¶Rocket Lab’s MSR proposal. Over the past three months, everyone’s favorite New Zealand-launching-rockets-and-more company has incrementally released a plan to fully replace NASA and ESA’s complicated and prohibitively expensive Mars Sample Return mission architecture with their own vertically integrated approach. The most recent installment of their slowly released plan was a detailed, high-def mission conops video showing hardware emblazoned with Rocket Lab logos launching to the red planet, landing, receiving samples, and returning to ballistically reenter Earth’s atmosphere, finally crashing down in the Utah desert with 30 hopefully-intact sample tubes on board. The price tag? Four billion dollars, fixed firm. That’s a huge savings from NASA’s current estimate of $11B (which seems likely to be a floor rather than a ceiling for the current architecture). The most recent version of Rocket Lab’s MSR proposal would involve launching three custom-built vehicles to Mars: one for landing and ascent, one for sample return from Mars orbit, and one for comms (including support for further future Mars missions). One requirement of the rejiggered mission would be for Percy to retrace its tracks, picking up each carefully deposited sample tube before inserting them into the Rocket Lab Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) for its return trip. Abandoned along the way is ESA’s in-development Earth Return Orbiter and Sample Fetch Rover. Could Rocket Lab successfully pull off a mission of this complexity entirely on its own? The company claims that its involvement with past missions (solar panels on the Perseverance transit craft and Ingenuity, software for Blue Ghost missions, etc.), along with its twin EscaPADE spacecraft, gives it the necessary expertise to complete a fully integrated MSR. (EscaPADE should’ve already launched but were delayed by Psyche’s mission energy and launch changes, and then again by New Glenn I delays, and now await the second New Glenn launch, sometime later this spring, none of this is seemingly RL’s fault.) This would be a huge stretch for a newspace company like Rocket Lab, and carries with it significant execution risk, but we like the ambition and would love to see them and MSR succeed. Landing the contract from NASA would roughly double the company’s revenue overnight, so one can understand the incentive to swing for the fences. Here’s a recent Planetary Society interview where Peter Beck and Richard French discuss their company’s proposal. |
|
 | Rocket Lab’s MSR mission plan. |
|
The Orbital Index is made possible through generous sponsorship by:
  |
|
¶Project Kuiper launching. The first production launch of Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a satellite internet constellation intended to compete with Starlink and OneWeb, is scheduled to launch today. (Avid readers of this newsletter will know that the constellation is named after the Kuiper Belt, the annulus of icy debris beyond the orbit of Neptune, which includes Pluto—we’re hoping this and other constellations don’t end up as belts of debris.) Kuiper’s first production launch, on a ULA Atlas V rocket, will send 27 satellites to LEO, the first of multiple planned for this year on Atlas and Vulcan (the latter can carry 45 satellites). This batch of satellites will orbit at 630 km, with others at 590 km and 610 km, forming the three shells and 98 orbital planes of Kupier’s initial 3,236-satellite constellation authorized by the FCC in 2020. Two prototype satellites were launched in October 2023, with little visible activity since then, but Amazon is now in a hurry, as this authorization requires 50% of the satellites to be in orbit by July 2026. Amazon has a whopping 8 Atlas V, 38(!) Vulcan, 18 Ariane 6, 3 Falcon 9, and 12-27 New Glenn launches booked (New Glenn’s mishap report was just concluded and it's now been cleared for its next launch). Like Starlink, Kuiper satellites will use phased array antennas to transmit to the ground and optical inter-satellite links for relaying information across the constellation. It’s getting crowded up there |
|
 | Kuiper 1 atop its ULA Atlas V. Credit: United Launch Alliance |
|
Support Us› Orbital Index is made possible by readers like you. If you appreciate our writing, please support us with a monthly membership! |
|
| ¶News in brief. SpaceX static fired Super Heavy Booster 14 (that had previously flown and returned on Flight 7) ahead of Starship Flight 9 with 29 of its 33 engines being flight proven—this will be the first reuse for the Starship system ● Seattle-based Portal Space Systems raised a $17.5M seed to develop their transorbital Supernova spacecraft that uses solar thermal propulsion for increased maneuverability ● Space-based solar power startup Aetherflux raised a $50M Series A, aiming for a space to ground power transfer tech demo in 2026 ● SpinLaunch plans to develop a 280-satellite broadband constellation, with their first satellites likely not launching on their unconventional centrifuge-based launch system that is still years away from being operational ● SpaceX’s privately funded and crewed Fram2 mission (c.f. Issue 312) returned to Earth ● The DOD awarded a massive $13.7B worth of launch contracts to SpaceX, ULA, and Blue Origin for 54 launches over the next 4 years ● MDA Space bought satellite chipmaker Satixfy for $269M to vertically integrate and boost their constellation production ● After years of confusion, India formally approved the joint ISRO-JAXA Chandrayaan 5 (LUPEX) mission that will study water ice on the Moon’s south pole—it will likely launch after Chandrayaan 4 takes off in 2028, and sometime before the end of the decade ● The FAA completed its investigation of the failed booster landing during New Glenn’s inaugural flight, citing its cause as the inability of the BE-4 engines to re-ignite properly ● Thermal infrared EO startup Hydrosat released the first images from their VanZyl-1 mission (providing field-level insights to optimize water use and crop yields) ● The Space Force swapped the launch of GPS III SV-08 from ULA to SpaceX and GPS IIIF-1 from a Falcon Heavy to Vulcan ● NASA’s SPHEREx spacecraft took its first images with its six infrared detectors as it prepares to map millions of galaxies |
|
 | Uncalibrated first images from all six sensors aboard NASA’s SPHEREx mission, with each exposure representing 100,000 light sources. |
|
|
