Starfall isn't the only vehicle the military has considered for its Rocket Cargo program.

SpaceX's much larger Starship rocket, which is still under development, was a likely candidate for tests at Johnston Atoll, a remote Pacific bird sanctuary where the Air Force proposed building a pair of landing pads for cargo delivery tests. However, those plans were suspended in July 2025 amid environmental concerns, and the status of the search for an alternative site is unclear.

A U.S. military intelligence agency has released an incredible new photograph of China's secretive space plane, showing it docked to another spacecraft in orbit.

The photograph was taken in 2024 by Vantor's WorldView 3 satellite, from a distance of 56 miles (90 kilometers). Ground-based observers have previously photographed Shenlong in orbit, but this new photo from Vantor, taken from space, reveals new details about the mysterious spacecraft in stunning clarity, with a resolution of 4.5 centimeters (1.8 inches) per pixel. The image was included in a new report released by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessing the scope and breadth of adversary threats in space.

In the image, the robotic Shenlong space plane can be seen docked to another satellite that has its solar panels deployed. It's not yet known which satellite that may have been. Shenlong's payload bay doors can also be seen in the photograph, in an open position.

Those payload doors may offer clues about what Shenlong is doing on its fourth mission, which launched in February 2026. China's space agency has stated only that Shenlong helps test technologies that "will pave the way for more convenient and affordable round-trip methods for the peaceful use of space in the future."

But observers have seen Shenlong release other objects while in orbit, such as in June 2026, when American space intelligence company LeoLabs reported that itdetected a new object in the vicinity of the space plane.

"Following additional observations across our global network and analysis via LeoLabs Delta, we have independently cataloged this object and assessed with high confidence that it was released from the Chinese space plane," LeoLabs stated at the time. "This activity is consistent with sub-satellite deployments conducted by the space plane in previous missions."

A similar event happened during Shenlong's third mission, which ended in 2024. On its second mission in 2023, the space plane also released an object and may have conducted what are known as proximity and rendezvous operations, in which two spacecraft maneuver close to one another.

It may have been that the spacecraft was releasing unnecessary hardware before landing, however. Like all things military space, few details have been released to the public about Shenlong's operations.

The United States, similarly, operates a secretive robotic space plane, the Boeing-built X-37B, and rarely releases concrete details about its capabilities or its missions. In February 2025, the U.S. Space Force released its first photo of the X-37B in space, offering a rare glimpse at the space plane in operation. The photo appeared to show it in a high Earth orbit with what appear to be its payload bay doors open.

In 2023, Space Force released its first official painting, depicting an X-37B-like space plane in orbit above Earth, intercepting another satellite.

With China and the United States currently jockeying for the lead in what many observers have called a new Space Race, rare glimpses like these images may be a way of militaries and intelligence agencies of teasing capabilities without fully revealing them to the public.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Cowboy Space just showed us how it plans to become a big player in the final frontier.

The California-based company, which is run by Robinhood co-founder Baiju Bhatt, intends to operate a constellation of 20,000 AI data centers in low Earth orbit (LEO). It will build those satellites in house and launch them on a homegrown rocket — a vehicle Cowboy Space unveiled here on Monday night (Oct. 26), at an event it called "Big Sky Rising."

"It's a fundamentally novel approach to rocketry in the modern era, in our opinion," Bhatt said during the event. "The idea is that you have a two-stage rocket where the upper stage of the rocket itself transforms into the satellite."

That rocket is called Big Iron, Bhatt told us on Monday night. And so is the data-center satellite, as both are considered to be part of the same system.

The stainless-steel rocket will be 282 feet (86 meters) tall and 15.4 feet (4.7 m) wide. It will be powered by Cowboy Space's Clydesdale engines — nine in the first stage and one in the upper stage, the same configuration employed by SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 rocket. And, like the Raptor engines that power another SpaceX launcher, the giant Starship, Clydesdale will burn liquid oxygen and liquid methane, a combo known as methalox.

