Enlarge / Four kerosene-fueled Reaver engines power Firefly's Alpha rocket off the pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. (credit: Firefly Aerospace)

Welcome to Edition 7.01 of the Rocket Report! We're compiling this week's report a day later than usual due to the Independence Day holiday. Ars is beginning its seventh year publishing this weekly roundup of rocket news, and there's a lot of it this week despite the holiday here in the United States. Worldwide, there were 122 launches that flew into Earth orbit or beyond in the first half of 2024, up from 91 in the same period last year.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and 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.

Firefly launches its fifth Alpha flight. Firefly Aerospace placed eight CubeSats into orbit on a mission funded by NASA on the first flight of the company’s Alpha rocket since an upper stage malfunction more than half a year ago, Space News reports. The two-stage Alpha rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California late Wednesday, two days after an issue with ground equipment aborted liftoff just before engine ignition. The eight CubeSats come from NASA centers and universities for a range of educational, research, and technology demonstration missions. This was the fifth flight of Firefly's Alpha rocket, capable of placing about a metric ton of payload into low-Earth orbit.

Enlarge / A test version of Firefly's Miranda engine fires up on a test stand in Briggs, Texas. (credit: Firefly Aerospace)

BRIGGS, Texas—The new medium-lift rocket under development by Firefly Aerospace and Northrop Grumman will eventually incorporate a recoverable booster that will return to its launch site in Virginia for reuse.

Firefly has previously suggested rocket reuse is on the roadmap for the new rocket—known, for now, only as the Medium Launch Vehicle (MLV)—but officials revealed new details of the plan during a recent visit by Ars to Firefly's rocket factory in rural Central Texas.

“Northrop and Firefly have a similar perspective and that is, for that class of rocket, reusability is a requirement for a bunch of reasons," said Bill Weber, Firefly's CEO. "Economically, it becomes an advantage because we don't have to go build additional floor space... Similarly, the pricing structure for customers starts to get super competitive, which we absolutely love, and we’ll be right in the middle of.”

Enlarge / Screen capture of a Runway Gen-3 Alpha video generated with the prompt "A giant humanoid, made of fluffy blue cotton candy, stomping on the ground, and roaring to the sky, clear blue sky behind them." (credit: Runway)

On Sunday, Runway announced a new AI video synthesis model called Gen-3 Alpha that's still under development, but it appears to create video of similar quality to OpenAI's Sora, which debuted earlier this year (and has also not yet been released). It can generate novel, high-definition video from text prompts that range from realistic humans to surrealistic monsters stomping the countryside.

Unlike Runway's previous best model from June 2023, which could only create two-second-long clips, Gen-3 Alpha can reportedly create 10-second-long video segments of people, places, and things that have a consistency and coherency that easily surpasses Gen-2. If 10 seconds sounds short compared to Sora's full minute of video, consider that the company is working with a shoestring budget of compute compared to more lavishly funded OpenAI—and actually has a history of shipping video generation capability to commercial users.

Gen-3 Alpha does not generate audio to accompany the video clips, and it's highly likely that temporally coherent generations (those that keep a character consistent over time) are dependent on similar high-quality training material. But Runway's improvement in visual fidelity over the past year is difficult to ignore.