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The Orbital Index

Issue No. 326 | Jul 9, 2025


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SpaceX’s Starship launch infrastructure. SpaceX currently has one active Starship launch tower at Starbase, TX, with a second, at Starbase Pad B, nearing completion. Meanwhile, at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX is actively building a launch tower at their LC39A site, which could see a launch next year after finishing touches to its launch mount, flame trench, chopsticks, ground support equipment, and plumbing (check out this picture for the scale of Starship’s tower vs Falcon 9’s). As Ars recently explored in depth, there is much more to come. First, the company is exploring adding a second, catch-only tower to LC-39A. Next, a recent favorable draft Environmental Impact Statement cleared the path to demolition of ULA’s mothballed Delta IV launch infrastructure at nearby Space Launch Complex 37 (here’s Delta’s MST coming down). In place of ULA’s systems, which launched the last Delta IV Heavy in April 2024, SpaceX hopes to build at least two more Starship launch/catch towers (but possibly four, if there’s room: two launch/catch and two catch-only) which could handle 76 Starship launches annually, possibly starting in 2027. If you’re keeping track, this is somewhere between 6 and 8 Starship towers on two coasts (counting both launch/catch and catch-only towers). SpaceX also has two Falcon 9/Falcon Heavy launch pads in Florida, a Vandenberg Falcon 9 launch pad, and a second Vandenberg pad which will support both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy coming online next year. ULA, meanwhile, “has reduced its footprint from seven launch pads to two as a cost-cutting measure. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company, operates a single launch pad at Cape Canaveral [and another suborbital site for New Shepard in western Texas], although it has unannounced plans to open a launch facility at Vandenberg. Rocket Lab has three operational launch pads in New Zealand and Virginia for the light-class Electron rocket and will soon have a fourth in for the medium-lift Neutron launcher.” With Massey’s damaged in the recent Starship test-stand explosion, SpaceX will temporarily use Pad A as a static fire test stand.

Starbase’s Pad B in May. Credit: Jack Beyer

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$10B more for NASA. The Republican-controlled US House and Senate passed a budget reconciliation bill on July 3rd that added $10B back into the national budget for NASA programs. This reconciliation bill, H.R.1, commonly known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, includes roughly $10B in additions that were slated to be cut in the Whitehouse’s budget request. These include operational funding for the ISS through 2030; $4.1B for Artemis IV and V SLS rockets; full funding of current Lunar Gateway plans; $1B in unspecified improvements to NASA centers around the country; $700M for the (revived after 20 years) Mars Telecommunications Orbiter, a close fit to the orbiter in Rocket Lab’s MSR proposal; an additional $325M for launching the SpaceX ISS deorbit vehicle; and, oddly, the relocation of a “space vehicle” assumed to be the Space Shuttle Discovery from DC to Johnson Space Center in Houston (to the tune of $85M). Despite the funding for these programs—most of which smell like pork barrel politics—little to no science was restored in the reconciled budget, meaning most if not all of the worst-case scenarios for NASA astrophysics and Earth science funding are poised to come true (every living NASA science chief opposes this anti-science budgetary agenda). This budget, it should be noted, despite cutting Medicaid and healthcare spending, many social services, renewable energy, and grid modernization, will increase the federal debt by a hefty $3-5 trillion, primarily by providing tax cuts to people and corporations that don’t particularly need them.

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Flight heritage matters. ispace released the results of its investigation into its recent Mission 2 lunar landing attempt, which ended as a new crater, rather than a functioning spacecraft, on the surface of the Moon. While similar in outcome to the company’s previous flight, the root cause was determined to be a faulty Laser Range Finder (LRF), which was the sole source of altitude data for the landing sequence (the Mission 1 crash was due to a software error). During the final descent phase, the spacecraft’s LRF hardware gave delayed or inaccurate readings of the lander’s altitude (possibly due to lower-than-expected surface reflectivity), causing the craft to eventually impact the lunar surface at >50 km/hr. The LRF on board had not been flown before, as the one used on ispace’s first flight had been discontinued. The key learning for the team was that flying “blind” without additional surface sensing capabilities was a core design issue. ispace’s future flights (three and four) shouldn’t impact their schedule (the next one is scheduled for 2027), but will cost a bit more (~$10M) and pack additional sensors for use during landing.

ispace’s Mission 2 milestone postmortem. Credit: ispace

News in brief. American companies conducted 21 commercial space missions in June, a new record for a single month 15 months into its scheduled 5-year mission, MethaneSAT unexpectedly lost power and the important mission is now likely unrecoverable 😢ArianeGroup conducted tests, such as four successive ignitions in a single day, with their Prometheus rocket engine China established the International Deep Space Exploration Association, their first international academic organization in aerospace An Indian cryptocurrency entrepreneur founded Astrobase, a launch vehicle startup with $10M in seed funding British smallsat maker Open Cosmos acquired Connected, a Portuguese startup developing 5G IoT payloads Russia sent a Progress cargo resupply spacecraft to the ISS China launched the first satellite of an experimental classified satellite constellation The International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA Hawai‘i) selected Astrolab’s FLEX rover to deliver its ILO-1 payload to the Moon on Astrolab’s Mission 1, set to launch in 2026 ESA launched the second of the Meteosat 3rd gen satellites to GEO Japan launched their H2A rocket for its 50th and final mission, delivering GOSAT-GW, an environmental EO satellite to orbit.
 

The 50th and last launch of Japan’s H2A rocket from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture.

Etc.

Care of Ethan Siegel, “This animation switches between the planned NASA astrophysics fleet, as originally published by NASA in December of 2016, and the current budget proposal for the 2026 fiscal year for NASA astrophysics. With only a few notable exceptions, the entire portfolio of NASA astrophysics missions is slated to be eliminated. Multiple active, functioning missions are being canceled, as are a slew of in-development missions where significant resources have already been invested. The damage currently being done to American leadership in space science is exceptional and is also occurring across numerous other scientific fields.