Welcome to Rocket Report Issue 6.44! Kathy Lueders, general manager of SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility, says the company expects to receive an FAA launch license for the next Starship test flight shortly after Memorial Day. It looks like this rocket could fly in late May or early June, about two and a half months after the previous Starship test flight. This is an improvement over the previous seven-month and four-month intervals between Starship flights.
As always, we welcome contributions from readers. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe to us using the box below (the form will not appear in AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report includes information on small, medium and heavy rockets, as well as a brief look at the next three launches on the calendar.
Blue Origin is scheduled to launch this weekend. Blue Origin plans to launch its first manned space mission in nearly two years on Sunday. This flight will carry six passengers on a flight into suborbital space more than 60 miles (100 km) above West Texas. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, has not flown people into space since the New Shepard rocket failed during an unmanned research flight in September 2022. The company successfully launched New Shepard on another unmanned suborbital mission in December.
Historic flight … This will be the 25th flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and the seventh manned space mission on New Shepard. Before Blue Origin’s rocket failure in 2022, the company achieved a flight frequency of about one launch every two months on average. The flight rate has since decreased. Sunday’s flight is important not only because it marks the resumption of launches for Blue Origin’s suborbital human spaceflight business, but also because the six-member crew includes an aviation pioneer. In 1963, 90-year-old Ed Dwight almost became the first black astronaut. Dwight, a retired Air Force captain, piloted military fighter aircraft and graduated from test pilot school, pursuing a familiar career like many of the early astronauts. He was on a short list of astronaut candidates that the Air Force provided to NASA, but the space agency did not accept him. Dwight will be the oldest person to ever fly in space.
The Camden Spaceport officially no longer exists. With the stroke of a pen, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed a bill dissolving the Camden County Spaceport Authority, Action News Jax reported. This news follows a March 2022 referendum in which more than 70 percent of voters rejected a plan to buy land for the spaceport on the Georgia coast between Savannah and Jacksonville, Florida. County officials still tried to push the spaceport initiative forward after the failed referendum, but Georgia’s Supreme Court ruled in February that the county must comply with voters’ wishes.
12 million dollars for what?… The government of Camden County, with a population of about 55,000 people, spent $12 million over a decade on the Camden Spaceport concept. The space agency’s goal was to attract small launch vehicles to the region, but no major launches ever took place from Camden County. State Representative Steven Sainz, who sponsored the bill to abolish the Spaceport Authority, said in a statement that the legislation “reflects the community’s choice and paves a path for future collaborations on economic initiatives that are more responsive to local needs.” (filed by zapman987)
Polaris Spaceplanes is moving on to bigger things. German startup Polaris Spaceplanes says it is moving forward with construction of its MIRA II and MIRA III spaceplane prototypes after MIRA, a subscale test vehicle, was damaged earlier this year, European Spaceflight reports. The MIRA demonstration vehicle crash-landed during a test flight in February. The incident occurred during takeoff from an airfield in Germany, before the vehicle could ignite its linear aerospace engine in flight. The remote-controlled MIRA prototype was about 4.25 meters long. Polaris announced April 30 that it would not repair MIRA and would instead move forward with building two larger vehicles.
Almost 16 months without a market launch … The MIRA II and MIRA III vehicles will be 5 meters long and will be powered by Polaris’ AS-1 aerospike engines as well as jet engines to power the vehicle before and after flight tests of the rocket engine. Aerospike engines are rocket engines designed to operate efficiently at all altitudes. The MIRA test vehicles are precursors to AURORA, a multi-purpose spaceplane and hypersonic transport vehicle that Polaris says will be capable of carrying up to 1,000 kilograms of payload into low-Earth orbit. (submitted by Jay500001 and Tfargo04)