Plus: Blue Origin begins rebuilding damaged launch pad
Welcome to our roundup of top SpaceNews stories, delivered every Friday! This week, Relativity Space announced plans for a private mission to Mars, Blue Origin started repair work on the launch pad damaged during its New Glenn explosion, NASA shared more Artemis details and more.
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OUR TOP STORY
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By Jeff Foust Relativity Space plans to launch a Mars orbiter in 2028 as part of a new initiative to privately develop planetary missions.
The company announced June 17 its Interplanetary Sciences Program, which it described in a statement as “an initiative to enable radically more science per dollar by building the next generation of interplanetary capabilities that make scientific discovery more capable and accessible.”
The program will support science missions that will also “develop and fly foundational technologies and payloads” to support research goals, the company stated, working in partnership with industry, academia, philanthropic organizations and NASA.
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SPONSORED |
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The Clouds Above the Clouds
40 Years of Collaboration
Salt Lake City, UT
August 23–26, 2026
The 40th Annual Small Satellite Conference will spotlight the technologies driving constellation success and celebrate the thousands of people whose vision and collaboration have propelled the industry forward over the past four decades. Join us as we celebrate the past, examine the present, and shape the future of small satellites.
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CIVIL
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At a June 9 event at the Johnson Space Center and in subsequent interviews, NASA provided more details about the revised approaches that Blue Origin and SpaceX are taking to accelerate work on Artemis lunar landers.
NASA announced June 18 that the Dynamic Atmosphere-Ionosphere Explorer, or DAPHNE, mission will proceed into the next phase of development, with a launch planned for no earlier than 2029.
A spacecraft developed by Tsinghua University is set to join international missions to study the asteroid Apophis during its close approach to Earth in 2029. The Student-led Threatening Asteroid Reconnaissance of Tsinghua, or START, mission is a low-cost smallsat led by a team of more than 20 undergraduate students at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
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LAUNCH
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An Ariane 6 with upgraded solid rocket boosters successfully launched three dozen Amazon Leo satellites June 17 as ESA weighs options for increasing the vehicle’s launch rate.
Astrobotic revealed its Griffin-1 lander during a June 15 event at its headquarters. The company is completing final work on the lander before shipping it to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California for environmental tests in the next few weeks.
China continued its accelerated launch pace with a series of missions, but long silence followed liftoff of a Kuaizhou-11 solid rocket Wednesday, suggesting potential issues. |
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COMMERCIAL
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Blue Origin has started rebuilding a launch pad severely damaged in a New Glenn explosion less than three weeks ago as it works to resume launches by the end of the year.
Private equity firm EQT is acquiring Exolaunch, a company that has handled the rideshare launches of hundreds of satellites, to help it meet growing launch demand. The companies announced June 18 that EQT would buy Exolaunch from its founder, Dmitriy Sternharz, for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Chinese startup Spark Space has secured a series of funding rounds for what it claims will be the world’s largest electric-pump-fed rocket, following engine tests. |
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SPONSORED CONTENT
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By Marc Berte, Founder and CEO of Overview Energy AI is making energy valuable enough that we’re reconsidering where infrastructure should live. Space is increasingly where that conversation leads.
Orbital data centers are the most visible expression of that shift right now. They’ve attracted real capital, and SpaceX’s endorsement alone moved the conversation. But they’re one answer to a larger opportunity: continuous energy in space is now commercially viable, and the industry is still working out what that unlocks. Not just compute. The whole thing. |
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FROM SPACENEWS |
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Join us for our next conversation on Golden Dome: Much of the Golden Dome system will depend on space-based and ground-based sensors — an evolving network meant to detect launches, follow hypersonic weapons and monitor activity across Earth and orbit. On June 25, join us as leaders from Arcfield, L3Harris and LeoLabs discuss these technologies, what’s necessary to make them operate at a high level and what possibilities could be in the works for the satellites involved. Register now. |
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