GPS III SV-08, built by Lockheed Martin, is the eighth of 10 GPS III spacecraft acquired by the Pentagon under a 2008 contract. Compared to earlier models, GPS III satellites provide nearly eight times better anti-jamming resistance and deliver improved accuracy and reliability, according to the Space Force. They also transmit the encrypted M-code signal for U.S. military use and L5, a civilian safety-of-life signal intended for aviation and other transport applications.

The satellites operate in medium Earth orbit, roughly 12,550 miles above Earth — an altitude optimized for global coverage and consistent timing signals.

“Every launch makes the GPS constellation more accurate and resilient,” Col. Andrew Menschner, commander of Mission Delta 31, said in a statement after the launch. Mission Delta 31 operates the GPS constellation from Colorado Springs, Colorado,.

“With 31 active vehicles, seven on orbit in reserve status, and two GPS III vehicles completed and ready for launch, the constellation is healthy and ready to support the six billion people around the world who use our capabilities every day,” he said.

SV-08 is now being controlled from Lockheed Martin’s launch and checkout operations center in Denver until its official acceptance into the operational GPS network.

Originally assigned to United Launch Alliance (ULA), SV-08 was switched to SpaceX to expedite deployment. ULA’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket, recently certified for national security missions, is not expected to begin flying such payloads until later this summer.

The switch underscores the shifting dynamics of the U.S. launch sector, where SpaceX dominates in both commercial and national security missions. Friday’s flight marked the fifth national security launch by the company this year, with another dozen on the manifest through December.

#FAA demands an accident investigation into SpaceX’s latest out-of-control Starship flight.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The Federal Aviation Administration is demanding an accident investigation into this week’s out-of-control Starship flight by SpaceX.

Tuesday’s test flight from Texas lasted longer than the previous two failed demos of the world’s biggest and most powerful rocket, which ended in flames over the Atlantic. The latest spacecraft made it halfway around the world to the Indian Ocean, but not before going into a spin and breaking apart.

The FAA said Friday that no injuries or public damage were reported.

The first-stage booster — recycled from an earlier flight — also burst apart while descending over the Gulf of Mexico. But that was the result of deliberately extreme testing approved by the FAA in advance.

All wreckage from both sections of the 403-foot (123-metre) rocket came down within the designated hazard zones, according to the FAA.

The FAA will oversee SpaceX’s investigation, which is required before another Starship can launch.

CEO Elon Musk said he wants to pick up the pace of Starship test flights, with the ultimate goal of launching them to Mars. NASA needs Starship as the means of landing astronauts on the moon in the next few years.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

Overcoming conservatism in the autonomous space revolution .

In the evolving landscape of space technology, a pivotal transformation is quietly taking shape: the development of spacecraft autonomy. While launch capabilities often dominate headlines, the real innovation frontier lies in what happens after they get there.

Think of autonomous spacecraft as the space equivalent of self-driving cars. For a decade, we’ve watched autonomous vehicles navigate our roads. Yet remarkably, despite the technology being available for years, fully autonomous spacecraft remain largely theoretical. This technological conservatism isn’t due to capability limitations — it’s driven by understandable risk aversion.

The hesitation is understandable. When missions cost hundreds of millions of dollars and failure means total loss, conservatism becomes the default. However, this cautious approach is increasingly unsustainable in the rapidly evolving space economy.
Why current operations don’t scale

Traditional spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations (RPO) require continuous communication between ground control and the vehicle. In Low Earth Orbit, this communication is only possible during brief 10-minute windows every 90 minutes. The remaining 80 minutes? Complete blackout.

For complex maneuvers like RPO — delicately approaching other objects in space — this limitation creates enormous challenges. It’s like climbing Mount Everest and then performing the Nutcracker ballet at the top. Everything is moving at seven kilometers per second, and a single miscalculation can be catastrophic.

The industry’s current solution? Expensive satellite communication relays and 24/7 teams of engineers ready to respond instantly. This approach simply doesn’t scale for the constellation era, where we envision hundreds of satellites working in unison.
Learning from past failures

The industry’s risk aversion isn’t without precedent. NASA’s 2005 Demonstration for Autonomous Rendezvous Technologies mission failed to meet any of its objectives, reinforcing the sector’s conservative tendencies. Such high-profile setbacks have cast long shadows over autonomous spacecraft development.

Most current approaches involve incrementally testing small technological components rather than implementing comprehensive autonomy solutions. Companies typically manually guide spacecraft to predefined positions before testing limited autonomous capabilities in controlled environments — a slow, cautious path to full autonomy.

