Space Exploration Technologies, better known simply as SpaceX, became a publicly traded company on Friday nearly a quarter of a century after it was founded.

The company began trading on the NASDAQ exchange in New York City at $135 a share, valuing SpaceX at nearly $1.8 trillion. By the end of the trading day the company's shares were selling at $160.95, a respectable increase of more than 19 percent.

On paper, SpaceX founder Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire, with his personal stake in the company valued at more than $700 billion. Because of the company's stock options plan, thousands of current and former employees became overnight millionaires. Employees at SpaceX have worked remarkably hard over the last 24 years, and now they will be richly compensated for having done so.

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Welcome to Edition 8.45 of the Rocket Report! Even though we are now two weeks removed from the catastrophic loss of the New Glenn rocket and its LC-36A launch pad, it continues to dominate discussion in the space community. This week, NASA said it nominally plans to fly Blue Origin's test lander on New Glenn for the Artemis III mission, but officials quietly acknowledged that other launch vehicles, including Vulcan and the Falcon Heavy, could also get the job done. We'll obviously be watching closely.

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.

Isar raises funding, announces new launch date. German launch startup Isar Aerospace announced this week that it had closed a 270 million euro Series D to "drive global scaling and ramp up serial production," European Spaceflight reports. The company also said the previously delayed second launch attempt of its Spectrum rocket would now take place sometime between June 15 and June 21.

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NASA pushed its Deep Space Network beyond its limits during the Artemis I mission nearly four years ago. The global array of deep space communications antennas couldn't keep up with the routine demands of 40 robotic science missions and the extraordinary surge required by NASA's Orion space capsule as it flew around the Moon.

The experience in late 2022 reduced or delayed downlinks from several high-profile science missions, including the James Webb Space Telescope and Mars rovers, as the data-hungry Artemis I mission took priority on NASA's communications network. And that was before the first Artemis mission with astronauts onboard. When Artemis II launched April 1, NASA called upon the Deep Space Network (DSN) again to connect Mission Control to the Orion capsule as it soared more than a quarter of a million miles from Earth.

With a crew of four flying inside the spacecraft, the agency's appetite for data from Orion on Artemis II was even higher than it was on Artemis I. But at a little more than nine days, the Artemis II mission was shorter than the 25 days Artemis I spent in space, helping alleviate the communications overload. Artemis I also launched 10 small CubeSats into deep space, many of which required tracking and telecom services from the DSN. Artemis II carried fewer CubeSats.

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On Tuesday, NASA announced the crew for the Artemis III mission, which is scheduled to be flown no earlier than summer 2027. As part of the announcement, space agency officials also discussed plans for the crew to dock with both a Blue Origin lander and a SpaceX Starship lander during the spaceflight in low-Earth orbit.

The presentation, although informative, still left open key questions about the landers' readiness and what exactly they'll look like. After the crew announcement, Ars sat down with Jeremy Parsons, NASA's Artemis program manager, to answer some of these questions.

This interview, conducted at NASA's Johnson Space Center, has been lightly edited for clarity.

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The US space agency unveiled the crew for its Artemis III mission on Tuesday during an enthusiastic event at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

For this spaceflight into low-Earth orbit, which will see the Orion spacecraft rendezvous and dock with lunar lander prototypes, NASA chose an experienced, all-male crew with military backgrounds. They were revealed inside a darkened Teague Auditorium where hundreds of friends, family members, and NASA employees cheered enthusiastically.

The four crew members are:

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The Federal Communications Commission has waived a requirement for Amazon to launch half of its satellite broadband constellation by the end of July, a key regulatory reprieve that buys the tech giant time to get more of its spacecraft into orbit.

Amazon won regulatory approval for the Amazon Leo network in July 2020. The FCC's authorization came with two deadlines. First, Amazon had to launch half of its 3,232 satellites by July 30, 2026, in order to maintain authorization to launch the rest of the network. The regulator gave Amazon a deadline of July 30, 2029, to have all of its first-generation satellites in orbit.

It has been apparent for some time that Amazon would not meet the FCC's requirement to launch half of its satellites—1,616 spacecraft—by the end of next month. Amazon filed an application in January requesting the FCC extend the deadline to July 2028 or waive it altogether. The commission decided on the latter option, removing any time limit for the 50 percent deployment milestone, but keeping the July 2029 deadline in place for the entire constellation.

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Russian satellites have been identified as the cause of mysterious, seconds-long bursts of GPS interference across Europe—a rare example of human-made GPS interference coming from space. But uncertainty still hangs over whether such interference is intentional and if it could be more powerfully weaponized as GPS jamming with continental reach in the future.

