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  • It’s hunting season in orbit as Russia’s killer satellites mystify skywatchers

    Russia is a waning space power, but President Vladimir Putin has made sure he still has a saber to rattle in orbit.

    This has become more evident in recent weeks, when we saw a pair of rocket launches carrying top-secret military payloads, the release of a mysterious object from a Russian mothership in orbit, and a sequence of complex formation-flying maneuvers with a trio of satellites nearly 400 miles up.

    In isolation, each of these things would catch the attention of Western analysts. Taken together, the frenzy of maneuvers represents one of the most significant surges in Russian military space activity since the end of the Cold War. What’s more, all of this is happening as Russia lags further behind the United States and China in everything from rockets to satellite manufacturing. Russian efforts to develop a reusable rocket, field a new human-rated spacecraft to replace the venerable Soyuz, and launch a megaconstellation akin to SpaceX’s Starlink are going nowhere fast.

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  • Nearly everyone opposes Trump’s plan to kill space traffic control program

    The Trump administration’s plan to gut the Office of Space Commerce and cancel the government’s first civilian-run space traffic control program is gaining plenty of detractors.

    Earlier this week, seven space industry trade groups representing more than 450 companies sent letters to House and Senate leaders urging them to counter the White House’s proposal. A spokesperson for the military’s Space Operations Command, which currently has overall responsibility for space traffic management, said it will “continue to advocate” for a civilian organization to take over the Space Force’s role as orbital traffic cop.

    Giveth and taketh away

    The White House’s budget request submitted to Congress for fiscal year 2026 would slash the Office of Space Commerce’s budget from $65 million to $10 million and eliminate funding for the Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS). The TraCSS program was established in the Department of Commerce after Trump signed a policy directive in his first term as president to reform how the government supervises the movements of satellites and space debris in orbit.

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  • China jumps ahead in the race to achieve a new kind of reuse in space

    Two Chinese satellites have rendezvoused with one another more than 20,000 miles above the Earth in what analysts believe is the first high-altitude attempt at orbital refueling.

    China’s Shijian-21 and Shijian-25 satellites, known as SJ-21 and SJ-25 for short, likely docked together in geosynchronous orbit sometime last week. This is the conclusion of multiple civilian satellite trackers using open source imagery showing the two satellites coming together, then becoming indistinguishable as a single object.

    Chinese officials have released no recent public information on what the two satellites are up to, but they’ve said a bit about their missions in prior statements.

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  • Do these Buddhist gods hint at the purpose of China’s super-secret satellites?

    Mission patches are a decades-old tradition in spaceflight. They can range from the figurative to the abstract, prompting valuable insights or feeding confusion. Some are just plain weird.

    Ars published a story a few months ago on spaceflight patches from NASA, SpaceX, Russia, and the NRO, the US government’s spy satellite agency, which is responsible for some of the most head-scratching mission logos.

    Until recently, China’s entries in the realm of spaceflight patches often lacked the originality found in patches from the West. For example, a series of patches for China’s human spaceflight missions used a formulaic design with a circular shape and a mix of red and blue. The patch for China’s most recent Shenzhou crew to the country’s Tiangong space station last month finally broke the mold with a triangular shape after China’s human spaceflight agency put the patch up for a public vote.

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  • Weapons of war are launching from Cape Canaveral for the first time since 1988

    The US military launched a long-range hypersonic missile Friday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on a test flight that, if successful, could pave the way for the weapon’s operational deployment later this year.

    The Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon fired out of a canister on a road-mobile trailer shortly after sunrise on Florida’s Space Coast, then headed east over the Atlantic Ocean propelled by a solid-fueled rocket booster. Local residents shared images of the launch on social media.

    Designed for conventional munitions, the new missile is poised to become the first ground-based hypersonic weapon fielded by the US military. Russia has used hypersonic missiles in combat against Ukraine. China has “the world’s leading hypersonic missile arsenal,” according to a recent Pentagon report on Chinese military power. After a successful test flight from Cape Canaveral last year, the long-range hypersonic weapon (LRHW)—officially named “Dark Eagle” by the Army earlier this week—will give the United States the ability to strike targets with little or no warning.

