Stephen Clark

1 day ago | arstechnica.com | Stephen Clark

A notice to mariners suggests SpaceX's next Starship test flight could launch as soon as May 21. SpaceX fired six Raptor engines on the company's next Starship rocket Monday, clearing a major hurdle on the path to launch later this month on a high-stakes test flight to get the private rocket program back on track. Starship ignited its Raptor engines Monday morning on a test stand near SpaceX's Starbase launch facility in South Texas.

6 days ago | arstechnica.com | Stephen Clark

SpaceX's plan to turn Starbase into Texas' newest city won the approval of voters—err, employees. Welcome to Edition 7.43 of the Rocket Report! There's been a lot of recent news in hypersonic testing. We cover some of that in this week's newsletter, but it's just a taste of the US military's appetite for fielding its own hypersonic weapons, and conversely, the Pentagon's emphasis on the detection and destruction of an enemy's hypersonic missiles.

6 days ago | arstechnica.com | Stephen Clark

Kosmos 482 is encased in a titanium heat shield, with a good chance of reaching the surface intact. Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth's atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago. On average, a piece of space junk the size of Kosmos 482, with a mass of about a half-ton, falls into the atmosphere about once per week.

1 week ago | arstechnica.com | Stephen Clark

"Hypersonic systems are now pushing the envelope beyond what can be done by the human body." Stratolaunch has finally found a use for the world's largest airplane. Twice in the last five months, the company launched a hypersonic vehicle over the Pacific Ocean, accelerated it to more than five times the speed of sound, and autonomously landed at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Stratolaunch used the same vehicle for both flights.

1 week ago | arstechnica.com | Stephen Clark

Amazon's Kuiper satellites look nothing like SpaceX's Starlink. The first production satellites for Amazon's Kuiper broadband network launched earlier this week, but if you tuned in to the mission's official livestream, the truncated coverage had the feel of a spy satellite launch. This changed with a video Amazon posted on social media Friday, giving space enthusiasts and prospective Kuiper customers their first look at the real satellites.