Creating truly autonomous spacecraft requires mastering several critical functions without constant human supervision. The system must handle path planning by autonomously calculating fuel-efficient orbital transfer routes, target identification by detecting and identifying objects from tens of kilometers away and visual navigation using onboard cameras and processing to understand a target’s position and movement. Additionally, it needs to perform proximity operations with safe maneuvers to approach and operate near other objects, along with error correction capabilities to make independent course adjustments when deviations occur.

Each of these challenges requires sophisticated algorithms that must function reliably in the harsh, unpredictable environment of space, where communication delays and outages are inevitable and testing opportunities are limited.
Breaking the cycle of conservatism

The space industry has reached an inflection point where operational demands are beginning to outpace traditional control methods. As satellite constellations grow larger and missions become more complex, autonomy shifts from luxury to necessity.

Breaking this cycle requires a dual approach: rigorous ground testing followed by incremental in-space validation. Advanced test facilities — where zero gravity motion and the harsh conditions of space can be replicated in controlled on-ground test environments – provide crucial stepping stones between simulation and actual deployment.

Achieving space autonomy requires everyone to play their part. The government can be a massive unlock for innovation, but as a nation, we must be willing to take risks, learn from our progress and share intelligence across borders. Part of the intelligence sharing further extends to our universities, which are already working on fundamental research challenges, particularly in artificial intelligence validation and verification. However, this research needs to come out of the labs and into the hands of established aerospace companies and emerging startups who can bring their systems integration expertise and flight heritage to drive nimble innovation in specific autonomy domains.

Buried in the hallways of universities, Australia’s emerging space sector is already contributing significantly to this transition, leveraging our world-class academic institutions, for example, the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre for Robotics and the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning. By focusing on autonomy solutions rather than replicating existing technologies, newer entrants to the space industry can establish leadership in areas where risk aversion has created innovation vacuums. Space development is not a zero-sum game – advancements in autonomous capabilities benefit the entire global industry, making collaboration the most effective path forward for Australia to secure its place among spacefaring nations.
The autonomous future

The benefits of autonomous spacecraft extend far beyond operational convenience. They will dramatically reduce costs by eliminating the need for constant monitoring, enable new mission profiles previously impossible due to communication constraints, and potentially increase reliability by removing the most common source of spacecraft failures: human error, often jokingly referred to as PEBCAK — “Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard.”

As space becomes increasingly commercialized, the economic imperatives for autonomy will only grow stronger. The companies and countries that master this technology first will establish the standards that others must follow.

The future of space operations is undoubtedly autonomous. The question is no longer if this transformation will occur, but who will lead it and how quickly they can overcome the industry’s inherent conservatism to bring these capabilities to market.

Justin du Plessis is Attitude and Orbit Control Systems Lead at Space Machines Company.

AMSTERDAM — SpaceX’s Starship suffered a loss of attitude control after reaching space on its latest test flight May 27, leading to an uncontrolled reentry and a third consecutive failure.

Starship lifted off from SpaceX’s test site at Starbase, Texas, at 7:36 p.m. Eastern. The liftoff was delayed in the final seconds of the countdown because of an issue with a quick-disconnect fitting in ground equipment that required resetting the countdown to the T-40 second mark for several minutes to fix it.

This mission, Flight 9, sought to avoid the engine problems on the previous two test flights in January and March that caused the loss of the Starship upper stage during its ascent. All eyes were on the performance of the Starship’s six Raptor engines during a burn lasting nearly six and a half minutes.

Unlike those earlier flights, the engines appeared to operate normally, shutting down as expected after placing the vehicle in its planned suborbital trajectory. Video from the vehicle immediately after engine shutdown, though, appeared to show the vehicle venting propellants and in a slow roll.

SpaceX confirmed about 30 minutes after liftoff that Starship suffered a problem. “We are in a little bit of a spin. We did spring a leak in some of the fuel tank systems inside of Starship,” Dan Huot, a host of the SpaceX webcast of the launch, said. “At this point, we’ve essentially lost our attitude control with Starship.”

That loss of attitude control ruled out a controlled reentry. SpaceX elected to “passivate” the vehicle, venting the remaining propellant, ahead of reentry. Intermittent video from the vehicle showed the vehicle begin that reentry a little more than 40 minutes after liftoff, including damage to a flap before telemetry from the vehicle was lost at nearly T+47 minutes. The reentry occurred over a portion of the Indian Ocean where airspace and maritime notices were in place.

