Plus: Congress urges White House to name a new NASA Administrator
| Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, the next Starship exploded during preparations for a static fire test, Congress urges the White House to put someone at the helm of NASA, the French government takes a 30% stake in Eutelsat and more.
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| | | | | OUR TOP STORY
| | By Jeff Foust A SpaceX Starship upper stage being prepared for the company's next flight exploded June 19 during preparations for a static-fire test.
Video from sources such as NASASpaceFlight.com showed the vehicle designated Ship 36, exploded just after midnight Eastern (11 p.m. June 18 local time) while on a test stand at a site known as Massey's, several kilometers west from the company's launch pads at Starbase, Texas.
| | | | | | | CIVIL
| | China carried out a successful pad abort test early Tuesday for its next-generation crew spacecraft for moon and low Earth orbit missions. Footage of the test shows the escape system rapidly boosting the spacecraft away from the ground. Around 20 seconds later, the vehicle reached a predetermined altitude. The return capsule separated from the escape tower and its parachutes deployed successfully.
ESA announced at the Paris Air Show June 18 that it signed a memorandum of understanding with Thales Alenia Space and Blue Origin to study flying European payloads, and possibly astronauts, to the Orbital Reef commercial space station proposed by Blue Origin.
China has sent several small spacecraft, DRO-A and DRO-B, into specialized lunar and cislunar orbits to test communications, navigation and orbital dynamics for planned Earth-moon infrastructure.
France would more than double its stake in Eutelsat to nearly 30% as part of a $1.56 billion capital raise backed by multiple shareholders, bolstering the French operator's plans to refresh its OneWeb constellation amid Starlink's growing dominance.
| | POLICY & POLITICS
| | The heads of leading U.S. satellite imaging firms are urging Congress to reject proposed budget cuts to commercial remote sensing programs, warning the reductions could undermine national security and reverse years of progress in integrating private-sector innovation into intelligence and defense operations.
In briefings organized by the Aerospace Industries Association June 16, representatives of House and Senate delegations to the Paris Air Show said it was critical that the agency get permanent leadership as it deals with potential significant cuts to its budget in the coming fiscal year. | | | | | | | COMMERCIAL
| | Chinese launch startup Landspace carried out a breakthrough static fire test as it builds towards an orbital launch attempt with its Zhuque-3 rocket. The Zhuque-3's self-developed Tianque-12A methane-liquid oxygen engines ignited in sequence and fired for 45 seconds, including gimbal control testing, before shutting down as planned. The test produced 7,542 kiloNewtons of thrust.
Local regulators have approved Ukrainian telco Kyivstar's plans to start testing space-enabled texting services this summer using SpaceX's Starlink constellation, targeting areas crippled by Russian strikes and other terrestrial coverage gaps.
Under the contract announced June 16, Colorado-based Ursa Major will deliver an upgraded variant of its Hadley engine for use in Stratolaunch's reusable hypersonic vehicle called Talon-A. Stratolaunch has a contract with the Pentagon to provide testing vehicles and infrastructure for military systems. | | | | | | | SPONSORED |  | | By Natalia Larrea Brito Next month, ASCEND 2025 kicks off in Las Vegas for the fifth annual event. AIAA's on-ramp-to-space gathering prides itself on its interdisciplinary focus: attendees will include leaders in commercial and government space as well as non-traditional disruptors in the worlds of drug discovery, agriculture, and other industries that increasingly are betting big that space will transform their future. | | | | | | | OPINION
| | By Casey Dreier The White House's FY 2026 budget request for NASA proposes a radical shift in the agency's direction, proposing extinction-level cuts to space science, severe cuts in other program areas and a dramatic pivot of human spaceflight focus to Mars.
I don't know if the cuts will ultimately occur, but I am confident in the following: As proposed, the new humans-to-Mars initiative will fail.
| | By M.C. Sungaila
By Mihail Várdai
By Ron Garan
By Robert Brüll
| | SpaceNews is committed to publishing our community's diverse perspectives. Whether you're an academic, executive, engineer or even just a concerned citizen of the cosmos, send your arguments and viewpoints to opinion@spacenews.com to be considered for publication online or in our next magazine. The perspectives shared in these op-eds are solely those of the authors.
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