On your radar this week: why Falcon Heavy doesn’t (and shouldn’t) launch Starlink, a new Executive Order to establish a NASA-led United States Space Academy, Europe’s first fully commercial rocket reaches orbit, satellite operators still paying premiums for boutique launch, and the upcoming Starship Flight 14.

The Scoop on Falcon Heavy

When we call Falcon Heavy a heavy-lift vehicle, those words are doing a lot of heavy lifting. Let me explain.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is an extremely capable rocket system. It’s also extremely resourceful in its design, being essentially comprised of two Falcon 9 boosters strapped to the side of a full Falcon 9 rocket. There are some minor changes to adapt the systems together (nose cones for the side boosters, center core reinforced to handle the thrust from 27 Merlin engines), but in the aerospace world this is by and large a MacGyvering of existing tech.

This is very much the SpaceX way - more changes to the design beget more changes in manufacturing beget more money and time spent to launch. The best part is no part, as they say.

SpaceX has launched 13 Falcon Heavies, with a 100% success rate. Most recently when it lofted the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope off-world late last month. Combined with the news that SpaceX will be putting Starlink launches from Florida on hold (!!!) and prioritizing getting Starship operational to launch their bigger, better Starlink V3s, the titular question has been floating around:

Why don’t they launch Starlink on Falcon Heavy?

There’s a few hiccups. Let’s go through them one-by-one:

The Mass Problem:

On SpaceX’s website, they quote that they can place ~140,000 pounds of payload in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and ~59,000 pounds in Geostationary Transfer Orbit (GTO). Unfortunately these numbers have never been demonstrated, and without a major structural overhaul to the rocket’s payload interface, these numbers are vapor.

The Payload Attach Fitting (PAF) is the structural interface that mounts your payload to the body of the rocket. The beefiest PAF that Falcon offers is its 3,117-mm variant with added struts. This is for “heavy to ultra-heavy payloads” and “payloads requiring additional capability,” per the manual.

This figure illustrates the limitations of the fitting. Your payload must comply with these limitations, lest something very, very bad happen. Note that this chart measures the allowable payload mass (including the mass of the adapter!), relative to the height of the payload’s center of mass.

At the fictional best-case scenario, where the payload adapter has 0 mass and your spacecraft’s center of mass is right at the interface plane (impossible for a batch of Starlink V3s, or anything worth launching on this fitting), this fitting can handle about 26,000kg (~57,000 pounds).

The NASA classification for a heavy-lift launch vehicle is one that can lift 44,000 to 110,000 pounds to low Earth orbit. It may be on a technicality, but Falcon Heavy makes the cut!

So even in the ideal world, with massless aluminum and paper thin spacecraft and spherical cows, Falcon Heavy falls short of its 140,000lb to LEO, 59,000lb to GTO claims.

SpaceX can always implement structural supports to reinforce this fitting, but again, that’s more time and money. And the returns diminish quick. Added structural support is more mass that your rocket needs to lift, which can throttle its performance significantly and becomes a very slippery slope.

Why do all that retrofitting when, as a company, SpaceX has faith in the Starship program? It might make sense if mass was the only issue, but alas. No such luck.

The Volume Problem:

The Falcon User’s Guide is the end-all-be-all source of information for all things Falcon. As an enthusiast, engineer, and writer, I couldn’t ask for a better resource. More companies could learn from SpaceX’s operational transparency.

But I digress! Our rocket Magna Carta mentions that the 3,117-mm strut PAF we would use for this mission requires the use of Falcon’s extended fairing.

This extended fairing is 5.2 meters longer, but -critically- no wider. For Starlink V3, we need the wideness.

The V3 satellites are designed specifically to be launched from Starship. In fact, the V2s were as well, until SpaceX pivoted to continue building up the constellation while Starship development stalled, creating the “V2 mini” spacecraft.

As you can see, even the V2 Minis are so wide that they can only be stacked up to the height before the fairing shape begins to curve. We call that curved-to-a-point shape the fairing ogive (pronounced oh-jive).

Now here is the size of V3 in comparison to V2 (not V2 Mini):

With the solar panels retracted while the satellites are stowed, the size difference remains astronomical. The pictures do all the talking, the point is moot, I am obsolete.

In contrast to our mass constraints, this may be a category where no amount of engineering could overcome the problem. Even a new Falcon fairing optimized for the width of Starlink V3 sats would be colossal and bulbous - generating structural, aerodynamic, and manufacturing implications that will cost time and money in an industry where efficiency is the name of the game. If they even proved possible.

More likely would be SpaceX pivoting again and making a Starlink V3 Mini, but again that presents costs to adapt the satellites, investing time and money into developing a rocket program that is no longer the company’s focus. SpaceX proves time and time again that their business goals are centered on (and dependent on) the success Starship.

The Reuse Problem:

One last nail in the coffin: Falcon Heavy is a logistical pain in the butt to reuse.

LC-39A is the only launchpad in the world equipped to launch Falcon Heavy, and it’s located here in sunny Cape Canaveral, Florida. In their East Coast fleet, SpaceX has two droneships to support Falcon booster landings. But Falcon Heavy has three boosters.

Which means the two side boosters must return to the launch site (pictured above) or the central booster needs to be expended. It takes a lot of fuel to bring your boosters home, so the first option severely limits your potential payload mass and the height of your orbit. If SpaceX had for some reason gone through the strengthening and widening of their FH payload accommodations to fit a load of upgraded Starlinks, they’d now be limited in the thrust department.

Option two is to ditch the core booster at the bottom of the ocean. This is what all Falcon Heavy mission profiles -except one- have demanded. This obviously bottlenecks how quickly you can launch again, because you need to build a new booster for every single launch and reinforce it for heavy-launch forces. This is impractical for the wallet and the schedule.

Interestingly, the one time a Falcon Heavy core booster did come back to land on a barge, it tipped over shortly after.

When a Falcon booster lands on the barge, a giant roomba rolls under it and grabs it from below. This system is called the Octagrabber, and its only job is to be heavy. This thing is covered in weights, so by connecting to the bottom of the booster it lowers the center of mass of the assembly. This makes the booster a lot less likely to tip.

However, Elon Musk confirmed in a tweet after the incident that the hardware required to make the Octagrabber compatible with the FH booster weren’t ready. The plan for that landing was to have marine personnel board the barge and tie the booster down manually, but the seas were too rough and it was unsafe to board.

So the core booster landing option requires retrofitting ground hardware to be compatible with FH. More cost, more testing, more time. In this case, it cost the whole booster.

In April of this year, SpaceX’s VP of launch stated that one of SpaceX’s East coast landing droneships “will join the ‘You’ll Thank Me Later’ ship to support Starship and SupeHeavy transport from Starbase to the Cape.”

He added “We have a plan for any double down range Falcon Heavy missions,” but this focus on Starship operations will inevitably make Falcon Heavy recovery even more of a logistical challenge.

The Starlink swarm is built on quantity, quantity, quantity; which is why having the reliable and rapidly reusable Falcon 9 vehicle has been key to its success. Even if SpaceX could retrofit an FH to carry significantly more satellites than an F9, it could still never compete on reusability.