“Leaks caused loss of main tank pressure during the coast and re-entry phase. Lot of good data to review,” Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, posted on social media after the loss of the vehicle. “Launch cadence for next 3 flights will be faster, at approximately 1 every 3 to 4 weeks.”

The plan for this mission included opening Starship’s payload bay door and releasing eight simulated next-generation Starlink satellites, which would also go on suborbital trajectories and reenter separately from Starship. However, the payload door failed to fully open and the release of the simulated satellites was canceled. It was not immediately clear if the failure of the door to open was associated to the propellant leak and loss of attitude control.

SpaceX also called off plans to relight a Raptor engine while in space. The uncontrolled reentry meant that SpaceX was unable to test alternative heat shield tiles or stress-test vulnerable areas on the vehicle, as planned.

SpaceX also fell short on some test objectives for the Super Heavy booster. The flight was the first to use a previously flown booster, in this case Booster 14, which launched Flight 7. SpaceX said before the launch it would not attempt a return of the booster to the launch site, carrying out tests intended to refine the flight profile of the vehicle and save propellant.

Those tests appeared to initially go as expected, but the vehicle was destroyed when it ignited its engines for a final landing burn.

Flight 9 is the third Starship test flight in a row that failed to make a controlled reentry and splashdown in the Indian Ocean. The previous two failures involved unrelated, separate issues with the Starship upper stage’s propulsion system. The failure raises new questions about SpaceX’s development of Starship and its ability to carry out key missions, including the Artemis 3 lunar landing currently scheduled for the middle of 2027.

Jared Isaacman, whose nomination to be NASA administrator its set to be confirmed by the Senate as soon as next week, expressed his appreciation for SpaceX continuing to show video from Starship as it began its uncontrolled reentry. “Appreciate the transparency–and bringing us space enthusiasts along through the highs and lows of a test program,” he said in a social media post moments after the loss of the vehicle.

“Some may focus on the lows,” he wrote, but argued that Starship and other launch vehicles in development are creating a “massive space economy” that will open up space. “When these capabilities arrive, they will spearhead a new era of exploration and discovery–and the lows will become a chapter in a much longer story.”

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force has ordered two additional Global Positioning System satellites from Lockheed Martin. The $509.7 million contract covers GPS III satellites 21 and 22, which are part of the advanced GPS III Follow-on constellation designed to provide enhanced positioning, navigation and timing services to both civilian and military users worldwide.

Delivery of the two satellites is scheduled by 2031, according to a contract announcement May 28.

The order was placed under an existing 2018 contract that allows for up to 22 spacecraft. With this procurement, the Space Force has now exercised options for 12 satellites, bringing the total value of the contract to $4.1 billion.

The GPS IIIF series represents the latest upgrade to the Global Positioning System, which provides essential geolocation services to more than 6 billion users worldwide, including military, commercial and civil users.

The newer IIIF satellites offer enhanced anti-jamming capabilities, improved accuracy, and additional features such as an upgraded nuclear detonation detection payload and a next-generation search-and-rescue package.

WASHINGTON — Dawn Aerospace announced May 22 that it has started taking orders for an uncrewed spaceplane capable of taking small payloads on suborbital flights.

The New Zealand company said it is beginning sales of the Aurora spaceplane, a vehicle capable of carrying six kilograms of payload to an altitude of 100 kilometers. First deliveries of the vehicle are projected in 2027.

Dawn Aerospace is following a model from commercial aviation rather than spaceflight with Aurora, selling the vehicle to customers who will operate it rather than flying the vehicle on its own. That will, the company argues, expand the potential market for the vehicle compared to the traditional approach of selling launch services.

“There are many out there who would love to have this capability and be willing to pay for it, but they simply can’t get their hands on it. It’s not for sale,” Stefan Powell, chief executive of Dawn Aerospace, said of launch vehicles during a May 22 webinar organized by the Global Spaceport Alliance.

He contrasted that with commercial aviation’s approach where airliners are operated not by the companies that build them but instead by airlines. “The airline model presents us with a far more scalable model for transportation, and one that we would really like to draw on.”

That mirroring of commercial aviation extends to Aurora itself. The company has been testing versions of the vehicle for several years, including a flight in November 2024 where the Mark 2 Aurora reached supersonic speeds for the first time. On that flight the vehicle reached a top speed of Mach 1.12 and peak altitude of 25.1 kilometers.

“This is an aircraft with the performance of a rocket, not a rocket with wings,” he said. “That is to say, reliability, reusability and, ultimately, scalability are not afterthoughts but baked in from day one to enable this airline model.”

