Rocket Report: Pentagon needs more missile interceptors; Artemis II clears review is currently attracting attention in the technology world.
Experts believe this development may influence how digital platforms evolve
over the coming years.
SpaceX has started commissioning a second launch pad at the company’s Starbase facility in Texas.
Welcome to Edition 8.33 of the Rocket Report! NASA officials seem optimistic about launching the Artemis II mission next month, so confident that they will forgo another fueling test on the Space Launch platform rocket to check the integrity of fickle seals in a liquid hydrogen loading line. The rocket will return to the launch pad next week, with liftoff targeted for April 1 at 6:24 pm EDT (22:24 UTC). NASA has six launch dates available in early April after the agency added April 2 to the launch period. April 1 and 2 each have launch windows that open before sunset, an added bonus for those of us who prefer a day launch, for purely aesthetic reasons.
As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Firefly’s Alpha rocket flies again. Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket successfully returned to flight Wednesday, March 11, launching a tech innovation demonstration mission more than 10 months after the rocket’s previous launch failed, Space News reports. The launch followed several delays and scrubbed launch attempts. The two-stage Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and headed southwest over the Pacific Ocean, reaching orbit about eight minutes later. Firefly said the rocket’s upper stage later reignited its engine, demonstrating restart capability required for some orbit insertion missions. This was the seventh flight of Firefly’s Alpha rocket, capable of hauling more than a ton of payload to low-Earth orbit.
Block II preview… The recent setbacks for Firefly’s Alpha program included a launch failure last April and a fire that destroyed a booster stage on the test stand. The Texas-based company billed this week’s flight as a purely demonstration mission to validate several upgrades for the Alpha Block II rocket configuration, which will debut on the next launch. The Block II will include a 7-foot (2-meter) increase to Alpha’s length, consolidated batteries and avionics built in-house, improved thermal protection platforms, and stronger carbon composite structures built with automated machinery. This week’s flight carried the rocket’s new in-house avionics suite and enhanced thermal protection platform, Firefly said. “Flight 7 served as a critical opportunity to validate Alpha’s performance ahead of our Block II upgrade, and this team knocked it out of the park,” said Adam Oakes, Firefly’s vice president of launch. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Rocket Lab launches undisclosed satellite. Rocket Lab launched a spacecraft March 5 for a confidential customer, most likely Earth observation company BlackSky, Space News reports. The mission began with liftoff of an Electron rocket from Rocket Lab’s private spaceport in New Zealand. The rocket delivered a “single commercial satellite” to a roughly 292-mile-high (470-kilometer) orbit for a “confidential customer,” Rocket Lab said in a press release. This was the 83rd flight of an Electron rocket, including suborbital flights for the US military’s Defense Innovation Unit testing hypersonic missile tech. Electron is a workhorse in the dedicated small launch sector, with capacity for up to 710 pounds (320 kilograms) of payload to low-Earth orbit.
Solving the puzzle… This was the second time in less than four months that Rocket Lab has launched a satellite mission for an undisclosed customer. BlackSky, a US-based remote sensing company, confirmed it was the customer for a November Rocket Lab launch under similar circumstances. BlackSky announced this week that it activated its newest “Gen-3” optical Earth-imaging satellite “in less than one week following launch.” While the company did not confirm its launch with Rocket Lab, this statement suggests BlackSky was, indeed, the customer on the March 5 mission. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Pentagon orders more SM-3s. In early February, the Pentagon and RTX, formerly Raytheon, reached an agreement to ramp up missile production, with a framework to dramatically increase manufacturing of Tomahawk cruise missiles, air-to-air missiles, and SM-3 and SM-6 missile interceptors. The announcement did not include a dollar value. The Defense Department put some numbers on the deal in the military’s daily dump of contract announcements Thursday. The Missile Defense Agency is ordering dozens of new SM-3 Block IB missiles, which are used to intercept enemy ballistic missiles in space. Thursday’s announcement added 23 SM-3 missiles to the order, bringing the total number to 78, for a total cost of more than $1.36 billion.
Before the Iran war… The Pentagon is making deals with several defense contractors to deliver more weapons platforms. Lockheed Martin plans to quadruple THAAD interceptor production to 400 units annually and boost Patriot PAC-3 output to 2,000 per year, Reuters reported. These agreements were in place before the US began striking Iran. The conflict has increased the military’s urgency to replenish weapons inventories, particularly interceptor stocks being used to shoot down Iranian missiles and drones attacking US and allied bases in the Middle East.
SpaceX delivers for EchoStar. A direct television satellite for Dish Network, a subsidiary of EchoStar, headed into geosynchronous Earth orbit on Monday night aboard a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral, Spaceflight Now reports. The satellite, EchoStar XXV, flew to a geosynchronous transfer orbit before maneuvering to its operation position at 110 degrees west longitude above the equator. This was the 30th flight of a Falcon 9 rocket so far in 2026, putting SpaceX on a similar pace to last year.