What It All Means

For customers like NASA and the DOD, these limitations don’t matter. These organizations use Falcon Heavy to launch relatively small and light payloads into hard-to-reach orbits. And they can afford to pay for mission architectures that expend the boosters and central rocket core, if need be. For that purpose, Falcon Heavy is a great option.

But for massive Starlink clusters, Falcon Heavy presents strict mass, volume, and reusability constraints that make the idea a bit of a non-starter. At the intersection between engineering and business there are a deluge of trades, determining the value, the cost, the risk, and the probability of a program’s success. When Falcon 9 can launch Starlink swarms as-is with rapid reusability, and when larger Starlink satellites are… well, larger, adapting Falcon Heavy for high-volume Starlink launches just doesn’t make sense.

The juice ain’t worth the squeeze.

Especially when you consider the following:

On Friday, July 24, 2026, Starship deployed 20 Starlink V3 satellites from its on-board “Pez Dispenser” system. It worked exactly as advertised. This set wasn’t deployed in a complete orbit, so the satellites re-entered the atmosphere, presumably burning up in the process. However, Starship Flight 14 is set to be the vehicle’s first ever orbital insertion and will deploy another 20 Starlink satellites, this time to remain in orbit. And it’s scheduled for this coming Friday morning!

Starship is designed to be able to handle 60 Starlink V3 satellites, which would add a proposed 61,000 Gbps of network bandwidth in a single launch. In contrast, a Falcon 9 carrying its full load of 27 Starlink V2 satellites adds just 2,600 Gbps. Pop that in your abacus and you’ll find that in terms of data transfer capacity, one Starship launch equals more than 23 F9 launches.

Knowing that, it’s no wonder why SpaceX is going so hard on developing Starship. Let’s wrap this up.

If you want to launch a reasonably sized spacecraft to somewhere far out, consider the Falcon Heavy. But if you want a heavy-lift system that can launch what FH claims, you’re gonna need a bigger boat.

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Interesting Links and Papers

• A new Executive Order directs NASA to stand up the United States Space Academy, a proposed NASA-led federal academy combining technical education with leadership development and service obligations.

• SpaceX is dialing back Falcon 9 flight rates, and some satellite companies still have an appetite for boutique launch services — dedicated small- and medium-lift launches remain worth the premium for operators who need exact orbits and timelines. As we noted in our inaugural edition, dedicated launch is a budget line that keeps growing, not shrinking.

• A new NASA office is set to consolidate launch procurements across the agency, streamlining how missions buy rides to space and potentially reshaping how small launch providers compete for government work.

• Europe just gained its first fully commercial orbital launch capability: Germany’s Isar Aerospace reached orbit on its second Spectrum attempt, delivering CubeSats from Andøya Spaceport in Norway - the first pure commercial European launch success and a timely counterweight to the Falcon 9 slowdown.

• Optical Flashes from Beam-Driven Light Sails with the Roman, Rubin and Euclid Observatories (Guillochon & Loeb): a feasibility study for detecting the photon exhaust of interstellar light sails as brief flashes, turning three flagship observatories into a Beamed Energy Propulsion detection network. I love a situation where the ground hardware is ready before the orbital hardware.

This Week’s Launches

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | O3b mPOWER 11, 12 & 13

  • Target Date / Location: Sunday, September 13, 2026 — 2:49 PM EDT (18:49 UTC) | Cape Canaveral SFS (SLC-40), FL, USA

  • Details: First-ever launch of three mPOWER satellites (5,100 kg total) for SES’s O3b Networks. The final mission of the constellation, delivering 3 payloads to Medium Earth Orbit.

• Avio Vega-C | Sentinel-3C & FLEX

  • Target Date / Location: Monday, September 14, 2026 — 9:21 PM EDT (Tue, 01:21 UTC) | Guiana Space Centre (ELV), French Guiana

  • Details: ESA’s Copernicus ocean-and-land monitoring satellite (Sentinel-3C) rideshare with the Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX) photosynthetic mapping mission, to Sun-synchronous orbit at 820 km.

• Landspace ZhuQue-2E Block 2 | Unknown Payload

  • Target Date / Location: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 — 2:25 AM EDT (06:25 UTC) | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China

  • Details: Methalox smallsat launcher from China’s Landspace, on an unannounced payload to low Earth orbit.

• Orienspace Gravity 1 | Unknown Payload

  • Target Date / Location: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 — 5:50 PM EDT (21:50 UTC) | Haiyang Oriental Spaceport, China

  • Details: Solid-fueled medium-lift rocket from Orienspace, a rising Chinese commercial launcher, delivering an undisclosed payload to orbit.

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | USSF-259

  • Target Date / Location: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 — 9:00 PM EDT (Wed, 01:00 UTC) | Vandenberg SFB, CA, USA

  • Details: U.S. Space Force national security payload, riding a Falcon 9 from the West Coast.

• Roscosmos Soyuz 2.1b | Progress MS-35 (96P)

  • Target Date / Location: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 — 9:33 AM EDT (13:33 UTC) | Baikonur Cosmodrome (Site 31/6), Kazakhstan

  • Details: Uncrewed logistics spacecraft delivering propellant, pressurized cargo, and science experiments to the International Space Station.

• CASC Long March 12 | Unknown Payload

  • Target Date / Location: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 — 8:25 PM EDT (Thu, 00:25 UTC) | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China

  • Details: Medium-lift cryogenic launcher from China’s state industry, deploying an undisclosed satellite batch.

• ExPace Kuaizhou 11 | Unknown Payload

  • Target Date / Location: Wednesday, September 16, 2026 — 10:31 PM EDT (Thu, 02:31 UTC) | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China

  • Details: Solid-fueled smallsat launcher operated by ExPace, a CASIC subsidiary, flying an unannounced payload.

• SpaceX Starship Flight 14 | Starship-Super Heavy v3

  • Target Date / Location: Friday, September 18, 2026 — 8:15 AM EDT (12:15 UTC) | Starbase, TX, USA

  • Details: The next integrated Starship test flight from Boca Chica, continuing the flight test campaign for the world’s largest rocket.

• CASC Long March 2D | Unknown Payload

  • Target Date / Location: Saturday, September 19, 2026 — 6:43 AM EDT (10:43 UTC) | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China

  • Details: Legacy small-to-medium launcher deploying an undisclosed payload, from China’s northern launch site.

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 15-27

  • Target Date / Location: Saturday, September 19, 2026 — 9:47 PM EDT (Sun, 01:47 UTC) | Vandenberg SFB, CA, USA

  • Details: Starlink.

Open Procurements & Grants

• NASA SBIR/STTR FY2026–2027 Rolling BAA — NASA has transitioned its SBIR/STTR program from a single annual drop to an active, rolling Broad Agency Announcement (valid through Sept 2027), seeking Phase I & II proposals across cryogenic fluid management, lunar surface mobility, and in-space autonomous assembly. (Continuous Rolling Submissions)

• SpaceWERX / DAF SBIR: 26.BX & 26.TX Release 6 — SpaceWERX has opened pre-release for its Release 6 topics, with submissions opening September 23. Includes SBIR & STTR, Direct-to-Phase II & Phase I, and 2 modernization priority tech areas for dual-use space systems. (Pre-release open now; submissions open Sept 23, 2026)

• SpaceWERX Specific Topic 26.BX Release 5 — SpaceWERX is actively accepting proposals through the DoD SBIR portal for Specific Topic Release 5, covering tactical space domain awareness, on-orbit servicing, and cyber resilience for space assets. (Open for submissions now)

• NASA ROSES-2026: Astrophysics Research and Analysis (APRA) — NASA Science Mission Directorate is seeking proposals for suborbital payloads, detector development, and laboratory astrophysics instruments supporting future space observatories. (NOIs due September 18, 2026; Proposals due October 23, 2026)

Space Job Openings

Full-Time

• Planet Labs is seeking a Flight Dynamics Engineer, Orbits R&D located in San Francisco, CA.

