| Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, the first in-person meeting between heads of NASA and Roscosmos in years was announced, the Eris rocket's first test flight failed 14 seconds after launch, the air leak in the Russian ISS module is still a problem, and more.
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| | | | | OUR TOP STORY
| | By Jeff Foust The acting administrator of NASA will meet with his Russian counterpart in the first face-to-face meeting between agency heads in several years.
Roscosmos announced on social media July 28 that the agency's director general, Dmitry Bakanov, would visit the United States to attend the launch of the Crew-11 mission, scheduled for no earlier than July 31. That mission includes Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov.
| | | | | | | CIVIL
| | At a July 30 press conference about the launch of the Crew-11 mission to the ISS, a senior Roscosmos official said a leak persisted in a portion of the Zvezda service module even after recent repairs.
The committee favorably reported Jacobs' nomination to the full Senate on a voice vote during an executive session July 30, sending it to the full Senate. While there was no roll call taken, at least seven senators, all Democrats, requested to be recorded as voting no on the nomination.
In a July 25 procurement notice, NASA said it was putting on hold acquisition plans for the Lunar Exploration Ground Sites (LEGS) program. The hold, which NASA stated was not a cancellation, is due to "the current uncertainty in our budgetary situation."
| | COMMERCIAL
| | Government revenue at SES surged more than 21% in the second quarter of 2025 amid accelerating demand from defense customers worldwide, the multi-orbit satellite operator announced July 31. The Luxembourg-based company reported 153 million euros ($175 million) in government sales, accounting for roughly a third of total revenues recorded for the three months ending June 30.
While several space companies have or are planning to go public, some in the industry see these initial public offering (IPO) plans as more of an anomaly than a trend. Firefly Aerospace is in line to be the third company in the space industry to go public this year, after Karman Space and Defense in February and Voyager Technologies in June.
Under the sole-source NASA contract, EraDrive will develop software and services to track satellites and orbital debris with star trackers on NASA's Starling spacecraft swarm. Space Rendezvous Laboratory software for the Starling Formation-Flying Optical Experiment calculates the orbits of the four Starling cubesats and objects that pass within the field of view of the onboard star trackers. | | | | | | | LAUNCH
| | The first flight of the Eris rocket, built by the Australian company Gilmour Space Technologies, ended seconds after liftoff July 29 when the rocket crashed near its launch pad. Video of the flight released by the company several hours later showed the vehicle struggling to clear the launch tower. The rocket drifted away from the pad before falling back to the ground and toppling over.
The U.S. Space Force announced a launch window for the next mission of the X-37B reusable spaceplane. The eighth flight of the Boeing-built plane, officially designated Orbital Test Vehicle-8 (OTV-8), is scheduled to lift off no earlier than August 21 from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. | | | | | | | SPONSORED |  | FEATURED JOBS Senior Spacecraft Power Systems Engineer Employer: Katalyst Space Technologies Location: Broomfield, CO, USA Type: Full time As a Spacecraft Power Systems Engineer, you will lead the development of high-reliability, high-efficiency power electronics and embedded systems that drive our spacecraft's reconfigurability. From low-level hardware design to spacecraft-wide power architecture, you will engineer the foundation on which orbital autonomy is built. READ MORE | | | | | | | OPINION
| | By Scott McLaughlin As space operations grow in the United States, we face a bottleneck: the limited capacity of coastal spaceports. While Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg remain effective for the nation, these launch sites are becoming congested, and their federally funded infrastructure has struggled to keep pace. Nearby communities face noise, sonic booms, environmental effects and concerns over airspace and ocean access. And although over 90% of launches at these sites are reported as commercial, it is the federal government that supports their operation.
It is time to expand our national launch infrastructure. Inland orbital spaceports offer the capacity, resilience and strategic security that the future of U.S. space operations demands.
| | By Grant Anderson
By Mathew Lewallen
| | 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.
| | | | | |  | Latest Press Releases
| | | | | | | FROM SPACENEWS |  | | Navigating the shift to commercial space stations: In this edition of Space Minds, host David Ariosto speaks with Robyn Gatens, NASA's Director for the International Space Station, live at AIAA Ascend conference last week in Las Vegas on the status of the International Space Station, its planned decommissioning by 2030 and the expected follow-on commercial space stations. Watch now.
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