Enlarge / An artist's illustration of the Europa Clipper spacecraft during a flyby close to Jupiter's icy moon. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

The launch date for the Europa Clipper mission to study the intriguing moon orbiting Jupiter, which ranks alongside the Cassini spacecraft to Saturn as NASA's most expensive and ambitious planetary science mission, is now in doubt.

The $4.25 billion spacecraft had been due to launch in October on a Falcon Heavy rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. However, NASA revealed that transistors on board the spacecraft may not be as radiation-hardened as they were believed to be.

"The issue with the transistors came to light in May when the mission team was advised that similar parts were failing at lower radiation doses than expected," the space agency wrote in a blog post Thursday afternoon. "In June 2024, an industry alert was sent out to notify users of this issue. The manufacturer is working with the mission team to support ongoing radiation test and analysis efforts in order to better understand the risk of using these parts on the Europa Clipper spacecraft."

Enlarge / The Ariane 6 rocket takes flight for the first time on July 9, 2024. (credit: ESA - S. Corvaja)

Welcome to Edition 7.02 of the Rocket Report! The highlight of this week was the hugely successful debut of Europe's Ariane 6 rocket. They will address the upper stage issue, I am sure. Given Europe's commitment to zero debris, stranding the second stage is not great. But for a debut launch of a large new vehicle, this was really promising.

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.

Chinese launch company suffers another setback. Chinese commercial rocket firm iSpace suffered a launch failure late Wednesday in a fresh setback for the company, Space News reports. The four-stage Hyperbola-1 solid rocket lifted off from Jiuquan spaceport in the Gobi Desert at 7:40 pm ET (23:40 UTC) on Wednesday. Beijing-based iSpace later issued a release stating that the rocket’s fourth stage suffered an anomaly. The statement did not reveal the name nor nature of the payloads lost on the flight.

Enlarge / Stuart Smalley is here to help with daily affirmations of SLS. (credit: Aurich Lawson | SNL)

There is a curious section in the new congressional reauthorization bill for NASA that concerns the agency's large Space Launch System rocket.

The section is titled "Reaffirmation of the Space Launch System," and in it Congress asserts its commitment to a flight rate of twice per year for the rocket. The reauthorization legislation, which cleared a House committee on Wednesday, also said NASA should identify other customers for the rocket.

"The Administrator shall assess the demand for the Space Launch System by entities other than NASA and shall break out such demand according to the relevant Federal agency or nongovernment sector," the legislation states.

Enlarge / Firefly Aerospace's board of directors in the late 2010s: Tom Markusic, Max Polyakov, and Mark Watt. (credit: Firefly)

A long, messy affair between US regulators and a Ukrainian businessman named Max Polyakov seems to have finally been resolved.

On Tuesday, Polyakov's venture capital firm Noosphere Venture Partners announced that the US government has released him and his related companies from all conditions imposed upon them in the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This decision comes more than two years after the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and the US Air Force forced Polyakov to sell his majority stake in the Texas-based launch company Firefly.

Enlarge / Why yes, that Starlink dish is precariously perched to get around tree obstructions. (credit: Eric Berger)

I'll readily grant you that Houston might not be the most idyllic spot in the world. The summer heat is borderline unbearable. The humidity is super sticky. We don't have mountains or pristine beaches—we have concrete.

But we also have a pretty amazing melting pot of culture, wonderful cuisine, lots of jobs, and upward mobility. Most of the year, I love living here. Houston is totally the opposite of, "It's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there." Houston is not a particularly nice place to visit, but you might just want to live here.

Except for the hurricanes.

Enlarge / In early June, the rocket for SpaceX's fourth full-scale Starship test flight awaits liftoff from Starbase, the company's private launch base in South Texas. (credit: SpaceX)

In a short video released Thursday, possibly to celebrate the US Fourth of July holiday with the biggest rocket's red glare of them all, SpaceX provided new footage of the most recent test of its Starship launch vehicle.

This test, the fourth of the experimental rocket that NASA is counting on to land its astronauts on the Moon, and which one day may launch humans to Mars, took place on June 6. During the flight, the first stage of the rocket performed well during ascent and, after separating from the upper stage, made a controlled reentry into the Gulf of Mexico. The Starship upper stage appeared to make a nominal flight through space before making a controlled—if fiery—landing in the Indian Ocean.

The new video focuses mostly on the "Super Heavy" booster stage and its entry into the Gulf. There is new footage from a camera on top of the 71-meter-tall first stage as well as a nearby buoy at water level. The video from the buoy, in particular, shows the first stage making an upright landing into the ocean.

Enlarge / The SARah-1 mission is seen on the launch pad in June 2022. (credit: SpaceX)

On the day before Christmas last year, a Falcon 9 rocket launched from California and put two spy satellites into low-Earth orbit for the armed forces of Germany, which are collectively called the Bundeswehr.

Initially, the mission appeared successful. The German satellite manufacturer, OHB, declared that the two satellites were "safely in orbit." The addition of the two SARah satellites completed a next-generation constellation of three reconnaissance satellites, the company said.

However, six months later, the two satellites have yet to become operational. According to the German publication Der Spiegel, the antennas on the satellites cannot be unfolded. Engineers with OHB have tried to resolve the issue by resetting the flight software, performing maneuvers to vibrate or shake the antennas loose, and more to no avail.

Enlarge / Image of Hurricane Beryl captured from the International Space Station on Monday. (credit: Matthew Dominick/NASA)

Officially, of course, the Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1, But most years, the tropics remain fairly sleepy for the first month or two, allowing coastal residents to ease into the season.

Yes, a tropical storm might form here or a modest hurricane there. But the really big and powerful hurricanes, which develop from tropical waves in the central Atlantic and roar into the Caribbean Sea, do not spin up until August or September when seas reach their peak temperatures.

Not so this year, in which the Atlantic Ocean is boiling already. The seas in the main development region of the Atlantic have already reached temperatures not normally seen until August or September. This has led to the rapid intensification of Hurricane Beryl, which crashed through the Windward Islands on Monday and is now traversing the Caribbean Sea toward Jamaica.

Enlarge / The Tianlong-3 rocket as seen on its test stand before the anomaly. (credit: Space Pioneer)

One of the most promising Chinese space startups, Space Pioneer, experienced a serious anomaly this weekend while testing the first stage of its Tianlong-3 rocket near the city of Gongyi.

The rocket was undergoing a static fire test of the stage, in which a vehicle is clamped to a test stand while its engines are ignited, when the booster broke free. According to a statement from the company, the rocket was not sufficiently clamped down and blasted off from the test stand "due to a structural failure."

Video of the accidental ascent showed the rocket rising several hundred meters into the sky before it crashed explosively into a mountain 1.5 km away from the test site. (See various angles of the accident here, on the social media site X, or on Weibo.) The statement from Space Pioneer sought to downplay the incident, saying it had implemented safety measures before the test, and there were no casualties as a result of the accident. "The test site is far away from the urban area of ​​Gongyi," the company said.