• Relativity Space is seeking an Aerothermal Engineer II located in Long Beach, CA.

• Rocket Lab is seeking an Avionics Automation Test Engineer II located in Long Beach, CA.

• SpaceX is seeking an Aerodynamics Engineer (Starship) located in Starbase, TX.

Internships & Co-ops

• Rocket Lab is seeking a Development Engineering Intern — Neutron Thermal Protection Systems located in Auckland, NZ.

• SpaceX is seeking a Summer 2027 Engineering Internship/Co-op located at a flexible SpaceX site.

Why Altru Space?

Altru Space is a technical deep dive on the space industry’s top stories, delivered weekly. We emphasize engineering excellence and sustainability to understand how we can make our world a better place and explore the final frontier at the same time.

Subscribe now

Top of stack: using magnets to protect a craft during re-entry, SpaceX confirms they will be retiring Falcon 9, an engineering student’s open-source fluid model of the Raptor 2 engine cycle, an investor’s post-mortem on three failed space startups, and the physics behind lunar launchpads.

Replacing Heat Shields with Magnets

For your spacecraft to be in a stable orbit, it needs to be moving quick. The closer to the Earth your orbit is, the faster it needs to be going. For a circular orbit at ISS altitude (400 km), you need to be cruising at about 17,160 mph.

For your spacecraft to land gently at home, it needs to be moving slow. To get from orbital speed to none speed requires the expulsion of a lot of kinetic energy in a short time, which tends to make things toasty.

Not to mention that once you’ve slowed down a little, mommy Earth wants to pull your vehicle down faster and faster. The lovely gravity that once kept your spacecraft going round and round is now converting your latent potential energy into kinetic energy. Giving you more speed, more friction, more heat. Not helpful.

In the last edition, we discussed the forerunner technologies your craft may use to survive re-entry, and some mechanical entrants to the field that could shake things up. However, each of those solutions incurs a heavy mass penalty. In spaceflight, a pound of mass can cost thousands to tens of thousands of dollars.

Heat shields can easily account for 15-30% of your craft’s total dry mass. And it’s completely dead mass that is bolted on and effectively useless until the very end of the mission.

And don’t even get me started on the radio blackout problem.

Too late, I’m started!!

The friction that slows your vehicle down heats the adjacent air into a fine plasma. In addition to cooking your vehicle, this plasma likes to act as a Faraday cage around it, so radio signals won’t be getting in or out.

During the most violent and safety-critical phase of the entire mission, your craft is unable to broadcast to the ground or receive commands from it. Complete radio silence. Flight controllers get to squeeze stress balls and chew pens.

Apollo 8’s blackout stretched to over five minutes while its family back on Earth listened to the clock. If something goes wrong, you find out afterward.

Also, if you want to have a live camera feed from your vehicle like SpaceX does on their launch vehicles (which I encourage everyone to do! I’ll save the diatribe for its own write-up. Put cameras on your craft.), your broadcast is cooked during re-entry. Literally and figuratively.

So, while your craft is plowing through the atmosphere, it is simultaneously being superheated by plasma and unable to communicate with the outside world.

What if we could solve both of these problems… with magnets!

Living Like Lorentz

Let’s talk about magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) shielding.

While the big, boiling bubble of plasma is the crux of our problem, it also presents our solution. See, plasma is a fluid of charged particles. And charged particles obey electromagnetic fields.

Content warning: equations. Skip ahead a little bit for the physical takeaways.

This is the standard Lorentz force enacted on an individual particle with charge q.

Our players:

• F = The resulting deflecting force (Lorentz force)

• q = Net electrical charge of particle

• E = Any additional electric field in the system (negligible here)

• v = Velocity of the charged particle (flow velocity of the plasma)

• B = Externally generated magnetic field vector

When scaling this up to a continuous fluid (like our plasma bubble), we transition from individual charge velocity to current density J = nqv (where n is charge carrier density). Ignoring the electric field component (E) yields the simplified form:

The beauty of the thing is, because entry velocity v is massive and J scales with it, the (J x B) cross-product generates an enormous deflecting force perpendicular to the field lines.

Pay attention to the direction of that (J x B) vector - that’s our resultant force.

Note that this is not a slowing force imparted on the vehicle. All of the slowing comes from the bow shockwave generated by the vehicle slamming into the air. For more information on that force and its implications, check out our previous issue.

Rather, this force is applied to the plasma itself! The magnetic field deflects the plasma, controlling the flow and pushing the shock layer away from the vehicle.

Okay, how does this help?

By pushing away the shock, putting a magnet in your vehicle can keep it cooler and grant it a communication window.

It keeps things cool because the farther away the shock is, the farther the thermal energy needs to travel to reach your craft.

It gets rid of the radio blackout by popping the “bubble.” Deflecting the plasma makes it harder for it to wrap around the backside of your vehicle, so your magnetic field helps you “punch” a hole through the hot air which you can broadcast through to reach your data relay satellite(s) in orbit.

Fancy folks call the backside of a vehicle its ‘leeward’ side.

Effectively, you are using magnets to mimic the radio tunnel that Starship creates just by virtue of being huge.

That’s the theory - killing two birds with one magnet. Does it actually work?

Demonstrating the Tech

While the concept has been studied in US academic and NASA circles for decades, Europe is ahead of the curve on this one.

The MEESST project (Magnetohydrodynamic Enhanced Entry System for Space Transportation) brought together a consortium of universities and research institutes to build the first-ever high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnetic shielding system.

Their demonstrator is exactly what you’d draw on a napkin: a blunt-nosed probe shape with a cryogenically cooled HTS magnet embedded behind the nose. The magnet is designed to generate a strong magnetic field that displaces the incoming plasma sheath before it can reach the hull.

Then, they blasted it with plasma. Specifically, they injected various plasma flows at tightly controlled temperatures and velocities to imitate different re-entry regimes.

They used two different test beds to accurately measure their mitigation of each re-entry problem. They quantified heat flux in the PWK1 arc jet facility at the Institute of Space Systems and radio blackout in the Plasmatron at the Von Karman Institute. A total of four experimental campaigns were conducted, two for each characterization.

In 2025, the EU published the headline results:

• Heat flux mitigation: Great! The magnetic field reduced convective heating on the probe surface by up to 40% for a Moon-return entry (60 MJ/kg) and up to 80% for an interstellar-return entry (80 MJ/kg) in supersonic air plasma.

• Radio blackout mitigation: Partial. The MEESST team measured up to 5 dB of signal-loss reduction (a measurable transparency window) in both air and CO₂ plasmas. This effect was weaker than hoped, “suggesting future tests with better antenna positioning, higher (supersonic) flow speed and a higher magnetic field,” per MEESST.

