Starship reaches orbit and comes home; NASA buys two more Starliner flights

Starship | Starlink Group 31-1 (Flight 14) — success. Super Heavy and Starship, Starbase, Texas, Monday 12:49 UTC: the first Starship mission to orbit, marked a success. One of the ship's six engines quit early on the climb and a single-engine burn finished the job of reaching orbit. The booster flew back and set down upright off the Texas coast (a second engine cut out early on that burn too), and the ship splashed down in the Pacific north of Hawaii at 15:57 UTC before toppling onto its side and burning off its leftover propellant. The part worth filing away is the engine-out: the vehicle lost engines on both stages and still flew the whole profile, which is what an operational rocket has to be able to do. SpaceX had originally planned six orbits and a splashdown off Chile around 6:40 p.m. EDT, but chose to bring the ship down early once the satellites were safely away. Space Launch Now

NASA buys two more Starliner flights and pays for the return to flight. NASA is adding two Boeing Starliner crew missions to its books and giving Boeing $359 million to cover rebuilding the troubled thrusters and certifying United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket to carry the capsule. That brings Starliner to six contracted flights. With SpaceX planning to retire Crew Dragon, Boeing's capsule is on course to become the only American ride to orbit for astronauts — a remarkable turnaround for a spacecraft whose thrusters nearly cost two astronauts their mission in 2024. Boeing has already swallowed more than $2 billion in losses on the programme. Seats on Starliner-2 through Starliner-6 are priced at roughly $90 million each, on top of the $5.1 billion NASA has paid Boeing under Commercial Crew. Ars Technica

The station's arm is fine — the rail car underneath it is not. After astronauts walked Canadarm2, the station's 58-foot robotic arm, to a new position, the mobile transporter that rolls it along the station's truss started throwing communication errors. The arm itself is working normally and is being used to inspect the Crew-12 Dragon. This matters this week because Cygnus and Japan's HTV-X cargo ships have no docking system of their own and need that arm to berth them. NASA and SpaceX are also checking that the transporter's parked position does not interfere with Dragon's GPS navigation for the incoming Crew-13 flight. Canadarm2 was built by MDA and launched in April 2001 aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour with a 15-year design lifetime — it is now 25 years old and nearly two metric tons of hardware. Ars Technica

The first commercial attempt to refuel-lift a NASA telescope ends without lifting it. A commercial servicing mission by Katalyst Space meant to raise the orbit of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, NASA's gamma-ray-burst hunter, has wrapped up with the orbit unchanged — and NASA has published the lessons it drew from the attempt. In-space servicing is the capability half the industry says is just around the corner; this is a rare public, honest failure in that field, and it comes with a deadline: without a boost, Swift burns up by the end of the year. Swift has been flying since November 2004, studying gamma-ray bursts. NASA Science

“From the beginning, this was a high-risk, high-reward mission.”

FOIA: NASA spent barely half its planetary research budget for FY2025. Documents pried loose through a Freedom of Information Act request show NASA spent less than half of the money budgeted for planetary research-and-analysis grants in fiscal 2025 — an underspend of more than 50 percent, according to an analysis by the Planetary Science Institute. These grants are the small money that pays scientists and students to work with mission data, and they had already been flat for 15 years. The analysis warns that forward-funding multi-year grants could shrink the number of new awards by about two-thirds — a structural problem, not a one-year dip. The figures, covering spending through June 30, 2026, come from a report by Mark Sykes, former CEO of the Planetary Science Institute. NASA Watch

SpinLaunch's satcom arm becomes its own company, weeks before its first demo. Meridian Space, the satellite-communications unit SpinLaunch has been growing since 2020, is being spun out as an independent company — and its first in-orbit demonstration is only days away. Among new entrants, this is a rare one with hardware about to fly: the demo will attempt the first customer link using Meridian's home-grown reflect-array antennas, which the company says draw less power than the satcom payloads they would replace. The demo launches on SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare, NET Thursday, Oct. 1; the long-run plan is a constellation of more than 250 satellites that could go up on a single dedicated launch. Payload

“We can build a system for less than a billion dollars. That includes the space segment, launch, and ground.”

Star Catcher's first power node has finished launch preparations. Star Catcher, one of the startups betting that satellites will one day buy their electricity in orbit, says its first prototype node, Protostar, is ready and booked onto SpaceX's Transporter-18 rideshare. Once in orbit it will attempt something no mission has done: handing useful energy from one free-flying spacecraft to another. Array size is a hard wall on spacecraft design today; if a neighbour can top up your bus without you changing any hardware, that wall moves. Star Catcher already has ten power-purchase agreements signed, so this flight is what turns those from paper into hardware. Transporter-18 flies NET Thursday, Oct. 1, at 18:18 UTC; last November the company pushed more than 1.1 kW onto commercial solar panels on the ground at Kennedy Space Center, and it holds a $60M Space Force STRATFI award plus $88M in venture backing. Payload

“testing this on orbit is success in and of itself”