NOT ONLY SpaceX News №52
A cosmic hello, everyone! Let’s skip the foreplay and dive straight into last month’s private-spaceflight news from around the globe.
Headlines
- SpaceX goes all-in ahead of Starship’s 10th flight
- South Korea and Honda crash the private-launch party
- Stoke Space engine milestone
- Boeing’s Starliner fear
- A summer with no New Glenn launch—and tourists riding New Shepard
- French start-up news, Falcon 9 tops Space Shuttle, and the military eyes Starlink
SpaceX goes all-in ahead of Starship’s 10th flight
As you know, on 18 June the curse of Starship v2 struck again. There was an… explosion at the Masseys test site. Both the ship and the pad were wrecked. We said last time that patching the pad would take a couple of months—so, an autumn launch? Think again.
SpaceX played a knight’s move. Instead of waiting for repairs, engineers rolled a temporary stand to the Mechazilla launch tower overnight 27–28 June. It looks like an adapter for mounting the second stage and running its static-fire tests. A few days earlier the same adapter was test-fitted on the Super Heavy stand, and under a tweet by @StarshipGazer the stand’s chief designer replied tersely, “cooking”—work is humming.
Translation: a Starship static fire could happen in July, so the next launch might beat the autumn clock. The stakes are higher now: they’re risking Pad A itself, not a test stand. But when has SpaceX ever played it safe? Remember 2008, when Falcon 1 had three failures and Elon flat-out said a fourth would bankrupt the company. The comparison isn’t perfect—SpaceX now dominates every segment it enters—but it shows the company’s operating principles.
South Korea crashes the race
On 28 May the privately built UNA EXPRESS-I lifted from the island of Yeongpyeong. The 10-m kerolox rocket, thrusting 5 tonnes, climbed exactly 10 km, splashed down in its target zone, and even ran micro-g experiments. Never before had a rocket designed and launched by a Korean private firm flown from Korean soil (Innospace had to launch from Brazil in 2023).
Start-up UNA STELLA was born in February 2022; in three years it went from idea to flight while attracting investors and building an electric-pump engine (Rocket Lab took the same route for Electron’s second stage). The goal is a suborbital tourist ship hitting 100 km. The launch also kicked off the government’s Space Pioneer grant scheme to localize key technologies.
The brand-new Korea Aerospace Administration (KASA), founded in 2024, watched closely. Don’t confuse it with the state defense giant KAI, whose three-stage Nuri has already gone orbital and is being handed to Hanwha for commercial service by 2028. If plans hold, Korea may soon field reusable boosters and a whole line of suborbital tourist craft.
Honda’s reusable-rocket hop
The Japanese auto titan isn’t sleeping. Honda released footage of a 6-m test article making a ≈300 m leap and a pinpoint landing. The 85-cm-diameter, 1.3-t cylinder looks like a baby cross of New Shepard and Falcon 9. Two gimballed cryogenic engines kept it aloft for 56 s, topping out at 271 m and touching down only 37 cm off target. Fold-out legs and nose-mounted grid fins echo Falcon 9’s hardware—just scaled for tech-demo duty. Honda says the point was to prove the basics: thrust-vector control and precision landing.
Stoke Space: 200-second Zenith burn
On 5 June Stoke Space executed a full-duration 200-second firing of its Zenith engine on a new vertical stand at Moses Lake. Zenith uses a closed, full-flow staged-combustion cycle—fiendishly hard. Only two private outfits, SpaceX and Stoke, have pulled it off.
In March the U.S. Space Force admitted Stoke to the NSSL Phase-3 Lane 1 roster. Real money flows only after a successful orbital launch by year-end. With the big burn in the bag, the window is still open—barely.
Boeing and the Starliner slog
Boeing is still floundering with Starliner. NASA’s letter of 6 June moved the next flight “no earlier than early 2026” and left the mission type—cargo or crew—undecided. Same “maybe, maybe not” NASA floated on 27 March, contingent on certifying fixes.
