Near Einstein Crater, a spent Falcon 9 upper stage slammed into the lunar surface and left behind a pit measuring about 60 feet wide and under 10 feet deep — and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the evidence. Ordinarily a space debris item like this barely registers. This one became a science opportunity.
Welcome to Edition 9.07 of the Rocket Report.
The Moon got hit and scientists got lucky
NASA published the imagery this week after LRO’s narrow-angle camera photographed the crash site from several viewing angles. Since it launched a commercial Moon lander back in 2025, the stage had been wandering through deep space.
Impacts of this sort are uncommon, though not without precedent. The silver lining: the strike excavated untouched material from below the surface — material never exposed to solar wind, galactic cosmic rays or micrometeorites.
The event doubled as a no-cost calibration test for the community that monitors incoming objects. Per NASA, asteroid trackers forecast the Falcon 9’s impact point to within roughly 0.6 miles.
ULA promotes from within after a rough year
Mark Peller, previously Chief Operating Officer at United Launch Alliance, has been elevated to president and CEO. He takes over from Tory Bruno, who departed in December for Blue Origin, where he is developing and managing national security programs.
Peller’s tenure at ULA stretches back to the company’s founding in 2006, and his most recent assignment was leading Vulcan rocket development. Vulcan’s 2024 debut went well, but the vehicle has been grounded since the start of this year because of trouble with its solid rocket boosters.
The job comes with plenty of baggage. Last year the 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin forfeited its long-held status as the Pentagon’s launch provider of choice — and that setback preceded February’s strap-on solid booster anomaly.
Despite the malfunction, the rocket carried on and still put its payload where it belonged. The problem is that it marked the second anomaly of that kind across the last three Vulcan flights — a trend rather than a one-off.
A redesign of portions of the booster’s nozzle structure is underway, and whether Vulcan returns to flight before the year ends remains uncertain. Boeing and Lockheed Martin acknowledged last month that they had backed a loan to ULA to carry it through the “financial challenges” stemming from the grounding.
Satellite operators can’t plan around Falcon 9 anymore
An entire generation of satellite startups reached orbit thanks to Falcon 9. SpaceX now intends to retire it in favor of the far bigger — and still unproven — Starship, and that has the commercial satellite sector on edge.
Their fear is that SpaceX prioritizes its own hardware, namely Starlink V3 satellites and orbital data centers, since the margins there are dramatically better. Starship’s Pez-style satellite dispenser was built around Starlink, which says a great deal about where priorities sit.
Gwynne Shotwell has said in the past that Falcon 9 could reach the end of its operational life somewhere around 2030 or 2032. Lately, though, commercial customers have run into dead ends when trying to book a launch beyond 2028.
According to one source, SpaceX has informed the US government that commercial launches will stop after 2028, with Falcon 9 continuing only for a small set of federally contracted flights. Regardless of whether those dates stick, the signal was received.
Taiwan’s first military launcher test ended in self-destruct
Taiwan’s Central News Agency reports that a prototype for a future satellite launch vehicle, built by the island’s leading weapons manufacturer, strayed from its flight path moments after Wednesday’s liftoff. The rocket’s self-destruct system was activated by the “trajectory anomaly.”
No injuries or property damage were reported by the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, which conducted the test. Wreckage came down inside a pre-designated safety control zone close to Taiwan’s southern tip.
Little has been disclosed, but the vehicle was probably a sub-scale suborbital variant of the military satellite launcher NCSIST has planned — a solid-fueled rocket intended to loft small payloads to low-Earth orbit. This was the program’s inaugural flight.
Separately, the civilian Taiwan Space Agency is developing its own liquid-fueled launcher, which could be flying orbital missions by the early 2030s.
Innospace fails twice in a row
South Korean startup Innospace said its small suborbital rocket went out of control just seconds into a Thursday test flight departing Brazil’s Alcântara Space Center. Operators of the spaceport, the Brazilian Air Force, activated the Sebit rocket’s flight termination system once it strayed from its intended trajectory.
There were no injuries and no property damage. “While we regret that the planned flight could not be fully completed, the test flight provided valuable flight data from key systems, including the launch pad, propulsion system, and guidance, navigation and control (GNC),” Innospace said.
Billed as a “multipurpose suborbital rocket,” Sebit is meant to lift payloads as high as 100 kilometers (62 miles). It was the company’s second failure in a row. Innospace’s debut orbital try from the same site in December fell apart when the Hanbit-Nano rocket began tumbling seconds after leaving the pad.
Ukraine hit the factory that builds Soyuz
On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed that Ukrainian ground-launched cruise missiles had struck the Progress Rocket Space Center far inside Russian territory.
“In Russia’s Samara region, one of the key enterprises within Roscosmos—the Progress Center, which was involved, among other things, in electronics production–was hit,” Zelenskyy wrote on X. “Flamingo missiles were used. A good achievement.”
Roughly 900 km separate Samara from the Ukrainian border, and the city hosts Russia’s single most important rocket builder. Progress puts together the Soyuz-2 and the newer Soyuz-5, and also manufactures military satellites.
