BLUE ORIGIN NEW GLENN UPDATES:
After New Glenn’s second flight, Blue Origin has successfully recovered the first-stage booster. The damage that is shown is mostly cosmetic—paint loss and some thermal protection wear. This means that only minor upgrades are necessary to make the booster fully reusable. Reusability is Blue’s main focus for making their flights cheaper.
They also plan to raise the combined liftoff thrust of the engines from around 17.2 MN to around 19.9 MN. This is being done by performance tuning and propellant subcooling (they make the LOX and CH₄ denser so the same tanks can carry more mass). This means that without any structural upgrades, New Glenn can carry more payload or increase its ΔV.
In the short term, the upgrades to the first stage should reduce the time between launches and the cost per launch. They could be implemented and tested in the next few flights. Long term, if pursued to flight, 9x4 is essentially a new family member. It introduces a structural redesign and ground infrastructure changes as well. It aims to compete with other heavy-lift vehicles, but costs and risks are high.
*The 9x4 variant is named after the number of engines on each stage (9 on the booster and 4 on the second stage). The current variant is 7x2. The 9x4 is a planned super-heavy lift variant of the New Glenn vehicle. The larger 9x4 will also feature an increased size to the fairings—8.7 meters. Both the 7x2 and the 9x4 will serve the market concurrently, giving customers more options for their missions.
SPACEX STARSHIP V3 BOOSTER 18 ANOMALY:
SpaceX rolled out Booster 18, the first V3 Super Heavy booster, for gas-system/cryogenic proof testing. During a gas pressurization test (in which no cryogens are loaded), an energetic rupture occurred in the LOX tank region. The LOX tank wall was breached, and the aft LOX structure was blown open. The vehicle did not collapse and remained upright thanks to the new large methane structure tube providing structural support. However, the aft LOX tank appeared destroyed, and photos show internal damage.
The conditions of this test are important. As already mentioned, this was a test in which no cryogens were present. This rules out cryo-related brittle fracture modes but still leaves a lot of options as to what could have happened. SpaceX has speculated about composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) chain reactions, weld porosity, or valve sequencing issues.
**Composite overwrapped pressure vessel is a container wrapped by a thin layer of a composite material designed to hold fluid under pressure. This includes liquid oxygen. The vessel expands in its operational state from the internal pressure.
SpaceX has lost vehicles previously to COPV explosions. If COPVs in the LOX feed system go, they can create shock or secondary failures in the tank structure.
Booster 18 included many Block-3 changes. These include a reworked aft section, a larger LOX tank, a new integrated hot-staging ring, metallic tiles on the engine shield, and many other changes. It is most likely due to these yet untested changes that the failure has occurred. They change load paths and failure modes—a single failure in a pressurization sequence can cascade differently on the new structure.
This failure causes SpaceX to be behind schedule. The loss of B18 means that there is no completed V3 booster to commission for the next flight(s). SpaceX will either need to repair the existing damaged booster or work on Booster 19. This means a 4-12 week slip is expected depending on the root cause of the issue.
JARED ISAACMAN CONFIRMED:
Jared Isaacman was officially confirmed by the U.S. Senate and sworn in as NASA’s 15th Administrator in mid-December 2025.
Isaacman’s public plans emphasize accelerating human exploration, stronger commercial partnerships, and program management changes. That could accelerate commercial lunar (Martian) efforts and increase reliance on providers like SpaceX and Blue Origin. We can expect a near-term focus on Artemis cadence and human lunar architecture decisions.
CHINESE LAUNCH CLOSE-APPROACH TO STARLINK:
Following a Chinese launch that deployed a cluster of 9 satellites, one of the satellites passed within 200 meters of Starlink-6079 at an approximate altitude of 560 km—which is an extremely close approach at orbital speeds of around 7-8 km/s. SpaceX publicly called out the lack of prior coordination, to which CAS Space responded that launch-window planning avoids known tracked objects and that the close approach occurred 48 hours after separation (which is after the launch provider’s role ended).
At orbital speeds, relative position errors of 200 m translate into tiny timing errors. Collision probability rises dramatically with small miss distances. A collision creates high-velocity fragments, and even a collision as small as this would create thousands of cascading pieces of debris (read more about the Kessler syndrome here).
The cause of the near collision is shared between CAS Space and SpaceX. When SpaceX launches satellites, especially into crowded LEO orbit, it’s standard to share orbital data as soon as possible so that other satellite operators can identify the object and plan avoidance maneuvers in time. In this case, the tracking data for a newly launched satellite became available late, which meant that other operators could not reliably know what that object was or where exactly it would be in the near future.
This implies that it is purely SpaceX’s fault for releasing orbit data late, but initial tracking also depends on ground-based tracking networks, which can lag after launch. Public catalogs like the ones used by third parties are not instant, and there is no single global traffic controller in orbit yet.
So in short, SpaceX bears responsibility for not publishing usable orbital data quickly enough, but launches in general are happening faster than coordination rules. This incident shows why a central space traffic management system is becoming urgent.
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