Plus: NASA wants more lunar lander missions
| By Jeff Foust
In today's edition: Rocket Lab wins a major HASTE order, NASA seeks to increase the rate of lunar lander missions, a South Korean defense satellite system takes shape and more.
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| | | | | | | SPONSORED |  | | L3Harris has been pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and observation for decades. This partnership with NASA spans the agency's 60-plus year history – ranging from the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Space Shuttle, International Space Station and James Webb Space Telescope to exciting new programs like Artemis. Learn more here. | | | | | | Top Stories
Rocket Lab announced Wednesday it won a Pentagon contract for 20 launches of the suborbital version of its Electron rocket. The $190 million award, issued by the Pentagon's Test Resource Management Center under its Multi-Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic Test Bed, or MACH-TB 2.0, program covers 20 missions scheduled over the next four years of Rocket Lab's HASTE vehicle. The contract follows a recent HASTE launch from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia carrying a hypersonic aircraft developed by Australia-based Hypersonix. With this latest award, Rocket Lab says its launch backlog now exceeds 70 missions. [SpaceNews]
NASA wants to start flying robotic lunar landers on a monthly basis as soon as next year. While the agency has not made a formal announcement, officials including Administrator Jared Isaacman have talked recently about rapidly increasing the cadence of robotic landers that could assist in plans to develop a lunar base. That would leverage the existing CLPS program supporting commercial lunar landers, although officials said other procurement mechanisms could be used. NASA said it will include science payloads on all of those missions, although in some cases those may be tech demos of instruments in development. One challenge to increasing the cadence of landers is the handful of companies currently building landers at a pace of about one per year, and the mixed record of missions conducted so far by CLPS. [SpaceNews]
Finnish satellite manufacturer ReOrbit has signed a contract with asset-financing company SLI for two small GEO communications satellites. ReOrbit announced Thursday the contract, valued at 150 million euros ($172 million), with the two satellites to be delivered four months apart in 2029. The satellites will have software-defined Ka-band communications payloads and 10-year lifetimes. SLI plans to lease the satellites to companies and countries using a business model similar to airliner leasing. [SpaceNews]
Apex has sold one of its Aries satellite buses to Japanese company NEC. The companies announced the sale on Thursday, with NEC using the bus to fly an optical communications technology demonstration mission in 2027. That mission could be a precursor to a future constellation. Apex, which has largely focused on U.S. government customers, says it is seeing growing international demand for its spacecraft buses. The company is currently producing about two dozen satellites a year at its factory, with plans to increase that production to 200 annually. [SpaceNews]
South Korea's plans for a national security constellation are coming into sharper focus with a contract for solar cells. Lithuania-based small satellite specialist Kongsberg NanoAvionics announced Wednesday a multi-million-euro contract to provide kilowatt-class solar arrays to Flexell Space, a South Korean startup that is supporting the LEO constellation. The deal adds to details emerging around the secretive program led by South Korean conglomerate Hanwha Systems, which recently partnered with Canada's MDA Space and Telesat to develop next-generation LEO capabilities. An initial demonstration satellite for that system is planned to launch as soon as the second half of 2027. [SpaceNews]
U.S. Space Command officials and representatives from 25 commercial space companies will participate in a classified wargame next week in Colorado Springs. The exercise is the first in a series of quarterly wargames in 2026 that will include commercial participants as part of a broader effort to bring industry more directly into classified planning. A Space Force general said Wednesday the decision to classify the wargame will allow for a level of intelligence sharing that has not previously been extended to commercial partners. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | | Other News
Two NASA astronauts performed a spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Wednesday. Jessica Meir and Chris Williams completed the seven-hour spacewalk at 3:54 p.m. Eastern after carrying out their primary tasks. That work involved the installation of a mount for a new solar panel that will be added to the station on a future spacewalk. Some additional tasks were deferred to a future spacewalk because of the limited time available. The spacewalk was the first from the U.S. segment of the station since last May, and took place on the 61st anniversary of the first spacewalk by Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. [Space.com]
China has identified a new target near Earth asteroid for its first planetary defense kinetic test mission. Long Lehao, a senior official with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, said at a Chinese conference thar the redirect test misison would go to 2016 WP8, a small Aten-class near Earth asteroid. The mission would launch in late 2027, with an observer spacecraft rendezvousing with the asteroid before a separate impactor spacecraft collides with the asteroid to change its orbit. [SpaceNews]
An American company is proposing moving a small near Earth asteroid. TransAstra has outlined plans for a mission that could launch in 2028 or 2029 to go to an asteroid weighing about 100 metric tons and move it to a stable orbit in the Earth-Moon system. Once there, additional missions could extract resources from it for space industrial applications. The concept is similar to NASA's Asteroid Redirect Mission proposed more than a decade ago, but later canceled. [SpaceNews]
Artemis 2 will be rolling back out to the pad tonight. NASA said Wednesday the rollout from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B would begin at 8 p.m. Eastern tonight and take about 12 hours. NASA has first planned a rollout Thursday but said it would be delayed to Friday because of repair work over the weekend, only to move it back to Thursday after close-out work was finished ahead of schedule. The rollout tonight preserves a launch as soon as April 1. The four-person crew went into quarantine Wednesday, two weeks before the first launch opportunity. [NASA]
Firefly Aerospace is the winner of a prestigious aerospace trophy. The National Aeronautic Association announced Wednesday it selected Firefly's Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander mission for the Collier Trophy, awarded annually for the greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America. Recent winners of the trophy include the Parker Solar Probe, OSIRIS-REx and James Webb Space Telescope missions. [NAA]
| | | | | | Thelma and Louise on the Moon
| "We like to say we Thelma and Louise'd this. We just went all out."
| | – David Stillman of the Southwest Research Institute, discussing in a presentation at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference this week a decision to keep an instrument on the Blue Ghost 1 lander running despite temperatures that exceeded limits set before the mission.
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