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SpaceX's Starship flew its fourth test flight Thursday, with both the booster and upper stage surviving reentry. The vehicle lifted off from the Starbase site at Boca Chica, Texas, at 8:50 a.m. Eastern. The Starship upper stage flew its planned suborbital trajectory, reentering over the Indian Ocean. Unlike the previous flight, Starship made it through reentry, although with some damage, and flew to a "soft splashdown" in the ocean. The Super Heavy booster also made a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX called the test flight a success and CEO Elon Musk suggested that, on the next test flight, SpaceX may attempt to bring the Super Heavy booster back to Starbase for a landing. [SpaceNews]
Boeing's CST-100 Starliner docked with the International Space Station Thursday despite thruster problems and new helium leaks. Starliner, with NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on board, arrived at the ISS at 1:34 p.m. Eastern, more than an hour later than planned. Controllers spent time diagnosing five thrusters that had gone offline, and were able to get four of them working again, allowing the docking to proceed. Officials they said they are not sure why the spacecraft's software was rejecting the thrusters. A fourth helium leak was also detected on the spacecraft, although the spacecraft has plenty of helium needed for the propulsion system to undock Starliner from the station and perform a deorbit burn at the end of the mission. [SpaceNews]
Chinese company Space Pioneer has raised $207 million to develop a reusable launch vehicle. The company, formally known as Beijing Tianbing Technology Co., Ltd., said Thursday it raised the funding from a mix of investors that included of private equity and state-linked investment vehicles. The funding will go towards the first launch of the new Tianlong-3 rocket, as well as its mass production and conversion for reusability. It will also be used for mass production of the smaller Tianlong-2. Tianlong-3 is by far the largest commercial rocket close to launch in China and would provide the country with greatly increased capacity for launch needed for proposed megaconstellations. Space Pioneer has raised more than $550 million to date. [SpaceNews]
A new report says the Space Force is demonstrating its support for a new approach to military satellite architecture through its budget request. A report released Thursday by The Aerospace Corporation concluded that the service's proposed 2025 budget demonstrates that approaches like proliferated networks of smaller satellites in low Earth orbit are a priority, with strong funding despite a constrained topline. The budget also boosts funding for integrating commercial satellite communications into military networks, which the report argues complements the proliferation focus. [SpaceNews]
Seraphim Space Investment Trust says the value of its early-stage space investments has grown slightly in the first three months of the year. London-listed Seraphim said it saw a 1.4% increase in the value of those investments to $257 million despite one of the companies it has a stake in, Astroscale, going public at a lower value than a recent private round as well as a decline in the share price of AST SpaceMobile. The trust saw increases from recent funding rounds by D-Orbit and Xona Space Systems. [SpaceNews]
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The Space Force is taking a cautious approach to making use of commercial capabilities in space domain awareness. Companies like ExoAnalytic Solutions and Slingshot Aerospace are leveraging technologies like AI to better track satellites and discern patterns of behavior, information that could be useful to the Space Force. The service is currently refining its plan to leverage these commercial innovations, but is still trying to figure out how to effectively integrate these new services. A recent report by Booz Allen Hamilton noted that traditional defense contractors still dominate military space domain awareness programs, with most of the spending allocated to government-owned sensors. [SpaceNews]
A commercial computer on the ISS is being used increasingly for AI applications. HPE's Spaceborne Computer-2, upgraded earlier this year, is being used for processing large data sets from ISS experiments, tackling increasingly complex artificial intelligence and machine learning assignments. It is also demonstrating some of the ways artificial intelligence is likely to be employed on future lunar and planetary missions. [SpaceNews]
China's space ambitions reflect both its technological capabilities and its strategic vision. In April, one Chinese official described the steady progress on a number of fronts the country was making toward a stated goal of putting astronauts on the moon before 2030. Those plans involve two launches of Long March 10 rockets, currently in development, carrying a crewed spacecraft and a lunar lander. That mission will allow two Chinese astronauts to land on the moon for a six-hour moonwalk before returning. A Chinese crewed lunar mission would have a number of ramifications, not just for China, but the United States and globally, showing China's capabilities and attracting new partners. [SpaceNews]
More than 40 companies and organizations have signed ESA's Zero Debris Charter. ESA held a signing ceremony Thursday at the ILA Berlin air show for the charter, which calls on signatories to take steps to reduce the creation of new debris. Among those signing the charter are Airbus, Amazon, OHB, Redwire and Thales Alenia Space. Last month ESA announced a dozen European countries had signed the charter. [ESA]
Virgin Galactic is dropping its lawsuit against Boeing in a procedural move. The company filed suit against Boeing and its subsidiary, Aurora Flight Sciences, in April in a dispute about development of a new mothership aircraft for Virgin's future Delta-class spaceplanes. That suit came after Boeing sued Virgin Galactic for failure to pay for work done to date and for intellectual property theft. Virgin, which argues Boeing did shoddy work on the project, will instead pursue its claims in the Boeing suit. [Reuters]
| |  | Toasty
"We've got s'more Starship test flights coming to you soon."
– SpaceX's Kate Tice at the end of the company's webcast of the Starship test flight Thursday, where she and co-host Jessie Anderson toasted a marshmallow using a torch shaped like Starship.
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