Big Iron's first stage will be reusable; an animation Bhatt showed during "Big Sky Rising" showed the booster coming down for a landing on a ship at sea, as Falcon 9 first stages often do these days.

The upper stage, meanwhile, will stay in orbit as a Big Iron satellite. The spacecraft will tip the scales here on Earth at about 33,000 pounds (15,000 kilograms), and, after unfurling its solar panels, it will be about 433 feet (132 m) long.

The payload fairing that protected the satellite during launch will morph into a radiator, which will dump into space the prodigious heat generated by Big Iron's GPUs (general processing units). And there will be a lot of GPUs: Each satellite will carry five racks of them, Bhatt said, which will provide about 1 megawatt of compute payload.

Big Iron will therefore be much larger than an "imperial-class satellite" — Bhatt's term for SpaceX's planned Starmind AI data center spacecraft, each of which will have a solar wingspan of 246 feet (75 m) and boast about 250 kW of compute payload.

Cowboy Space plans to operate about 20,000 Big Iron satellites in LEO, a constellation it calls Stampede. Each rocket will carry just one of these satellites to orbit, so it will take 20,000 launches to build Stampede — and, likely, several thousand more every year to maintain it at that number.

Cowboy Space therefore intends to launch very often — multiple times per day, from launch complexes it calls Trailheads. The company has not yet announced where these complexes will be, but each one will likely feature four active launch mounts, Bhatt said on Monday night.

And not all of these launches will serve Stampede. Toward the end of "Big Sky Rising," Bhatt announced that Big Iron will also launch payloads for customers, a service that Cowboy Space calls Big Iron Express.

The first flights of this new rocket are a few years away. Cowboy Space — which was founded in 2024 as the power-beaming company Aetherflux — is still building and testing its Clydesdale engine and says it aims to launch Big Iron for the first time in December 2028.

"Now, a lot of things have to go right for that to happen; it's not a guarantee," Bhatt said. "I think it's ambitious. But if it wasn't ambitious, I wouldn't be an entrepreneur."

Cowboy Space is operating one piece of space hardware at the moment, by the way — a satellite called Reason-1, which launched on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare mission on Oct. 1.

"Its job is to prove out power beaming: using a high-power laser to transfer energy from low Earth orbit to a receiver on the ground," Cowboy Space said via X on Sept. 28. "If you want to build data centers in space, you have to master the optical systems between orbit and Earth. This is where that journey begins."

A new stack of Starlink satellites is now in orbit following an early morning SpaceX launch from California.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 3:25 a.m. EDT (0725 GMT) on Oct. 27, from from Pad 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base. The rocket delivered the 27 satellites of Starlink Group 15-16 to low Earth orbit (LEO), and successfully executed its first stage booster landing.

The mission's booster, B1082, cut its engines and disengaged from Falcon 9's upper stage approximately 2.5 minutes into flight, and adjusted its trajectory for a touchdown on SpaceX's Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) droneship in the Pacific Ocean.

B1082 successfullly landed on OCISLY at T+8:23, seconds before Falcon 9's second stage completed its first engine burn. The return of B1082 marks the booster's 21st Starlink mission, and 26th overall flight, the others of which include USSF-62, OneWeb Launch 20, NROL-145, Transporter-18.

Falcon 9's upper stage ignited its engine for a second time about 53 minutes after liftoff, circularizing its orbit with a burn that lasted a very short 3 seconds. That was followed several minutes later by the deployment of the rocket's Starlink payloads.

SpaceX's Starlink network consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft. The speed with which the company is delivering them to orbit in bulk, however, has slowed somewhat.

As SpaceX shifts focus to its larger, more powerful Starship rocket under development, plans to retire Falcon 9 have already begun. Part of that process included ending Starlink launches from Florida earlier this year.

Today's mission was the 117th Falcon 9 launch of 2026, so far. About three-quarters of those were dedicated to Starlink.