The discovery came from an investigation detailed in a June 2 preprint paper by Todd Humphreys and his student Zach Clements at The University of Texas at Austin, along with Argyris Kriezis at Stanford University in California. By sifting through public data from ground-based stations with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers, they identified a pattern of high-powered interference lasting less than 10 seconds each time but simultaneously detectable by ground stations across Europe from Norway to Spain to Poland, and even reaching as far west as Greenland and Canada.

By analyzing the ground station data from January 2019 to April 2026, the researchers found 75 days with at least one widespread GNSS interference event overlapping with the GPS L1 frequency band centered on 1575.42 megahertz. That represents the main band used for signal transmission by the US-made GPS satellite constellation and GNSS constellations from other countries.

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NASA's Artemis II crew are the fastest people alive, and now they have the patch to prove it.

Mission Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen (the latter with the Canadian Space Agency) spent 10 days in early April flying by the Moon. Their journey took them farther away from Earth than any humans have gone (52,756 miles [406,771 km]) and then, on the way back on board their Orion spacecraft Integrity, they sped up to about 24,664 miles per hour (39,693 k/ph) reentering the atmosphere.

Only three other people in history have traveled faster. NASA's Apollo 10 astronauts Thomas Stafford, John Young, and Eugene Cernan set the record for the highest speed attained by a crewed vehicle relative to the Earth's surface: 24,791 mph (39,897 kph) on May 26, 1969.

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A little more than five years ago, a shiny white Falcon 9 rocket made its debut flight, boosting a Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Over the next year, it would launch a pair of astronaut missions and a handful of commercial spacecraft.

But since then, this first stage booster, designated B 1067, has mostly flown Starlink missions. It has launched them one after another, always returning safely to a drone ship before undergoing refurbishment and flying again. Sometimes it has flown twice in a single month.

On Monday morning, B 1067 once again took to the skies, launching 29 Starlink Internet satellites into low-Earth orbit from Florida. Upon landing on the A Shortfall of Gravitas drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, the vehicle completed its 35th mission overall, retaining its title as fleet leader for SpaceX.

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Five of the seven crew members on the International Space Station briefly sought refuge inside a SpaceX return capsule Friday morning as two Russian cosmonauts worked on an air leak on the other end of the complex.

NASA ordered US astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, French astronaut Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev into SpaceX's Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft around 9 am EST (14:00 UTC) on Friday. The foursome launched aboard the SpaceX crew capsule on the Crew-12 mission in February, and the ship serves as their lifeboat until the crew's scheduled return to Earth in September.

NASA astronaut Chris Williams, who flew to the station in a Russian Soyuz ferry ship, joined the Crew-12 astronauts inside the Dragon spacecraft.

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Welcome to Edition 8.44 of the Rocket Report! The news this week is decidedly weighted in favor of heavy-lift rockets, largely due to the fallout from last Thursday's explosion of Blue Origin's New Glenn on its launch pad in Florida. Blue Origin aims to resume launches at the badly damaged launch facility by the end of the year, but there's good reason to be skeptical of this timeline. With New Glenn grounded, will Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos approach Elon Musk's SpaceX to launch his Blue Moon lander to the lunar south pole? It sure sounds like NASA is pushing for that.

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.

Spaceport development moves forward in Canada. There's been a lot of talk about the Canadian government's recent commitment to invest in a sovereign launch capability. There was the announcement last year of a federal budget of 182.6 million Canadian dollars ($131 million) over three years to establish a sovereign launch program. In March, the government said it would lease a dedicated launch pad at a commercially developed spaceport in Nova Scotia for national defense purposes, committing 200 million Canadian dollars ($144 million) to the deal. The agreement is a boon for Maritime Launch Services, which is developing Spaceport Nova Scotia after years of slow progress at the coastal site, SpaceQ reports.

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Last week's explosion of a New Glenn rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was clearly a setback for Blue Origin and NASA, but it was a learning experience for safety officials looking to open up the spaceport to hundreds more launches per year.

The launch base on Florida's Space Coast is gearing up for a flurry of new arrivals. SpaceX is building multiple launch pads for its super-heavy Starship rocket, which will operate within a few miles of launch pads operated by SpaceX rivals Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance. Two other companies, Stoke Space and Relativity Space, are also developing launch sites along a narrow stretch of coastline at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

All of them have, or will soon have, rockets burning methane or liquified natural gas, replacing legacy launch vehicles fueled by kerosene, liquid hydrogen, or solid propellants. There are good technical reasons for making the switch, but until last week, engineers had scant real-world data on the damage that millions of pounds of methane and liquid oxygen would cause if a fully loaded rocket exploded on the launch pad or soon after liftoff.

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