Dawn Aerospace is working on the new version of Aurora capable of suborbital flights. That includes increased propellant and engine thrust, as well as the addition of reaction control system thrusters to provide control outside the atmosphere. Those modifications will be accommodated within the same outer mold line as the previous version.

The first Aurora suborbital vehicle will be ready for flight within 18 months, starting a flight test program lasting six to nine months. Those test flights will start at low altitudes but quickly progress to much higher altitudes.

On a typical suborbital flig

NASA says long-running budget shortfalls may lead to ISS crew and research reductions.

NASA says a “multi-year” budget shortfall even before the proposed cuts in the fiscal year 2026 budget request have led the agency to consider reductions in crew size and research on the International Space Station.

At a May 20 press conference about the upcoming Ax-4 private astronaut mission to the station, Dana Weigel, NASA ISS program manager, was asked about language in the top-level fiscal year 2026 budget proposal that seeks to reduce spending on the ISS by half a billion dollars, part of $6 billion in overall cuts to the agency.

The so-called “skinny” budget also mentioned reductions in the crew size and research on the station, without providing details. The research that would be performed on the station, it stated, “would be focused on efforts critical to the Moon and Mars exploration programs.”

Weigel said #NASA was facing resource problems with the ISS before the cuts proposed for fiscal year 2026. “Today, the station has been faced with a cumulative multi-year budget reduction,” she said, including the continuing resolution that funded NASA at 2024 levels for all of fiscal year 2025.

A House hearing about how #NASA is dealing with the threat posed by asteroid impacts turned into a discussion about a very different threat: the impact of proposed NASA budget cuts.

The focus of the May 15 hearing by the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee was on NASA’s efforts to discover and track potentially hazardous asteroids, as well as measures to prevent any possible impacts, collectively known as planetary defense.

NASA requested $276.6 million for planetary defense in its fiscal year 2025 budget proposal, a little more than 1% of the agency’s overall budget. Most of that money would go towards the Near Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor mission, an infrared space telescope designed to more effectively search for asteroids than ground-based telescopes.

While NASA’s investment in planetary defense is modest relative to the overall agency budget, that activity has a high profile that was further raised earlier this year when an asteroid, 2024 YR4, briefly had more than a 3% chance of colliding with the Earth in 2032. Subsequent observations of the asteroid’s orbit effectively ruled out any impact in 2032 or for the foreseeable future.

“Planetary defense is one of the most important objectives” of the agency, said Rep. Mike Haridopolos (R-Fla.), chairman of the subcommittee. He noted one recent survey by the Pew Research Center that found that planetary defense “was the highest priority of American citizens.”

There was little debate about NASA’s work in planetary defense at the hearing. Democratic members of the committee, though, used the hearing as an opportunity to ask the witnesses, including Nicky Fox, NASA associate administrator for science, about budget cuts facing NASA’s science program in the White House’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal.

“This budget, if enacted, would strip away NASA’s storied leadership, disrupt decades of progress in U.S. space exploration and cripple the agency’s ability to pursue bold and ambitious goals going forward,” said Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-N.C.), ranking member of the subcommittee.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), ranking member of the full committee, noted that planetary defense requires NASA to cooperate with other agencies, from the National Science Foundation to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who are also facing severe cuts in the proposed budget. “Will anyone be home to answer the call if a NEO were found to be on a trajectory headered towards to Earth?” she asked.

Members, though, got few additional details about the effect the proposed budget will have on NASA science. Fox said that she has received only the “skinny” budget framework released by the Office of Management and Budget May 2 that cut overall NASA spending by 24% from 2025 levels.

“We have not seen any details on the missions or any direction on the missions other than the Mars Sample Return program and Landsat Next,” she said. The skinny budget specifically called for canceling Mars Sample Return and restructuring Landsat Next, but did not mention any other science missions. “We await the full president’s budget so we can see the priorities and direction on which missions may be supported or not supported.”

That includes NEO Surveyor. At the hearing, Fox and Amy Mainzer, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles who leads the mission, noted that work on NEO Surveyor is going well, with the mission still scheduled to launch no later than June 2028 but potentially as soon as the fall of 2027.

“We have not seen the details of the budget yet” and how it might affect the mission, said Mainzer. “From my perspective, we do not know the impact yet.”

FAA license update brings SpaceX closer to next Starship launch , #SpaceX is a step closer to winning regulatory approval for its next Starship test flight, a critical launch after the previous two failed.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced late May 15 that it updated its launch license for Starship ahead of the vehicle’s next launch. That update incorporated an environmental approval earlier this month allowing SpaceX to perform up to 25 launches per year from its Starbase facility in south Texas, five times the previous annual limit.

