Blue Moon lunar lander concept of operations.

Credit: NASA

The chart shared by NASA showed Orion docking with the Blue Moon lander in an elliptical lunar orbit, approximately 8,500 km above the Moon’s surface. However NASA is also working to have the option of docking with Orion in low-Lunar orbit.

According to Jeremy Parsons, the manager of the Artemis Program for NASA, such an orbit a few hundred km above the Moon would significantly reduce the propellant needed by Blue Moon to bring astronauts down to the lunar surface and back up. This mass could be used elsewhere on the vehicle. The lower orbit would also offer more, and faster opportunities for astronauts to get off the lunar surface if needed. In short, it makes some aspects of a lunar landing significantly easier for Blue Origin.

Extended Centaur

As part of this, NASA announced Friday that it is working with United Launch Alliance to develop an “extended” version of the Centaur V upper stage. In concert with the core stage of the Space Launch System, this upper stage would allow Orion to reach low-lunar orbit.

This is a big deal. It has long been a point of embarrassment for NASA that Orion, with its low-performing Service Module, does not have the delta-V capability to launch from Earth, reach low-lunar orbit, and return to Earth for splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. But no one had seemed prepared to fix this problem before.

“Getting Orion to low-Lunar orbit means solving propulsion and spacecraft integration problems that were left unaddressed for far too long,” Isaacman said Friday.

Instead, NASA created workarounds like the Lunar Gateway, which was put in a near-rectilinear halo orbit that Orion could safely reach. The burden of performance to reach the lunar surface was pushed on to the lunar landers and the companies developing them.

Given the urgency of the situation, NASA has been trying to help lunar lander companies in any way they can, Isaacman said.

“We’re listening to the data, and looking at what’s happening around us,” he said. “What progress are our landing partners making? Where are they struggling? What can we do to be helpful? Their lives get easier if we can get Orion closer to the Moon, substantially. We could choose to continue on our track and say, maybe they’ll show up and meet our timelines. Or we can say well let’s start turning those knobs to help.”

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/nasa-updates-lander-plans-for-moon-landings-finally-solves-long-festering-orion-issue/

Public, private, or both?

But there’s no firm plan yet for when the military might get moving on actually setting up a new launch base. “It’s going to take a strong partnership with local and state governments,” Garrant said. “As far as decision timelines, we don’t have anything yet.”

There were 175 orbital launch attempts last year from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Space Force officials project the country’s established spaceports will need to support 700 launches per year by 2036.

A third launch site would offload some of the launch demand from limited real estate at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg. It would also provide what Space Force leaders call “geographic resiliency” to mitigate the risk of a natural disaster or military attack knocking the Cape or Vandenberg offline.

The federal government already owns a third spaceport at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, used for suborbital rocket tests and small- and medium-class satellite launches. Small rockets can also launch from Pacific Spaceport Complex, owned by the state of Alaska.

There are also commercial options that might be available for a new military spaceport. Ars asked Garrant if the Space Force might consider leasing property from a privately owned launch base, such as the expansive spaceport SpaceX plans to build in southern Louisiana.

“We’ve discussed that we need to consider all of those opportunities: public-private partnership, new federal installation, state land, leveraging commercial land—all of those are possibilities. They all have pros and cons. We haven’t made that decision yet, but we’re not discounting any of those options.”

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/senior-commander-says-space-force-needs-new-spaceport-by-2030/

Welcome to Edition 9.16 of the Rocket Report! Lots of SpaceX-related news this week including a couple of Thursday shockers. In one story, the company told the US Space Force thanks, but no thanks after being offered three military launch contracts. Then, on the civil space side of things, SpaceX’s Starship may required up to 22 refuelings to support a lunar landing, a NASA safety panel said.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

Miura 5 getting closer to launch. PLD Space says its Miura 5 rocket, due to undertake its inaugural launch next year, is nearing final integration, Aviation Week reports. The rocket is one of three Miura 5s the company has already manufactured, with the other two designed to qualify key system elements, CEO Raúl Torres said in an October 19 program update. PLD Space now targets a first flight of the small-lift vehicle before mid-2027.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/rocket-report-spacex-says-no-thanks-to-military-launches-spanish-rocket-nearly-ready/

NASA does not have, nor want, nuclear weapons. But when it comes to a particular metric that is part of the Artemis Program to land people on the Moon, NASA guards a particular number like they are trying to prevent outsiders from cracking nuclear codes.

I am speaking of the number of Starship launches required to fuel a Starship-based lunar lander in low-Earth orbit such that it can fly out to the Moon, land there, and return to lunar orbit.

This number has been a moving target over the years. The general response from NASA has typically been, ‘We don’t know for sure, so we’re not going to say.’ In 2023, for example, the then-director of NASA’s Human Landing System, Lisa Watson-Morgan, told Ars, “We have a general idea, but I’m reluctant to say exactly what that is.”

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/latest-estimate-for-starship-launches-required-to-support-a-moon-landing-22/

Elon Musk said Tuesday that he would like to see the consolidation of his business empire by formally merging his two largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla.

“Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes,” Musk said of a potential merger. He was speaking during a question-and-answer period as part of SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call. Musk said, ultimately, it not his decision. “But at the end of the day the shareholders have to be supportive of this.”

Musk’s talk of a merger comes after a busy year in which SpaceX already acquired Musk’s artificial intelligence firm, xAI, in February. In June, SpaceX went public with the largest initial public offering on record.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/spacex-and-tesla-into-a-single-company-has-a-lot-of-merit-musk-says/

Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I’m most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan’s Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it’s set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot’s Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/rocket-report-faa-eyes-more-starbase-traffic-indias-skyroot-snares-us-customer/

Blue Origin announced a major expansion of its already considerable Florida launch facilities on Friday morning with the intent of eventually flying more than 100 rockets a year from there.

