Astronomy Prints 🌌: Starship could launch as early as Tuesday

A SpaceNews daily newsletter

05/23/2025

Top Stories

The FAA has given final approval for the next launch of SpaceX's Starship. The agency said Thursday it completed a "comprehensive safety review" after the mishap on the previous flight in March and concluded SpaceX addressed the causes of that failure. The FAA did not disclose those specific causes or the steps SpaceX took to address them. SpaceX is preparing for the Starship launch, called Flight 9, as soon as Tuesday from its Starbase facility in South Texas. The upcoming launch will have larger airspace closures because of the failures on the two previous flights as well as the use of a previously flown Super Heavy booster for the first time. [SpaceNews]

The Senate is set to vote on Jared Isaacman's nomination to be NASA administrator in early June. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) filed cloture on Isaacman's nomination Thursday, a procedural move that sets up a vote in early June after a break next week for the Memorial Day holiday. Since the Senate Commerce Committee advanced the nomination at the end of April, Isaacman has continued to meet with senators not on the committee amid concerns about proposed major budget cuts to NASA in 2026. [SpaceNews]

The Pentagon is dramatically increasing spending on artificial intelligence for military operations through a contract with Palantir. The Defense Department announced this week it is increasing the spending limit for software licenses for Palantir's Maven Smart System Maven by $795 million, compared to a ceiling of $480 million just a year ago. The new funding is specifically for U.S. combatant commands, which oversee military operations across geographic regions. Maven uses AI to analyze massive volumes of imagery and data from sources like satellites, drones and other sensors, enabling rapid detection, identification and tracking of objects of interest. [SpaceNews]

Dawn Aerospace has started sales of a small suborbital spaceplane. The company announced Thursday it is selling Aurora, an uncrewed spaceplane capable of carrying six kilograms of payload to 100 kilometers, taking off and landing on a runway. Aurora has not yet flown to space but has made many test flights at lower altitudes, including one in November where it went supersonic and reached a peak altitude of 25 kilometers. Dawn Aerospace says it plans to sell Aurora, rather than operate it itself, in a bid to expand the market and adopt an airline-like model for its operations. [SpaceNews]

A Space Force official says the service is dissatisfied with ULA's work on the Vulcan Centaur rocket. In written testimony earlier this month, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, who is serving as acting assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition, said that ULA has "performed unsatisfactorily" on Vulcan, citing a slow transition to the new rocket that has delayed national security launches. He added that while the Space Force has certified Vulcan, "open work" remains on the vehicle before its first national security launch, scheduled for no earlier than July. Those comments, in his written testimony, did not come up during the hearing last week by a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee. [Ars Technica]

Other News

Two Chinese astronauts performed a spacewalk outside the Tiangong space station Thursday. Astronauts Chen Dong and Chen Zhongrui spent about eight hours outside the station, installing a debris protection device and inspecting equipment. The spacewalk was the first by the current Tiangong crew since they arrived at the station on the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft last month. [Xinhua]

Weather delayed the undocking of a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft from the International Space Station. The SpX-32 Dragon spacecraft was scheduled to undock Thursday, but NASA and SpaceX called off the undocking because of poor weather conditions in the splashdown zone off the California coast. The spacecraft is now scheduled to undock at 12:05 p.m. Eastern Friday, splashing down early Sunday. [NASA]

An Emirati rover will go to the moon on the next Firefly Aerospace lander mission. Firefly said Thursday it signed an agreement with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) to fly its Rashid 2 rover on the company's Blue Ghost 2 lander. That spacecraft is set to launch next year, landing on the far side of the moon. The small rover will collect data on lunar dust and the plasma environment. MBRSC's first Rashid rover was lost in the crash of the ispace HAKUTO-R Mission 1 lander in 2023. [Firefly Aerospace]

An Indian navigation satellite stranded in a transfer orbit will only be able to provide limited services. The NVS-02 satellite was launched in January, but a problem with the satellite's liquid apogee motor meant it could not raise its orbit to the geostationary belt as planned. Indian officials said that, in its current geostationary transfer orbit that goes between 190 and 37,000 kilometers, NVS-02 will only be able to provide services for two to three hours per day. [The Times of India]

A mystery aerospace company is seeking to establish a facility just outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center. The company, identified only as "Project Beep" in documents by Space Florida, the state's aerospace economic development agency, is proposing to build aerospace manufacturing, research and administrative facilities on 25 acres at Exploration Park, a business park adjacent to KSC that currently hosts Blue Origin and Airbus U.S. Space and Defense. The company behind Project Beep plans to invest $247 million in the development, which will create about 1,000 jobs. [Florida Today]

Note: FIRST UP will not publish on Monday in observance of Memorial Day. We will be back on Tuesday.

Uncanny Moon

"One-sixth gravity is a very uncanny valley."

– Joseph Marlin, chief engineer of the Blue Ghost Lunar Program at Firefly Aerospace, showing video of a deployment of an instrument on a long tether from the Blue Ghost 1 lander during a presentation at the spring meeting of the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium Wednesday.

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