The old pain: thruster failures and helium leaks. In August 2024 NASA ordered a crew-less return, stranding astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore on the ISS for nine months; they came home 19 March on a Crew Dragon. NASA will rule on crewed flight only after summer thruster tests, and its Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel warned that astronauts get a green light only if those little thrusters pass.
Boeing has already written off >$2 billion on Starliner. New CEO Kelly Ortberg admits the trouble “overshadows the rest of the space portfolio.” Worse, NASA’s draft FY-2026 budget chops ISS ops and transportation by roughly a quarter, adding another cloud over Boeing.
New Glenn pushed—and leadership churn
January saw New Glenn’s debut: the second stage orbited the Blue Ring tug, but the reusable first stage disintegrated on return. Entering 2025, CEO Dave Limp and Jeff Bezos promised eight launches this year. After a five-month silence Limp admitted the second flight slips to ≥ 15 August and might be the only one in 2025. He even named the mission “Never Tell Me the Odds,” a sweet Han Solo nod. Limp boasted they’re “on pace to build eight second stages,” as though iron on shelves could paper over a blown schedule.
Meanwhile, turmoil upstairs: VP of engines Linda Cova retired 28 May, and New Glenn boss Jarrett Jones takes a year-long leave starting 15 August—the very day the rocket is supposed to be on the pad.
Leaked to Ars Technica: even August looks rosy; insiders see September. If they hit it, the booster will likely loft NASA’s dual-probe ESCAPADE to Mars—a payload under 1 t riding a rocket rated for 45 t to LEO. In other words, launch timing dominates everything.
New Shepard tourist flight
On the evening of 29 June New Shepard made its 33rd flight overall and 13th with tourists. The ten-minute hop reached 105 km; the capsule and booster Tail-5 both landed safely in West Texas.
- environmentalists Allie & Carl Kuëhner
- philanthropist & ex-transport exec Leland Larson
- entrepreneur Freddy Resigno Jr.
- California civil-rights lawyer Jim Sitkin
- Nigerian attorney Owolabi Salis
Carl Kuëhner became both Blue Origin’s 70th astronaut and the 750th human to cross the Kármán line. Fittingly, the crew capsule is literally named “Karman Line.”
Because weather pushed the launch from 21 June, the crew nicknamed it “Solstice 33.” They enjoyed ~3 minutes of weightlessness before re-entry, parachutes, and a retro-rocket flare braking to 1 m/s. Touchdown dampers handle the final kiss.
Over a thousand “Club for the Future” postcards rode along—now tradition. NS-33 raises suborbital tourist headcount to 123 and brings New Shepard’s four-year passenger total to 70.
Latitude debut set for 2026
French start-up Latitude dropped a 3-D animation: its Zephyr rocket launching from Kourou, placing a client’s 100-kg satellite into a 500-km sun-sync orbit—the very mission they promise in 2026. Zephyr is 19 m tall, 1.5 m wide, two stages, kerolox. All Navier engines are fully 3-D-printed—seven atmospherics on stage 1, one vacuum on stage 2. They’re also spending €8 m building their own pad in French Guiana. Target price: $3 m per launch, tailor-made inclinations. In Europe, almost no one else serves the ≤100 kg class.
Starlink goes military?
The U.S. Space Force published a contract with SpaceX for MILNET—a new constellation of >480 satellites. Custom terminals will talk to both MILNET and civilian Starlink birds, effectively turning the commercial network into a military backup layer. Given the ready-made infrastructure, you can see why the brass pounced.
Falcon 9 eclipses the Space Shuttle
Falcon 9 is now the king of net payload. Totting up recent launches, it has pushed ≈5 565 t of pure cargo—overtaking the Shuttle’s ≈5 233 t. Two-thirds of Shuttle tonnage was the orbiter itself; with Falcon 9 only 7 % is Dragon.
To cap it, SpaceX lofted the fifth and final Crew Dragon capsule, completing the set: Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance, Freedom, and now Grace. Grace is already berthed to the ISS with the Axiom-4 crew.
That’s the month in private space: boosters bursting, budgets bleeding, ambitions undimmed. See you in thirty days—if any of these bets are still on the table.