• Weight and power: Because HTS coils conduct with near-zero resistance, they generate stronger magnetic fields with dramatically lower mass, volume, and cryogenic power draw than legacy low-temp systems, making the concept compatible with flight hardware constraints. This has engineering implications we’ll talk about in the next section.

So where is MEESST headed? The consortium closed out its grant in September of 2024 and is now scaling the demonstrator toward an actual flight demo, with plans to commercialize via a startup and fly on The Exploration Company’s Nyx capsule.

I love it when a plan comes together - a technology that has been theoretical since the 1960s has finally produced measurable, promising numbers in a test environment.

So why isn’t everyone flying high-temperature superconducting magnets?

Why Must There Always Be Drawbacks

You may have noticed from the picture of the MEESST demonstrator test set that the capsule hardware is only a fraction of the whole setup. The blunt body is dwarfed by its coolant system.

To generate magnetic fields at the level required by this system without melting the copper wires, you need special coils.

Calling them High-Temperature Superconductors is a bit of a misnomer. Older, “Low-Temperature” hardware needed to be kept at 4 Kelvin, which is scraping Absolute Zero. Extremely hard to maintain even in a controlled environment.

High-Temp coils must be kept chilled at cryogenic temperatures near 77 K (-321°F). Compared to Low-Temp, this is positively balmy. Compared to re-entry heating, not so much.

Recall that these frigid temperatures have to be maintained right next to a superheated atmospheric plasma boundary.

Also, to generate a sufficient magnetic field for minutes on end requires discharging stored energy on the order of megajoules.

Battery hardware that can support this level of drain plus coolant hardware to chill the superconductor can chew through the mass you save by ditching ceramic tiles.

And you won’t be able to bank on magnetism guiding a spacecraft all the way to the ground and plopping it down feather-light. The magnetic shielding relies on the existence of the plasma, which stops forming in the lesser hypersonic velocities (Mach 5-10 in the lower atmosphere).

Without the ionized gas in the plasma, the Lorentz force evaporates. There’s nothing left for the magnet to deflect, so by the time you’ve slowed down to supersonic speed, your forcefield has fizzled.

As a result, your blunt body is still gonna need to be able to take some heat - though significantly less. And you’ll still need a way to slow down near ground level; parachutes, thrusters, etc.

The tech has proven promising in a test environment, but remains to be demonstrated in a real atmospheric re-entry situation.

It won’t replace ceramic tiles tomorrow, but for Moon- and Mars-return velocities that push ablators to their limits, and for eliminating the radio blackout, MHD shielding could be just what this industry needs to enable better performance for anything you want to bring home from space.

Interesting Links and Papers

• An engineering student, Saaketh Ramoju, reverse-engineered a steady-state fluid model of SpaceX’s Raptor 2 engine cycle using publicly available data to test his open-source 1D fluid solver, FullFlow.

• SpaceX officially confirmed plans to retire its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket once Starship reaches regular operational cadence. This move has massive supply-chain ramifications for launch availability that we analyzed in detail in our inaugural edition.

• An angel investor offers a candid retrospective on his three failed space tech investments, breaking down the commonalities that doomed each one.

• Jatan Mehta breaks down the mechanics that reveal the Moon’s value as a deep space launchpad, illustrating how launching a mission to the asteroid belt from the lunar surface can require 40% less energy than departing from Mars.

• Türkiye became the 71st nation to sign the Artemis Accords.

This Week’s Launches

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 15-24

  • Target Date / Location: Sunday, September 6, 2026 — 06:59 AM EDT (10:59 UTC) | Vandenberg SFB (SLC-4E), CA, USA

  • Details: Starlink.

• Roscosmos Soyuz 2.1b | Progress MS-35 (96P)

  • Target Date / Location: Wednesday, September 9, 2026 — 12:15 PM EDT (16:15 UTC) | Baikonur Cosmodrome (Site 31/6), Kazakhstan

  • Details: Uncrewed logistics spacecraft delivering propellant, food, and scientific experiments to the International Space Station.

• CASC Long March 8A | Constellation Batch Demonstration

  • Target Date / Location: Friday, September 11, 2026 — 12:00 PM EDT (16:00 UTC) | Wenchang Space Launch Site (Commercial LC-1), China

  • Details: Medium-lift commercial cryogenic launch vehicle deploying satellite constellation payloads into low Earth orbit.

• Arianespace Vega-C | Sentinel-3C & FLEX

  • Target Date / Location: Monday, September 14, 2026 — 09:21 PM EDT (Tuesday, Sep 15 01:21 UTC) | Guiana Space Centre (ELV), French Guiana

  • Details: Four-stage light launcher inserting ESA’s Sentinel-3C ocean monitoring satellite alongside the Fluorescence Explorer (FLEX) photosynthetic mapping mission.

Open Procurements & Grants

• NASA SBIR/STTR FY2026–2027 Rolling BAA: NASA has transitioned its SBIR/STTR program from a single annual drop to an active, rolling Broad Agency Announcement (valid through Sept 2027), seeking Phase I & II proposals across cryo fluid management, lunar surface mobility, unlocking the orbital economy, and more. (Continuous Rolling Submissions)

• SpaceWERX / DAF SBIR Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO): SpaceWERX and AFRL have active Direct-to-Phase II and Phase I open-topic solicitations for dual-use commercial space systems, including tactical space domain awareness, on-orbit servicing, and cyber resilience for space assets. (Release 5 Submissions close on Sept. 26)

• NASA ROSES-2026: Astrophysics Research and Analysis (APRA): NASA Science Mission Directorate is seeking proposals for suborbital payloads, detector development, and laboratory astrophysics instruments supporting future space observatories. (NOIs due September 18, 2026; Proposals due October 23, 2026)

Space Job Openings

Full-Time

• Planet Labs is seeking a Flight Dynamics Engineer, Orbits R&D located in San Francisco, CA.

• Relativity Space is seeking an Aerothermal Engineer II located in Long Beach, CA.

• Rocket Lab is seeking an Avionics Automation Test Engineer II located in Long Beach, CA.

• SpaceX is seeking an Aerodynamics Engineer (Starship) located in Starbase, TX.

Internships & Co-ops

• Rocket Lab is seeking an Avionics Intern - Neutron Hardware located in Auckland, NZ.

• SpaceX is seeking a Summer 2027 Engineering Internship/Co-op located at a flexible SpaceX site.

Why Altru Space?

Altru Space is a technical deep dive on the space industry’s top stories, delivered weekly. We emphasize engineering excellence and sustainability to understand how we can make our world a better place and explore the final frontier at the same time.

Subscribe now

On the radar this week: a breakdown of hypersonic re-entry methods, the new bottleneck for spacecraft design, NASA prioritizing debris tracking efforts, and a new control system for spacecraft rendezvous.

Surviving the Shockwave

When a spacecraft enters the upper atmosphere at Low Earth Orbit velocities (roughly 7.8 km/s), it carries A LOT of kinetic energy. To land safely, nearly every joule of that energy must be dumped into the surrounding air before impact. This makes the air very angry.

