Top Stories of the Week From SpaceNews
03/07/2025 | Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, another Starship explodes, mixed results for commercial lunar landers, a lost Falcon 9, and more. | Our Top Story | | |
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| |  | By Jeff Foust, March 6, 2025
| SpaceX's Starship vehicle suffered its second consecutive test flight failure March 6, tumbling in space before breaking up and reentering over the Caribbean.
The Starship/Super Heavy vehicle lifted off on the Flight 8 test flight at 6:30 p.m. Eastern from the company's Starbase test site in South Texas. The countdown appeared to go smoothly other than a hold at the T-40 second mark that lasted only a few seconds.
The vehicle's initial phases of flight went as planned. That included the ascent of the vehicle through stage separation and the return of the Super Heavy booster, which was caught back at the launch tower for the third time in four missions dating back to October 2024.
However, just after eight minutes into the flight, four of the six Raptor engines in the Starship upper stage shut down in quick succession. The vehicle immediately began to tumble but continued to relay video, showing the Earth spinning in and out of view. Read More |  | Other News From the Week | CIVIL | ISS astronauts reject call for early retirement of the station Speaking to reporters March 4, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who have been on the station since June on a flawed Starliner test flight, and Nick Hague, the commander of the Crew-9 mission that will bring the two back with him later this month, addressed political issues like an early retirement of the ISS and Musk's claim he offered NASA an early return of the Starliner crew. Read More
Questions linger about future of TraCSS The manager of the Commerce Department's program to develop a civil space traffic coordination system is back on the job after being swept up in layoffs, but questions remain about the future of that effort. Dmitry Poisik, program manager for the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS) in the Office of Space Commerce, was among so-called probationary civil servants — new to their positions — at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who were fired Feb. 27 as part of efforts across the federal government to terminate such employees. Read More | | | Loving SpaceNews This Week? Check out SpaceNext: AI, where we look at how artificial intelligence is becoming integral to the space industry, and how companies and agencies are using it for their missions. | | | COMMERCIAL | IM-2 lunar lander on its side after touchdown The second lunar lander mission by Intuitive Machines reached the surface of the moon March 6 but appears to be resting on its side, hampering its planned science and technology demonstration mission. Read More
Firefly's Blue Ghost 1 lands on the moon Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander touched down on the surface of the moon March 2, a key milestone for the company and NASA's lunar exploration efforts. The spacecraft touched down at 3:34 a.m. Eastern, a little more than an hour after it started maneuvers to descend from a low orbit around the moon. The company said the lander was in an "upright, stable" position. Read More | | | LAUNCH | Ariane 6 launches French spysat on second flight
An Ariane 6 launched a reconnaissance satellite for the French military March 6 on the second flight of the European rocket. The Ariane 6 lifted off from the European spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, at 11:24 a.m. Eastern on a mission designated VA263. The rocket quickly soared out of view into cloudy skies above the spaceport. Payload deployment took place a little more than an hour after liftoff following a second burn of the upper stage. Read More
Falcon 9 booster lost after droneship landing
A Falcon 9 booster was lost after making a droneship landing March 2, the latest incident involving the rocket that has raised reliability concerns. A Falcon 9 lifted off at 9:24 p.m. Eastern from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, carrying 21 Starlink satellites. The webcast of the launch showed the booster touching down on its droneship, Just Read the Instructions, about 8 minutes and 15 seconds after liftoff. The company later reported a successful deployment of the Starlink satellites. Read More | | |
|  | OPINION | |
|  | By Deborah Lee James, Ryan McCarthy and Michael E. White, March 6
| What do China, Russia, North Korea and Iran have in common? Each member of this axis of aggressors has developed (or at least has claimed to have developed) operational hypersonic weapons. These adversaries' hypersonic capabilities significantly enhance their ability to threaten American interests at home and abroad, including the ability for the United States to quickly come to the aid of its allies in crisis or wartime.
Adversary hypersonic capabilities seriously challenge the effectiveness of U.S. deterrence by threatening the U.S. homeland and forward bases with survivable, long-range conventional and nuclear lethal effects. To address this growing challenge, the U.S. Congress, Department of Defense (DoD), and industry all need to ensure that U.S. programs to develop both offensive hypersonic weapons and counter-hypersonic defenses are a national priority, are effectively and affordably executed, and rapidly deliver to the warfighter these essential capabilities in meaningful numbers. Read More
Make America test again: How rapid, iterative testing will advance hypersonic development
By A.J. Piplica
Patenting space: promoting innovations and patents for exploring our final frontier By Lionel Lavenue, Joseph Myles and Josh Sprague Oliveira
Radiation as a service: How the private sector can protect America's space infrastructure
By J.C. Btaiche
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