The company said it would add two launch pads for the New Glenn rocket, in addition to two already under construction at Cape Canaveral. The company is also investing heavily in a new manufacturing facility that will produce up to 150 upper stages for a larger variant of the New Glenn rocket.

The company also plans to procure two additional landing ships to catch and return the first stage of the New Glenn rocket (it currently has one, named Jacklyn). Finally, Blue Origin said it would add a new customer integration facility, built in conjunction with the US Space Force, that will feature four payload bays to process multiple missions at the same time.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/blue-origin-is-going-all-in-on-the-new-glenn-rocket/

Rocket Lab announced Wednesday that its Neutron launch vehicle won’t fly until 2027, citing an issue discovered during manufacturing of the rocket’s carbon composite structures.

The announcement was public confirmation of what nearly everyone inside Rocket Lab and the wider space industry already knew. The most recent official update from Rocket Lab in August suggested the company still held hope of delivering the first Neutron rocket to its launch pad at Wallops Island, Virginia, before the end of this year, a schedule that would have almost certainly pushed the first flight into 2027.

But Rocket Lab’s statement Wednesday about Neutron’s schedule suggests the company is still struggling with manufacturing the rocket’s large booster stage. Neutron’s reusable first stage is made of carbon composite structures, which offer low weight, high strength, and corrosion resistance. But carbon composites in aerospace are generally harder to manufacture than metallic structures.

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https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/rocket-lab-announces-another-delay-for-its-medium-lift-neutron-rocket/

This will be the rocket’s first flight from European soil … The flight from SaxaVord will be HyImpulse’s second SR75 mission and its first to carry commercial payloads. The company completed an initial test flight of the suborbital rocket on May 3, 2024, from the Koonibba Test Range in South Australia.

German launch company gets a new CEO. The Supervisory Board of Rocket Factory Augburg has appointed Alexander Dahm as CEO. He succeeds Indulis Kalnins and will be responsible for the company’s continued development and its path to the debut flight of the RFA ONE launch vehicle, the company said this week. Dahm has 30 years of aerospace experience, including involvement with the Ariane 5 program.

Still seeking orbit … “I am impressed by the grit, innovative strength, and passion with which a new generation of European launch vehicles is being developed here. Together, we will reach the next important milestones on the way to the maiden flight of RFA ONE and actively shape the company’s future,” Dahm said. RFA has been working toward its first orbital launch following the loss of its first stage during a 2024 static-fire test.

SpaceX has rare scrub of Falcon 9 late in countdown. A Falcon 9 launch planned for early Monday morning was scrubbed in the final minute of the count as the rocket was shifting into its automated startup sequence, Spaceflight Now reports. SpaceX didn’t provide a reason for the abort. The rocket is intended to launch a new batch of data satellites to low Earth orbit on behalf of the United States Space Force’s Space Development Agency.

A relatively young booster … The company targeted Tuesday, October 6, for its next launch attempt, but waved off that opportunity as well. Following additional changes, the company is now aiming for no earlier than Saturday, October 10. The mission will use Falcon 9 first stage booster B1103. This will be its sixth flight following the launches of the SDA’s T1TL-E, NROL-179, and three batches of Starlink satellites.

Europe’s progress on hop tests remains slow. The European Commission has extended the deadline for the SALTO reusable launcher project to the end of 2026, giving the program another three months to complete the first hop test of Europe’s Themis reusable rocket demonstrator, European Spaceflight reports. This is the latest in a series of extensions that have pushed the completion date back from the original November 2025 deadline.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/rocket-report-a-rare-falcon-9-scrub-is-it-just-about-vulcans-time-to-shine/

“My fundamental ask here is that we need to make headway here and begin sharing data across all vehicles, from whatever country you are, with us and with others, to promote a safe operating environment,” Nicolls said.

Nearly all Chinese satellite operators decline to publicly share their satellite ephemeris data.

Credit: SpaceX

What do SpaceX’s competitors think? Ars asked the head of Amazon Leo, Rajeev Badyal, about coordinating with Starlink, his chief competitor in the satellite broadband market. Amazon has 396 satellites in orbit today, with hundreds more awaiting launch when their rockets are ready to take them to orbit.

“Space safety is paramount to us as well,” Badyal said. “Every launch we do, we actually coordinate with SpaceX. We coordinate with others who have satellites. We let them know where we’re going to drop them off, how we’re going to orbit raise, etc. So we have regular meetings with companies like SpaceX to exchange data.

“So, for us, sharing ephemeris or sharing the information necessary for space safety is a non-issue,” Badyal said. “We’re big proponents of making sure that all of us operate in this domain in space in a coordinated fashion because [the] consequences of not doing so are significant for everybody, and there’s no reason not to.”

Amazon Leo’s first-generation constellation will consist of 3,232 satellites, and the Federal Communications Commission in February approved Amazon’s request for a 4,504-satellite second-generation network. Amazon has filed for FCC approval for an additional 5,105 satellites for direct-to-device connectivity, but the company is still far from matching the size of the Starlink fleet.

“Obviously, SpaceX is the largest constellation out there,” Badyal said. “We work with them hand in hand. In terms of China and adversaries, that’s something I can’t comment on at the moment. At some point, we will have to coordinate, or it’ll end up being a negative thing for everybody, especially if they get to scale.”

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/10/spacex-calls-for-better-coordination-in-orbit-after-near-misses-with-starlink/