Contrary to popular belief, most re-entry heating isn’t caused by surface friction, but rather ram compression. When your vehicle slams into thin upper-atmosphere air at hypersonic speeds, atmospheric gas can’t move out of the way fast enough. As it piles up, it compresses violently into a shockwave, converting kinetic energy into heat and ionizing air molecules into a glowing, 2000°C/3600°F plasma sheath.

Peep this equation:

There’s 3 values that are important to us here.

• q_c​ = Convective heat flux (we want to keep this low)

• v_∞ = Vehicle entry velocity

• r_n​ = Radius of the vehicle’s nose curvature

As you can see, heat flux scales with the velocity cubed. Doubling your entry speed increases thermal loading eightfold.

On the bright side, heat flux scales inversely with the square root of the “nose” bluntness. This means that for re-entry, the less streamlined your body is, the better. Who’da guessed that bellyflopping beats diving?

In 1953, H. Julian Allen proved that making a vehicle’s nose blunter (increasing r_n) pushes the superheated bow shockwave further away from the skin, dumping >90% of the heat into the surrounding airstream rather than the hull. This single discovery made manned spaceflight physically possible.

However, the remaining 10% of thermal energy is still enough to melt structural aluminum or carbon composite in seconds. Your vehicle needs to be able to tank it and walk away.

Every unique vehicle drives its own Thermal Protection System (TPS) design, but they all fall into a few categories.

Option 1: Disintegrating on Purpose

This is the original old magic. It’s been used since the Gemini capsules and even on ballistic missiles before that. It’s still used on NASA’s Orion and SpaceX’s Dragon capsules.

Ablative shields use materials like PICA (Phenolic-Impregnated Carbon Ablator), which absorb heat by intentionally destroying themselves. As the temperature rises, the resin matrix inside its porous carbon structure vaporizes (pyrolyzes). This gas expands outward through the surface, blowing the superheated boundary layer away from the hull while leaving behind a highly insulating carbon char layer.

This system provides unmatched thermal protection to slow down from high speeds, like lunar/interplanetary returns. However, it comes at the cost of reusability.

Ablative heat shields are heavy, single-use, and susceptible to pockets of char recession that make swapping in a new one challenging. This complicates rapid reuse of your vehicle.

Option 2: Store as Much Heat as Possible

Every year or so, this video bounces around the internet. In it, someone takes a sample of Space Shuttle tile material out of the 2200°C oven and touches it with their bare hands just seconds later.

Source: Roscket Tasartir on YouTube (full video)

This isn’t some cheap trick - in fact, it might be one of the most expensive demonstrations out there. As a taxpayer, I don’t wanna know.

It works because heat travels through this material extremely slowly. Even when superheated, a coupon of this material acts like a heat battery, storing a ton of thermal energy and slowly trickling it back out. It will take hours to cool back to ambient temperature.

This is also Starship’s approach to surviving re-entry.

Rigid silica tiles rely on extreme thermal insulation and high surface emissivity. Made of 99.8% pure amorphous silica glass fibers, these tiles are mostly air by volume. This air remains trapped in the tile and absorbs the heat of re-entry, while barely transmitting any heat to the hull beneath.

But, like any solution, there’s a trade-off.

Silica tiles can withstand 1,400°C+ repeatedly without degrading, but they are essentially brittle glass. On Starship, 18,000 individual hexagonal tiles must be mechanically pinned to a stainless steel hull that expands and contracts under thermal cycles. If a single tile pops off, that hot plasma directly impinges on the underlying steel skin, threatening structural burn-through.

On the Space Shuttle, NASA engineers were accustomed to seeing minor tile damage from ice and foam on the orbiter. Refurbishing a shuttle took a very long time, partially because workers had to inspect, test, and hand-replace hundreds of damaged or loose tiles after every landing. This was exacerbated by the fact that no two tiles were the exact same size or shape.

On Starship, the tiles are standardized to simplify reuse, but there are still unique geometries required to wrap-around the fins and shield other non-uniform areas. SpaceX have yet to fly the same Starship orbiter twice, so we’ve yet to see how the vehicle can handle cycling.

This option’s heat shielding capability has been flight proven time and time again on Shuttles and Ships, but its capability for rapid reuse has yet to be demonstrated.

Option 3: Make Your Vehicle Sweat

Active transpiration cooling is where liquid or gas coolant is forced directly through micro-porous skin panels to squeeze onto the outer surface, where it absorbs heat and wicks away.

It has never been used to re-enter a full-scale orbital production vehicle. However, film cooling has been used inside high-heat rocket thrust chambers and turbopump exhaust liners for decades.

In 2012, the German SHEFEX II (Sharp Edge Flight Experiment II) ran an active transpiration cooling panel directly through one of the high-heat belly tiles. Thermocouples embedded in the panel measured an immediate surface temperature drop of over 200°C compared to adjacent uncooled reference tiles during peak heat flux.

Earlier design concepts for Starship proposed a double-walled, transpiration-cooled skin in 2019. But SpaceX abandoned the full-vehicle concept when arc-jet testing revealed susceptibility to pore-clogging from soot and atmospheric debris. Rocket acne.

As SHEFEX proved, transpiration cooling may be best suited for ultra-sharp, low-drag re-entry profiles. As we discussed earlier, sharpening your vehicle’s “nose” means it takes on a lot more heat as compared to a blunt face which pushes the heat into the surrounding airstream. You’ll also gather localized hotspots along the knife’s edge.

So why would you want to be pointy?

• You can enter like an airplane, instead of like a rock. A sleeker profile allows your vehicle to benefit from lift, allowing it to perform aggressive turns in the upper atmosphere. Instead of landing along a predictable parabolic footprint, a low-drag sharp vehicle can maneuver thousands of kilometers to reach virtually any runway or landing site on Earth from a single orbital pass. Or in the case of weapons systems, any target.

• Being able to pick your landing site also means you save a lot in recovery costs. Compare the shuttle landing at Kennedy to a blunt capsule splashdown requiring specialized sea-retrieval ships.

• Gliding is a whole lot more comfortable than slamming into the air. With a spaceplane profile, you can expose the people and/or payload on board to a lot fewer G’s of acceleration. Useful if your passengers are high-maintenance.

So transpiration cooling is useful to enable low-drag vehicles like spaceplanes and warheads.

However, mass penalties spent on the plumbing and the risk of catastrophic localized hot-spot burn-through if even a fraction of the pores become blocked mean that this is a specialized solution with limited use in the space industry.

Also, your vehicle might need some deodorant.

Option 4: Stoke Space’s New Groove

To compete with the tried and tested technologies of yore requires great confidence in your fledgling design. With their efficacy and decades of flight data, ablative shields and emissive tiles won’t go down without a fight.

Stoke Space is proposing a new re-entry architecture for the reusable second stage of their Nova rocket. This design replaces ceramic tiles and ablators with a high-temp metallic heat shield (Niobium/Inconel alloy) actively cooled from behind.

During re-entry, sub-cooled liquid hydrogen propellant is pumped through an intricate network of internal micro-channels embedded directly inside the metallic heat shield. The cryogenic propellant absorbs peak heating via forced convection before being routed into the rocket’s engine for landing. This has the added benefit of pre-warming the fuel before it reaches the engine, which improves performance by smuggling in thermal energy from re-entry.