Capable of delivering about 8 metric tons to low-Earth orbit, Soyuz-2 serves both civil and military customers. It is likewise the workhorse behind Russia’s crewed spacecraft launches, which prompts questions about knock-on consequences for the International Space Station.
China now has two companies landing boosters
Just over a month has passed since China first recovered an orbital-class booster. On Tuesday, a second operator managed the same feat.
LandSpace’s Zhuque-3 departed Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, delivered a lone satellite to low-Earth orbit, and set its first stage down on target downrange in the Gobi Desert. LandSpace is 11 years old. It was Zhuque-3’s second outing; the booster came down hard on the maiden flight last December.
The LandSpace success comes after a Long March 10B booster was recovered in July, and a handful of additional Chinese firms appear poised to attempt landings within the next few months.
Not one of them — the massive state-owned enterprises included — approaches SpaceX’s flight rate. Taken together, they launch roughly half as frequently. They manage that with fully expendable vehicles, however, which is precisely why reusability could shift the equation.
The cost gap is now a chasm
Fresh research is beginning to put numbers on just how completely Falcon 9, reuse and high cadence rewrote the global launch business. The study, from public policy researchers in the United Kingdom and Italy, appeared in Economics Letters.
Its most arresting graphic plots cumulative payload delivered to orbit by country. For decades Russia and the United States moved in lockstep, drifted apart over the past 10 years, and then separated dramatically as Falcon 9 flights ramped up in the early 2020s.
The cost data points the same direction. Ten years ago, the United States and Europe were more or less level. Now, based on publicly available figures, European launches cost three times as much for equivalent payloads.
By the researchers’ calculation, the average American price to put a kilogram in orbit is $3,225. Japan sits at $5,287, China at $5,809, Russia at $6,682 and Europe at $9,897. India tops the list at close to $15,000 per kilogram.
Ariane 6 Block 3 is dead
European Spaceflight reports that the European Space Agency has dropped the Ariane 6 Block 3 evolution from consideration — an upgrade that would have replaced heavier legacy metallic structures with a carbon-fiber reinforced plastic upper stage.
Block 2 technologies remain under development, an ESA spokesperson said, with some of them already in service as larger solid rocket boosters. Around 2029, an Ariane 6 add-on kick stage named Astris will enter the picture.
The lightweight Icarus upper stage, however, is done, having failed to secure backing from ESA member states.
The earliest signal surfaced via SpaceScout, which reported earlier this month on a presentation by an ESA scientist covering a proposed robotic mission to orbit and land on Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. That team is now revisiting a design built on the assumption that Ariane 6 Block 3 would be ready to launch in the 2030s.
SpaceX towed a Starship 24 days across the Indian Ocean
The test flight on July 24 concluded, but the mission carried on. Against expectations, the spacecraft survived its Indian Ocean splashdown intact, prompting SpaceX to improvise a recovery operation.
Over the course of 24 days, a recovery ship hauled the vehicle engines-first for several hundred miles to Christmas Island, an Australian territory. SpaceX now hopes to work out a route to bring it home to South Texas.
All 13 Starship and Super Heavy test flights have already handed engineers mountains of data. But data is not the same as hardware. SpaceX’s record recovering and reflying Falcon 9 boosters is nearly spotless, and the few minor Falcon 9 failures have involved the expendable upper stage.
That makes an intact ship enormously valuable. Inspecting the heat shield is of particular interest to engineers as they zero in on a design capable of full and rapid reusability.
China’s Long March family bounced back fast
China’s workhorse Long March family is rebounding swiftly after an unusual failure on August 10. Officials have not stated publicly what caused the Long March 7A to come apart in under 90 seconds of flight.
Because the vehicle uses YF-100 engines, questions initially arose about other Chinese rockets flying the same hardware. Those worries were short-lived. Six days later YF-100 engines flew again on a successful Long March 12, and the heavy-lift Long March 5 — also YF-100 powered — is only days from carrying out one of China’s most consequential missions of the decade.
Chang’e 7 goes for the best real estate on the Moon
Possibly as early as Sunday, a Long March 5 will lift off from a Chinese coastal seaport with Chang’e 7 aboard — the most advanced mission yet in a lunar effort spanning nearly two decades.
Riding together are a lunar orbiter equipped with high-resolution cameras and other advanced instruments, a lander, a rover and a mini-hopper probe. China hasn’t revealed the lander’s mass, though it is several times heavier than recent NASA-backed craft such as Firefly’s Blue Ghost.
Where it’s going counts for more than what it’s carrying. Shackleton Crater, situated almost exactly at the south pole, is the target.
The bulk of the lunar surface is desolate. The south pole is the exception: Shackleton’s towering rims produce permanently shadowed “cold traps” in which water ice and other valuable materials may have built up across billions of years. Across every long-term settlement blueprint drawn up by NASA and China, a comparatively small patch of terrain at the south pole is the prize.
Next three launches
August 21: Falcon 9 | Starlink 10-39 | Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida | 15:14 UTC
August 22: Falcon 9 | Starlink 15-20 | Vandenberg Space Force Base, California | 07:25 UTC
August 24: Long March 5 | Chang’e 7 | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China | 00:05 UTC