The FAA noted, though, that the license update alone does not allow SpaceX to conduct its next Starship launch, known as Flight 9. “SpaceX may not launch until the FAA either closes the Starship Flight 8 mishap investigation or makes a return to flight determination,” the agency said in a statement. “The FAA is reviewing the mishap report SpaceX submitted on May 14.”

On Flight 8 in March, Starship suffered what SpaceX called an “energetic event” in the aft section of the Starship upper stage during its ascent, causing several Raptor engines to shut down and the vehicle to lose attitude control. The vehicle reentered over the Caribbean.

That was similar to a failure on Flight 7 in January. SpaceX said shortly before the Flight 8 launch that the upper stage suffered a “harmonic response several times stronger in flight than had been seen during testing,” stressing the propulsion system and creating propellant leaks that triggered fires. The FAA accepted those findings March 31.

At that time, neither the FAA nor SpaceX had disclosed details about the potential cause of the Flight 8 failure. The FAA stated then that Starship launches would not resume until either it accepted the Flight 8 mishap report or makes another determination that launches can safely resume.

SpaceX is moving ahead with preparations for Flight 9, including a long-duration static-fire test of the Starship upper stage May 13. The company said at the time that it was in “final preparations” for the launch. Airspace and maritime notices indicate a launch could take place as soon as May 22, pending FAA approval.

“Just before the Starship flight next week, I will give a company talk explaining the Mars game plan in Starbase, Texas,” Elon Musk, chief executive of SpaceX, posted on social media May 13, adding that the talk will also be streamed online.

After the two previous Starship failures, some in the Caribbean sought changes to the Starship trajectory to avoid airspace closures and other disruptions caused by falling debris. ProPublica reported May 15 that Stephen Doughty, the United Kingdom government minister responsible for overseas territories like the Turks and Caicos in the Caribbean, contacted the U.S. State Department seeking changes to the Starship flight profile and timing to minimize risks to the islands.

The FAA published May 15 an environmental assessment for updated airspace closures for the Flight 9 launch. The aircraft hazard area, or AHA, now extends to the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. “The Starship vehicle mishaps from Flights 7 and 8 caused a greater probability of failure of the vehicle and, therefore, a larger AHA,” the document states.

The document states that more than 175 flights would be affected by the airspace closures, many of which would be delayed by an average of 40 minutes to avoid the hazard zone. The launch would also take place “outside peak transit periods,” with an anticipated liftoff at 7:30 p.m. Eastern. In addition, the main airport in the Turks and Caicos, Providenciales International Airport, will close during the launch window.

Space Force, Space Command seek over $2 billion for unfunded programs to counter anti-satellite threats.

The Space Force submitted $1.1 billion and Space Command $1.2 billion in their “unfunded requirements” lists for fiscal year 2025.

The U.S. Space Force and U.S. Space Command submitted a combined $2.3 billion in “unfunded requirements” to Congress last week, with the vast majority of the funds requested for classified programs aimed at space control, space superiority, and space domain awareness. These are broad categories of technologies sought by the military to protect U.S. assets in orbit from anti-satellite weapons being developed by China and Russia.

The unfunded priorities list is an annual ritual in which the military services detail important priorities and capabilities left out of the president’s official budget request. The items in the Space Force’s $1.1 billion and Space Command’s $1.2 billion lists did not make it into the fiscal year 2025 budget proposal the Pentagon submitted to Congress on March 11, which included $29.4 billion for the Space Force. Space Command is a combatant organization that relies on the Space Force to acquire the space hardware and systems needed for operations in the space domain.

Funds needed to improve satellite defense

Gen. Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, said in a memo to congressional committees that the funding is crucial to defend U.S. satellites from threats posed by anti-satellite weapons being developed by China and Russia. These weapons, if used, could disrupt Global Positioning System satellite navigation, communications, and intelligence gathering capabilities vital to the U.S. military.

“Chinese and Russian threats in the space domain pose a dangerous challenge to the American military instrument of national power and our modern way of life,” Whiting wrote. “Their increasingly assertive actions have created threats to our critical space infrastructure and national space power, putting all branches of the military at risk.”

He noted that Russia “presents an acute threat as it becomes increasingly focused in its cyber, nuclear and space capabilities.”

The requests for space control, space superiority and space domain awareness technologies did not provide specifics due to classification.

Space control involves measures to ensure U.S. military operations in space while denying adversaries the same. Space superiority is the capability to maintain freedom of operation in space for the United States and its allies. And space domain awareness refers to tracking objects and activities in orbit to avoid collisions and detect potential hostile actions.