This is the same principle as regenerative cooling, a technique that’s already actively used on many rocket engines. The nozzle is cooled by channels carrying cold fuel, and then the warm fuel runs to the combustion chamber to be ignited. Stoke is simply adding their heat shield into the cooling circuit.

Stoke’s system completely eliminates fragile, maintenance-heavy silica tiles and single-use ablators, enabling rapid turnarounds with zero thermal shield refurbishment.

However, it requires flawless fluid dynamic balance across hundreds of micro-channels. If propellant flow starves or cavitates locally, the metallic surface will instantly vaporize under hypersonic plasma loads. That said, if your propellant flow fails you’ve already got some major problems.

The big “but” is that it’s never been done before.

We’re rooting for Stoke - this industry can always use some competition and fresh ideas - but whether this approach is successful and practical (read: cheaper than the alternatives) remains to be seen.

— — —

If you wanna get even more experimental, there may be a path to abandoning physical heat shields altogether.

Coming Next Week:

In the next issue, we’ll dive deep into Magnetoshell Aerocapture - using high-temp superconducting coils to generate magnetic fields which physically repel plasma, eliminate radio blackout, and could revolutionize deep-space atmospheric insertion.

Interesting Links and Papers

• US Spacewalk 97 is set to occur on Tuesday, Aug. 18 - Anil Menon and Sophie Adenot’s spacewalk will begin at approximately 8:35 EDT and last about six and a half hours. (NASA)

• Cheaper launch has moved the spacecraft bottleneck from mass to surface area - deployable radiators and solar arrays now drive satellite design. (SpaceNews)

• NASA brings industry into the space sustainability conversation - building the software and infrastructure to locate and track Earth’s growing space debris problem. (Space Explored)

• Genetic Fuzzy System-based Control for Spacecraft Proximity Operations - a new paper on robust spacecraft control amid orbital disturbances and sensor noise. This will enable better spacecraft rendezvous for on-orbit servicing and proximity operations. (ArXiv)

  ---

Upcoming Launches

• CASC Long March 12 | SatNet LEO Group 24

  • Target Date / Location: Sunday, August 16, 2026 — 12:10 AM EDT (04:10 UTC) | Wenchang Space Launch Site, China

  • Details: Launch of China’s new 3.8-meter diameter kerosene/LOX medium-lift launcher.

• LandSpace Zhuque-3 | Flight 2 Orbital Demonstration

  • Target Date / Location: Tuesday, August 18, 2026 — 07:35 PM EDT (23:35 UTC) | Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China

  • Details: Stainless-steel methane/LOX orbital rocket flight test evaluating booster recovery avionics.

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 17-50

  • Target Date / Location: Tuesday, August 18, 2026 — 10:00 PM EDT (Wednesday, 02:00 UTC) | Vandenberg SFB (SLC-4E), CA, USA

  • Details: Starlink.

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 10-39

  • Target Date / Location: Thursday, August 20, 2026 — 11:19 AM EDT (15:19 UTC) | Cape Canaveral SFS (SLC-40), FL, USA

  • Details: More Starlink.

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 15-20

  • Target Date / Location: Saturday, August 22, 2026 — 03:25 AM EDT (07:25 UTC) | Vandenberg SFB (SLC-4E), CA, USA

  • Details: More Starlink.

Space Job Openings

Full-Time

• Planet Labs is seeking a Flight Dynamics Engineer, Orbits R&D located in San Francisco, CA.

• Relativity Space is seeking a Launch Integration Engineer II located in Cape Canaveral, FL.

• Rocket Lab is seeking a Senior Spacecraft Thermal Engineer I located in Long Beach, CA.

• SpaceX is seeking a Sr. Space Lasers Engineer, Satellites (Starlink) located in Redmond (Seattle), WA.

Internships & Co-ops

• Rocket Lab is seeking a Manufacturing Engineering Intern, Fall 2026 located in Long Beach, CA.

• SpaceX is seeking a Summer 2027 Engineering Internship/Co-op located at a flexible SpaceX site.

Why Altru Space?

Altru Space is a technical deep dive on the space industry’s top stories, delivered weekly. We emphasize engineering excellence and sustainability to understand how we can make our world a better place and explore our next frontier at the same time.

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What to care about this week: NASA launches their second deep-space telescope in five years, a retrospective on global lunar progress, decentralized spacecraft collision avoidance, generative AI CubeSat design, and a rocket survives a lightning strike during ascent.

Also, a retraction from our first edition.

Hubble’s Big Sister, Launching This Month

Where Did She Come From?

In the early 2010s, the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) made a few too many spy satellites.

They offered the surplus hardware, two telescope mirror systems designed for orbit, to NASA, who at the time were planning a project with a similar primary mirror. Similar, but much smaller. This gift nearly doubled the size of the developing spacecraft and significantly enhanced its imaging capability.

The donated mirrors were 7.9 feet in diameter, the same size as Hubble’s and far more advanced thanks to the intervening decades. Paul Hertz, the then director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, described “about [a] 100 times bigger area that you can image well.”

Even with the new hardware, NASA would still have to create all of the systems that support the optical components.

Fast-forwarding through three presidential administrations worth of design, integration, and test yields the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

The observatory is named for NASA’s first ever Chief Astronomer. Dr. Roman took the position only 6 months after NASA was founded, and spearheaded the creation of its space-based astronomy program. She championed Hubble’s value when it was just a twinkle in NASA’s eye.

“I certainly did not receive any encouragement. I was told from the beginning that women could not be scientists.” - Dr. Nancy Grace Roman

Such a prolific namesake deserves an equally prolific mission. Roman features two instruments on board, both of which contain the potential for grand discovery.

Besides sounding like my approach to homework in college, the Coronagraph instrument will enable imaging of exoplanets that we don’t yet know exist. It’s the first Coronagraph in space to contain moving mechanical components that can adjust to decrease the starlight captured by the instrument, allowing it to see planets almost a billion times fainter than their host star.

This coronagraph is also an engineering pathfinder, paving the way for development of the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which will require an instrument 100x more effective at masking stars.

Also on board is the Wide Field Instrument, an infrared camera sensitive enough to see farther than any previous telescope.

Because light does not travel instantaneously, the farther away you gaze, the older the image that you receive will be. The Wide Field Instrument will allow researchers to gaze back in time and observe how the universe has expanded throughout history.

The camera has 18 detectors which can capture a maximum 4096 x 4096 resolution apiece. Each image will require massive bandwidth to beam home, and each image will look absolutely stunning.

Commissioning of the system in orbit is planned to take 90 days, after which it can begin making observations long before reaching its destination.

This December, be ready to update your desktop background!

Where Will She Go?

On (no earlier than) August 30th, Roman will be launched on a one million mile journey away from the Earth. A distance so great, it requires the 13th ever launch of the Falcon Heavy system.

Why? Putting telescopes in deep-space sidesteps a lot of problems faced by those on Earth and in its orbit.

The Earth has a pesky habit of getting between telescopes and their targets. It also regularly separates solar panels from the sun - and even if you cleverly dodge it with a specific sun-synchronous orbit, glare from the Earth will still blind and heat up sensitive instrumentation. Think of the tanning reflectors that cartoon characters always unfold at the beach.