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  • A military satellite waiting to launch with ULA will now fly with SpaceX

    For the second time in six months, SpaceX will deploy a US military satellite that was sitting in storage, waiting for a slot on United Launch Alliance’s launch schedule.

    Space Systems Command, which oversees the military’s launch program, announced Monday that it is reassigning the launch of a Global Positioning System satellite from ULA’s Vulcan rocket to SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This satellite, designated GPS III SV-08 (Space Vehicle-08), will join the Space Force’s fleet of navigation satellites beaming positioning and timing signals for military and civilian users around the world.

    The Space Force booked the Vulcan rocket to launch this spacecraft in 2023, when ULA hoped to begin flying military satellites on its new rocket by mid-2024. The Vulcan rocket is now scheduled to launch its first national security mission around the middle of this year, following the Space Force’s certification of ULA’s new launcher last month.

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  • With new contracts, SpaceX will become the US military’s top launch provider

    The US Space Force announced Friday it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Blue Origin for $13.7 billion in contracts to deliver the Pentagon’s most critical military to orbit into the early 2030s.

    These missions will launch the government’s heaviest national security satellites, like the National Reconnaissance Office’s large bus-sized spy platforms, and deploy them into bespoke orbits. These types of launches often demand heavy-lift rockets with long-duration upper stages that can cruise through space for six or more hours.

    The contracts awarded Friday are part of the next phase of the military’s space launch program once dominated by United Launch Alliance, the 50-50 joint venture between legacy defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

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  • Maybe Trump should go back to calling his missile shield the Iron Dome

    The US Space Force celebrated its fifth birthday last year, when it boasted an annual budget of $29 billion, about 3.5 percent of the Pentagon’s overall funding level.

    On March 15, President Donald Trump signed a stopgap spending bill that set the Space Force’s budget for fiscal year 2025 at $28.7 billion. This was the first cut to the Space Force’s budget since Trump created the military’s newest service branch in 2019.

    Gen. Chance Saltzman, the top general in the Space Force, worries that the budget crunch will hamstring the military’s ability to match China’s fast-growing space architecture. The Space Force is charged with developing and operating satellites, ground systems, and weapons that the Pentagon could use to track and target enemy forces on the ground and in space.

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  • The ax has become an important part of the Space Force’s arsenal

    ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico—For decades, America’s big defense contractors have known they can count on a steady flow of business from the Pentagon. You win some, and you lose some. But don’t fret. Inevitably, there’s a new opportunity to get money from the world’s largest military.

    This paradigm is shifting with the launch of a wave of startups eager to deliver software, missiles, drones, satellites, and other services. It’s no surprise that the US military is often the core market for these companies.

    Since its establishment more than five years ago, the Space Force inherited many of the old ways of doing business ensconced at the Pentagon since World War II. Over the last half-century, numerous defense contractors merged and acquired one another, often escaping scrutiny by promising efficiencies that will result in savings for US taxpayers. Those efficiencies rarely materialized.

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  • Rocket Report: ULA confirms cause of booster anomaly; Crew-10 launch on tap

    Welcome to Edition 7.35 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX’s steamroller is still rolling, but for the first time in many years, it doesn’t seem like it’s rolling downhill. After a three-year run of perfect performance—with no launch failures or any other serious malfunctions—SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has suffered a handful of issues in recent months. Meanwhile, SpaceX’s next-generation Starship rocket is having problems, too. Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX’s vice president of launch, addressed some (but not all) of these concerns in a post on X this week. Despite the issues with the Falcon 9, SpaceX has maintained a remarkable launch cadence. As of Thursday, SpaceX has launched 28 Falcon 9 flights since January 1, ahead of last year’s pace.

    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.

    Rocket Report: ULA confirms cause of booster anomaly; Crew-10 launch on tap

    Alpha rocket preps for weekend launch. While Firefly Aerospace is making headlines for landing on the Moon, its Alpha rocket is set to launch again as soon as Saturday morning from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. The two-stage, kerosene-fueled rocket will launch a self-funded technology demonstration satellite for Lockheed Martin. It’s the first of up to 25 launches Lockheed Martin has booked with Firefly over the next five years. This launch will be the sixth flight of an Alpha rocket, which has become a leader in the US commercial launch industry for dedicated missions with one-ton-class satellites.

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