Plus: A guide to NASA’s major reorganization
By Dan Robitzski
After several delays and a scrub due to ground equipment issues, SpaceX has finally conducted its first test launch of the Starship V3, sending the latest version of the spacecraft on a roughly 67-minute suborbital flight that ended with a (planned) explosion after a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean.
The mission has largely been celebrated as a success, with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman calling it “a hell of a V3 Starship launch” on social media. That’s a much-needed win for SpaceX, which has faced myriad criticisms that it won’t be ready to support NASA’s Artemis launches and other mission needs, and which has pinned much of its future success as a business on Starship’s ability to launch safe, successful missions into orbit and beyond.
To that effect, SpaceX revealed in its IPO filing that it invested more than $15 billion in Starship so far, in hopes of tapping into a market that it estimates to be worth $28.5 trillion.
How you interpret the V3 launch depends on where you place the goalposts. Like many other space launches (Starship or otherwise) the mission was a partial success — a vague term that keeps mission postmortems positive by focusing on the parts of a mission that did get completed rather than those that didn’t.
In fairness, there’s much less “partial” in this partial success than previous Starship launches. The V3 did face engine troubles during ascent. One of the Super Heavy Booster’s 33 Raptor 3 engines shut down about 100 seconds after liftoff, before the upper stage separated. The Super Heavy continued to face engine problems: Several of its engines failed to ignite (those that did ignite shut down less than 20 seconds into an anticipated 60-second burn) during preparations for a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. One of the Starship upper stage engines also shut down early, so the other five engines had to burn longer than anticipated to reach the planned suborbital trajectory. SpaceX Communications Manager Dan Huot said on the mission webcast that it wasn’t a “nominal orbital insertion, but we’re on a trajectory that we had analyzed, and it’s within bounds.”
So, it’s still a big step forward for Starship, with less consequential technical issues and fewer missed or skipped objectives than previous missions. But looking at how much of the space industry is counting on Starship’s payload capacity, and given how many future crewed missions hang in the balance, a genuine resounding success during a future test shouldn’t be too much to ask for.
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SIGNIFICANT DIGIT
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$80B |
The amount SpaceX hopes to raise in its initial public offering, at a valuation of roughly $2 trillion. |
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MAJOR REORG AT NASA
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NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced a broad reorganization to the agency’s internal structure May 22. The changes, which include restructuring mission directorates and shuffling leadership, were intended as a means to improve agency efficiency without laying off staff or closing facilities, SpaceNews’ Jeff Foust reported.
There are a lot of moving parts, so here’s a quick rundown of what’s changing.
Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate (ESDMD) and Space Operations Mission Directorate (SOMD) are merging into a new Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate (HSMD), reversing when a similar directorate was split in 2021. Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator for ESDMD, will serve as HSMD associate administrator. Joel Montalbano (SOMD acting associate administrator) and Kelvin Manning, Kennedy Space Center acting director, will serve as deputy associate administrators. HSM will also have three project managers: Dana Weigel (low Earth orbit, including the International Space Station and Commercial LEO Destinations), Jeremy Parsons (Artemis) and Carlos García-Galán (Moon Base Initiative).
The Space Technology Mission Directorate and Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate are merging into a new Research and Technology Mission Directorate (RTMD). The RTMD will be led by Glenn Research Center Director James Kenyon, with Wanda Peters, who had been deputy associate administrator for programs in the Science Mission Directorate, serving as deputy associate administrator for RTMD. RTMD will also take over NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program.
NASA also announced a variety of leadership changes — program and directorate heads and deputies are being shuffled around to align with the new internal structure. Some of these reappointments are also to fill gaps made by other changes. For instance, Dawn Schaible, who had been deputy director of the Glenn Research Center under James Kenyon, will take his place. Brian Hughes will now serve as director of the Kennedy Space Center with Manning’s move to HSMD.
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Two companies best known for brokering payload space on SpaceX rideshare launches, Exolaunch and SEOPS, have each purchased dedicated Falcon 9 launches to meet the growing demand for such missions.
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| NASA plans to add more missions to SpaceX’s commercial crew contract, protecting the agency from the possibility that Boeing’s spacecraft is never certified for missions to the International Space Station.
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