But our planet isn’t the only thing in the way.

Radio telescope observations and artsy iPhone long exposure shots alike are being increasingly obstructed by satellites. The biggest offender: internet megaconstellations.

SpaceX Starlink, Amazon Leo, Eutelsat OneWeb, China SatNet’s Guowang; all of these projects are taking a ‘the more, the merrier’ approach to satellite design. SpaceX alone owns roughly two-thirds of all active satellites, with over 10,000 operational units in orbit as of writing. I’ll break down all of the current and planned swarms by the numbers in a future edition.

One of the many consequences of this approach is its effect on astronomy, hindering stellar observation with bright trails and false positives.

Hubble currently orbits 326 miles above Earth’s surface - roughly the distance between Baltimore and Boston. Even up there, no one is safe from a bug on the lens.

Finally, a topic that is all too often overlooked, the ideal spots to plant a giant telescope tend to be sites of great cultural significance.

For example, Maunakea is the site of 13 active telescope facilities, with another one - controversially - planned. Maunakea is also deeply sacred to native Hawaiians, “symbolic of the piko (umbilical cord) of the island-child, Hawaiʻi, and that which connects the land to the heavens.” (Kepa Maly and Onaona Maly, 2005).

Humanity has been gazing into the stars since long before the invention of the telephoto lens.

This is a gross oversimplification, of course. If you’re interested in learning more about the fraught relationship between astronomy and colonialism, Dr. Fatima Abdurrahman has an excellent (3 hour) deep dive on the subject.

All of these challenges can be avoided with a quick jaunt to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange Point (L2), which is Roman’s destination. The James Webb Space Telescope is also at L2, so she’ll be in good company.

She’ll also be kept company by the 1,350,144 names installed on a memory card as part of an onboard commemorative plaque. Because this mission is worth commemorating!

Roman is the second major deep-space telescope to launch in only 5 years. The assembled spacecraft was completed under budget and ahead of schedule, an impressive feat for a non-military government aerospace project.

Roman represents our human investment in exploring the universe, our rapid innovation in imaging technology, and the redemptive transformation of hardware built for espionage into hardware used for discovery.

I find that deeply meaningful. I hope that you do too.

— — —

…Because I lack restraint, I have to conclude this article by completing the pattern set up by the section headings. Thank you for reading.

Where Did She Come From, Nancy Grace Ro’?

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Interesting Links and Papers

• Jatan Mehta published a semi-annual retrospective on global lunar exploration milestones and delays, analyzing payload integration bottlenecks, public-private lander architectures, and timeline shifts across Artemis, ESA Moonlight, and Chang’e missions.

• Researchers demonstrated using generative AI tools to optimize CubeSat chassis structural design, achieving mass reduction while maintaining modal frequency and thermal dissipation bounds for astronomical payloads.

• A new study proposes a semi-decentralized multi-spacecraft collision avoidance architecture, reducing ground-station contact delays by enabling onboard autonomous trajectory renegotiation for megaconstellation maneuvers.

• A Chinese Long March 3B rocket was struck mid-ascent by lightning shortly after launching from Xichang Satellite Launch Center, yet successfully delivered its communications payload to orbit.

Upcoming Launches (Sunday, August 9 – Sunday, August 16, 2026)

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 10-15

  • Target Date / Location: Monday, August 10, 2026 — 06:12 UTC | Cape Canaveral SFS (SLC-40), FL, USA

  • Details: Starlink.

• CASC Long March 3B/E | Geostationary Telecom Payload

  • Target Date / Location: Wednesday, August 12, 2026 — 16:30 UTC | Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China

  • Details: Hypergolic three-stage launch vehicle inserting heavy high-throughput communications payload into GTO.

• CASC Long March 6A | Qianfan (Thousand Sails) Group 06

  • Target Date / Location: Thursday, August 13, 2026 — 10:15 UTC | Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, China

  • Details: Solid-booster augmented core stage deploying China’s LEO megaconstellation batch to polar orbit.

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 12-7

  • Target Date / Location: Friday, August 14, 2026 — 03:00 UTC | Vandenberg SFB (SLC-4E), CA, USA

  • Details: More Starlink.

• Roscosmos Soyuz 2.1b | Resurs-P No.5

  • Target Date / Location: Saturday, August 15, 2026 — 11:20 UTC | Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan

  • Details: Civil commercial Earth-observation satellite featuring hyperspectral and high-resolution optical sensors.

• Rocket Lab Electron | “Look Ma, No Hands” Mission

  • Target Date / Location: Saturday, August 15, 2026 — 21:00 UTC | Launch Complex 1, Mahia Peninsula, New Zealand

  • Details: Dedicated rideshare mission deploying synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellites to 500 km LEO.

• SpaceX Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 10-21

  • Target Date / Location: Sunday, August 16, 2026 — 08:45 UTC | Cape Canaveral SFS (SLC-40), FL, USA

  • Details: More Starlink.

Space Job Openings

Full-Time

• Planet Labs is seeking a Senior Spacecraft Systems Engineer located in San Francisco, CA.

• Relativity Space is seeking a Launch Integration Engineer II located in Cape Canaveral, FL.

• Rocket Lab is seeking a Propulsion Systems Engineer I/II located in Littleton (Denver), CO.

• SpaceX is seeking a Sr. Space Lasers Engineer, Satellites (Starlink) located in Redmond (Seattle), WA.

• Vast Space is seeking a Mechanical Engineer I, Avionics (Haven Station) located in Long Beach, CA.

Internships & Co-ops

• SpaceX is seeking a Summer 2027 Software Engineering Internship/Co-op located in Redmond (Seattle), WA & McGregor, TX.

• Varda Space Labs is seeking a Mechanical Engineering Intern located in El Segundo, CA.

Mea Culpa

In our first edition, I relayed a quote from Bloomberg stating that the Falcon 9 program is halting manufacturing of their second stages. Seeing as those stages are expendable every launch, that has huge implications for the Falcon program and the launch industry at-large.

In the following days, it has become clear that this claim has no basis in reality. Additionally, the authors of the source article have altered the verbiage to be much more vague, with no notes about the edit.

I reached out to a contact of mine who currently works Falcon 9 Second Stage Integration and they denied any winding down of upper stage manufacturing.

I apologize for uncritically parroting misinformation. This newsletter is, by name, predicated on everything I publish being all true. I failed to live up to that in the very first publication.

The friends I’ve made in my career so far are uniquely suited to confirm or deny claims like this. You have my word that from now on, I will lean on my network and ensure everything written here is verified by a credible second source.

I appreciate your grace, I won’t let you down.

I’m Ben Durkee and this is Altru.

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Why Altru?

Altru Space is a technical deep dive on the space industry’s top stories, delivered weekly. We emphasize engineering excellence and sustainability to understand how we can make our world a better place and explore our next frontier at the same time.

Earlier this month, SpaceX launched its 17th rideshare mission, successfully deploying a total of 81 payloads from a single rocket. While killing a lot of birds with one stone, this cosmic clown car also heralds the beginning of the end for the Falcon 9 rideshare program, and for future commercial contracts.

Satnews.com reported on Monday that “small satellite operators and mission integrators confirmed that SpaceX has stopped accepting new commercial launch bookings for both its Sun-Synchronous Orbit (SSO) Transporter series and mid-inclination Bandwagon missions beyond late 2028.”

