NASA will pay Boeing $359 million to facilitate Starliner's return to flight, and help certify the Vulcan rocket for future missions in the 2030s.

I'm not sure any of us expected Arianespace to be Amazon's most important launch partner for Leo, but here we are. newsroom.arianespace.com/ama…

Katalyst Space is calling off its effort to reboost NASA's Swift gamma-ray observatory because of ongoing attitude control problems with its Link spacecraft. linkedin.com/posts/katalyst-…

Rocket Lab Germany is here. Europe faces glaring gaps across both launch and spacecraft manufacturing. Rocket Lab Germany addresses these directly, combining opportunities for high-frequency access to space with high-volume satellite production to deploy resilient constellations on rapid timelines. Read more: bit.ly/4wUJvbS

New look at Neutron’s second stage from Rocket Lab's latest quarterly update.

I will weigh in, reinforce some of the programmatic changes made, but also use the opportunity to emphasize the importance of getting things right from here forward. NASA can’t succeed if it is trying to take on endless complex and costly development programs in parallel: SLS, ML-2, EUS, Gateway, crewed vehicles, a deorbit vehicle, replacement station-as-a-service, all the exciting science missions we all love, and a healthy fleet of X-planes. The solution becomes partnering with everyone who can fill holes in the self-inflicted strategy, which leads to more compromises. Those partners then run into their own budget challenges or quality issues, and the solution is simply to slip the schedule until what you eventually get, if you get it at all, is no longer relevant. This should be reasonably obvious when you look at the pace of progress: years between big missions, stretching out on-orbit ISS missions, one signature X-plane that wasn’t flying much, and years between big science programs. Recycling a lot of parts from Shuttle may have been logical in 2005, as I am sure many of the programs envisioned in years past seemed logical at the time, but it led to a lunar rocket where Saturn V was materially better at converting pad mass to mass headed for the Moon, while simultaneously building a lunar Gateway in an NRHO orbit that shifts a huge performance burden to the landers because of compromises made earlier in the Orion/ESM design. The indefinitely paused Gateway concept also came with safety concerns, including limited abort opportunities, along with orbital and communications disadvantages. Not to mention, it is just another costly and complex “part” in what is already an incredibly hard equation, and one we haven’t solved in more than half a century. We also want to be building the infrastructure for an enduring presence on another world..not above it. Mistakes of the past are what lead us down the path of a single lunar rover-as-a-service, when you need dozens for the future Moon Base, a dream state reactor-as-a-service, because you can’t afford to do it the right way, one X-plane, and ultimately means you get none of what you actually want on the Moon because you spread yourself too thin to develop something extremely difficult in a logical, iterative way. Now we are fixing the SLS program, standardizing, and getting into a cadence of launches that will ensure NASA astronauts can get to the Moon at least yearly until other commercial and more affordable means of transport are available. By that point, we should already be well prepared for the ‘Nuclear NASA’ transition. Artemis, as a program, will certainly live on past any one launch platform. I say all this because the second space race is going to be a lot closer than it needed to be, and under this Administration, we are going to ensure the third race will never be in question.

I thought you guys might enjoy this infographic on the Blue Ring. The first of an entirely new kind of spacecraft…

No Vulcan launches until some time next year