This week, Romania accused Russia of sending a drone boat loaded with explosives to a vital European natural gas platform in the Black Sea. A Romanian F-16 fighter jet used its cannons to disable the surface drone so that explosive ordnance experts could blow it up safely.

On August 20, the Romanian Coast Guard first spotted the maritime drone a few hundred meters away from the Neptun Deep project’s main drilling platform, where several hundred workers were busy with the platform’s ongoing installation, Defense Minister Radu Miruță said in a Facebook post. The offshore gas project would make Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union once it starts full production in 2027.

To protect the lives of the workers and the offshore gas infrastructure, the Romanian military scrambled two F-16 fighter jets to stop the drone with cannon fire, Miruță said. Army specialists later carried out a controlled detonation, as seen in a Facebook video shared by the defense minister.

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Welcome to Edition 9.07 of the Rocket Report! China's workhorse Long March rocket family appears to be rebounding quickly from a rare launch failure August 10. Chinese officials have not publicly released any information on what may have caused the Long March 7A rocket to break apart less than 90 seconds after liftoff, but the rocket's use of YF-100 engines initially raised questions about the failure's impact on other Chinese rockets that use the same type of engines. But no biggie. YF-100 engines returned to flight six days later with the successful flight of a Long March 12 rocket, and the heavy-lift Long March 5—also with YF-100 engines—is set to launch in a few days with one of China's most important space missions of the decade: the Chang'e 7 lunar lander en route to the Moon's south pole.

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.

Trouble in Taiwan. A prototype for a future satellite launch vehicle developed by Taiwan's top weapons manufacturer veered off course shortly after liftoff Wednesday, Taiwan's Central News Agency reports. The "trajectory anomaly" prompted the activation of the rocket's self-destruct mechanism. The government agency responsible for the test flight, the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST), reported no injuries or property damage. Debris from the rocket fell into a planned safety control zone near the southern tip of Taiwan.

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Russian tanks have entered battle for the first time with a new active protection system designed to shoot down incoming drones. But the technology’s recent combat debut in Ukraine met with only limited success—Ukrainian drones still destroyed the Russian armored vehicles by attacking in overwhelming numbers.

The first documented battlefield appearance of the Arena-M active protection system took place when Russian forces launched a company-size assault with tanks and other armored vehicles in the Donetsk Oblast region of eastern Ukraine on July 22. The Ukrainian defenders repelled the attack and posted video footage of their kamikaze drone strikes destroying at least seven T-72B3A tanks, including some that carried the Arena-M system, according to Euromaidan Press.

However, Ukrainian soldiers also described the Russian Arena-M system successfully shooting down some incoming drones, according to the journalists Dmytro Putiata and Rob Lee. The Ukrainians reported requiring between 15 and 20 drones to finish off each tank.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy confirmed on Saturday that his country struck the Progress Rocket Space Center deep within Russia using ground-launched cruise missiles.

"In Russia’s Samara region, one of the key enterprises within Roscosmos—the Progress Center, which was involved, among other things, in electronics production–was hit," Zelenskyy said on the social media site X. "Flamingo missiles were used. A good achievement."

The largest city in the Samara Oblast, about 900 km from the Ukrainian border, Samara is home to Russia's most important manufacturer of rockets. The Progress Center assembles the workhorse vehicle for Russia, the Soyuz-2 vehicle, as well as the newer Soyuz-5 rocket. The facility also builds military satellites.

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Ukrainian drone teams demolished a brigade of US Army tanks and armored vehicles during a live war game held this year—but the US soldiers were lucky enough to get “respawn” attempts while learning from the experience.

The semiannual military exercise, called Combined Resolve, gave the US military a firsthand taste of how modern drone warfare has evolved on the battlefields of Ukraine. The Ukrainian drone operators participating in the exercise were easily able to spot and destroy US armored vehicles by mimicking the actions of dropping bombs from above or moving close enough to simulate a kamikaze strike, according to US officials and a participant who spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

US armored vehicles were being destroyed so quickly that they were “respawned” and sent back into the simulated fray, a US official told The Wall Street Journal. The US troops who participated in the exercise—held in Germany from April 9 to May 10—were on rotational deployment from Fort Hood, Texas.

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Romanian army divers used explosives to destroy two Russian-made drones found floating in the Black Sea near Romania’s largest natural gas project, according to the NATO member country’s defense minister.

Defense Minister Radu Miruță posted a Facebook video supposedly showing one of the drones being blown up in the water by explosive ordnance disposal divers of the Romanian army on August 11, as reported by Reuters and other news outlets. The drones were first spotted in the water by a ship working in the vicinity of the Neptun Deep—an offshore gas project under development in the Black Sea that will make Romania the largest gas producer in the European Union.

A Romanian Coast Guard ship that responded with army soldiers aboard found two drifting Gerbera-type drones of Russian design along with other debris. Miruță also disclosed that Romania had reached out to “Ukrainian partners who confirmed that the systems do not belong to them.”

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German police disarmed a drone carrying explosives after it was discovered near Ukrainian cargo aircraft parked at Leipzig airport—and authorities are looking into the possibility of a second drone after an approaching aircraft collided with something midair.

The drone, first spotted by an airport employee, was hovering close to the ground between two parked An-124 cargo aircraft owned by Ukraine’s Antonov Airlines shortly before midnight on August 4, according to The Guardian. It had apparently been modified to help avoid detection by the airport’s drone defense sensors, said Alexander Dobrindt, federal minister of the interior for Germany, during a press conference.

Dobrindt described the drone as carrying a fist-sized package of a substance believed to be the plastic explosive Semtex. Only a failed detonator prevented the drone from exploding near the Ukrainian cargo aircraft, he said.

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Ukrainian drone operators have destroyed many Russian armored vehicles on the ground and even military helicopters in midair using $400 Shrike drones with explosive payloads. Now thousands of such drones are getting upgraded with an AI system capable of autonomously tracking and homing in on moving targets.

In mid-July, the Ukrainian military began receiving Shrike drones made by the Ukrainian company SkyFall equipped with AI-powered autonomy hardware and software developed by the US company Auterion. The companies plan to deliver 50,000 drones equipped with Auterion’s Skynode S strike kits in the coming months.

That allows human operators to manually fly the Shrike first-person view (FPV) drones into a battlefield area, designate a target up to half a mile away, and then “flip the switch to turn it into fire-and-forget terminal guidance mode,” Lorenz Meier, co-founder and CEO of Auterion, told Ars.

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