The SpaceX website details only 3 remaining rideshare launches; all of them completely full and all of them scheduled for 2027. Historically, these missions have been scheduled years in advance, so for today’s interested customer not a single spot remains.

The website also used to have a function where anyone could apply to book a singular launch, boasted proudly on the front page and the site header. Now? The option is gone without a trace.

To be clear, Falcon 9 launches are not freezing - at least not yet. Rather, much like how Micron stopped selling memory to consumers because they make more revenue by selling solely to AI firms, SpaceX is ceasing to serve external clients in favor of scaling up Starship infrastructure and creating their own demand.

SpaceX is not a charity, especially now that they are a publicly traded company, and the profit incentive directs them to bolster their breadwinner: Starlink. In 2025, 75% (123 out of 165) of Falcon 9 launches were dedicated to Starlink missions alone. That’s up from 66% (89 out of 134) of F9 launches in 2024. SpaceX’s biggest customer is SpaceX.

To make a single trip to the moon, Starship’s architecture may require more launches than some entire space programs. But it’s uniquely equipped to deliver a huge mass to Earth orbit, i.e. a swarm of identical satellites or a colossal datacenter, hence the decision to wind down Falcon and go all-hands-on-deck for the new vehicle.

So what does this mean for everyone else? SpaceX’s largest competitor, Blue Origin, is no longer completely owned by Jeff Bezos and co., having just received its first round of outside funding to the tune of $4 billion. Blue also has a series of projects which represent internal1 demand for launches of their New Glenn vehicle, a rival of Starship.

If these companies have their hands full launching their own stuff, that leaves us relying on a couple industry mainstays and the next generation of launch vehicles.

🚀 Rocket Lab’s Electron vehicle remains the only other new-space vehicle with truly mature flight heritage. Their upcoming Neutron vehicle (comparable to Falcon 9 in size) just underwent a successful test of one of its engines.

🚀 United Launch Alliance (ULA) are grizzled industry veterans, but they’re phasing out their proven Atlas V rocket. Its successor, Vulcan, has 4 successful launches under its belt and is scheduled far in advance to be shared between national security payloads and commercial constellation launches (Amazon Leo). So these potentially profitmaxxing payloads are poised to take other rockets off the menu as well.

🚀 Firefly Alpha has yet to stabilize its mixed launch record.

🚀 China’s Zhuque-1 and Long March 10B are in accelerated development - the latter of which just caught its booster with a barge-mounted wire rope assembly.

🚀 Skyroot Aerospace’s Vikram-1 successfully launched last week - on its first try, no less - crowning it India’s first private rocket to reach orbit.

🚀 And there’s a myriad of promising up-and-comers with no successful launches yet. See the footnotes2 for an exhaustive list.

Will these launch vehicles remain accessible to smallsat customers for one-off missions? Or will space internet service providers and AI firms soak up every launch for years to come? How long before Firefly announces a line of AI datacenters and calls it “Hivemind?”

The long-term stability of launch costs is still impossible to predict. We’re privileged to live in a time where rocket supply and demand are both going gangbusters, and we have front row seats to watch the next generation of launch vehicles unfold. Maybe expect a spike in popcorn sales.

In the near-term, the almighty dollar has ushered in an era of high-speed internet and AI chatbots. And while at first glance it may seem bleak, this represents a major vacuum in the market. Research groups, climate institutes, governmental agencies, and satellite startups will still need rockets to launch their products, and having the big dogs bow out of the market creates a feeding frenzy for new rocketeers to take over and propel launch technology forward.

If we’re lucky, this temporary lull is going to precipitate the biggest surge of innovation the launch industry has ever seen. Stay tuned! You won’t want to miss it.

This Week’s Upcoming Launches

• July 28, 2200 EDT • Falcon 9 Block 5 • Starlink Group 17-52 • Vandenberg, CA

• July 28, NET 0700 EDT • Long March 7A • Unknown payload • Wenchang, China

• July 29, NET 2100 EDT • Long March 6A • Unknown payload • Taiyuan, China

• July 30, 0309 EDT • Falcon 9 Block 5 • NROL-95 • Cape Canaveral, FL

• Aug. 1, 1000 EDT • Falcon 9 Block 5 • Starlink Group 17-53 • Vandenberg, CA

Who, What, & Why is Altru Space?

Hi!

My name is Ben Durkee, and I’m an aerospace engineer and science communicator. In the past, I worked design, integration, & test on Northrop Grumman’s Minotaur rockets and later Firefly’s Blue Ghost 1 lunar lander. Now I work launch operations on New Glenn, Blue Origin’s burgeoning heavy launch system. The very same one that just disassembled its launch pad… so we may have burgeoned a little too close to the sun. There’s never a dull moment in this industry of ours!

Which is why I love to talk about what I do and what’s going on in the space realm. But eyes have begun to glaze over at the Thanksgiving dinner table, so I’m seeking other outlets.

The conflict of interest is visible from orbit. I’m one to err on the side of caution, so if you find that my writing is noticeably hesitant to speculate on Blue Origin’s moves and machinations, please understand that I really like my job.

You have my word that I will develop this publication with the most up-to-date information that I can confirm is publicly available. Inevitably, my work will inform my writing and my writing will inform my work. I intend to use these swords to sharpen each other in the pursuit of absolute quality. Because participating in the space industry is special.

That’s really the crux of the thing! Space is the next frontier, the ultimate unknown that’s worth exploring not for any material or intellectual benefit, but Because It’s There. It inspires and delights and represents hope on a cosmic scale. And now that so much money has entered the scene, our technology and access is about to develop lightning-fast.

But there’s a whole lotta snags that seem to be falling to the wayside. Snags that are eventually going to bite us in the rear; including, but not limited to:

How can we scale up our launch cadence without injecting the atmosphere with greenhouse gases? How do we improve our launch capability without stuffing Earth’s orbit full of satellite constellations? How can we develop a presence on other worlds without paving over paradise? How can we move manufacturing and other polluting industries off-world without exacerbating wealth inequality and making Earth exclusive to the rich?

These are heady questions, ones I can really only answer with abstract platitudes, nothing concrete. We need to think and act with care. To be conscientious of our actions and their consequences. To get it right the first time, lest we condemn ourselves to a never-ending game of keepie-uppies.

In an industry moving so quickly - where one of the largest non-nuclear explosions on American soil is nothing but an inconvenient setback - those answers are inadequate. If I want to contribute my skills to this exciting new frontier and help us course-correct towards becoming an altruistic spacefaring people, I’m gonna need a better understanding of all the moving parts and where I can fit in to do the most good.

I’m gonna need a way to get my finger on the pulse, share my unique perspective, and build a network of people smarter than me, all at the same time.

I’m gonna need a newsletter.

So that’s where we are now - the first edition of my desperate attempt to catch a moving train. As we characterize this industry that changes every day, I’m confident that my research, stories, and outlook will provide you with insight you won’t find anywhere else. Together, let’s figure out how we can make the world a better place and launch rockets at the same time.

Be good and please remember: we can’t put humanity in space if we lose our humanity in the process.

I’m Ben Durkee and this is Altru.

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