A rarity these days… This was the first launch of a large commercial geosynchronous communications satellite in nearly six months. These types of satellites operate more than 22,000 miles (nearly 36,000 kilometers) over the equator, where their orbits match the rate of Earth’s rotation. They were once the favored solution for commercial broadcasting and data relay. Today, the strong trend is toward large mega-constellations in low-Earth orbit, with networks like SpaceX’s Starlink beaming broadband Internet to global customers. Commercial geosynchronous satellites are now a niche, primarily for markets like direct-to-home TV and satellite radio. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
China resumes space launches. Two Chinese rockets launched Thursday, March 12, from spaceports in the northwest and south of the country. These were the first Chinese orbital launches in more than a month, a break that coincided with the Chinese New Year holiday. It is not clear if the holiday was the reason for the interruption in satellite launches. China did not have such a long lull in launch activity the last couple of years. Two Chinese rockets failed during launches in January, but China’s rocket industry has a deep bench, so there’s no obvious link between those failures and the recent letup in launches.
Assembling a network… The first of Thursday’s launches from China involved a Long March 8A rocket carrying a batch of Internet satellites, followed by the launch of a Long March 2D rocket with a pair of classified military satellites. These missions continued China’s rapid build-up of satellite networks for data relay and imaging surveillance.
Artemis II clears critical review. NASA plans to haul its Artemis II Moon rocket back out to its seaside launch pad next week to ready the huge booster for blastoff as early as April 1 on a delayed-but-historic flight to send four astronauts on a nine-day trip around the moon, CBS News reports. At the conclusion of a two-day flight readiness review, “all the teams polled ‘go’ to launch and fly Artemis II around the Moon, pending completion of some of the work before we roll out to the launch pad,” said Lori Glaze, associate administrator of Exploration platforms advancement at NASA Headquarters, in a press conference Thursday. “Just a reminder to everybody, we talk about it every time we talk about this flight, it’s a test flight, and it is not without risk. But our team and our hardware are ready,” Glaze said.
Behind schedule… Based on the ever-changing positions of the Moon and Earth, along with a complex mix of mission objectives, NASA must launch Artemis II by April 6, or the flight will slip another month or so. For an April 1 launch, liftoff is expected at 6:24 pm EDT, followed by splashdown in the Pacific Ocean nine days later. NASA workers had hoped to launch the Space Launch platform rocket, the Orion crew capsule, and its four passengers—Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen—in early February. But the long-awaited flight was delayed by hydrogen fuel leaks and, more recently, by problems with the rocket’s upper-stage propellant pressurization platform. (submitted by EllPeaTea)
Goodbye to NASA’s Exploration Upper Stage. The death of NASA’s Exploration Upper Stage was confirmed last Friday, March 6, in a a seemingly pedestrian notice posted on a government procurement website: “NASA/MSFC intends to issue a sole source contract to acquire next-generation upper stages for use in Space Launch platform (SLS) Artemis IV and Artemis V from United Launch Alliance (ULA).” The announcement spells the end of the Exploration Upper Stage, a multibillion-dollar, Boeing-led advancement 10 years in the making that was still years away from being ready to fly, Ars reports.
We hardly knew ya… Contracted to Boeing more than a decade ago, the Exploration Upper Stage upgrade was intended to allow the SLS rocket to launch not just the Orion spacecraft to the Moon, but large payloads alongside it. That the advancement of capable rockets by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and United Launch Alliance to deliver large cargo to the Moon rendered it obsolete mattered, for a long time, not at all. If the Exploration Upper Stage was anything, it was a survivor—a testament to the power of pork and the value of political support from key Southern senators in Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Florida. Now, NASA is going with a more affordable commercial option to upgrade the SLS rocket.
SpaceX activates second Starbase launch pad. For the first time since October, SpaceX has a rocket on the launch pad at Starbase, Texas, NASASpaceflight reports. This time, it is the first of SpaceX’s new Block 3 Super Heavy boosters mounted on SpaceX’s newest launch pad, Pad 2. The launch pad has been under construction for the past 22 months and will help usher in the next chapter for the Starship program. This is the start of pad commissioning, a process that will culminate with the first launch of the upgraded third-generation Super Heavy booster and Starship rocket. SpaceX previously put the new booster and ship through a series of checkouts at a separate test stand at Starbase.
Slipping until April… At some point, SpaceX is expected to test-fire the new Super Heavy booster on Pad 2. But the booster only has a subset of its 33 Raptor engines, so a static fire test does not appear to be in the plan for the booster’s current stay at the launch pad. Meanwhile, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk posted on X on March 7 that the first Block 3 launch is about four weeks away, suggesting a launch sometime in early April. SpaceX had been targeting March for the test flight. This time one year ago, Musk wrote that SpaceX was “tracking to a Starship launch rate of once a week” within 12 months. That launch cadence has not been achieved.
Why This Matters
This development highlights the rapid pace of innovation in the technology sector.
Companies are constantly pushing boundaries in order to stay competitive.
Analysts suggest that such changes could influence future product design,
user expectations, and industry standards.
Looking Ahead
As technology continues to evolve, developments like this may shape the next
generation of digital services and consumer experiences.
Industry watchers will continue to monitor how this story develops and what
impact it may have on the broader technology landscape.